Moon Rising (21 page)

‘I should think it was long ago,' I said, ‘but there's bound to be copies of Old Uncle's books in the library – you could look them up.'

He promised he would, and paused for a moment more to look out over the water. Chilled and longing to be gone, I slipped off the cold stone and took his arm, persuading him back to the path.

He turned towards me then. ‘Tell me,' he said with low intensity, ‘have you ever heard of
vampires
?'

All at once, as my breath caught in my throat, the moon appeared, rising fast and huge like a monstrous face behind the abbey. For a few seconds it looked capable of swallowing cliff, church and graveyard, including ourselves, without so much as a hiccup. Startled, awe-struck, we watched it rise clear of the horizon, miraculously shrinking until its great yellow smile ceased to threaten and became no more than a distant smirk of amusement.

An omen, I thought with the frantic racing of my heart, a warning. Eyes staring down at us from the sky; like the eyes of God, I thought in a moment of panic, remembering the homilies of childhood. The embroidered sampler,
THOU GOD SEEST ME
, complete with cyclops eye, had always scared me. I pictured the Day of Judgement when all would be called to account; when the dead would rise up to answer the charges against them, before being cast back down the cliff to eternal damnation.

Standing there, surrounded by tombstones, picturing skeletons and decaying bodies bursting forth from their graves, I had a moment of paralysing fear. I clung to Bram's arm and he turned to me, eyes glittering in the moonlight.

‘There's no need for alarm,' he said softly, ‘it's only the moon . . .'

But I thought he regarded me strangely. He cupped my chin in his hand and moved to kiss me, licking at my lower lip, lightly drawing its fullness between his teeth. I wanted to move away but his embrace was overwhelming; he furled my lip with his thumb and bent to taste the soft flesh within. As I responded to him I felt the sharp nip and sting of his teeth.

Shocked, I struggled in his embrace, but he held me to him, apologising, kissing me more gently, whispering that he loved me, wanted to be part of me, wanted me to be part of him. Wiping my mouth, feeling the place with my tongue, I said shakily I didn't care to be loved like that, and would thank him not to do it again.

As we left the graveyard and its strangeness behind, I began to wonder what was happening to us, whether the moon was exerting her strange power as she did upon the tides, and turning us both into lunatics.

Fired by what I'd told him about Old Uncle's published works, Bram went to the subscription library on Pier Road the following morning and borrowed several books by different authors. That afternoon, he spent his time reading, dipping into various local histories and travel books, and making notes.

He seemed intrigued by the idea of the dead walking, not just unquiet spirits, but physical bodies rising from the grave to ‘come again'. As he browsed through the volumes he wondered aloud where such beliefs originated, while my mind, conditioned by the previous night's talk of plague and premature burial, came up with one of the worst of childhood's tales, made all the more terrifying by the fact that it was a well-known family story and probably true.

At the end of the last century, I said, the young and unmarried Alicia Sterne had died suddenly, of no obvious cause except that her heart had simply stopped beating. That was odd in itself, but she remained mysteriously unaltered.

On the day appointed for her funeral, while the house was full of relatives and friends gathered for the interment, the undertaker refused to close the coffin. He insisted that the Doctor be recalled, that another examination be made to certify death, since her glossy fair hair, rosy lips and cheeks, and bright, wide-open blue eyes looked so terrifyingly alive. The Doctor pierced her heart to be certain; but the word that had been whispered ever since, and always silenced, was that which Bram had used:
vampire.

It was an oft-repeated tale, mostly at wakes and vigils. Children had terrified each other with it down the years, until poor Alicia Sterne had passed into legend, and her grave in the old churchyard above Bay was given a wide berth.

I'd barely finished speaking when Bram wanted to go at once and find it. But as I said, the cemetery was scattered with Sterne family graves, and I didn't know where to start looking. Nevertheless, when he met me that night after work, his footsteps led inexorably in that direction, over the tops of the moors with the glittering sea beyond.

Bay was further than he realised, and thankfully, after a while, we turned for home. It would have been more sensible to return by the road, but Bram, armed with a local map, was set on taking the shorter way, by the old monks' trod which led down through Cock Mill Woods.

