By Blood We Live Part 56

Between the main bedroom and the bathroom a smaller door stood ajar. I froze as I reached it, my senses suddenly alert, my ears seeming to stretch themselves into vast receivers to pick up any slightest sound. For there had been a sound. I was sure of it, from that room....

A scratching? A rustle? A whisper? I couldn't say. But a sound, anyway.

Adrienne would be coming soon. Standing outside that door I slowly recommenced toweling myself dry. My naked feet were still firmly rooted, but my hands automatically worked with the towel. It was nerves, only nerves. There had been no sound, or at most only the night breeze off the sea, whispering in through an open window.

I stopped toweling, took another step towards the main bedroom, heard the sound again. A small, choking rasp. A tiny gasping for air.

Karpethes? What the h.e.l.l was going on?

I s.h.i.+vered violently, my suddenly chill flesh shuddering in an uncontrollable spasm. But...I forced myself to action, returned to the main bedroom, quickly dressed (with the exception of my tie and jacket) and crept back to the small room.

Adrienne must be on her way to me even now. She mustn't find me poking my nose into things, like a suspicious kid. I must kill off this silly feeling that had my skin crawling. Not that an attack of nerves was unnatural in the circ.u.mstances, on the contrary, but I wasn't about to let it spoil the night. I pushed open the door of the room, entered into darkness, found the light switch. Then- I held my breath, flipped the switch.

The room was only half as big as the others. It contained a small single bed, a bedside table, a wardrobe. Nothing more, or at least nothing immediately apparent to my wildly darting eyes. My heart, which was racing, slowed and began to settle towards a steadier beat. The window was open, external shutters closed-but small night sounds were finding their way in through the louvers. The distant sounds of traffic, the toot of horns-holiday sounds from below.

I breathed deeply and gratefully, and saw something projecting from beneath the pillow on the bed. A corner of card or of dark leather, like a wallet or- Or a pa.s.sport!

A Greek pa.s.sport, Karpethes', when I opened it. But how could it be? The man in the photograph was young, no older than me. His birth date proved it. But there was his name: Nichos Karpethes. Printed in Greek, of course, but still plain enough. His son?

Puzzling over the pa.s.sport had served to distract me. My nerves had steadied up. I tossed the pa.s.sport down, frowned at it where it lay upon the bed, breathed deeply once more...then froze solid!

A scratching, a hissing, a dry grunting-from the wardrobe.

Mice? Or did I in fact smell a rat?

Even as the short hairs bristled on the back of my neck I knew anger. There were too many unexplained things here. Too much I didn't understand. And what was it I feared? Old Mario's myths and legends? No, for in my experience the Italians are notorious for getting things wrong. Oh, yes, notorious....

I reached out, turned the wardrobe's doork.n.o.b, yanked the doors open.

At first I saw nothing of any importance or significance. My eyes didn't know what they sought. Shoes, patent leather, two pairs, stood side by side below. Tiny suits, no bigger than boys' sizes, hung above on steel hangers. And-my G.o.d, my G.o.d-a waistcoat!

I backed out of that little room on rubber legs, with the silence of the suite shrieking all about me, my eyes bulging, my jaw hanging slack- "Peter?"

She came in through the suite's main door, came floating towards me, eager, smiling, her green eyes blazing. Then blazing their suspicion, their anger, as they saw my condition. "Peter!"

I lurched away as her hands reached for me, those hands I had never yet touched, which had never touched me. Then I was into the main bedroom, s.n.a.t.c.hing my tie and jacket from the bed, (don't ask me why) and out of the window, yelling some inarticulate, choking thing at her and las.h.i.+ng out frenziedly with my foot as she reached after me. Her eyes were bubbling green h.e.l.ls. "Peter?"

Her fingers closed on my forearm, bands of steel containing a fierce, hungry heat. And strong as two men, she began to lift me back into her lair!

I put my feet against the wall, kicked, came free and crashed backwards into shrubbery. Then up on my feet, gasping for air, running, tumbling, cras.h.i.+ng into the night. Down madly tilting slopes, through black chasms of mountain pine with the Mediterranean stars winking overhead, and the beckoning, friendly lights of the village seen occasionally below....

In the morning, looking up at the way I had descended and remembering the nightmare of my panic-flight, I counted myself lucky to have survived it. The place was precipitous. In the end I had fallen, but only for a short distance. All in utter darkness, and my head striking something hard. But....

