The Serialist Read online

  You, too, opened me.

  Parting like any ripe breadfruit does.

  In a way no man ever had.

  Sweet summer sister.

  I recall.

  This got a warm round of applause and then Jane stepped up.

  “Thanks, Margaret, that was lovely. And you can read more of her work in the new issue of Coat. Not to be too pushy, ha.” There were a few chuckles. Jane laughed nervously at her little joke and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. She looked more beautiful than ever, in a blue dress, awkward and happy. “Our next reader, who is also appearing—well, not appearing, his work is appearing in our spring issue—is fictionist Michael Branborn, whose short story collection Impossible Tribes is due out this fall. Michael?”

  A tousled young man, younger than me anyway, in thick black eyeglass frames, and wearing a leather jacket over a vintage Happy Days T-shirt, got up and hugged Jane chastely before acknowledging the hearty applause. Clearly he was a local favorite. In the front row, I recognized the shaved head of Ryan, Jane’s husband. He wore plastic red eyeglass frames and a Gumby T-shirt and sat with a woman whom I recognized as important from somewhere. Maybe on Charlie Rose.

  “Thanks,” the young writer began. “This story is from my book. It’s called, ‘The Alien Invasion of Scarsdale.’” There was a lot of overly enthusiastic laughter at this. Branborn laughed too. “I used to really dig these toys called Transformers. Does anybody here remember Transformers?” More whoops and howls. “Cool. Well this takes place in the summer of 1990, which, as you might remember, was the last year for the original Japanese line of Transformers.”

  “Yes!” someone shouted, and Michael laughed again.

  “All right. Cool. Ha. OK so anyway, here’s the story.” He took a sip of Brooklyn Beer from the bottle. “ ‘Josh racing down the driveway, skidding to a stop on his Schwinn Racer five-speed. I had envied that bike ever since he got it for his birthday. Chrome handle bars and banana seat.”

  This got a nice laugh too, and unable to swallow anymore, I got up and went downstairs, where, like some guilt-stricken perv, I loitered about in the restroom, pretending to wash my hands. I searched my bloodshot eyes in the mirror, counted my gray hairs, and by the time I climbed back up, Branborn had reached his climax.

  “ ‘And so . . . , ’” he was now intoning, beer raised, manuscript aloft, “ ‘we fall at last into the arms of our own lawn, which was, that summer, the greenest green in all of Scarsdale.’”

  Jubilant applause. The tattooed pixie sitting in front of me whispered to her multipierced friend: “I love that, ‘greenest green.’”

  I fled once more, this time to the bar. I was about to order a shot of Pepto-Bismol and split when I felt a tap on my arm.

  “Hi, Jane.” We exchanged an awkward cheek kiss and shoulder-level hug. “How are you?”

  “Super. Everything’s excellent,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Fantastically superb.”

  She laughed. “Did you like the reading?”

  “Absolutely incredible.”

  “OK, OK. I get it. Here, take this anyway.” She handed me a copy of The Torn Plaid Coat. The cover of course was a plaid, this time drawn in what looked like crayon, with a ragged tear actually die-cut into the paper, exposing part of the contents page.

  “Thanks,” I said. By then a small herd of writers and artists had gathered around us, or around her, as I was quickly closed out of the circle. “Ted, Kylie, Jeremy, Sloane,” she sang. “This is Harry. A friend.” I winced at that.

  “Hi, everyone.” I waved roundly, searching for a way out. There was a lull as the group regarded me. Jane pointed to a tall fuzzy man. “Ted’s novel just got picked up.”

  “Great,” I said.

  He put his palms together and dipped his beard.

  “Actually, you might be interested,” Jane went on. “It’s about coming of age, really, in an eccentric family in Ann Arbor in the nineties.”

  “Great,” I said again. “That does sound interesting.”

  “Don’t congratulate me too much,” Ted said. “Selling it was the easy part. Now I have to write it.” He mock whispered, “I’m sentencing myself to Yaddo.”

