eat me, drink me, love me
Title: eat me, drink me, love me
Rating: R
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: Season 3
Warnings: Nothing worse than your average episode, surely.
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. And that’s probably for the best, really.
Notes: My infinite gratitude to alchemise who bought me in the Help Haiti auction, asked for a True Blood fic, and then waited patiently while I picked my life up, moved it, reassembled, and put off writing this story the whole time. Thanks also to jujuberry136 for the short-notice beta! All remaining errors are mine and mine alone. My apologies to Christina Rosetti, for mauling ”The Goblin Market” for my own base purposes. This was also inspired by Toulmouche’s ”The Reluctant Bride”. Canon wise, I’m straddling book and TV here. So forgive me if when there are inconsistencies.
Summary: She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood.
She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood. It was on her tongue, fresh and somehow stale, too. Like an unearthed penny.
I’m a dead woman, she thought.
A clink and a noise like popping grease.
“Answers, Pamela. I want answers.”
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly...”
She was twenty-eight years old when she watched the love of her (first) life marry. The worst of it was how happy Sadie seemed, how she smiled at her groom, how she laughed after the priest pronounced her someone’s wife. She was laughing at Pamela--she was laughing at every kiss and every touch and every breath-jerking moment of bliss they shared. Because it was nothing to her, next to this man who would make her a Peer. Who would make her respectable.
I wish she were dead.
It would be preferable. A sanctuary full of silence and black instead of happy murmurs, light colors. A June funeral. Yes, Pamela preferred to think of Sadie as a dead woman. White and still in a casket, perfect and hers forever. They would put her in the ground, true, but Pamela would always have a picture of Sadie, white and still and quiet. Never again would she have to share her.
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
He was a grim bastard, and she hated him like she had once hated India. A dull, inevitable, life-sucking tide on her countrymen. The Magister laid another chain across her legs and Pam closed her eyes to keep from crying. For pride’s sake, yes, but also for reasons more practical. It was quite likely she was going to need all her blood before this was over. Under her breastbone, beneath the hate of the Magister and the fear of the True Death, was a small river of calm that kept the hate and the fear separate.
Eric.
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
Pamela was married six months after Sadie. It could have happened much earlier, but she’d put it off--put them off. Her parents had disapproved, but they hadn’t fought her. There were other sisters. And Pamela was the least favorite. She was too sullen as a child, too jealous of her siblings. Her parents had never liked their youngest girl.
Alone in the house, truly alone, she found herself hating them, the old people whose joints ached, whose faces sagged, whose every waking moment seemed to demand some attention of her. What’s more, they were out of money. Four dowries they had paid, for four far more winsome daughters. If she stayed, she would be a martyr to their infirmity. They could afford no more nurses.
So Pamela made herself an object at a few respectable teas and soirees. She found a solid man who needed a woman whose chief virtue was the ability to live alone. In exchange for his inheritance, and his monies, she engaged herself to a recently widowed Navy Captain named George. He had a moustache and a soft belly.
Now, they were dressing her, Pamela’s sisters were. She wanted, more than anything, to tear the artfully arrange pins out of her hair, to tear the hair out, too, if necessary. Frozen, while her sister Alice ministered to her, Pamela wished for a knife so that she could cut the dove grey silk off of her. That was not an option. If she wanted bread on the table, if she wanted her parents put away from her, if she wanted to be left alone, then this would happen.
Was this what it felt like for prostitutes? Certainly not. This was much more decent. This was arranged. There was a church. And it would only happen once. No, that was a lie. It would happen as often as he liked. She fought down panic as her sisters finished making her ready.
This was much more decent. She would get a home and her parents would get a nurse.
Alice kissed her temple.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
The chains, heavy and undiluted, were burning her even through her clothes. It was dawn. She was lethargic, drawn to sleep like an anchor plunging to the bottom. But he wouldn’t let her. So she carried this story, her story, inside of herself like buttressing. Upright, even when tied down, buoyed by conviction. The bleeds had set in. Mostly, she was able to swallow it before it ran from her nose. I’m going to need the blood. I already need the blood. He had, of course, noticed this.
“Very diligent, Pamela. Good forethought.”
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” she said quietly. Eric had not taught her how to be strong. She had learned that young, fastening another woman’s corset laces and kissing her goodbye. This was her kind of game, a waiting game that ended with death or not. This was, after all, how it began.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
"Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather."
