SecretHistoryOfVampires,The

You could have taken me for some kind of gaping, slack-jawed, adolescent apprentice completely at a loss for anything to say when confronted with the Great Man. Maybe that had even been the case when my father had gotten me the position and I had accompanied Sir Henry McPherson, at the age of seventeen, to Egypt on an expedition of discovery that would have made him the greatest uncoverer of legendary antiquity since Heinrich Schliemann. But the expedition had come to naught. Sir Henry had, inexplicably, on the eve of his triumph, disappeared into the night—murdered, it was more or less assumed, by Arabs.

And that was twenty-five years ago. Queen Victoria was still on the throne in those days. I had stayed on, doing my own steady but modest work in Egyptology, and I no more expected to see Sir Henry on a quiet street in Alexandria than I expected to shake hands with Ramses II.

Almost as astonishing as his mere presence was his appearance. Of course, it is difficult to judge with someone so much your senior, but to my eyes he looked exactly as he had when I’d last seen him in 1899. I did a quick mental calculation. He’d have to be in his eighties by now.

We took a table at a Greek cafe’, outdoors, but well under the porch and into the shadows. It was almost completely dark. The daytime pedestrian traffic had pretty well thinned out, though there were nighttime strollers. Alexandria is not what the world pictures when it thinks of Egypt. The architecture is mostly modern and European. We could have just as well been sitting in a piazza in Italy as anywhere in Africa, but for when the Muslim population was called to evening prayer.

Sir Henry ordered drinks. The Greek waiter nearly spilled them. He glared at Sir Henry with obvious disapproval, tempered by the fact that we were English and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about our being there.

“It was on a street like this [Sir Henry began], here in ’Lex, that I had an encounter which proved to be fully as astonishing as mine with you right now must seem. It was the stuff of romance, like something out of Rider Haggard: a chance collision with a mysterious, veiled woman, a clue leading to the discovery of the most amazing archaeological relic of them all, further mystery, which has shrouded the secret until now. . . . Smashing stuff, David, as I am sure you would have phrased it in those days.

“On the evening I ‘disappeared,’ I had come up from the dig site to Alexandria for a small conference of colleagues. On that particular evening I was pretty much lost in my thoughts, in my own little world of anticipation and theory—not a good idea, even in ’Lex. There may not be quite so many cutpurses and cutthroats here as in the back alleys of Cairo, but you still do need to keep your head about you, English or not.

“But I wasn’t paying attention. My gaze wandered and I literally crashed into the woman, who was draped and veiled in the usual Muslim fashion, but not, it was curious to note, apparently accompanied by protective menfolk. She had a black bag with her. Several small objects and packages spilled out.

“She must not have been quite listening to what I was saying, because she addressed me in French. ‘Pardonez-vous, monsieur,’ she said, in a low voice and a little husky. ‘Est-ce que vous êtes Franc¸ais?’

“My conversational French is fairly good because I have to use it at conferences, and we could have continued conversing in that language, but suddenly our eyes met—and her gaze was, what can I say? Mesmerizing, perhaps. More extraordinary still was that she next spoke to me in oddly-accented, not quite classical Greek: ‘It is destiny that we have met, thus. Our goddess wills it.’

“It was only after a moment that I realized that she had pressed something into my hand. It was a stone scarab. In the course of my work I have handled thousands of such things. I fancy that I can tell a tourist’s fake from the real merely by hefting it, and I must admit this felt like the real thing. I could also tell there was an inscription cut into the smooth bottom. I struck a match and quickly read: KLEOPATRA.

“Now this was the moment of decision, or destiny, or the working of the gods. Call it what you will. Of course I was a damned fool to run after her, and I didn’t even have the excuse that I was a young and inexperienced damned fool. Like a character in some cheap novel, I felt instinct overwhelming all reason, dismissing all thoughts of back alleys and cutpurses and worse. I suppose it assuages my pride to say that I was bewitched, that I couldn’t help myself, that maybe the stone scarab I held was as cursed as the ruby eye of a Hindoo idol.”

Sir Henry paused. It was completely dark now, and dark where we sat. Inside the cafe’, around a lamp, I could see several Greeks conferring, every once in a while turning in our direction with a scowl or look of alarm. One of them made a gesture, quite familiar throughout the Mediterranean world, to ward off the evil eye.

“There are things that are ageless, David. Truly ageless. That is what I learned in the course of my adventure . . . an adventure which is still, even as we speak, continuing.”

“So I followed her [Sir Henry continued his tale], and I cannot even say where. Explain it any way you want. We turned into streets I had never known existed in modern Alexandria. I became disoriented. I knew the sea was . . . over there somewhere, but I was less and less sure where there was.

