The Vampire Tapestry

  When he came in, Reese entered behind him, smiling.

  “Mark, I want you to meet Alan Reese, an occultist I’ve known for a long time,” Roger said. “He has some suggestions for managing our guest.”

  “I am, strictly speaking, a Satanist,” Alan Reese introduced himself in a measured, theatrical voice. A light of triumph sparkled in his blue eyes, as if Mark had held a castle against him which he had blown down with a breath. “Does that make you nervous, Mark? It shouldn’t. Having a vampire in an unprotected house with you is what should make you nervous. I’m going to help you keep control of him, using my knowledge of his Master.”

  Oh boy, Mark thought. He got the key from the cupboard door and went into the hall ahead of them to unlock the gate, determined to stick close. He wanted to see the man who had written the introduction to Notes on a Vanished People take this guy Reese apart with a sharp remark.

  Dr. Weyland turned his head to watch them come in.

  Ignoring him, Reese slipped on a black gown over his street clothes and took some objects from his briefcase. He murmured over them, kissed them, held them up to the four directions. One, a metal charm on a chain, he put around Roger’s neck, its twin around Mark’s. The rest—a knife, a ring, a silver bowl, a withered brown thing that Mark couldn’t identify—he placed carefully in the corners of the stark white cell.

  Then he brought out a nest of trays and lit incense in them, and these Roger set down where Reese directed. Reese talked or chanted the whole time, projecting so that he seemed to fill the room. From a little pouch hung round his neck on a thong he rubbed something onto the window frame, the door frame, the drains of the bathroom appliances, and even the electric outlets. He made markings on the floor with a lump of red chalk.

  Mark was given a censer and a candle to hold. He felt a fool and wished now he’d let them do all this weird stuff without him.

  To his surprise and disappointment, Dr. Weyland made no comment. Mark had his first chance to observe the vampire without those chilly eyes staring back at him, and he felt an unpleasant shock. He thought he saw fear.

  “All right, he’s well bound. That’s a start,” Reese said finally, standing in the middle of the little room with his feet braced apart as if against a typhoon. He looked about him with a pleased expression.

  “The funny thing is,” Roger said, “he doesn’t seem to have fangs, but he does—well, bite.”

  “So Bobbie said.” Reese pulled back the sleeves of his gown from muscular forearms. “Hold him quiet—he can’t hurt you, don’t worry—and let me see.”

  Roger made a nervous grab for the vampire’s wrists. Dr. Weyland did not resist, not even when Reese hooked him under the armpits and dragged at him so that his head hung off the end of the cot. There was nothing silly in the scene anymore. Dr. Weyland’s fear touched Mark like a cold breath.

  Reese bent and clamped the vampire’s head hard against his thick thigh with one arm. Seizing him by the jaw, he wrenched his mouth open.

  A sound of protest escaped Mark.

  Reese looked up. “This being is inhabited by a devil’s strength. He only pretends weakness and pain to fool us. I may seem rough with him, but I know what I’m doing. I put all the force I have into encounters like this because that’s the only way to keep control. He’s all right; it would take a tank to hurt one of these.”

  Roger said, “You’ve come across vampires before?”

  “I come across all kinds of abstruse things,” Reese replied. “It’s true there are no fangs, but here—see that? A sort of sting on the underside of the tongue. It probably erects itself at the prospect of dinner, makes the puncture through which he sucks blood, and then folds back out of sight again.”

  “Sexy,” Roger said with new interest. “Maybe that’s why he doesn’t talk?”

  “It shouldn’t interfere,” Reese said. “Let’s have a look at his eyes.” He shut the mouth and moved his hand to thumb back one of the vampire’s eyelids.

  Mark told himself they weren’t really hurting Dr. Weyland. They were like zoologists or veterinarians immobilizing a dangerous animal so they could examine it. But Reese gripped and twisted the passive body of the vampire brutally, like a guy wrestling an alligator in a movie about the Everglades. Mark tried not to breathe the sharp odor from the censer and waited miserably for the examination to be over.

  At last they finished, leaving the disheveled vampire—who had still spoken no word—stretched out on the cot, one arm over his eyes. Roger looked high, as if exhilarated by the defeat of someone who had scared him. Reese, smiling, packed up his gear and shed his gown. He came and sat in the verdant living room like any casual guest.