"You have much gold upon your head,"
They answered altogether:
"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood. It was in on her tongue, fresh and somehow stale, too. Like an unearthed penny.
I’m a dead woman, she thought. Consumption. The White Death. Pamela looked down at her body. It wouldn’t last, the swell of her breasts or the fashionable pout of her hips. None of it would last. She would fade into nothingness. She would not even outlive her own decaying parents.
George was away, posted to some godforsaken place near Bombay. Pamela rather suspected he would never return. Malaria was always a concern. Yellow Fever, White Death. Pamela spat the bloody mouthful into a napkin and threw the napkin on the fire.
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
“How are you feeling, Pamela?” asked the Magister.
Pamela was feeling very 1942. Just beyond the edges of her eyesight was a basement, and in that basement was a record player.
“...my hours are slumberless. Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless. Little white flowers will never awaken you...”
She and Eric were dancing cheek to cheek, the blood on his sticking to the fine powder on hers. He was telling her some lie about what he and Godric had been doing. She didn’t ask, didn’t confront, because he didn’t want her to, and there was no reason to bother. If she needed to know, he would tell her. Besides, she liked it here, she liked these goose-stepping, stupid men. They were self-important and humorless and it pleased her to eat that kind of man. Pamela was developing a palette.
“You smell like Gestapo,” Eric said.
You smell like wet dog, she thought.
“Pamela, you’re not listening,” said the Magister.
“I was only dreaming,” Pamela said.
”Nay hush," said Laura.
"Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more," and kissed her.
There was a sore inside of her, something raw and stinging. Every night she scratched it open and let it weep.
She read Sadie’s birth announcements in the papers, the clippings she kept in her desk. She took her husband’s letters from India and burned them sealed in their envelopes. She underpaid the servants and made the Irish ones work on Sunday. She stayed in the rooms upstairs and embroidered obscene words onto very expensive linens and coughed up bloody sputum. She was more and more convinced that the disease was a gift, something Fate had given her to keep some of that bile inside, all for herself.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain,
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
"Come buy, come buy,"
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
Her fire away.
The Magister laid the chain across her chest. Eric did feel this. He did. He was her Maker. He could call her from anywhere, anytime, and now all she felt was a vague sense of coiled energy. But she trusted him, and not just because she was Made to.
In the twenties, Eric had been poisoned. Hep D, they called it now. She found him in a light-tight space, where some enterprising citizen had once stashed his or her whiskey. He was still, so still, and covered in a crimson sheen. Two days she had searched, and he had been in the ground sweating blood without her. Pamela fed him, from her own body, for months. In the evenings she went out into speakeasies and looked for thrill seekers. In a time when re-distilled government poison could kill you in any cocktail, it was not a difficult task. She promised them a drink more illicit than ginger jake. After draining them to the point of weakness, Pamela left them propped up somewhere with the hazy memory of a good time.
And then, still made up for the night in a swinging dress and beautiful shoes, she raced back to Eric and fed him again before dawn. She helped him wash and dress and covered him when he felt cold--a rediscovery for both of them. Eric was sucking desperately at her open vein, exhausted, starved If she wasn’t careful, he could drain her entirely.
Eric’s head lolled back against her arm. Pam tore her teeth into the palm of her hand to reopen it, holding it above his lips. She squeezed her hand into a fist, letting the blood drop effortlessly into his mouth.
“Enough, Pamela,” he said after a time.
“Eat if you’re hungry,” she said. “Eat.”
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.
What they said was true after all. A woman couldn’t be too cautious of herself. She ought to watch where she walked after dark. She ought to dress properly. She ought not to go to the theater by herself. Not even for Gilbert and Sullivan, not even for the last thing on earth that could make you smile.
Because if you did. If you were a woman and you did go to the theater to smile and it was after dark, and your husband was in Bombay instead of London, then bad things did happen to you.
The man smelled like turnips and bad gin. He’d torn her sleeve and stepped on the hem of her skirt and, absurdly, Pamela could only think about the cost of that. She would have to do the mending herself, or else turn it over to another woman who might guess. Who might know that she, Pamela, was one of those stupid women who went out at night.
He forced a hand down her blouse, his fingernails dragging painfully across her skin, and he grabbed her breast and squeezed--tore at it like he would separate it from her. But there was not so much left above the buttressing of her corset. So he pulled harder and it hurt.
