Right across the river from our house in Kittery Point, Maine, is Portsmouth, N.H., site of the Portsmouth Conference in 1905.  When Michele Slung asked me for a vampire story, I wrote this one sitting in the same place in Market Square where Miss Susan Wentworth first meets Count Zohary. 

Though the vampire may not be a vampire, his victim undoubtedly is...

When the Red Storm Comes:

or, the History of a Young Lady's Awakening to her Nature

Sarah Smith

“Do you believe in vampires?” he said.

I snapped Dracula closed and pushed it under the tapestry bag containing my neglected cutwork. “Mr. Stoker writes amusingly,” I said. “I believe I don’t know you, sir.”

“What a shame,” he said, putting his hand on the cafe chair across from me. I looked up—and up; he was tall, blond; his uniform blazed crimson, a splash of blood against the green trees and decent New Hampshire brick of Market Square. The uniform was Austro-Hungarian; his rank I did not know, but clearly he was an officer.

“You should be better acquainted with vampires.”  He clicked heels and bowed. “Count Ferenc Zohary.”  Without invitation he sat down, smiling at me.

In this August 1905, in Portsmouth where I was spending the summer before my debutante year, negotiations were being held that might finish the long Russo-Japanese War. Aboard his yacht Mayflower at the Naval Yard, President Roosevelt had hosted the first meeting between the Russian and Japanese plenipotentiaries, Count Serge Witte and the Marquis Komura. Now the opponents met officially at the Navy Yard and schemed betweentimes at the Wentworth Hotel. My Aunt Mildred did not encourage newspaper reading for unmarried women, so I was out of date, but knew the negotiations were supposed to be going badly.

The town was crowded with foreign men; there was a storminess in the air, a feel of heavy male energy, of history and importance. Danger, blood, and cruelty, like Mr. Stoker’s book: it made my heart beat more strongly than any woman’s should. Don’t talk to any of them, Aunt Mildred had said.  But for once my aunt was out of sight.

“You are part of the negotiations?  Pray tell me how they proceed.”

“I am an observer only.”

“Will they make peace?”

“I hope not, for my country’s sake.”  He looked amused at my surprise. “If they continue the war, Russia and Japan will bleed, Russia will lose, turn west; they will make a little war and probably lose. But if they sign their treaty, Russia will fight us five years from now, when they are stronger; and then the Germans will come in, and the French to fight the Germans, and the English with the French. Very amusing. My country cannot survive.”

“Is it not wearying, to have such things decided and to be able to do nothing?”

“I am never wearied.”  My companion stretched out his hand, gathered together my half-finished cutwork linen, and waved it in the air for a moment like a handkerchief before dropping it unceremoniously on the ground. “Your mother makes you do this,” he said, “but you prefer diplomacy. Or vampires. Which?”

I flushed. “My aunt controls my sewing,” I said. Cutwork had been my task for this summer, sitting hour after hour on Aunt Mildred’s verandah, sewing hundreds of tiny stitches on the edges of yards of linen, then clipping out patterns with my sharp-pointed scissors. Linen for my trousseau, said Aunt Mildred, who would not say the word “sheets.”  In the fall I would go to New York with my aunt and uncle, planning my strategies for marriage like a powerless general. The battle was already hopeless; without greater wealth than I commanded, I could not hope to be in the center of events. I would become what I was fit for by looks but not by soul, the showy useless wife of some businessman, whose interest in war extended only to the army’s need for boots or toothbrushes.

But now, because Admiral Togo had won at Tsushima, I had however faraway and tantalizing my taste of war; I was sitting with a soldier, here in the hot thick sunlight and green leaves of Market Square.

“Do you like war,” my companion asked, “or simply blood?”

An interesting question. “I think they both concern power.”

“Precisely.”  He leafed through the book while I watched him secretly. In the exquisitely tailored crimson uniform, he had a look of coarseness combined with power. Above the stiff gold-braided collar, his neck was thick with muscle. His hands were short and broad-nailed, his fingertips square against the yellow-and-red binding of Dracula. Perhaps feeling my eyes on him, he looked up and smiled at me. He had assurance, a way of looking at me as though I were already attracted to him, though he was not handsome:  a thick-lipped mouth, a scar on his jaw, and a nick out of his ear. And he had thrown my cutwork on the ground.  “My name is Susan Wentworth,” I said.

