Blood Sisters_ Vampire Stories by Women - Paula Guran Page 0,20

jaw, long black lashes. Pallid features a sculptor might have chiseled with idealistic fingers, shaded by hair that is dark, formless and too long. My eyes are deceptive; they’re the green-brown of hazel nuts and they look gentle, pensive. They tell you nothing about my character.

“Just a shade, fair child,” I tell her gently. “I need your help. Would you help me?”

There’s so much history in this house, Blackwater Hall. I should know, for I built it.

Eight years the construction took me, and in 1704 the Hall was finished, standing magnificent beside the River Blackwater amid the rich landscape of County Waterford. My wife Mary was weeks from giving birth. Years, it had taken us to conceive a child! Now all my dreams were close to fruition. Soon we would be leaving the decrepit tower of my Norman and Anglo-Irish ancestors and moving into the new mansion, a place grand enough to befit our heirs. Such struggles I’d had to keep my estate from the hands of the conquering English! I even changed faith from Catholic to Protestant to save it from confiscation—and yet it slipped from my hands anyway. All gone in one terrible night.

Perhaps this was divine punishment. To me, it meant little to betray my religion, since I never was devout. All I cared about was keeping my lands—not out of greed, but passion. I loved my birthright so deeply, I valued it even above my immortal soul. Some say Irish Catholicism is only one step away from paganism, that the faerie folk were never destroyed, only assimilated into the new faith and given the names of saints so the people could still worship without heresy. I believe in those darker, older gods: devouring black mother Callee and her ilk. They never went away, only vanished into sea and stone, tree and sky. And that dreadful night, three of them came to wreak vengeance. Three ancient gods with burnished skins and writhing hair and terrible golden eyes.

They took me, and reforged me into what I am.

The trinity who chose me personified that very peculiar delusion some vampires have—that they have become mythological personalities, demi-gods. And who’s to say they are wrong? We slip into another reality when we change, a soup of dreams and nightmares that some call the Crystal Ring. It swarms with archetypes born from the human subconscious (and from the subconscious of other beings, too, I don’t doubt). Who is to say that the thought-form of a god or an archangel can’t take over a newly made vampire, fusing with a soul that has been broken apart like a raw egg?

I digress.

When I recall my human self, I peer through a veil. I recall Mary as beautiful, a tall fine woman. We loved each other, I thought … I’d been patient with the long time it took her to conceive, as I had with the long construction of the house. Wasn’t that enough to prove my devotion? Apparently not, by her standards. Mere days before the house was ready for us, it came to pass that I discovered her in the old tower house in the company of some stuttering, milkweed clerk from Dublin. She was packing, ready to run away with him.

Each time I return to Blackwater Hall and stand once again in the courtyard, the grey walls rising like thunderclouds above me, I relive that night. The yellow ropes of Mary’s hair hanging over her breasts, the swell of her belly beneath her clothes as she made her confession. “The child is not yours, Sebastian. In ten years, you could not give me a child. You care nothing for me—all you love is the house! My lover has come for me and we’re leaving.”

She shrank away then as if I would strike her, but I didn’t. Instead, I ran into the courtyard of the new house and screamed my rage at the heavens. The black sky split open, and the deluge of rain sent me skidding to the door of a cellar. Somehow I’d gashed my arm in my anguish and blood was dripping from me.

In a few fatal minutes I’d lost everything. I had no wife, no child, so what now was the use of a grand hall? There was wood stacked inside and I meant to set light to it, to burn my dream to its foundations.

The darkness inside the cellar was absolute, but I knew its shape: a long chamber with racks set ready for storage. Only a store-room