The Silver Kiss (2 page)

This first book of mine has been successful beyond my wildest dreams.
The Silver Kiss
earned wonderful reviews, won awards, has been taught in schools and colleges (sorry, kids), and has even been produced onstage in Japan with an allmale cast. (That one's weird.) The book started my publishing
career with a bang. I am constantly amazed and thankful that it is still in print after all these years.

I still receive letters and e-mails about my book, but I don't think anything could top the excitement I felt at the very first fan letter I received, in which a girl declared, “I, too, would surrender my neck to Simon.”

Yessssss! That's what I wanted people to feel. That's what it was all about.

So here, for all those girls who wanted to know more about Simon and Zoë, is a new edition of
The Silver Kiss
that includes two bonus stories about what happened to Simon before and what happens to Zoë after. I hope you enjoy them. And for those of you who are meeting Simon for the first time—surrender your neck.

Annette Curtis Klause

IT
was the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, the newspapers called it, and I wandered the streets of San Francisco with the most plentiful source of food around me since the day I'd died. Runaways from all over the country were lured here by the dream of freely offered sex, plentiful drugs, and rock 'n' roll on every corner; and layered over the gray, workaday city was a multicolored party that seemed to exist in a parallel world. I walked that world.

I was almost a happy man, if a three-hundred-year-old vampire could ever be called happy. This is what I call fast food, I thought. These children knew no fear. Strangers were their friends. All they needed was love. They slept in doorways, in the parks, and in “liberated houses” that held dozens. How easy it was to slip in next to a girl drunk on cheap wine and take my own wine from her rich, young veins. It was fortunate that the drugs they imbibed had no effect on me, else I'd have been staggering around half-blind all the time. But my unnatural body screened all chemicals out that didn't nurture it, and in these good times I pissed a red stream of waste maybe twice a week.

Love, love, love. How meaningless it was to me. My own loved ones were centuries dead, and I, forever trapped in-between, frozen in the form of a youth not yet twenty. What did I care of love? The ones I'd loved had always abandoned me or betrayed me. I wouldn't be what I am except for one I loved. Yet, in this city of love, I could go anywhere—join in parties, hang out at those spontaneous park festivals called be-ins, wander nighttime concerts—and all welcomed me. If I didn't tell my name, no one pressed me; if I lied, no one cared. I had friends everywhere, and still no one knew who I was. “Who's that pale dude?” I'd hear a boy say as I watched my menu sway to the music, the colored lights dancing on their faces. “What's the name of that cute blond?” a girl would whisper to her friend, winding her fingers in the layers of beads around her neck as if they were in my hair. But they never found out, not even when I sweet-talked one of those yearning girls out under the stars and lulled her into a sparkling silver trance of ecstasy, my fangs firmly planted in her neck. I was gentle with them, let there be no mistake in that, and I tried very hard to leave a drop of life in their veins so they would see the dawn, but I could not make friends with those I hunted—the thought repelled me. I didn't take the pills they gave me, and I turned down the weed they offered in hand-rolled, smoldering cigarettes. “I prefer to drink,” I'd explain if I had to.

But I loved the music. Wild and free, tunes went on and on, meandering out to the moon and beyond. I
danced to the throbbing music by myself, arms waving, eyes closed, and pretended to be moved by life. I floated through the laughter, music, and excitement of the night in a dark bubble of my own making, and it was cold inside, very cold, but the less that was known of me, the safer I was. In my stolen bell-bottom jeans and flowered shirts, I looked just like them but I never would be, and I doubted that their precious, shallow love would save me if they knew.

In the day, I had to have my sleep, and in an alley behind a row of shabby Victorian houses, I'd found my den—an abandoned garage with crumbled gingerbread trim. Perhaps it was a stable once. I covered the windows with old blankets I stole from revelers in the park, and stuffed the chinks in the wood with newspaper to keep out the damaging light. Under the floorboards beneath my bed I kept a suitcase with all that was valuable to me: a meager portion of my native soil, without which I could not sleep, and a painted portrait of those I once held dear. I curled above that suitcase every day, in a deep, sodden coma, too full of rich human blood to bother with the rats that shared my home.

It was there, one misty morning, groggy with the need to sleep off excess, that I found the cat.

It must have squeezed under the ill-fitting doors looking for shelter from the damp night air. Woken by my return, it crouched on my pile of blankets in a dusty corner behind a stack of old tires and stared warily at me.