“Wentworth, like the hotel. That is easy to remember.”  No sweet words about my face being too beautiful for my name to be forgotten. “Do you stay at the hotel?” he asked.

A gentleman never asked directly where a lady lived, to save her the embarrassment of appearing to desire his company.

“My aunt has a cottage at Kittery Point.”

“That is not far. Do you come to the tea-dances at the hotel?”

“Seldom, Count Zohary. My aunt thinks the diplomatic guests are not suitable company.”

“Very true. But exciting, no?  Do you find soldiers exciting, Miss Wentworth?”

“Soldiering, yes, and diplomacy; I admit that I do.”

“A certain amount of blood...that is nice with the tea-dances.”

With his thumbnail he marked a passage in the book and showed it to me. As she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, I read. “Do you find that exciting?”

“I am not a vampire, Count Zohary,” I said, uneasily amused.

“I know that.”  My companion smiled at me, showing regular even teeth. “I, for instance, I am a vampire, and I can assure you that you are not one yet.”

“You, Count Zohary?”

“Of course, not as this man Stoker describes. I walk in the sun, I see my face in my shaving-mirror; I assure you I sleep in sheets, not dirt.”  He reached out and touched the thin gold cross I wore around my neck. “A pretty thing. It does not repel me.”  His fingers hovered very close to my neck and bosom. “The vampire is very sensual, Miss Wentworth, especially when he is also a soldier. Very attractive. You should try.”

I had let him go too far. “I think you dare overmuch, Count Zohary.”

“Ah, why I dare, that is the vampire in me. But you don’t hold up your cross and say, ‘Begone, necuratul!’,” he said. “And that is the vampire in you. Do you like what you read, Miss Susan Wentworth?  You look as though you would like it very much. Are you curious?  If you will come to the tea-dance at the hotel, I will show you the handsome hotel sheets, and teach you that vampires are—almost—as civilized as diplomats.”

He looked at me, gauging my response:  and for a moment, horrified, I felt I would respond. I wanted the brutal crude power of the man. “Count Zohary, you have mistaken me, I am respectable.” I snatched the book away from him and stuffed it deep into my tapestry bag. “I have—certainly no desire to see your—” I would not give him the satisfaction of finishing the sentence. “You’re making me talk nonsense.”

He brushed his mustache with his finger, then lifted one corner of his lip. “What will convince you, dear respectable Miss Wentworth?  My fangs?  Shall I turn into a wolf for you?  Come into your chamber like a red mist, or charge in like cavalry?”

Over our head the leaves rattled and wind soughed through the square. Count Zohary looked up. “Shall I tell you the future in your blood?  Shall I control the sea for you, or call a storm?  That is my best parlor-trick. Let us have a thunderstorm, Miss Wentworth, you and I.”

The tide controlled the sea, and the Piscatequa River called thunderstorms once or twice a week in August, without help from Hungarian counts. “If you can tell the future, Count Zohary, you know that everything you say is useless.”

“It is not my most reliable gift, Miss Wentworth,” he said. “Unfortunately, or I would not be here watching Witte and Komura, but back in New York drinking better coffee at the Embassy. It works best after I have had a woman, or drunk blood. Shall we find out together what Witte and Komura will do?  No?  You do not wish to know?” On the cafe table there was a ring of condensation from my glass of ice-water. With mock solemnity he shook salt from the table shaker over it and stared at the water as if into a crystal ball, making passes like a fortune-teller. “Sea water is better to look into; blood best. Ice-water—ach, Miss Wentworth, you make me work. But I see you will come to the tea-dance. Today, Wednesday, or Thursday you will come.”

“I will not,” I said. “Of course I will not.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Certainly not.”

“Thursday, then.” From the direction of the ocean, thunder muttered above the white tower of First Church. Count Zohary made a gesture upward and smiled at me. I began to gather up my things, and he bent down, stretching out his long arm to pick up my fallen linen. “This is almost done; you must come Thursday.”

“Why Thursday?” I asked unwillingly.

“Because I have made a bet with myself. Before you have finished this Quatsch,” he said, “I will give you what you want. I shall have turned you into a vampire.”

