Burns Night Read online

  “Can I buy you a drink?” asked the man, startling him.

  Robert was at a loss for words. He thought of the coin in his pocket, and with a swift calculation, understood that this offer would carry him further through the evening by sparing him the cost of a drink.

  He nodded his agreement.

  “What’re you having?” asked the man. His accent was strange. Robert could not place it.

  “Whisky,” said Robert. The man beside him seemed to scrutinise his features, and Robert felt an uncanny sense of being trapped, hypnotised and pinned, by the emerald green of his gaze.

  “Like your eyes,” said the man finally, winking. He nodded towards the tables and Robert felt the overpowering need to sit down, so he went to one of the empty tables at the back, unsure why he’d obeyed the man without question.

  “Robert!” boomed a voice, as a much larger man threw himself into a chair beside him. “It’s all been arranged.”

  A great big barrel of a man, Captain Richard Brown, put a friendly arm around Robert’s frail frame.

  “Oh. Er. I don’t really think that’s necessary – “ Robert began. The other man laughed.

  “Nonsense! You’re going to be a great poet,” he said. “But no one is going to know that unless you recite your work.”

  “But Richard, my father –”

  “Your father’s not your king and commander!” said Richard. “Besides, he can’t live forever. No one can.”

  This statement was followed by the loud clink of whisky glasses on the table. The sound made Robert look up into the man’s strange green eyes, and he suddenly felt sure he could drown in them. The man sat down, never breaking eye contact for a moment.

  Richard took one look at the pair of them, grinned, slapped Robert on the back, and made himself scarce.

  “So,” said the stranger, “You’re a poet.”

  “I – er. Sometimes I write.”

  “Your friend said you’ll be doing a recitation?” he asked.

  Robert looked wistfully after the man who had left them at the table.

  “Richard can be...rather forceful,” said Robert weakly.

  “Man after my own heart,” grinned the stranger, raising his glass and then drinking the whisky in one go. Robert couldn’t understand the thrill in his heartbeat that responded to his voice.

  And then, the strangest thing began to happen. Robert started to talk about everything in his life, how he hated farming, how he wanted to be a poet, how deeply he believed in love. He was so dizzy, and he kept looking into the stranger’s eyes, and then at the whisky, which kept coming; good-quality whisky he couldn’t possibly afford, and plenty of it. And yet, he’d never felt this way when he’d been drunk before, and he’d been drunk plenty of times. He felt arousal thrumming in his veins as he listened to the dark, rich sound of the man’s voice rolling across him like the tide, the hair of his body standing on end, his limbs lax with the want of it, his body an offering, waiting, waiting, he knew he belonged to this stranger and only waited for him to take, waited to submit as he knew he’d be asked, ready as a sacrifice. He fell towards the man, drunk on whisky and something else, to capture his lips in a burning kiss, and –

  Suddenly, the stranger was lifting him out of the chair. The spell was broken and shattered as the door opened and fresh, cold air suffused the smoky room. He was nearly dragged outside and thrown unceremoniously against the wall of the tavern.

  “I think it’s time you got home,” said the stranger, an odd note in his voice. Robert put his hands forward clumsily, a desperate wanting still driving him, a desire dark and deep, but the stranger kept putting him off. After a while, Robert found that he could breathe again, and his head cleared. He wondered if there had been something strange in the peat-smoke of the fire that night. He shook his head, a little giddy with whisky but otherwise fine. Then he realised that he had no memory of drinking it. Had he only had the one drink? Had he drunk it at all? If he hadn’t, why did he feel so strange? The intense, pounding desire within him was diminishing, and by the time he had himself to rights again, the stranger was long gone.

  Now, Robert had been taught all the bogie-tales a child should know. He knew of ghaists and witches, as he called them, and he also knew that something strange had happened that night. He hurried along the roadway to cross the Cessnock water, because like all canny Scots know, witches and various other creatures cannot cross a running stream.

