The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE TENTH SCHOLAR Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem

He answered the door himself. I was disappointed that it wasn’t his aide-de-camp; the term had always made me think of tents and marshmallows and songs around a fire and two weeks in the country, where I’d never been. “A woman,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

We looked at each other. I knew I couldn’t let him stare me down; I had experience on the streets, and I’d thought about this a lot before I’d come here, practiced looking tougher than I really am. You had to keep a balance. I’d always had to do that. Out on the streets it was important to look tougher than you were, and talk dumber than you were. If you talked too smart, then people got it into their heads that you were all head and weak everywhere else. But with him, I knew I just had to look tough, but I couldn’t let him think I was dumb. His eyes were green and he had really long white eyelashes. “A very young woman,” he said.

“Not as young as you think,” I shot back, but that wasn’t true. I was sixteen and pregnant, and I looked like a twelve-year-old who hadn’t lost her baby fat.

His thick white eyebrows rose a little, and he said, “Interesting.” During the next months I would hear that comment from him countless times. It was the only compliment he ever paid any of us, and it always surprised me how often he used it, how many things he still genuinely found interesting, after all the years he’d lived and all the years he knew he still had coming.

“I saw your ad,” I told him.

He nodded and stepped back, bowing slightly and making a welcoming gesture with one hand. I remember thinking that his hands were elegant, long and pale and thin, except that they were so hairy. “Come in, my dear.”

“‘My dear'?” I laughed. I’d figured he would talk like that, and I wanted him to know right away that it didn’t impress me.

Except, of course, that it did. Not so much his fancy accent or old-fashioned language, but the way he noticed me, the fact that he really did seem to think it was interesting that I was there. That was new for me, and as soon as I got a little of it I wanted more. I went in, noticing the gold dragon under the gold cross on the door.

Against the bright, trendy pastels of this penthouse office suite, he looked like something out of a black-and-white movie. The only colors on him were his green eyes and the red of his mouth, so red I thought he might be wearing lipstick. He was dressed in crisp, creased black, although he wasn’t wearing a cloak; I’d been expecting a cloak, and that threw me a little. His face and hands were so white that I wouldn’t have thought anything could be whiter, but then I saw the tips of his teeth pushing out over the edge of his lower lip. His curly hair went past his shoulders—black, when I’d imagined it would be white—and his moustache was as white as his eyebrows, so that I could hardly see them across his skin.

“Sit down, my dear.” When he soundlessly shut the door, it was as if we were the only two creatures in the world. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m answering your ad,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t like it when people made fun of me, and I heard mockery everywhere. I’d punched people out, scratched their green eyes, for less. “I’m applying for the school. The ad didn’t say you needed an appointment.”

I wished I could think of things to say that sounded more intelligent. People on the street were easy to impress; even Oliver didn’t take much. Though at first I’d thought he would. But this guy would be a real challenge; I’d known that before I came. He’d be like my grandmother, only more so—able to see who you really were and what you really wanted when even you didn’t know. I sat down on the gigantic couch that took up one whole wall of the room. The couch was that peculiar yellow-green color they call chartreuse, and the walls and carpet were mauve. Who’d have thought that mauve and chartreuse would go together? Who’d have expected this guy to be an interior decorator? But then, he’d already lived long enough to be anything he wanted.

The guy had power. Once you had power, nobody could hurt you. I’d learned that much on the streets. And before. Power might have kept my grandmother alive. It didn’t really matter how you got it, because once you had it nobody much cared about the how. I’d been around the powerful people in my life—my mother, a social worker or two, PD’s and DA’s and juvenile court judges, Oliver. But they were little fish. They had power only in relation to utterly powerless people like me. This guy had real power, and he could teach me how to have it, too. So I could pass it on to my baby.

I shivered in appreciation, then stiffened my body to still it and hoped he hadn’t noticed. He had, of course; I saw the amusement in his eyes.

My jeans were dirty and smelled of the streets. It pleased me to think I might be soiling the fancy upholstery. I squirmed on the couch, moved my butt around a lot, just to make sure.