“The veiled woman walked just a little ahead of me now. I know we drew some astonished looks at first from passersby, at the spectacle of an otherwise unaccompanied, apparently native woman being followed so closely by a European. Some people looked away, or even muttered and made signs with their fingers. Perhaps they thought she was a woman of ill-repute, and I was her companion of the evening.

“In any case, it did not matter. I was now in a part of the city I had never known existed, almost as if I had been transported back in time to the Middle Ages. There were no gas lamps, no signs that the French or the English had ever set foot here. The architecture was, indeed, very much like the dark and winding byways of Cairo, complete with darkened archways choking the streets, beggars settling down for the night in corners, surrounded by animals. From somewhere there came the sound of singing, a wailing Arabic song accompanied by a soft drum.

“We came a two-storey, whitewashed building with black double doors facing the street. From somewhere inside, I heard chanting. It wasn’t the right hour of Muslim prayers, I knew, and in any case, the chanting did not sound like such, nor was it in Arabic.

“The doors were not locked. My veiled guide pushed them open and ushered me into a large atrium. I glanced around with interest. Smooth, red-and-black marble columns rose twenty feet high, supporting a domed ceiling painted with stars in half-familiar constellations. Little clay oil lamps of the ancient type flickered in various alcoves, providing some light. I had been all over ’Lex, all over Egypt for that matter; and I had never seen anything quite like this, except as ruins which one reconstructed in the imagination into a similar appearance. The place fairly oozed antiquity, like something out of pharaonic times.

“She passed through another door, and I heard a man’s voice, again speaking Greek, say something that sounded like, ‘Ah, faithful Charmion, you have returned. ’ She said something in reply as she closed the door, but I could not make it out.

“While I waited, alone in the atrium, I poked around into the various shelves and nooks in the walls and was astonished at some of the artifacts I found—ancient things from the very earliest Egyptian dynasties, things the British Museum would pay well to possess. They did not seem to be reproductions, either. But a great deal more: little statuettes of gods, tomb figurines, ushabtis; and, in particular, a large and well-worn alabaster bust of a woman with her hair tied back in a bun, a band around her head in the manner of Hellenistic royalty, was of an obviously much later date, from Ptolemaic times, perhaps the second or first centuries before Christ.

“Next to the bust lay a silver bowl and a sacrificial dagger. I picked it up. Beautiful. I pride myself on my expertise, as you know. This was not a fake. Something like this could only come from an undiscovered, unlooted tomb of the greatest importance—and that was when my head began to clear from whatever witchcraft had befuddled me.

“I might well be in a den of thieves, tomb-robbers whose purpose was nothing magical or romantic or particularly mysterious, just a sordid attempt to sell stolen antiquities. I did not immediately fear for my safety, but I was still glad I had my revolver.

“ ‘The illustrious McPherson, welcome to my home,’ someone said, not in English, not in French, or even Arabic, but in that strange, half-classical Greek. I could barely recognize my name, so rendered.

“Standing in the doorway was a man of indeterminate age, older than myself, I was sure, but by no means decrepit. He was dressed in loose clothing, a robe of some sort, not in the Arab fashion, but more—it came to me now; my mind was clearing—in the manner of the ancients. I realized, all at once, that his speech and many of the artifacts in the room were of the same time. He was speaking Ptolemaic Greek, which I had never actually heard spoken before. I could make out what he was saying, but it was as far removed from classical Greek as contemporary English is from that of Chaucer.

“But when his gaze locked on mine, he had that same bewitching, numbing effect as had Charmion. He seemed very, very old. I felt as if, staring into his eyes, I was gazing down into a bottomless pit, to the very depths of eternity.

“I was directed through the door, into a spacious banqueting room and directed to recline on a couch, as the ancients did, while a meal was served. Again, my mind was a muddle, racing in many directions at once. I wanted to ask, but did not, how he knew my name, since I had not actually introduced myself properly to ‘Charmion’—if that were really her name—so she could not have told it to him, unless she read minds.

“I later came to understood that immortals, beings who have survived two, three, or even four thousand years, might as well be able to read minds, because we are not even as children to them, all our thoughts as familiar and obvious to them as are a dog or cat’s limited repertoire of tricks to a pet owner.

“A sumptuous meal was served by—I do not exaggerate—noiseless, barefoot servants in plain tunics. We had been joined by perhaps a dozen others, the master of the house, who said his name was Isidoros; Charmion; another woman, like Charmion neither young nor old but ageless; and by several more . . . Greeks, all of them reclining as we did, conversing but a little in the same antique dialect.

“It was then, perhaps because there was some fiendish drug in the wine or food, or because I was bewitched by mysterious rays emanating from the magical scarab in my pocket, or because his eyes transfixed me as would an asp’s stare, I realized that I could not rise and rush for the door, or even pull out my revolver and shoot my way clear, as any sensible person might—much less a proper hero out of a romance—that I could only sit there and listen while my host explained everything, while he regaled me with a tale so fantastic, so romantic, that no one could ever set it down properly, and my attempts to summarize must remain woefully inadequate.