I did survive. Survived both Adrienne and my flight from her.

Waking with the dawn, stiff and bruised and with a ma.s.sive b.u.mp on my forehead, I staggered back to my hotel, locked the door behind me-then sat there trembling and moaning until it was time for the coach.

Weak? Maybe I was, maybe I am.

But on my way into Geneva, with people round me and the sun hot through the coach's windows, I could think again. I could roll up my sleeve and examine that claw mark of four slim fingers and a thumb, branded white into my suntanned flesh, where hair would never grow again on skin sere and wrinkled.

And seeing those marks I could also remember the wardrobe and the waistcoat-and what the waistcoat contained.

That tiny puppet of a man, alive still but barely, his stick-arms dangling through the waistcoat's arm holes, his baby's head projecting, its chin supported by the tightly b.u.t.toned waistcoat's breast. And the large bulldog clip over the hanger's bar, its teeth fastened in the loose, wrinkled skin of his walnut head, holding it up. And his skinny little legs dangling, twig-things twitching there; and his pleading, pleading eyes!

But eyes are something I mustn't dwell upon.

And green is a color I can no longer bear....

Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire.

by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu.

Translated from the Romanian by Catherynne M. Valente Catherynne M. Valente is the critically acclaimed author of The Orphan's Tales, the first volume of which, In the Night Garden, won the Tiptree Award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of the novels The Labyrinth, Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, and The Gra.s.s-Cutting Sword. Her latest novel, Palimpsest-which she describes as "a baroque meeting of science fiction and fantasy"-was published in February. In May, her first science fiction story, "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" appeared in my anthology, Federations.

This next piece, translated by Valente, is an excerpt from Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire, the indispensable tome of vampire legends and lore by noted vampire scholar Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu of the University of Budapest.

Valente originally published this prefatory and press material on her website, annapetrescu.catherynnemvalente.com. It appears here in print for the first time. Look for Exsanguinations at fine purveyors of Demonic Texts throughout Europe and America in October 2009.

An Ideal Vampire: Prefatory Notes Death is such a Victorian conceit.

Death is solemn, it is colorless. The unfortunate maiden is laid in a long bed with a silk scarf at the neck, scented with oils so that her stink does not offend delicate nostrils, her hair brushed to a l.u.s.tre never achieved in life, skin powdered pale and smooth, lips drawn in obscene red: all to give the appearance of life just snuffed out, so recently that the body has not yet realized it has not merely dozed off in the midst of a pleasant afternoon. Why, her eyelashes never laid so coyly dark upon her cheek! Her color was never so high and fever-flushed! Her teeth never sat so white upon her scarlet lips, her curls never cl.u.s.tered so black around her seraphic face!

In short, all effort has been made to make the poor corpse appear immortal, to dress it as a vampire. After all, it is not a proper funeral if she does not look so fresh that she could leap at any moment from the coffin and affix her teeth to a relative's jugular. It is a fetish, really, the just-dead virgin. As if death were a door from which she must emerge a wh.o.r.e, demoniac, and hungry.

The vampire, on the contrary, is essentially Byronic. It walks in beauty like the night, and through the night, and in it, it is always windswept and brooding, dandified by the accessories of death-the cross, the coffin, the shroud. But these things are merely fas.h.i.+on, no more intrinsic to the vampire self than a widow's peak or a Lugosian laugh. What is necessary is the predatory instinct, and the eternal study of death, since the vampire is its most skilled pract.i.tioner. The vampire is not half in love with easeful death, it is easeful death, and it has some small duty to make of death an art, an ecstasy, a philosophy. Else why be a demon? Certainly mortals cannot get away with such pretension. One might casually wonder whether the vampire was a product of the Gothic imagination, or the Gothic imagination was a product of the vampire-if one were predisposed to ponder such questions. The vampire, by its nature, does so. Unable to see itself in a looking-gla.s.s, it is the vainest of all creatures, and considers its own nature incessantly. These days, there are night-conferences in Bulgaria and Romania, with endless papers and sample chapters of promised masterpieces.

Of course, being Byronic, the ideal vampire is male, heroic in his way, a frontiersman braving the wilds of humanity, piling high his carca.s.ses on the plains.

I am not an ideal vampire.

