Melancholia
ROBERTA LANNES lives in Southern California with her husband, British poet/journalist/music critic and software developer for the J. Paul Getty Trust, Mark Sealey. Retired from thirty-eight years teaching secondary school English and art, she is a successful digital artist whose work has appeared on CD labels, as well as numerous websites and iPhone application screens.
Since 1985, when she sold her first horror story to Dennis Etchison for his seminal anthology Cutting Edge, she has published science fiction, fantasy and horror fiction in many anthologies, including Alien Sex, Splatter punks, The Bradbury Chronicles, Still Dead: Book of the Dead II, Dark Voices 5, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Spatterpunks II, Dark Terrors, Lethal Kisses, Love in Vein II, White of the Moon, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Don’t Turn Out the Light and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series. A collection of short stories, The Mirror of Night, was published in 1997 by Silver Salamander Press with an Introduction by Harlan Ellison.
Lannes is currently working on a YA dark fantasy trilogy.
Like nearly everyone else in Los Angeles, Dracula is in therapy ...
~ * ~
THAT I AM bereft, perhaps insane with grief and melancholia, is beyond dispute. That I seek to take my own life as a result, may be up for contention, but it is my choice. What I leave behind, here, is a sort of last will and testament. More testament than will, since all that I leave is the myth, and mystery.
I, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, have lived too long a life, full of depravity on a par with no other, compulsions beyond what the great artists of pain might imagine, and a loneliness that, until recently, lies deep within me, unexamined. I have hurt many, killed some, and left others with the same affliction from which I suffer. In all my memory, I’ve brought true joy to only one. And that one is gone. I have no more reason to go on.
Ironically, it was to love that would become my ruin. To love, and to enter analysis.
Most know my history, or a version of it, but no one knows of the last thirteen years. No one but myself, Ashley Lark Hibbert, and Dr Alex Bloward PhD, psychologist. I am telling it here so my death might be understood, and in that, so my life.
I have worked nearly my entire existence, which will destroy the myth of my endless independent wealth, but perhaps will show all that this Dracula was far more worldly, resourceful and diverse than imagined. When I came to the City of the Angels, I found my calling working the graveyard shift at a shelter for homeless and runaway children in Hollywood.
I have never been fond of children, but I found the bedevilled souls who ended up in the haven on Las Palmas to be clever, wicked and defiled, and therefore fascinating. That they were also wounded from this experience on the streets, and abusive homes, was of no interest to me. I wasn’t called to heal the poor bastards, just watch them sleep and keep others from wandering in to sell drugs or seduce a sorry body.
There, I met Ashley. She came in writhing and hollering in the hands of two Christian Soldiers, a group of evangelical teenage pus-faced fanatics who “cleanse the streets of Sodom” as part of a volunteer army “sent from God”. She was tall, blonde, skinny, and no different from most of the kids brought in by the Christian Soldiers, a prostitute.
Sitting in my office, which amounted to nothing more than a corner of a room strewn with tatami mats and sleeping bags inhabited by teenagers, I watched as they threw her into the intake seat across from me. Some of the sleeping lot woke and complained, but most snored on. They held her as I retrieved the proper forms from my desk and wearily began the futile process of writing down a string of false information, all of which would later be nothing less than confusing if used in the actual attempt of locating the girl.
“Name?”
“Princess Daisy.” She snarled at me.
I wrote it down. “Age?”
She stared at my writing. “Fifty.”
I wrote that as well. “Address, if any?”
“Address ... you’ve got to be kidding. Hell, the corner of Hollywood and Vine. That’s as good as any. The motel around the corner. What difference does it make? I’ll be back on the street in an hour ...” She rolled her eyes.
“We’re not the police, Miss Daisy. We don’t release you. We don’t hold you, either.” I frowned at the burly idiots holding her. They loosened their grip on her and she rubbed her arms.
“You two can go. I’ll handle the princess here.” I smiled as vacantly as I could manage.
When they were gone, Ashley, then the princess, looked around at the sleeping forms and took me in more carefully.