It was a clear night and almost bright as day in the open; but faced with the woods I felt my heart begin to pound. All the old tales flooded back: fighting and gambling and the grasp of Old Nick...

‘No! No, I can't,' I protested, ‘we must go back to the road!'

At once Bram enfolded me in his arms, soothing and stroking as though I were a child. ‘It's all right, I'll keep you safe. I won't let Lucifer get you,' he chuckled, ‘he'll have to get me first!'

And so he assured and teased and persuaded until at last I gave in. Having agreed, I wanted to run; but from the moors to the river was a steep descent of over a mile. The old paved way dropped through blackness, illumined here and there by shimmering pools of moonlight, blue-white and brilliant under the trees. Everything was distorted, every footfall uncertain, every stride like stepping through water.

The path was too narrow to go safely side by side. At first Bram went ahead, but with a better view of the steps he let me go in front. Aware of his voice behind me, I had to concentrate on every step, fear of falling outdoing even my fear of the devil. Praying all the way, all I wanted was to get safely down to the river.

But Bram, reminded of the German forests he'd visited the year before with Ellen and Irving, would keep on talking. I begged him sharply to tell me no more of his gruesome tales, but of course he did. His favourite,
Carmilla,
had been written by a friend of his, the editor of the newspaper for which he'd once penned theatrical reviews. He said it as though I should understand how normal it was to invent these macabre tales, as though really there was nothing to fear, it was all imagination.

Imagination was the trouble. I tried to close my ears but there was a rhythm to his words that matched every descending footfall, and a hypnotic quality in his voice which seemed to resonate through the woods. In the rustling darkness, he told the story of a young woman, the only child of an elderly father, and the arrival at their castle of a cultured lady in a state of distress.

The mysterious Carmilla was cared for and befriended. She stayed on at the castle in the forest, while the impressionable young heroine fell rapidly under her spell. But despite her beauty and those lustrous eyes, Bram went on, the girl was aware of an element of revulsion, especially when overwhelmed by one of Carmilla's ardent embraces. The grand lady could be as suffocating as she was passionate; there were kisses and caresses, and the languid, sensual gestures of an experienced, voluptuous woman. The girl was disconcerted, but she was steadily being seduced; and in her heart, in spite of herself, she longed to respond...

‘
Desire and loathing strangely mixed
,' he quoted, and I pictured it at once. Friendship, beauty, sensuality, the attraction of knowing one is loved and desired, accompanied by a strong sense of dismay. Even, ultimately, revulsion. I could understand those feelings, but it was disturbing to hear them expressed by Bram. At Carmilla's name I even found myself picturing Bella's face and form, at every step half expecting her to be lying in wait for me with bared teeth.

‘Then the courtship,' Bram went on in that insistent tone, ‘began to change. In the midst of this romance there came disturbing dreams; the girl was feeling lethargic, melancholy, dimly in love with death. The beautiful Carmilla was as fiendish as she was seductive, using vampire arts to mesmerise the girl, to visit her at night, to possess her youth and beauty, to drain her very life . . .'

I had the feeling he was aroused by the story and wanted some kind of response from me, but I was too scared even to protest. I sped down the worn and broken pathway, trying not to think of the Gentleman in Black as we came down past the old watermill, nor to worry about nameless horrors lying in wait under the bridge.

As last the worst was behind us. As the trees thinned I began to catch my breath; but then, as we came down to the smooth-flowing river, he said chillingly, ‘You see, Damaris,
love will have its sacrifices, and there's no sacrifice without blood
.'

‘What on earth do you mean by that?' I demanded, breast still heaving, but braver now that I could see light reflected off the water.

‘Well, I'm merely quoting,' he said. ‘It's a line from the story that always stuck in my mind. But it's true, don't you think?'

He went on to expand about love and marriage and the sacrifice of a woman's virginity, about birth and death, and the ultimate sacrifice of friends laying down their lives for each other.

I'd come to feel almost chastened, when he said: ‘And what about the greatest sacrifice of all? The Blood of Christ, which we drink as wine? Or actual blood, come to that, if you happen to be Catholic.'

