THE STORY TO NOW: The Fates weave together the lives in this tale, playing out in San Francisco in the 1980’s.
Gabriel, a human-vampire hybrid, has the ability to make vampires forget time and stay up till dawn. When they turn to dust, he makes jewelry out of their rainbow crystal teeth. He sells these in a shop run by the Fates. The necklaces attract vampires and cause a slate of murders.
River, who has a supernatural gift for baking sweets that induce happiness, and his crow, Huck, have followed Gabriel to San Francisco. In a 24 hour diner, River falls in love with a red-haired waitress named Pam. He discovers Thanatos, who he thought was a homeless man, is actually the Greek god of death who takes blood from coma patients and delivers it to vampires with AIDS. He learns that Pam is one such vampire.
Read last week’s installment here. See all installments here.
PART III
History: Pamela
“A daughter without her mother is a woman broken. It is a loss that … settles deep into her bones.” — Kristin Hannah
Chapter 97
Pamela
San Francisco 1848 – 1899
The Beginning
“People say that time is curved, and space is relative, but ghosts live it,” Ryo tells River. River does not hear him. He’s deafened by the sorrow roaring in his ears like the tide inside a seashell. Ryo signs. It’s like talking to Gabriel, like calling into an echoless void.
“The disembodied are unstuck in time. I can see the past but not change it. It’s like watching a movie. Or really, more like putting yourself in the stream from the camera. Images flow over me, but they can’t hear… you might as well talk to light. Pictures pass by, untouchable and unchangeable as I am. Still, being freed of time allows me to follow threads. Pamela’s is a long one.
“There are places that attract spirits,” Ryo says. “Native Gods and monsters have favored the Bay Area for millennia. And when Europeans and Asians immigrated, they brought with them fairies, bogies, ghosts, Banshees, vampires, and monsters. Old Gods followed. Demons and deities only need a little belief to linger. They wander from era to epoch, fears made manifest across time and distance, transcending continents and centuries, as old as nightmares, as constant as death.”
Ryo’s words hang in the air. River feels their weight but cannot hear them or decipher their meaning.
“In the 1960s, workers who were building a subway under the Tenderloin found two pairs of sharp crystals that divide the sun into rainbows. Researchers employed methods tried and true, experimental, and established, but the crystals defied categorizing.
“I think your friend Jackson would have recognized them.
“Those particular crystals dated back to the late eighteen-forties, when the first vampires arrived in San Francisco. It was a wild time… From eighteen-forty eight to eighteen-forty nine, San Francisco’s population leaped from eight hundred to fifty thousand. The magic lure was gold. A fortunate few found nuggets in streambeds and became millionaires. Most were not so lucky. Life was brief and brutal. Lawlessness was the law. Blood was plentiful. It flowed as freely as the miners had imagined gold would, gushing from the streams of humanity surging into the city.
“Vampires followed the deluge of fluid and fear, tracking the lonely, homeless, and lost to the city, drawn by the need for belief, as well as blood. On their persons, most migrants bore only bare necessities. But their hearts were full of myths and legends, tales sucked in with their mother’s milk, beliefs built on with their grandmothers’ stories.
“Spirits, gods, and demons need faith as surely as you need food, or Huck needs peanuts.” Huck caws softly. He can hear Ryo just fine. In fact, his sharp eyes can even see disturbances in the atmosphere when Ryo moves. But Huck is not afraid. Animals fear death, but not the dead. The dead, in fact, are a comfort, an assurance of continuance.
“The city was and is a haven for vampires,” Ryo continues. He wishes River could hear him, but even with only Huck for an audience, he enjoys talking. Ideas made audible have power. Giving voice to visions makes them real. “The fog made darkness linger and there was, and is, so much available food. Then, it was easy to pick off lone prospectors. Now, it’s mostly the homeless. San Francisco’s a good place for vampires. Vampires need blood and belief.
“Werewolves are different. They crave solitude and meat. Back then, what werewolves there were usually preferred the country. No one wondered if the mauled remnants of a solitary prospector were discovered in the high mountains. It was eighteen forty-seven. The land was wild. Beasts roamed the hills. Bears, mountain lions, rattlers: all spelled danger for a lone man. And men, as usual, were their own worst enemies. One was much more likely to be killed over a disputed claim than end up as dinner.”
Ryo’s weightless hand strokes Huck’s glossy feathers. Huck closes his eyes and cocks his head sideways. Ryo tickles the underside of Huck’s chin. Normally River would have noticed the movement of air over Huck’s plumage, even though there was no wind. But today he cannot see beyond his sorrow.
“Most lives have their villains and their heroes. It is a pity that Pam’s nemesis would turn out to be her mother, but perhaps that is one thing you have in common.
“Pamela’s mother, Teresa, was born in eighteen sixty-nine. At fifteen, when she married, she was already a voluptuous two-hundred and forty pounds of woman. Her groom, Edward Wall, was a handsome, feckless fireman more than twice her age with a taste for large ladies and abundant alcohol.
“Two years later, Teresa gave birth to a son, Joseph, delicate as a snowflake. A baby so sweet, if you cut him, sugar would drip from his wounds. So loving that, on foggy days, doves fluttered around, warming him with downy feathers. When Teresa cradled Joseph in her arms, she didn’t think about Edward’s drinking. When she looked deep into his bottomless blue eyes, she forgot that their house was cold and dirty. When she sang to him, her voice, usually rough as sandpaper, rose purer than a lark’s up to heaven.”
Ryo continues. He thinks that maybe his words will seep into River’s mind and help heal his pain with the invisible balm of understanding. He knows that eventually River will hear him again. It’s just a matter of time, and Ryo has all the time there is.