“What is this place, a hostel?”
“It’s a shelter. A place for runaways to crash so they don’t have to sell themselves. The bullies for Jesus seem to think it’s easier to dump the lowlife here than take them into the church. I’d have thought they wanted to save them. Isn’t that what their sort do?”
She was squinting at me in the dim light. “Wow, a deep thinker. Great. So. I can go?”
“You can go. You can also come back anytime you want to. It’s relatively clean, dry, and sometimes there’s even food and clean clothes donated by some Samaritan. Nothing worthy of a fashion statement, but it beats shoes with holes in them. And then there’s my scintillating company. As you can see, I don’t have anyone to converse with at these hours.”
“Yeah, well, then, bye.” She stood, turned to go, then looked back to me. “By the way, my real name is Ashley.”
“Nice name. Mine’s ... Vlad.” Sometimes I use that name, though we were never the same person. One of many of my myths I resent.
“Vlad? Russian, right?”
“Romanian. But I’ve been in this country a long time.”
“Sure, I’ll come visit sometimes. When it gets slow ... you know, out there.” She pointed girlishly to the streets.
“Whenever.” I was clearly uninterested, which somehow intrigued her.
She sauntered out into the fall night, and I wasn’t to see her for a ridiculously long three hours. When she returned, she was bruised on her forehead, cheekbone, and had a nasty welt on her neck. I enquired if she wanted medical attention, but she asked only that I sit beside her while she slept on the only mat left available. I said I’d watch her, but that I needed to be at the desk for the phone, and such. She shrugged, but I could see she was hurt.
I left at six and she was snoring as loudly as the next guy.
Ashley began haunting the shelter, but only after she’d earned out the night. Sometimes she’d try to engage me in conversation, but mostly I sat listening to her tales of torrid and tragic family dysfunction. She was fifteen, and already had seven years of therapy behind her.
At first, she interested me no more than any other bastard who fell into the shelter. I was simply doing my job, earning enough to keep a dark room for the daylight hours. I had my free time to ferret out a good vein before I went to work. Perhaps that was why, in part, I was often lethargic and uncaring with the kids. That and I simply have never spent enough time with anyone to develop an attachment or emotional bond.
Then, Ashley got pregnant. I hadn’t seen her for nearly four months. She was different. Bulging a bit at the belly. And she glowed. Had put on weight.
A Madonna. That’s what she was.
Ashley sat down, put a stuffed make-up bag on the desk and sighed. “Vlad, you’re my only friend. I need a place to live until my baby’s born, and then I’ll split. I have enough money to pay part of the rent. I don’t do drugs, but your sort never believe that anyway. Would you take me in?”
Maybe it was the way she looked. That I hadn’t had a meal in twenty-four hours. Or gradually, I’d come to miss her and felt some kind of connection to her after all this time. Regardless of why, I said I would.
It didn’t dawn on me until I left for home at six that I would have to tell her who I really was, and assure her silence before she could stay a night. Or day. Seemed we both worked at night and might sleep all day. An auspicious sign.
I sat her down in the dinette and paced as I explained.
“Okay, here’s the story. Don’t interrupt me. My name is Dracul, I am a count from Transylvania. I am commonly known as Count Dracula, and I’m far older than I can remember. I am a vampire, I survive because I live on human blood, and I can’t have you living here with me unless you understand that if you tell anyone this truth, you endanger my very existence. And ruin your chances for having a place to stay, since I’d have to leave, and you’d be summarily put back on the street.”
She grinned. “Helloooo, Halloween was in October. This is March?”
I froze. “You don’t believe me?”
“Besides the fact that you have very long, ink-black hair you keep tied up in a band, have skin that’s clearly never seen the sun, and eyes the colour of kiwi, I’d just say you’re a very weird guy who needs to believe he’s a guy who turns into a bat. Fine, just don’t be drinking my blood, okay? I need to keep some to feed junior, here.” She nodded down to her belly.
“You don’t believe me.” So few had known the truth in the past, and all were in awe when they learned it. I didn’t know how to approach her incredulity.
