Bad Dreams (11 page)

‘Your Majesty,’ she said, appearing through the curtains like a leading lady, ‘I am honoured.’

She was mocking him.

‘The Kingdom of the Cats is over,’ he said. ‘I’m Hugh Farnham, now.’

‘Hugh. Very well. You change your names with your skins, nephew.’

‘We all do.’

She made no noise as she came near him, her dress catching the lights of the city.

‘Not all. I’m Ariadne.’

He had heard of her, but not much. Giselle had met her in Portugal, after the Lisbon earthquake. And, he realized, he had seen her credits on motion pictures.

‘Of “Gowns by Ariadne”?’

She smiled. She was supposed to be one of the Elders, but she was not above being flattered by recognition.

‘I am pleased to meet you,’ he said.

‘No, you aren’t. You were enjoying your uniqueness, imagining yourself the last of the Kind.’

He said nothing. She was more beautiful even than Giselle, and stronger even than he.

‘We’ve flourished since your little kingdom fell, you know. We’ve changed our ways, while you’ve stayed the same.’

‘Am I to be punished, then?’

She laughed, musically. ‘Oh no, Hugh. You may follow your own road. Perhaps there’ll be another Kingdom of the Cats. You can always rejoin when you get tired of playing with all this…’

She extended her arms, including the city in her gesture.

He reached out to her, drawn to her burning ice centre. Feeding was one thing, but this desire was different. The way he felt for Ariadne was not so different from the way the Objectivist or the Lawyer felt for him.

‘No,’ she said, holding his hand, ‘I don’t think so. I have other business to…’

‘Who is he?’

She was taller than she had been, her cheekbones more prominent, her eyes brighter.

‘My date?’

He nodded.

‘A man of genius, nephew. A lamb among wolves just now, I admit, but a remarkable man. Cameron Nielson.’

He knew of the young man. A playwright, his first works – a two-handed drama about a prisoner and his psychiatrist, and a family saga called
Father, Son and Holy Terror
– had been successful on Broadway, netting two successive Drama Critics Circle Awards, and were optioned by Mark Hellinger at Universal. Along with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, he was expected to shake up the American theatre a little.

The Monster had a taste for geniuses. In his mind, he saw Ariadne opening Nielson’s head, and scooping his genius out in grey lumps.

‘Not yet,’ Ariadne said. ‘Later, maybe. But not yet. He has things to do.’

‘Why do you care?’

She smiled again. ‘I’m a patron of the arts.’

A wind blew by, bringing a chill. Ariadne’s dress clung where the wind pressed, and stirred, flapping on her other side. In the starlight, her skin was as dead white as her hair, but her eyes shone, red under green. She was the adult Giselle might have become in a thousand more years. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘will you ride your crusade?’

He nodded. She laughed.

‘It’ll be interesting. But it’ll be the end of you.’

It was like a blow. The Elders were always like that, secure in their survival, contemptuous of the rest of the Kind, treating them like children playing at the edge of the precipice, knowing better but doing nothing.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, maybe not. Maybe you’ll last. But your friends in there are a poor lot.’

‘They don’t matter.’

‘That’s a dangerous thought. You should be careful about the people you mix with. I prefer the brilliant…’

‘So do I, they taste better.’

‘Not just for that, nephew. They’re less prone to envy us. Among humans, the brilliant are freaks and sports. It’s mediocrities you should watch. Like your friends back there, arguing about movie stars. When they’ve finished with the Reds, they’ll want to see your head on a pole. Have you read that woman’s books?’

He was embarrassed, and shrugged.

‘I trust you’ve not fed off her. She would be such a feeble meal.’

They had nothing more to say to each other, but they stayed on the terrace, politely sampling each other’s memories. There were great parts of her experience that she successfully kept him away from. She was much older, much stronger. It was not really new to him, being powerless, but it was hardly relishable.

All she gave him were a few pictures of the world as it had been for her. And yet, she exhausted him in a single draught. All his ghosts were conjured up for her. It was a wrenching, unpleasant experience, but he submitted to it, hoping to impress her. When it was over, she looked at him with an expression he would never be able to wipe from his memory. There was a nannyish kindliness in it, but also disappointment, and – intolerably – pity. She shrugged, her dress rippling from her shoulders, and smiled.