***
It’s eighteen eighty-six. The sisters sit in the perpetual twilight of their back room. Nona is weaving an infant’s jumper, blue as a forget-me-not. Decima has measured out two lengths of thread. One is strong, rough, fire-engine-red twine. The other is short and as insubstantial as good intentions. She holds both out to Morta who, with a grim smile, severs the red twine with black handled shears, sharp as scalpels.
Decima begins measuring out yards of rosy yarn.
“Think you’re almost done with this jumper, Nona?” Morta asks, pulling from her apron a child’s blue-handled scissors. Nona nods.
Decima is still unrolling coils of rose, blue, indigo, and red yarn.
“That’s very long,” Morta says.
“Oh yes,” Nona says. “You should see the pattern. This cloth could furnish a whole wardrobe.”
***
“Edward’s incendiary combination of occupation and affinity ends abruptly. A fireman who drops his flask in a burning building blazes the path to his own destruction,” says Ryo. “Joseph, fragile as he is sweet, lingers only a few months before following Edward to the grave. Teresa, pregnant with Pamela, determines that this child will live, though she could never guess how long.
“Yet, Pamela gives Teresa more sorrow than joy. When she looks at Pamela’s round rosy face and ruddy cheeks, she yearns for Joseph’s slender, fair countenance.
“If Joseph had lived, she thinks, he would be walking. Butterflies would be clustering round him, making a winged garden of the dirty San Francisco streets. Flowers would sprout from the cold dry mortar of the lifeless brick. He would be talking, voice melodious as a songbird’s.
“Teresa works and saves money like dreams, each penny building a life for Pamela. Pamela is darling. She is sweet as honey, but she is not Joseph. She is Teresa’s motivation, but never her being. Teresa’s blond waves and lush curves get her work in a dance hall. Champagne flows like wine. And Teresa likes champagne.
“I’m going back a long ways, I know, but sometimes it’s a long journey backwards to understanding and acceptance.
“In five years, Teresa saves enough to buy a two-story wooden building in the Tenderloin. In eighteen ninety-eight, the Tenderloin is an elegant neighborhood right in the heart of San Francisco. From there, Teresa can touch the pulse of the city, hear its breath, feel its life. She turns her building into a boarding home for young ladies.
“Her house usually contains ten or fifteen girls, all of them young, none of them ladies. Teresa favors large curvaceous blonds who resemble her. The single brunette or sole redhead in the parlor stands out as flamboyant and exotic as an orchid in a field of daisies.
“I love this era of San Francisco, colorful as the Victorian painted ladies that line the Streets of the city. Not the best time to be alive perhaps, but wonderful to watch.
“Teresa furnishes her house with antiques and lavish velvet draperies fringed with gold. She dresses herself and her gals in the latest fashions. Draping herself in jewels, attempting to procure contentment from cold gems. Teresa and her girls live in luxury, while Pamela is relegated to the attic with Sarah and Margareta. Sarah and Margareta are twins, tall girls, with skin black and smooth as obsidian. Margareta is the housemaid. It is her duty to usher men to the parlor to await Madam Wall. Sarah is Pamela’s nurse and nanny, her alpha and omega, her mother and father.”
Ryo pauses. He puts a hand on River’s shoulder wishing he possessed the weight and substance to hold River tight. River shrugs, feeling a breeze on his shoulder, but he is too sunk in memory to notice that there is no wind stirring the leaves on the trees or blowing stray paper through the streets. It’s the kind of anomaly any good naturalist should note. The type that Ryo has taught him to observe. Ryo wonders if understanding the past makes the present more palatable? If knowledge breeds forgiveness?
“Sarah loves Pamela with a fierceness born of frustration and pain. Into her, Sarah pours all her hopes and dreams of a different, a better, life. She makes it her duty to educate Pam. It’s Pamela’s great good fortune that Sarah is literate, fluent in both English and French, schooled at an early age by her mother.
“Sarah was that rare being in the nineteenth century: an American black girl who had never known slavery. Buried deep in her family’s history, where fact and fiction mingle and interbreed, lay a tale: Sarah and Margareta’s great-grandmother had been mistress to a wealthy American. She’d been a Sarah too, though she’d been called Sally her whole life long. “Sarah” was too elegant, too formal a name for a slave. He was famous, the man, so famous that at the mention of his name, small children were silent, trees bent their trunks, and even cats, those most arrogant of creatures, stopped licking their paws and paid attention. He was more brilliant than the stars and sharper than an ax. Words flowed from his pen that soothed the troubled waters of a new country. And of all the women in the world, he had loved Sarah’s great-great grandmother best, though he never set her free.
“Perhaps, Pamela thought, it was because he loved her so much? Maybe he was afraid she would leave him? Pamela wishes that Teresa loved her even half so much, even a quarter. She would gladly have been Teresa’s slave if her mother would love her.
“But not Sarah. Sarah is proud of her ancestry: not of the famous white man buried in her genes, but of her mother and grandmothers who’d kept the gifts of literature and knowledge alive within her. She scorns any man who would cage what he loves, no matter the motive or the enclosure. ‘You preach a better sermon with deeds than discourse,’ Sarah tells Pam.
“Sarah treasures her legacy of learning. She tries to obtain suitable literature, but also smuggles up newspapers, novellas, and discarded love notes, figuring that any prose is better than none. It’s an odd and interesting, if not a well-rounded, education. After all, Pamela has many, many more years before her in which to read, far more than anyone suspects.”
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: “The Great Earthquake of 1906. It’s one of those brief windows in history when tragedy unites, not divides. They never last long, these brief moments of connection, I don’t know why, I suppose I never shall. It’s only the dead who no longer fight.”
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.