Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (51 page)

Maybe it was because there was no music. Every restaurant played music; without it, the pauses seemed longer and burdened with meaning. “I love you,” he said.

“I love you too.”

“I’m hungry.”

“I’m hungry too.”

She finished her cigarette, but there was nowhere for her to stub it out, so she set it down upon the table, standing it upright on its filter. The table wobbled. The stub refused to fall over.

“We should call the waiter,” Donald said at last. And he suddenly thought,
Perhaps he’s died
, and that made him laugh, just a single bark that sounded too loud and too rude. “I can call the waiter. What’s the French for
menu
?” But on cue the waiter appeared, and in both hands he was carrying a single dinner plate, and, in his breast pocket, a knife and fork. It was only when he set the plate down in front of Chrissie that the couple could see what the meal was.

“
Non, non, non
,” said Donald. He pointed at Chrissie. “Vegetarian.
Veg-e-tari-en.
Um.
Legumes.
”

Because there in front of her, proud, unabashed, was a hunk of steak. There was nothing to disguise it, or to distract from its obvious meatiness; there were no greens around, no scattering of
pommes frites
. It was rare, it was pink. “It’s all right,” said Chrissie. “Just this once. I’m on holiday, aren’t I?”

“But we didn’t order it. Tell him we didn’t order it. Tell him we want the menu.”

Chrissie said something brief in French, the waiter said back something briefer, Chrissie nodded, smiled. The waiter walked away.

“Well?”

“They don’t do menus here,” she said.

“Well, how does that work?”

“Do you mind if I start?” she asked.

And he watched her as she sliced off strips of her steak, as she speared them with her fork, as she lifted them to her mouth. “Is it really all right?” he asked.

“Mmm, juicy,” she said, and she spoke with her mouth full, and he could see a fat ball of meat roll around her tongue wetly, and she grinned at him. Then her attention was back to the dead animal on her plate, she tore into it so eagerly, and the farther into the carcass she ventured, the pinker it got. Bright pink, but not quite as pink as her chipped fingernails, nor as pink as the pink of her stupid pink suitcase sitting in the hotel wardrobe.

He watched her, unhappily, hungrily.

And without any music all he could hear was that chewing.

“I love you,” he said.

She nodded, chewed on.

“I thought we could stay here in France and be farmers. What do you think?”

At last the waiter reappeared, and this time he was carrying Donald’s dinner, and he swooped it down in front of Donald with a flourish that was almost elegant.

Donald looked down at his steak. It quite brazenly stared back up at him.

“
Non
,” he said. “I want it well-done. What’s the French for
well-done
?”

“
Bien cuit
.”

“I want this
bien cuit
,
oui
?”

And the waiter shrugged, and Chrissie shrugged, and Donald said, “I can’t eat this.”

The steak was thicker than Chrissie’s piece had been—it looked not so much like meat, more something newly hacked off a living animal and dropped straight onto the dinner plate. It wasn’t even pink; it was blue. It lay there, dead, or dying, and dribbled blood.

“You could at least try it,” said his vegetarian girlfriend. So Donald prodded it with his fork, he tamped it down with the flattened underside of the prongs, and the steak felt spongy and soaking wet, and an almost acrid smell like copper came off it.

He turned it over. He thought it might look better if he turned it over. He prized it from the plate; it pulled free from its moorings with a low reluctant squelch, and then he let it splash back down onto its belly. He looked at the underside. He wished he hadn’t turned it over. He wished he’d left it as it was.

He looked around to see whether the other diner in the restaurant had been given raw meat, whether he cared, whether he was
shoveling it in under his pencil mustache quite cheerfully. But the other diner had gone.

Back down at the steak.

There, across the whole breadth of it, ran a single vein. The vein was raised off the flesh, like a tapeworm, Donald thought, or an elongated leech—it didn’t look as if it had grown out of the meat at all, he could have grasped it between thumb and forefinger and peeled the worm off—it was thick, and rubbery, and gorged with blood.