  “Have you any plans for him?” he asked intently.

  Roger scowled. “He’s not very cooperative. I’ve been trying to get him to tell me things. Can you imagine what a bestseller it would be, a real vampire’s story from his own lips? But he won’t answer questions.”

  Reese stood up. “I was thinking of something more ambitious—some effort to cut through appearances to his essential self, the black and powerful heart of an existence beyond the laws of the life we know. Some way of taking over and harnessing this arcane and formidable nature to our own uses.”

  The atmosphere of the room seemed changed—darkened. Reese’s bombast should have reduced him to an absurdity, but it didn’t. He came across as not silly but scary. His melodramatic style was backed up by his beefy, aggressive muscularity and by the watchful stare of his small, cold eyes as he stood over the two of them.

  “You have a marvelous find here,” Reese said, “rich in possibilities. My High Priestess is skilled in hypnotism. With that and whatever rites and pressures seem appropriate, we’ll have this creature begging to give up his secrets. Believe me, Roger, we’ll wring him like a wet rag; he’ll be our bridge to realms you can’t even guess at yet. On May Eve, the night of April thirtieth, I and my group customarily hold a Great Sabbat, as you may remember. I want to hold it here and include your guest in the proceedings. Good, that’s settled, then.

  “Meanwhile, try to emphasize fresh supplies, like Bobbie. I know some who’ll volunteer for the experience, if I give the word. I agree there’s no danger of the occasional donor becoming a vampire, especially now that I’ve mobilized my protective forces. Some trustworthy students of my arts would even pay to watch a vampire feed. The proceeds . . .”

  The whole thing was building a crazy momentum. When Reese paused for breath, Mark cleared his throat and said, “I found out something about him today. His name is Edward Lewis Weyland and he’s a famous anthropologist.” Well, he certainly had their attention. He explained about the vampire’s identity. “It’s a kind of kidnapping already, don’t you see? We could all get into a lot of trouble. He’s not just some crazy tramp; he’s an important professor.”

  Roger began to say something resentful, but Reese cut him off. “Be patient, Roger. Mark’s young; he needs careful instruction.” Reese’s moon face looked placid, but he cracked the knuckles of his hands with a muffled crunching noise. “He thinks what we have here is merely an ordinary man, albeit one of prominence, with a freakish taste for human blood—but basically a human being like ourselves to whom the laws of human societies apply.

  “However; I am here to tell both of you—and qualified to tell both of you—that what you have behind bars in there is not simply a perverted human being. I felt the aura around it, and I arced my spells to subdue its real, its supernatural, nature and render it docile.”

  “He didn’t fight you because he’s hurt,” Mark blurted.

  “Oh, I don’t deny that the vampire has a fleshly carapace and that that shell has been damaged. But if you could see beyond the disguise, Mark, as I can, you’d know right away that this isn’t a person at all. It’s a bloodsucking devil, and it’s subject to no laws but those of the Great One whose rites I study.”

  Argument was hopeless. Mark retreated to his own room, busying himself at his desk u
ntil the two men, still talking, left. Then he stepped into the hall, intending to go fix himself some dinner. He hadn’t meant to look across into the cell, but he couldn’t help himself.

  The vampire sat elbows on knees, hands clasped at his mouth as if he’d been gnawing at his knuckles. His wide gaze seemed to leap to meet Mark.

  In a low, tense voice Dr. Weyland said, “Let me out.”

  Face doggedly turned away, Mark shook his head, no.

  “Why not?”

  “Look,” Mark said. “You don’t understand. I’m just a kind of a guest here. Roger never messes around with my stuff and I don’t mess around with his.”

  “Alan Reese will kill me.”

  “Roger wouldn’t let anyone get hurt!” Mark was shocked. Did Dr. Weyland really misunderstand Roger so badly?

  “Reese will bring a dozen or so of his followers here on May Eve. I think Roger, facing them, will be something less than brave.”

  “But this is his home. He wouldn’t let them.”

  “He’ll have no choice. Don’t you recognize the kind of man Reese is?”