But surely my curls were never so black and s.h.i.+ning as the day they lay me in the dirt. I listened to them mumble the old 23rd and counted like sheep the thud-falls of shoveled earth on the lid of what I must a.s.sume was a very expensive coffin. Death, as I have said, is Victorian-thus, no family would allow themselves to be seen in public with sub-par funerary rites.

I will not here indulge in that most vulgar of recent fas.h.i.+ons, autobiography. Suffice it to say that I, along with every other vampire since the cla.s.sical age of our Slavic forefathers, clawed my way out of that very well-appointed coffin and into the inevitably moonlit night. I availed myself, as so many of us do, of the graveyard caretaker as my first victim-how many of us recall the awkwardness of that first exsanguination! It is so much like making love for the first time; one has no clear idea what goes where, but clutches stiffly to whatever seems more or less correct, spraying fluids all over one's best evening clothes and mumbling apologies to the hapless partner, who no doubt experienced none of the crude pleasure one h.o.a.rds to oneself. Of course, the experience of feeding is hardly the psycho-s.e.xual revelation recent extra-cultural authors have claimed-do you, dear reader, find yourself in involuntary climax when ingesting a plate of pasta and a modest red wine? Certainly not. Yet certain in vogue lady novelists would have their deluded readers.h.i.+p believe our own furtive suppers are orgiastic communions of the highest order.

Ah, but I have forgotten the tiresome necessity of all vampiric literature-I have not given my credentials. I ought to simply attach a notice of my parentage to my lapel or my Curriculum Vitae, perhaps even have it notarized like the breeding papers of a half-feeble spaniel. But certainly, without credentials, I can have nothing of importance to say. Very well.

I was sponsored by a very beguiling old debauch by the name of Ambrose Mosshammer who asked me to stay after his Herodotus seminar for special instruction. I fully expected to be accosted in his windowless eighth floor office-though when I imagined his skeletal hand groping my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and tearing my new wool skirt, I did not quite realize that he would simultaneously be whispering the tale of Gyges in my ear and divining the path of my jugular with his tongue before slas.h.i.+ng into my throat with his gnarled, ancient teeth. It was certainly not what I had been led to expect young ladies experienced behind the closed doors of the offices of elderly colleagues. (I beg the forgiveness of any vampiric readers, for whom this recitation must be as tedious and gauche as a human reading about the expulsion of the placenta from his mother's womb. But the forms must be followed.) Ambrose's blood tasted faintly of dust and the glue of book-bindings, as well as a peculiar undertaste of sandalwood and tobacco. It was not unpleasant, but I was rather in a rush to finish the process, once I realized what was afoot. There is no need to dwell in ritual-that sort of decadence can be safely left to Catholicism. He proffered his wrist in a most gentlemanly manner, and I availed myself of the necessary blood. I cannot overstate his professionalism and patience, truly, the old ones have a gravitas the younger generation of fiends cannot match.

I left his office with a rumpled skirt and a torn blouse, carried by his graduate students out to the parking lot, where I could safely be a.s.sumed to have been a victim of an over-zealous mugger. A few days later, I had risen from my grave and thusly embarked on my postdoctoral career.

Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu University of Budapest Night Campus

About the Author.

Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu was born in 1948 to Danish-Romanian parents, Adrian Petrescu and Marie Oppenhagen. Adrian and Marie had immigrated from the Continent whilst Marie was pregnant to the quiet London suburb of Kensington, where they raised their only daughter in relative tranquility 1 .The life of a young scholar is often tediously predictable, and young Anna was educated in the usual single-s.e.x boarding schools before entering the equally h.o.m.ogenous St. Hilda's College, Oxford University. She studied Cla.s.sics there under the watchful eye of Dr. Ambrose K. Mosshammer, who in her final year of study graciously Converted her in recognition of her great talent 2 .Once Anna had graduated, her interest s.h.i.+fted from the roots of human civilization in Ancient Greece to the roots of Vampiric civilization in the Slavic states and Central Europe. Her unromantic and strictly researched work in the field of Proto-History is widely recognized as having been one of the foundations of the field. In 1983, she helped to establish the Order of the Ivory Tooth, an a.s.sociation of literary historians who set out to archive the entirety of the Vampiric Corpus-that is, the sum total of all literature involving Vampires in the West. While this goal is far from complete, the Order is now one of the most highly respected inst.i.tutions among the Vampiric elite, and its work, and ritual conferences, are watched with great interest.

