By Blood We Live (33 page)

It was then we begged John White to return home, & fetch aid for our defense, a Company of soldiers to protect us from the Americans. His face grew sharp & he repeated the warnings of the blackguard Fernandez, that the storm season was upon us. Yet he went, for we were fearful, & in truth we knew it was too late already. Some claimed they saw signs of a wreck when the tide came in that very day, boards & sailcloth floating on the oily tide. For myself I saw nothing, & wished our Governor God's Speed.

The next day Robbie Caithness, the Scotch carpenter who had signed on with the Corporation only after we were well asea, knocked on my door as if he were pounding to get into Heaven on the Day of Judgment. His face was pale as death when I answered & in troth he lived but moments longer. His clothing was bloody but his skin was white as a new made shirt. "Ye bownes onlie we fownd," he said to me, before God took him.

The bones in the barrel, he meant, & I knew it. The next day I took Isaac, my son, & I told him we would leave the Colony & make a new establishment of our own elsewhere.

"Whut doth ye wright thir, son?" I asked when I found Isaac carving on a tree, one hour later only. I had been gathering up my nets & my gun, & as much food as we two could carry. I had set Issac to choosing our clothes & finding a tarpalling we might make into make-shift shelter during our journey. Instead I found him playing at wood-carving: CRO, he carved. He had made the letters tall & deep, so all could see them. I stopped him at once but it was his second effort, for on a post of the fort already he had written it out in full, our destination: CROATOAN. For such was the name of the Island where I thought to take my refuge. I clouted him on the ear but could not explain why. He begged of me why we should go alone, & why I wished none other of the Colony to follow, & I could tell him nothing.

We took a short boat out in the mists of day's first dawning, & paddled softly across the Sound, & walked inland, through the trees, all that day. There were Americans about, I was sure of it, yet I feared them less than the bones of a dead man set to brine in an oaken barrel.

Of the Colony at Roanoke, & what my friends & partners did after, I can not add more.

It was a fortnight afore we found good water & a place to make a home. We had been unassailed & for once I rested easy, thinking the Lord had provided. We made of our tarpalling a lean-to, a canvas roof under which to sleep, & Isaac built a good fire, for he was a fine boy & clever, if only ten years old. We ate a rabbit that I shot & prepared ourselves to sleep, & rise in the morning, & begin to construct a house fitting for two such gentlemen of Virginia as we.

I sent Isaac into the tent to say his prayers & lay himself down, while I poured out water on the fire & watched it steam. It hissed & spat & a half-burnt log cracked with a loud report, as of a gun firing, & I laughed so that Isaac would hear me & be not afraid.

It was then in the darkness between the trees, which were not well lit by the dying fire, that I was sure I spied some movement.

"Speeke up, that I shuld heere ye praye, lad," I called, thinking it was some simple animal, & would be frightened by man's speech.

"Our father whiche art in heuen, halowed be thy name," Isaac said, raising his voice to me & to the Father of us all. The motion in the woods stopped at once, & I was eased. It were some dumb animal surely, that was driven off by Christian prayers. "Let thy kingdome cum unto us. Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe, as it is in heuen," Isaac said, & I thought to calm him, for he sounded afeared. Yet even as I turned to say somewhat, I saw red eyes, two of them, no more than one dozen yards from me, betwixt the trees. I turned to ice, & sat stock still, & did not move. The eyes blinked, lazily. Was it a wolf? Was it a bear, one of those titans of the forest that dwarf our English breed? The eyes were of a height above the ground that I thought it was no wolf.

"& lede vs nat in to temtacyon. But delyuer vs from euyll. So be it." As the words stopped & Isaac fell silent I felt a cold draught flood through the clearing, as if winter had come on at once.

The red eyes took one step closer to me.

I sought for something, some weapon, & for a missile I found pine cones only, which lay all about in good supply. I thurst forward my arm & cast the pine cone at the eyes. They disappeared at once. Yet in a moment I saw them again, this time a step to my right.

I grasped another pine cone, & threw it with all my strength, directly at the eyes. They blinked but this time they did not move. They took a step closer, in fact.