  The man was already fading into the darkness when Robert glanced over his shoulder during the walk towards his farm. He could see the purple tinge of dawn just kissing the horizon and he knew his father would be furious with him. As he walked in the brightening darkness, he remembered only that the stranger had promised to attend the poetry reading that Richard had set up. Despite knowing there was something fey about the man, this cheered Robert to no end. He wondered at the intensity of his feelings and the strange fog that seemed to cloud his perception, the way his head swam and the desire to offer himself up to the stranger. Robert suddenly realised that he’d never learned his name.

  Far down the path in the opposite direction, Desdemona walked with her lieutenant, Iain Grey.

  “What is it? I can feel you wanting to ask a question,” she said, smoking quietly.

  “What was that about?” Iain demanded. “You haven’t fed in months and you had him.”

  Desdemona looked at the horizon, purpling with the oncoming day.

  “Best we get under some cover,” she said.

  “Desdemona,” Iain said urgently. She sighed.

  “Look, I don’t know, all right?” she asked. “There was something...different about him.”

  “Different?” asked Iain. “He’s a damned nobody, some poor farmer just like everyone else around these parts. You can hypnotise people and he fell for it, and you let him go! Don’t tell me we’re going back to the Highlands just so you can surprise unsuspecting travellers. It’s not 1200 anymore! We don’t have time for this.”

  Desdemona shook her head as they entered a deep copse of trees on Cessnock Banks.

  “I don’t know, Iain,” she said. “I can feed later. This one was different. That’s all I can say. Leave it.”

  Iain muttered to himself, but otherwise held his peace.

  ***

  The same dawn light that had compelled Desdemona and Iain to find cover slowly woke Robert Burns in his rumpled, small bed, mere hours after he had fallen into it. His great whisky-coloured eyes opened, the irises breaking into shining facets in the dawn, while a smile played at his lips before he was even fully awake.

  ...and then it hit him with all the force of a hammer, that headache right between the eyes, a hangover of epic proportions; the evidence of a night foolishly spent, but happily so.

  “Robert!” his father called. “Robert, wake up!”

  Robert crawled out of bed and did the 18th century equivalent of the walk of shame in his small Ayrshire farmhouse. He sat down heavily beside his father, who hadn’t missed Robert’s dreamy expression, his wincing at the sunlight from the windows, or his dishevelled self. William Burness was no fool and was already well-aware of his son’s proclivities. He was concerned he’d be paying for children up and down the Ayrshire coast if Robert didn’t get it together soon.

  “Late night, son?” asked William, stirring his porridge with a spoon.

  “Aye, Father,” said Robert, whose head felt so heavy he couldn’t lift it to squint at his father in all the bright sunlight. This was Scotland, why was it so damned sunny?

  “Ye’ve responsibilities at the farm, Robert,” William chided his son. “What were ye doin’ out so late?”

  Robert grinned, and laughed at a joke only he understood.

  “I met the Devil on the road last night,” he said. His long-suffering father sighed, shook his head, and turned back to his porridge.

  Robert smiled a secret smile, knowing he’d be seeing the stranger again soon.

  CHAPTER TWO

&nbs
p; WAKING THE DEAD

  Oh, the battlefield is still

  Just the splash of falling rain

  An’ there’s a red mist o’er my eyes

  Bonnie Mary Jane

  And as night begins to fall

  I can’t walk, but I can crawl

  And I’m comin’ hame tae you my bonnie Mary Jane.

  - Bonnie Mary Jane, Jim MacLean

  Waking was not, for Robert Burns, a pleasant experience.

  His body had been exhumed in order to move it to the larger mausoleum in St. Michael’s Kirkyard in Dumfries. When the men opened the broken pine casket of the poet who had died poor and in debt, unable to afford any kind of luxury including a fine casket, they had expected the worst.

  What they found was the poet’s beautiful face, warm and cherry-apple cheeked in white pale skin, thirty years after he’d passed, as if he were still asleep.