Pamela spun herself away from him, clutching at her shirt and stumbling for balance. He said something, slurred something at her, but all she got was turnips and bad gin. He came towards her; she waited until he was close and kicked at his shins. Stunned, drunk, he fell. And dropped the garish walking stick in his other hand. She’d never picked up such an item before, only seen them carried about by proper men going about their business, or by low men trying to make themselves feel proper.
It was surprisingly heavy--weighted? Or perhaps she was just weaker. The man was standing up again. Pamela held it awkwardly, like she would a cricket bat, although she’d never held a cricket bat before. She swung and it glanced off his shoulder. He laughed. She swung again and it missed. He laughed harder. Pamela swung and hit him in the forehead. He dropped.
Pamela did not stop swinging.
“I believe that is sufficient.”
She dropped the club, her arms suddenly burning, impossibly heavy, and turned around. Behind her, in the shadows, was a very tall man with a very clean accent. It had been studied.
“What?” she gasped.
“I said I believe that is sufficient. He’s quite dead, you know.”
“What?” Pamela turned, looked down. The man’s face was some kind of pulp, with little bits of bone showing in surprising places.
“You see?”
“Damn,” she hissed. “Damn!”
“I am,” he said smoothly, “sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”
“I wasn’t done with him yet!” she said, breath catching as she inhaled. “I wasn’t finished!”
“What else did you have in mind?”
He still has to pay. They all still have to pay.
“Pamela?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She began setting herself to rights, gasping. This would pass. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“It was on your opera glasses.” He stepped forward and offered them. “Engraved. A gift from your husband, perhaps?”
“An old school friend. And you are?”
Till Laura, dwindling,
Seemed knocking at Death's door:
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse,
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook,
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
It was a long three months while Eric fed on her, embarrassing both of them, but mostly him. Every night she came back, flushed with the blood of some hapless boozer, and he looked at her for a moment before he fed. He knew that she would return, felt that she would, and yet was always mildly surprised.
The thought had occurred to her. She could leave him, strike out on her own. For the first time in her life. The opportunity was there. Eric was her Maker, but he couldn’t impose his will on her, not now. But every night she returned and fed him again.
She lay beside him in the dark, her heeled shoes kicked off and ankled crossed while he went to work on her wrist. After a while, Eric detached and drifted off, even though it was an hour until dawn. Pamela wiped his mouth and licked her fingers. Eric tensed and opened his eyes, briefly awake, searching.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I choose you.”
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
Immortality: a modest proposal.
He had showed her his fangs, demonstrated his ability to feed, but she balked. Pamela had been different all her life. She preferred the touch of women, the simplicity of solitude, the power of being left alone. This, this thing, could only make her more different. It could only make things worse.
“Kom här.”
She didn’t know what he said, but she approached him regardless.
“Do you want to die as a passable human? And you will die, very shortly.”
Pamela was silent.
“Or do you want to live forever?”
Was she supposed to go home like this, now, after everything? What would she get? Another newspaper clipping? Sadie was pregnant again. A letter from Her Majesty? There was always that yellow fever. Maybe her negligible inheritance? A funeral, perhaps two, she would have to arrange before it was her turn to die.
“Yes,” she said. “And then I never want to see this place again.”
Eric smiled, already proud. His fangs extended. He bent her head back. He bit into her flesh, tearing the delicate skin and the more flexible arteries. He drank. It was awful and she fought it at first, not expecting this, not expecting this kind of pain or savagery. But then, over Eric’s shoulder, she saw the dead man on the street. The one she had killed.
She tried to relax then, and make things go faster.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
“Do you ever get them?” Pam slurred.
“Get what?” the Magister asked.
“Answers. Do you ever get them?”
“My methods are proven.”
She smiled, blood on her teeth. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot.
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple.
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.
The coffin was very small. The little choking noises she made were very close to her face. Everything was very close. No more than a few centimeters all around. And beyond that--she could feel the dirt weighing in. It was all weighing in. She couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t breathe.
“Eric?” she whispered. “Eric!”
For a few long seconds, she couldn’t trust her own memory. Was he real? Or was this just what it appeared to be, that she had been buried alive? It happened. There wer estories. But she wasn’t breathing. She felt that and she felt the weight of the dirt, the proximity of the walls, and inside of her, a misplaced seam tore and everything fell out.
“Eric!” she screamed, kicked, flailed. “Eric!”
