From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me Read online

  Thanatos wondered what it was that made him willingly return, again and again, into the house of Death. Perhaps around her he could have a little of that mortality he craved, though she did not understand his yearning. It was utterly beyond her to grasp such things.

  When the nights were clear, Thanatos set up her telescope and watched the stars. She could spend hours charting constellations and she was a lot less prickly than usual when she peered into the illuminated sky.

  For everything a price, she would remind him sternly whenever he once again ranted about the injustice of blood and eternity. And Death could listen well, for hours on end, before becoming whimsical and making pancakes in the shape of skulls. He protested against being made to cook on account of the fact that he was strictly of a liquid-diet persuasion.

  But he would sit in the kitchen, play with the wooden spoons and watch her while she sang and cooked. She flowed in and out of the world around them with an ease he could never emulate even at his very best, because she was more a part of it than he could ever be. He lacked a pulse that she had never had, and thus she could not miss it, or be held back by the memory of it.

  Friendship was such a strange thing – comforting and terribly intrusive. There was to be a price for that, too, though they had not expected it. Sylvester got extremely grumpy the one time she suggested they watch Dracula and he had an annoying habit of quoting the most morbid parts of TS Eliot, whom Thanatos didn’t much care for.

  Sometimes, when the vampire was in a particularly bad mood, he hung upside down off her rafters as a giant bat, or as many ordinary ones, and watched her out of black clever eyes. Death never minded because she did not find bats alarming in the least, so long as he steered well clear of her carpets. And she never played chess with him, though he insisted that surely, as a professional courtesy, she must play chess with anyone who asks.

  Sylvester thought it a peculiar thing, that Death was so determined to teach him how to live, especially since she could never bring herself to care about the trite mortal things that haunted him.

  Thanatos always did precisely as she wished, Sylvester quickly discovered, aside from being rather cantankerous, Thanatos was quite remorseless, impulsive and possessed of a nasty streak a mile wide. Her well-calculated nastiness was generally used to mock him out of a sulk and, somehow, she managed to be great fun when she ought to have been grim and ominous.

  Sylvester would wax lyrical about mortality lost, and the life he could never lead, because he could never live again: he would muse about children, and old age. Thanatos would look patient but she was never affected by his words. She didn’t quite understand what there was to complain about.

  She had no desire for a mortal life or children – she could not long for such things or pay much attention to the passage of time, because she had no real concept of either.

  “Would you not like even a taste of what it is like to be mortal, to cherish every passing minute?” he asked, his thoughts far away in the days of his own mortality.

  Thanatos was surprised.

  “Perhaps if I were mortal I would do,” she replied. “But I am not, and such an idea is entirely foreign to me. I have never desired children and I have no desire to grow frail or forgetful. And why count minutes, when you have all of time, which is just as precious and just as beautiful? Time lies before you, an endless path like the night sky. It seems silly to long for what you can never have, when there is a limitless world out there, just waiting to be discovered.”

  The vampire’s melancholy came from romanticising what he had lost: was fed by it, inevitably. But Thanatos had never known any such thing to romanticise it, she would remind him.

  “I have seen the ages – the terrible and the great. So have you. There is little poetry in a world cut short.”

  When that still hadn’t worked, she pointed out that, had he remained what he had once been, he would likely have died of influenza, cholera or some other unsightly infection, or perhaps he would have fallen off a horse or poisoned himself with the lead it had been so modish to put on one’s face.

  “I am called the great equaliser – and with good reason. We build our own cages, Sylvester, all of us, whether alive, dead or something beyond both.”

  “Hell is empty and the devils are here, you mean?”

  “Precisely, though perhaps I would not have been so dramatic as to quote the Bard. Now there was a character…”

  Sylvester never did understand the simple pragmatism with which Thanatos viewed the world, though he thought about it often when away from the house with the yellow door.

  Thanatos gardened voraciously. She pottered in the garden when not curating at her museum or wandering the pebbly beach or any number of the things with which she chose to fill all the time she had. Perhaps it was a way to create life to counterbalance the death that was her being. Perhaps it was simply because she enjoyed it. She spoke of her museum often and fondly, though he thought it was a strange whimsy for Death to have a job at all.

  Lady Death knew more about the exhibits than anyone – she could narrate stories as if she had been there, and when she handled the exhibits in the storage room, they shivered with something that wasn’t quite life. She wove the past each time anew for her visitors, telling them of ancient rooms, and forgotten artefacts. For a moment, as they listened to her speak, it was as though they could peer into that forgotten world of which she spoke, peel back the veil of years like onion skin, and step through.

  Occasionally, when Sylvester was back in his own manor, listening to the silence, he would wonder if she thought of him also as another of her plants or her exhibits, or one of her mortal tour groups, staring at her with far-away eyes.

  The vampire brought classical music into her house – the very darkest he could find, and then proceed to shamelessly tease her about Schubert.

  Thanatos, however, saw no reason to let him have his fun.

  “A surprisingly charming man, given the glum subject-matter,” she replied, over whatever it was she had been writing at a little old-fashioned escritoire.