In the early eighties, while a humble lecturer at the University of the Danube 3, Anna was also involved in the Eden Project, a think-tank which aimed to definitively prove or debunk the ever-popular claims of pre-Slavic heritage through Lilith. In recent years, the Edenites have s.h.i.+fted their focus to doc.u.menting the Dark Ages of the Cla.s.sical World and Early Semitic Culture, in which the records of Vampiric activity are so scarce as to be by and large discounted by the academic majority. The "Lilith Question," a now-ubiquitous term coined by Dr. Moira Russell, Anna's partner in Edenism, was never qualitatively answered, and the two disagree on the subject to this day.

In 1986, Anna was hired as a tenure-track professor at the University of Constantinople, where she produced her enormous and definitive critical work, She Drained Me of My Very Marrow: The Female Vampire in History and Literature 4.The success and influence of this work cannot be overestimated, and continues to be the bedrock of Black Feminism5, a movement which has become something of a juggernaut in recent years. In fact, it was largely due to the popularity of this "lay" history that the loose confederation of Night Campuses organized the first of its annual Conferences in Madrid, in 1993. Of course there are many other conferences around the world, and meetings of various Societies, but the general Conference of Shadow-Academia is by far the largest, most prestigious, and well-attended. It is, nowadays, simply referred to as "The Conference6."

Disagreements arose between Anna and the Faculty of Sanguinary History at Constantinople, largely revolving around Anna's involvement with the Edenites and her insistence on encouraging her graduate students to generate texts of their own to counter the horde of human literature on the subject of Vampires 7. In 1991, she left Constantinople and took the prestigious Geisslerin Chair at the University of Budapest, where she teaches to this day.

Anna remains unmarried 8 . ____________________.

1 It is considered somewhat gauche to reference one's mortal parentage when in polite society. Most modern vampires trace their heritage purely through the line of Conversion, often in the Spanish style, in which case Anna's rather baroque moniker would be Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu y Mosshammer y Chamberlain, etc. Nevertheless, for the sake of the laity, she has chosen to briefly recount the flotsam and jetsam of her pre-Conversion existence here. Those of standing in the Community may feel secure in pa.s.sing by this piece of historical curiosity.

2 Dr. Mosshammer has kindly agreed to write an introduction to Dr. Petrescu's forthcoming work, Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire. (University of Csejthe Press, 2005). The apprentice-master relations.h.i.+p between many vampires and the quasi-parental figures who Converted them is well-doc.u.mented, but Dr. Mosshammer has been particularly supportive, and the editors of this site wish to take this opportunity to publicly thank him.

3 And thus able to take part in such specious feminist activities, as the Danube is well-known as a hotbed of radical thought and shoddy workmans.h.i.+p-even popularly referred to as "The Berkeley of Eastern Europe."

4 University of Darvulia Press, 1987.

5 Black Feminism, a movement which centralizes the role of the female Vampire, the succubus, in Sanguinary History, is somewhat tainted in the view of most historians due to its roots in human scholars.h.i.+p. In the mortal world, second-wave feminism resulted in a great deal of literature-much of which was written by women like Anna who would later be Converted, bringing this rather specialized interest into their Vampiric studies. In addition, many find it ridiculous, in light of the great Vampires of literature being predominantly male, to privilege the role of the female-in essence, placing the role of the Three Sisters over that of Dracula. However, Black Feminists trace their lineage through such actual Vampire personages as Elizabeth Bathory, Clara Geisslerin, Augusta Gordon, and Emily Draper, scoffing at any attempt to drag Dracula into serious discussions of gender in the Community. This remains a controversy which finds Anna and her colleagues at its center, however, it has been suggested that since Anna herself was Converted by a male Vampire, she ought to be more grateful to the masculine animus, and confine herself to more traditional histories.

6 The 2005 Conference will take place July 25- 29 in Lodz, Poland, hosted by Plogojiwitz University. Hotels fill up quickly, so reservations are suggested.

7 Much as it was once considered beneath mortal n.o.bility to engage in mercantile activities, it is widely a.s.serted that for Vampires to produce their own quasi-fictional texts is vulgar in the highest degree. To speak for ourselves threatens the exposure of our entire Community, and most agree that the formulation of ridiculous and outlandish stories of bloodletting and cannibalism ought to be left to those mortal authors who find it t.i.tillating.