“Lucky for you I've had my dinner, tabby,” I said. “Now off with you.”

It should have been scared, animals ran from me, but instead it hissed.

Somehow, the absurdity made me laugh.

My laughter made it crouch lower, and its ears flattened. It edged away, and I saw how skinny it was, and weak. For a second I remembered crawling in the forest newly made, starving, and too stunned to know that blood was now my food. Just then, one of the occasional rats chose to make an ill-advised dash across the floor. I don't know why I did it, curiosity perhaps, but I snatched the squealing rat up. I tore the creature open with my teeth and tossed it near the cat. The cat flinched but didn't run.

“Well, there you are, puss,” I said. “Food with your lodging. What are you waiting for?”

Slowly it crept from the shadows and finally sniffed the corpse. I could see then it was female. It didn't take her long to recognize a meal, and she wolfed the rat meat down so fast, I feared she would vomit.

“Steady on,” I warned. “I don't care to share my den with cat puke.”

When she'd finished I flung the remnants under the door and stuffed the crack with an old coat. Ignoring the cat, I sank to my bed and took my crimson sleep.

The cat shot out the door the next evening as soon as it was opened, not surprising, as she had managed to
spend the entire night without soiling the floor. I didn't expect to see her again.

I was wrong. She was there in the jingle-jangle morning I'd heard the band sing of the night before. She sat by my front door with an expectant look on her little tabby face. What could I do? I found her another rat.

The routine became a habit. Dawn. Cat. Rat. Then she slept in a corner of my den. “But don't get used to it,” I told her. “I'll be moving on soon.”

Perhaps because I spent all my time avoiding conversation with humans, I soon found myself confiding in the cat. I only shared a few words at first. “Good morning,” I'd say. “Found a plump brunette at the Quicksilver concert. How was your night?” Soon I surrendered more details. “Last night's girlfriend was an Airplane fan,” I might begin. “I thought she'd give in easily, but she'd traded her brains for LSD, and my charms didn't work on her. She screamed when I bit her and I'm afraid I overreacted. I was really sorry afterward, cat. Honestly. I had to drop her in the bay so no one would find her.”

It was such a relief to confess.

The cat was wary at first. She wanted the meat, but she kept her distance, eyeing me suspiciously as if trying to place what kind of creature I was. Perhaps I smelled of death; perhaps I smelled of nothing known to her. Her aloofness saddened me. Was my only intimacy with those who lived to be when draining the very source of that life? A foolish question, for I knew that to be true. Nevertheless, I made a game of befriending her.

My words brought her near, yet she was shy of my touch. She ducked from my first advances, and danced on the shadow tip of my embrace, but I didn't give up. I wooed her like a lover. Each day she lingered longer within reach, and I held myself in check. Each day her little ribs became less obvious, and she trembled less. I remember the electric crackle of joy the first time she let me stroke her head.

Soon, like a fool, I named the beast. Grimalkin, I called her—a witch's cat's name, but I'm close enough to a witch in most minds, I suppose. Stroking her became my delight—and hers. I had forgotten how a purr could buzz in one's fingers like summer. She slept at the foot of my bed.

One morning I came home to find a mouse upon my pillow. “And now you are the provider?” I asked her as she wound between my legs. The bursting fullness in my chest was fleeting, but frightened me. I readied for sleep briskly, paying her no more heed. When I woke in the evening, I found her curled against my stomach. “Why?” I asked. “You will find no warmth there.” But the fullness was back and wouldn't be ignored. It was I who took warmth from her.

The summer danced on, the music played, and the generous girls came and went. I tried to be careful, I truly did, but excess was all around, and I became prey to it, too. I had spent almost three hundred years in trying to control the lust, I had even tried to exist on the blood of beasts alone, and now one hedonistic summer had
undone me. I found it harder and harder to stop in time. If I took too much, at least they died gently, I consoled myself, at least they felt no pain. I refused to feed on their terror like others of my kind, but feed I must, so under an August moon I romanced a girl, all fringes and swirling skirts, that I'd lured out from the bands and the smoky air of the dance hall called the Fillmore.

“What's your favorite band?” she asked.

“The Grateful Dead,” I answered. Christ, I was almost getting a sense of humor.

“I'm not a runaway,” she told me when I asked. “I live in Mountain View with my mom, and sister, and three old cats.”

