Blood on Silk

S
aloman. Again.

“I’m beginning to hate that guy,” Elizabeth muttered. “If he ever existed.”

She spoke in English, so her informant, Maria, an almost entirely toothless old lady in black, merely grinned without a clue as to what she’d said.

“Thank you,” Elizabeth said in Romanian, switching off the tape recorder on the table between them. “You’ve been very helpful.” As she rose to her feet, Maria grinned again, adding to Elizabeth’s suspicion that she’d just been fed a farrago of nonsense. It was as much for the locals’ amusement as for her own—one of the challenges of her research was to pick out the “genuine” myths from the made-up ones, and it wasn’t always easy.

The villagers who’d gathered curiously in the garden during the interview now fell back as Elizabeth stashed the recorder in her bag and turned to go.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she added to the younger woman who’d brought it, and this time Maria’s smile was genuine.

Elizabeth slung her bag over her shoulder and made her way along the shaded path toward the rickety garden gate. She’d get no further useful material here. The villagers would just vie with one another to impress her now—or fool her. It wasn’t always clear which.

But although some of them stayed to chat with the old lady and her daughter, others walked toward the gate with her, as if eager to impart more nonsense. Elizabeth avoided eye contact, knowing she could be here for hours if she didn’t. And she was tired. It had been a long day, and despite the weeks she’d spent here in the summer heat, she still found it grueling. She had never imagined she’d miss the cold and rain of a Scottish summer.

She liked this charming garden, though, full of fruit trees and vegetables as well as large, brightly colored roses and, most of all, the maze of paths lined with vines that had been trained to form an almost impenetrable roof. The shadowed tangled-lattice effect in the sunlight was pretty and, more important, cool.

“Miss Silk? What makes you think the vampire Saloman didn’t exist?”

Damn.
She’d met the speaker’s gaze before she realized it, drawn by sheer surprise because he spoke excellent English. The other locals, as though accepting his victory, fell back and dispersed by other routes.

Elizabeth said, “Besides the word ‘vampire,’ you mean?”

The man smiled. She’d noticed him before, watching her a little too closely for comfort, while she talked to old Maria. Although she didn’t doubt her ability to get rid of him—eventually—her internal alarm bell gave a warning tinkle. He was perhaps around forty years old and wore the traditional garb of most of the older villagers—long white shirt, belted in the middle, and dark trousers—and his dark, steady eyes were of the same nut-brown color as his sun-drenched skin. Only the mass of deeply etched lines around his eyes spoke of greater age, but then, the sun did that to people.

“If you want to hear about vampires, the villagers will tell you,” he explained. “They always do.”

She allowed herself a rueful smile. “I’m not the first to ask these questions around here, am I?”

“No. We’ve had people writing books, people making films, people who want to meet vampires, people who want to
be
vampires—”

“I’m a little more serious than that,” Elizabeth interrupted. Her car was in sight, and she wanted nothing more than a cool bath and some dinner in her own room before a good night’s sleep.

“Ah yes. You’re writing your doctoral thesis.” He held the gate open for her, and she cast him a quick glance as she passed, checking for any signs of mockery. The shading vines cast an intricate pattern of shadows across his face—an interesting, intelligent face, but not a comforting one. Something about him—something both attractive and repellent—bothered her. But then, she’d had that reaction to men before. Excessive interest might be flattering, but she didn’t trust it.

“I heard you tell Maria,” he added, obviously misunderstanding her suspicion. “What exactly are you writing about?”

She smiled and nodded a definite farewell as she passed through the gate. “Vampires, of course.” Once she was away from the sheltering vines, the sun hit her like a wave.

He called after her. “So what’s your problem with Saloman?”

Well, she could bore him with that till he shoved off. Then she could drive away, venting her frustration inside the car. She halted and frowned back over her shoulder. “That he keeps cropping up in too many eras,” she all but snapped. “I have recorded stories of at least one Solomon before Christianity, several Salomans between the eleventh and the eighteenth centuries, and one Sal at the beginning of the twentieth. Oh, and Maria’s Saloman in the nineteenth.” She snorted. “And everyone claims they’re the same man!”

“He’s a vampire,” her companion said reasonably. “He can exist for centuries.”

Elizabeth cast him a withering stare and in spite of herself walked back to him as she dug in her bag for the car keys. “I’m writing a doctoral thesis, not a fairy tale. My interest is in the social conditions that inspired and fed the vampire superstitions, not in the gory details.”

“And what were they?” the man inquired.

“What?” Distracted, Elizabeth fumbled the keys, dropping them into the recesses of her bag. She rummaged for them again.

“The social conditions,” he said patiently.

Retrieving the keys, Elizabeth came up for air. She sighed. “Are you really interested in this?”

“Of course.”

She shrugged. “My theory is that accusations of vampirism resemble accusations of witchcraft in western Europe, insofar as they were made against people who presented some kind of threat to their communities—either economic threats, such as the single, unsupported women who made up the bulk of so-called witches, or more physical ones. I believe accusations of vampirism were made after deaths to justify killings that would otherwise have been unlawful. There may be elements of guilt and other factors in there, too, but in basic terms, that’s what vampire legends come down to—people who threatened villages by stealing, pillaging, excessive taxation, military levies. . . .” She trailed off. “Well, you get the idea. Anyway, generally it works. Most of the individual cases I’ve found support my theory. I can trace many such characters to legal documents and recordings of their deaths. But Saloman . . .”