‘No,’ she said again, ‘I don’t think so.’

His question was only a thought. Some day?

Her answer was not even that. Maybe, who knows, never…

She gave him her hand to be kissed – the Kind always found it hard to dispense with the old manners – and left him, the curtains closing after her. On the balcony, he was alone again.

His fingernails, he realized, were two inches long, and curled into bony barbs. And his mouth was full of blood.

Inside, he was shaking. She had left something of herself in him, perhaps out of tenderness. He hated her for that gesture, and tried to force the images she had spilled into him out of his mind, erasing the centuries with a burning fury.

A girl came out. She had a short black dress, red hair and pale freckles the assistant director who had supervised her screen test thought would not show in Technicolor. She was lighting a cigarette, and shivering. She was here with the assistant director, and was not sure whether she should go to bed with him tonight. He was important, but maybe not that important. Daphne had told her to get an agent, and sleep with him.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry… I thought there was no one out here.’

He laid his hands on her shoulders, and looked into her face. Her eyes moved from side to side, trying to take all of him in. His nails pinched her bare skin, drawing points of blood.

Still trying to wash Ariadne out of his mind, he bent his neck and kissed the girl – Therese Colt – on the mouth, forcing his long tongue into her throat, latching suckerlike to her tonsils.

Therese did not struggle, melting in his embrace as she had done during the screen test with the iron-jawed desert sheik.

He sucked part of her in, finding the Mary Teresa Garrity beneath Therese Colt, and gulped it down. She tasted bitter. After Ariadne, they would all, for a while, taste bitter. He sucked back his tongue, pulling it out of the girl with a rasping slurp, and pushed her away.

He wiped his bleeding mouth with the back of his hand, scraping away skin, then pulled out a silk handkerchief from the top pocket of his dinner jacket, balled it, and used it to mop up the mess. Therese was looking at him with concern, unheeding the part of her that had just been torn loose. Blood was seeping from one of her nostrils, and his nailpoints had opened three twin vents in the side of her dress, exposing more freckles.

‘Mister,’ she said, ‘are you all right?’

He ignored her. She stepped closer, reaching out, but then her knees gave way and she slumped to the floor in a faint.

The Monster grabbed the rail, and took control of himself. Gripping tight, he watched his hands as the nails shrank. He smoothed his hair, and tugged at his clothes, sharpening his appearance.

Therese would recover. She had warmed him, helped him survive Ariadne’s indifference. He had taken something from her, but had also left something inside her. Perhaps he had chilled her heart where it needed to be chilled. She would not sleep with the assistant director, but she would become a star.

He left her there, and went back into the restaurant. Ariadne had rejoined Cameron Nielson, and was listening intently as he talked to her. The Monster knew he was talking about his work, for he could feel the young man’s burning intensity from across the room. Ariadne had her hand lightly on his arm. The Monster was still shivering. Ariadne gave him the briefest of smiles, and returned her attention to the playwright.

They would never speak again, the Monster and Ariadne, although they would occasionally be in the same city and sense each other’s presence. If there were, as she had implied, others of the Kind still surviving, then he never encountered any.

Tail Gunner Joe was drunk and getting abusive, calling the waiters ‘kikes’ and ‘Commies’. He was itching for an injection, the Monster could tell. The Lawyer was making inscrutable little notes. And the Objectivist, deprived of his presence, had gone to the powder room to repair herself.

‘And when we’ve finished hammering the fuckin’ Reds,’ Tail Gunner Joe told the Lawyer, ‘we’re gonna go after the fuckin’ queers.’

The Monster watched Ariadne lean over to Nielson, and saw the playwright’s face rise to meet her kiss.

‘Fuckin’ asshole bandits oughta be strung up,’ the Junior Senator grumbled. The Lawyer was shut up tight, his face not registering everything, but the Monster could sniff his funk.

Ariadne broke the embrace, and nipped playfully at Nielson’s ear. He smiled, an odd expression on so serious a young man, crinkling his face like a comedian’s. He called the waiter for more drinks.

If he could not have Ariadne, the Monster swore, he would have her protégé. Not now, but when she was through with him.