There was a cracking noise, a shower of soil, and then she was pulled free of it. The air wasn’t city air. Of course not, of course not, because they buried her in one of the new places outside of the city instead of a claustrophobic little churchyard. Because she was dead.
She looked down. “Jesus Christ.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They buried me in my wedding dress.” She began to strip it off, hands tearing the fine cloth like paper.
“It’s a nice dress, Pamela.” He paused, taking in the sartorial crime at hand. “It was a nice dress.”
“It’s wretched. It was always wretched, and now it doesn’t even fit. I bet it was my mother’s idea--the stupid bitch.” It fell apart in her hands, tearing into smaller and smaller pieces until she was in her underclothes. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t hot or cold, just filled with a kind of nervous energy that didn’t seem to stop. Her skin was tight, her lungs frozen, her heart stopped. “That stupid bitch.”
Eric removed his coat and held it out to her.
“No. Thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” he murmured, smiling.
Pamela took a moment, sorted her hair, and straightened her chemise. “Eric?”
“Yes, Pamela?”
“I’m famished.”
She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."
Apparently even this Torquemada piece of shit had to sleep sometime. Pamela closed her eyes.
“Hello, my little dove.” Sadie stood above her, blond hair resplendent in the harsh light of Fangtasia’s basement.
“Holy shit.”
“Pamela,” Sadie chided. “There are ladies present.”
“You’re dead.”
“And so are you, angel.”
“Not quite.” She was suddenly uneasy. What was she to say? “You’re looking well.”
“I wish I could say the same.” Sadie touched her face, disturbed.
“It’s nothing,” Pam said quickly. “It won’t last.”
“This too shall pass, hm?”
“Why are you here?” She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t see this for what it was. But it was...she hadn’t seen Sadie in more than a century.
“Because I love you.”
“Not true,” Pam rasped. “You left. Why are you here?”
“It is only right that I should be. I made you what you are.”
“No. No, you didn’t.” Pam couldn’t keep a smile from slipping across her face.
“I did,” Sadie insisted. “I made you bitter and alone and angry.”
“I was always bitter and alone and angry. You just made me desperate.”
“I broke you when I married.”
“Maybe,” Pam allowed. “But I got better.”
Someone slapped her in the face.
“Wake up, Pamela.”
She blinked, her vision cleared. Fuck me into the wall.
“Time to start again,” The Magister said cheerfully. “I’ve got a present for you.”
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin;
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
It was wonderful. It was wonderful like the priest had once told her the Word of God was wonderful. Wonderful like her mother had once said marriage was wonderful. Wonderful like the words Sadie had once said, the kisses Sadie had once kissed.
Pamela moaned, writhed, hands slipping over cooling skin. She put her fingers to her face, licked and sucked. Again, she stooped over and drank from the dying stevedore. It was like a star burning inside of her, from her hair to her toes and everything in between.
“I like your enthusiasm, Pamela.”
She gasped and sat up, suddenly pulled back to the present. “Oh my.” She wiped at her face. “I didn’t intend to be so...” Indelicate? Indecorous? Her fangs--her fangs--retracted.
“It’s refreshing.”
“I shouldn’t...I shouldn’t.” Oh God, her chemise was soaked with blood, her hands and neck and chest sticky with it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, in public, undone, almost naked, shameful desire writ large. “It’s not polite.”
“Pamela.” When he spoke like that, it rolled through her and she looked up at once.
“Yes?”
“Do you truly care about polite?”
“Of course. I do. Yes.” And she believed it, right until she realized that she was already licking the blood off the back of her hands.
“Pamela?” He looked amused.
“No.” She put her hands in her lap. “No.”
“Good girl. Now. Are you ready for your entree?”
“I can have more?” Her new world was already a marvel.
“Pamela, you can have everything.”
Her fangs fell into place.
Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?
“Are you alright?”
She swayed a moment, and almost fell against him, but righted herself. And, see? Here she was, and here was Eric. The one person, the only one--fader och dotter, moder och son, syster och bror
But enough. Enough of that maudlin sentimentality. She left that behind, in pieces, in a churchyard more than a century ago. She didn’t need feelings, she had appetites. She didn’t need help, she had fangs. And any tears she shed, she shed in blood.
Rating: R
Genre: Gen
Spoilers: Season 3
Warnings: Nothing worse than your average episode, surely.
Disclaimer: I don’t own them. And that’s probably for the best, really.
