Page 43 of Lucy Undying

Boston, September 26, 2024

Client Transcript

No, I didn’t hear anything at the window, Vanessa. It’s late, past midnight now. You’re tired. Should we stop?

No? Then back to Paris.

There we were, on stage, and the Lover had just found what she was looking for. Instead of continuing our pattern of switching clubs almost as often as we switched hairstyles, the Lover insisted we go back to that one, every night.

I didn’t mind. I wasn’t paying much attention, fully besotted with a woman named Coral. Dimples everywhere: cheeks, wrists, elbows, knees. Dimples you could drown in. And her boyfriend, René, a perfect sprite of a man, lashes so long he looked sleepy all the time, jaw like he had been carved by the hands of the gods. I was besotted with him, too. Coral had a solo number each night where she slowly, luxuriously went from nude to clothed. I sat in the audience with René, clutching hands, both of us out of our minds with lust as we watched her.

Have you ever eaten the middle out of a fresh loaf of bread? Everything about it pleasurable, from reaching in and tearing a chunk free to chewing it? Coral was like that. René and I luxuriated in her, devoured her, lost ourselves in the pillowy, dense pleasure of her flesh.

So, as I said, I was distracted. One day as I was getting dressed, running my fingers along different material to see which felt most decadent, I noticed that our apartment was filled with flowers. They were all dried and dead, so there was no smell. That, and I didn’t spend much time there, between the club and my various paramours and sleeping in the old culvert.

The flowers were everywhere. Bouquet after bouquet of them, all withered and desiccated. I asked the Lover where they had come from. She sighed dreamily, trailing a finger along one of the roses. Its petals fell, dark spots like dried blood on the floor.

“He leaves me gifts. Every night, a bouquet of flowers. And drawings. Look at his drawings of me!” She pointed to one of the tables haphazardly strewn around the space. The Lover and I were big on luxury—everything was silk and velvet, gilt and polished wood—but not big on cleaning, or on organizing.

I found a stack of drawings. My fingers twitched, remembering something lost long ago, but I didn’t have time to think about it. I was looking at the Lover. Image after image of her, in every costume she’d worn since we’d started haunting that same club. Sometimes she was singing, sometimes she was dancing, but always, always, she looked scared. Her eyes never gazed directly out at the observer, cutting to the side instead. Like she couldn’t see what was coming for her.

I had never seen the Lover look afraid. She was radiant on stage, a living smile. So why was this admirer drawing her that way?

“Who are these from?” I asked.

“Aren’t they dreamy?” She took the drawings. “My face,” she said, stroking them. “Me.”

But it wasn’t her real face. She had changed after that first time we woke up together. A rounder jaw, eyes tilted up at the corners instead of down, a slight swoop to the end of her nose. Like Dove, most vampires can change our appearance a little if we’ve had enough blood and enough rest, but the Lover was an artist at it.

Much more an artist than her admirer. I left her staring at his drawings and went back to choosing a dress. But the flowers bothered me. Had they been delivered dead, or did she leave them at the club until they were dried out and less noxious?

Unsettled and restless, I tore through the racks of clothes. I didn’t want to wear anything I’d worn before. I wasn’t even excited to see Coral and René. I wanted something new, something surprising, something to take my mind over. Behind the rows of hanging dresses were trunks I’d never looked in. I battled my way to them and opened the first.

The Lover stared up at me. I pulled out stacks and stacks of portraits, discarding papers like leaves falling from a dying tree. It was always the Lover, though her features were subtly changed in every set. To the unaware, she could have been a different girl each time. Just another beautiful face in a line of them, just another dancer on a stage.

No matter how the Lover’s face changed, her expression never did. Always that fear. As I went down the stacks, the perspective got progressively closer. They always started as full-body portraits, the artist gazing from a distance. But the view crept up, eating the space around her, until at last it was only her eyes. Finally turned to look directly out, no longer terrified, but blank and lifeless.

There was a pattern. It had happened before, and it was happening again.

I was an idiot to have chalked up that first night to random violence. I rushed out to the sitting room, but the Lover was already gone. I grabbed the newest stack of art. There, at the bottom. Her dead, empty eyes.

Out in the night, the city didn’t seem to gleam with twinkling lights and winking invitations. Every shadow held eyes, watching. Waiting. But I had an advantage. I might not have much sense, but I have excellent senses. The Lover’s scent wasn’t hard to find. All the vampires I’d met had a metallic clang, a smell like accidentally biting down on a fork.

The Lover’s scent was softer than most, but I still caught it. I hurried through the night, afraid for her but also not quite sure why I was afraid. Maybe because I had too much information and not enough time to properly sort through it all.

She was being stalked. She had been stalked before. But it seemed like she knew her stalker, or at least knew when it was starting. So why did it keep happening?

I stopped so abruptly a couple behind me stumbled into my back. I didn’t pay attention to their shock as they bounced off tiny me and I stayed ramrod straight. Nearby. There was a heart racing with pleasure, a cry of surprise, and—

Blood spilled. Old, borrowed blood.

Blurring with speed through the streets, I turned three more corners and found her. I should have known from the start. It was the same alley where he had gutted me my first night in Paris. And there was the Lover. Laid out on the ground like she was asleep, tucked into a ball with her hands beneath her chin. Three holes in her back. Her stomach split open like a smile. And her skull bashed in—except for her eyes. Those he had carefully left open, staring out lifelessly. Just like in the final drawing.

This time it was my turn to take her to unhallowed ground. Instead of dragging, I carried her as gently as I would a child. I laid her down in the culvert, packing the grave dirt around her. And then I waited.

It took several days, but at last she healed enough to wake up. She gazed into my eyes and sighed, a smile on her face. Like she’d been in the middle of the loveliest dream. Which I knew wasn’t right, because we don’t dream.

“Who is he?” I asked. “Who did this?”

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