The Tower

The dark girl in the black coat walked to a disused railway bridge by night. Her eyes were as her clothes—the sky—were, and her nails were lacquered with the red that they would soon be from other matter.

A man awaited her, his white hair blown up into the wind like a waterfall in reverse.

His face, in profile, was young, but not modern, the bone structure suggestive of a medieval prince, or more precisely a Victorian painter’s interpretation of one.

The young man’s balance upon the bridge was astonishing. He crouched on one slat, peering over the edge into the thrashing river below without evident dread of falling.

He raised his head at the girl’s approach, but did not look at her until she spoke.

“Gunther,” she said, into the wind, her raised voice nearly lost to its howling. “Gunther Dietrich?”

“No,” said the boy. “It is Gun, now.”

His eyes seemed calm, perhaps even amused by the question. His hands, across his knees, were thin and beringed, like a beautiful woman’s. The nails, which the girl had expected to be long, were not, yet still gave the impression of sharpness.

“Gun, then,” said the girl, and she sat down cautiously beside him, gripping the bridge with both hands, her jaw gritted. “My name is Charlotte Dance. They told me I’d find you out here.”

“Who are they?” Gun asked.

Charlotte looked at him, seeing nothing in the winter glass of his eyes now but interest.

“I don’t know,” she said, shortly. “I asked a bunch of people. Street folks. Carnies. Artsy types in underground cafés and shitty music venues. All of them were connected, somehow, and all of them knew you. They said that this was where you’d be tonight. So I came.”

Gun’s head tilted aside, the direction of his hair in its mad surge changing with that slight motion.

“I see,” he said. “And how did you come to know these people?”

“My sister, Darla. She hung out with all of them. Those last few weeks she was alive, that’s where she was. So I asked around after you. Figured if they didn’t know where she is, you would.”

Charlotte crossed her arms over her chest to fend off the nipping cold. The young man did not seem to feel it, half-closing his eyes luxuriously, as though against a sea borne breeze.

He said, “Your sister is missing.”

“Yes, she’s missing,” snapped Charlotte. “You know she is. Darla came to speak to you, and she hasn’t been seen since. So where is she?”

Gun leaned forward slightly, provoking her to inch across the edge of the bridge, away from him. He smelled of incense and fir, churches, forests. His clothes, she noticed, were expensive, the shirt beneath his jacket an oily silk unbuttoned low down his chest, which was as hairless and pallid as his cheekbones.

“Do you know why she came to me?” he asked. “Your sister?”

His accent was Germanic, spoken in a drawl that, though polite, told of a natural arrogance.

“I know why she wanted to see you,” said Charlotte, “but I don’t believe it. The street people, the circus people. They all have some idea about you, a superstition. I think you just let them believe it’s true. I guess you just like feeling powerful, or something.”

The boy smiled. The expression did not warm his face, but rather made him seem less like a man, and more something else.

“We all like to feel that way,” said Gun. “Powerful. People come to me because they hope that I will offer that feeling to them as a gift.”

Charlotte put her hands inside her coat to stop them shaking, or else to conceal them from the boy.

“I hear that you do, sometimes,” she said. “Gift power to people.”

“Sometimes.”

“But not always.”

Gun shook his head.

“There would be too many like me, then.”

The young woman’s answer was spittle through her teeth.

“Vampires.”

“Yes,” said Gun, levelly. “But you don’t believe that.”

“Why would I?” asked Charlotte, and she laughed, an embittered cough of sound. “Life’s terrible enough without making shit up, too.”

The young man looked away into the night, and his irises then were siblings to that darkness.

“It is not terrible, to be what I am.”

“Isn’t it?” asked Charlotte. “Why would my sister flip a coin between living like that forever or straight up dying?”

Gun shrugged.

“You know her reasons better than I.”

Charlotte’s hands inside her coat were fists.

“I know she was depressed. But to go out like that? They say you just drink the ones you turn down. Cut their throats and go at them like an animal. Why would Darla risk dying in so much pain just to be whatever the hell you say you are?”

