The Falstaff Vampire Files (8 page)

Chapter 23

Sir John Falstaff’s words

on black digital recorder, undated

I am little better than a man
trapped in amber—and what a prodigious stone it would take to hold the man in full.

Time to reset that stone.

I whisper in the dark into this small black lump, like a weightless stone, and it whispers back my words. Hal gave it me to learn my secrets while I slept. As if I did not know how to hide it from the daylight and from him. If they could hear this smooth stone repeating my words back to me, the folk I knew where I was born would burn me as a witch, if not as a vampire first. If I can elude their clutches for centuries, can I not sidestep this nosy pup? If I whispered my secrets to anyone who asked I would not have lived a hundred years past my first death.

“Minions of the moon, under whose light we steal,” the Bard said of us. He meant robbing purses by moonlight, but I steal dearer than that. A famous glutton I may have been—I sup no more on roasted fowl, no more stave off the cold with sack sherry, cakes and ale. Cruel, is it not? A man of famous appetites now lapping up small drops of blood. I drain a taste of life from several in an eve, killing none and yet making a meal.

The belly that I forged in life still leads the way like the prow of a ship, identical to the day I died these many—ahem! I shall not say how many centuries ago.

I could haunt this bustling hospital for many a night if necessity did not demand I move my coffin. First, a visit to my lady Reba. Easily tracked by the bloodhound I’ve become. Her scent’s a luminous road to where she is. Someone under these harsh lights will gladly drive me to her, and never remember the journey.

Poor Reba, once so young and wild. Sipping her life was like drinking bolts of lighting. Now near the end. She must be old—indeed, she has no choice. Her mind’s long gone. I’d never bring her over to share undeath with me. But I might take her last breath. Where she is now, if she had her wits she might beg me to do so. Or she might be glad if I just drop in from time to time to take a little blood and leave a little pleasure. For her. And mayhap the night nurse as well.

Can I do that and make a jest of this, my long half-life? I can. And mortals gladly pay a small piece of life for the rare entertainment I can offer.

Young Hal has plans to root me out of my earth, and now his shed’s a risky place. So to gather my forces and find a likely wine cellar, windowless closet or basement, where an old man might store a casket and sleep the daylight hours. Times change, tunes change. The old fox needs a new den.

Chapter 24

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 6th

I woke up late and rushed
to get ready for my first client, followed by a day so full of interruptions and unexpected demands that I had no time to think about the two marks on my neck covered by a blouse with a high collar. It was already dark when I stood on Vi’s back steps and knocked on her kitchen door holding a box of pastries from a bakery down the street.

When she answered the door Vi was in such a state of rare excitement that she could barely stand still.

“Oh, thanks, wonderful! Put it on the counter and come through to the front room—you have to see this.” She led the way through the hall.

“My lady, your presence honors us.” Sir John’s smiling presence made the air shimmer with anticipation that I totally mistrusted. He half rose and sketched a bow, then settled back into the big wing chair next to the tall bookcases that framed the fireplace. The huge greatcoat I’d seen him wear was draped over the back of the sofa.

“How did you get in here?”

He smiled, inclined his head toward Vi.

“Kit, this is so exciting.” She waved a spiral notebook at me.

“Oh, God.” I felt the blood stirring inside me as if I were blushing all over, yet there was also a chill down my spine. Vi’s front room, where I had stood a hundred times, seemed strange and alien. Even my own psychology reference books in the bookcase opposite Vi’s vampire books looked alien, as if I were seeing them through someone else’s eyes.

Vi sat down on the sofa and leaned toward the wing chair. “Sir John has been telling me about his life as a vampire. He met the real Henry the Fourth and the Fifth, and Christopher Marlowe. Shakespeare’s Falstaff is based on him. This is so exciting.”

I sat next to her on the sofa. “Violet, are you crazy?”

She smiled even more broadly. “I think the jury is out on that one.”

“This is so unwise. You don’t know this man.”

“I know.” Vi waved her notebook. “That’s why I’m interviewing him.”

I turned to Sir John. “How did you find this place?”

Ignoring my hostile tone, Sir John leaned back in his chair.