  In awe, one of the men reached out and touched one of those cheeks, and at the brush of the pad of the poor man’s fingertips, the poet’s body fell into ash.

  Horrified, they drew away to whisper hurriedly about what to do regarding this recent development. A crowd had gathered despite the late hour and enough had seen the spectacle for the news to spread, of the poet’s lifelike appearance in death and the body’s subsequent crumbling to dust. Others wanted his skull, to measure and weigh it, against the other geniuses of his time.

  During their deliberation, the ashes stirred. As if the wind had nudged them into new piles, twisting strangely into new forms, until the form of the poet was intact once again.

  The body breathed. Once, twice.

  Robert Burns opened his eyes.

  He knew by some instinct that he was in danger of discovery, and so had rolled out of the way. There were enough bones and skulls nearby; the cemetery was full of the poor, after all. He dug them out and placed them back into the casket, drawing back into the darkness. Soon enough, the move across the cemetery was completed, the crowd dissipated, and the men left. People would talk long and low about what they had seen that night, but it would soon pass into memory, then legend, and at long last, be forgotten.

  Robert Burns sat atop his final resting place, the now-empty grave bathed in the light of the moon, hidden behind a few iron bars that those who had taken pity on poor Jeannie Armour had constructed around his grave out of respect for the poet. When he’d still lived, but was winding his slow way towards death, people in the street would ask his doctor, who do you think will be our poet now?

  He looked up into the sky, the moon large and bright, the stars pinpricks beside, and noticed he did not feel cold, despite the lateness of the year. He contemplated the night sky for a while, until he realised he could not feel nor hear the beating of his heart. Was this some kind of medical wonder? Had he been buried alive by accident? Had he been unwittingly rescued by those who hoped to honour his body with a monument more fitting to his place in the world?

  A shudder ran through his frame. He was not to know, that night, how many years had passed between the day of his death and this one.

  He remembered it, if vaguely. Jeannie and the children, destitute, wandering through the house like ghosts, inconsolable, distressed. How the doctor had administered the physic, after Robert’s ill-advised and disastrous visit and plunge into the freezing waters of the Brow Well at the Solway Firth, on doctor’s orders. After the local pub refused to sell him wine and he had to walk half-dead to the next village just to get some drink into himself, a gaunt half-shadow of the strong ploughman’s body that once belonged to him, walking with the permanent stoop he’d acquired after years spent at the plough.

  He remembered how that physic, that miraculous drug, had restored his health and his senses, and he had bounded up –

  And there, his recollection ended, until this cool, dark night, where he sat at the edge of a crumbled grave in Dumfries town and stared wondering into the night sky.

  And then, he felt hunger. But not like any hunger he had ever known, a deep and aching, scrabbling thing, piercing his being as if he would go mad with it.

  He looked at his hands, translucent in the moonlight. So white he almost outshone the moon.

  Then he remembered that other night, the night spent with Desdemona in Clarencefield, where they sold him a bottle of wine after he was refused.

  I’m dying, Desdemona!

  He fell to his knees.

  Please.

  And she sank down to the floor with him, and her talons impaled his neck, her mouth on him and his body gathered to hers, a proximity he would never forget, blind with a passion he could barely remember, as he rutted against her, helpless as she drank, and the experience was worth the pain, even if it did not save him from death in the end.

  He could scarcely believe it.

  “It worked,” he whispered, both terrified and overwhelmed.

  He did not know what to do next; he had no idea how long it had been since he’d been buried. Everything in this new life after death was foreign to him. But he realised there was someone who could help him – if she still lived.

  And then he thought, Desdemona.

  Something more savage than hunger pierced his soul, dug in deep, and stayed there like a feeding parasite, a leech twisting on a hook.

