“Yet I could feel the end of this peace as surely as I’d felt my brief surrender to it, and it was breaking like the dark clouds. The urgent pain of Claudia’s loss pressed in on me, behind me, like a shape gathered from the corners of this cluttered and oddly alien room. But outside, even as the night seemed to dissolve in a fierce driving wind, I could feel something calling to me, something inanimate which I’d never known. And a power within me seemed to answer that power, not with resistance but with an inscrutable, chilling strength.
“I moved silently through the rooms, gently dividing the doors until I saw, in the dim light cast by the flickering gas flames behind me, that sleeping woman lying in my shadow on the couch, the doll limp against her breast. Sometime before I knelt at her side I saw her eyes open, and I could feel beyond her in the collected dark those other eyes watching me, that breathless tiny vampire face waiting.
“ ‘Will you care for her, Madeleine?’ I saw her hands clutch at the doll, turning its face against her breast. And my own hand went out for it, though I did not know why, even as she was answering me.
“ ‘Yes!’ She repeated it again desperately.
“ ‘Is this what you believe her to be, a doll?’ I asked her, my hand closing on the doll’s head, only to feel her snatch it away from me, see her teeth clenched as she glared at me.
“ ‘A child who can’t die! That’s what she is,’ she said, as if she were pronouncing a curse.
“ ‘Aaaaah…’ I whispered.
“ ‘I’ve done with dolls,’ she said, shoving it away from her into the cushions of the couch. She was fumbling with something on her breast, something she wanted me to see and not to see, her fingers catching hold of it and closing over it. I knew what it was, had noticed it before. A locket fixed with a gold pin. I wish I could describe the passion that infected her round features, how her soft baby mouth was distorted.
“ ‘And the child who did die?’ I guessed, watching her. I was picturing a doll shop, dolls with the same face. She shook her head, her hand pulling hard on the locket so the pin ripped the taffeta. It was fear I saw in her now, a consuming panic: And her hand bled as she opened it from the broken pin. I took the locket from her fingers. ‘My daughter,’ she whispered, her lip trembling.
“It was a doll’s face on the small fragment of porcelain, Claudia’s face, a baby face, a saccharine, sweet mockery of innocence an artist had painted there, a child with raven hair like the doll. And the mother, terrified, was staring at the darkness in front of her.
“ ‘Grief…’ I said gently.
“ ‘I’ve done with grief,’ she said, her eyes narrowing as she looked up at me. ‘If you knew how I long to have your power; I’m ready for it, I hunger for it.’ And she turned to me, breathing deeply, so that her breast seemed to swell under her dress.
“A violent frustration rent her face then. She turned away from me, shaking her head, her curls. ‘If you were a mortal man; man and monster!’ she said angrily. ‘If I could only show you my power…’ and she smiled malignantly, defiantly at me ‘…I could make you want me, desire me! But you’re unnatural!’ Her mouth went down at the corners. ‘What can I give you! What can I do to make you give me what you have!’ Her hand hovered over her breasts, seeming to caress them like a man’s hand.
“It was strange, that moment; strange because I could never have predicted the feeling her words incited in me, the way that I saw her now with that small enticing waist, saw the round, plump curve of her breasts and those delicate, pouting lips. She never dreamed what the mortal man in me was, how tormented I was by the blood I’d only just drunk. Desire her I did, more than she knew; because she didn’t understand the nature of the kill. And with a man’s pride I wanted to prove that to her, to humiliate her for what she had said to me, for the cheap vanity of her provocation and the eyes that looked away from me now in disgust. But this was madness. These were not the reasons to grant eternal life.
“And cruelly, surely, I said to her, ‘Did you love this child?’
“I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute hatred. ‘Yes.’ She all but hissed the words at me. ‘How dare you!’ She reached for the locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. It was guilt — that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. She had her hand out towards me. She touched my waistcoat and opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was on my knees, drawing close to her, her hair brushing my face.
“ ‘Hold fast to me when I take you,’ I said to her, seeing her eyes grow wide, her mouth open. ‘And when the swoon is strongest, listen all the harder for the beating of my heart. Hold and say over and over, “I will live.” ’
“ ‘Yes, yes,’ she was nodding, her heart pounding with her excitement.
“Her hands burned on my neck, fingers forcing their way into my collar. ‘Look beyond me at that distant light; don’t take your eyes off of it, not for a second, and say over and over, “I will live.” ’
“She gasped as I broke the flesh, the warn current coming into me, her breasts crushed against me, her body arching up, helpless, from the couch. And I could see her eyes, even as I shut my own, see that taunting, provocative mouth. I was drawing on her, hard, lifting her, and I could feel her weakening, her hands dropping limp at her sides. ‘Tight, tight,’ I whispered over the hot stream of her blood, her heart thundering in my ears, her blood swelling my satiated veins. ‘The lamp,’ I whispered, ‘look at it!’ Her heart was slowing, stopping, and her head dropped back from me on the velvet, her eyes dull to the point of death. It seemed for a moment I couldn’t move, yet I knew I had to, that someone else was lifting my wrist to my mouth as the room turned round and round, that I was focusing on that light as I had told her to do, as I tasted my own blood from my own wrist, and then forced it into her mouth. ‘Drink it. Drink,’ I said to her. But she lay as if dead. I gathered her close to me, the blood pouring over her lips. Then she opened her eyes, and I felt the gentle pressure of her mouth, and then her hands closing tight on the arm as she began to suck. I was rocking her, whispering to her, trying desperately to break my swoon; and then I felt her powerful pull. Every blood vessel felt it. I was threaded through and through with her pulling, my hand holding fast to the couch now, her heart beating fierce against my heart, her fingers digging deep into my arm, my outstretched palm. It was cutting me, scoring me, so I all but cried out as it went on and on, and I was backing away from her, yet pulling her with me, my life passing through my arm, her moaning breath in time with her pulling. And those strings which were my veins, those searing wires pulled at my very heart harder and harder until, without will or direction, I had wrenched free of her and fallen away from her, clutching that bleeding wrist tight with my own hand.
“She was staring at me, the blood staining her open mouth. An eternity seemed to pass as she stared. She doubled and tripled in my blurred vision, then collapsed into one trembling shape. Her hand moved to her mouth, yet her eyes did not move but grew large in her face as she stared. And then she rose slowly, not as if by her own power but as if lifted from the couch bodily by some invisible force which held her now, staring as she turned round and round, her massive skirt moving stiff as if she were all of a piece, turning like some great carved ornament on a music box that dances helplessly round and round to the music. And suddenly she was staring down at the taffeta, grabbing hold of it, pressing it between her fingers so it zinged and rustled, and she let it fall, quickly covering her ears, her eyes shut tight, then opened wide again. And then it seemed she saw the lamp, the distant, low gas lamp of the other room that gave a fragile light through the double doors. And she ran to it and stood beside it, watching it as if it were alive. ‘Don’t touch it…’ Claudia said to her, and gently guided her away. But Madeleine had seen the flowers on the balcony and she was drawing close to them now, her outstretched palms brushing the petals and then pressing the droplets of rain to her face.