“Pregnant,” he observed. He was standing too close to me, and he was really tall. I hated it when people, especially men, towered over me like that; too many times, at home and in juvie and in foster homes and on the street, some guy had stood too close to me like that and had ended up fucking me over.

I wasn’t about to let him know he was making me nervous; you didn’t dare let them know. I yawned, hoping my breath smelled as bad as it tasted, and put my filthy tennis shoes up on the arm of his elegant sofa. “So,” I demanded, looking up at him as insolently as I could, “what do I have to do?”

He sat down in the enormous armchair that faced the couch. He crossed his legs, meticulously adjusted his pantleg. He wasn’t a very big man; he was as thin as anybody I’d ever met under a bridge or in a shelter, as if, like them, he was always hungry—though I doubted it was because he couldn’t afford food. For some reason, I’d thought he’d be bigger. I wondered what Oliver, who thought he knew everything there was to know about him, would think of him in person. “I ain’t smart enough to go to some hot-shit yuppie school,” Oliver had sneered. “You’re the schoolgirl. You go, and then you come back and tell us.” But I was never going back. I hadn’t loved Oliver; I just let him think I did. He wasn’t very powerful; for a while he could keep me safer than I could keep myself, but now I was ready for more.

There was a long silence. I noticed that I couldn’t hear anything from the street or from the rest of the building, only his breathing and mine. Wondering about that, I pressed the back of my fist against the wall over my head; the wall was spongy and gave a little, like living tissue, and before I could stop myself I’d gasped and jerked my hand away.

He saw me do that, too, of course, and I knew he was keeping score. This was some creepy kind of exam. He sat there quietly with his thin white hands looking very thin and white against the wide chartreuse arms of the chair, and he looked at me calmly without saying anything. I was used to that. There was this chick in a doorway up across from Columbia who looked at you that way; you knew she saw everything about you and kept a list in her head, but I’d never heard her say anything, even the night she came after me with her nails and teeth and stole my sandwich—whole, still wrapped in wax paper—that I’d found on a table in a sidewalk cafe that lunchtime and been saving all day. The next day I went to her doorway and just sat on the stoop beside her and stared at her, to see what she’d do. She didn’t do anything, so finally I gave up.

I didn’t give up this time. I sat as quietly as he did and stared back at him. I didn’t exactly look him in the eye; his eyes were too much for me. But I did stare at his face, and all of a sudden I was seeing a tiny drop of bright red—blood, I supposed—on the point of one of his teeth.

He spoke first, but not because I’d won anything. “What is your name?”

I couldn’t think of any reason not to tell him. “Marie.”

“And your surname?”

That was none of his business, and I wasn't part of that family anymore anyway. So I said, “Bathory,” just to see what his reaction would be, sort of the way I’d sometimes shit on the sidewalk in front of some snooty restaurant.

He chuckled. He was laughing at me. “And why do you wish to attend the scholomance, Marie Bathory?”

I was ready for that one. I said what Oliver had told me to say, although I didn’t always follow his orders no matter what he did to me. “Hey,” I shrugged, “beats living on a heat grate, y’know?”

His face sharpened like a blade, and in one swift sharp motion he had stood up. “You are wasting my time.”

I panicked. I’d overplayed the tough and ended up sounding stupid. As usual, Oliver didn’t know what he was talking about. I told him, too soon and too eagerly, “When my grandmother died they drove a nail through her forehead.”

“Interesting,” he said, and I relaxed a little. “Why?”

I was confused by that, and my temper flared. I put my feet down on the thick carpet, leaned forward, even raised my voice. “What do you mean, why? Why do you think? They thought she was a vampire.”

He nodded. “And was she?”

I started to give him some smart-ass answer, but then I was remembering my grandmother and having to fight back tears. She’d loved me. I remembered a lot of whippings, a few times locked in a dark rustling closet, but I’d deserved that. I also remembered feeling safe with her, and noticed, and understanding that my grandma was the most powerful person in the whole world and that if I was good and did what she told me I could grow up to be just like her.