I slung one last missile & saw it fly through the dark air, & kept my eyes upon it. & thus I saw when a hand the color of bleached linen caught the cone in mid-flight. Caught it, & threw it back.

"Isaac," I shouted, "Isaac, sonne, saye ye praier againe," but already, I knew it was too late for us.

Norman Partridge is a three-time Stoker Award-winner, and author of the novels
Saguaro Riptide, The Ten Ounce Siesta, Slippin' into Darkness, Wildest Dreams,
and
Dark Harvest,
which was named one of the 100 Best Books of 2006 by
Publishers Weekly
. Partridge's short fiction has been collected in three volumes:
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, Bad Intentions,
and
The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists
. A new collection is due out in October called
Lesser Demons
, which features an original vampire novella called "The Iron Dead."
 
This story, which first appeared in the landmark vampire anthology
Love in Vein
, riffs off Bram Stoker's
Dracula
, telling the story of Quincey Morris, the American cowboy who, along with Jonathan Harker, kills the count at the climax of the novel. "My version of the tale is different than Stoker's, and it involves Morris's Texas homecoming after the events of
Dracula
," Partridge said. "It's about demons old and new, on both sides of the pond."

He was done up all mysterious-like—black bandana covering half his face, black duster, black boots and hat. Traveling incognito, just like that coachman who picked up Harker at the Borgo Pass.

Yeah. As a red man might figure it, that was many moons ago. . . at the beginning of the story. Stoker's story, anyway. But that tale of mannered woe and stiff-upper-lip bravado was as crazy as the lies Texans told about Crockett and his Alamo bunch. Harker didn't exist. Leastways, the man in black had never met him.

Nobody argued sweet-told lies, though. Nobody in England, anyhow. Especially with Stoker tying things up so neat and proper, and the count gone to dust and dirt and all.

A grin wrinkled the masked man's face as he remembered the vampire crumbling to nothing finger-snap quick, like the remnants of a cow-flop campfire worried by an unbridled prairie wind. Son of a bitch must have been
mucho
old. Count Dracula had departed this vale of tears, gone off to suckle the devil's own tit. . .though the man in black doubted that Dracula's scientific turn of mind would allow him to believe in Old Scratch.

You could slice it fine or thick—ultimately, the fate of Count Dracula didn't make no never mind. The man in black was one hell of a long way from Whitby, and his dealings with the count seemed about as unreal as Stoker's scribblings. Leastways, that business was behind him. This was to be
his
story. And he was just about to slap the ribbons to it.

Slap the ribbons he did, and the horses picked up the pace. The wagon bucked over ruts, creaking like an arthritic dinosaur. Big black box jostling in the back. Tired horses sweating steam up front. West Texas sky a quilt for the night, patched blood red and bruise purple and shot through with blue-pink streaks, same color as the meat that lines a woman's heart.

And black. Thick black squares in that quilt, too. More coming every second. Awful soon, there'd be nothing but those black squares and a round white moon.

Not yet, though. The man could still see the faint outline of a town on the horizon. There was Morrisville, up ahead, waiting in the red and purple and blue-pink shadows.

He wondered what she'd make of Morrisville. It was about as far from the stone manors of Whitby as one could possibly get. No vine-covered mysteries here. No cool salt breezes whispering from the green sea, blanketing emerald lawns, traveling lush garden paths. Not much of anything green at all. No crumbling Carfax estate, either. And no swirling fog to mask the night—everything right out in the open, just as plain as the nose on your face. A West Texas shitsplat. Cattle business, mostly. A match-stick kind of town. Wooden buildings—wind-dried, sun-bleached—that weren't much more than tinder dreading the match.

The people who lived there were the same way.

But it wasn't the town that made this place. He'd told her that. It was that big blanket of a sky, an eternal wave threatening to break over the dead dry husk of the prairie, fading darker with each turn of the wagon wheels—cresting, cresting—ready to smother the earth like a hungry thing.

