Nancy Baker works in magazine publishing (circulation management). Her first professionally published story, “The Party Over There,” received an honourable mention in the sixth Twilight Zone short story contest and was published in June 1988 issue as part of the “TZ First” program. A second story, “Exodus 22:18,” was published in the same magazine a year later. She has completed a novel, The Night Inside, which features the considerate but spooky male protagonist from “Cold Sleep” as a major character. The novel is set in contemporary Toronto, a city which, it appears, is doomed to suffer a series of vampiric infestations—at least on the printed page. Keep that garlic handy!
It had stopped snowing by the time she reached the top of the hill, though the wind sent swirls of flakes from the heavy-laden pine branches. Rachel paused for a moment, breathing hard, feeling the air slice like frozen razors through her lungs. Her dress was wet and going stiff against her skin, the skirts clotted to the knees with snow. Her body had stopped shaking, too cold to tremble, just as her heart had gone cold and grey, too empty to be afraid.
She started again, staggering down the hill, her feet numb inside her shoes. She caught a tree to steady herself, clinging like the snow to its rough bark. It had been ten minutes since she had climbed over the brush-covered wall of the cemetery. It had closed hours earlier and she was sure she could avoid detection. There was no one to see her—and certainly no one to miss her.
For once she had planned it well. This was no spur-of-the-moment suicide, no heat-of-passion self-destruction. There had been those, to be sure, but they were hot and swift, and she realized now that they were desperate affirmations of life. Now it was different. It was as if her heart lay embedded in ice, all the uncontrolled passion that had ruled her laid to frosty sleep. Rachel was not sure how it had happened, this quiet certainty, but she welcomed it and the weary peace it brought. It gave her a courage she had never had before.
Though not much, she thought with a silent chuckle. To die in the snow was painless, so she had heard, and she disliked physical pain. It was also an almost embarrassingly romantic way to die. There was no blood, no ugliness. All in all, very dramatic and tragic. If one could not live well, at least one could die well, she thought with bleak, self-mocking humour. This time nothing could go wrong, even if she wanted it to.
Then she looked up and saw the man standing by the mausoleum.
He was slender and rather short, though in his pale coat it was hard to tell where the snow ended and he began. His grey hair hung like thin cindered silk over his neck, ears, and brow. His eyes were startlingly dark, though there was ice over the gaze, colder than the frost fringe of lashes and brows. His lips were pale but full, promising a rich redness that would have been like blood on snow.
Rachel thought of a half-forgotten children’s tale and her lips jerked unconsciously. He smiled narrowly in response and she saw the glitter of his teeth, like ice shards in the darkness of his mouth. She stood still, leaning against the tree as he took a step forward, melted drops of snow falling from his heavy greatcoat.
“Do not be afraid,” he said then, in a voice as soft and impenetrable as fog. Rachel let go of the tree to flounder through the snow, then stopped, aware that he would see her thin clothing. “What are you doing out here alone?” he asked. She answered honestly, for there was no point in lying, not to this fog-grey, ice-sharp man.
“I’m dying,” she said, and saw something flare in his eyes. He smiled again, closed lips twisting.
“You certainly shall if you stay out here in such attire.” He gestured and she watched him curiously. He did not seem concerned for her, did not seem as if he would drag her back to the dull heat of the world and rub painful life into her frozen limbs. She lifted her hand to brush the snow from her lashes and saw that her fingers had curled up, as if trying to furl back to some cell-remembered position of the womb. She could barely feel them now. She dropped her hand, looking back at the man.
“Oh, do not fear that I shall rescue you.” He smiled suddenly, baring ice teeth, and held out his hand. “Come, and I will keep you company.” Without thinking, she went to him and let him take her curled fingers in his. She could not feel his touch and wondered idly if it was because her flesh was numb or because his was like cold stone. He led her to a broad headstone and brushed away the snow with deliberate courtliness. As they sat together on the wet granite, he said, “Now, child, what is your name?”
“Rachel.”
“So, Rachel, why are you dying here?” he asked, stroking the pale scar on her wrist with one finger. She laughed, the sound constricted by the numbness in her throat.
“I am tired of living.”
“What? No lost lover, no tragic tale?”
“Nothing so romantic.” Her lips quirked in an echo of his ironic smile. It was a relief to find herself amused at her own despair. “I’m just tired. Of the pain, of the loneliness, of everything.”
“So you brave a mortal sin? Or does this new world no longer live and die by God?” The odd phrase made her look at him sharply, cold realization beginning to form in her mind.