He would have Cameron Nielson drained and drunk dry, and he would then turn his attention to anything, or anyone, that came from the man. His women would weep blood.

When he was through, it would be as if the playwright had never walked the Earth.

I
n the taxi, on the way to St John’s Wood, Nina fell asleep on Anne’s shoulder. The creosoty smell of the girl’s hair dye was pleasant in a roundabout way. Anne almost relaxed.

Nina had lent her an outfit – a short, tight skirt, black tights, a black jacket not designed to fasten up – and helped make her up. She had suddenly turned into a teacher, gently ridiculing Anne’s idea of a tarty face, and subtly rearranging and highlighting her make-up. Anne had to admit she did not look bad, and hoped she could pass for one of Nina’s workmates. She had tried a pair of Nina’s spike heels, but they had pinched painfully, and she had to hope her comfortable flats would pass. They were black, highly polished and matched the rest of her get-up.

It was a dingy afternoon, and slate grey slabs of cloud had brought the already early sunset forward. The chilly, heavily padded interior of the cab was comfortably gloomy, lit only by the orange numbers adding up on the meter as the fare increased.

Anne found that Nina had, in her sleep, reached out and taken hold of her hand. Nina’s own was cold, but she squeezed gently. The unconscious intimacy surprised and comforted Anne. She wished that she could express her feelings in such a simple, honest manner.

Of course, a cynical footnote inevitably came to mind. Doubtless, Nina was habitually intimate with strangers in ways far more involved and far less innocent than hand-holding.

Anne could not help thinking of Judi.

For the first twelve years of the dead girl’s life, Anne had seen her sister, been with her, talked to her, spent time with her, almost every day. And yet, her images of Judi as a baby, as a little girl, as an elementary school pupil, as a young teenager were alternately fuzzy and artificial, like the photographs she had collected in a folder somewhere. Anne was not sure whether her memories were first hand, or had been impressed upon her by the familiarity with those snapshots and the reminiscences of relatives.

Everything else about that period of her life was still vivid – arguing with Cam about trivial things like who should sit in the front seat of the car, being taken for the first time to the theatre for one of Dad’s plays and not understanding what was going on in the dark auditorium or the remote stage, being taken by her mother on a holiday for two in the desert where the cowboys had lived and getting bored after a few days with the heat and the sand. But Judi, dead Judi, was quietly fading from her memory like a disgracefully dissolute pharaoh being rubbed out of the history books by unforgiving high priests.

In that folder, there were a number of photographs of babies and little girls, usually caught by the sun among the greens of the garden in New Hampshire, that Anne could not identify. They might be of Judi, but they could as easily be of her younger self. Not until they reached school age, apparently, had the sisters developed any distinctive characteristics of their own.

Much clearer in her mind were the scenes from later life.

Now, it seemed to Anne as if the first time she had really noticed Judi was during the summer after she returned from college. During the three years the sisters had mainly lived apart, Judi had grown into an intelligent, difficult, uncomfortable teenager, chain-smoking at fifteen, reading her way through every book in the house, from
Peyton Place
to
The Romantic Agony.
She had been interested in Anne only in that she would have liked to know the blow-by-blow details of her sister’s sex life as a student. She had lost her own virginity, she boasted (confessed?), to one of the local stupids, and was just getting over her initial disappointment with sex by casting around for less conventional ways of annoying her family. Now, Anne suspected that at twenty-one, with two whole neatly-over-and-done-with love affairs to her credit, she must have been unbearably priggish and self-obsessed. Love Affair Number Two was going to be her first novel, but that had worked out less well even than the real life episode. Judi had read some of her draft chapters, and gone uncharacteristically quiet, refusing to offer criticisms or comments. Shortly afterwards, Anne had abandoned fiction altogether.

Three years later, when Anne had already decided to move to London and visits to Judi in police stations were no novelty, she had seen Judi squatting in a New York City cell with five other prostitutes, dressed in glittery tatters, with a face like a painted and bruised punk madonna, and dried blood on her neck and upper breasts. Anne, brought up with liberal folk myths of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Paris
soixante-huit
and Attica, had seen the red badge of courage and threatened the polite lieutenant with a hard-hitting exposé of police brutality.