“I have a cat, too,” I said, surprising myself.

I soon was sorry. My admission provoked an avalanche of anecdotes. “Enough!” I said, finally losing patience, and drew her to me, my gaze on her neck, my gums itching.

“Ooh! You remind me of that Doors singer, Jim Morrison,” she said. “Beautiful and scary at the same time.”

I decided she was more intelligent than most. “You are beautiful, too,” I whispered, trailing my fingers down her cheek, capturing her eyes with mine.

She relaxed into my arms, surrendering to the spell I wove, and I took her throat. “The stars are swirling,” she said vaguely as I sipped gently on her blood. “Did you give me some drugs or something?” She giggled weakly. “But I'd remember, wouldn't …” Her voice trailed off into a sigh. I allowed myself to tumble into
the lake of dreams with her, drowning, drowning in the sweet froth of her life, and I would have finished her in that glorious haze, drained her of the nectar that sustained me, except I remembered the three old cats, and all of a sudden I couldn't go on. Ashamed, I left her there in Golden Gate Park to wake with the dawn and wonder if someone had slipped some acid in her drink.

Grimalkin wasn't waiting at the garage door. After half a summer of the same routine, she wasn't there. I tried to shrug off the disappointment. It had to happen sooner or later—either she would leave or I would. Maybe she was delayed by a mouse, I told myself, but not believing it. I hesitated over whether to block the crack under the door, but common sense won out and I grabbed for the dusty old coat. A day out won't harm her, I thought, but a touch of sunlight would certainly harm me.

She was already curled on my bed.

“Grimalkin! Trickster!” I exclaimed. The joy of seeing her surprised me into laughter. Who would have thought? I made ready for bed hastily with a smile on my face.

When I woke in the evening, she was still in the same spot. “Wake up, lazybones,” I said over my shoulder, but her only response was a slight opening of her eyelids.

“What ails you, puss?” I asked, rolling over to stroke her. She trembled. “Ah, yes, I'm very cold,” I said,
making it a joke. Then I noticed the slime around her mouth and found it was possible to be colder still.

I smelled a rankness in the air I hadn't noticed in the morning. Before I identified the source, Grimalkin showed me. She wobbled to her feet, staggered a few steps, and vomited on my blanket. She collapsed again and lay there panting.

I panicked.

I, who had lived by my wits for centuries and could mesmerize or crush with my strength; I, who could fly with wings through the night, or drift like mist; I, who thought I was above the laws of nature, didn't know what to do for a little sick cat.

I swept her into my arms and took to the streets. I had no money and didn't know where to go. I would have to ask for help. Did these people who danced all night and had no job I knew of have doctors who healed for the sake of love? If anyone knew, it would be in Haight-Ashbury, the kaleidoscope heart of the alternate city.

I ran to a head shop on Haight, which I knew was open until midnight. Wrinkling my nose against the overwhelming stench of incense and patchouli oil, I pushed past the browsers around the comic book racks and the bulletin board, to the far end of a glass display case full of pipes, roach clips, and other drug paraphernalia. The girl at the counter was almost hidden by racks dripping with multicolored scarves and beads.

“Where do the sick go?” I asked her urgently.

She stared at me blankly for a moment, and I would have grabbed her if my arms had not been full.

“The free clinic, man.” I turned to see a young man with a bushy black beard, holding a flyer up for me to read the address.

“The doctors volunteer,” he said. “It's for the street kids who don't have money.”

I thanked him and hurried out.

“Stay cool!” I heard him call after me—advice or a meaningless salute, I don't know.

The clinic was in the basement of a church. That stopped me cold. I stood there staring at the looming facade, a sinking feeling in my gut. I must have held my cat too tight. She squeaked in pain. That decided me. But as soon as I crossed the threshold I felt my insides crush together in fear.

A motley assortment of young people sat in the rows of ancient straight-backed wooden chairs, or lounged in the few tattered armchairs that sat on the cloudy linoleum floor.

“Dude's got a cat,” a youth in a purple shirt said to no one in particular, and giggled irrelevantly.

A shivering boy with large black pupils was led past me by his friends. Too much LSD or mescaline, I guessed. “You'll be safe here,” I heard one friend say. “They'll give you something to bring you down.”

“They never call the police,” said the other.

The girl at the table looked over her square, pink-lensed
glasses at me. “Whatcha here for?” she asked, pen hovering ready over a printed form.