A sea-salt wave of breeze rolled over the Square, hissing; the leaves turned pale side up like dead fish. I stared at him, the smell of the sea in my mouth, an acrid freshness. He smiled at me, slightly pursing his lips. Flushing, I pushed my chair away. Count Zohary rose, clicked his heels, raised my hand to his lips; and through the first drops of rain I saw him stride away, his uniform the color of fresh blood against the brick and white of the Athenaeum, darkening in the rain. A soldier, his aide-de-camp, came forward with a black cape for him.

Unwillingly I thought of vampires.

oOo

That night the rain shook the little-paned windows of my white bedroom. This monster has done much harm already, I read. Moisture in the air made the book’s binding sticky, so that both my palms were printed with fragments of the red name backward. The howling of wolves. There were no wolves around Portsmouth, nor vampires either. I could tell my own future without help from him: this fall in New York would decide it, whatever my strategies. Women of my sort all had the same future.

How much less alive could I be, if I were a vampire’s prey?

I pictured myself approaching young men of my acquaintance and sinking my teeth into their throat. This was fancy; I had no access even to the ordinary powers of men such as the Count.

But he had told me one quite specific thing, and it intrigued me: he was with the embassy in New York.

The next day, though I was tired, I assiduously sewed at my cutwork and pricked at it with my scissors, and finishing this respectable task, I felt as though I were again in control of myself, triumphant over Count Zohary, and ready to face him.

At my instigation, my aunt’s friend Mrs. Lathrop proposed that we visit the Wentworth, and Aunt Mildred was persuaded to agree.

On Thursday, Elizabeth Lathrop and her daughter Lucilla, Aunt Mildred and I all fit ourselves into the Lathrop barouche, and at a gentle pace we were driven through the curving streets of Kittery and past the Federal mansions of Portsmouth. It was a perfect day, the breeze from the sea just enough to refresh us, late day-lilies and heliotrope blooming behind old-fashioned wooden trellis-fences; a day for a pleasant, thoughtless excursion; yet as we passed through Market Square, I looked for his glittering red figure, and as we pulled into the handsome gravel driveway of the Wentworth, I found myself excited, as if I were going to a meeting of some consequence.

Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Lathrop found us a table by the dance floor, which was not large but modern and well-appointed.  An orchestra was playing waltzes; a few couples practiced their steps on the floor, and many soldiers sat at tables under the potted palms, flirting with young women. Mrs. Lathrop and Lucilla intended a sight of Count Witte, whose manners were reported to be so uncouth that he must eat behind a screen. I saw no sign of Count Zohary. At one table, surrounded by a retinue of men, the notorious Mme N. held court, a laughing, pretty woman who was rumored to have brought down three governments. While the orchestra played, Mrs. Lathrop and my Aunt Mildred gossiped about her. Lucilla Lathrop and I discovered nothing in common. From under my eyelashes I watched clever Mme N.

Three women from the Japanese legation entered the dining room, causing a sensation with their kimonos, wigs, and plastered faces. I wondered if there were Japanese vampires, and if the painted Japanese ladies felt the same male energy from all those soldiers. Were those Japanese women’s lives as constrained as mine?

“The heat is making me uneasy, Aunt Mildred; I will go and stroll on the terrace.” Under my parasol, I let the sea wind cool my cheeks; I stared over the sandy lawn, over the sea.

“Miss Wentworth. Have you come to see my sheets?”

“By no means, Count Zohary.” He was sitting at one of the little cafe tables on the terrace. Today he was in undress uniform, a brownish-grey. In the sea light his blond hair had a foxy tint.

Standing, he bowed elaborately, drawing out a chair. “I would not give you the satisfaction of refusing.” I inclined my head and sat down.

“Then you will satisfy by accepting?”

“Indeed not. What satisfaction is that?” I looked out over the sea, the calm harbor. White yachts swayed at anchor; the Star Island ferry headed out toward the Shoals, sun gleaming off its windows and rail. I had seen this view for years from Aunt Mildred’s house; there was nothing new in it.