Notes: My infinite gratitude to alchemise who bought me in the Help Haiti auction, asked for a True Blood fic, and then waited patiently while I picked my life up, moved it, reassembled, and put off writing this story the whole time. Thanks also to jujuberry136 for the short-notice beta! All remaining errors are mine and mine alone. My apologies to Christina Rosetti, for mauling ”The Goblin Market” for my own base purposes. This was also inspired by Toulmouche’s ”The Reluctant Bride”. Canon wise, I’m straddling book and TV here. So forgive me if when there are inconsistencies.
Summary: She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood.
She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood. It was on her tongue, fresh and somehow stale, too. Like an unearthed penny.
I’m a dead woman, she thought.
A clink and a noise like popping grease.
“Answers, Pamela. I want answers.”
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly...”
She was twenty-eight years old when she watched the love of her (first) life marry. The worst of it was how happy Sadie seemed, how she smiled at her groom, how she laughed after the priest pronounced her someone’s wife. She was laughing at Pamela--she was laughing at every kiss and every touch and every breath-jerking moment of bliss they shared. Because it was nothing to her, next to this man who would make her a Peer. Who would make her respectable.
I wish she were dead.
It would be preferable. A sanctuary full of silence and black instead of happy murmurs, light colors. A June funeral. Yes, Pamela preferred to think of Sadie as a dead woman. White and still in a casket, perfect and hers forever. They would put her in the ground, true, but Pamela would always have a picture of Sadie, white and still and quiet. Never again would she have to share her.
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
"Lie close," Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?"
He was a grim bastard, and she hated him like she had once hated India. A dull, inevitable, life-sucking tide on her countrymen. The Magister laid another chain across her legs and Pam closed her eyes to keep from crying. For pride’s sake, yes, but also for reasons more practical. It was quite likely she was going to need all her blood before this was over. Under her breastbone, beneath the hate of the Magister and the fear of the True Death, was a small river of calm that kept the hate and the fear separate.
Eric.
"No," said Lizzie, "no, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us."
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
Pamela was married six months after Sadie. It could have happened much earlier, but she’d put it off--put them off. Her parents had disapproved, but they hadn’t fought her. There were other sisters. And Pamela was the least favorite. She was too sullen as a child, too jealous of her siblings. Her parents had never liked their youngest girl.
Alone in the house, truly alone, she found herself hating them, the old people whose joints ached, whose faces sagged, whose every waking moment seemed to demand some attention of her. What’s more, they were out of money. Four dowries they had paid, for four far more winsome daughters. If she stayed, she would be a martyr to their infirmity. They could afford no more nurses.
So Pamela made herself an object at a few respectable teas and soirees. She found a solid man who needed a woman whose chief virtue was the ability to live alone. In exchange for his inheritance, and his monies, she engaged herself to a recently widowed Navy Captain named George. He had a moustache and a soft belly.
Now, they were dressing her, Pamela’s sisters were. She wanted, more than anything, to tear the artfully arrange pins out of her hair, to tear the hair out, too, if necessary. Frozen, while her sister Alice ministered to her, Pamela wished for a knife so that she could cut the dove grey silk off of her. That was not an option. If she wanted bread on the table, if she wanted her parents put away from her, if she wanted to be left alone, then this would happen.
Was this what it felt like for prostitutes? Certainly not. This was much more decent. This was arranged. There was a church. And it would only happen once. No, that was a lie. It would happen as often as he liked. She fought down panic as her sisters finished making her ready.
This was much more decent. She would get a home and her parents would get a nurse.
Alice kissed her temple.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
The chains, heavy and undiluted, were burning her even through her clothes. It was dawn. She was lethargic, drawn to sleep like an anchor plunging to the bottom. But he wouldn’t let her. So she carried this story, her story, inside of herself like buttressing. Upright, even when tied down, buoyed by conviction. The bleeds had set in. Mostly, she was able to swallow it before it ran from her nose. I’m going to need the blood. I already need the blood. He had, of course, noticed this.
“Very diligent, Pamela. Good forethought.”
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” she said quietly. Eric had not taught her how to be strong. She had learned that young, fastening another woman’s corset laces and kissing her goodbye. This was her kind of game, a waiting game that ended with death or not. This was, after all, how it began.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
"Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather."
"You have much gold upon your head,"
They answered altogether:
"Buy from us with a golden curl."
She was thirty years old the first time she tasted blood. It was in on her tongue, fresh and somehow stale, too. Like an unearthed penny.
