Suzie and the Monsters (10 page)

‘Was he a vampire?’

‘You’re getting ahead of the story... One evening he came home, riding with haste. “I have to leave tonight,” he said to me, “and will never return. Will you come with me?” I was ill, reluctant and scared to go anywhere, but even more scared to let him go without me. He was the only person in my life. I agreed to go with him, and we made love there for the last time. Afterwards he handed me a glass of wine. “Let us drink to a fabulous future!” he said, and we drank.’

‘It was his blood?’

‘God you’re impatient. Yes. The point I’m trying to make is that for three years he was drinking my blood and then he gave me his blood to drink, and not once did I suspect anything.’

‘Because he was hypnotising you.’

‘Yes. I’m telling you all this for two reasons. The first is because I want you to believe that I could never treat someone I care about like that. The second is to make you understand just how dangerous I can be if I lose control of myself, like last night.’

Cleo nods. ‘Thank you for telling me. It means a lot that you’re willing to... to let me catch a glimpse of the real you.’

‘I’ve reinvented myself so many times that who I was as a human has almost lost meaning. The reason I don’t like to talk about my origin is because it’s like looking back along a long dark tunnel of misery and death.’

‘But why? It can’t be all bad.’

‘Being immortal has its moments, I won’t deny, but to be an immortal alone is a cruel existence. You can’t stay in any one place longer than ten years, because people start to question your age, and in times past would accuse you of witchcraft or worse. Even ten years is pushing it, if the lies you tell start to unravel, if your essential strangeness makes people pay attention to you. Where do you come from? What is your ancestry, your family? And if you’re a vampire, you never eat, and eating is such a fundamental part of human society. And as if that’s not already making life difficult, try to imagine what it’s like to be a young woman, unmarried, with no known family and no guardian.’

‘But you did get married, you said. What happened to your husband?’

‘Yes, I had been married, although a husband that no one has ever met isn’t a particularly useful one. For all the difference that made I might as well have never been married. I would introduce myself as Mrs So-and-So, claiming my husband had been killed fighting in some war or other. People often married young, so a young widow wouldn’t seem odd. But even a widow would be expected to have a household, servants, children, otherwise she would be expected to serve in another household. A young woman living by herself was often seen as a problem, and might be asked to leave the town or, if there was any suspicion of prostitution, sent to jail.

‘You have no idea how lucky you are to be a twenty-first century girl. The last fifty years have been the best of my life. I can live alone, without people watching and judging my every movement. I can go out shopping by myself, spend my own money, make myself look absolutely fabulous. I can drive a car! I can even go to university and get a degree, which may sound like a strange thing to say, but the first time I got a degree I couldn’t stop crying for three days.’

‘Why would getting a degree make you cry? And what do you mean, “first”? How many degrees have you got?’

‘My first degree was history. It sounded like an easy thing for me to do, but my actual experience of history made it more complicated and frustrating than I had anticipated, and in the end I didn’t really learn anything useful. Did you know, Oxford University didn’t award degrees to women before 1920? Real degrees, that is. Cambridge was later, 1947 I think. London University started back in the 19th Century, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that universities started to open up. I studied at Goldsmiths’ College, and graduated in 1965. I was holding a piece of paper in my hand that said women were not inferior to men, and that I, Olivia Bartlett, had achieved a position of respect in human society.

‘And, no, that’s not my real name, nor was any of the names on any of my degree certificates. I know what I have achieved, and it is astonishing after so many years of desperately trying to survive in a man’s world to discover the world has opened up, and that I can be a part of that change. It gave me life. It made me feel almost human. But it doesn’t take away the essential problem of my immortality and the need to continually create new lies about myself. What practical use is a degree I got years ago under a different name?’

‘Not much, I guess.’

‘No, but the great thing about universities these days is the chance to mix in with thousands of people from around the country, from around the world even, all looking about the same age as I do, all away from home and full of energy and new ideas. Why on earth study history when now is what matters? So of course I went back, and keep going back, but it’s physics, and computers, that I find endlessly fascinating. I mean, look at this.’ I hold up my iPhone. ‘A hundred years ago this would have been inconceivable. A hundred years ago they were still struggling to invent a calculator.’

