Vita Noire

The Promise of Youth

In the sixth week of her internship, Dominique Baptiste still hadn't gotten used to the lobby.

Devereaux Cosmetics headquarters rose out of the Baton Rouge skyline like a glass blade, all white marble and brushed silver, every surface lit so cleanly it seemed to hum. Enormous advertisements lined the atrium featuring flawless models, celebrity endorsements, the tagline Beauty Without Apology in letters taller than she was. Twenty-three years old, an LSU senior chosen from over four thousand applicants, Dominique carried her badge like a winning lottery ticket.

Her favorite place was the Founders' Gallery, a long corridor of photographs tracing the company's history. In every one stood Victoria Devereaux, the elegant founder, the legend, the woman who had built an empire from a single face cream.

On her fifth walk down the gallery, Dominique noticed the thing she would spend the rest of the summer trying to unsee. In a photograph from 1999, Victoria cut a ribbon at the first flagship store. In another, from last spring, she accepted an industry award. Twenty-five years apart, and the woman had not changed. Not a line. Not a shadow.

Good genes, Dominique told herself. Great surgeon. Better Photoshop.

She moved on, the way you let go of a sound in the night.

On a Thursday, a marketing executive named Trent Hollis leaned into the intern pit and asked if anyone could take notes in a confidential meeting. Everyone else suddenly had urgent spreadsheets. Dominique raised her hand.

The conference room sat on the top floor, glass on three sides, the city spread below like a circuit board. Twelve executives sat around a long table. At its head sat Victoria Devereaux herself, hands folded, saying nothing.

Up close she was more striking than in any photograph. Early fifties, perhaps. Silver-black hair, skin almost luminous under the lights, dark eyes that moved slowly around the room and missed nothing. Dominique kept her head down and her pen moving.

The slide behind Trent read:

VITA NOIRE Everlasting Beauty Begins Within.

"Our most revolutionary product to date," Trent said, "Dramatic rejuvenation of mature skin. Restored color, restored elasticity, cellular regeneration driven by an exclusive proprietary ingredient developed personally by Ms. Devereaux."

Testimonials followed. Test subjects who felt younger and more alive.

"Honestly," said a man near the window, chuckling, "it's immortality in a jar."

A few people laughed. Dominique wrote it down.

Victoria didn't laugh. She only smiled, slowly, the way someone smiles at a private joke that is very old.

The back of Dominique's neck went cold. She wrote strong reaction from CEO in her notes, then crossed it out.

Afterward, staff were invited to take promotional samples from a table by the door. Small jars, matte black with gold lettering, heavier than they looked.

Dominique thought immediately of her grandmother.

Nana Odile had raised her in the small house outside Thibodaux after the car accident that took Dominique's parents. She had packed lunches, sat through recitals, worked double shifts, and still found energy to tease Dominique about her taste in boys. Lately she'd taken to staring into the bathroom mirror and joking about the woman looking back.

That night Dominique set the jar on the kitchen table.

Nana turned it over in her hands. "This the stuff they charge two hundred dollars for?" she asked.

"Three hundred. It's a sample," Dominique replied.

Nana snorted, unscrewed the lid, and dabbed a little on her hand. "Smells like nothing," She laughed, that big warm laugh that filled the whole house, "Baby, if this makes me twenty-five again, I'm sending that woman a thank-you card."

"Just don't start acting twenty-five," Dominique responded with a slight chuckle.

"Too late," Nana said, and swatted her with a dish towel.

Dominique would remember that laugh for the rest of her life. She would replay it and count the days.

Something Is Happening to Grandma

The cream worked.

By the third day, the lines around Nana's eyes had softened. By the fifth, the deep creases in her forehead were simply gone. The gray at her temples darkened strand by strand back to the black of the old wedding portraits on the wall.

"Would you look at that," Nana kept saying, turning her face to the light.

She applied it every morning and every night, almost reverently. She hummed while she cleaned. She no longer needed her cane on the porch steps.

It's a miracle, Dominique thought. And I brought it home.

Then the small wrong things started.

On the sixth night Dominique woke thirsty and padded into the kitchen. The light over the stove was on.

