HLS No. 16: Asleep on the Threshold
A vampire story by L. Y. Norris
What makes a Renfield tick? Many are wannabes; some are unwilling thralls; some are professionals. Most are human beings, with all the emotional subtlety—often ineffable, sometimes terrible—that human existence entails.
Each morning Ervo goes to sleep on the threshold of my chamber. Each evening he dresses me and combs out my hair. Each night he sweeps the house and prepares my narrow bed. As dawn approaches he draws my bath and takes my raiment, stained with blood and sometimes other things, and counts and sorts the items I have gained.
For this, he receives meals, clothing, a few coins to send to his family in another country, and—someone to pity.
I have another man, Garet, who lives by day. He sells what Ervo sorts. He buys food for Ervo, candles and whatnot for the household. He washes the windows and keeps the roof in repair. He is just my height, and with corsetry has a figure like mine, and is not ashamed to go about as a woman, and so he also buys my clothes.
Garet lives elsewhere. He is not close enough to pity me. He has a wife who knows nothing of me and an idiot child who knows nothing at all. For his services, he receives enough to keep them.
It is the first warm night in spring. I have been tired lately. Undeath is not one long sameness: it has its undulations, as life does. I do not have the wit or will to seek out money tonight. I feed on a young streetwalker and take nothing but a pair of costume earrings. Her gaudy clothing is too foul to touch.
Ervo, too, has seemed slow and tired lately. Perhaps it is the spring weather. But he draws my bath as always and brushes out my hair as I soak in it. His face sometimes comes close to my forehead, as though he would kiss it. It seems like the attitude of a parent toward a child, although he is two centuries my junior.
My sleep is no trance. Like any sleep, it sometimes does not come.
Closed in the darkness as evening approaches, I hear a soft knock on the street door. The cushion rustles as Ervo rises. The door creaks as it opens—I must leave a note for Garet to oil the hinge.
“Thank you, doctor, for coming again.” Ervo’s voice has a quaver in it. “Do you have news?”
The doctor is a soft-spoken man. “I have tested what you gave me,” he says. “I will need to reexamine you to be certain.” After a time of silence, he speaks again: “I am sorry.”
The doctor says some other things. Then he is gone. Soon enough it is time for me to rise.
I open my door and Ervo is standing there, so close it startles me. “Mistress,” he says.
I do not greet him. I do not want to appear any kinder than usual, for nothing hurts like pity revealed. “Give me the pearl combs tonight,” I say. “I mean to seduce a gentleman.” I do not know if I really have the strength for such a seduction. But since I am neither sick nor dying, I feel it would be an insult to Ervo to keep indulging in easy kills.
And a gentlemen will be cleaner—perhaps—and make things easier for Ervo in the aftermath.
Why do I care about him, really? It is a paid arrangement, and his attitude toward me is not attractive. And yet, now that I am a pitier, I realize how beguiling pity can feel.
The gentleman is not cleaner. I come home greasy and sticky and filled with more than blood. Even the combs in my hair will need washing. Most men are disgusting, regardless of class.
But Ervo draws my bath and all the filth comes off me. He is not quite middle-aged, with flat, dark hair and a smooth countenance that betrays little. He brings his face close to my forehead again, and I close my eyes because I cannot bear that pity. Though now, I suppose, he is entitled to feel whatever he will.
A salt tear touches my lip. It is not mine; I have none.
When I am clean and wrapped in my sleep-wrap and perched but not reclining on my satin bed, he knocks at my door.
“Come in,” I say.
He comes in and kneels before me. He seems to like kneeling, just as he seems to like calling me “Mistress,” although it is no longer a usual term. I suppose there must be some irony or condescension in this, although he playacts it with a very straight face.
“Forgive the intrusion, Mistress,” he says, and then says no more.
At last I realize he is waiting for a response. “It is no intrusion,” I say. “This is your house as well.” It really is: he spends more time in it, and certainly more waking time, than I do.
Still he says nothing.
“Go on,” I say.
“Mistress,” he says, “I will soon be required to leave your service. To… return to my home country.”
“Your are rejoining your family?” Too late I remember that, in the language we are speaking, the word for family also means ancestors.
He only nods.
“I will miss your ministrations,” I say. It is meant as a pleasantry.
But his expression becomes for an instant liquid, rapturous. It smooths over just as quickly. “You will need to replace me,” he says. “Shall I begin searching for a new man? Or does that task fall to Garet?”
“Let him worry about it,” I say. “He has feelers all over the city, that one.” What I think but do not say is: Save your energy. Don’t fret yourself.
I leave a letter for Garet. I think I can trust Ervo not to read it, and so I am plain-spoken; but I also doubt him enough to go along with his lie. Ervo is quitting. Find me another night man, similarly clean, discreet, and unencumbered—and as soon as possible. Wage can be increased if necessary.
Any other business? When you go clothes shopping, I would like another of those tiered things from the dressmaker on Vale Street—dark green this time.
