Anouk and The Cold Front
Anouk and the penultimate cold front of the winter arrived simultaneously just before dawn. I heard the key turn in the lock and seconds later the first gust from the south rattled the windows. Both the wind and her steps up the long staircase made our old terrace creak.
Snug in a warm bed, I listened to the wind rip along the long straight streets of the city centre, gusting past the clubs where Anouk had been dancing. It would go quiet for a few seconds, sometimes a minute, and then the next gust would build, streaming towards us, a rolling, incoming tide of dusty air. Anouk ran the tap, rattled things in the bathroom and then went to her room. I fell back asleep to a distant car alarm and the wind’s thrashing of the spring’s new growth.
The front was weak and in the morning when I woke it was cooler, but not cold. I opened the door of my bedroom. Across the corridor, Anouk’s door was closed but I could hear soft snoring. On the carpet in the hall were scattered the evening’s clothing plus a white handbag and a bright purple vape. There were splatters and drops of dried blood on all of it.
I picked everything up. The clothes I put into the washing machine. The handbag and its contents I put aside for later. I needed to sort the victim’s things from Anouk’s and ask what she wished to keep. Once I found two fingers in one of her bags and I disposed of them carefully but without asking. A rookie error. When Anouk found out she flew into a rage and beat me so furiously that my ribs were black and blue for weeks.
At one stage of the violence she held my body high above her head as she stood at the top of the stairs. Semi-conscious, I could feel my hair standing on end from the energy she was discharging. Another few seconds and she would have hurled me down, but she mastered herself and threw me to the floor. When I woke hours later she was wiping blood from my face with one smooth cold hand, licking her fingers and masturbating me with the other.
I went downstairs to make coffee. But first I would check the steps and the front yard. The things dropped in the hallway, the snores from Anouk’s room were signs that I had seen before. There is a cycle. A cycle for everything in the universe, and Anouk can be, in certain years, less cautious, more flamboyant. I have managed this in the past and will again.
My name is Mick and I am almost immortal. I look mid to late twenties but I have seen that age seven times over. I have seen my beloved Demons win finals in three centuries. I have no children. Anouk saw to that. I can’t remember my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews; some kind of defence system my brain has developed over the last ninety years. I am the familiar to the vampire Anouk and like a single mother to triplets, I am always busy.
I opened the front door and disturbed a crow on the second step. The crow flapped up to the nearest high branch and cawed mournfully. A leg was on the stairs, not a whole leg, the thigh was there with the knee, but the tibia and fibula of the lower leg and the foot were nowhere to be seen. Drained of blood the meat was torn, grey and blotchy, the remaining skin dark and hairy.
I looked around. Sightlines to the front steps from outside the property were minimal. We had the hedge and the fence to shield us from the street and our neighbours’ houses were set back further than ours. I had developed a very green thumb over the decades.
This event with the leg was not dangerous in itself. At this stage I just felt annoyed and even that was stupid. Anouk has walked the earth undead for four thousand years. Living, feeding, thriving, she is quick, strong and cunning. This was the same as the spring of 1917 and autumn 1963; she was just going through a phase.
I picked up the thigh by the bony ball that had once sat in a hip socket and went back inside. There was a chest freezer in the basement for such contingencies.
Anouk slept for the next three days, waking with the sunset on Tuesday. I was downstairs watching TV, drinking tea, wondering what to make for dinner when I heard the gas hot water system kick in and shower water begin to gurgle down the drain. There would be no complaints or comments from her. Everything was clean and her wardrobe was restored after a trip to the dry cleaners and a morning spent gently handwashing her delicates, easing blood and other fluids out of the silks and wools.
It was a Tuesday night so she wouldn’t be needing those sort of clothes anyway. Tuesday Night always began with Pub Trivia at the Cambridge, a pub in which Anouk had first drunk and worked back in the winter of 1877. We had seen it evolve through many incarnations over the years. It was always a great night out in the 80s and before that in the 40s. Of course any vampire or even their familiar will tell you almost nothing lasts. A lot of the energy has dissipated. Drained out of not just the pub but the whole suburb, drained like a body of its blood.
Anouk, through a complicated arrangement of financial hocus pocus, has owned The Cambridge since the 1970s. She owned three other pubs in this city and more in others. She had been around long enough to see and read the patterns in urban development around the world and take advantage financially. In the modern world a vampire does not live by blood alone.
Anouk’s ability to move silently and quickly when she desired still surprised me. I was still not sure if her feet really touched the ground or stopped mere atoms above.
“Good evening Mick, nice work with the clothes.”
I jumped and turned around from the stove. Anouk was standing half a metre away, dressed and ready to go out. She smiled and her face lit up with a joy for life that only the living dead possess.
