The Vampire Tapestry (3 page)

* * *

Jackson came down from the roof with watering eyes. A damp wind was rising.

“That leak is fixed for a while,” he said, hunching to blow on his chapped hands. “But the big shots at Buildings and Grounds got to do something better before next winter. The snow will just pile up and soak through again.”

Katje polished the silver plate with a gray flannel. “What do you know about vampires?” she said.

“How bad you want to know?”

He had no right to joke with her like that, he whose ancestors had been heathen savages. “What do you know about vampires?” she repeated firmly.

“Not a thing.” He grinned. “But you just keep on going to the movies with Nettie and you’ll find out all about that kind of crap. She got to have the dumbest taste in movies there ever was.”

* * *

Katje looked down from the landing at Nettie, who had just let herself into the Club. Nettie’s hair was all in tight little rings like pigs’ tails. She called, “Guess what I went and did?”

“Your hair,” Katje said. “You got it done curly.”

Nettie hung her coat crookedly on the rack and peered into the foyer mirror. “I’ve been wanting to try a permanent for months, but I couldn’t find the spare money. So the other night I went over to the sleep lab.” She came upstairs.

“What was it like?” Katje said, looking more closely at Nettie’s face; was she paler than usual?
Yes
, Katje thought with sudden apprehension.

“It’s nothing much. You just lie down on this couch, and they plug you into these machines, and you sleep. They keep waking you up in the middle of your dreams so you can describe what’s going on, and you do some kind of tests—I don’t remember, it’s all pretty hazy afterwards. Next morning there’s a sort of debriefing interview, and you collect your pay and go home. That’s all there is to it.”

“How do you feel?”

“Okay. I was pretty dragged out yesterday. Dr. Weyland gave me a list of stuff I’m supposed to eat to fix that. He got me the day off, too. Wait a minute, I need a smoke before we go into the linens.”

She lit a cigarette. “Really, there was nothing to it. I’d go back for another session in a minute if they’d have me. Good money for no work; not like this.” She blew a stream of smoke contemptuously at the linen-closet door.

Katje said, “Someone has to do what we do.”

“Yeah, but why us?” Nettie lowered her voice. “We ought to get a couple of professors in there with the bedding and the inventory lists, and us two go sit in their big leather chairs and drink coffee like ladies.”

Katje had already done that as Henrik’s wife. What she wanted now was to sit on the
stoep
after a day’s hunting, sipping drinks and trading stories of the kill in the pungent dusk, away from the smoky, noisy hole of a kitchen: a life that Henrik had rebelled against as parasitical, narrow, and dull. His grandfather, like Katje’s, had trekked right out of the Transvaal when it became too staid for him and had started over. Katje thought sometimes that challenging his own people about the future of the land, the government, and the natives had been Henrik’s way of striking out afresh. For herself, she wished only to return to her old country and its old ways.

Nettie, still hanging back from the linen closet, ground out her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. “Coming to the meeting Friday?”

Dr. Weyland was giving a lecture that same evening, something about nightmares. Katje had been thinking about attending. Now she must decide. Going to his lecture was not like going to his laboratory; it seemed safe enough. “No union meeting,” she said. “I’ve told you, they’re all Reds in those unions. I do all right for myself. I’ll be going to Dr. Weyland’s open lecture that night.”

“Okay, if you think it’s fine to make what we make doing this stuff.” Nettie shrugged. “Me, I’ll skip his lecture and take the bucks for sleeping in his lab. You ought to go over there, you know? There’s hardly anything doing during intersession with almost everybody gone—they could take you right away. You get extra pay and time off, and besides Dr. Weyland’s kind of cute, in a gloomy way. He leaned over me to plug something into the wall, and I said, ‘Go ahead, you can bite my neck any time.’ You know, he was sort of hanging over me, and his lab coat was sort of spread, like a cape, all menacing and batlike—except white instead of black, of course—and anyway I couldn’t resist a wisecrack.”

Katje gave her a startled glance. Nettie, missing it, moved past her into the closet and pulled out the step stool. Katje said cautiously, “What did he say to that?”