I’m a dead woman, she thought. Consumption. The White Death. Pamela looked down at her body. It wouldn’t last, the swell of her breasts or the fashionable pout of her hips. None of it would last. She would fade into nothingness. She would not even outlive her own decaying parents.
George was away, posted to some godforsaken place near Bombay. Pamela rather suspected he would never return. Malaria was always a concern. Yellow Fever, White Death. Pamela spat the bloody mouthful into a napkin and threw the napkin on the fire.
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore,
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away,
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
“How are you feeling, Pamela?” asked the Magister.
Pamela was feeling very 1942. Just beyond the edges of her eyesight was a basement, and in that basement was a record player.
“...my hours are slumberless. Dearest, the shadows I live with are numberless. Little white flowers will never awaken you...”
She and Eric were dancing cheek to cheek, the blood on his sticking to the fine powder on hers. He was telling her some lie about what he and Godric had been doing. She didn’t ask, didn’t confront, because he didn’t want her to, and there was no reason to bother. If she needed to know, he would tell her. Besides, she liked it here, she liked these goose-stepping, stupid men. They were self-important and humorless and it pleased her to eat that kind of man. Pamela was developing a palette.
“You smell like Gestapo,” Eric said.
You smell like wet dog, she thought.
“Pamela, you’re not listening,” said the Magister.
“I was only dreaming,” Pamela said.
”Nay hush," said Laura.
"Nay hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still;
To-morrow night I will
Buy more," and kissed her.
There was a sore inside of her, something raw and stinging. Every night she scratched it open and let it weep.
She read Sadie’s birth announcements in the papers, the clippings she kept in her desk. She took her husband’s letters from India and burned them sealed in their envelopes. She underpaid the servants and made the Irish ones work on Sunday. She stayed in the rooms upstairs and embroidered obscene words onto very expensive linens and coughed up bloody sputum. She was more and more convinced that the disease was a gift, something Fate had given her to keep some of that bile inside, all for herself.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain,
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry:
"Come buy, come buy,"
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay, and burn
Her fire away.
The Magister laid the chain across her chest. Eric did feel this. He did. He was her Maker. He could call her from anywhere, anytime, and now all she felt was a vague sense of coiled energy. But she trusted him, and not just because she was Made to.
In the twenties, Eric had been poisoned. Hep D, they called it now. She found him in a light-tight space, where some enterprising citizen had once stashed his or her whiskey. He was still, so still, and covered in a crimson sheen. Two days she had searched, and he had been in the ground sweating blood without her. Pamela fed him, from her own body, for months. In the evenings she went out into speakeasies and looked for thrill seekers. In a time when re-distilled government poison could kill you in any cocktail, it was not a difficult task. She promised them a drink more illicit than ginger jake. After draining them to the point of weakness, Pamela left them propped up somewhere with the hazy memory of a good time.
And then, still made up for the night in a swinging dress and beautiful shoes, she raced back to Eric and fed him again before dawn. She helped him wash and dress and covered him when he felt cold--a rediscovery for both of them. Eric was sucking desperately at her open vein, exhausted, starved If she wasn’t careful, he could drain her entirely.
Eric’s head lolled back against her arm. Pam tore her teeth into the palm of her hand to reopen it, holding it above his lips. She squeezed her hand into a fist, letting the blood drop effortlessly into his mouth.
“Enough, Pamela,” he said after a time.
“Eat if you’re hungry,” she said. “Eat.”
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter-time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.
What they said was true after all. A woman couldn’t be too cautious of herself. She ought to watch where she walked after dark. She ought to dress properly. She ought not to go to the theater by herself. Not even for Gilbert and Sullivan, not even for the last thing on earth that could make you smile.
Because if you did. If you were a woman and you did go to the theater to smile and it was after dark, and your husband was in Bombay instead of London, then bad things did happen to you.
The man smelled like turnips and bad gin. He’d torn her sleeve and stepped on the hem of her skirt and, absurdly, Pamela could only think about the cost of that. She would have to do the mending herself, or else turn it over to another woman who might guess. Who might know that she, Pamela, was one of those stupid women who went out at night.
He forced a hand down her blouse, his fingernails dragging painfully across her skin, and he grabbed her breast and squeezed--tore at it like he would separate it from her. But there was not so much left above the buttressing of her corset. So he pulled harder and it hurt.