I pick up my coffee and give it a sniff, but it’s cold now, and doesn’t do anything for me. ‘I will take you home now if you want, Cleo, but I really don’t want to. What I really want to do is take you back to mine and fuck you senseless.’ Cleo blushes, and looks uncomfortable. ‘Okay, instead, why don’t we go into town. I really need a drink, and you probably have a hundred questions you still want to ask me.’ She nods agreement.

I take her arm as we leave, and she doesn’t try to pull away, and we walk along the street in silence but arms entwined, and take the Northern Line to Embankment. Gordon’s Wine Bar is another of my favourite places and usually busy, but there’s a table free against the back wall. I order a bottle of Chateau La Fleur without looking at the list or bothering to check with Cleo. She doesn’t complain.

‘How come you drink wine?’ she asks.

‘I drink all sorts of things, although only in small quantities. I drink about half a litre of water every day, sometimes I have orange juice but I have to filter it first. I love the smell of coffee, but if I drink it I’ll throw up very quickly. Fizzy drinks, and anything with milk, make me very ill. Tea is okay.’

‘So you don’t need to drink blood?’

‘That’s a bit like me asking you whether your ability to drink wine means you don’t need to eat food. I need blood, and if I don’t get enough I get vicious. You really wouldn’t like me.’

‘Do you,’ she starts, then hesitates and glances around. ‘Do you... kill people?’ she asks in a nervous whisper. She’s biting her lip.

‘I try not to. I certainly don’t need to.’

Suddenly she’s staring at me like she’s never seen me before. I wait, watching her study me for a few minutes. The waitress brings the wine and pours some for me to taste. Lovely, plums and spices. I nod my satisfaction and she pours out two glasses. I raise my glass towards Cleo. ‘Cheers!’

After a moment’s hesitation, she returns the gesture. ‘You’re real,’ she says quietly. ‘I keep trying to explain it as a fantasy, a joke, a trick, but it’s not. You’re a real vampire. You don’t look a day older than me, but you’re centuries old. You drink human blood. You’re a killer. It’s absurd, but it’s true.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you want us to be friends.’

‘Yes.’

‘You hunt humans. I should be trying to kill you.’

‘Cleo the Vampire Slayer!’ I shout dramatically, attracting the attention of the whole room.

‘Shut up,’ she mutters. ‘You do realise I was only a child when Buffy was on. These days it’s all Twilight and Vampire Diaries.’

‘I prefer True Blood and Underworld myself. I’d love to get my hands on Kate Beckinsale’s leather corset, preferably while she’s still wearing it.’ This gets a fleeting smile from Cleo. ‘The problem with all of these is the sheer number of vampires. Humans would notice. Even if the vampires do feed on animal blood or hospital blood. The reality is that neither of those is an option for me.’

‘What about Dracula?’

‘Which one?’

‘The real one. Vlad the Impaler.’

‘Ah. Țepeș. If you’re asking me whether Vlad, Dracula, Prince of Wallachia, was really a vampire... that was before my time, but I doubt it. From everything I’ve heard and read, he was a brilliant and brutal warrior. Transylvania was a perpetual war zone between the Austrian and Ottoman empires, and the Transylvanian warlords were a bloodthirsty bunch. They used to celebrate their victories by dancing with their enemies’ dead bodies and playing football with their decapitated heads.’ Cleo grimaces. ‘It’s interesting that two of his closest allies were a Corvinus and a Bathory,’ I add.

Cleo looks lost. I explain, ‘The first two Underworld films are all about Alexander Corvinus and his descendants — his son Marcus is bitten by a bat and becomes the first vampire?’

‘Oh. Yes.’

‘Well, the Hungarian king who supported Vlad Dracula against the Turks was Matthias Corvinus, Hunyadi Mátyás, the son of a Transylvanian warlord. Underworld places Alexander Corvinus a thousand years earlier, which doesn’t make much sense. The Bathory family is much more interesting. István, Stephen, who fought alongside Vlad, was later appointed governor of Transylvania, and later several other Bathori were Transylvanian warlords. The Stephen Bathory who became King of Poland at the end of 1575 was a Prince of Transylvania.’

‘I’ve always just thought of Transylvania as a castle deep in a forest.’