“Does it matter? I need you. You could be Napoleon for all I care.”
She was right. It didn’t matter. I listed my rules for living with me, and she shrugged at all of them.
“Anything’s better than living with my family. I sleep all day, too. But I’ll be eating a lot. I can’t seem to help that. But I won’t bug you. Promise. I’m actually grateful.”
She looked at me then with something I came to learn later was love. Gratitude isn’t love, though that was there as well. Dr Bloward taught me that.
For three months we lived together. I grew more and more fond of her, to the point of distraction. I found it difficult to concentrate on my seductions in order to feed. I got sloppy, and I admit, a bit too preoccupied and aggressive. I nearly killed a woman in Los Feliz. When Ashley had the baby and gave it away, her sadness and guilt became mine. We were becoming something of a family, albeit an odd one.
It became obvious after a few weeks that it was time for her to leave, as she’d agreed. To go back to the streets, selling herself, I imagined. Yet neither of us said anything, me because I’d come to care about her as much as I could anything, and she, I learned later, was thoroughly and blissfully in love. So she just stayed.
One early evening, when I was about to go out to find my sustenance, she sat down on the bed as I dressed.
“You think of me as a sister, don’t you.” It was a statement.
“I don’t know ... I’ve never had a sister. Do you? Think of me as a brother?”
She chuckled. “I think knowing you’re hundreds of years old sort of kills that notion, even if you look like a man in his late twenties.”
“Oh, so now you believe me…Well, does this notion include not thinking of me as a potential lover?” My preternaturally still heart fluttered.
She squinted at me just then. “I’m ... afraid to think of you that way. I don’t know why.”
“As am I afraid to think of you that way.”
She brightened a bit. “You’ve actually considered it?”
My turn to brighten. “Well, yes, of course. You haven’t then?”
“Oh, hell, yes, I have. I’m just afraid to .,. you know, do anything about it.”
“We are good together, aren’t we.” It wasn’t a question, either.
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, really good. But can we ... you know ... be together? A vampire and a regular girl?”
I was suddenly young, recalling my youth with a longing I’d never known. Had I felt this way once?
“I don’t know, Ashley. Do you want to find out?” Please, I thought, please.
“Could we? Vlad ... I don’t want to go back out there. I want to stay with you.”
“Ashley ...” I opened my arms and she leaned warmly into me.
The concussion of two conflicting feelings overwhelming me was almost unbearable. Somehow, in the months we’d lived together, we’d stayed sufficiently apart to keep my blood hunger at bay. My lechery had not so easily been contained. Suddenly, now, my appetite and my profound lust battled for preeminence. Under my nose, her jugular pulsed, and her pink and luscious girl-skin gleamed radiantly, voluptuously. The scent of her made me swoon. I thought, for so long, I couldn’t feel anything. Now I’d been tossed into a whirlpool of emotions.
“Kiss me.” She turned her face up to mine.
My feeding incisors began extending, and I salivated, ready for blood. I could feel my eyes burrowing into hers, turning her into a helpless victim, not a willing partner. Could I ever simply make a woman my lover?
My Ashley froze, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me to arm’s length. “You asshole, I’m not going to let you turn me into a snack. I want to be your lover.”
Oh, the spirit of her! I still reel at her memory. The Prince of Darkness’s wiles weren’t going to work on such as this worldly girl.
“I know, Ashley. My body’s taking over. I have no idea what to do.”
She grinned. “I love it when you get all little-boy lost, and stop being that big old stuffy Dracula.”
“All well and good, you’re happy, now. Have you any suggestions for how we can get around this ... hunger?”
She cocked her beautiful head and thought. Clever girl. “Well, after you eat, you don’t want to eat again for nearly two days. Why don’t you go feed yourself and then ... we’ll see.”
“Brilliant. I’m on my way.” And so I left Ashley sitting on my bed, waiting for her loverboy to return.
If only I knew then what I know now.
We walked into Dr Bloward’s office two months later, both of us miserable and wanting to make our union work. Ashley did the talking that first session, since she was the one with years of experience at the hands of a shrink.