“There is no afterlife. I don’t want hell—or heaven. I want to die forever,” she said swiftly and his eyes narrowed.
“There are things between heaven and hell.” She looked at him squarely then, at the frost hair, the dark eyes, the glittering smile.
“I know what you are,” she said at last.
“And are you now afraid?”
“No. Why should I be? You deal in death.”
He lifted his pale head and the snowflakes clung like pearls to his hair. “I deal in undeath.”
She drew a sharp ragged breath and let it out in a trembling sigh. “Then it would do me no good to be afraid,” she whispered at last, and he nodded calmly. He straightened her numb fingers and watched them curl up again. Rachel wished that she could move her hand, pull her fingers away, knowing that she would yield as easily as they to his touch. And if she did, she could sleep, cold, in his arms tonight and wake, colder still, when the next moon rose. She forced her mind, as sluggishly frozen as her limbs, to work.
“Tell me,” she began carefully, “how did you become a . . .”
“A vampire?” he supplied, and smiled indulgently. “I was an alchemist, dabbling in those things upon which the village priest would frown, and in which the village women would believe. Most of my time was spent attempting to transmute iron into gold. We were so innocent then, so eager to believe that all the world lay before our hungry minds.” He shook his head a little, making the snow pearls drop from his hair. “I experimented, sometimes, in necromancy, but with no great success. Then one night I called and something came. I did not know what she was until she smiled, but then it was too late. I woke with the next dusk and for two nights we ran the hills like wolves. Then I told the parish priest where her coffin lay. He drove a stake through her heart and cut off her head, then filled her mouth with garlic.”
“Why did you betray her?”
“I tired of her. And . . .” he paused, “there was still enough human in me to hate what she had done. But time heals all and I have had three hundred years. One survives. And there are pleasures.” He looked at her again, smiling, and reached out to touch her frost-silvered hair. “Rachel—” Her name was a caress, a prelude.
“And then one day some daring young man, fired by my voice, would come and put a stake through your heart.”
“I can give you eternity.”
“I don’t want eternity. I want oblivion,” Rachel said desperately. She tried to rise, but her body would not obey and her eyes could not leave his face.
“It is not so fearful, to run with the night through the jungles of mortar and wood, to watch the moon shroud herself in smoke, to taste life. And there is the sleep. It is still and grey and cool. It can give you the peace that life has not,” he whispered, his gaze smouldering beneath the frozen lashes.
“Is that what it has brought you?” she asked, and his eyes widened, the ice cracking and the dark despair pouring out like a river freed by spring. Then he turned away and his hand clenched cruelly over hers.
“I could take you, make you mine,” he said harshly, and she nodded.
“You could. You might even stop me from betraying you. But please, let me die forever.” She lifted her hand to touch his chill cheek. “Is it so much to ask? Take some of . . . some of me if you want, but then let me die.” There was a moment of silence. All Rachel could hear was her own hoarse breathing and the hiss of the wind in the trees. Finally he lifted his head, shook back his ragged hair, and looked at her.
“If that is what you wish.”
“Swear,” she whispered urgently, not trusting his alien sharpness, his ancient chill.
“By what? Surely you do not expect honour from me?”
“From what you were. Swear by your name. It, at least, must have been honourable.” He sighed and smiled slightly as he spoke, but he said the words and she accepted them. He turned to face her and touched her hair lightly.
“I would not ordinarily surrender anything so lovely to the worms,” he said softly, and Rachel bit back a laugh. Just once she would listen to such words and not question. Freed from the desperate desire to believe him, she did not care if he was lying. She let her heavy lids close as he drew her against him, covering her cold lips with his colder ones.
He seduced her there in the snow, though he did not need to, as if she were a fragile virgin from an old romantic tale. Though her body stayed as chill and damp as before, inside she felt like molten fire and thought perhaps an eternity in his arms would be too short. But when his mouth moved to her throat, she whispered, “By your name!” and heard his reassuring murmur. Then she felt his teeth against her skin and they pierced her shell of frozen flesh to taste the rivers of fire beneath. He gave her oblivion of a different kind, when all the world was but a dream unremembered and she thought that she would shatter like the ice in his arms.
She was almost unconscious when he raised his head. “Fear not. You will sleep forever. Sleep for me.” Drawing her into his lap like a child, he held her until she was warm again and she slept.
At last he laid her in the snow, brushing the dark hair back from her pale brow, touching the plain features that the snow had set with diamonds.
Then he rose and walked easily across the snow. He did not want to hunt any more tonight, for the moon had come out, and its remorseless silver light was too bright, too eternal, for him to bear.