Free The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas

Kelly was getting awfully chummy lately. There was nothing like a cash transaction to push a relationship back into shape. He settled down to the poem, trying to make sense of it.
    * * *
    The evening after that, instead of packaged blood Wesley brought Bobbie, one of Roger’s former girlfriends. Going down the hall between Wesley and Roger, she kept laughing and saying, “It’s just one of your theater friends fooling around, right, Roger? Come on, I know you—it’s a joke, right?”
    Then she was sitting there on the cot in the little white room and not laughing at all. She looked down with wide eyes at the vampire’s head bent over her arm. Mark could only bear to watch out of the corner of his eye.
    “Oh,” she said softly. And then, still staring, “Oh, wow. Oh, Wesley, he’s drinking my blood.”
    Wesley said, “I told you. No joke.”
    “Don’t worry, Bobbie,” Roger said, patting her shoulder. “You won’t grow fangs afterward—Wesley hasn’t, anyway.”
    She put out her hand as if to push the vampire’s head away, but instead she began to stroke his hair. She murmured, “I read my tarot this morning and I could see there would be fantastic new things, and I should get right behind them and be real positive, you know? But I never thought—oh, this is so far out, this is a real supernova, you know?” Until he finished she sat enthralled, whispering, “Oh, wow,” at dreamy intervals.
    When the vampire lifted his drowned, peaceful face, she said earnestly to him, “I’m a Scorpio; what’s your sign?”
    * * *
    Roger came home, having at last fired a store manager he disliked. He took Mark out for Chinese dinner and talked angrily about the mess the manager was leaving behind—unrecorded orders, evidence of pilfering and jacking around with receipts...
    Mark handed him a note from school. “They want a signature on this.” Roger was good at signing his brother’s name.
    “Sent home early for sleeping in class? What gives?”
    Mark braced himself and explained.
    Roger looked at him in openmouthed astonishment and the beginnings of outrage. “You mean you’ve been having midnight chats with our friend for the three nights he’s been with us? What’s he told you?”
    “Nothing. He just listens. Last night I told him Childhood’s End, The Mysterious Island, and some Ray Bradbury stories.”
    “And he doesn’t say anything?”
    “Nothing much.”
    Roger’s mouth got thin and pressed together. “Tonight you take the tape recorder in with you, and you ask some questions and get some answers before you tell him a goddamn limerick.” Roger had been trying his questions on the vampire for shorter and shorter periods, perhaps because his efforts were always failures. Mark did no better. When he asked his memorized questions that night, they were ignored.
    The vampire merely remarked, “Scheherezade has joined the Inquisition, I see. Fortunately, I can manage now without these diversions.”
    * * *
    Roger was going away for the weekend, leaving Mark to look after the vampire. You had to keep Roger from taking advantage. He did it without thinking, really; he just sort of forgot about your interests in the pursuit of his own.
    “Look, Roger,” Mark said, “I’ll take care of the place for you—water the plants and do some cleaning up and all that, like before, to pay you back for letting me stay here. But you’re away a lot partying or checking out the shops, and that means I’m stuck with...him, in there. That’s a big responsibility.”
    Roger was packing a rainbow sweater in nubbleknit acrylic he had borrowed from the uptown store for the weekend. “You can always go home,” he said. Mark waited. Roger sighed. “Okay, okay. Five dollars a week.”
    “Ten.”
    “Bloodsucker!” Roger said. “All right, ten.” So simple, no tearing your guts up over everything like at home. “Listen, there’s a special reason why I’m going up to Boston. I want to consult with a few friends