“To be a vampire changes perspective,” said Gun. “If she had the powers I have, the length of life that I have. She would not have felt the same, afterwards.”

The young woman stared into the boy’s face, and saw him unabashed by her hatred.

“But you didn’t change her,” she said. “You killed her.”

Gun’s chin lifted archly.

“How are you so sure?”

“She told me she’d come back to tell me, and she didn’t. Anyway, I felt it: Darla, going out of the world. Don’t laugh,” Charlotte added. “We’ve always been close like that, sensing stuff about each other.”

“I am not laughing,” said Gun. “I know of such things. They are not strange to me.”

Charlotte eyed the beautiful, sombre face, a study in Roman marble. He did not lie, had not uttered one since she had called out to him across the bridge, but she still thought him capable of it, for his own amusement.

“Well, that’s how I know that Darla’s gone,” said Charlotte. “That you murdered her. Why?”

“Chance,” said Gun, with an honesty so flat as to be a cruelty in his absence of attachment. “It did not fall in her favour, that night.”

“Bullshit,” said Charlotte, and she looked at him through tears that broke her vision like a shell. “You’re lying. You just didn’t want to change her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know how you pick the ones you spare.”

A silence lanced briefly between them, the cutting through of Gun’s sly play.

“You make people choose tarot cards,” said Charlotte. “And the reading of almost any of them as a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is subjective. You didn’t want to change my sister.”

Unmoved, Gun withdrew a tattered cardboard box from his trouser pocket began to pass it back and forth between his hands.

“You do not want to know which card she chose, then,” he commented, and Charlotte stood up at once, swaying in the wind like a wounded drunk.

“The fuck is wrong with you?” she demanded. “You killed her, and you’re talking to me like that? Trying to get a reaction out of me? I don’t believe in vampires. You would have screwed her over no matter what.”

She made as if to lunge at Gun, and he did not flinch. If anything he leaned in closer to her, attracted to the violence of her grief.

“Assholes like you are the reason she didn’t want to be here anymore,” said Charlotte. “Taking advantage of vulnerable people like her. That happened to Darla over and over until she couldn’t take it, and then this is how she went out. Judged and slaughtered by some— what are you, twenty? Twenty-one? A fucking kid.”

She herself was not much older, only by a year or so.

Slipping the tarot deck back into his pocket, Gun said, “I am not a kid.”

Charlotte laughed again, leaning down so as to sneer into his face.

“Yeah, you are,” she said. “A spoiled damn kid.”

Something changed in Gun, then, like a shadow blackening a wall at some red sundown.

“No,” he said. “I will show you.”

The young man stood up on the edge of the bridge, his jacket flying suddenly in a tongue of vicious wind. As he turned to look at Charlotte his face and hair became a white mist, then a red smoke, his features now mere holes in the twisting mass above his clothes.

Charlotte swayed, crying out only once before she was overcome by silence.

The boy did not approach, only stood before her, a beast of air. Of darkness.

“I am tired of being disbelieved,” he said, quietly. “All this second life I have hidden nothing, and always it is the same until I show them this.”

Charlotte remained soundless, watching him. Her fear seemed to have calmed her from her rage.

“I understand,” said Gun, “that what I am is a story to people, a fairy-tale. Then, once they believe in it, they do not like it. But my people, we are still that. People. We have lives, and they are worth living. Your sister wanted this.”

“So why didn’t you give it to her?” Charlotte whispered— still, he heard her above the weather that clapped about them both like God’s hands upon the world.

“She pulled the Tower,” said Gun, and as he sat down again it was in the shape of a boy again. “She would not have been at peace with what she would become. There would be chaos, upheaval, always.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in your own horseshit,” said Charlotte, managing, now that fear had passed, to be angry again. “You could have given her a chance.”

“You do not understand my responsibility. I cannot turn all who ask me.”

“You don’t have to change anybody at all. That’s your choice. You’re martyring yourself for what? To make what you are matter?”