  “Yes. I had no idea you had such a fondness for mortals. Rossetti, Schubert – such laudable circles. Our composer seemed quite enamoured of you.”

  “Death and the Maiden, you mean? Or Der Erlkonig?” she laughed, still scribbling.

  She had been listening to popular things of late – a little to annoy him, and a little because she liked to keep an ear on the world around her. Schubert felt strange in her parlour.

  “The former. I hadn’t realised the latter had anything to do with you – methinks perhaps you’re overreaching.”

  More scribbling.

  “Yes, I know it rather well, the former. She would not bow to death and so he came down to look at her. A charming tale. I may be overreaching, but you are indulging in symbolism and parallels, which is a lot more dire. The trouble with your charming theory, you see, is that I was here rather before you, and I doubt very much if you are a maiden.” She regarded the vampire out of shrewd eyes. “Now, if you won’t be going home, I think you had better get your coat – I think I’d like a walk.”

  Despite the fact that he had his own perfectly good manor, run by an army of Renfield-esque servants to do all the dusting, he seemed to spend all of his time at Thanatos’s little cottage. He didn’t understand why she had a cottage instead of a castle or something else more appropriate, but it was an undeniably cosy house, considering the occupation of its owner.

  Sylvester retrieved his coat and considered going home a moment, but came along on her walk instead.

  Over time, he came along on more walks. Thanatos made him play Scrabble with her friends on Tuesdays and she even got him mildly addicted to brain teasers. Her Scrabble friends were certainly a motley group.

  He would have expected demons, or at least a ghost of some long-dead wordsmith, but they seemed to consist of a rather bitter classist, a librarian, the tour guide for the Renaissance Italy exhibit and the local florist.
The florist spent a lot of time debating the best way to grow cammelias with Thanatos, and reminiscing over their trip to a lavender farm somewhere in the great wilderness of the Kentish countryside.

  None of them were anyone Sylvester would have chosen to spend time with, though there was something about them that proved strangely relaxing, provided he’d taken care to have dinner beforehand.

  When he invited Thanatos to a ball at his manor, complete with marble ballroom, orchestra and the very finest scions of undead society, she turned up in a suitably glittery black creation like spun pieces of night, and spent most of the party failing to take his vampire friends seriously.

  She told him loftily that that was completely what they deserved for assuming she was human and trying to scare her, and for being needlessly moody and pretentious when such fun music was playing. She was indeed nothing if not a great equaliser, he supposed – and not just for the mortals.

  He didn’t bother pointing out that the music was fun only because she had gone to talk to the orchestra in that way she had that suddenly made them change the entire program: Thanatos could be quite unscrupulous when she wanted something. He doubted he’d ever be able to live down having happy music at a vampire event.

  When the weather turned dryer, she made him go with her to the lavender farm and he rather thought the scent of all the flowers would drive him insane. He was in a mood all the way there.

  “How can you make me go walking with you in the sun?”

  “Because it is a lovely day and I wish to see flowers. You’ll like it, you’ll see.”

  He was silent a moment, brooding and sickly-looking in the sunlight.

  Something was obviously on his mind.

  “Why do we bother to exist then, if we only build our own cages?” he said at last, feeling stormy and throwing her own words from months ago back at her.

  Thanatos looked up from a potted plant, surprised, and blinked a moment. “Hope of course,” she said, and went back to her browsing.

  He hadn’t thought she’d known about hope, being what she was. “Hope?” Sylvester whispered. “Even for you, or for me? I think I have lived and waited a little too long to believe in such things. I was always the cause of its demise.”

  Thanatos smiled then, a little sadly. “Sometimes, you have to wait beyond hope. Time can be surprisingly flexible when it comes to such things.”

  He wondered what it was she might have been waiting for beyond hope, if anything.

  During the week, Thanatos would go to work, and Sylvester would come and haunt her museum, which seemed to him a peculiar thing for her to love, given that nothing there could ever be new to her, or surprising.

  Other times, she would leave to fulfil her natural duty and he had no choice but to stay behind and wait, because he rather thought she would like the company when she returned. Which she did, though she was never distraught about carrying the scythe. It was simply a part of what she was.

  “The robes are rather out of date though,” she would comment wryly, holding out the voluminous dark fabric before her like some sort of sacrificial offering.

  As a joke, Sylvester got her a pet raven, which delighted Thanatos to no end. She refused to name him Poe, however, because that would have been silly and pretentious, and very much something one of his vampire friends would have done.

  Instead, she named him Rumple because of the way his feathers stuck out at odd angles when disgruntled. Like Sylvester, she pointed out, Rumple spent an inordinate amount of time feeling disgruntled.

  *

  The days went on.

  Time was an odd thing, Thanatos remarked, a year and a day after their first meeting, when they went for a walk and stood close together, looking at the blackened stone and the towering spires of the ancient colleges in town.

  Time was the one thing they had plenty of. More than anyone else, possibly, and more than enough for them to muddle on as best they could. Thanatos seemed to like this idea, because she smiled at him as she said it – her most tranquil smile.