But she died. She hadn’t been powerful enough. Some lady in a shawl came and hammered a nail through her forehead. I remembered the shiny nailhead among the soft wrinkles between her eyes. My father had pulled her yellow-white hair down low, trying to hide the nail, but he’d made no move to pull it out. That’s how I knew she was really dead, and no one would ever love me again.

Sometimes, though, I looked at the New York City buildings I’d lived among all my life, and saw them the way she must have seen them when her own grandmother brought her here from Rumania. Mountains, they became, and the alleys crevasses, and lightning could be made to strike from the lake in Central Park or from the crowded ocean beaches as powerfully as from any isolated Carpathian pool deeper than a dream.

“Yeah, she was.” I’d never said it out loud before, though I’d always secretly believed it. Foolishly, I added, “I miss her.”

“Interesting. And your grandmother the vampire told you about the scholomance, did she?”

“No. Oliver did.” That was a lie, partly. She’d told me a little—about the scholomance, about the tenth scholar, but when I kept asking her about them she’d shut up, as if she was sorry she’d told me anything at all. Then Oliver came along, and he told me more, and I wanted to be that tenth scholar, and would be, because I had to be for me and my baby.

He didn’t ask who Oliver was. It wasn’t as if he already knew; he just didn’t care. So much for Oliver’s power; I smiled to myself. When Oliver died, I wondered, would there be a shooting star? And would anybody notice it among all the city lights?

“Who is the father of your child?”

“I don’t know.” That was the truth, but I wouldn’t have told him if I had known. On an impulse, watching his face, I added, “You can be if you want.” His face changed. Not much, but enough that I knew I’d scored a point. He smiled, showing more of his teeth under the moustache.

“Nobody gave my grandmother a candle while she was dying,” I heard myself say. “So she died without light. She always said that was the worst thing that could happen to anybody, to die without light. ”

He understood what I meant better than I did. “And that is why you want to study at our school.”

“I guess.” The tenth scholar wouldn’t die without a light, I was pretty sure of that. It was hard to believe, but maybe the tenth scholar wouldn’t die at all.

He was moving around the room. Gliding, really; I half-expected him to vaporize at any second. I wondered if he really could do that, and if he could teach me; I wondered what I’d do if he left me, too. “Not a bad reason to apply,” he said. “But you must understand that you will be expected to study diligently. To apply yourself. ”

“I’m not stupid,” I said, feeling stupid.

“Only ten scholars are accepted into each class.”

“I know. And one stays. As payment.”

“Correct. So far, I see, you have done your homework.”

“I’ll be the one to stay,” I said boldly.

“Ah, my dear, but I make that choice.”

“You’ll choose me.”

He came too close to me again and peered down from his great height. The drop of blood was gone; his teeth gleamed. “Marie Bathary, do you know who I am?”

“Vlad Tepes,” I said, giving the first name Oliver’s broad Brooklyn “a” and pronouncing the last name “Teeps,” the way Oliver did.

He exploded into laughter and I was mortified. “Tsepesh!” he exclaimed. “It is pronounced ‘Tsepesh’!” I tried and failed to say it right. He bent like a huge shiny insect and took my face in his cold hands. “Marie. Say it. Vlad Tepes, the Impaler. ”

I could hardly breathe, but I managed to say, “Tepesh.”

“Very good. Now say nosferatu.”

That was easier. “Nosferatu,” I gasped. His nails were digging into the soft flesh behind my ears.

Then his sharp cold face was only inches away from mine, and I thought he was going to kiss me or to sink his teeth into my neck. I would have been glad for either. He whispered “Dracule,” and I repeated “Dracule,” and then he let me go. My face was numb where he’d held me.

“Classes begin tomorrow,” he said. “You will stay with me tonight, and you will be prepared.”

Later that night he sent me down to the alley with his garbage, as he would so many other nights during my stay. I suppose this was meant to be part of my payment to him. He didn’t trust the service the building provided, he said. They were lax and inefficient, he said. He said he wanted something more private.