“My sojourn in the ranks of the undead, young madam, has sharpened my senses immensely.” He stretched with a show of massive arms and belly. “Once I had your perfume in here—” he tapped his reddened nose—”’twas a simple matter to track you to this place. As soon as I arose this eve, I came here looking for you and found our lovely hostess on the steps. She invited me in. She even found a place for my luggage in a spare room. In return I promised I would a tale to her unfold of the tragical life and undeath of poor Jack Falstaff. A man deprived. A man who loves roast fowl and sack, condemned to a life without either.”

He heaved a sigh that I could have sworn stirred the curtains. “Food, I miss mightily. But sack! No sack, no reason to live.”

“Uh, excuse us a minute. Violet, come here.” I pulled her out into the hallway. “What’s this sack he keeps talking about?”

“It’s sherry. I looked it up. “

“The man is mentally ill.”

“I can hear every word, most clearly, ladies,” Sir John called from the front room.

I stuck my head back in the door. “All right, Sir John. You must know that you can’t abuse Vi’s hospitality much longer. Amuse yourself with some books or something and we’ll be back in just a minute.” This time we went all the way to the kitchen, testing the theory that maybe he wouldn’t hear us back here. “Vi, everyone knows that Falstaff is a literary character. He wasn’t even alive.”

“Vampires are mythical too. So what?”

“Two myths don’t make a reality. A literary creation can’t become real enough to sit in your living room, and vampires don’t exist. Can’t you see you’re being conned? He’s either deluded, or an actor playing a part, or both.”

Every objection I raised increased Vi’s enthusiasm. “If he’s acting he’s better than any Falstaff I’ve seen on stage. If I can only keep him around long enough to go to the Ren Faire, he’ll be a major hit. He’s got some wonderful stories to tell. I think they’ll make a terrific book.”

“He could be dangerous, Vi. Come in here.” I motioned her over. “I didn’t want to show you this. But I think he assaulted me.”

“He was violent?” Her expression dimmed a little. “What do you mean you
think
he assaulted you?”

“I went into some sort of a trance when I gave him a ride to the VA, and I woke up with this on my neck.” I held the hair back so she could see the marks on my neck.

“Wow that is so cool!” Her voice was tinged with awe. “Maybe he really is a vampire.”

“Violet!”

“I’ll watch him. Okay? I’m a night person anyway, and I’ll just stay up tonight with him. In the daytime he’ll either sleep or die.”

“Yes, well, what if he doesn’t do either? He could be on drugs or manic—some people with mania don’t sleep for days.”

“Well, we should know by dawn. If he’s a real vampire, he’ll go to earth. Except—”

“Except what?”

“Except I’m out of cat food and I really do have to go out for just an hour or so to do my shopping. If I’m going to watch him and get his stories for the next week or more, I’ll need to get a bunch of groceries.”

“Why don’t you let him help you?”

“Look at how he’s dressed.”

“So get him some clothing.”

“I was hoping you’d do that. He says he has money, but I need some help—you’re more assertive—”

I sighed. “Oh, all right.”

Chapter 25

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 6th continued

Vi went to get her coat.
I came back to the front room to find Sir John standing by a bookshelf holding an open volume, shifting from foot to foot, and muttering under his breath. “Look at this!”

It was a copy of
The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud.

“This is Freud, he was a physician in the early years of the 19th century—”

“I know who he was, Mistress Kit!” His voice rumbled in deep base tones of rage. “A man couldn’t venture out of his coffin in the past century without hearing the name. But here I see the arrant knave slanders me.”

He moved a pudgy finger down the page as he read. “…the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, is based on economized contempt and indignation. To be sure, we recognize in him the unworthy glutton and fashionably dressed swindler.” He threw back his head and roared, “‘Glutton!’ he calls me. Swindler! Fashionably dressed, I grant you—when pocket permits. But how would he know a swindler, unless he himself was one?”

“I had a colleague who called him ‘Sigmund Fraud.’”

Sir John started to laugh. “A brother swindler!” He tossed the book down, open, on the table, and subsided into the armchair, arms and legs spread wide with a gesture that conjured up a youth who was considerably fitter and carried a sword.