  We all chuckled.

  “God, don’t do that,” drawled Kylie, blowing smoke through her bangs. She’d written an anorexic memoir called Skintight. I recognized her from the naked picture on the cover, which I’d ogled in the store, without buying it, of course. “I wrote my book sitting alone in a room at the Chelsea.”

  “Yeah, the bathroom,” snapped Jeremy, a hooded and baggy-jeaned fellow, who’d written a memoir about growing up rich and misunderstood in Connecticut as the son of a famous writer. He turned to me. “I never even leave Brooklyn anymore. What do you do?”

  “Podiatrist,” I said. “In Queens. I have to get back, actually. Emergency. Poor kid might lose a toe. Excuse me.” But I found my retreat blocked by Ryan, pale ale in hand. Why had I ever left my room? In my life, I mean.

  “Hey, Bloch. How are you?”

  “Ryan, hi, what’s up?” We shook hands heartily.

  “So Harry, what are you working on?” he asked with a smile.

  “Oh, Ryan, the usual bullshit,” I said, and laughed shrilly.

  “Seriously,” he said, “when are you going to write something real, with your real name on it?”

  “I am, I am,” I told him. “It’s a coming-of-age novel. Only the Lame Know Queens.”

  “Seriously, Harry,” he said again, in a warmer tone, and behind their twin windows, his eyes blinked kindly at me.

  And then, I don’t know why, for no good reason, maybe to chase away that look, too close to pity, or to squash the slightly human feeling I was almost having near someone I couldn’t afford to like, I said, “Actually, Ryan, I’m cowriting a book with Darian Clay, the serial killer.”

  “Really?” he said, stepping back. “You don’t say?”

  “Holy shit,” Jeremy broke in, bumping into Ryan. “The one they’re about to execute?”

  “He took those pictures, I remember,” Kylie said, joining the circle. “He chopped up those girls.”

  “They never found the heads,” Ted added through his beard.

  “Did you really meet him?” blond Sloane, the spoken word artist, asked as she sidled up. “That is so creepy,” she added, standing a bit too close.

  “Yeah, of course,” I told her, with a casual smile. “I’m going back to interview him. They’re going to execute him in like eightysomething days.”

  A brief silence descended, though this time I was not the uneasy one. I felt at peace. Perhaps the angel of death passed over. Perhaps each reflected on his or her own proud project and the dust it would one day become. Jane stared at the faux-torn copy of Coat in her hand. Ryan raised his beer bottle to his lips. They all shut up for a moment and looked at the ceiling or the floor, as if in acknowledgment of what I myself had suddenly decided: I was going to write this book. Finally, there was a real writer in the room.

  As I nodded good-bye and turned to go, I heard Jeremy whisper to Jane. “He’s also a podiatrist.”

  Walking to the train, I left Dani a message telling her I was going ahead with the book. When I emerged in Flushing, there was a response on my voice mail. She was at work, and again noise drowned her out, but I could hear that she was excited. “Come in for a free drink if you want,” she shouted, and then giggled. “Unless that’s totally weird and inappropriate.”

  As opposed to what? I thought, although I didn’t call back. I ate some bibimbop at a Korean place and went home, to bed, alone. But I was smiling.

  PART TWO

  April 16, 2009–May 5, 2009

  21

  From Crimson Darkness Falls, chapter 6:

  I have decided. I am ready to give myself to Aram. I am ready to be turned. As if there was ever really any doubt, any choice. I know full well that either he or Ivy could have taken me any time, by force, if they so wished. But the truth it h
as taken me longer to admit is that I would not have resisted. I was waiting for them. I was yearning.

  Still they did not take me. Cruelly, they gave me my freedom, my choice. Why cruelly? Because in the end it is so much more humiliating to make me beg. Is that not the ultimate demonstration of the hunter’s power, when the prey surrenders, offers her throat to the fang? The spider, the cobra, the flame that calls the moth: are they killers or lovers who know us better than ourselves? After all, the vampire must be invited in.

