This time I managed to keep a secret for almost an hour. At first her news blotted it out, and then her requirement that I please her as a reward kept my thoughts away from the little stash of papers. As she stretched languorously afterwards, a little mushroom of fear budded inside my head, and she was instantly attentive, watchful. Then a ship paddled into my minds eye, to be followed shortly by kites, sand dunes, windy days and the whole panoply of forbidden treasures. Uncontrollable.
Sexual release worked wonders for her mood. On this occasion she was more disappointed than angry.
I'd already had the lecture all about the importance of the past to a vampire, but I prefer advice to torture, so I listened attentively. She is at her most beautiful, when she talks like this. Usually we have just fed, or made love, or both at the same time, and are reclining, entwined, in front of a fire. Her skin, which is normally a little too pale, takes on a reddish hue from the flames; her hair becomes less colourless too, appearing honeyed and rich instead of whiteish blond. She stares into the fire, like an enormous, flaxen-winged moth, lured by the warmth.
According to her lore, the past, or our perception of it, is inextricably linked with our ability to face the future, our "eternity", whether that measures a hundred years, or four hundred or a thousand. To reach, as she puts it, an accommodation with the past, is essential. Without it, we are still fettered to the human world, and nothing good ever comes of that.
They are animals. They are our prey.
However, we are forced to use them to give ourselves substance, and no habitation is ever perfect. Although our possession is irreversible, it is never complete. Something, some aspect of the host always remains. Because we use their brains to have consciousness, to move our limbs, even to reason, we are to some degree stuck with their mode of thinking.
"Liam is dead. I killed him. You are not him, but you will live with his peculiarities, his desires, for a long time, perhaps forever. Humans who know about us are obsessed by the idea of a soul departing. Well, that is their belief. In reality, what is departed is much more subtle."
Firstly, she explained, I would never be troubled by conscience. Secondly, I would be driven by my own needs and wants. Beyond these two truths, many lives were possible. Some vampires formed attachments to their own kind and those feelings were real, but put two vampires together in a room and explain that only one may leave alive, and whatever attachment exists between them, they will fight each other to the death. Some vampires prefer to be alone from the beginning.
She smiled at me indulgently, and told me that many vampires were troubled by memories of their human past. For Darla, it is not a question of forgetting, but putting the past where it where it belongs. Vampires who seek to remain part of their former, human world, find they cannot, because the human world works in an entirely different way. Humans multiply and survive in great numbers by having a belief in the common good, in social order, in selflessness. They believe, at least in theory, in all these concepts, but they are concepts that a vampire, in the essence, can know nothing.
"If you cannot be satisfied with your past, my own, it will haunt you. You have found this already with your father. He died, and you rejoiced. But now, your human brain regrets your haste. It tells you he should have loved you for what you were, and your vampire selfishness wants it to be so, because then you could just forget him and set about the more rapid acquisition of the things you now want. But instead of accepting that the pain of this relationship is in the past, you write down reams of memories, in the hope that one day, one day, there will be a memory which proves his love. And then your human brain will be satisfied and stop tormenting you with dreams of love you cannot appreciate and do not want."
She went on, talking about love, all kinds of love. It was not that a vampire could not harbour desires for someone living, or that those desires could not be long-lasting, but they couldn't be love, not in the human sense of the word. A true human love would contain an element of selflessness, and that was a quality quite absent from a vampire's nature.
As she was in such a friendly mood, I asked her why I did not treasure memories of my mother, or Kathy. She laughed, "Because, my sweet, those relationships were purely loving ones when you lived. As calm as the sea on midsummer's day - no resentments, no hidden hatreds or torments. Once your capacity to love was removed, they became nothing; their life and death became meaningless, except that their blood was food or their stupidity might provide access to a forbidden dwelling. But other than that, you are indifferent to them, and so should you be. What are they to you now? What can they provide that you want?"
In contrast, she said I could not bear to leave Anna behind to live out the rest of her life. Because my mind was so bent towards having her when I lived, there was so huge an unrequited and unsatisfied passion, that now the echoes of it haunted me.
"If you truly loved her, you'd leave this city and her, and never come back. But you haven't. Between your human forbear and her were all the important questions, unresolved. Did he love her? Did she love him? Did they, either of them, love each other enough for the troubles that undoubtedly lay ahead? You cannot lay her to rest in your head until you concede that these questions are now meaningless. And, in addition, there are those wants that mark the common ground between you and Liam, those urges he felt too, but contained, those questions that remain: can I take her now? can I finally have what I want?"
She turned towards me and ran her finger though my hair.
"Because want is all you're capable of now, my sweet. There is no ought, or can't, or won't, or respect for her feelings. Or love, most assuredly, there is no love."
"There are merely wants. Some wants are capable of being satisfied, and some wants are not."
She said that at present, I was allowing myself to be detained her on a fool's errand. I was pursuing a woman to my own destruction, when there was no reason to desire her more than any other equally as pretty.
"And if you could keep her, would you be satisfied? Of course not - there can be nothing lasting between you. Because you are now incapable of feeling as she does, and if she knew what you were, she would feel nothing but horror. The echoes are like a false light on the shore. They lead you in, and all you will find for your trouble is jagged rocks, half submerged, and the wreckers on the beach."
As I lay on the velvet cushions and watched the shadows cast by the flames on her skin, she became at once serious.
"You must end it, for your own sake, and the sooner the better."