Bloody Fabulous (3 page)

“Your coat is beautiful. It glows like the sun,” the faery said, reaching out to touch the fabric.

“I would give it to you,” said Rafe. “Just let me have Lyle.”

A smile twisted her mouth. “I will let you spend tonight with him. If he remembers you, he is free to go. Will that price suit?”

Rafe nodded and removed the coat.

The faery woman caught Lyle’s hand as he spun past, pulling him out of the dance. He was laughing, still, as his bare feet touched the moss outside the circle and he aged. His chest grew broader, he became taller, his hair lengthened, and fine lines appeared around his mouth and eyes. He was no longer a teenager.

“Leaving us, even for a time, has a price,” the faery woman said. Standing on her toes, she bent Lyle’s head to her lips. His eyelids drooped and she steered him to the moldering mattress. He never even looked in Rafe’s direction; he just sank down into sleep.

“Lyle,” Rafe said, dropping down beside him, smoothing the tangle of hair back from his face. There were braids in it that knotted up with twigs and leaves and cords of thorny vines. A smudge of dirt highlighted one cheekbone. Leaves blew over him, but he did not stir.

“Lyle,” Rafe said again. Rafe was reminded of how Lyle’s body had lain in the casket at the funeral, of how Lyle’s skin had been pale and bluish as skim milk and smelled faintly of chemicals, of how his fingers were threaded together across his chest so tightly that when Rafe tried to take his hand, it was stiff as a mannequin’s. Even now, the memory of that other, dead Lyle seemed more real than the one that slept beside him like a cursed prince in a fairy tale.

“Please wake up,” Rafe said. “Please. Wake up and tell me this is real.”

Lyle did not stir. Beneath the lids, his eyes moved as if he saw another landscape.

Rafe shook him and then struck him, hard, across the face. “Get up,” he shouted. He tugged on Lyle’s arm and Lyle’s body rolled toward him.

Standing, he tried to lift Lyle, but he was used to only the weight of bolts of cloth. He settled for dragging him toward the street where Rafe could flag down a car or call for help. He pulled with both his hands, staining Lyle’s shirt and face with grass, and scratching his side on a fallen branch. Rafe dropped his hand and bent over him in the quiet dark.

“It’s too far,” Rafe said. “Far too far.”

He stretched out beside Lyle, pillowing his friend’s head against his chest and resting on his own arm.

When Rafe woke, Lyle no longer lay beside him, but the faery woman stood over the mattress. She wore the coat of fire and, in the light of the newly risen sun, she shone so brightly that Rafe had to shade his eyes with his hand. She laughed and her laugh sounded like ice cracking on a frozen lake.

“You cheated me,” Rafe said. “You made him sleep.”

“He heard you in his dreams,” said the faery woman. “He preferred to remain dreaming.”

Rafe stood and brushed off his pants, but his jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth hurt.

“Come with me,” the faery said. “Join the dance. You are only jealous that you were left behind. Let that go. You can be forever young and you can make beautiful costumes forevermore. We will appreciate them as no mortal does and we will adore you.”

Rafe inhaled the leaf-mold and earth smells. Where Lyle had rested, a golden hair remained. He thought of his father laughing at his jokes, his mother admiring his sewing, his sister caring enough to ask him about boyfriends even in the middle of a crisis. Rafe wound the hair around his finger so tightly that it striped his skin white and red. “No,” he told her.

His mother was sitting in her robe in the kitchen. She got up when Rafe came in.

“Where are you going? You are like a possessed man.” She touched his hand and her skin felt so hot that he pulled back in surprise.

“You’re freezing! You have been at his grave.”

It was easier for Rafe to nod than explain.

“There is a story about a woman who mourned too long and the spectre of her lover rose up and dragged her down into death with him.”

He nodded again, thinking of the faery woman, of being dragged into the dance, of Lyle sleeping like death.

She sighed exaggeratedly and made him a coffee. Rafe had already set up the sewing machine by the time she put the mug beside him.

That day he made a coat of silver silk, pleated at the hips and embroidered with a tangle of thorny branches and lapels of downy white fur. He knew it was one of the most beautiful things he had ever made.

“Who are you sewing that for?” Mary asked when she came in. “It’s gorgeous.”

