where rocking horses stand motionless under the soft, endless fall of dust. The edifice endures like an ancient castle fortress, tired yet impervious to time.
Was it I who sucked the life from this house? Will it ever be done with its revenge? I wanted the family gone and yet, without them, it is nothing. The house is dead yet here it stands, undead. Blackwater Hall draws me back, I swear, like a jealous lover. I know it is not done with me yet.
One day it may yet spring to life again. Some rich and enterprising young family might take on the Hall and restore it to glory, filling the rooms with fresh colors, with the chat and bustle of their lives, with scents of flowers and cooking; with the vigor of their own throbbing, blood-filled bodies. Children will run laughing and screaming along the endless corridors. Doll’s house doors will be opened, gigantic child-faces staring in awe through the windows. Rocking horses will creak into life.
And on that day I will be here, waiting to claim my own.
IN MEMORY OF…
Nancy Kilpatrick
Award-winning author and editor Nancy Kilpatrick has published eighteen novels, one nonfiction book, and has edited thirteen anthologies. Of those, eight of the novels are vampiric, including her popular Power of the Blood world. Two additional volumes collect some of her vampire short fiction: The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick and Vampyric Variations. Three of the anthologies she’s edited are Love Bites; Evolve: Vampire Stories of the New Undead; Evolve 2: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead. A goodly number of her two hundred and twenty published short stories fall into the undead realm. She writes on other themes, but vampires are still near and dear to her heart. This has propelled her to acquire, over the years, a vast book collection of vampire fiction and nonfiction that now totals well over 2,200 titles. Look for her upcoming (non-vampire) anthologies: Expiration Date (spring 2015) and Nevermore! Murder, Mystery and the Macabre (fall 2015). Check nancykilpatrick.com for updates, and join her on Facebook.
In the following story, Kilpatrick weaves real historical characters and a few facts into an unusual tale of psychic vampirism…
If memory serves, yellow marigolds and blue narcissus clotted the flowerbeds of my father’s estate in Clontarf that August. The gardener had outdone himself, and it was as though at every turn, life itself permeated the grounds—short-lived life. But 1875 was the spring of my years. Barely seventeen and dreamy, the way Irish girls were then, my future stretched before me like an endless bare canvas, awaiting whichever colors and brush strokes I deigned to paint upon it. Had I but known the outcome of that fateful afternoon, surely I would have fled to the bluffs, hurled my young body over the cliffs and onto the jagged rocks below.
The lawn party my parents hosted was not as large as some, but the crème de la crème was in attendance. I recall gazing from the terrace, across the clipped lawn, at the finely attired men in their frockcoats, and the women in soft silks hidden beneath frilly parasols to ward off the sun’s rays. Suddenly, for some unknown reason, I gazed upward. A flock of ravens swarmed overhead, so thick that they shrouded the sun’s rays, darkening the sky temporarily, sucking up all the light from it. The sight sent a chill down my spine, as if this were a terrible omen of some sort. Just as quickly, that gloomy manifestation evaporated, like a nightmare on awakening, leaving behind only a wisp, a remnant. Immediately the sky brightened.
“May I present my daughter.” My father’s voice startled me, and I turned. “Florence, this is Mister Oscar Wilde. Mister Wilde is a writer, in his first year at Oxford.”
“How very nice to meet you.” The words caught in my throat, and I extended my gloved hand.
His face was almost an anachronism. Long, large-featured, flesh pale yet ruddy, with emotion-laden eyes and a peculiar twist at the corners of his full lips. The exact nature of the crooked line between those lips was, for some time, a mystery to me. And what I often felt then to be a grimace, I have now come to understand to be something entirely more sinister.
Mister Wilde took my hand in his and kissed it, in the continental fashion. “Lieutenant-Colonel Balcombe, your daughter is both remarkably beautiful and, I can see already, utterly charming in a way which will shatter many hearts, all of which, no doubt, will