“The scene was two thousand years ago, 30 B.C. to be precise. Marc Antony and Cleopatra—the Cleopatra, the famous one, the last of the Ptolemies—having suffered defeat at Actium and retreated back to Alexandria, now awaited their doom. The skies were full of strange portents. In the night, strange revelry was heard, though no one saw the revelers, as they passed out of the city and into the desert, a sure sign that the god Bacchus, to whom Antony was devoted, had abandoned him. Stagnant, helpless months passed. Octavian and the Roman army arrived at the city. Loyal armies melted away. This much is known to history and to legend, that Antony fell on his sword, and, dying, was raised up into the tomb where Cleopatra had betaken herself.

“What is not known is that she, in her despair, thinking him already dead, had availed herself of certain arts she had gained in her profound studies of all things Egyptian. The other Ptolemies had been too proud of being Greek. They had dismissed all else as barbarian rubbish, but she truly appreciated the ancient and unfathomable mystery which is this land. She called out of the darkness, from beneath her tomb, from out of the earth’s depths, something, some vital, infinitely powerful force, and it changed her. She gave up her blood. She drank of its blood. Honored be her name! She was changed into something else, not a demon, not a god, but not human either. That which lives on to this day. I was among her worshippers, who also lived on, those who served her, and who, this night, intended to summon her once more out of the darkness, to drink blood and to share it.

“It was my blood she was after. That was the purpose of this entire charade. And to think I suspected them of trying to sell stolen antiquities. Ha! Isidoros would have found this funny. He would have laughed that hideous laugh of his. He might have said, ’Sell antiquities? No, we are antiquities!’ but of course he did not say it, because the joke would have been as obvious to him as a cat’s trick you’ve seen a thousand times.

“I had been fattened for the slaughter, which was the purpose of the meal. I struggled to rise. My limbs would not quite work properly. My mind was not clear. I understood, either because someone told me or because I was starting to read thoughts myself that Cleopatra’s lost tomb was right there, under or adjoining that house, or perhaps part of it in some magical space beyond three dimensions . . . certainly its location is unknown to archaeologists. I came to understand that she had had no further use for Marc Antony, who was ultimately a bungler, and so she had left his corpse for the Romans to find, but she vanished. That final scene in Plutarch, ‘Was this well done by your lady?’ and so on and so on . . . that is the kind of thing that makes her acolytes laugh so horribly. Yes, in eternity, they have their little jokes. Honored be her name!

“I tell you that Cleopatra, immortal, transformed, more than human, came to us out of the darkness that night. There was drumming and chanting, the playing of unworldly notes on some kind of flute or horn, and a great doorway opened up where I hadn’t realized there even was one. It was like the stones within a tomb rolled aside, grinding slowly, with a sound like muted thunder, and then she came forth to drink my blood and share my blood with the others—hence the sacrificial knife, and the bowl—but—honored be her name!—I was to be initiated into this blessed, damned company, forever and ever.

“I met Cleopatra that night. I encountered her face-to-face. The look in her eyes . . . I cannot tell you . . . all I can say is that in a last moment of rationality I lurched up from the table, pulled out my revolver, and emptied it into her. You might say I missed, I was drugged, my hand was unsteady, and I missed. But I know I did not. Of course the bullets did no good. They only made her laugh. Horribly.”

It was late. We were alone now, in the darkness. The street was empty. I looked back into the Greek cafe’ proper. No one seemed to be there. The few candles had burned low or gone out. The city itself seemed preternaturally hushed. No dogs barking in the distance, no night birds, no laughter or song from late-night revelers.

And then Sir Henry McPherson began to laugh, and my blood chilled at the sound of it. This was not the good-natured chuckle of the kindly, fatherly man who had once been my mentor. No, this was something else.

“Quite a story, isn’t it, David? Yes, quite a story. The ending is all rushed and a muddle. Go ahead and critique it if you will. I value your opinion, David. You were always such a clever boy.”

“You want to know, David, why Cleopatra, after two thousand years in the grave and beyond the grave, in her undead state, as you might call it, went through all that rigmarole for me. Well, I assure you, she had done this sort of thing before, summoning Arabs into her darkness, Persians, Turks, even Mongols, as each of those nations ruled the world and might be manipulated through her dark influence. Hundreds of them. She knows that the power is gone from Greece, from Rome, and now, fee, fi, foe, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman—isn’t that funny, David? Now she knows that if she is to rule, she must do so from London.

“But there’s more. You want to attack the plausibility of my story. You dearly wish you could bring yourself to not believe a word of it. There is one point of logic you particularly wish to assail. Go ahead, my boy, ask your question. If you must.”