Pamela spun herself away from him, clutching at her shirt and stumbling for balance. He said something, slurred something at her, but all she got was turnips and bad gin. He came towards her; she waited until he was close and kicked at his shins. Stunned, drunk, he fell. And dropped the garish walking stick in his other hand. She’d never picked up such an item before, only seen them carried about by proper men going about their business, or by low men trying to make themselves feel proper.
It was surprisingly heavy--weighted? Or perhaps she was just weaker. The man was standing up again. Pamela held it awkwardly, like she would a cricket bat, although she’d never held a cricket bat before. She swung and it glanced off his shoulder. He laughed. She swung again and it missed. He laughed harder. Pamela swung and hit him in the forehead. He dropped.
Pamela did not stop swinging.
“I believe that is sufficient.”
She dropped the club, her arms suddenly burning, impossibly heavy, and turned around. Behind her, in the shadows, was a very tall man with a very clean accent. It had been studied.
“What?” she gasped.
“I said I believe that is sufficient. He’s quite dead, you know.”
“What?” Pamela turned, looked down. The man’s face was some kind of pulp, with little bits of bone showing in surprising places.
“You see?”
“Damn,” she hissed. “Damn!”
“I am,” he said smoothly, “sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.”
“I wasn’t done with him yet!” she said, breath catching as she inhaled. “I wasn’t finished!”
“What else did you have in mind?”
He still has to pay. They all still have to pay.
“Pamela?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” She began setting herself to rights, gasping. This would pass. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”
“It was on your opera glasses.” He stepped forward and offered them. “Engraved. A gift from your husband, perhaps?”
“An old school friend. And you are?”
Till Laura, dwindling,
Seemed knocking at Death's door:
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse,
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook,
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
It was a long three months while Eric fed on her, embarrassing both of them, but mostly him. Every night she came back, flushed with the blood of some hapless boozer, and he looked at her for a moment before he fed. He knew that she would return, felt that she would, and yet was always mildly surprised.
The thought had occurred to her. She could leave him, strike out on her own. For the first time in her life. The opportunity was there. Eric was her Maker, but he couldn’t impose his will on her, not now. But every night she returned and fed him again.
She lay beside him in the dark, her heeled shoes kicked off and ankled crossed while he went to work on her wrist. After a while, Eric detached and drifted off, even though it was an hour until dawn. Pamela wiped his mouth and licked her fingers. Eric tensed and opened his eyes, briefly awake, searching.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I choose you.”
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
Immortality: a modest proposal.
He had showed her his fangs, demonstrated his ability to feed, but she balked. Pamela had been different all her life. She preferred the touch of women, the simplicity of solitude, the power of being left alone. This, this thing, could only make her more different. It could only make things worse.
“Kom här.”
She didn’t know what he said, but she approached him regardless.
“Do you want to die as a passable human? And you will die, very shortly.”
Pamela was silent.
“Or do you want to live forever?”
Was she supposed to go home like this, now, after everything? What would she get? Another newspaper clipping? Sadie was pregnant again. A letter from Her Majesty? There was always that yellow fever. Maybe her negligible inheritance? A funeral, perhaps two, she would have to arrange before it was her turn to die.
“Yes,” she said. “And then I never want to see this place again.”
Eric smiled, already proud. His fangs extended. He bent her head back. He bit into her flesh, tearing the delicate skin and the more flexible arteries. He drank. It was awful and she fought it at first, not expecting this, not expecting this kind of pain or savagery. But then, over Eric’s shoulder, she saw the dead man on the street. The one she had killed.
She tried to relax then, and make things go faster.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in;
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
“Do you ever get them?” Pam slurred.
“Get what?” the Magister asked.
“Answers. Do you ever get them?”
“My methods are proven.”
She smiled, blood on her teeth. “That wasn’t what I asked.”
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot.
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple.
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.
The coffin was very small. The little choking noises she made were very close to her face. Everything was very close. No more than a few centimeters all around. And beyond that--she could feel the dirt weighing in. It was all weighing in. She couldn’t breathe.
She didn’t breathe.
“Eric?” she whispered. “Eric!”
For a few long seconds, she couldn’t trust her own memory. Was he real? Or was this just what it appeared to be, that she had been buried alive? It happened. There wer estories. But she wasn’t breathing. She felt that and she felt the weight of the dirt, the proximity of the walls, and inside of her, a misplaced seam tore and everything fell out.
“Eric!” she screamed, kicked, flailed. “Eric!”
