Suzie and the Monsters (12 page)

The first time I tried to kill myself was a few days after my husband turned me, just after I killed for the first time. Not, to be clear, the first time I drank human blood, about which I have very confused memories of excruciating pain, violent sickness and raging hunger, and a young woman wearing rags and smiling dreamily while my teeth tore into her wrist, but taking only a few mouthfuls before I must have collapsed into a feverish cold. No, it was some time after that that I truly awoke, pain and illness gone, but not that terrible need.

The young woman was still there, wherever we were, I really couldn’t say. Still in England, probably near the south coast, not in a town, just a basic stone house. Alive but pale, her wrist bandaged, the woman shivered in the cold. My husband sat in a chair by the window, waiting and watching. I ignored him. Only the girl mattered.

‘Come here,’ I ordered her.

She looked up, startled, then looked into my eyes and flinched. She tried to deny me, to wriggle deeper into the corner where she sat, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the demand in mine.

‘Come!’ I repeated, soft but firm, and she burst into tears, but she stood up and approached me submissively. ‘Lie down with me,’ I told her, taking her hand in mine and guiding her onto the bed. On impulse, I stripped her rags away, revealing shapely breasts. I caressed her nipples with my cheeks for a minute before taking the left into my mouth and biting. The poor woman screamed, but I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I just wanted the blood I could sense racing beneath her skin. I moved up so that I could sink my fangs into her neck, for indeed I do have fangs when I feed.

For a long time I was aware of nothing but her blood rushing into my mouth, my body electric with pleasure. I don’t remember if the woman screamed or struggled, although I expect she did both. At some point I became aware that the blood was no longer flowing freely — indeed, my attempts to draw more blood from her pierced neck were increasingly futile. She was dead. ‘I want more!’ I cried, asking I don’t know who.

‘Later, my love,’ my husband laughed gently.

Slowly I began to remember who I was, and pieced together fragmentary memories of the past few days. I looked down at the emptied body in my arms and finally understood that I had killed her, that I had fed on her blood like a ravening monster of myth, and had enjoyed it.

At that very moment, my husband took me from behind, without warning or preparation, and for the second time in my life, and certainly not the last, I felt the pain of being a virgin. I cried out in complaint, but my body welcomed him, and for hours we fucked roughly, like two wild animals trying to devour each other sexually. I can say without question that it was the most satisfying night of my life. It wasn’t until I woke again that the guilt and horror set in, and I started screaming.

In time I calmed down and started trying to rationalise it, that we had been possessed by demons, and I begged my husband to send for the priest, but of course he didn’t. He didn’t argue with me, or tell me anything, just waited patiently while I bounced between storms of tears and fearful wailing, and fury at his resistance, made all the worse by my persistent, shameful desire for him to grab me again. There was a dead women on the floor beside our bed, and I wanted to fuck my husband.

But I was a good Christian woman, and fought back this evil. He nodded his understanding, then forced me onto the bed and tied me down with rope, which both excited and confused me. I waited for him to take me. I wanted him to take me. But instead he picked up the body of the woman from the floor and carried her out of the house, stopping at the door to say he’d be back soon.

Soon is a relative concept. Soon I was hungry. Soon it was dark and I was starving. All I could think of was blood, hot blood flooding my mouth, filling my being, transcendent joy. I struggled to divert my thoughts. I invented prayers to Christ, to Mary, to God, to save me, I screamed at Satan, demanding he and his dark minions depart, I wept, I laughed.

And then he was back, another young woman in tow. She screamed when she saw me tied to the bed, but couldn’t escape him and he quickly tied her to the bed also, and gagged her to muffle her shrieks and whimpering.

‘If I take you to the priest, he will lock you up. He will torture you, and rape you, and let the townsmen pay to torture you and rape you again and again, and when your spirit is utterly crushed, they will take you to the town square for all to see you and revel in your distress. They will rip your breasts from your body, shove a red hot poker here,’ he illustrated by thrusting two fingers into me, breaking my hymen for a third time and I cried out in pain, ‘and burn you alive.’