“Nothing, but he smiled.” Nettie climbed up onto the step stool. “You know how his mouth turns sort of down at the corners? It makes him look grim all the time? Well, real serious anyway. When he smiles you’d be amazed how good he looks; he could really turn a girl on. We’ll start up top in this closet, all right? I bet all the guys who work nights at the labs get those kind of jokes all the time. Later he said he was hoping you’d come by.”

Taking a deep breath of the sweet, sunshine smell of the clean sheets, Katje said, “He asked you to ask me to go there?”

“He said to remind you.”

The first pile of blankets was handed down from the top shelf. Katje said, “He really accepts anyone into this project?”

“Unless you’re sick, or if you’ve got funny metabolism or whatever. They do a blood test on you, like at the doctor’s.”

That was when Katje noticed the little round Band-Aid on the inside of Nettie’s elbow, right over the vein.

* * *

Miss Donelly was sharing a jug of cheap wine with three other faculty women in the front lounge. Katje made sure the coffee machine was filled for them and then slipped outside. She still walked alone on campus when she chose. She wasn’t afraid of the rapist, who hadn’t been heard of in several days. A pleasurable tension drove her toward the lighted windows of the labs. This was like moving through the sharp air of the bushveldt at dusk. Awareness of danger was part of the pleasure.

The lab blinds, tilted down, let out only threads of light. She could see nothing. She hovered a moment, then turned back, hurrying now. The mood was broken, and she felt silly. Daniel from Security would be furious to find her alone out here, and what could she tell him? That she felt herself to be on the track of something wild and it made her feel young?

Miss Donelly and the others were still talking. Katje was glad to hear their wry voices and gusts of laughter, equally glad not to have to sit with them. She had never been comfortable among Henrik’s highly educated colleagues.

She had more on her mind than school gossip, too, and she needed to think. Her own impulsive act excited and astonished her: sallying forth to the lab at dusk at some risk from the rapist (her mind swerved neatly around the other, the imaginary danger), but for what? To sniff the breeze and search the ground for tracks?

The thought of Dr. Weyland haunted her: Dr. Weyland as the charming, restless visitor prowling the Club kitchen, Dr. Weyland thrusting young Denton aside with contemptuous strength, Dr. Weyland as the heartless predator she had at first thought him that morning in the parking lot of the lab building.

* * *

She was walking to the bus stop when Jackson drove up and offered her a lift. She was glad to accept. The lonesomeness of the campus was accentuated by darkness and the empty circles of light around the lampposts.

Jackson pulled aside a jumble of equipment on the front seat—radio parts, speakers and wires—to make room for her. Two books were on the floor by her feet. He said, “The voodoo book is left over from my brother Paul. He went through a thing, you know, trying to trace back our family down in Louisiana. The other one was just laying around, so I brought it along.”

The other one was
Dracula
. Katje felt the gummy spot where the price sticker had been peeled off. Jackson must have bought it for her at the discount bookstore downtown. She didn’t know how to thank him easily, so she said nothing.

“It’s a long walk to the bus stop,” Jackson said, scowling as he drove out through the stone gates of the college drive. “They should’ve fixed it so you could stay on in faculty housing after your husband died.”

“Our place was too big for one person,” Katje said. Sometimes she missed the house on the east side of campus, but her present lodgings away from school offered more privacy. He shook his head. “Well, I think it’s a shame, you being a foreign visitor and all.”

Katje laughed. “After twenty-five years in this country, a visitor?”

He laughed, too. “Yeah. Well, you sure have moved around more than most while you been here: from lady of leisure to, well, maid work.” She saw the flash of his grin. “Like my aunt that used to clean for white women up the hill. Don’t you mind?”

She minded when she thought working at the Club would never end. Sometimes the Africa that she remembered seemed too vague a place to actually go back to, and the only future she could see was keeling over at the end while vacuuming the Club rugs, like a farmer worn to death at his plow...None of this was Jackson’s business. “Did your aunt mind her work?” she snapped. Jackson pulled up opposite the bus stop. “She said you just do what it comes to you to do and thank God for it.”

“I say the same.”

He sighed. “You’re a lot like her, crazy as that sounds. There’s a bunch of questions I want to ask you sometime, about how it was when you lived in Africa; I mean, was it anything like in the movies—you know,
King Solomon’s Mines
and like that?”