  “He’s just a weird friend of Roger’s,” Mark said uncomfortably. “Nothing terrible will happen.”

  “Nothing terrible?” Dr. Weyland seemed to look into space and to speak more to himself than to Mark. “I felt his hands on me; I saw his eyes. He’s not the first man to lust after powers he imagines me to have.”

  Mark’s scalp prickled. He said rapidly, “Look, you’re forgetting—this is all Roger’s idea; he’s running things. He’s taken care of you so far, hasn’t he? I mean, Roger can be sort of inconsiderate and wild and Reese is definitely creepy, but they’re not—they’re not in a class with the person who shot you, for instance.”

  Dr. Weyland frowned. “Of course not. That was a matter of poor judgment on my part and self-defense on hers—an incident of the hunt, no more.”

  “It was a woman?” Mark was fascinated despite himself.

  “Yes, a woman of more discernment and competence than I had thought. She acted as any intelligent prey acts. She wanted to escape me, and she succeeded.

  “But this man Reese wants . . . to use me, to tear out my life and devour it, as men once ate the hearts of slain enemies in order to acquire their strength and skill in battle.”

  Overriding the vampire’s final words, Mark said loudly, “That doesn’t make sense. I’m not going to stand here and listen to a lot of crap that doesn’t make sense.” His face felt hot. He hurried up the hall to the kitchen.

  His appetite was gone. He took off Reese’s amulet and threw it into the garbage.

  Later when he looked for Notes on a Vanished People, which he had used to prove Dr. Weyland’s identity, he couldn’t find it. Reese must have taken the book.

  * * *

  All the next morning Mark dreaded a resumption of that upsetting conversation with Dr. Weyland. He came home by a roundabout route from school and watched TV a while in the living room, but he couldn’t put off the vampire’s feeding indefinitely.

  He delivered the mugful of blood with a tool that Wesley had contrived for the purpose the last time he was here by twisting a coat hanger around the end of a detachable mop handle. Reaching between the bars with this, Mark carefully pushed the mug across the floor toward the cot.

  “Lunch,” he announced in a tone he hoped would discourage conversation.

  Moving very slowly, Dr. Weyland leaned down and took up the mug, emptied it, and carefully set it down on the floor again. He said, “Might you bring me something to read?”

  Caught off balance, Mark blinked foolishly at him. “To read?”

  “Yes. To read. Books, magazines, newspapers. Printed matter. Though of course I can’t pay you for the service, since you’ve already ‘earned’ everything that I owned.”

  Those three nights of storytelling had transferred the second quarter and the pocketknife into Mark’s possession. How else could he have made it unmistakably clear to Dr. Weyland that he operated on a strictly business basis?

  “Now Roger pays me to look after you,” he mumbled. He went to the living room and collected whatever was on the coffee table. The horn-rimmed glasses he placed on top of the pile before pushing it all into the cell.

  Dr. Weyland picked up the glasses and put them on.

  God, Mark thought suddenly, he’s just an old guy with glasses, like Mr. Merman at school. “The lens was cracked when they came,” he said.

  He watched while the vampire, sitting with the blue blanket pulled around his shoulders, sorted through the untidy heap. “Harper’s. The Village Voice. Women’s Wear Daily. The New Yorker. Prevention. Does your uncle subscribe to everything published, regardless of the contents?”

  “He doesn’t have time to read most of it anyway,” Mark said. “I have to do some homework now.” It was long past time to do it, in fact.

  He couldn’t find his dictionary. Hesitantly he called, “How do you spell kinesthetic?”

  “Look it up,” replied the vampire.

  “Can’t find my dictionary.”

  Dr. Weyland spelled out the word. Then he said, “ ‘Kinesthetic’? What are you writing?”

  “An assigned paper on some mushy poem,” Mark said.

  “May I see?” Dr. Weyland put aside the magazines.

  With the mop handle Mark pushed in the book of poems. Dr. Weyland opened to the place marked with the flattened drinking straw. “ ‘The Land of Lost Content,’ ” he murmured. “ ‘Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows . . .’ ” Mark’s outline for the paper was tucked inside the front cover. Dr. Weyland read this swiftly and looked up with a keen glance that made Mark uncomfortable.