Gun’s eyes narrowed with a new and curious slyness.

“Why did you come here, Charlotte? Not to kill me. You do not think you can. To degrade me, yes. But something more.”

Lowering herself gingerly to sit by him again, Charlotte asked, “Where is my sister’s body?”

“Buried,” said Gun. “I have servants for that. They will show it to you, if I ask them.”

The young woman shuddered with a spiteful vehemence.

“You disgust me.”

Gun examined her without visible emotion.

“Do I?”

“Yes,” said Charlotte, and then she altered, calcified into a state beyond her grief. “I’ll tell you why I came. To take something from you the way you took my sister from me. If you hadn’t been real, it would have been something else. I don’t know what. But you are, so it’s this.”

Suddenly Charlotte jerked sideways and climbed atop Gun with a liquid aggression, a pocket knife in one hand, brought from an inner pocket of her coat up against the shallow of his neck.

Gun did not prevent her, nor did he change his shape, though like breathing, like blinking, he could have done so.

As Charlotte sank the blade into his throat his slender arms went about her back to rock her against him, allowing her to shake her face through the first sprig of blood and drink of it in ecstasy.

Whatever was in him—a poison, a ghost of death, the devil’s magic—presented a feeling neither of coming into the world or of leaving it. It was as though like some Argonaut Charlotte had come upon a fleece of gold and through its mantle was made a king, all the earth prostrate to her in what she had become.

She pressed her mouth to the slit of Gun’s throat and probed her tongue through the wound, opening it to her thirst like a cunt.

Their faces were both helms of scarlet, Gun’s upright to the heavens, joyful.

Half-delirious, Charlotte cut her own fingers and pressed them to his lips, against his teeth, cutting them further on their edges. She barely felt the pain of it, only the cities of new and foreign senses built within her by her change.

“Drink, you monster,” said Charlotte. “They told me you have to, your people, for me to be like you. So fucking drink.”

Gun did.

His obedience was sickening, sensuous and eager. He brought a hand to her wrist and pulled her fingers into the red well of his throat, milking her of ichor till she gave no more.

His body, which had been cool against her, felt strangely warm, as though absorbing Charlotte’s fury like some pale mirror.

She had expected him to fight her, to kill her; she would not have cared. Yet it seemed instead that Gun accepted her loathing and welcomed it as readily as desire.

The attack aroused him, she felt it against her, hard as coal, a filthy stone. An answering interest careered through Charlotte’s loins, scarce though she had expected it, or asked.

Gun’s eyes, watching hers, were onyx plates of want.

She moved upon him, undid him from his clothes, hating herself for the instinct that led her to take him in. His white hair covered her, as though to give her back what dignity slipped from her flesh as she rose and fell on the serpent of their Eden.

Gun let himself be fucked by her. She kissed and kissed his throat, and groaned, a suckling animal.

He had thought of this from the first, she realised, had saw in her something of worth he hadn’t in her sister. Gun would have propositioned Charlotte through his cards, only he’d found he liked her fury more, and the rare opportunity of challenge.

Yet it was only upon the arc of his pleasure, at which his hands went with a cruel cleverness under her clothes in search of hers that Charlotte undid her lips from his vein.

“Enough,” she said, and scrambling backwards from him forgot the gully of air beyond the bridge.

She fell like a dashed stone into the river below, too wild with the high of blood to fear the drop, or else knowing by instinct that she need not.

Though the waters took her, would bear her, seemingly dead, to the bank the following morning she would crawl free of it, spitting oysters of ichor into the dirt.

Perhaps she would find again Gun Dietrich, whom, smiling coolly downwards, had long decided that he would not run from her approach.

“You would have pulled the Tower, also,” he said, to the dwindling shape in the water. “But your chaos, Charlotte Dance. For that I would have turned you.”

He touched his throat, now smooth beneath the drying of a would-be death, and closed his eyes in remembrance of its delights.

Then he stood, and as a white fog he fled the bridge like the blood of stars spilled across the night.