I ventured close enough to pick up the book and eluded his cheerful grab.

“Sir John!”

“Begging your pardon, madam. The ladies need more wooing, while a man stands, like a hungry vampire outside the door, begging invitation to enter.” He hung his head in mock contrition. “I await your pleasure, madam.”

Vi was right, the man had an advanced degree in Renaissance Faire behavior. It was alarming how easy it was to fall into the illusion that he was a time traveler from Elizabethan England.

I picked up the book, and examined the page he had been reading. “My recollection is that Freud did end up liking you, Sir John.”

“Indeed?” For all the bluster in his voice the big man had subsided. He raised his eyebrows as if challenging the long-dead analyst. “The man recants his slander after heaping insults on my good name?”

I took the book and looked little further down, “Here it is. ‘Sir John’s own humor really emanates from the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its joviality and security.’”

“Physical and morally defective. But jovial! This is damning with faint praise indeed.” His voice was a low growl.

“For Freud that was pretty close to a valentine.”

“I’d call him out for a duel,” Sir John muttered. “If I knew where he lived.”

“He’s been dead a long time, Sir John. Unless he’s become a vampire somewhere.”

“Not he. Not the type.”

“You’re probably right. I’m sure Freud would have preferred death to considering that there might be a reality in what he thought of as superstition.” As I said it, I wondered if it was Freud or myself I was describing.

Vi waved as she went out the door on her grocery errand.

Sir John stood and bowed goodbye. He turned to me. “So, wench, shall we to supper?”

I stepped back and put my hand up to guard my throat instinctively. “I thought vampires couldn’t eat solid food.”

“Nor can we. Come, Mistress Kit, there’s a way round many a locked door. Who calls me glutton? Let us go to the banquet hall or tavern, you eat and the smallest sip of your substance will last me the night.”

“I take it I get to pay the bill as well?”

He laughed, “So you do. So you do, indeed.” He dug into the pocket of those awful striped track suit pants and pulled out a much-worn velvet bag, opened it up and dug out a handful of odd looking coins, mostly dark with age and strangely lumpy looking. One of them, I noted, had been cut in half. He selected three and motioned for me to put out my hand. He pressed two dark coins into my palm with a solemn expression.

They seemed very old and crudely minted. “I’ve never seen a coin like this.”

“That is a groat. Worth much more now.”

I pointed to the face stamped in metal. “The man on there looks like you.”

He bent to look and I smelled his strange, scent. “Ah, that is Great Harry, the eighth by that name.”

“Henry the Eighth of England?”

He nodded. “The same.”

I examined the other. “This one says,
Dum Spiro Spero.”

“Meaning—‘While I breathe, I hope.’” He snaked the other arm around my waist to pull me close. “The third coin could be had, my lady, if you could be had.”

His hands were cold, and I felt a rush of fear. Then as if my skin reached out for his touch, a drowsy, sensual warmth stole over me. This must have been what happened in the car. I tried to pull away, but he held me fast.

“Let me go.”

For a moment we stood almost nose to nose, then I saw the coin he held up just out of reach. I laughed. “That third coin is an Eisenhower dollar, you cheapskate. Let’s go to dinner.”

He released me so quickly that I nearly stumbled.

“So it’s not a rumor that vampires—?” The question was half out before I realized how unwise the question was.

“What rumor would that be?” He smiled as if he knew what I had been about to ask.

“Never mind.” Had I really been so unwise as to think of questioning him about whether vampires had sex? I put the two coins he gave me in my pocket. They could have been fake, or rare and valuable enough to repay me for the money I was surely about to spend on him in high-priced, twenty-first century San Francisco.

I looked him in the eye. “I won’t let you drink my blood.”

“No need of that, fair one. Take me to where people eat and drink, and I will do the rest.”

I sighed. “Do you have anything else to wear?”

He glanced down at his outfit. “Not this?”

“Not for a nice restaurant.”

“Mistress Reba brought in a seamstress to clothe me in style. Then she took back the splendid garments in a fit of rage, and exiled me from the house. No need for fine clothes in the garden shed.” He raised his eyes mournfully to the ceiling.