I didn’t believe him, just thought he was being cruel, tying me up like this and now trying to frighten me, but what he predicted is similar to what I witnessed many times over the years. I was also rather distracted by the whimpering body on the bed next to me. I itched to touch her, taste her, bite her, and I struggled harder to escape my bonds. My husband’s fingers, having penetrated me so harshly, became more tender and playful in their ministrations, and soon I was begging him to release me so that we could fuck properly.

He withdrew his hand and stood watching me as I writhed helpless, hungry, horny as hell. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘Can you doubt that there is still a demon in you?’ I couldn’t deny it. ‘No priest can help you now,’ he continued. ‘If you want to be free, you will have to cut out your heart. Or you can choose to embrace the demon and discover pleasures no mortal has ever enjoyed.’ He took his knife and placed it in my hand, then sat by the window to watch.

I lost no time in cutting the ropes that restrained me, but even in so short a time my husband was forgotten. I tore and sliced feverishly at the woman’s clothes until her naked flesh was fully revealed. I bit into her chest above her breast, but only to taste her blood a little, I wanted to take my time. My left hand explored between her legs, more for my curiosity than her pleasure, since she was too terrified for that, but I had never touched a woman there before, and being honest with myself I admitted that I wanted to.

Suddenly I recoiled. Was there no limit to the sinfulness? I had drunk the blood of a woman, had killed the woman, had made love to my husband like a beast, and now I lusted after a woman. I wanted to run away into the night, far from these temptations. I wanted to tear deep into this woman and drink the blood pounding out from her heart. I sat still, caught between these twin desires, and cried tears of self pity — for myself, that is, certainly not for the poor woman staring in terror at my blood-stained lips and the knife in my right hand.

I looked at her, imagining tracing lines across her skin and licking the blood along the scratches. I wondered what it would be like to taste between her legs, make love to her there with my mouth the way my husband liked to do to me sometimes. Slowly I crept towards her again, only to hesitate at the last instant, point of the knife pressing gently in the valley between her breasts. Suddenly I hated my weakness, and knew there was only one way to destroy the evil that had possessed me. I reversed the knife and pointed it at my heart. Taking my own life I considered as just one more sin on a list of the many I had committed over the past day or so, and at least this would be my last. Even so, taking that final step and plunging the knife into my heart wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to die like this, painfully and still young. I almost yielded again to the those beautiful breasts heaving in panic next to me.

And then I did it, and the agony astonished me, incapacitated me. I tried to take the blade out again, but movement had become difficult, my muscles weak. I crashed onto the bed and lay screaming silently until everything faded.

When I awoke the knife was gone from my chest. I was lying on the bed next to the woman, whose eyes went wide in fresh terror when she saw I was alive. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just straddled her and plunged my teeth into her neck and drank long and deep, until once again there was only the frustration of death. Suddenly my husband grabbed me and threw me onto the bed, and himself onto me, and we lost ourselves in this carnal pleasure for hours until we slept the sleep of exhaustion and satiation.

The Schubert has finished. Staying with Richter, I scroll back in time to Beethoven’s Appassionata, a piece with strong currents of rage and determination. I need an antidote for my depression.

After killing myself that first time, I stopped struggling with my nature. I gave up in many ways, and just let my husband move me from place to place, city to city, down through France and across Italy and eventually to Venice, pretending always to be a good Christian wife when out in public. The hunger I felt during those first few days lessened over time, so that there was no need or desire to kill the victims he brought home for us to feed on, but he enjoyed watching me kill and often waited for a few days until I was crying of hunger, knowing that I would show my victims no mercy, and that afterwards my sexual appetite would peak and he could use me in every way he wished.

I believe he loved me, in a very twisted way, and he gave me such pleasure that I conspired in my own monstrous degradation, but there was never any prior, informed consent, so to speak. He controlled me completely, with his trickster eyes when I was still human, and through his understanding of my fundamental nature after the change coupled with my vulnerability as a woman in the sixteenth century in a strange country with no family besides himself.