  In a crowd of many lives rushing each and every way, they were an untold story, and that was fine.

  Beowulf, a prequel: in which no one could be bothered to speak in verse

  The morning dawned grey and miserable. Aeschere did his best to ignore it.

  Something had to be done, he decided, glaring into his porridge (oatmeal, with extra cinnamon because it was just that sort of morning). Quite frankly, the whole situation was getting to be intolerable. First there had been the annual ale-tasters’ convention. Cancelled! He’d been looking forward to that for months. Then there had been karaoke night, which had been completely ruined (but no one who had ever heard Unferth and Hrothulf trying to sing “Defying Gravity” could have minded that). Then there had been film night…

  And it certainly didn’t look good for Thursday’s board games night, either. Aeschere glanced sadly at the little bright-yellow bag on the table and sighed. Bananagrams. He had spent all night reading the rules and practising, because he knew none of the others would bother. He was really looking forward to winning and showing off his impressive vocabulary. Especially, winning.

  The winner would get a nice pile of treasure and a paid holiday to somewhere where it was warm and where there would be palm trees. Aeschere had no idea what a palm tree was, but he didn’t really care – they were bound to be better than spending another week watching Unferth complain about singledom, get severely drunk, and sing lame songs about how his heart would go on. Yes, the more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that what he needed was a holiday.

  He had already almost packed. He’d bought swimming trunks: bright ones with flowers on, which he wouldn’t ever dare wear around Heorot. (He’d never hear the end of it if anyone saw him.) And after some consideration, he’d also bought sunglasses. Privately, he thought they made him look rather suave. Aeschere thought he might even buy suntan oil: one of those bottles with a cheery picture of the sun on it. You never ever saw sun like that at Heorot

  If he closed his eyes, Aeschere could almost taste the ubiquitous holiday fruity beverages. He’d read about those in a magazine, and he thought it might be nice not to have to drink mead all the time. He didn’t even really like mead all that much. Finally, he’d have a chance to sit around and read murder mysteries (he was mildly addicted), without people interrupting him all the time. The Bloodstained Chalice was at the very top of his ‘to read’ pile and it promised to be full of blood, murders, séances, and lots and lots of hypermetric verse… He’d been trying to read it for years, but some disaster always happened just as he was about to start.

  Yes, he absolutely had to win.

  Provided something was done to address the problem at hand. He wondered if other people’s friends were just as ineffectual, or if it was just his usual dreadful luck. He was also starting to wonder if any of them meant to show up for breakfast at all. Aeschere had always been the only punctual one, which meant that he spent a lot of time waiting around for everyone else to turn up. This time, though, the wait was particularly annoying. He tapped his fingers impatiently on the table, but there was no one there to appreciate the gesture.

  His problem could be summed up in just one word: Grendel. Grendel had always been aggravating, but just recently he had become completely insufferable.

  They couldn’t quite decide whose idea it had been to become friends with him in the first place. (Aeschere knew for a fact that it had been Hrothgar’s, but the king always gave people one of his nasty looks whenever anyone suggested that something might be his fault.)

  In fact, Aeschere remembered that day perfectly: it had been another grey and miserable morning, and he had been trying very hard to do the weekend crossword and tune out the conversation around him. He had just set down his pencil in order to butter a bit of toast (too burnt on one side, as always), when Hroth was visited by that particular stupid idea.

  Unferth had been nattering on about the date he’d been on the ni
ght before. Everyone else had been pretending to believe him. He’d obviously been lying – even at that tender age he had developed a reputation as a bit of a creeper, and it had been common knowledge that he didn’t know any real girls.

  Hrothgar’s father, Healfdene, had been king in those days. Healfdene had liked war, treasure and mead, and was also partial to a bit of musical theatre, but only when he thought no one was around. Aeschere had once walked in on the late king doing jazz hands. He didn’t think he would ever forget that. As king, Healfdene had naturally also been in charge of the longboats.

  Hrothgar had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to prove how mature he was so that he might be allowed his own longboat. He had already picked out the one he wanted. After much deliberation, he had also decided that he would paint lightning bolts on it, and maybe wings, dragons and racing stripes. A good six months before his fifteenth birthday, Hroth had started dropping hints around his parents. They’d smiled indulgently, and got him a new tunic and a sword instead.

  “Great,” he’d said to Aeschere dourly after his birthday party, throwing pebbles into the nearby mere, “because, clearly, there aren’t enough swords lying about the place. And the tunic has lambs on it!” Splash! The pebble had hit the water, and the bit of tentacle that had been slowly reaching towards them from out of the murky depths gave a pained twitch. Aeschere had winced, feeling sorry for the mere-monster. Hrothgar had always been very good at throwing things.

  They’d taken a moment to consider the offending article of clothing, which was draped over a rock. Aeschere had thought his friend had a point. The tunic was blue and the lambs had painfully inane expression on their faces. Hrothgar’s mum could never get animal faces right – her lions suggested that she’d not only never seen one, but never heard of one either. To wear it in public would have been social suicide of apocalyptic proportions.