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again."
"Marty?"
"Yes?"
But then, before she said anything more, the young woman stroked the young
man's hair for a time in silence. At last she murmured: "I
was buried there, Marty."
That got him to lift his head from the pillow and turn toward her. "I
don't understand."
"I was put there, in the family vault. You, and Father, and Mother, and Becky,
buried me. I can remember it, my funeral, and all the rest, like some bad
dream. I was aware of what was happening. I
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire just couldn't move."
"Don't talk like that!"
But Louisa's voice went on, dully, gently, as if the story she recounted had
happened a hundred years ago. "When the boat tipped, Marty, he was there, and
he carried me away. Dragging me with him while he swam at great speed
underwater. I was under water until I thought I was going to drown I was still
breathing then but at last he brought me to the surface for a while and let me
have air."
"Don't talk like that, I said!"
Louisa paused, looking at her lover wistfully. She added: "It was later when I
stopped breathing, after he had How can I tell you what it was like? But when
we were far downstream, he took me out of the water, and he drank my blood,
again and again until finally I wanted him to do it. And he gave me his blood
to drink
he opened one of his own veins for me and it was marvelous."
"Lou!"
"Then you found me, and said prayers, and put me into the vault
and it was warm and dark and pleasant there. But twice now, he has made me
leave the cemetery by night, and go back to the house, and say things to
Mother and Father about some treasure."
Martin breathed twice before he asked: "What treasure?"
"I don't know! I say only what he orders me to say. I went into
Father's safe, and took out some jewels; but he was only angry when
I brought them to him, and he threw them all over the cemetery...
and then he would not let me go back to my coffin, where it was so
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire nice and dark all day. Now I must spend
the day in a place where there are many windows, but no curtains, and light
comes through into the place... and it's so hard to sleep. Oh, Marty! Hold me!
Love me!
And Martin Armstrong did his best.
Ecstatic fainting blurred and prolonged itself, in some manner, into sleep.
From a dream of still being embraced tightly in Louisa's arms, Martin
Armstrong drifted slowly into wakefulness. Early summer daylight had arrived
outside his window, where now all was birdsong and gray light. His body
stirred slowly, full wakefulness coming only as he sat up with a jerking
start. Louisa was gone, gone as if she had never existed. Martin himself was
entirely naked, his nightshirt having been cast aside during the...
The dream?
Lurching out of bed, he stumbled to the bureau, where his shaving mirror was
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
propped. It was the need to see his own face that drew him there, the feeling
that some essential doubt had been created regarding his own identity.
And indeed, the reflection of his face looked strange enough, pale and gaunt,
but after a single glance he hardly looked at it. What put the seal of reality
on Louisa's life, on last night's encounter, were the two painless little
marks on his throat. As if they had been magically transferred somehow from
her throat to his.
Becky was right, he realized twenty minutes later, while knotting his tie
preparatory to going down to breakfast. (His collar hid one of
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire the little marks at least, and the
other was not particularly noticeable.) Louisa still lived perhaps now more
intensely than ever before but she had been drastically altered. The woman who
had come to him last night (however that trick had been managed)
was no substitute for Louisa Altamont, but rather Louisa Altamont transformed.
The girl to whom he, Martin Armstrong, had once proposed marriage had not
become a ghost but certainly the young woman who had wantoned in his bed last
night was not the same one who had accepted his proposal of holy matrimony.
Last night's .. . last night's whore (in the privacy of his own thought, he
could try how that word sounded, when applied to his betrothed)...
that woman could not be identified with the sunlit figure in a summer dress [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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