  You might as well know, I was still a virgin. Snicker if you want, my friends all did, leaving condoms in my locker at the swimming pool and signing me up for creepy online dating sites as a prank. But the truth is that I was not a prude, not scared, at least not in the way they all thought. I was scared of myself. Here is my true secret, which I’d never whispered to anyone: a virgin, I longed for defilement. My purity cried out for darkness. My dad always told me not to give away my “precious flower” to anyone unworthy, but the whole time, my heart was silently beseeching, Daddy, don’t you see? I long for the cruel stranger who will pluck my tender blossom and fling it in the muck!

  For weeks, after I learned the truth about Ivy and Aram, they made not the slightest move or threat. Ivy even ceased her nocturnal visits to my room. Instead, they seemed to be tutoring me in their history, as if helping me to decide.

  Aram is more than nine hundred years old, though he appears to be even younger than forty-three, the age at which he was turned by Ivy, who must be over a thousand, though she looks like she’s twenty-five. Ivy is vampire royalty, the descendant of a bloodline, a House, they call it, that goes back to ancient times. She is a pure, born vampire, which makes her extremely powerful and rare. Still, when she met Aram, she fell hopelessly in love. He was a knight then, a Crusader journeying to the Holy Land. In Egypt he visited the brothel Ivy was running, where the women were actually all vampiresses. Infatuated with the handsome, charming knight, she turned him. They were married in Jerusalem and he carried his bride back to Europe like the plague.

  They built a fortune, as mercenaries, brigands and pirates. They learned Greek and Latin, mathematics and philosophy, studying with scholars and monks who never suspected they were the ones harvesting children from the villagers, who blamed it on Gypsies and Jews. They attended conservatory in Vienna. They traveled through India and across China, learning Sanskrit and meditating in caves for years, then spent a decade in Japan learning calligraphy, flower arranging and swordsmanship.

  They went everywhere—Africa, South America, even the Arctic, with a cargo of live victims chained below decks for food. They fought in both world wars, on both sides. They’d been in New York for decades and had amassed yet another fortune in real estate, buying up property just after the Depression. Through a web of false names and companies, they controlled nightclubs, drug dens, bars, trendy restaurants and a famous art gallery. They wore the best clothes, owned the finest of everything, and feasted on the most beautiful boys and girls in the world.

  Yet they were bored. Eternally and exquisitely bored. Ivy, who had experienced every sensual pleasure possible, and found every man and woman she encountered at her feet, spent most days in her room, reading poetry. Aram was sick to death of his own hunger, his bloodlust, and felt like a junkie when, with nightfall, he once again needed to seek his prey and bring his trophies home to his beloved. They loved each other utterly, divinely and satanically, to the point of despair, but for two such passionate souls to be together so long inevitably led to epic fights that those of us who break up every six months can’t imagine. That was when the games of killing each other began: shooting, stabbing, hanging, drowning. It amused their jaded senses and relieved the tension, while hiding a darker truth: the only thing that still thrilled and frightened them, that made their pulse quicken, was the thought of dying together.

  I think this is the reason they gave me the choice. To let me see far down that path before I took the first step, the one with no return. I think this is why Aram spent so many hours working with me, going through the artifacts and telling me about his life. Why he let me see him when he returned from the hunt, hair wild, clothes torn and dirty, blood on his teeth and the look of a victorious predator in his blazing green eyes. But why me? Why did they deign to grant me the decision at all, when they’d left a trail of empty bodies behind them? All I knew was that my own hunger was growing stronger and stronger. The more Aram warned me away, the more I wanted him, and to be his. Although in so many ways, without saying it, he seemed to be urging me to flee while I still could, another force, deeper than fear, was drawing me, hopelessly, helplessly closer.

  Finally, the night before my twenty-first birthday, I couldn’t stand any more. Aram was showing me a battle-ax, circa 1400. As he hoisted the weapon in his hands, those hands that could caress a violin or crush a windpipe, I saw that distant look in his eyes.

