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, snatching 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 lashing out frenziedly with my foot as she reached after me. Her eyes were bubbling green hells. "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, crashing 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 massive bump 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 buttoned 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 Grass-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 lustre 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 clustered 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 whore, 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 fashion, 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 practitioner. 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-glass, 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 carcasses on the plains.
I am not an ideal vampire.
But surely my curls were never so black and shining 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 assume 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 fashions, autobiography. Suffice it to say that I, along with every other vampire since the classical 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 hoards to oneself. Of course, the experience of feeding is hardly the psycho-sexual 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 readership believe our own furtive suppers are orgiastic communions of the highest order.