As I sat back, eyeing the man who carried his balding, portly, self with the wariness of prey, Ashley explained our plight.
“Well, we’ve been together for about two months. At first it was great. The sex was unreal, the passion glorious, and the love was ... like nothing I’d ever known. You should know right up front, I’m not yet eighteen, but I’ve been on my own and a prostitute for three years, so I am totally cognizant of my choice in being with Vlad. We have both had to overcome previous baggage to be together, but some of it just feels like we’re stuck in cement.”
Alex, as he asked us to call him, turned his beady eyes on me, and asked me if Ashley had given a reasonable assessment so far. I nodded.
“Are you ill, Vlad?”
Ashley piped in. “Oh, yeah, I guess we have to get that out in the open, too.”
“HIV?” Alex frowned a bit
“No, he’s a vampire.” She saw the incredulity in his eyes. I saw the fear.
He chose to respond clinically. “And how long have you believed yourself to be a vampire, Vlad?”
“I have been a vampire for over three hundred years. I’ve forgotten my childhood, much of the past. I know this is stretching credulity for you, especially since your profession is trained to vet out the psychotic or schizophrenic who believes he’s something or someone else other than he is. I can only assure you I am, unhappily now, a true vampire.” I looked away. Not ashamed, but unwilling to see the look of derision on his face.
“You’ve forgotten your childhood?” I turned to him. His fingers were stroking his chin, considering. “What do you know of your parents?” Like ditch-diggers shrinks are, plumbing the bowels of one’s psyche for pay dirt.
And so our first few sessions went. Ashley or I talking about what we could recall of our childhoods, chronicling our declines. I grew comfortable with him quickly, which Ashley said was a mark in his favour, since her experience of therapists was that when she felt weird with one, she knew he or she was no good. I trusted her experience implicitly.
It was during our tenth meeting we finally told him our difficulties. I was eager to be the one to spill it. Quite unlike me, but I was changing even then.
“It has to do with jealousy, mostly. You see, I am out from dark until ten or eleven at night feeding. I don’t kill my donors, haven’t for centuries, but I must seduce them close enough to make a meal from their jugular, or another prominent vein or artery. Ashley resents this, which I completely understand, but I cannot live any differently. If I don’t acquire a donor, I won’t feed. If I don’t eat, I can’t live.
“As for me, Ashley has taken to using the hours before we are together in the evening for supplementing our income with hooking. While I am aware her having sex with another man is a performance of sorts, as are my own seductions, I feel she should find other work and keep herself for me. I do not, I will point out, do anything more than kiss a woman, and only if she appears to expect it.”
“How do you see what Vlad is telling me, Ashley?”
Her arms were crossed on her stomach and her foot was pumping. “Well, he certainly is articulate, isn’t he? And to think English isn’t his first language ...” She glared at me a moment. “Yeah, he’s right. I’m jealous and he’s jealous. We’re both so fucking insecure, we can’t love each other right.” She began to cry. “Help us, Alex. I love him.”
I reached for her hand and she took it, her face going into my chest. She sobbed for a few minutes while I stroked her head.
“I can see you love and care for each other. We need to separate the issues between you into Vlad’s and Ashley’s, not the unit of the us.” He proceeded to show us how our old “tapes” of conditioned response and reaction reflexes were controlling us, and how we might get free of them.
It took Ashley four years to learn that she was terrified of losing me, needed to control me, had to learn to accept that my seductions were nothing more than calling a cow in for the slaughter, and that her anger was behind her prostituting herself. Not some imagined need for financial security. When she got it, she got it. She turned to acting lessons at a local theatre while I was out feeding, and began to get parts in equity plays.
For me, it took six years to learn that I was living in denial of my emotions for so long I had no self, no ego, and therefore no one to respect in myself. I also intellectualized Ashley’s jealousy as insignificant. I also tended towards an antisocial personality, and needed to acquire a sense of purpose in my life beyond food, sex, and the love of a beautiful woman. He also suggested I find another manner of acquiring blood that would put my relationship first, and not allow my sustenance to be lessened.