I sign it. But it seems imbalanced, somehow, to ask for a new manservant in almost as few words as it takes to ask for a new frock. In a postscript I add, Be here 5 a.m. Thursday. Ervo will fill you in on current night duties.
Neither I nor Ervo generally see much of Garet. But in this case, I would rather speak than write.
Wednesday night goes poorly: the girl I am stalking jumps into the river to escape me, and a man leaps in to rescue her, and it ends in such a noise all over the city that the only thing I can do is slink home and hide.
So when Garet arrives for the Thursday morning meeting, I am hungry and annoyed.
Garet looks like a man’s head atop a woman’s body: already done up in a shirtwaist for a visit to the dressmaker, but still missing his wig and his hat. I have long since ceased to find such things absurd. “Good morning,” he says to me. “And good morning, Ervo.”
“Hello,” Ervo says sullenly.
They’ve never liked each other, though I can’t tell why.
We seat ourselves around the little table in the parlor. Ervo pours some hot beverage for the three of us; I cannot drink it, but I appreciate the chance to warm my hands.
“I understand you’re leaving us,” Garet says to Ervo. “What is it you do, anyway?”
Ervo’s face is very still. “I attend to the mistress’s bodily needs. And I guard her when she sleeps.”
“Guard her? You’re asleep yourself whenever I come in.”
“He’s like a night nurse,” I say. “A light sleeper, ready to be up in an instant.”
Garet doesn’t acknowledge me. “You’re around,” he says to Ervo. “I’ll grant you that. But what makes you think you earn your wage?” He leans close to Ervo and speaks so quietly he must think I cannot hear: “I do her filthy laundry. All you do is… take her clothes off.”
Ervo’s face remains unmoved.
“You forget,” I say, “that I’m a robber as well as a murderess. I can afford to hire as many men as I want—for anything or nothing.” This is an exaggeration, but my next words are honest: “If you don’t like your pay, Garet, you only have to ask.”
It is just as well that he does not have a hatpin on him. His eyes are sharp enough.
“My duties,” Ervo says, “are those of a valet. Perhaps my replacement should be sought among the servant classes rather than among criminals.”
We are all aware of his origin, but only he dares allude to it.
The pre-dawn hours have been still, with a light tick of rain on the slate roof. But now I hear another noise, a noise at the front of the house.
Ervo hears it, too. “Please excuse me,” he says.
A door opening. A voice in the foyer: “Where is my husband?”
“What is his name?” Ervo asks.
“Garet Smalltooth—unless he’s going by something more feminine.”
My right hand steals to my temple where, if I were living, I would feel the beginning of an ache. A life premised on secrecy is prone to breaking out in farces.
Garet’s pale eyes flick toward the shadowed foyer. The angle blocks the view both ways.
“She’s got the wrong house,” I call. “There’s no Mr. Smalltooth here.”
But she growls out “Garet!” and he stands, seemingly against his will, and stalks to the foyer.
I follow. Her eyes widen in the gloom as he approaches. She gasps. “So this is how you bring the bread home.”
She turns to me. “Are you the whoremistress here?”
Ervo’s face is suddenly all rage. He steps between us.
Her hand goes to her hat, and before either of us can react she sinks her hatpin in his throat.
He stumbles back against the wall, eyes closing. How poorly must he be, I wonder, for so slight an injury to fell him all at once?
The smell of blood billows toward me and it snaps me into another way of thinking. I sense the corruption of his illness in it, but I know it cannot hurt me. In my craving, all things collapse together, and hunger and practicality seem to share the same end. What does he do, after all, as a living man that he could not do dead?
And so I am on him, drinking of him, pressing him against the dust and the damp of the stone of the foyer wall, the air cold around us, the taint of his blood no more offputting than the stink of a lover’s sweat. I drink and drink until I am flush and filled, and all I must do now is give a bit of my blood back to him and he will turn.
I prick open my thumb and feed him.
“What is this house?!” hisses Mrs. Smalltooth. “I’ll have the police here in an hour.”
Ervo’s eyes come open, but they are unfocused. “Mistress,” he slurs.
Mrs. Smalltooth has Garet by the wrist. She speaks between clenched teeth. “I’m taking you home,” she says. “You’re going to put on some decent clothes and then you’re going to start packing, because I never want to show my face in this city again.”
I do not pursue them. I am neither stronger nor faster nor more persuasive than a living being, and Ervo—having lost more blood than he has gained—cannot do much at all.
The sun will not kill us, but we are like night-shift miners: accustomed to sleeping during the day. We can hide, flee, fight, or deceive—but we will be muzzy while doing it.
Ervo is still weak—and will be until he has drunk the blood of the living. So the decision is mine.
I choose to deceive.
The bite is healing already. There’s a little blood on his shirtfront, but no more than a consumptive might cough up.
I haul his arm over my shoulders and half-carry him to the bedroom. I remove his boots and trousers and tuck him into bed. And then I go about the house, trying to look at it with the eyes of the living.