Not a bigger, blacker night anywhere on the planet. When that nightwave broke, as it did all too rarely—wide and mean and full up with mad lightning and thunder—it was something to see.

He'd promised her that. He'd promised to show her the heart of a wild Texas night, the way she'd shown him the shadows of Whitby.

Not that he always kept his promises. But this one was a promise to himself as much as it was a promise to her.

He'd hidden from it for a while. Sure. In the wake of all that horror, he'd run. But finally he'd returned to Whitby, and to her. He'd returned to keep his promise.

And now he was coming home.

"Not another place like it anywhere, Miss Lucy. Damn sure not on this side of the pond, anyhow."

She didn't fake a blush or get all offended by his language, like so many of the English missies did, and he liked that. She played right with him, like she knew the game. Not just knew it, but thrived on it. "No," she said. "Nothing here could possibly resemble your Texas, Quincey P. Morris. Because no one here resembles you."

She took him by the lapels and kissed him like she was so hungry for it, like she couldn't wait another moment, and then he had her in his arms and they were moving together, off the terrace, away from the house and the party and the dry rattle of polite conversation. He was pulling her and she was pushing him and together they were going back, back into the shadows of Whitby, deep into the garden where fog settled like velvet and the air carried what for him would always be the green scent of England.

And then they were alone. The party sounds were a world away. But those sounds were nothing worth hearing—they were dead sounds compared to the music secret lovers could make. Matched with the rustle of her skirts, and the whisper of his fingers on her tender thighs, and the sweet duet of hungry lips, the sounds locked up in the big stone house were as sad and empty as the cries of the damned souls in Dr. Seward's loony bin, and he drew her away from them, and she pushed him away from them, and together they entered another world where strange shadows met, cloaking them like fringed buckskin, like gathered satin.

Buckskin and satin. It wasn't what you'd call a likely match. They'd been dancing around it for months. But now the dancing was over.

"God, I want you," he said.

She didn't say anything. There was really nothing more to say. She gave. She took. And he did the same.

He reined in the horses just short of town. Everything was black but that one circle of white hanging high in the sky.

He stepped down from the driver's box and stretched. He drew the night air deep into his lungs. The air was dry and dusty, and there wasn't anything in it that was pleasant.

He was tired. He lay down on top of the big black box in the back of the wagon and thought of her. His fingers traveled wood warped in the leaky cargo hold of a British ship. Splinters fought his callused hands, lost the battle. But he lost the war, because the dissonant rasp of rough fingers on warped wood was nothing like the music the same rough fingers could make when exploring a young woman's thighs.

He didn't give up easy, though. He searched for the memory of the green scent of England, and the music he'd made there, and shadows of satin and buckskin. He searched for the perfume of her hair, and her skin. The ready, eager perfume of her sex.

His hands traveled the wood. Scurrying like scorpions. Damn things just wouldn't give up, and he couldn't help laughing

Raindrops beaded on the box. The nightwave was breaking.

No. Not raindrops at all. Only his tears.

The sky was empty. No clouds. No rain.

No lightning.

But there was lightning in his eyes.

The morning sunlight couldn't penetrate the filthy jailhouse window. That didn't bother the man in black. He had grown to appreciate the darkness.

Sheriff Josh Muller scratched his head. "This is the damnedest thing, Quincey. You got to admit that that Stoker fella made it pretty plain in his book."

Quincey smiled. "You believe the lies that Buntline wrote about Buffalo Bill, too?"

"Shit no, Quince. But, hell, that Stoker is a silver stickpin gentleman. I thought they was different and all—"

"I used to think that. Until I got to know a few of the bastards, that is."

"Well," the sheriff said, "that may be. . .but the way it was, was. . .we all thought that you had been killed by them Transylvanian gypsies, like you was in the book."

"I've been some places, before and since. But we never got to Transylvania. Not one of us. And I ain't even feelin' poorly."

"But in the book—"

"Just how stupid are you, Josh? You believe in vampires, too? Your bowels get loose thinkin' about Count Dracula?"

"Hell, no, of course not, but—"

"Shit, Josh, I didn't mean that like a question you were supposed to answer."