It seemed that after seven years together, I, the Prince of Darkness, and Ashley Hibbert, were making a go of a real relationship. Everything was wonderful. Ashley was about to star in a television series, and I had become a reader for the Braille Institute. I was feeling fulfilled, as was she, and our love life was renewed with passion and devotion.
Alex told us we didn’t need him any more, and off we hurried into a new wall. Too embarrassed to return to face him, I kept my new discomfort to myself.
Ashley was an instant little star. Because we agreed she wouldn’t allow anyone access to me or to know about me, she fell prey to every hip single guy or unscrupulous married man in town. She resisted them all, but their curiosity had to create some answer for her rejections or their egos couldn’t take it. The tabloids had fun with speculating on her gender preferences, and she soon had to devise dozens of circuitous ways to get home to me. All of this exhausted her, but she remained devoted.
Somehow, this annoyed and finally angered me. Her complaints she was too tired to make love grew in number, and the time apart due to her change in sleep cycle from mine multiplied as well. I suffered this in silence. After all, she loved me. I was nothing any more without her.
She sensed my troubled heart and soul and begged me to go back to Alex. Ashamed, but determined not to lose my Ashley, I humbled myself back into my nine o’clock appointment.
Alex listened, more fascinated now than ever. Ashley said she’d go with me, but she was always too tired. Alex said I should work on myself, and during the hiatus, she’d come in. He trusted her sincerity in wanting to save our relationship. So, I went alone.
What a mistake. I delved into the psyche of the most perverted compulsive the world’s ever known. Alex was elated in this process, while I only grew more and more depressed.
“When will this melancholy leave me, Alex? I am no good to Ashley when all I want to do is mope around the house when I am awake, and sleep too many hours in the day.”
“Vladdie, depression is the valley in the walk of life. You and Ashley hiked up a steep mountain together and while her road is still in ascension, she will grow depressed as part of her walk. You, my friend, are in the period of time when all you’ve learned has pitched you into a world where things are no longer familiar. You don’t know yet where you’re going, but the past is behind you. Trust that in time, you will be moving up the side of another mountain. This time to greater heights.”
“And how long should I give this valley?”
He chuckled warmly, always assuming I was kidding around when I used his words in the mocking manner I had.
“If you’re still feeling blue in a year, I’d say we should try tricyclics on you. There are antidepressants around that could wipe this dysphoria right out.”
“Pardon my naïveté, but wouldn’t it be a helpful thing for me to take an antidepressant now, while I’m newly depressed?”
Again he chuckled. “Dear Vlad, you don’t want to run from these negative feelings. They’re just as valuable as your positive feelings. You grow from fully experiencing both of them. All of them. Don’t you enjoy your emotions now that you have them?”
I found myself studying his neck, seeking a pulse under his thick skin.
“Well, frankly, no, I don’t. And I’m afraid Ashley will leave me if I continue to be a sucking vortex of negativity, as she calls it.”
Alex mused over this. He had the habit of appearing to stare at me blankly, but that analytical mind was always working. Working. “Isn’t that telling ... a sucking vortex. She’s admitting to her co-dependence in this depression of yours. Tell her I want her here next session, even if she has to drink a gallon of coffee.”
Ashley was reluctant, only because, she said, she didn’t want to confuse her television persona with her evolving self. But she went. We were back to our weekly sessions, endless and intense discussions at home, our language peppered with psychobabble.
The years in love and therapy continued. Ashley’s show was cancelled, and she developed anorexia. My depression was unaffected by medication, and Alex got fatter, older and richer on us. He even put Ashley into a thirty-day residential programme for eating disorders, while I began combing the city in bloodlust, growing sloppier by the night.
My evolution was becoming my undoing. I was decompensating. Dracula was not meant to be self-aware. Guilt and remorse lived in me like parasites, sapping my motivation for living. I could barely recall what it felt like to know a positive emotion. My anger at my ignorance in this ate at me as well.