Katje had never seen that movie, but she knew that nothing on film could be like her Africa. “You should go to Africa and see for yourself,” she said.

“I’m working on it. There’s your bus coming. Wait a minute, listen—no more walking alone out here after dark, there’s not enough people around now. You got to arrange to be picked up. Didn’t you hear?

That guy jumped another girl last night. She got away, but still. Daniel says he found one of the back doors to the Club unlocked. You be careful, will you? I don’t want to have to come busting in there to save you from some deranged six-foot pre-med on the rampage, know what I mean?”

“Oh, I take care of myself,” Katje said, touched and annoyed and amused all at once by his solicitude.

“Sure. Only I wish you were about fifteen years younger and studying karate, you know?” As Katje got out of the car with the books in her arm he added, “You told me once you did a lot of hunting in Africa when you were a kid; handling guns.”

“Yes, a lot.”

“Okay. Take this.” He pulled metal out of his pocket and put it in her hand. It was a gun. “Just in case. You know how to use it, right?”

She closed her fingers on the compact weight of it. “But where did you get this? Do you have papers for it? The laws here are very strict—”

He yanked the door shut and said through the open window, “You going to holler ‘law’ at me, you can just give the damn thing back. No? Okay, then, hurry up before you miss your bus.”

* * *

Dracula
was a silly book. She had to force herself to read on in spite of the absurd Van Helsing character with his idiot English—an insult to anyone of Dutch descent. The voodoo book was impenetrable, and she soon gave it up.

The handgun was another matter. She sat at the Formica-topped table in her kitchenette and turned the shiny little automatic in the light, thinking,
How did Jackson come by such a thing?
For that matter, how did he afford his fancy sports car and all that equipment he carried in it from time to time—where did it all come from and where did it go? He was up to something, probably lots of things, what they called

“hustling” nowadays. A good thing he had given her the gun. It could only get him into trouble to carry it around with him. She knew how to handle weapons, and surely with a rapist at large the authorities would be understanding about her lack of a license for it.

The gun needed cleaning. She worked on it as best she could without proper tools. It was a cheap

.25-caliber gun. Back home your gun was a fine rifle, made to drop a charging rhino in its tracks, not a stubby little nickel-plated toy like this for scaring off muggers and rapists. Yet she wasn’t sorry to have it. Her own hunting gun that she had brought from Africa years ago was in storage with the extra things from the old house on campus. She had missed the presence of that rifle lately. She had missed it because, she realized now with a nervous little jump of the heart, she had become engaged in stalking a dangerous animal. She was stalking Dr. Weyland. She went to sleep with the gun on the night table next to her bed and woke listening for the roar so she would know in what direction to look tomorrow for the lion’s spoor. There was a hot rank odor of African dust in the air and she sat up in bed thinking,
He’s been here.
It was a dream. But so clear! She went to look out the front window without turning on the light, and it was the ordinary street below that seemed unreal. Her heart drummed in her chest. Not that he would come after her here on Dewer Street, but he had sent Nettie to the Club, and now he had sent this dream into her sleep. Creatures stalking each other over time grew a bond from mind to mind. But that was in another life. Was she losing her sanity? She read for a little in the Afrikaans Bible she had brought with her from home but so seldom opened in recent years. What gave comfort in the end was to put Jackson’s automatic into her purse to carry with her. A gun was supposedly of no use against a vampire—you needed a wooden stake, she remembered reading, or you had to cut off his head to kill him—but the weight of the weapon in her handbag reassured her.

* * *

The lecture hall was full in spite of the scarcity of students on campus this time of year. These special talks were open to the town as well.

Dr. Weyland read his lecture in a stiff, abrupt manner. He stood slightly cramped over the lectern, which was low for his height, and rapped out his sentences, rarely raising his glance from his notes. In his tweeds and heavy-rimmed glasses he was the picture of the scholarly recluse drawn out of the study into the limelight. But Katje saw more than that. She saw the fluid power of his arm as he scooped from the air an errant sheet of notes, the almost disdainful ease with which he established his dominion over the audience. His lecture was brief; he fulfilled with unmistakable impatience the duty set every member of the faculty to give one public address per year on an aspect of his work, in this case “The Demonology of Dreams.”