He looked back up at Chrissie. For some sort of help, any help—but she wasn’t even watching him, she was fully occupied by her own dinner. And there was a rhythm to the way she ate her steak now, the slicing, the forking, the ceaseless grinding of her teeth as she tipped a new gobbet of flesh past her lips and into the machine—and the swallowing, oh, the utter remorselessness of that swallowing.

She pushed the plate aside; at last she was done. She smiled. There was blood on her teeth.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” she asked.

“Please,” he said. “Please.”

“You should eat.” She continued to smile. “Come on, Monsieur
MacAllisteurrr.”
She elongated the accent; it made him sound like such a silly man.

So he picked up the fork once more. He put the merest pressure onto the meat. At contact, the vein began to bulge. He watched it; a small bubble began to swell from it. It was round and thick like a balloon, and it was a perfect dark red, shiny with blood. He took the fork away. The bubble stayed firm, bobbing up at him. He approached with the fork again. A different angle this time, he’d be careful. He’d attack it more stealthily from the side. The first bubble deflated, yes, he watched the blood drain away from it, he couldn’t help but sigh with relief—and then, there it was, another bubble,
closer by, rising out of the vein loud and proud, bigger and juicier than the last. And he knew, he knew if he pressed down any harder that the balloon would burst.

Chrissie frowned, sighed. She picked up her cigarettes. And in an instant the waiter was back by her side with a lighter. She exhaled smoke away from Donald, but not so carefully this time. “Come on,” she said. “I enjoyed my meat. Why can’t you?”

“We could be farmers.”

“Yes, yes.”

They were both watching him now, his girlfriend and the waiter. And the waiter somehow contrived to contort that quizzical look he had, he strained his forehead and bent the eyebrows into something more angular, something more mocking.

The waiter idly picked a few more hairs off Chrissie’s shoulder, and this time he let his hand stay there, and those bony old fingers began to play at the nape of her neck.

“Just one bite, baby,” said Chrissie, “just one bite for me,” and she smiled, and she made her voice light and encouraging, but Donald thought he could hear the anger behind it. And she looked older than her fifteen years, all made up, smoking like a grown-up, her own eyebrows arched into an expression of oh-so-mature disappointment.

Donald plunged his fork into the dead animal, and it was too much for the vein to take, the bubble burst, it sprayed blood across his hand and a little on his face—mostly red, a dark red, but also some blue, and also something that seemed white and speckled.

“One bite,” she said, and she nodded, and the waiter nodded too, and they were both leaning forward now in anticipation, the waiter was biting down hard upon his bottom lip and he was making it bleed—and so Donald did it, Donald raised a forkful of raw flesh to his mouth, and for a moment it wasn’t in his mouth and in the next moment it was, and he was chewing frantically, and he did it, he did
it, he did all the chewing and all the swallowing too, it was out of his mouth and down his throat and that chunk of meat was gone for good, he would never have to see it again.

He sat back, panting. He looked at her, and he winked, and he half expected a round of applause.

Chrissie stubbed out her cigarette on her plate; there was a quick fizz as the lighted end touched the wet blood. She said something to the waiter in French—it must have been French, surely, but the words seemed so hard and clipped. The waiter’s eyes still burned, he hadn’t yet recovered from the excitement of watching Donald eat—now he calmed down, he wrenched his face back into a more professional, more skeletal pose. He nodded, he licked his lips, he wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, he wiped the blood on his suit, he went to fetch their coats.

It was only after they were outside into the dark and the rain that Donald realized they hadn’t paid for the meal. Chrissie told him it had all been taken care of.

T
hey didn’t talk much on the way back to the hotel. No, that’s not true—they talked about lots of things, Donald hoped that the weather would be better for tomorrow, and Chrissie translated all the advertisements on the metro—but they didn’t talk about anything important.

“I’ll use the bathroom first,” said Donald, quite cheerfully really. He locked the door behind him.

He got undressed and changed into his pale blue pajamas. He brushed his teeth and then brushed them again, hard, very hard. He studied his face in the mirror, and it didn’t look any different than it had before. Then he sat down upon the toilet lid and began to draft a letter.

I’ve made a terrible mistake
, he wrote.
I’m sorry.
He couldn’t get beyond that
sorry
—it was meant to be the floodgate for everything he needed to tell her, so why on the page did it look like an ending?
He started when Chrissie knocked upon the door: “Are you going to be much longer?”

