Mercy- Nosferatu
In a dark room, deep underground, where distantly you can hear the drip-drip of water falling. The air is sickeningly heavy with a sweet, flowery perfume called "Tea Rose", and on one wall, meticulously clean, is a white sheet. On that sheet, flickering images of several silent films, edited together to make one never-ending loop. The images focus on a young woman, long hair perfectly coiffed, at times playing the vamp, at times the comedienne, the virginal beauty, the star struck lover. Over the film, instead of the typical orchestral soundtrack one would hear at a silent film, is a raspy, coldly practical voice that might have been feminine.
"Back then, a broad could be anything on the silver sheet. She could be a heroine or a villain, a bitch or a queen. I was all of that and then some. I played for all the big names: DeMille, Mayer, Universal, Famous Lasky, all the big names. I was one of the Bathing Beauties for a little while and let me tell you, ain't nothin' less comfortable than them wool bathin' suits and them damn rocks."
"Cept maybe dyin."
In the prime seat in the house is a hunched figure, all bundled up in moth-eaten furs. A sparkling cut-crystal decanter full of thick matter catches the flickering light of the projector and throws it in a thousand rainbows across the walls, illuminating water damaged posters of the beautiful young woman in various poses, splashes of movie-poster text seeming to retain the glow of the light long after it's faded. The voice continues.
"I was in my prime! I once got a fan letter from Benito Mussolini. He asked me to marry him. Naturally, I said no. He was Italian! All that hair! Ugh."
A man's dimage flickers up on screen. It's Rudolph Valentino, wooing the lady as only Valentino could.
"God, now -that- was a man. Notorious of course, but that made me want him all the more.... Where I was born, you didn't see folks like Rudy on the street. Ohhh no, Duluth wasn't a town like that. My parents liked it that way too! Good, white, American people my parents, they brought me up right! My mamma, she took damn good care of me and my brothers and sisters- I was the youngest, you know. The baby of the family. My big brother died in the Great War... the first one. After that, my father didn't have the heart to work, so mamma put us kids out there doing what we could!
We worked hard. I was a dancer, and a damned good one too! Let all those floozies shake their assets to get the fella's attention, a pretty girl with good legs'll beat 'em every time! I had good legs- long legs..."
The voice trails away and for a long time there's nothing but the flickering movie screen and the faraway dripdripdrip.
"Course, I didn't just have legs. Ohhh no. They called me Lil' Miss Midas, cause EVERYTHING I touched turned to gold! They could bring me into a film with just a chicken and a doll on a string and I'd make it a box office sensation! By the time the talkies took over, I was the highest paid actress in Hollywood, I got $300,000 dollars a week for a four-week picture. I had a house in them hills that was so big I'd ride my horse around it just to exercise him!
Now, like I said, I was a dancer...and a star. Then 1917 came around and talking pictures became the big 'thing'. Some of them broads, they couldn't talk their way outta a wet paper sack! But me...oh, I was a star. I was ready to shoot into the stratosphere, passing that little swede Garbo like she was a stone. It was on the set of my first talkie that I got 'discovered'..."
Her voice trails off and goes silent. The reel of video runs out at last and the silence is punctuated by the soft slap of the reel's end against the projector. After a long moment, her voice starts up again, her tone low and angry.
"The bastard had a line a mile long and a tongue of silver and I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. He seemed pretty normal, but then agents always were back then. Didn't have the looks to be a star, be an agent! I had an agent, of course, all of us did, but he offered me the world on a string and like a schmuck I followed him. His name was Dimitri Rosenstein and everyone knows them Jews know a thing're three about the movies!
So I arranged to meet in his office the week after shooting began. He wined and dined me to the T, boy did he. It was perfect, really...guess that's why I didn't mind it so much when he started puttin' the moves on. Wasn't nothin' new, of course, I was a star like I said, but he got kind of bite-y and I wasn't having none of that, until he bit me. Then..."
She bursts into laughter that's brittle as broken glass.
"Well, then things got interesting. He Embraced me right then and there. Course, I didn't know what that meant then. I just know he bit me and went from unremarkable to mind-numbingly ugly. His blood tasted like gym socks, rotten meat, sour milk, all the nasty stuff that just smelling makes your stomach turn. I threw up the first bit, all over him, and he hit me. Boy, I thought I had been hit by a Mack truck. I went down like a stone.
When I woke up, wasn't nothin' the same. It wasn't like in the pictures, where you become beautiful and immortal and have the power to seduce anyone. Course, now I know that I got picked by the Nosferatu, and that some of the Kindred really -do- get it like in the pictures. Me, I got the shit end of the stick and don't mind saying it.
Still...I got uses. I got friends high and low, a little cozy home, and hell, I've got what every little girl with skinny legs and a trick to turn dreams of having."
Wild laughter echoes before being cut off abruptly, the voice oozing sexuality in a disturbing parody of sultriness.
"I'm immortal...I'm a star, kid."
The flickering light reflecting off the white sheet shows a once-feminine face surrounded by a beautiful mane of hair. The face looks like the carapace of an insect, the eyes sunken, the skin like that of the preserved men and women of the peat bogs- dry, dessicated, tough as old leather. Brilliant green eyes sparkle still though, all the more grotesque for the face that they are placed in, and when her rouged lips curve into a half-smile it extends in a thin line nearly to her ear and shows a hint of sharklike teeth.