This story is not intended to infringe on any legal
copyrights of any characters. Nicholas, LaCroix, and
Janette, among others, do not belong to me. The
character of Iris is my own creation. Thanks to Lisa
Burstiner, Juli Monroe, and Ruth Imeson for the helpful
beta reads. Permission is granted to repost, reproduce
or archive this story freely.


1966 ENCORE

By Sue Burke
sueburke@compuserve.com

     This time it was a book. I felt Nicholas's mind
whirl after a trip to the Bibliotheque Nationale. This
time, as the spring of 1954 brought its beauty to the
boulevards of Paris, he believed he could find a cure
for his "curse" in an ancient book from India.

     This time, as I said. In his obsessive search, at
other times, he had placed himself in the hands of
madmen who imagined themselves scientists. He had
journeyed to Mexico to the midst of Maya shamans who
could have destroyed him as a demon. He had prostrated
himself for Chinese cures or Egyptian cures -- one
folly after another in his envy of mortality, in his
hatred of what he was, and in his hatred of me for
supposedly cursing him. He was willing to throw his
life away, and he never believed my warnings.

     I knew nothing of the ancient Vedic Sanskrit book
that occupied his thoughts, the "Abharat" according to
the notes he tried to hide, and I sought advice from
the eldest vampire of the city: Iris, named for the
Greek goddess of the rainbow, or perhaps the goddess
was named for her.

     We agreed to meet just after twilight at a cafe on
the sidewalk of the Boulevard St-Michel, near the Rue
St-Severin, where tourists emerged from the narrow
Medieval lanes of the Latin Quarter wondering what kind
of people could have trod that pavement when it
traversed the intellectual heart of the world. Tourists
didn't know some of those people still existed.

     I arrived at the cafe early and waited for Iris at
a little round table flanked by a pair of rattan
chairs. The maitre d' knew us both and gave me a prime
spot. I very much wanted to make a good impression. She
had, over the centuries, been warming to me, a trend I
hoped would continue. Long ago, for more than a
thousand years, we had kept different paths. Hers had
led to libraries and dry debate, and mine to the revels
of our kind.

     Then in the summer of 1348, famine, war, and
finally the Black Death came to France, an apocalypse
almost inconceivable in these modern days. My children
went hungry. I searched, but I could not find them
prey. Kings and queens died in their castles, and
commoners fell in their kitchens and fields -- too many
for the churches to ring to their rest, and none left
to bury them anyway. Wolves fought over human bones.
Villages stood deserted while the air stank with death.

     We could not know where the dying would stop, or
if it would, for in any direction it was the same. To
Nicholas and Janette and I, and to mortals in their
forsaken and agonized final moments, it seemed the end
of the world. We starved.

     In that desperate hour, in the empty hills of
Normandy, Iris came from Byzantium, elegant as an icon
in indigo and purple silks embroidered with pearls,
like a twilight sky alive with stars. Already more than
two thousand years old, she had used the strength of
her age and the cunning of her education to seek
through barren lands for those who hunt by night.

     "Nil desperandum," she commanded. "There is
nothing to despair. The plague has come and gone in
Constantinople, as it will here, for the cause has been
discovered in Spain. The mortals of the world will not
all perish, nor shall we." Janette wept in Nicholas's
arms. I stood transfixed in Iris's gaze. She had
suffered danger and sacrifice -- for what? For me? I
saw her as if for the first time. I had thought her
fainthearted, and I had been mistaken.

     She told us where to find sustenance and safety,
then left to tell others. But she had words for me
before she parted. "Mundus vult decipi. The world
wishes to be deceived, but you must never let it
deceive you. You can earn more enduring treasures than
pleasure, and you must. We are destined to be wise or
perish. Cavere." Beware.

     It took years for me to understand. Slowly, I
added scholarship to my treasures, and it profited me.
In time, when we met again, we could converse, and
together we encountered the wisest mortal minds of the
day. None equaled Iris, who was beyond the attrition of
time.

     If there was an Abharat, she would know.

     She arrived promptly at the cafe. She shimmered
with a commanding aura even mortals could sense, and so
she strode along the boulevard's busy evening sidewalks
without a jostle. After a few words with the maitre d',
she joined me -- and smiled, a smile that had been
carved into marble before I was born and still allured
visitors in the Louvre across the Seine, as it should,
moths to a flame. The waiter brought us glasses and a
bottle of something philosophic in origin. We drank and
silently felt the meditative flavor flow into us. I
pondered the humans at the cafe.