He rubbed his eyes and gave her a tired smile. “It’s supposed to be the payment a mortal tailor used to win back a lover from Faeryland.”

“I haven’t heard of that story,” his sister said. “Will it be a musical?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Rafe. “I don’t think the cast can sing.”

His mother frowned and called Mary over to chop up a summer squash.

“I want you and Victor to come live with me,” Rafe said as his sister turned away from him.

“Your place is too small,” Rafe’s mother told him.

She had never seen his apartment. “We could move, then. Go to Queens. Brooklyn.”

“You won’t want a little boy running around. And Mary has the cousins here. She should stay with us. Besides, the city is dangerous.”

“Marco is dangerous,” Rafe said voice rising. “Why don’t you let Mary make up her own mind?”

Rafe’s mother muttered under her breath as she chopped, Rafe sighed and bit his tongue and Mary gave him a sisterly roll of the eyes. It occurred to him that that had been the most normal conversation he had had with his mother in years.

All day he worked on the coat and that night Rafe, wearing the silvery coat, went back to the woods and the river.

The dancers were there as before and when Rafe got close, the faery woman left the circle of dancers.

“Your coat is as lovely as the moon. Will you agree to the same terms?”

Rafe thought of objecting, but he also thought of the faery woman’s kiss and that he might be able to change the course of events. It would be better if he caught her off-guard. He shouldered off his coat. “I agree.”

As before, the faery woman pulled Lyle from the dance.

“Lyle!” Rafe said, starting toward him before the faery could touch his brow with her lips.

Lyle turned to him and his lips parted as though he were searching for a name to go with a distant memory, as if Lyle didn’t recall him after all.

The faery woman kissed him then, and Lyle staggered drowsily to the mattress. His drooping eyelashes nearly hid the gaze he gave Rafe. His mouth moved, but no sound escaped him and then he subsided into sleep.

That night Rafe tried a different way of rousing Lyle. He pressed his mouth to Lyle’s slack lips, to his forehead as the faery woman had done. He kissed the hollow of Lyle’s throat, where the beat of his heart thrummed against his skin. He ran his hands over the Lyle’s chest. He touched his lips to the smooth, unscarred expanse of Lyle’s wrists. Again and again, he kissed Lyle, but it was as terrible as kissing a corpse.

Before he slept, Rafe took the onyx and silver ring off his own pinkie, pulled out a strand of black hair from his own head and coiled it inside the hollow of the poison ring. Then he pushed the ring onto Lyle’s pinkie.

“Remember me. Please remember me,” Rafe said. “I can’t remember myself unless you remember me.”

But Lyle did not stir and Rafe woke alone on the mattress. He made his way home in the thin light of dawn.

That day he sewed a coat from velvet as black as the night sky. He stiched tiny black crystals onto it and embroidered it with black roses, thicker at the hem and then thinning as they climbed. At the cuffs and neck, ripped ruffles of thin smoky purples and deep reds reminded him of sunsets. Across the back, he sewed on silver beads for stars. Stars like the faerie woman’s eyes. It was the most beautiful thing Raphael had ever created. He knew he would never make its equal.

“Where do you get your ideas from?” his father asked as he shuffled out to the kitchen for an evening cup of decaf. “I’ve never been much of a creative person.”

Rafe opened his mouth to say that he got his ideas from everywhere, from things he’d seen and dreamed and felt, but then he thought of the other thing his father said. “You made that bumper for the old car out of wood,” Rafe said. “That was pretty creative.”

Rafe’s father grinned and added milk to his cup.

That night Rafe donned the shimmering coat and walked to the woods.

The faerie woman waited for him. She sucked in her breath at the sight of the magnificent coat.

“I must have it,” she said. “You shall have him as before.”

Rafael nodded. Tonight if he could not rouse Lyle, he would have to say goodbye. Perhaps this was the life Lyle had chosen—a life of dancing and youth and painless memory—and he was wrong to try and take him away from it. But he wanted to spend one more night beside Lyle.

She brought Lyle to him and he knelt on the mattress. The faerie woman bent to kiss his forehead, but at the last moment, Lyle turned his head and the kiss fell on his hair.

Scowling, she rose.

Lyle blinked as though awakening from a long sleep, then touched the onyx ring on his finger. He turned toward Rafe and smiled tentatively.

“Lyle?” Rafe asked. “Do you remember me?”