“Come now, turn your head, Miss Wentworth. You don’t know what I offer. Look at me.” On his table was a plate of peaches, ripe and soft; I smelled them on the warm air, looked at them but not at him. A fly buzzed over them; he waved it away, picked up a fruit and took a bite out of it. I watched his heavy muscular hand. “ You think you are weary of your life, but you have never tasted it. What is not tasted has no flavor. I offer everything you are missing—ah, now you look at me.” His eyes were reddish brown with flecks of light. He sucked at the juice, then offered the peach to me, the same he had tasted; he held it close to my lips. “Eat.”

“I will have another, but not this.”

“Eat with me; then you will have as many as you want.” I took a tiny nip from the fruit’s pink flesh. Soft, hairy skin; sweet flesh. He handed the plate of fruit to me; I took one and bit. My mouth was full of pulp and juice.

“I could have your body,” he said in a soft voice. “By itself, like that peach; that is no trouble. But you can be one of us, I saw it in the square. I want to help you, to make you what you are.”

“One of us?  What do you mean?”

“One who wants power,” he said with the same astonishing softness. “Who can have it. A vampire. Eat your peach, Miss Wentworth, and I will tell you about your Dracula. Vlad Draculesti, son of Vlad the Dragon. On Timpa Hill by Brasov, above the chapel of St. Jacob, he had his enemies’ limbs lopped and their bodies impaled; and as they screamed, he ate his meal beside them, dipping his bread into the blood of the victims, because the taste of human blood is the taste of power. The essence of the vampire is power.” He reached out his booted foot and, under the table, touched mine. “Power is not money, or good looks, or rape or seduction. It is simple, life and death; to kill; to drink the blood of the dying; but oneself to survive, to beget, to make one’s kind, to flourish. Komura and Witte have such power, they are making a great red storm, with many victims. I too have power, and I will have blood on my bread. Will you eat and drink with me?”

“Blood—?”

He looked at me with his lightflecked eyes. “Does blood frighten you, do you faint at the sight of blood, like a good little girl?  I think not.” He took a quick bite from his peach. “Have you ever seen someone die?  Did they bleed?  Did you look away?  No, I see you did not; you were fascinated, more than a woman should be. You like the uniforms, the danger, the soldiers, but what you truly like, Miss Wentworth, is red. When you read about this war in the newspapers, will you pretend you are shocked and say Oh, how dreadful, while you look twice and then again at the pictures of blood, and hope you do not know why your heart beats so strong?  Will you say, I can never be so much alive as to drink blood?  Or will you know yourself, and be glad when the red storm comes?”  He tapped my plate of peaches with his finger. “To become what you are is simpler than eating one of those, Miss Wentworth, and much more pleasant.”

“I wish some degree of power—who does not—but to do this—”  He was right; I had been fascinated. The next day I had come back to the scene, had been disappointed that the blood was washed away. “This is ridiculous, you must wish to make me laugh or to disgust me. You are making terrible fun of me.”

“Drink my blood,” he said. “Let me drink yours. I will not kill you. Have just a little courage, a little curiosity. Sleep with me; that last is not necessary, but is very amusing. Then—a wide field, and great power, Miss Wentworth.”

I swallowed. “You simply mean to make me your victim.”

“If it seems to you so, then you will be my victim. I want to give you life, because you might take it and amuse me. But you undervalue yourself. Are you my victim?” For a moment, across a wide oval in front of the hotel, wind flattened the water, and through some trick of light and wave, it gleamed red. “See, Miss Wentworth. My parlor trick again.”

“No— I often see such light on the water.”

“Not everyone does.”

“Then I see nothing.”

By his plate he had a little sharp fruit-knife. He picked it up and drew a cut across his palm; as the blood began to well, he cupped his palm and offered it to me. “The blood is a little sea, a little red sea, the water I like best to control. I stir it up, Miss Wentworth; I drink it; I live.” With one finger of his right hand he touched his blood, then the vein on my wrist. “I understand its taste; I can make it flow like tide, Miss Wentworth, I can make your heart beat, Miss Wentworth, until you would scream at me to stop. Do you want to understand blood, do you want to taste blood, do you want your mouth full of it, salty, sweet, foul blood?  Do you want the power of the blood?  Of course you do not, the respectable American girl. Of course you do; you do.”

He took my hand, he pulled me close to him. He looked at me with his insistent animal eyes, waiting, his blood cupped in his hand. I knew that at that moment I could break away from his grip and return to Aunt Mildred and the Lathrops. They would not so much as notice I had gone or know what monstrous things had been said to me. I could sit down beside them, drink tea, and listen to the orchestra for the rest of my life. For me there would be no vampires.

