The Silver Kiss

“How can you expect me to believe that?” she cried, and started to stand up. He grabbed her hand in an icy grip and held her there while he awkwardly slid the painting between the end table and the couch. This was a mistake, she thought, a stupid mistake.

“He waits by dark places,” Simon continued.

Oh, no, it’s not you. Please, it’s not you, Zoë begged silently.

“He tells women he’s lost, then he takes advantage of their kind hearts.” Simon’s eyes burned, terrifying her. “He leads them into the dark and slaughters them, then cuts their throats.” His grip tightened with the urgency of his words. “He looks like a child, but he’s old as sin, and he’s bloated with filth and corruption. They think he’s only a child.”

Zoë grew colder and colder, as if the chill of his hand were seeping into her. She saw back to the little boy at the alley’s mouth, talking to Lorraine. “I’m lost,” he had told her. She trembled. He’s tricking me somehow, she thought. But no, she’d never told him about that. How could he know? My God, she realized. It could have been Lorraine lying there dead. No, it wasn’t true.

“He killed my mother,” Simon was saying. “She was overjoyed to have him again, but he killed his own mother in the filthiest way. And he knew who she was. I have followed him for a long time, and now I have found him. But I failed, Zoë. I tried to kill him, and I failed. What am I to do?”

Let me go, she wanted to scream.

His grip softened. His hand moved up her arm. She tried to move back but found herself leaning forward instead. She saw a crackling of summer lightning in his eyes—the heat lightning she had felt the night he walked her home. He needed her. After weeks of not feeling needed by others, it seemed welcome. His lips touched hers, cool, soft, almost chaste. I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought. He moaned slightly, as if it were his first kiss, long denied, and she gently folded into him while he put his arms around her. Her mouth parted. He nibbled her lip.

“Ouch!” She pushed him away.

His eyes were large, dark, and compelling. He blinked, and suddenly she felt like she was waking from a dream. He looked ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I made you kiss me. I wasn’t going to. I wanted you to come to me of your own free will. But the chance was slipping away. I was afraid I was losing any chance with you.”

“That’s absurd,” she said indignantly. “You didn’t make me kiss you.” Her heart beat fast, and her lip tingled where he had bitten her. “What makes you think you could do that?”

“I am not like you,” he said. “I am not human anymore, I think.”

She frowned. She didn’t want to be reminded of his strangeness; she wanted to be held, and to forget it. She had never enjoyed a kiss like that before. She climbed up beside him on the couch, but embarrassed by her desire to be kissed, she found she couldn’t look at him directly. She absently brushed her mouth, and it left a smear of blood on her hand. He leaned to her and gently licked her lip. She felt like she was melting, but he shivered as if he were cold. She pulled back, afraid of her response.

“I will tell you a story,” he said, with a slight tremble to his voice, “and then you will believe me.”

10

Simon

Simon turned off the radio. No distractions now, he thought, no matter how much I like the music. Motorhead was abruptly silenced. He settled back on the couch next to Zoë and began his tale.

“I was born in a village outside Bristol—that’s in the west of England. My father owned a fair amount of land, upon which he raised sheep, and he sold cloth locally. But he was ambitious.” Simon saw Zoë sink into the cushions, relaxing into the tale.

“In those days Parliament ruled. The old king was dead, and the king-to-be still in exile. They were grim times, when the slightest hint of pleasure was condemned as sin. The maypole was cut down, and Christmas was forbidden except as a fast. This made life difficult for my mother, because she had a happy nature, and was fond of dance and song, but was forced to wear dark colors and keep a solemn look on her face in public. Yet in her own home she sang to her children at night, and the neighbors be damned. She had a merry laugh, and all who knew her said it was hard not to join her in a prank.” Simon reached over the arm of the couch and stroked the picture frame gently as he talked. It was all he had left of her.

“My father’s business was just starting to do well when I was an infant, so he commissioned this portrait to record his good fortune. It was shortly after this portrait was painted that Wulfram von Grab came into our lives.” Simon’s spine stiffened. He saw Zoë look at him curiously, and tried to relax.

“My father would always say that, whatever else the faults of puritan rule, the Lord Protector had opened up more chance of trade in Europe than any of the Stuart kings. Businessmen with political good sense were offered a golden opportunity to succeed, and my father took more and more trips to the city. On one of those trips he met von Grab. Von Grab said he could help my father take advantage of the thriving market for British broadcloth on the Continent, in return for a percentage, of course. Since he had contacts my father could benefit from, my father brought him home to discuss it further.”

Simon saw the question on Zoë’s face before she voiced it. How would he know all this? “Of course, I only heard of this when I was older, and in dribs and drabs, but I gathered enough to put the story together.

“Von Grab was a tall, pale man, with a mane of dark hair—rumored to be a frivolous wig—and darker eyes. He moved gracefully and punctuated his animated conversation with quick gestures of his long, elegant hands. He made himself a pleasant guest and won my mother over quickly with jokes and songs. He was, in turn, quite taken with my brother, Christopher.

“No matter how charming my parents found von Grab, the servants thought him odd. Whether this was because he was European, or because he was truly eccentric, they couldn’t say, but at a time when people rose at dawn, he slept past noon, and while the family went to bed not much after dusk, they knew that he was awake well into the night. He hardly ate at all, claiming a weak digestion, although he liked a good red wine; and he never attended chapel. But he had plenty of money, and was likely to make my father rich, so his strangeness was overlooked.

“Von Grab rarely ventured outside, but he did enjoy sitting by the fire after supper, spinning a tale or two, and even the few servants would creep into the shadowed drawing-room to hear his fanciful stories.

“They say Christopher was spellbound. He would sit at the visitor’s feet, or on his knee, and beg for one more tale. While Mother looked on amused, von Grab would laugh and tousle Christopher’s light brown hair—the hair that is now white—and call him his sweet angel, his little Fledermaus. Christopher spent as much time as possible with him. My mother judged von Grab to be an affectionate man and chided him gently for not having a wife.”

Zoë shifted restlessly, and Simon motioned for her to be still. “I’m getting to the point.

“One night my father’s manservant was slipping secretly through the hall to visit the scullery maid, when he heard soft voices on the upstairs landing. Creeping partway up the stairs, he saw von Grab at his door, talking to Christopher, who stood there in his nightshirt, looking small and hollow-eyed in the candlelight. The servant assumed the boy had had a nightmare and gone for reassurance to his friend, so he withdrew. He was not eager for anyone to know he was up and about at this hour.

“Perhaps von Grab knew he had been seen and thought the seeds of suspicion had been sown, or perhaps he couldn’t wait any longer. I can only imagine. But the next night he left after all were sleeping, taking only a few belongings on his black mare, and nobody knew until the morning after, when the whole household was searching for Christopher.

“That morning the child’s bed had been discovered empty by the housemaid, and he couldn’t be found anywhere. Finally, when my mother was thoroughly panicked and the house was in an uproar, my father’s manservant had to put aside his embarrassment and tell what he had seen. My father knocked on von Grab’s door, but no one responded, and the door opened easily onto an empty room. The bed had not been slept in. Wulfram von Grab had gone, and Christopher with him.”