That first night when I reached the alley I couldn’t resist the temptation to peer into the thick, black plastic bag. The bag had been so heavy, I couldn’t imagine what he’d thrown away.

It was a Rottweiler, its throat torn open sloppily, the edges of the wound frayed as if the killer had been starving, hadn’t been able to wait to do it right.

Somehow, I would have thought him above all that. It embarrassed me. I closed the bag up quickly, and tried not to think about it after that. And I never told anyone.

I never thought I had much competition. Although Dracula would comment once in a while that he found us “interesting,” individually or as a group, it didn’t seem to me that we were an especially strong class, compared to those who must have gone before.

I was the only female, the only student under twenty-five, of course the only one pregnant, the only one who lived at the school. The others all came and went, and they actually seemed to have lives outside. I couldn’t imagine any of them staying. I was so sure I had a lock on Tenth Scholar that I didn’t worry much about what I’d do if he sent me away, where I’d go, how I’d ever live.

Some of my classmates I scarcely remember now, and wouldn’t recognize on the street. Some of them, though, I remember. Andy, for instance, was an accomplished serial killer before classes ever started, and I’m sure he’s still going strong. Although Dracula never made distinctions based on how we’d come to the school, we all guessed that Andy had been recruited, and he never did quite grasp what he was doing there, what was expected of him, what opportunities there were. I lost count of how many whores and street people he killed and dismembered; for one thing, it was more every time he talked about it. I used to sit in class and stare at him, sometimes losing track of the lesson; I’d try to figure out what Dracula saw in him, and whether I’d have pegged him as dangerous if I’d just met him on the street. I doubted it, not because he looked innocent—nobody has looked innocent to me in a long time—but because he looked so dumb.

Conrad preyed on kids. I remember him. The official scholomance policy was that child-molestation and -murder were inherently no more or less praiseworthy than any other approach, but I couldn’t help taking special note of Conrad. He was old, maybe fifty, and he participated a lot in class. He stared at me a lot, too, at my belly as I started to show.

Then there was Harlequin. Actually, Harlequin might have been a woman. He might also have been an animal—a lizard, say, or a bat—or some alien thing nobody’d ever heard of. I had no idea, either, how old he was, or what race. He was an exotic dancer, a hooker, a performance artist, a beggar. By turns he was fey and crude, heavy-handed as a rapist in a reeking alley and light-footed as the eternally restless spirits my grandmother had called strigoi (restless, I remembered, either because of some great sin or because of some great unclaimed treasure). I never knew exactly what he’d done to be admitted or how he got such spectacularly high grades—except that, rather than stalking and terrifying his victims, he dazzled and seduced them, and they died not out of fear of him but out of passion.

What I remember most vividly about Harlequin, though, are thunderbolts and blood.

We were having our regular early-morning nature class in Central Park. The sun was probably just rising over a horizon we couldn’t see; the bowl of the park, inside our horizon of mountainous buildings, was still pretty dark, the charcoal-rose sky like a lid.

Andy, as usual, was already half-asleep; he should have been in his element here. Conrad, as usual, was sulky because there were so few children in the park at this time of the night, and those who were out were already taken.

Harlequin was even more spectacular than usual. He’d been studying, I could tell. I always hated brown-noses. The first of us to master vaporization, he kept disappearing and reappearing all over the place, leaping in the fountain like waterdrops himself, slithering through the dewy grass to coil himself adoringly around Dracula’s ankles.

Dracula always put up with more from Harlequin than he should have. But finally that morning he observed sternly, “All this is most entertaining, but you are only distracting yourself and the others from serious application to the matters at hand.”

Harlequin laughed like the cry of a gull, made himself very tall and thin, and swept both cupped palms across the paling sky. A shower of stars fell into the city, stars I didn’t think had been ready to fall yet. Souls leaving this world, my grandmother would have said. Souls pulled from this world before their time, I thought, and grudgingly I acknowledged to myself Harlequin’s skill and style.