Suddenly the Allegro is rippling around me infusing me with a cold hatred, partly directed at myself for having endured him for so long. It’s a cruel thing to lie here thinking of all the ways I could have killed him or escaped, but the torrent of music has at last banished my tears, and filled me with a new energy. As the last, fantastic chords give way to audience applause, I stand up and scroll further back in time to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. God I love the 21st Century. Hundreds of years of music compressed into this tiny gadget.

Suddenly I’m laughing at the idea of myself standing out here in the dark in my five-inch stilettos and Dolce and Gabbana dress soaked from the cold, wet grass. I walk back towards the Lion Gate and, not caring who may hear me, join in Donna Anna’s tirade against her seducer, ‘Al traditore! Scellerato!’ I’ll never be a professional opera singer, but I can sing soprano well enough for my own enjoyment.

Hanging Out (Sunday)

The man from outside Alex Graham’s place, the man who shot me, wakes up and immediately and frantically struggles against the cord that binds him thickly like a spider binds the prey it catches in its web. The right side of his face is cut and bruised from when my gloved fist hammered through the driver’s side window. Otherwise he’s not unattractive, short fair hair and blue eyes, lean and fit without being over-muscular. I would guess he has served in the army.

I went to the 24/7 last night after leaving Kew Gardens, got there half an hour before it shut which was enough time to buy a dark, hooded tracksuit and new trainers, as well as gloves, cord and a few other things. I parked a few streets away from home and approached on foot, dressed appropriately for a night of skulduggery, and was pleased to discover this man parked across and down the street from my flat, keeping watch by himself, although for what and who I’m not sure. I’ve had to knock him out a few times getting him here, and at one point made him walk, hobbled, the silencer of his own gun digging into the back of his neck.

But I have him finally in position, hogtied at the base of this elevator shaft, the lift itself currently on the first floor and the ground floor doors are open. The lights in the corridor penetrate the shaft well enough for him to see what a fine mess he’s in. He’s swearing and yelling and threatening and calling me all manner of horrible names in a strong Cockney accent.

Eventually he understands that there’s no point struggling and that I obviously don’t care how much noise he makes, and with one final curse he relaxes. ‘I thought I killed you.’

‘You nearly did. Somehow you managed to miss everything vital. Seems a steel-boned corset makes surprisingly good armour.’ He doesn’t look entirely convinced. ‘So, what’s your name?’

‘Fuck off, I’m not talking.’

He’s naked from the waist down, although I’ve left the shredded remains of his trousers under his legs to shield them from the cold concrete floor. I reach for his wallet, and open it to find a thick wad of twenties, and bank and credit cards that identify him as John Smith, which may be real, I suppose. ‘I’m really quite annoyed, John Smith,’ I say quite calmly. ‘I loved that corset. Who do you work for?’ He doesn’t answer, just glares angrily. I wonder what he’s imagining doing to me when he escapes.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Why did you try to kill me?’ Bitterness and doubt mixing with the rage. ‘No? How about Alex? What was the naughty Mr Graham up to?’ Confusion this time. Either he doesn’t know, or he thinks I should.

Wrapped securely around the base of John Smith’s scrotum is several turns of cord, tied off in a collar, a hangman’s knot. His balls protrude comically, grotesquely, and he must be in some pain. The cord runs up into the darkness above us. I give it a gentle tug, and he starts swearing at me again, and strains to lift his pelvis.

I wait for him to quiet down. ‘The Inquisitors would hang men by their balls,’ I tell him, and pull harder on the cord for a few seconds. ‘Now, I don’t like torture. It’s not that I’m squeamish, just that I’m ethically opposed to it, in general. But you did try to kill me, and I’m worried about my girlfriend, so I’m willing to make an exception in your case. I want answers, John Smith.’

‘Let me go and I’ll tell you everything.’

‘Tell me everything and I’ll let you go.’

‘Right,’ he says, one word of purest sarcasm.

‘I know you have no reason to believe me, but it’s true. I’ll give you your freedom. But I want you out of the country in twenty four hours, and if I ever see you again you will wish I’d left you here to die.’