     At the next table a man and woman in the vigor of
American youth murmured to each other of their joy to
be in the City of Lights for their honeymoon. Too many
tourists, some Parisiens complain, but I savor tourists
everywhere. They're always so delighted when someone
speaks to them in their native tongue, always so
pleased to meet someone local, always so easy.

     But I was neglecting Iris. I waited respectfully
for her to speak. I myself, only a thousand years
younger, was still not her equal. She set down her
glass and turned her dark, rich eyes to me and spoke in
a voice too low for mortals to overhear.

     "It's a suicide book," she said, "for us, at
least. We are beyond the endless cycle of birth and
death and rebirth of souls. The book is one of the
ancient sacred scriptures written when the Aryans came
to the Indus Valley. Fortunately I was not present at
their arrival." She smiled again, serenely.

     In her guise as a Spanish dona, Iris trilled her
"r's" and occasionally dropped her French subject
pronouns, "je" and "tu" and "elles," as would a speaker
accustomed to the directness of Castilian. It suited
her. She sat regally in a dark bolero over a
wide-collared white blouse that enhanced her throat
like the perfect frame enhances a masterpiece. So
close, and so far beyond my touch. She possessed the
imperial dignity of the Escorial, the palace of Felipe
II of Spain, at its completion four hundred years ago
stunning in its grandeur and austerity, as was she: The
ruler of all she surveyed.

     "The Abharat makes sense," she said, "within the
philosophy of Hinduism. The book says:  Worn-out
garments are shed by the body; worn-out bodies are shed
by the dweller.' It promises the miracle of rebirth. A
soul is reincarnated through samsara into a sequence of
bodies. If a body becomes inhospitable to the soul, if
a body becomes cursed by karma, it can be cleansed  
with fire, as the penitent will discover too late, and
the god Agni will guide the soul flying on the smoke of
the worn-out body to the realm of the gods, where the
disembodied can petition for a less punishing rebirth.
So says the book of Abharat."

     "A Pyrrhic cure," I said. So like Nicholas to find
one.

     From the corner of my eye I noticed two women,
young of our kind, strolling insouciantly down the
sidewalk until they saw Iris. Their eyes grew wide like
schoolgirls, and they stared stupidly at her. She
noticed and nodded an acknowledgment of their awe, far
more lenient than they deserved, and they knew it.
Chastened, they averted their gaze and passed in
silence. They would know better next time.

     "Patience, LaCroix," she said, "and a little
forbearance: These can teach more than any punishment.
This is about Nicholas again, no?"

     "It always is these days." I had hoped she would
not guess at my worry, at my embarrassment, but of
course she did.

     "Such things happen. You are not the only master
who suffers an unhappy child. They can be led astray by
the mortal hopes and fears that surround us."

     Her fingers, in black gloves, rested on the cafe
table less than an inch from my hand. Mine was not the
place to touch her without invitation, but a regard for
her words might win her.

     "Many are watching to see if he can be healed,"
she said, no longer serene but somber. "He is one of
our best flowers, and if humans pluck him with their
deceptions, others might follow. This is a crisis for
us all."

     I had been chastened, and I deserved it. "I have
let things go too far. I have done what I could, and
nothing has worked. I will try again and try harder, I
promise." I looked up into wise old eyes that seemed to
care for me.

     "Be gentle with him," she said. "Anger will only
drive him further from us. Perhaps it would aid your
efforts if I spoke with him to explain how we hold what
is permanent and real. We enjoy the freedom mortals
long for."

     "Perhaps."

     Her eyes as deep as time held mine. "We elders owe
service to our own and to each other. It would hurt me
to see your inconsolable loss. Let me help." Her
fingertips touched my hand. The leather of her gloves
felt so soft it could melt. Perhaps, with patience, she
would remove her gloves for me. Perhaps she could help.

     She deigned to hunt with me from time to time that
spring, casting spells on mortals like gossamer nets,
leaving them pleasingly awake, fully compliant, and
entirely forgetful. In the warm evenings, she would
slip her hand around my arm and stroll with me along
the Champs-Elysees among human couples, as couples have
strolled for centuries beneath the rows and double-rows
of chestnut trees. Above us in the branches, buds
unfurled like baby fists of spring chartreuse,
eventually to become glossy dark leaves the size and
shape of a hand.