“Don’t rush your dinner I have some reading to do. We will go in an hour. Tonight I might try winning at trivia, win you some beer, help you make some friends.”
She was joking of course. Anouk always wins at trivia if she tries and there was only one good reason for me to make friends.
**
He wasn’t dressed like one, but like a young lawyer on the make, he was really putting his case. They were sitting at the bar at the Cambridge after trivia, heads close together, drinking matching pots of beer. Their conversation was intense.
He was average height, thin, with a boyish face. He was dressed like he had just finished ollying the nearest council skate bowl but his hair was already thinning and receding. He would be bald by forty.
She was the opposite. Tending toward voluptuousness, long mane artfully dyed with sunny streaks. Her eyelashes were as thick as palm fronds, black as deep depression. Anouk was wearing a strapless top that tied at the back with a quantity of lace and eyelets that would not have been out of place on a pair of Converse hi tops.
He kept on talking and Anouk kept listening. Maybe closing arguments were his strength. Maybe he was one of those blokes who just wore them down with words, like a wolf pack that chases an elk till it can’t run anymore. Nothing flashy in the beginning or even in the middle act, just the erosion of resistance with flattery, entrustments, logic and dares until it was easier, less painful to just succumb.
I finished my beer and looked over at Katrina behind the bar. I signalled for another and watched Anouk as she listened to the pitch.
I think I loved Katrina. It was hard to tell though. Being a vampire’s familiar does that to you. Your feelings are deadened except for the ones around lust and hunger. And the older you are, the more those feelings, unnaturally extended, become confusing. Sometimes a powerful surge of something that I thought was love would roll through, a real swell of feeling of wanting to spend time with another person. It didn’t matter anyway as I wasn’t allowed attachments. Attachments were too dangerous, too inconvenient for Anouk.
Katrina liked me though. I could tell. Whenever she brought over a drink, she would smile and linger, ask a question, make conversation. She asked me if I was going to a free concert the next Saturday. I stalled. She said she and her friends would definitely be there and for a few seconds she held my eye. I felt the strongest surge ever, a feeling of being so alone, of being imprisoned, mixed with the sadness of knowing that I might be wanted by someone else and being unable to do anything about it. I can’t remember what I said, some vague maybe, and she smiled and went back behind the bar.
I didn’t go of course and that Saturday evening Anouk sensed my sadness and doubt. She was getting ready to go out, maybe to the same concert. I did not ask.
Being what she was, Anouk’s approach was to exploit my weakness to alleviate my sadness, so as to really reaffirm the one commitment that truly mattered, my commitment to her. So when she called me to her bedroom I found her atop her crisply made bed, naked on her stomach riding a plump pillow placed between her legs.
Anouk knew I was there watching and she started to call my name. It was an old game we played. Once it felt optional but now it was compulsory. My job was to resist approaching till I could not. Of course the longer I resisted, the more her excitement and mine, but also her calling of my name increased in volume and tone. It became more and more a command, delivered with more undead power with each uttering, and so I had to fight both lust and the underlying spell that first joined us when I accepted her offered blood.
Sometimes as I started towards her, she would flick the spell around and use the same force to stop me in my tracks. By now I was crazed with lust and the invisible wall, just a metre from her body, would make me lose reality. For a few seconds I was in her world with every sense more heightened. I could smell her, see the dust motes being sucked in and out of my mouth as I panted like a wolf. Then the wall would vanish and I could rush to her.
Afterwards, I would lay beside her, one hand on her bottom, stroking and marvelling at how cold her firm flesh was. Anouk would stroke my brow, whisper endearments, tell me how she could not survive without me and how we, the two of us, were special, so special.
But this time I asked her how special we really were.
“Mistress, how many are you in the world?”
I almost said us because without a me there cannot be a her or a him. At least not for too long. But that would have been dangerous, I well knew that being her familiar did not mean I was safe from her temper.
She grabbed my face with her white hands, her long, beautiful fingers gripped my head like a vice and I thought she was going to snap my neck. She looked into my eyes and I felt myself beginning to float away from this world into hers.
“You doubt yourself Mick, always have, but you, you are the best familiar I have ever had. So I will answer your question and show you your predecessors. You will see.”
Anouk took a deep breath and pushed the air into my own lungs from her frozen lips, inches away from my own. The sensation of connection grew and then I had her memories and information in my mind. It was fascinating and horrible.
It was a history unfurling. Dozens of familiars, male, female, every culture, from the Mekong Delta to London’s East End, all serving her.