‘With Christopher Lee its sole inhabitant...’ She grins. ‘Patience a minute — I am going somewhere with this. Transylvania is a region of modern-day Romania, but for a long time it was a province of Hungary, and part of Hungary, including Transylvania, became a province of the Ottoman Empire. The Bathory family were Hungarian nobility with strong links to Transylvania, and they sided with the Ottoman Empire, but they gave their brightest star in marriage to Ferenc Nádasdy, a noble in the Austrian-controlled Kingdom of Hungary. Ferenc grew up to be a proud and determined warrior, eventually becoming Captain of the Hungarian Army, and spent his life fighting the Turks, becoming incredibly wealthy. He was a national hero. But in 1575, when he was nineteen years old, he married the fourteen-year-old Countess Erzsébet, or Elizabeth, Bathory.’

‘I’ve heard that name somewhere.’

‘In popular legend, Elizabeth Bathory was famous for bathing in the blood of virgin girls, believing this would give her immortality.’

‘Did it?’

‘It’s just a legend.’

Her eyes widen suddenly. ‘Are you —’ she starts, then bites her lip. ‘Sorry.’

‘No,’ I reply. ‘I’m not. But I did spend a few years in Vienna in the late 1580s, and Elizabeth would stay in Vienna from time to time. I never spoke with her, of course. She was high in society, and I stayed in the fringes and the shadows. But I did see her. She was beautiful and very intelligent, and absolutely in command of the people around her. I was in awe. I wanted to be like her. One night I went hunting for a way to sneak into her mansion, and heard screams of torment from within. I waited for someone to react, for I could see guards and servants and knew that they must hear, but there was no rush to the rescue, just a general agitation.

‘The screams continued intermittently for hours, and the following night there were more, and the following. This fantastic, beautiful woman I so admired spent her nights in relentless torture of young serving girls. There were rumours of coffins being taken away, supposedly victims of cholera. But no one was investigating. She was the wife of Hungary’s hero, and servants in those days were just property and often treated badly. By the time she was finally arrested, many years later, she and her cohort were said to have tortured several hundred young girls to death.

‘But however terrible the Countess was, she was kindness itself in comparison to the Inquisitors. Those holy messengers of God developed the torture of heretics and witches into an art form. No one was safe, and tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were killed. I saw inhumanly cruel things done that are still giving me nightmares four hundred years later.

‘There are monsters, Cleo, and I am one of them, but I am the least of them. It’s the human ones you should hide from.’ My muscles are tense around the stem of the wine glass, and I have to consciously relax them. ‘I have done many terrible things over the years, but what troubles me, sometimes like a sharp blade in my chest so that I can hardly breathe, is the guilt I feel for my cowardice, for not killing Bathory, the Inquisitors, the witch-hunters, and the many abusers and torturers of women.’

Cleo has gone pale. She sits back, glass in hand, deep in thought for a few minutes, until: ‘What happened to your husband?’

‘Cleo,’ I say. ‘Tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, maybe, when you decide that I am truly a monster, and you need to save humanity from me, what will you do?’

‘Put a wooden stake through your heart?’ she asks uncertainly, suddenly glowing with embarrassment.

‘You could do that to me?’ I gasp, eyes wide and sad, lips trembling melodramatically. ‘Hold a sharpened wooden stake to my heart with one hand, and drive it in with a heavy hammer in the other?’ I let tears roll down my cheeks.

Cleo looks at me guiltily for a few seconds, then glares. ‘Stop that!’ I burst out laughing, and I’m pleased to see Cleo is suppressing a smile.

‘Are you sure that would work? I was shot in the heart last night, and look at me now. Practically perfect. Mary Poppins.’

‘Cut off your head?’

‘Now you’re talking. Of course, I’m not going to just lie down and let you do it. And I’m not going to let you tie me up, not even for kinky sex games. Why don’t you just call the authorities, let them deal with me?’

‘They’d never believe me.’

‘Well, no, not if you phoned them up and said, “My girlfriend’s a vampire.” But if you phoned them up and said, “I’ve just stuck a knife in my girlfriend’s heart,” you’d get their attention pretty quickly. Tie me up, blindfold me, and, when the police arrive, make them watch me heal after you pull the knife out, and pretty soon I’ll be crying out for blood.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ she asks shakily.