The blood, crusted at the base of his fingers, still welled from the slit he had made in his palm. It was bright, bright red. I bent down and touched my tongue to the wound. The blood was salty, intimate, strong, the taste of my own desire.

oOo

The white yacht was luxuriously appointed, with several staterooms. We sailed far out to sea. Count Zohary had invited the Lathrops and my aunt to chaperone me. On deck, Mr. Lathrop, a freckled man in a white suit, trolled for bluefish and talked with Count Zohary. I heard the words Witte, Sakhalin, reparations; this evening there was to be an important meeting between the plenipotentiaries. Aunt Mildred and Mrs. Lathrop talked and played whist, while Lucilla Lathrop’s crocheting needle flashed through yards of cream-white tatting. I began still another piece of cutwork, but abandoned it and stood in the bow of the boat, feeling the sea-waves in my body, long and slow. In part I was convinced Count Zohary merely would seduce me; I did not care. I had swallowed his blood and now he would drink mine.

Under an awning, sailors served luncheon from the hotel. Oysters Rockefeller, cream of mushroom soup with Parker House rolls, salmon steaks, mousse of hare, pepper dumplings, matchsticked sugared carrots, corn-on-the-cob, a salad of cucumbers and Boston lettuce, summer squash. For desserts, almond biscuits, a praline and mocha-buttercream glazed cake, and ice cream in several flavors. With the food came wine, brandy with dessert, and a black bottle of champagne. I picked at the spinach on my oysters, but drank the wine thirstily. In the post-luncheon quiet, the boat idled on calm water; the sailors went below.

Mr. Lathrop fell asleep first, a handkerchief spread over his red face; then Lucilla Lathrop began snoring gently in a deck chair under the awning, her tatting tangled in her lap. Mr. Lathrop’s fishing rod trailed from his nerveless hand; I reeled it in and laid it on the deck, and in the silent noon the thrum of fishing line was as loud as the engine had been. Aunt Mildred’s cards sank into her lap. She did not close her eyes, but when I stood in front of her, she seemed not to see me. Alone, Mrs. Lathrop continued to play her cards, slowly, one by one, onto the little baize-colored table between her and my aunt, as if she were telling fortunes.

“Mrs. Lathrop?” She looked up briefly, her eyes dull as raisins in her white face, nodded at me, and went back to her cards.

“They have eaten and drunk,” Count Zohary said, “and they are tired.” A wave passed under the boat; Aunt Mildred’s head jerked sideways and she fell across the arm of her chair, limply, rolling like a dead person. I almost cried out, almost fell; Count Zohary caught me and put his hand across my mouth.

“If you scream you will wake them.”

Grasping my hand, he led me down the stairs, belowdecks, through a narrow corridor. On one side was the galley, and there, his head on his knees, sat the cook, asleep; near him a handsome sailor had fallen on the floor, sleeping too; I saw no others.

The principal stateroom was at the bow of the ship, white in the hot afternoon. The bed was opened, the sheets drawn back; the cabin had an odor of lemon-oil, a faint musk of ocean. “Sheets,” he said. “You see?” I sank down on the bed, my knees would not hold me. I had not known, at the last, how my body would fight me; I wanted to be not here, to know the future that was about to happen, to have had it happen, to have it happening now. I heard the snick of the bolt, and then he was beside me, unbuttoning the tiny buttons at my neck. So quiet it was, so quiet, I could not breathe. He bent down and touched the base of my neck with his tongue, and then I felt the tiny prick of his teeth, the lapping of his tongue and the sucking as he began to feed.

It was at first a horror to feel the blood drain, to sense my will struggle and fail; and then the pleasure rose, shudders and trembling so exquisite I could not bear them; the hot white cabin turned to shadows and cold and I fell across the bed. I am in my coffin, I thought, in my grave. He laid me back against the pillows, bent over me, pushed up my skirts and loosened the strings of my petticoats; I felt his hand on my skin. This was what I had feared, but now there was no retreat, I welcomed what was to come. I guided him forward; he lay full on me, his body was heavy on me, pressed against me, his uniform braid bruising my breasts. Our clothes were keeping us from each other. I slid the stiff fastenings open, fumbled out of my many-buttoned dress, struggled free of everything that kept me from him. Now, I whispered. You must.