Then the memories seemed to pull back like a camera and I could see a world map huge and illuminated, pinned to a black void by a thigh bone in each corner and beside the map a legend, where in typical vampiric humour a set of teeth, the canines insanely long, represented vampires. There were twenty-one sets of teeth scattered across the world. Melbourne had the only set of teeth on the Australian continent.
I passed out. When I came to it was dark and I was alone. Anouk had gone out and she would be hungry.
I knew that Anouk would bring Katrina home. She would think that she had to because she needed to prove to me who I belonged to, who was in charge. Katrina was getting too close, too familiar with me, her familiar, would be how Anouk would put it to me afterwards. What I didn’t expect was that Katrina would still be alive when she got here.
Sometime after three I heard the front door open and then drunk giggles. I couldn’t sleep so I was waiting in my room, reading in the armchair and wrestling with a parade of emotions. Anouk’s blood in my veins deadened any feeling of concern, let alone guilt, at what I knew was going to happen next. A familiar was immune to a victim’s cries of help and screams of abject terror. But some emotion was generating a feeling like a sleeping cat, hot, heavy and uncomfortable was on my chest.
A tap ran in the kitchen. Music started in the lounge room and a few minutes later Anouk swept into my room. She was radiating blood lust, her eyes burned red and hot like a forest fire.
“Come down now, it is time to see your friend Katrina. Come and say hello, and goodbye.”
I stood up and followed. I would like to say reluctantly but I don’t think that was true.
Katrina was looking out of the living room window, her body framed against the black night. She was swaying clumsily to the music and when I entered the room she turned and almost stumbled when she leapt towards me. She was very drunk and stoned but was obviously determined to keep the party going.
“Mick,” she almost yelled, “You should have come to the festival. It was fucking great, me and Anouk had the best time. We’ve been dancing all night.”
By now she was in my arms and I was hugging her and suddenly something broke in me, the weight rolled free and I whispered in her ear, “You need to go, right now, believe me, go, it’s dangerous. Anouk only invited you back to…” I did not know what to say, what would she believe? Was I even getting through her high?
But it was all too late because Anouk let herself loose then. An immense blackness filled the room and then the evil tide receded to reveal Anouk beside us now, eyes blazing, mouth wide open, her chalky white fangs grown long and narrowed to a pinpoint, her crimson nails were like daggers. I could hear her scream of lust and rage in my head, but Katrina still stayed in my arms, seemingly oblivious to the danger. Then as fast as Anouk reached in to grab her shoulders, somehow Katrina was quicker. With sudden strength she pushed me away and I fell backwards on to the couch where I watched what happened next.
I didn’t think that Katrina would do anything more than scream and die in the next few seconds. So only Anouk was more surprised than I when Katrina produced from somewhere the sharpened wooden stake. She held it firm, at just the right height, and then pivoted with perfect timing for Anouk to drive herself on it. The stake pierced her vinyl bustier and the point plunged into her cold, leathery heart. Anouk’s scream became a cry of pain, then despair, and before I could pick a side and say or do anything, Anouk was a dust cloud drifting onto the floorboards. Katrina looked at me.
“Mick, you old familiar you.” she said. “I think you need to go and have a look in the mirror.”
I went to get up, maybe to do what she said or something else. I was so in shock I was operating on suggestion. But suddenly it was hard to get out of the chair. When I looked down at the back of my hands I could see that they were now terribly wrinkled and covered with liver spots. I had lost all the virility from Anouk’s blood. I was an old man.
I looked up at Katrina. She had a smile on her face.
“The look on your face when you came down the stairs, the concern in your voice when you were whispering.” She laughed and pushed her hands through her hair. “You are an unusual familiar. I feel sorry for you, far more than the others I have met, but in the end.” She paused. “Have you thought about what happens now? Do you even know?”
She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Three days till you die or find another bite buddy. But I don’t think there are any vacancies around here and even if there were, well let’s face it, you didn’t see me coming, did you, old man?”
Katrina reached down and patted my shoulder. She grabbed a blanket from a chair and threw it over my knees.
“Tomorrow afternoon, come down the Cambridge while you still have some strength and I’ll buy you a beer. No one will recognise you; I’ll tell anyone who asks that you’re my Grandfather.”
Grabbing her handbag she waved goodbye and left. I sat until the dawn broke.
She was right. Nobody knew who I was but all the regulars thought it cool that Katrina would invite her grandfather, the sprightly, can’t believe you’re a day over seventy Michael to the pub. She even gave me a lift home after closing because a cold front had blown through and there was a chilly drizzle. I went to bed but couldn’t get warm. I dreamt about Anouk and once just before dawn I woke to what I thought were footsteps on the stairs, but it was just the house creaking in the wind.
Photo by Camila Quintero Franco