In spite of what I liked to call my unbelief, I thought I detected a whiff of blasphemy there which justified an outraged protest. I suppose fear added force to my words, but they were barely out before Bram caught at my arm. He pulled me round to face him then, his breath coming hard enough for me to realise he was angry too.

‘I never thought of you as small-minded, Damaris. Young, yes – insufficiently educated, perhaps, but never ignorant, never petty. Don't you understand? I'm not trying to upset you. This is a matter that interests and intrigues me – blood is the essence of life itself, that's why we fear to see it spilled. That's why it's so precious to us, so mystical, so
significant.

‘Doesn't it mean anything,' he asked more softly, touching my face and throat, ‘that you gave your virginity to me –
gave
it,' he repeated, ‘to me, a stranger? I couldn't have
taken
it, knowing – it was far too precious a gift. You said you wanted me to love you – and I have, I do. I've shared things with you,' he whispered earnestly, ‘that have never been shared with anyone else...'

So then I felt ashamed for having given myself so lightly, and for such unconsidered reasons; at the time, evidently, it had meant more to him than to me, and now I was hurting him by failing to understand the gift he was bestowing in return.

‘You hold my secret self,' he murmured, ‘so please hold it safe . . .'

Feeling unequal to the burden, I hardly knew what to say. His ideas made me uncomfortable. Even though I tried to view them calmly, I had the suspicion he was a little too intrigued by the significance of life-blood and bloodshed, and the mystical idea of marriage.

~~~

We reached home before cock-crow and, after a few hours' sleep, it was easy to dismiss my unease as the result of fatigue. Bram was generally up and dressed before me, with the fire lit and kettle bubbling on the hob, and that morning was no exception. When I went through into the kitchen he was at his desk, writing and smoking a cigarette, with a mug of tea at his elbow. As he reached up to kiss me I told myself that there was nothing wrong with him or the world beyond the window; he was simply imaginative, intrigued by aspects of life that most people never thought about. Never had time to think about, if truth be told.

When he went outside, I took the opportunity to look at the notes he was making. Open on the desk was an old book with a strange title:
An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia,
written by a man who had once been the British Consul in Bucharest. I glanced at a page or two, and it seemed to be an account of the times when Catholic and Orthodox princes were at war with each other as well as the Ottoman Turks, a time when it was difficult for any overlord to keep his territory for long.

Bloodthirsty days, and, as I saw from his notes, they had evidently caught Bram's imagination. I don't know why, but my tongue went straight to the place inside my lip where he'd drawn blood the night before; and then I went back to the bedroom, opening my collar to view the purple marks of lovebites on my breast and throat.

Whenever I was in Whitby, I kept a lookout for people I knew: mostly to duck down a side-street, although there were times when face-to-face meetings were unavoidable.

Since leaving the Cragg it was curious to note the various reactions. As Bella's cousin I'd been more or less accepted; but evidently word had spread that I was ‘housekeeping' for a London gentleman, and that seemed to have whetted more than a few appetites. Suddenly, women who were neighbours of the Firths were eager to stop me in the street and ask how I was getting along.

Previously, who I was and where I came from had rarely been mentioned, but now they wanted to know about my side of the family, and what the Sternes thought of my new job. And by the way, what was it like looking after a rich foreigner? Was he very demanding? Did he like good plain cooking or demand fancy dishes, and was he difficult to please? And with the questions came the sly smiles or avid looks. What they really wanted to know, of course, was whether I was sleeping with him, and what he was like in bed; whether, in fact, he was very different from other men, working men, the kind of men they were used to.

I thought he probably was, even though I had no other experience to go on, and it was beginning to worry me. Unable to say so, I tried not to flush under those searching eyes, saying only that he was kind and easy enough to work for. They took in my clothes, pretty and sweet-scented, and, with a twist of the lips, drew their own conclusions. It was uncomfortable to know these conclusions would be carried away and repeated; but there was nothing I could do about that. I found it more difficult to be told that without me, Bella was like a lost soul.