     Once, finally, she shared the rapture of her
blood, but not her bed. In a garden, beneath a bower of
fragrant flowers pink as tears, her bare fingers
stroked my face and fumbled to open my collar, and in
turn I tasted her, tasted a million nights, felt
mysteries unravel. But I slept alone that day and ached
to feel her purr again in my arms. Her blood sang like
a chorus in my mind.

     I felt her assurance that by acting only in the
fullness of time could I bring Nicholas back to me. I
could make muddy waters clear by letting them stand in
peace. By forcing nothing, I could gain everything. She
had advised not opposing Nicholas but befriending him.
I resolved to try, to trust the blood already fading in
my veins.

     I do not know if she spoke to Nicholas. He hardly
spoke to me, and might have rebuffed even Iris -- and
lucky he was that she practiced magnanimity.

     I confronted Nicholas one evening as he left the
Bibliotheque Nationale to tell him he sought a book of
death. He did not believe me.

     "You'll do anything to keep me," he said, "even
lie."

     He barely tolerated me as I walked with him
through the evening streets. With all the patience I
could, I shared what I had learned from Iris: the cure
would burn him alive. To no success. We parted at the
Louvre, these days a museum in a delicately carved
stone palace. Long ago it had risen as the stout, rough
fortress of Philip II of France, its round
corner-towers and tall armory looming over the Seine.
I had made Nicholas a vampire in 1228 in Paris, five
years after King Philip died, and in that fortress and
in the castles and palaces that followed it, we had
hunted century after century. Nicholas, the fair and
handsome knight back from a Crusade, grew to love and
then despise my gift of eternal life and immense power.

     He looked at me with eyes close to tears. "You
can't understand," he said, and walked on without me.

     He kept looking for the book. I understood then
and understand now the seduction of mortals, how their
ideas fill our lives until we forget we are not part of
their suffering. We need at most to pity or envy them,
but never to follow them in their deceptions. I would
not then and will not now surrender him from me to such
a desperate illusion. I will not permit his death. I
will not lose him.

     His search took him across years and continents,
to libraries and universities and scholars, some
willing to share their knowledge and others compelled
when their eyes met his. I followed him as masters
follow their children, our duty to protect them. The
whisper of his thoughts was always with me -- and
sometimes mine with him, always ignored.

     When I could, I preceded him and erased clues to
the suicide book. The cat-and-mouse game grew
pleasurable until one night I arrived barely ahead of
him at the office of a Harvard Divinity School
professor. At my encouragement the man suddenly
succumbed to a heart attack. Nicholas arrived as the
learned professor gasped his final rasping breaths,
sweat glistening on his face turned gray and twisted by
the crushing pain in his chest. I hid still as a corpse
in a coat closet while Nicholas attempted to revive him
and shouted for help. I heard colleagues run from their
offices and the department secretary dial frantically
for an ambulance. I waited among boots and umbrellas,
hiding from my own son, hoping no one would decide that
the dead man needed his coat and complete my
humiliation.

     Be gentle, Iris had said. I hoped she would
appreciate how much forbearance I showed him that
night. And I wondered if the fullness of time would
ever arrive or if even more bitter turnabouts awaited
me. He searched on, too desperate even to take time to
learn Vedic Sanskrit, convinced I also searched for the
book, when I searched only for him.

     He heard the whisper of my thoughts when I called
to him in East Berlin, in the winter of 1966, when he
believed he was close to finding the book that would
kill him. He had enlisted human help, a family named
Topfler laboring in a nameless state archive where
antiquities stolen by Nazis moldered in uncatalogued
crates. He would not answer me, and I had arrived too
late to intervene gently.

     I eavesdropped at the archive as he and the lovely
Topfler daughter searched through crate after crate for
his "freedom." I followed him and the Topfler men to
the ruins of Bergenkirche. Beneath that church, when
Berlin was a stinking backwoods town in 1576, its
burghers had dug catacombs to bury their 4,000 plague
victims, one-third of their citizens, and promptly
forgot them. More recently, war had damaged the church,
and a jealous government let it lie shattered and
derelict. Nicholas remembered the catacombs and, amid
the wreckage, found them. The catacombs crept under the
Berlin Wall to the western half of the city.

     I contacted the Stasis, the East German State
Security Service -- no relation to the Nazi's Gestapo
but just like them, right down to the heavy boots. In
parades, they still goose-stepped. But would they step
fast enough and clever enough to save Nicholas from
himself?

     The next night, he returned to the archive with
plans to find the book and lead his human friends to
new lives for all, when Stasi agents thundered in like
Percherons. Nicholas simply overpowered them, ripped
open a few doors, and left with his humans.