The baby kicked. I could feel it drinking my blood through the umbilical cord, and I knew it was transforming me into something I didn’t want to be. I imagined sinking my teeth into its not-yet-developed little neck, through the layers of my own flesh and blood.

Harlequin raced to the lake, the rest of us following. He found a rock the size of a baby, raised it above his glittering bald head, and threw it in. The splash wasn’t very impressive in the noisy city dawn, and the surface of the water had already been deeply rippled, but there was a dragon in there and it awoke. Two, three, four long thunderbolts leaped out of the lake and crackled through the air to the sky, where they lit up the craggy top floors of the buildings. There was the immediate odor of burned hair and flesh, and from the shadows on the other side of the lake somebody screamed.

Beside me, always beside me, Dracula murmured, “Interesting,” and jealousy licked like a fetus at the bottom of my heart. But Harlequin got on everybody’s nerves, and just before the end of class, with the sun about to show above the buildings and Andy all but snoring, Dracula finally lost his patience. “Harlequin, enough. I have had enough. This morning, right now, you must prove yourself or leave the scholomance.”

I was shocked. I hadn’t known you could be expelled. Scared, I tried to move close to Dracula, yearning to touch him openly, to claim him in front of the others and put an end to the pointless competition for Tenth Scholar. But Dracula was watching Harlequin and took no notice of me.

Harlequin stood absolutely still among the moving shadows of the sunrise, looking small and frail. I hadn’t realized until then how sick he was, and always would be. Immortal now, of course, like the rest of us, and eternally wasting away. The disease was his curse and his power; his kisses brought to his victims, who were his lovers, immortal sickness, too.

From behind the bushes that separated us from the path, we heard voices. We all sat up straight, even Conrad, who I knew was hoping for the sweet voice of a child unattended. Even Andy tried to rouse himself, but the sun was too high for him.

I started to move but Dracula held me back, his cold hand across my belly. Harlequin paused for maybe five seconds, centering himself as Dracula had taught us to do before an approach, and then stepped through the bushes. Conrad and a few of the other students repositioned themselves quietly to watch, but Dracula stayed where he was and kept me there, too.

There was almost no noise. Harlequin made none, of course, and his victims never knew what happened. That was the way it should be; Dracula loathed noise. I remembered how quiet my grandmother had been, too: how peaceful. We waited. Daylight had started to seep into the park and class was almost over when Harlequin stepped like a dancer back into the clearing among us.

His face and clothes were scarlet with blood. His teeth dripped. He looked stronger than he had in a long time, more substantial. His movements were more fluid and directed, less flighty.

In outstretched hands he carried two tall ridged silver thermos bottles, apparently taken from the victims. He dropped to his knees, bowed his head as if in offering, and passed one of the bottles in each direction around the circle. Dracula drank first, his eyes closed in pleasure and his long throat working. At last, without opening his eyes, he passed the thermos to me.

The blood was warm and sweet. Obviously the victims had been virgins, barely so, a young man and a young woman on the verge of becoming lovers when Harlequin had intervened. The mouth of the thermos was wide enough that the blood spilled over my nose and chin, bathing me in its vitality. I knew some of it was reaching the baby and I was glad, then I wished it wouldn’t because maybe there wouldn’t be enough left for me, but there was nothing I could do about that.

I drank until I felt renewed, and then, reluctantly, passed the bottle on.

When Dracula said, “Prove yourself” to me, we were making love on his red silk sheets. The others had gone home for the day, or had gone wherever it was they went when they weren’t at school; I couldn’t imagine. City daylight came through the high window gray and pale blue, and it was exciting to be awake.

He was straddling me on all fours, and under the huge mound of my belly his penis entered me easily. It thrilled me to think of his penis pushing back and forth past the fetus like a fang.

I would turn seventeen soon. The baby would be born soon. Soon we would be graduated.

“Prove yourself," he said, and I thought he was talking about something sexual.

Although I couldn’t guess what there was left that I hadn't already done, I gasped, “Tell me what you want.”