  “I took many lives with this,” he mused.

  I reached out and touched him, the tips of my fingers kissing his wrist. “Take mine.”

  He looked at me curiously. I let my fingers circle his strong but surprisingly thin and delicate wrist. “Not with your weapon. With your lips. Your arms. Your fangs. Take my life. Take me.” Summoning all my courage, I looked up and met his eyes. “Please.”

  He said nothing. He held my gaze. He set down the ax and took me in his arms. Then he bent his face to mine and let his lips brush my lips before settling his mouth on my throat. I gasped as he entered. How can I describe this feeling? Pain filled with pleasure, sweetness sharpened with fear. And then the fear melted as he drank from me, and I lost myself, feeling his presence everywhere within me, every nerve, every vein . . .

  “Aram!” It was Ivy, there before us. Aram pulled away, smiling, my blood oozing through his lips. He pulled Ivy close. He pressed his mouth to hers. He fed her my blood from his lips. While she sucked on his mouth her eyes fixed, wildly, on mine.

  I held my breath. I waited for the change. For something. Nothing came.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  Smiling and licking his lips, Aram turned to Ivy. “Would you like to explain?”

  Ivy leaned toward me. “What is your mother’s real name?” she asked.

  “My mother?” My mother died giving birth to me. I am named after her. “Her name was Sasha Smith, why? She was an orphan. She never knew her real name.”

  “Your mother’s name,” Ivy said, “was Sasha Divina Diamonedes de Troth, Princess of the Royal House of Troth. She was my cousin.”

  “What?” I felt like I was dreaming. I wanted to laugh.

  “We played and hunted together as children. She fell in love with a mortal as I did. But instead of turning your father, as I turned Aram, she attempted to turn herself, and live as humans lived. It killed her.”

  “But what are you saying?” I asked. “That I’m some kind of vampire?”

  “You are a half-breed. Very rare. Few survive. And to carry royal blood, that is unique. We searched the world for you. Watched and protected you from afar. And brought you here when the time was right.”

  “But why? Why now?”

  Aram put his hand on mine. “The reason my bite didn’t turn you is that your own vampire blood makes you impervious. You are inoculated. But from the day you turn twenty-one, you will begin to grow and change. To develop new powers, unique to a half-breed. If you train with us you will be even stronger. And then . . .” He hesitated. Ivy took my other hand.

  “Then when you are ready, dear cousin, we will let you feed on us. Drink our blood. And then you will be as we are. Forever.”

  22

  The first woman on Clay’s list was Morgan Chase. She lived in a quaint little building on Horatio Street, in the West Village, and worked in corporate banking, which is what it takes to live like a bohemian in the Village these days. She was in her thirties, tall and slim, with fashionably cut dark hair, and dressed in a perfectly fitting but very subdued sui
t. Prada, I think, or Jil Sander. Her living room, when I met her, was tastefully decorated and immaculate, with a lot of well-worn old friends on the shelves: the darkly tressed Brontë sisters were there, weeping together, beside fat Pamela and Clarissa, promiscuous, sprawling Trollope, and even Walpole and Radcliffe, the original moody Gothics, with their crypts and dungeons and moss. No doubt if I peeked behind Pamela’s skirt I’d find The Story of O. Her coffee was good and she used real cream. In other words, Morgan was highly educated, attractive and stylish. Really, under different circumstances, I would have been happy to take her out myself, but then I’d never ask. She was clearly out of my league.

  Perhaps you are surprised to learn that this is the kind of woman who writes love letters to a murderer of women. Let’s pause here and consider this fact, because it’s a question that will come up again, and honestly, I don’t want to waste too much time thinking about it. I’m not that big on character motivation, frankly, with my vampires and wizards, my hit men and nymphomaniacs. I’m really not even that interested in motivation as a person, though perhaps I should be. Why anyone, myself included, did what we did was a hopeless mystery to me.