  In a moonlit cemetery in Dumfries, Scotland, Robert Burns stood up from the wrought-iron cage that once held his coffin and crept out weakly in the darkness. His strength was almost non-existent, and so he had to pull himself along on his belly, his hair caked with graveyard dirt and his face and clothes filthy with earth, as he began the long and arduous journey to Cessnock, where she would be waiting.

  I’m coming back to you, Des, he thought, and the first wildfire whisky glint of his eyes shone with the moon.

  ***

  Desdemona was exhausted. It was not her fault she’d nodded off, really; monsters such as herself were not in need of sleep for the most part. The war seemed endless and there were no longer any diversions; the fighting was in earnest now, the harshest she’d seen in all these centuries of battle. She longed to return to the New World, to feel the quiet peace of the forest around her, to be away from noise and blood and death.

  The tall shadow of the man with a tattered shirt that darkened her doorway did not properly register with her until her gun was already aimed at his face. She was on her feet before she had woken properly.

  Those bright green eyes he’d loved so long were like a comforting balm to the strange pull of his soul.

  “Desdemona,” he said, as though his throat had been filled with dirt for the last twenty years. And it had.

  She stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “Robert?” she whispered. The man before her nodded, filthy and frail, nearly unrecognisable if not for the huge eyes that glowed like amber lamps in his skull.

  “Aye,” he said. “I think it worked.”

  “But Robert, it’s been years,” Desdemona said in disbelief. “How could – “

  He shook his head.

  “Desdemona,” he said, with a fierce tone she had never heard from him in all their years of friendship. He swayed toward her. Despite herself and her long history as a warrior, she took a step back.

  “What?” she asked, wary.

  “I’m hungry,” he said, in that grave-dirt voice.

  ***

  They’d returned to the inn at Clarencefield. It wasn’t too far off from Dumfries, and besides, they knew Desdemona there and they weren’t in the habit of asking questions.

  “Concentrate,” Desdemona told him, “stretch out your fingers and focus on your nails. It might take a few tries, but the talons should come out.”

  Robert tried, swiftly opening his hand as he’d seen Desdemona do when she had turned him. Nothing happened. He tried it more softly, as if he were dropping something. He held his hand out, his fingers splayed wide. Nothing continued to happen.

  “Hmmmm,” said Desdemona, truly puzzled. She raised an eyebrow.

 
“That can’t be possible,” she said to herself. “Well, it’s worth a try.”

  She turned to him.

  “Open your mouth and think of biting someone’s neck. A woman’s.”

  He did, and then collapsed as if punched in the stomach.

  “Not my neck, you idiot,” grumbled Desdemona. “I drank from you. That’s not going to work. Try again.”

  Robert opened his mouth, and to his surprise and dismay, his canine teeth lengthened to long, vicious-looking points.

  Desdemona shouted a laugh.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, and sat back on her haunches, lighting up her pipe.

  Robert looked at her in horror. He felt the sharp teeth with the pads of his fingers.

  “This means...” he said, uncertain, “I have to bite people?”

  “Looks like,” said Desdemona.

  “Ugh!” he said, “That’s unsanitary!”

  Desdemona shrugged.

  “You signed up for it,” she said.

  “Well, I mean, but – drinking blood?”

  Desdemona wrapped her lips around her pipe and breathed in. Robert felt unreasonably jealous of the pipe, and not for the first time.

  “I am not entirely certain if you are aware of what being a vampire means, Robert Burns,” she drawled, “but blood-drinking is definitely an aspect. Although the baobhan sith are also technically succubi so you can also drink their sexual potency if you feel like it.”

  Robert blanched, and then thought further about this possibility. The expression on his face was somewhere between horrified and extremely turned on.

  “Did you...” he said, “Did you do that to me?”

  Desdemona gave him a look.

  “Clearly, I did not,” she said.

  ***

  Desdemona recalled the time she first let Robert feed with some regret.

  There were no ready sources nearby, and she had fed recently. Desdemona was a baobhan sith instead of a proper vampire, and her ancient age meant that she could survive far longer on less blood than most of her kind.