He buried his face in my shoulder. His teeth grazed my neck and found a spot, but they didn’t go in yet; he was playing with me. “Prove yourself,” he murmured again, “or leave the scholomance. Now.”

I stiffened with fear and outrage and frantic desire. I tried to wrap my arms and legs around him, but my stomach was too big, the baby was between us, and Dracula was moving down my body. I spread my legs and waited for his sharp tongue, but he stopped at my navel and I felt his teeth.

“You are not the Tenth Scholar,” I heard him say.

“Why not? Who is? Harlequin? Shit, I thought you were smart enough to see through him—”

“The baby is the Tenth Scholar.”

A fang went into my belly button and withdrew again. There was the suggestion of pain.

I struggled weakly to get out from under him. Of course I couldn’t, and, anyway.

I didn’t know where I’d go if I got free. “You mean I can’t stay?”

“I have taught you as much as it is possible for you to learn.”

Betrayal made me light-headed, as though he’d already bitten through. “No,” I cried foolishly. “Please.”

His voice came up to me singsong, seductive, and cold as immortal blood. “If you give me the baby now, you may stay to raise it until it can take its place at my side. Twelve years, perhaps, or ten years, or fourteen, depending on its nature and inclinations. If you do not give me the baby, you will leave. Tonight. I have lost interest in you.”

“Take it,” I said.

A vision of the dog with the butchered throat came into my head. A vision of my grandmother, dying when I’d been sure she’d never die, leaving me. I bit my lower lip hard to drive the visions away.

At first there was no more pain, really, than during any normal bite, except that the nerves in my abdomen were exquisitely sensitive. He sucked and drank a lot of blood. Before he was done I was so dizzy I could barely see, and he, obviously, was stoned.

His hands went all over my body—cold skin, sharp nails. His tongue went all over my body. He had started to sing as if to himself, to croon, and his laughter was sweet and smooth. Unable to fathom what I’d be like in fourteen years, what the city would be like when I had to go back into it alone, I paid attention only to him, only to the perforations his teeth were making from my navel to my pubic hair, only to his promise that if I did this he would let me stay.

Now pain and blood gushed. I lost and regained consciousness and lost it again; stars fell. When I awoke, the light was the same blue-gray it had been, but I was sure time had passed. There was a terrible, wonderful emptiness in my abdomen, and the wound had already started to close.

I heard Dracula’s odd crooning and the gurgling of an infant, but for a while I couldn’t find them. The colors in the room—chartreuse, mauve, blood-red— gave around me like living tissue. Then I saw the tall thin form by the window, blackened by my blood and the baby’s and the rich nourishing blood of the placenta and afterbirth.

“It’s a girl,” he told me.

I was dizzied by a peculiar kind of pride: I’d borne a healthy daughter who would be the Tenth Scholar, even if I could not be. I’d carried on my grandmother’s line. I’d given Dracula something he’d wanted, something that, apparently, no one else had ever given him. And fourteen years was a long time.

It was, of course, a trick. Go now,” he said, almost casually, staring at the baby in his arms.

“What?”

“Leave. The scholomance is filled.”

“You said I could stay. You said—”

“I saw no point in exerting myself to take my daughter by force when you would give her to me out of love.”

“She’s my daughter!”

The baby in his arms curled and stretched. Somehow, she was feeding. “I am her father,” he said, and I understood that it was true. He looked at me then, green gaze forking like lightning, and said, “Go. You have no place here.” ’

My daughter is fourteen now. I look for her everywhere and see her nowhere. Probably I wouldn’t know who she was, anyway, except for her resemblance to him.

I kill for sustenance; there is no pleasure in it. I infect some of my victims with immortality in hopes that they will be my companions, but they always leave.

I know that my classmates are out here, and they’ve been taught by the Master; I try not to forget that. I try to protect myself against them, but it’s unclear to me what danger there is, what pain there could be left. The city seems full oi scholomance graduates and wannabes, and it’s hard for me to believe these days that Dracula accepts only ten students at a time.