Séance for a Vampire, Fred Saberhagen [win 10 ebook reader txt] 📗

He strained to see her face, but that was still well-nigh impossible.

“Martin, can you help me? I’m caught in the most hideous nightmare. I can’t go to Mother or Father–I don’t dare–becky’s room’s right next to theirs. If I can’t turn to you, then there’s no one.”

“Of course, of course, love. You can turn to me, Lou. What’s happened?” He was aflame with both fear and fascination, dying to know what had happened to her in the hands of the kidnappers. In the back of Armstrong’s mind was the idea that he would have to have second thoughts about marrying a woman who had suffered a fate worse than death.

And even now, in his first awareness that she had come back to him again, there came a moment of revulsion at the sheer strangeness of this new Louisa. He tried to put the strangeness from his mind, to focus his attention on her beauty–but he could not entirely succeed.

“Marty,” she repeated. “Can you help me?”

“Of course, Lou. What can I do to help?”

“I don’t know. Help me out of this.” And for a moment, Louisa buried her invisible face in her pale hands.

Armstrong choked, at about this point, and could think of nothing further to say. The only certainty in all the world was the total, unarguable awareness of Louisa’s presence in his room, in his bed.

At last he managed, “You’ve got free of them now.”

“Got free?” Her hands came down. Now he thought that he could see her eyes. And something about her teeth, as if she were smiling strangely.

“Free of the villains who took you away,” the young man replied. “You’re here. Safe. With me.” but even as he spoke those words they sounded odd and hollow in his own ears, and he knew with part of his mind that they were not true. Whatever strange and terrible thing had happened to Louisa had not yet been put right; and neither of them were yet anywhere near being truly free.

“No, Marty, I’m not free. Not free at all. Whenever he calls me, I must go to him...”

“Who?”

Her answer sounded like words out of a dream: “I cannot say his name. That’s been forbidden me.”

But then she moved, sliding even closer to him, and for the moment none of those objections mattered, because she was here with him. She was genuinely here. In his arms–and, for the first time, in his bed.

Again Louisa was trying to speak, but his lips crushed hers to silence. Now both of his hands, as if they had escaped from his control and taken on a life of their own, were seeking her warm body under the pale gown. And he discovered with joy, with all the certainty of dreaming, that under the gown she was wearing nothing at all.

Overpowering delight–the unmatched, unhallowed delight of her sensual embrace! Nothing mattered but this; everything else could be put right, somehow, later...

Their two bodies rolled over on the bed. To Martin Armstrong the fact seemed unutterably strange, and at the same time irresistibly arousing, that Louisa should be biting at his throat.

Later–Armstrong having at last convinced himself almost completely that he was fully awake–they were lying side by side on the cool sheets. Louisa was more silent tonight than had ever been her wont before... before...

He cleared his throat. “Last night–no, only tonight, only a few hours ago–we even went to look at the place where we thought you were buried.” Her lover was almost chuckling with amusement at the outrageous idea. “How could we ever have believed that you were dead? Of course the coffin was empty. Whoever it was we thought we had buried there... whoever it was, she had been taken away again.”

“Marty?”

“Yes?”

But then, before she said anything more, the young woman stroked the young man’s hair for a time in silence. At last she murmured: “I was buried there, Marty.”

That got him to lift his head from the pillow and turn toward her. “I don’t understand.”

“I was put there, in the family vault. You, and Father, and Mother, and becky, buried me. I can remember it, my funeral, and all the rest, like some bad dream. I was aware of what was happening. I just couldn’t move.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

But Louisa’s voice went on, dully, gently, as if the story she recounted had happened a hundred years ago. “When the boat tipped, Marty, he was there, and he carried me away. Dragging me with him while he swam at great speed underwater. I was under water until I thought I was going to drown–I was still breathing then–but at last he brought me to the surface for a while and let me have air.”

“Don’t talk like that, I said!”

Louisa paused, looking at her lover wistfully. She added: “It was later when I stopped breathing, after he had... How can I tell you what it was like? but when we were far downstream, he took me out of the water, and he drank my blood, again and again–until finally I wanted him to do it. And he gave me his blood to drink–he opened one of his own veins for me– and it was marvelous.”

“Lou!”

“Then you found me, and said prayers, and put me into the vault–andit was warm and dark and pleasant there. but twice now, he has made me leave the cemetery by night, and go back to the house, and say things to Mother and Father about some treasure.”

Martin breathed twice before he asked: “What treasure?”

“I don’t know! I say only what he orders me to say. I went into Father’s safe, and took out some jewels; but he was only angry when I brought them to him, and he threw them all over the cemetery... and then he would not let me go back to my coffin, where it was so nice and dark all day. Now I must spend the day in a place where there are