We were skin to skin, and then, in one long agonizing push, he invaded me, he was in my very body. Oh, the death-pangs as I became a vampire, the convulsion of all my limbs! I gasped, bit his shoulder, made faces to keep from screaming. Yet still I moved with him, felt him moving inside me, and his power flowed into me. I laughed at the pain and pleasure unimaginable, as the sea-waves pulsed through the cabin and pounded in my blood.

“Are you a vampire now, little respectable girl?” he gasped.

“Oh, yes, I have power, yes, I am a vampire.”

He laughed.

When I dressed, I found blood on my bruised neck; my privates were bloody and sticky with juice, the signs of my change. I welcomed them. In the mirror, I had a fine color in my cheeks, and my white linen dress was certainly no more creased than might be justified by spending an afternoon on the water. My blood beat heavy and proud, a conquering drum.

I went on deck and ate a peach to still my thirst, but found it watery and insipid. It was late, toward sunset, the light failing, the sea red. In the shadows of the water I saw men silently screaming. I desired to drink the sea.

Mr. Lathrop opened his eyes and asked me, “Did you have a pleasant afternoon, Miss Wentworth?” His eyes were fixed, his color faded. Lucilla’s face, as she blinked and yawned, was like yellow wax under her blond hair. Flies were buzzing around Mrs. Lathrop’s cards, and Mrs. Lathrop gave off a scent of spoiled meat, feces and blood. “Good afternoon, Aunt Mildred, how did you nap?” She did not answer me. Oh, they are weary, I thought, weary and dead.

Count Zohary came up the stairs, buttoning his uniform collar gingerly, as if his neck were bruised too. To amuse him, I pressed my sharp cutwork scissors against the vein of Aunt Mildred’s neck, and held a Parker House roll underneath it; but he and I had no taste for such as Aunt Mildred. I threw my scissors into the blood-tinged sea: they fell, swallowed, corroded, gone.

Under a red and swollen sky, our ship sailed silent back to the white hotel. Count Zohary and I were the first to be rowed to shore. Across the red lawn, lights blazed, and outside the hotel a great crowd had assembled. “In a moment we will see the future,” he said.

“I saw men dying in the ocean,” I answered.

We walked across the lawn together, my arm in his; under my feet, sea sand hissed.

“Count Zohary, perhaps you have friends who share those interests that you have taught me to value?  I would delight to be introduced to them. Though I know not what I can do, I wish for wide horizons.”

“I have friends who will appreciate you. You will find a place in the world.”

As we entered the even more crowded foyer, Count Sergei Witte and the Marquis Komura stood revealed, shaking hands. From a thousand throats a shout went up. “Peace!  It is peace!”

“It is the great storm,” said Count Zohary. For a moment he looked pensive, as though even vampires could regret.

He and I gained the vantage-point of the stairs, and I looked down upon the crowd as if I were their general. Many of the young men were dead, the Americans as well as the foreign observers. I looked at the victims with interest. Some had been shot in the eye, forehead, cheekbone; some were torn apart as if by bombs. Their blood gleamed fresh and red. The flesh of some was gray and dirt-abraded, the features crushed, as if great weights had fallen on them. Next to me stood a woman in a nurse’s uniform; as she cheered, she coughed gouts of blood and blinked blind eyes. Outside, Roman candles began to stutter, and yellow-green light fell over the yellow and gray faces of the dead.

But among them, bright as stars above a storm, I saw us, the living. How we had gathered for this!  Soldiers and civilians; many on the Russian and Japanese staff, and not a few of the observers; the eminent Mme N., who bowed to me distantly but cordially across the room; by a window a nameless young man, still as obscure as I; and my bright, my blazing Count Zohary. The hotel staff moved among us, gray-faced, passing us glasses of champagne; but my glass was hot and salt, filled with the sea of blood to come. For the first time, drinking deep, I was a living person with a future.

That autumn I was in New York, but soon traveled to Europe; and wherever I went, I helped to call up the storm.

The End
Copyright © 1992 by Sarah Smith
First published: Shudder Again, 1994