8 Predictably, this has caused a number of rumors to arise as to the orientation of Dr. Petrescu. While the editors of this site feel that such a subject is merely salacious and has no place in a professional biography, or in the parlor rooms of certain aged male Faculty members, they will note, without commentary, that Dr. Petrescu has co-habited with the Italian Edenite scholar Genevra Verzini in Budapest since 1995.

University of Csejthe Press 14 dr. Razvan Zeklos str., bl. 12C, 1st floor, 1st district, 011035 Bucharest Phone: +4021.3316688 Fax: 4021.3316689 ____________________.

CONTACT: Andrei Bogoescu, [email protected] EXSANGUINATIONS.

A Handbook For The Educated Vampire by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu translated from the Romanian by Catherynne M. Valente ____________________.

AN OCTOBER 2009 RELEASE.

In October 2009, the prestigious University of Csejthe Press will release Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu's long-awaited work, Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire. This much-discussed volume will contain a distillation of 25 years of research into the Origins, Customs, History, and Literature of the Vampire Community. It will serve both as a primer for the Newly Converted and a convenient desk reference for the experienced Dark Academic. Never before has such a variety of scholarly work been brought together in one place, and readers can look forward to a truly definitive delineation of the Vampire Culture in Dr. Petrescu's trademark simple, elegant prose.

Look for Exsanguinations at fine purveyors of Demonic Texts throughout Europe and America in October 2009.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR EXSANGUINATIONS.

"Petrescu has done it! This text will stand for many cycles of Conversion hence. There can be no finer manual for the Vampiric existence than this lovely volume, no more concise and sensitive expression of the postmodern fiend."

Genevra Verzini "Dare I call this the Vampiric Bible? I think I must, for no more inclusive and profound a book has yet been produced in the Community."

Adrian Maru To interview Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu, or to request more information about Exsanguinations or any other Csejthe Press t.i.tles, contact Csejthe Press publicity director Andrei Bogoescu at

EXSANGUINATIONS.

by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu (Non-Fiction / 978-1-59780-156-0 / $15.95 / 400 pages) a Csejthe Press trade paperback / October 2009.

to learn more visit www.csejthepress.com.

Lucy, In Her Splendor.

by Charles Coleman Finlay.

Charles Coleman Finlay is the author of the novel The Prodigal Troll. Writing as C. C. Finlay, he has a historical fantasy trilogy called Traitor to the Crown just out from Del Rey, consisting of The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat. Finlay's short fiction has appeared in several magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in Wild Things. His novella, "The Political Prisoner," is a finalist for the 2009 Hugo and Nebula awards.

Finlay says that the appeal of the vampire is about the seduction of easy, self-gratifying choices, and the prices we pay for our pleasures. "It's about the contradiction that happens when we peer at the darkness within ourselves only to find a light," he said. "I suspect that vampires are a kind of literary Rorschach test, revealing the suppressed secrets of our individual personalities and emotional states. That's why they're such a source of endless fascination."

"Lucy, In Her Splendor" is about a couple that owns a bed and breakfast on an island. What happens on the island stays on the island, even when you'd rather have it go away.

When they were done, they sat in the plastic lawn chairs by the lake and listened in the dark to waves lapping the sharp white boulders mounded along the sh.o.r.e.

The first moth came fluttering from the direction of the pumphouse. It slapped into Lucy's cheek almost accidentally and startled them both. She raised her hand against it and the moth settled on one white-tipped nail. As she flicked her fingertip, it lifted into the air and hurtled back at her face.

A second and a third moth followed seconds later, followed in time by others until a tiny halo of insects swirled around her short, platinum blonde hair.

"Could be worse," Martin said, trying to wave them off. "Could be mosquitoes."

She smiled at him, s.h.i.+fted her chair closer, and leaned against his shoulder.

"G.o.d, Lucy, you're hot," he said.

She laughed, a little sadly, making a warm vibration that resonated in his chest. "I'm glad you still think so."

"No," he said. "Are you sure you haven't turned into a bug lamp. I swear you're hot enough to zap those bugs to ashes."

"You-"

She lifted her hand to slap him, but he caught it and folded her fingers within his own. Her skin was dry, caked with grit. He gave it a little squeeze and looked around, but rows of trees blocked the view of their neighbors. More bugs flew at Lucy's head.

Her voice trembled. "I'm really sick, aren't I?"

"It's just a fever. That's all it is." He placed her hand in his lap, and tried to wave the bugs away. One of the moth's wings buzzed harshly while the stones tapped against each other in the susurration of the waves. "Let's go inside."