     "What kind of ubermensch is your American Nicholas
Thomas?" the Stasi commander sneered.

     "My kind, which is why I want him."

     Although the commander trained on me the permanent
grudge his kind bears toward all, I showed him where
the catacombs lay. A vampire hates to divulge
bolt-holes -- the future is hard to predict -- but
Nicholas's life was at stake. Yet they did not catch my
ubermensch, and after two men did not return, the
commander decided to content himself with second prize,
me. When he glanced away to order my arrest, I simply
disappeared. Wind-up toy soldiers, the German
Democratic Republic's finest. If they could not help
me, I had to help myself.

     Stasis had strip-searched the archive's basement
workroom, and had in their clumsiness managed to ignite
the building -- for me, I realized, a boon, but a
costly one. Iris's counsel dimmed.

     When Nicholas returned and saw flames in the
windows, I was waiting. I held a leather-bound vellum
manuscript, slim for something so full of miracles. "Is
this what you want, Nicholas?" I called from the
portico roof as he approached. At my sight, his hopes
fell and my anger rose. I had acted gently for so long,
and my best efforts were about to collapse. He met me
at the doorway. "I must say," I continued, calmly as I
could, "it's quite an interesting read."

     "Give me the book, LaCroix."

     "What is it worth to you? Three, maybe four Stasis
dead? Killing is still such a pleasure, isn't it?"

     "That book is my escape."

     "And I'm holding it hostage. This Abharat is your
freedom, you say, but you don't know what you want. You
don't want to be a vampire because you kill, and yet
you would kill not to be a vampire."

     "It's my cure."

     "A cure from what? It offers you death, Nicholas,
not a new life. That's its prescription, an entry into
the endless void. Did you really think I would let you
get your hands on this? I will never let you die."

     "I'm taking the book with me, LaCroix. I'll kill
you if I have to."

     "I'm afraid not, Nicholas. If you want immolation,
here it is." I threw the book in the fire and left.

     I was the enemy again, the devil, perhaps driving
him farther away, although I had just saved his life.
And what deadly folly would he find next time? I could
no longer bury my anger and bear unending troubles. I
was older, I was stronger. I could force my will. Iris
was wise, but the wisest sometimes make mistakes. I
would pursue Nicholas and keep him until he regretted
his errant ways. That would solve things. Simply.

     Meanwhile I was hungry in a city at the focus of
the world's intrigue. Spies and counter-spies filled
Berlin, including the ranks of its guards and soldiers.
Spies could disappear without a trace, a permanent
retirement from a temporary job.

     At the old Bergenkirche, the Stasis were leaving
amid talk of crashing down the catacombs with dynamite
the next day, probably bringing down the church with
it. Pity. I alit in the bell tower. A wooden beam
creaked ominously beneath my weight. I found safety on
a wide stone windowsill. Weeds and saplings grew among
the statues over the portals. The rose window's glass
had shattered, leaving tracery like a skeleton. But the
buttresses stood strong, arches over windows held, and
spires still pointed to Heaven. It had stood for five
hundred years. With repairs, it could stand for a
thousand.

     It wasn't a masterpiece, but aesthetic enough next
to the dreariness and shabbiness of modern East Berlin.
Communism's magnum opus stood directly before me, the
five-year-old Anti-Fascist Protective Wall. In front of
it lay a fifty-foot-wide Zone of Death, elaborated to
include tank traps, mine fields, dog runs, trip wires,
alarms, listening devices, and electrified barbed wire.
Soldiers in concrete machine gun towers played
searchlights across the wasteland. At the far side of
the zone, the twelve-foot-tall Wall itself had been
painted white to silhouette anyone who got that far and
thus give the guns an easier aim.

     All of it drab and brutal, a testament to the
people's paradise.

     One of the 13,000 soldiers that patrolled with
orders to shoot to kill neared me. In a flash, he had
joined me in the bell tower. Under a spell I had
learned from Iris, he stood unconcerned in his helmet
and jodhpurs on the windowsill overlooking the Wall,
one of the blond, handsome Aryans Hitler thought should
rule the world.

     I spoke with him. "Tell me, young man, what do you
hope for?"

     "A car," he said. "A girlfriend. An apartment of
my own. I want to shop in West Berlin for ."

     I shushed him before I got an incantation of
consumer goods. "But what do you hope for?