“Rafael?” Lyle asked. He reached a hand toward Rafe’s face, fingers skimming just above the skin. Rafe leaned into the heat, butting his head against Lyle’s hand and sighing. Time seemed to flow backwards and he felt like he was fourteen again and in love.

“Come, Lyle,” said the faery woman sharply.

Lyle rose stiffly, his fingers ruffling Rafe’s hair.

“Wait,” Rafe said. “He knows who I am. You said he would be free.”

“He’s as free to come with me as he is to go with you,” she said.

Lyle looked down at Rafe. “I dreamed that we went to New York and that we performed in a circus. I danced with the bears and you trained fleas to jump through the eyes of needles.”

“I trained fleas?”

“In my dream. You were famous for it.” His smile was tentative, uncertain. Maybe he realized that it didn’t sound like a great career.

Rafe thought of the story he had told Victor about the princess in her louse-skin coat, about locks of hair and all the things he had managed through the eyes of needles.

The faery woman turned away from them with a scowl, walking back to the fading circle of dancers, becoming insubstantial as smoke.

“It didn’t go quite like that.” Rafe stood and held out his hand. “I’ll tell you what really happened.”

Lyle clasped Rafe’s fingers tightly, desperately but his smile was wide and his eyes were bright as stars. “Don’t leave anything out.”

Savage Design
Richard Bowes

Early one evening last September Lilia Gaines pulled open the metal gates of Reliquary on West Broadway at the shoddy Canal Street end of Manhattan’s Soho. As she did, she murmured to herself:

“In the city with sleep disorders styles get old fast. But old styles never disappear. They lay waiting for a kiss or a love bite . . . ”

She trailed off. Lilia’s copywriting skills had never been a big strength and she found herself groping for a punch line.

A really young couple appeared wearing knock-off Louis Vuitton sunglasses and looking like they might be at the start of a long Nightwalker romp. His jacket collar was turned up; she had a wicked, amused smile.

Lilia could remember being like them, a brand new walker in the dark with eyes just a bit sensitive to sunlight. They waited while she unlocked the door, came inside with her and headed for the relics table at the rear.

In the last few months this kind of eager customer had started reappearing. Twenty-five and thirty years ago, Reliquary was open all night, closing only when full daylight fell on the storefront and the customers fled.

“Reliquary—Boutique Fashion—So New and SO Undead!” was the slogan in those glory days. Then as now one could find capes in a variety of lengths, elegant black parasols to keep the sun at bay, tops designed for easy exposure of the neck and throat. Some of the stock was a bit shopworn.

There had been good years when Nightwalkers were THE fresh thing. Then there were the lean years when Vampires were afraid to show themselves and Reliquary became a dusty antique store while Lilia worked part time jobs and held on tight to her rent controlled apartment on East Houston Street.

This evening Lilia watched the boy select a red silk handkerchief displaying a black bat, the long-ago emblem of Bloodsucker Night at the gay disco The Saint. The girl slipped on a pendant with the logo of the Gate of Night, that brief legend of a blood bar on Park Avenue South three decades back. Reliquary had always specialized in memorabilia of past Undead revivals.

Another customer, a man in running clothes and shades, entered and went over to a rack of capes. A woman stepped inside and glanced around, found a repro of a poster for
Fun and Gore,
a scandalous 1930’s Greenwich Village “Transylvanian Review.”

As the young couple approached the register, the girl pulled the boy’s jacket and shirt off his shoulders. She smiled at Lilia as though offering her a piece of expensive white fudge.

This was very young love. Their teeth still looked normal; the small bites on his neck had barely penetrated the skin. Fangs and puncture wounds still lay in their future.

The boy’s smile was blank. He knotted the kerchief over the bites but left one showing. Lilia guessed that his first blood buzz had been last night and that he’d be bitten again very shortly.

The girl looked at the photo behind Lilia, raised her sunglasses and said, “That’s you!”

The kid was sharp; Lilia nodded. The picture was from the 1980 Mudd Club Undead and Kicking Party where Lilia and Larry had introduced Downtown Manhattan to Nightwalking.

She was front and center along with Larry Stepelli, the bisexual boyfriend who designed all her clothes. In black with faces white as bone, they stood out among the graffiti artists, stray freaks, and Warhol Factory stars.