  “Interesting,” the vampire said. “The second paragraph, under the heading ‘Kinesthetic Sense,’ where you note, ‘Poet writes about highways he went on, remembers moving muscles while going on highways . . .’ That must be in response to a question from the teacher?”

  “Yes, about what senses the poet uses in the poem.”

  “But when Housman writes of ‘an air that kills,’ I doubt he means he’s smelling the air,” Dr. Weyland said. “The deadly breeze seems to me to blow directly into Housman’s heart, bypassing his senses altogether.”

  Mark fidgeted unhappily at the bars. He should have known better; there was nothing worse for schoolwork than a grownup helping you with it. He said, “Well, without smell there’s just sight and the kinesthetic sense. That’s only two senses. I need more than that. The teacher wants at least two whole pages, double-spaced.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Weyland dryly. “Nevertheless, while the point about muscular memory does have some minor value, you would do better without a paragraph on the senses altogether. Then the outline would flow much more easily from the first paragraph about the fairy-tale atmosphere of the poem, through the second on its childlike simplicity, to your conclusion concerning its meaning.”

  Mark remained mutinously silent.

  Dr. Weyland flicked the edge of the page with his forefinger. “I see that you mean to conclude, ‘I like the poem a lot.’ But you called it a ‘mushy poem’ when you first mentioned it to me.”

  “I hate this assignment!” Mark burst out. “The poem doesn’t even make sense. What’s ‘an air that kills,’ anyway, poison gas? It’s just dumb, a lot of babyish moaning around for no reason.”

  “Good, you do realize that you’ve avoided the main question,” said Dr. Weyland; “what, precisely, ‘an air that kills’ might be and what it destroys in the poet. As for ‘moaning around,’ have you never had to leave behind an existence that suited you better than the one you moved on to?”

  For no reason Mark felt a pressure of tears in his eyes. He turned away, angry and embarrassed.

  “I have,” Dr. Weyland added meditatively. “Often.”

  “That doesn’t mean a person should go around whining all the time,” Mark muttered. “Can I have that stuff back now? I have to go and type the paper up.”

 
“You’re not ready to,” Dr. Weyland said. “Not until you at least consider the central question.”

  “I’m only in the ninth grade, you know. I’m not supposed to know everything.”

  “What is the air that kills?” asked Dr. Weyland inexorably. “Why does he let it into his heart?”

  “I guess it’s memory,” Mark said sullenly, “and he lets it into his heart because he’s a jerk. He’s doing it to himself—making himself miserable by thinking about his happy childhood. Only a stupid jerk walks around thinking about his childhood. Most people’s childhoods are actually pretty lousy anyhow.”

  “It isn’t necessarily childhood that he means,” Dr. Weyland said, “although you make a good case for that in your outline. I think the reference is more general—to the perils of looking backward on other times and the seductiveness of memory. Well . . .” He fell for moment into an abstracted silence. Then he added briskly, “I think, by the way, that if you really dislike the poem you should say so—and why—in your paper.”

  “I can’t,” Mark said. “This is for Carol Kelly, and she likes the crummy poem. She would.”

  “Who is Carol Kelly?”

  Suddenly recalling that Dr. Weyland was a teacher himself, Mark tried to brazen it out. “This is her assignment. I’m doing it for her.”

  “How kind of you,” murmured Dr. Weyland, returning the book.

  “She’s paying me ten dollars. It’s a business.”

  “My God,” Dr. Weyland said, “a thesis mill! How old are you—fifteen?”

  “Fifteen in June.”

  “Fifteen and rich, no doubt. Certainly enterprising.”

  “I’m not greedy,” Mark said stoutly. “It’s important to have an income of your own, that’s all. Then you don’t have to depend on other people. You should know—I bet you’re rich yourself, I bet you’ve salted away all kinds of treasure from other times.”

  “Unfortunately, great wealth, like renown or exalted rank, attracts too much attention, most of it hostile,” Dr. Weyland said. “I learned a long time ago to travel unencumbered and to depend on my wits. Now I’m not so sure. What a pity I have no diamonds about me, no purses of pirate gold. If I had, you and I could make a transaction of the kind you like, all business: my freedom for your enrichment.”