     He stared at me as if I had asked him the secret
of the universe, and I had. He shrugged. "To stay out
of trouble, of course."

     "That is a fear. What do you hope?" But I had
already plumbed the depth of his soul. He did not
understand hope and fear, his most compelling mortal
heritages. He wanted only what those around him wanted.
He knew nothing of himself, even what he was.

     His willingness to be deceived disappointed me.
Humans disappointed me. And I had disappointed myself.
I had not befriended Nicholas. Patience had failed.
Iris would not willingly lead me wrong, but this
nonsense about muddy waters becoming clear with peace
had led me to the finish of an unhappy episode in a
miserable saga that might never end. I had no peace. I
had only a soldier in a stupor.

     Yet before me was the Berlin Wall, as impotent as
Hadrian's Wall or the walls of Constantinople when the
empire within falls, as it would. They all do. I could
capture Nicholas and hold him within a wall against the
humans, but that would engender the stupid virulence
that had poisoned the Stasis, a hatred that would clear
nothing. Even as a human, Nicholas had been a dozen
times better than the soldier with me in the window,
and had possessed hopes and fears the soldier could
never feel. Nicholas now loathed the vampire in him for
its distance and its damage to mortals, but humans
could make their own misery and ugliness in large
supply. Proof lay all around me. I would be deceived to
act as these humans.

     Nicholas was deceived, which he would someday see
as I did, slowly but in time, and I had to let that day
come. When he saw humans as they were, he would know it
would be childish to refuse our life with its mystery
and rapture. He would learn again to value my gift. All
acts are good and evil, even the acts of vampires, and
we add no more trouble to the world than it would have
without us, so to deny us because we cause human pain
is to deny life itself. All life is pain and trouble.
And joy.

     Iris was right. Punishment would be easy but would
do no good. She had not told me her way was the harder
path, and I would not have believed her, just as I
would not have believed scholarship held profit until
it had saved my life. In time, with patience, I would
regain Nicholas, and I dared not lose him no matter
what difficulties I faced. Others were watching. His
recovery would guide our kind.

     I still had the soldier, and I was still hungry. I
broke the spell. He discovered with shock his lofty
perch and me, and fumbled for his machine gun. I threw
it away and stifled his scream. Noise would alert his
fellow idiots. He tasted as vapid as his words despite
the spice of fear. When he began to tremble and faint,
I propped him against a wall, listened to his heart
falter, and savored the final swallow, sweet with
death.

     I left him in the bell tower to rest in peace or
be blown to bits, depending on how much dynamite the
Stasis used the next day.

     By the winter of 1967 we were in Chicago, and my
forbearance remained. Nicholas was living a fantasy
mortal life as a police officer, and I let him. Police
see humans as they are. I even tried to encourage him
when his first night went badly, and offered some
advice about mortals: "You're not one of them. Their
rules do not apply, and the longer it takes you to
realize that, the longer your life will remain the
living hell that it already is." My words did little
good, but I would not give up.

     Iris visited unexpectedly one night. No longer the
Spanish dona, she, like me, was an American, and in a
miniskirt she resembled for a moment a young
Renaissance patrician, full of self-assurance and
absolute authority. Perhaps with honesty I could have
her again and feel her in my arms and in my veins
again.

     The cold and late hour had driven humans from
snowy Grant Park. We walked near Lake Michigan and
watched waves crash over the ice-encrusted breakwater a
quarter-mile from shore. A rising crescent moon
sparkled on the waves and ice, and skyscrapers lit the
night behind us.

     "In time, ice will melt," she said. "He will learn
mortals pursue treasures we don't need. In the endless
night only they must grope toward something dim in the
distance. Yet we know mortals would hate us and kill
us, and the knowledge can burden us. Expect
backsliding, and expect partial successes."

     "I don't think I did well in Berlin."

     "But at least the book is destroyed. Without it,
your friendship might heal. You eliminated a rift
between you."

     "It might not be destroyed. The Stasis may have
taken it. I burned a thesis on transubstantiation
written by an Armenian priest."

     Her eyes flashed red at me, and she smiled that
mesmerizing smile. She put her gloveless hand in mine.
"Do you know why the night is dark, LaCroix? The
darkness resides from the void into which our universe
exploded with light. The night is older than the day,
older than being itself. Darkness is beyond space and
time, beyond endless and eternal. And darkness empowers
us. At night you see the darkness from which we came."

     We talked a while longer, then went home together.


(Comments may be sent to Sue Burke at
sueburke@compuserve.com)