On Ashley’s twenty-eighth birthday, she insisted she never looked better, and would I please marry her. I blinked at her. She knew I couldn’t marry. Wouldn’t marry. I was working on that part of commitment phobia as her birthday neared.
“No, no, Vlad, you don’t understand. I want you to drink my blood and let me drink yours. I want to remain this way for eternity with you.” She took my chin in her hand and batted her lashes at me. “It may take that long for us to resolve all our issues in therapy, yes?”
I spun away. “God, Ashley, how can you think of spending eternity with a depressed partner? It is a comfort to me to think one day you will be free of this burden in your death, if you don’t choose to leave me first.”
“Turn around you ancient bag of psychological torments, and look at me.” I did. “I love you. I’ve not stopped loving you. You will not be depressed forever. Alex said so.”
I hated to correct her. “He said that it is not uncommon for someone to be depressed a month for every year they were abused or tortured or whatever their trauma. Darling, I’ve lived far longer than most psychology texts have been around, and that means I could be depressed for decades.”
“And what if I choose to work with you in this?”
I was suddenly tired, weary of working on myself. Exhausted at searching for myself. I hadn’t yet found anyone within me worth being glad about. Her enthusiasm was born of her mortality and dogged faith in our love. My affection for her couldn’t have been more at that moment.
“I love you, Ashley, but I’m afraid I love you too much to allow you to attach yourself to an emotional cavern of gloom for eternity. I’d rather let you go, than do that to you.” I regretted saying that as soon as it left my lips. How could I not see then the manipulation? It was shouting in my face!
“Oh, Vlad, you’re so noble. But I want to be immortal. Please. I mean what I said. I’m not bullshitting you.” She set her manicured fingers on her perfect hips.
Three sessions later, I’d been convinced, even though I couldn’t summon the ecstasy I knew I should be feeling at the prospect of eternity with her. With that we went home to Ashley’s grandly theatrical production of the Big Seduction. She wanted to be reborn in splendour.
A thousand candles, twenty pots of smouldering incense, silk sheets, sultry music and a table of delicate sweets awaited us. I knew as I went through the motions, that it was wrong, that my dammed emotions weren’t going to spring a leak in time to make this glorious for me as well. Ashley, contrary to my experience, was ardently amorous.
When it was over, I found myself wishing to stand in the face of the sun at dawn. Ashley was sick as hell for a while, but rebounded as I knew she would. I also knew how being immortal would come to change her. I simply hadn’t imagined the speed at which that metamorphosis would occur.
It was less than a week later when she called me into the bedroom where she reclined in all her bored immortal beauty. “I don’t like you any more, Vlad. Whining, moaning, telling me all the time how you miss your old self. Well, I miss him, too. I’m leaving. I want to find someone who can keep up with me, who can feel joy and smile. It’s been years since I heard you laugh.”
I couldn’t say I was stunned. I suspected this was coming. I tried a hollow chuckle. It failed as miserably as our union.
What I hadn’t expected was how her leaving would be as a stake to my heart.
Alex continued to treat my ennui, and I continued to lose what desire I had left to go on. He tried to put me in a psychiatric hospital, but I had to remind him I would be a danger to the patients, and it would jeopardize my anonymity. He relented.
So you can see, can’t you? Once the most feared and most fascinating of monsters in the known world, I’ve become a pathetic mass of neuroses, pathologies, with an apparently endless road ahead of me towards an iota of peace and a cohesive self. I’ve even lost interest in eating. What is the point? I can’t even live up to my myth any more.
When I’m gone, I ask only that you not tell the truth of my downfall, the demise of the Dracula the world still clings to with trepidation. Allow my legacy to live on.
I leave this world without regrets, and I have found some measure of peace. I made my last appointment with Dr Alex Bloward, and told him of my plans. He did his duty as a psychologist and insisted on committing me for my own protection. It was while he was on the telephone ordering the ambulance, I ripped out his throat and eviscerated him.
The condemned are always given whatever they ask for for their last meal, and I couldn’t have asked for better.
~ * ~