While she undressed, Donald got into bed. He’d pretend to be asleep. He might even fall asleep if he were lucky, and then he wouldn’t even have to pretend. He closed his eyes and stared at the blackness in his head. When the bathroom door opened, he couldn’t help it—he looked at her. The pink dress was gone, the lipstick, nail varnish, all gone. She was wearing her Disney pajamas again, and she seemed so sweet, and so young, and so easy to understand. She smiled. He smiled back. He watched Tigger bounce gently in the gap between her breasts.

She climbed into bed beside him.

“Well, good night,” she said.

“Good night,” he agreed.

She turned out the light.

He closed his eyes once more, once more pretended he could sleep, that he even knew what sleep was or how it could ever be reached again.

He wondered if she still might say anything about what had happened in the restaurant, and his body tensed in the expectation of it. But minutes went by, and then he heard her breathing regularly, and he relaxed, he’d got away with it.

He didn’t even sense her moving closer until he felt her hand around his penis.

At first he wasn’t even sure that it was her—at first, stupidly, he wondered whether it was one of his own hands creeping between his legs unawares—at first, stupidly, his impulse was to lift up the sheets and check. He didn’t lift the sheets. He lay there, rigid.

The hand didn’t flex. Now that it had found the penis, its mission seemed accomplished. It held on to its prize firmly, through his pajama trousers. Not so firmly that it demanded anything from it, firmly enough that it couldn’t escape.

The slightest extra pressure of the fingers—the very slightest squeeze—and that would have been different, that would have been something Donald would have needed to address. Donald would have had to turn on the lights and sternly remind Chrissie of the boundaries he’d set up for their mutual protection. So he diligently waited for it, waited for that little pressure, for the slightest flex—he lay there focused, intent only upon his penis and her hand and any change of relationship vis-à-vis the two of them.

His penis swelled a little, the blood rushed to it in blameless curiosity, and the fist opened out slightly to accommodate it.

He felt himself breathe faster.

He turned to look at Chrissie. Tried to make out her face in the dim light. Her eyes were still closed. He thought she was asleep. And then—and then maybe the clouds parted a bit, because the Paris moon stretched across the bed and in the light of it her eyes opened at last, and they looked straight into him and straight through him. The rest of the face was still an impassive mask, utterly cold, utterly without expression, and looking so adult once more. But the eyes, was there a challenge in them? He thought there was.

He held his breath. He licked his lips. He didn’t say anything.

Nor did she.

And then her eyes closed again.

The grip of her hand didn’t relax, not even now. The blood drained out of his penis. It started to wilt.

He waited ten minutes, maybe more, not daring to breathe properly, not daring to stir her again. Until he was sure she must be asleep, and then he edged away from her, very gently, and as he pulled his body into the cold outer fringes of the bed, he pulled his penis away with him. By now it was just a stump, there was nothing left for the hand to grip on to. He felt the hand clasp and unclasp uselessly for it, then slow, then stop.

A little later, he carefully got out of bed. He wanted to go back to the bathroom. To brush his teeth, wash his face, finish the note, whatever.

He felt his way slowly through the darkness, and he was making good progress—and then his foot collided hard with something firm and round, and it hurt, and he couldn’t stop himself, he cried out in surprise if not in pain, and the grapefruit he’d kicked rolled across the carpet and bounced against the wall.
Pamplemousse
, he thought to himself involuntarily.

“What are you doing?” Chrissie asked, drowsy, irritated.

“Nothing.”

“Come back to bed.”

“I’ll come back to bed.”

He got back under the sheets, and didn’t dare move again, and at some point he must have fallen asleep.

W
hen they woke the next morning, she gave him a kiss, and it seemed perfectly well intentioned and well executed.

At breakfast, he decided not to spread
confiture
or
beurre
upon his croissants. “Look,” he told her, “I’m having them plain, just as you suggested! Are you proud of me?” She smiled, and congratulated him, and told him he was being a proper Frenchman. Even the waitress looked pleased, she hardly glared at him at all.