It’s distinctly shabby, dusty in places, half-bare. There is an upstairs but it’s all closed off. A story forms in my mind: a merchant-class couple fallen on hard times because of the husband’s illness, the servants dismissed, the household goods incrementally sold or pawned. My rich wardrobe belies this a bit—but then again, sudden poverty doesn’t banish vanity at one stroke.
In the kitchen cabinets there’s a cache of unsold jewelry, mostly rings and earrings. One by one I drop them down my throat. We’ve no digestion to speak of, so getting them out will be a matter of knifework. Never mind; I’ve come back from worse.
I change from my red silk taffeta into something dull and gray and take a handkerchief to hold to my tearless eyes. By the time the inspector arrives I am the picture of a careworn wife. I put a finger to my lips as I answer the door. The world outside is filled with the light of an overcast dawn.
“My husband,” I whisper, “is sleeping.”
“Won’t be a minute, ma’am,” the inspector says. There’s kindliness in his voice, and I’m sorry to hear it. “We had a complaint, but… no, there’s no sense in it. Nice respectable house, this.” He glances around at the bare, pictureless parlor. “Couldn’t look less like a… well…”
I school my face into a puzzled expression. “What kind of complaint? My husband was coughing earlier, but surely not loudly enough to wake the neighbors.”
“’Twasn’t that, ma’am. May I look around?”
“Of course,” I say.
I lead him through the whole ground floor, excluding only the chamber I use for a bedroom. Afterward he starts up the stairs, but when he sees the undisturbed dust on the landing, he does not bother to go farther. Good. If—as I assume—the police have an arrangement to send someone after him if he does not return within a fixed time, then a quicker end to the visit means more time for our purposes before he is missed.
It doesn’t really matter. Ervo must feed.
“I am sure my husband is fast asleep by now,” I say. “He is up hacking all night and then sleeps in the day—you know how it is in these cases. You can look in on him if you like.”
“It isn’t necessary, ma’am.” He sounds kindly again.
“It will ease my mind,” I say. “I have nothing to conceal.”
“Very well,” he says, and I open the bedroom door.
I have not really considered what we will do with the body. I never, never kill at home.
We step into the dim, curtained bedroom.
“Do try not to wake him,” I say.
The inspector steps closer. “I don’t hear any breathing,” he says softly. He lays a hand on Ervo’s forehead. “He feels very cool. Is there a chance he could be…?”
“Put your wrist under his nose,” I say. “You’ll feel his breathing.”
He does it. He actually does it! I reach over him and press down on the wrist and Ervo’s new instincts take over: he latches on and drinks and drinks until redness come back into his face. I pull up a chair for the inspector to swoon in. A heavy body—a body that smells already, if only of onions. I feel his pulse until it stops, and then I know what must be done.
“Cut your thumb on your tooth,” I say to Ervo, “and stick it in his mouth.”
“Yes, Mistress.” He seems still dazed, in some way still unconscious. But he obeys.
I chafe the inspector’s hands as he comes round—and I take the opportunity to wipe clean his rapidly-healing wrist wound. “Dear, dear,” I say. “I wouldn’t have expected a policeman to faint at the sight of blood. All his linens are stained with it, I’m afraid, because of the illness.”
He blinks rapidly. “Did your husband… bite me?”
I find my best silvery, tinkling laugh—a laugh with a hint of nervousness in it, but not verging into hysteria. “Heavens, no!” I say. “He’s been asleep this whole time. I say, are you all right?”
“I could have sworn…” He shakes his head. “It’s been a queer morning. Don’t mind me. I’ll be back to the station and let them know you’re all right.”
Sooner or later he’ll realize the bite was real. But by that time we’ll be a closed record—and he’ll have priorities that have nothing to do with police work.
I fall asleep on the threshold of the chamber. When night has fallen, I wake and look in on Ervo. His eyes roll white in the darkness.
“Mistress!” he says. “Your bed!”
“It’s all right,” I say. “You needed it more than I.”
“But it isn’t right for an im— for one of your— for—” His hand goes to his throat. “Oh, God. I remember. We’re both the same.”
For the first time in decades, I see a face convulsed with grief. But I don’t understand what he thinks he’s lost.
“I saved you,” I say, stepping closer to the bed.
“For what?” He has a forlorn expression in his eyes. “How can I serve you now that I’m like you?” His voice picks up speed: “I was your slave and you’ve made me a master. How can I live with that?”
For a moment I’m puzzled. I paid him a wage, didn’t I? But then suddenly the kneeling, the Mistress, the not-quite-kisses—they all fall into place.
This one never pitied me at all.
And as I look at him, at the strength and fire returning to him, I realize that what I felt for him in his sickness was not pity, either: it was mourning for the loss of what I did not know I had.
“Our kind are neither masters nor slaves,” I say. “But before we go out tonight”—I see him wince at the we—“I still need someone to dress me and comb out my hair.”
I keep my gaze fixed on him, watching his expression, memorizing the moment he realizes nothing between us has to change.
The tears he is not crying are of joy.
L. Y. Norris is a writer from the American Midwest.