There was a cracking noise, a shower of soil, and then she was pulled free of it. The air wasn’t city air. Of course not, of course not, because they buried her in one of the new places outside of the city instead of a claustrophobic little churchyard. Because she was dead.
She looked down. “Jesus Christ.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They buried me in my wedding dress.” She began to strip it off, hands tearing the fine cloth like paper.
“It’s a nice dress, Pamela.” He paused, taking in the sartorial crime at hand. “It was a nice dress.”
“It’s wretched. It was always wretched, and now it doesn’t even fit. I bet it was my mother’s idea--the stupid bitch.” It fell apart in her hands, tearing into smaller and smaller pieces until she was in her underclothes. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t hot or cold, just filled with a kind of nervous energy that didn’t seem to stop. Her skin was tight, her lungs frozen, her heart stopped. “That stupid bitch.”
Eric removed his coat and held it out to her.
“No. Thank you.”
“Suit yourself,” he murmured, smiling.
Pamela took a moment, sorted her hair, and straightened her chemise. “Eric?”
“Yes, Pamela?”
“I’m famished.”
She cried "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me:
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men."
Apparently even this Torquemada piece of shit had to sleep sometime. Pamela closed her eyes.
“Hello, my little dove.” Sadie stood above her, blond hair resplendent in the harsh light of Fangtasia’s basement.
“Holy shit.”
“Pamela,” Sadie chided. “There are ladies present.”
“You’re dead.”
“And so are you, angel.”
“Not quite.” She was suddenly uneasy. What was she to say? “You’re looking well.”
“I wish I could say the same.” Sadie touched her face, disturbed.
“It’s nothing,” Pam said quickly. “It won’t last.”
“This too shall pass, hm?”
“Why are you here?” She wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t see this for what it was. But it was...she hadn’t seen Sadie in more than a century.
“Because I love you.”
“Not true,” Pam rasped. “You left. Why are you here?”
“It is only right that I should be. I made you what you are.”
“No. No, you didn’t.” Pam couldn’t keep a smile from slipping across her face.
“I did,” Sadie insisted. “I made you bitter and alone and angry.”
“I was always bitter and alone and angry. You just made me desperate.”
“I broke you when I married.”
“Maybe,” Pam allowed. “But I got better.”
Someone slapped her in the face.
“Wake up, Pamela.”
She blinked, her vision cleared. Fuck me into the wall.
“Time to start again,” The Magister said cheerfully. “I’ve got a present for you.”
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
"Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin;
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?"
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
It was wonderful. It was wonderful like the priest had once told her the Word of God was wonderful. Wonderful like her mother had once said marriage was wonderful. Wonderful like the words Sadie had once said, the kisses Sadie had once kissed.
Pamela moaned, writhed, hands slipping over cooling skin. She put her fingers to her face, licked and sucked. Again, she stooped over and drank from the dying stevedore. It was like a star burning inside of her, from her hair to her toes and everything in between.
“I like your enthusiasm, Pamela.”
She gasped and sat up, suddenly pulled back to the present. “Oh my.” She wiped at her face. “I didn’t intend to be so...” Indelicate? Indecorous? Her fangs--her fangs--retracted.
“It’s refreshing.”
“I shouldn’t...I shouldn’t.” Oh God, her chemise was soaked with blood, her hands and neck and chest sticky with it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, in public, undone, almost naked, shameful desire writ large. “It’s not polite.”
“Pamela.” When he spoke like that, it rolled through her and she looked up at once.
“Yes?”
“Do you truly care about polite?”
“Of course. I do. Yes.” And she believed it, right until she realized that she was already licking the blood off the back of her hands.
“Pamela?” He looked amused.
“No.” She put her hands in her lap. “No.”
“Good girl. Now. Are you ready for your entree?”
“I can have more?” Her new world was already a marvel.
“Pamela, you can have everything.”
Her fangs fell into place.
Swift fire spread through her veins, knocked at her heart,
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame,
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped water-spout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?
“Are you alright?”
She swayed a moment, and almost fell against him, but righted herself. And, see? Here she was, and here was Eric. The one person, the only one--fader och dotter, moder och son, syster och bror
But enough. Enough of that maudlin sentimentality. She left that behind, in pieces, in a churchyard more than a century ago. She didn’t need feelings, she had appetites. She didn’t need help, she had fangs. And any tears she shed, she shed in blood.