The Monster Trilogy. Brian Aldiss
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on the terrace below.
As he thought of it, of that shadowy thing he was wise to dread, a wave of desire came over him.
He fought it back. ‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness …’ Was that how the rest of the psalm went?
To calm himself, he measured his strides about the bedroom, trying again to think of the problem scientifically.
Why else were vampires so feared?
Because they were parasitical. Parasites were always feared.
If they long preceded humans on the scale of existence, then they had once preyed on other living things.
What had they been – he caught himself avoiding the word – what had vampires been before they became parasitical? Before that dreadful need for blood arose?
Many arthropod bloodsuckers existed – bed bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, all parasitical on man. As the fossil record proved, those creatures were about in the busy world long before mankind. Even before birds and mammals.
All those little plagues to human life were originally innocent suckers of fruit juice and plant juices. But the taste of blood proved addictive and they had become enslaved by parasitism.
Blood was a dangerous beverage. An addiction like any other drug.
And vampire bats …
So what had vampires been, many millions of years ago, before they became enslaved?
It was a short distance from gnawing on a wound to drinking its substance … From swooping down through the air to being called to swoop … From inciting the dread to inciting the lust …
Almost in a fever, he thought he had glimpsed what turned an aerial predator into the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Sick with the sound and smell of the gas jet, Bodenland went to the window and flung back the curtains, letting moonlight enter the fuggy room. Brushing away the strings of white flowers, he threw open the window and took some lungfuls of air.
The moon still floated upside down in the pool.
Of Stoker there was no sign.
The woman stood there on the terrace, tall against the figure of a putti. She looked up at him, eyes agleam with a cold green fire.
His heart turned over. But his intellect remained cool.
Distantly, the clock in the asylum tower chimed one in the morning.
She lifted her arms and flew up to him.
She was in the bedroom, among the domestic things with her dead eyes, walking, gliding, rather. Close to him – and he staring with his hair standing on end.
‘This is no dream, Joe,’ she said. Her voice was deep and masculine.
She brought a chill to the room. In her whiteness, with something sparkling like frost in her hair, and the wan white robe, all shadowy yet bright – why, he thought, it’s more like a fever than a person, frightening, yes, yet no more dangerous than a ghost … Yet he was in a prickle of lust to be touched by her, to enjoy an intimacy no one knew this side of the grave.
His intellect had no part in this encounter.
Her name was Bella, the name spoken like a bell.
‘What do you want of me?’
‘I know what you want of me, Joe.’ Still the voice was thick, as if there was blood just below the throat. And her lips were red.
She began to talk, and he to listen, entranced.
Her people were ancient and had survived much. When oak trees die, they still stand against the storm. Her exact words never came back to him after; he only recalled – trying to recall more – that she gave an impression of the Undead as being nothing outside nature, as being of nature. Of humans as being the exiled things, cut off from the ancient world, unable to throw themselves into the streams of continuity pouring from the distant past into distant futures. She spoke, and it was in images.
For these reasons humanity was doomed. Men had to be slain for the survival of the ancient planet. Yet she, Bella, had it in her power to save him, Joe. To more than save him: to crown him with eternal life, the great stream of life from which his humanity exiled him. She spoke, and he received a picture of glaciers from which pure rivers flowed, down to teeming future oceans, unpolluted by man.
‘What do I have to do?’ His whisper was like the rustle of leaves.
Bella turned the full beam of her regard upon him. The eyes were red like a dog’s or yellow like a cat’s or green like a polar bear’s – after, he could not remember. They pierced into him, confident, without conscience or consciousness.
‘All Fleet Ones need to attend a great conference which our Lord has called. We are summoned, every one. We must go to the region you call Hudson Bay. There we will finally decide mankind’s fate.’
‘You cannot exist without us.’
‘As we existed once, so we shall again. You’re – but a moment.’
Again a kind of telepathic picture of the highest mountains brimming over with glaciers, slow-growing glaciers crowned with snow. And, by their striped flanks, thorn bushes growing, stiff against the wind.
Oh, it was beautiful. He longed for it. Ached.
‘The great Lord Dracula will guide our decisions. All of us will have a voice. Possibly extermination, possibly total enslavement. All of you penned within …’
She named a place. Had she said ‘green land’ or ‘Greenland’?
‘Understand this, Joe. We are much stronger than you can imagine. As we possessed the past, so we are in possession of the far future.’
‘The present? You’re nothing, Bella.’
‘We must have back the time train. You have to surrender it. That is what you have to do, and only that, in order that we become immortal lovers, borne on the storm of ages, like Paolo and Francesca.’
While she said these things and uttered these inhuman promises, she lightly roamed the room, as a tiger might pace.
He watched. She gave no reflection as she passed the mirror on the dressing-table or the glazed map of the British Empire, or any of the pictures which lay behind glass.
He sat on the side of the bed, unable to control his trembling.
‘What does this mean – you possess the future?’
‘No more talk, Joe. Talk’s the human skill. Forget the future when we can together savour the present.’
The dark voice ceased. She unfolded great wings and moved towards him.
Something in her movements woke in Bodenland the promptings of a forgotten dream. All that came back to him was a picture of the thing that had rushed towards him down the corridor of the time train, covering infinite distance with infinite speed. He had time to appreciate the gloomy chamber in which, it seemed, every vertical was ashily outlined by the glare of the gas, caging him into this block of past existence, until the very scent of her, the frisson of her garments, drowned out all other impressions.
She stood by him, over him, as he remained sitting on the side of the bed, arms behind him to prop his torso as he gazed up at her face. The red lips moved and she spoke again.
‘I know of your strength. Eternal life is here if you wish it. Eternal life and eternal love.’
His mouth was almost too dry to speak. He could force no derision into his voice. ‘Forbidden love.’
‘Forbidden by your kind, Joe, not mine.’
And with a great rustle of wings, she embraced him, pressing him into folds of the eiderdown.
Even as his body’s blood flowed thick and heavy with delight, he was also living out a vision. It was antique yet imperishable,