Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,24

scrolled woodwork of chairs, all gold. There are chairs lush with needlepoint roses, tapestry stools and firescreens. Too many ornaments; clocks, statuettes, vases, elephants carved of onyx and jade. More paintings, huge mirrors rimmed with gilt.

None of this stuff is mine. Only the shell matters.

These great rooms—which feel so alien to me, even though I commissioned them—fill me with delicious, creeping awe. This place has the feel of a theatre, each room a lavish set waiting endlessly for the actors to arrive. The house creaks. Speaks. Upstairs there are nurseries and playrooms where expensive toys have been played with too little. Alas, the mortality rate of children has been tragically high over the decades—and not all my fault, far from it.

Feeding upon infants is a dull game, after all. True pleasure lies in toying with the adult inhabitants. I goad them, rather as a dog scratches at fleas, to remind them they should not be here.

Some regard the house as ugly. All things decay, of course. Each time I come I see further hints of weathering, paint peeling, rust-marks streaking the render. Perhaps Blackwater Hall is, as some claim, a brute of a place, as desolate as a prison fortress. Well, I don’t ask anyone to admire it. It’s the mirror of my soul. It is my soul.

In truth, I’ve no need to reclaim it, because it was never truly taken from me. It can’t be taken; it’s as if it exists partly in the Crystal Ring, an etheric house that transcends its earthly form. It transcends beauty itself.

If I speak of my house like a lover, it is because I regard it as a lover.

On the surface, Elizabeth is the good wife, attending church, managing her household, pretending to be thrilled when her husband brings her some trinket. She affects ignorance of his gambling, drinking and whoring when he’s away in Dublin or in London. Like the dutiful wife she is, she turns a blind eye. But she has a secret.

Me.

Our limbs twine like snow in the moonlight, blood streaking darkly down her throat. Blood on snow. She knows by now that I’m no ghost, that my needs are nothing to do with saving my poor tormented soul—but she’s beyond caring. We are both too addicted to this sensual game. When she feels faint, I hold her up and give her dark stout to drink, to strengthen the blood.

She knows that if we keep doing this, it will kill her, yet she cannot stop. Neither of us can. Urgently she welcomes me to her bed, whenever the husband is absent.

Then one night, panting in the aftermath of passion, she cries, “You must leave me alone, Sebastian.” She pushes me away into the wreckage of bed sheets, her essence still sweet on my tongue. “I need to have children. Can you give me children?”

I laugh and reply, “I hardly think so. We both know that I can’t.”

Even in life, as I’ve mentioned, I failed to impregnate my wife. Whatever cold essence now spurts from my member, it is as clear as ice water and as sterile as poteen. There is no life-force in it.

“Then you have to go, and leave me to my husband!”

So I do as she asks—out of curiosity, not compassion. I let her alone for a few years, and children she has. Three rosy daughters and two sons, who suck as greedily upon her breast as ever I have feasted on her neck. The beating urgency of life will always win out against the vampire.

Why did I indulge her? Well, I have patience. Of course the temptation was there, to guzzle the life from those rosy children, from mother and father too, all in one debauched night—but I didn’t. What am I, a fox in a flapping hencoop, to go on killing and killing until nothing moves anymore? No.

I was too soft on Elizabeth but, you see, if I’d destroyed her—and it would have been so easy, done in a moment—I’d have destroyed the very conditions that made my existence worthwhile. I was in love, a little. If not with her, then with the situation.

I still had to feed, of course, and so I went away for a while, a fair few years in fact, and found entertainment elsewhere. I might even have lost interest and never gone back at all—but by coincidence, nearly twenty years on, we meet at a ball in Dublin.

Elizabeth greets me with the same sly smile of recognition and, as I bow