Nana stood at the counter in her nightgown with a plate in front of her. On the plate lay a steak, barely cooked. Blood ran in thin rivers across the plate. She had a fork in her hand, but she'd stopped using it.

She turned when the floor creaked, like a child caught with a stolen cookie. Then she smiled, embarrassed.

"I guess I've been craving iron," she jokingly suggested.

"It's raw, Nana," Dominique stated.

"Mostly," Nana laughed, but the laugh was a little off, like a song played in the wrong key. "Go back to bed, baby."

The next afternoon, three packages of ground beef had vanished from the freezer.

Nana stopped sitting on the porch.

She had spent every evening of Dominique's life on that porch, rocking and waving at the neighbors. Now she kept the blinds drawn. On Saturday morning, Dominique yanked the living room curtains open to let in the light.

Nana screamed.

It was not a startled cry. It was a raw animal sound. She threw herself against the wall, arm flung across her face. Where the sunlight had touched her forearm, a welt rose almost instantly, blistering, and a thin curl of smoke lifted from the skin.

"Close them!" Nana snarled, "Close them, close them, close them!"

Dominique dragged the curtains shut. In the dimness she heard her grandmother's ragged breathing.

Minutes later Nana sat on the edge of the sofa, cradling her arm, and her face crumpled.

"I'm sorry, baby. I don't know what's happening to me," she said with a sense of remorse.

She was frightened too. That was the worst part. Dominique sat beside her and held her good hand, and neither of them said what they were both thinking.

At two in the morning Dominique woke to the sound of quiet, deliberate movement.

She crept down the hallway and stopped at the corner.

Nana sat alone at the kitchen table, lit only by the pale light over the stove. A sewing needle lay beside her hand. Beside the needle, the black jar.

Nana pressed the needle into her fingertip.

A single bead of blood welled up, bright as a jewel. She lifted her finger to her mouth and closed her lips around it. Her eyes fluttered shut. Her whole body relaxed, the way a person's does after the first sip of water in the desert.

She pricked her finger again.

And again.

And again.

Dominique stood frozen in the dark hallway, her hand over her mouth. Her eyes moved to the jar, to the gold letters catching the light.

VITA NOIRE.

Every change had begun the day Nana opened it. Every single one.

The Secret Ingredient

On Monday, Dominique went to work with a knot in her stomach and a plan.

She had access to the shared drives, and she was good at finding things people didn't want found. The public files were polished and empty. The ingredient list said only proprietary biological complex. But intern access reached into old internal memos, and in one, buried in a supply chain spreadsheet, she found a line item:

VN-1 Biological Catalyst — Source: V.D.

Dozens of documents referenced it. All said the same thing: the catalyst was prepared on-site, in the fourth-floor laboratory, under the personal supervision of Victoria Devereaux. No employee was permitted inside during preparation.

V.D.

Dominique stared at the initials until the screen blurred.

That evening she was assigned a mountain of filing. By ten o'clock the building had emptied, and the white corridors, so cheerful by day, had turned cold and hollow. Emergency lights cast long silver stripes on the floor. The Founders' Gallery was a row of pale faces in frames, and in every one Victoria stared out with the same unchanging smile.

The building felt like a mausoleum someone had polished.

On the fourth floor, light spilled from beneath the laboratory door.

Dominique should have turned around. Instead, she heard something metallic strike glass, and then a voice she knew.

The door stood open by two inches. She put her eye to the gap.

Victoria Devereaux stood beside a stainless-steel vat the size of a bathtub, filled with thick pale cream. She had taken off her jacket. In her right hand she held a long, ornate dagger, its handle black with age, its blade etched with markings older than the city.

She drew the blade across her left palm.

The blood was very dark, nearly black, and it moved like syrup. It fell into the vat in heavy ropes and spread through the cream in delicate threads, blooming like ink in water.

Dominique's breath caught. It was the smallest sound.

Victoria whispered words in a language Dominique had never heard, low and liquid and ancient. The threads curled into the compound and vanished. And as Dominique watched, the wound in Victoria's palm knit itself shut. In seconds there was only smooth, unmarked skin.

Victoria raised her head.

Her pupils had swallowed the irises entirely, two enormous black pools. Her lips parted, and her canine teeth slid down, long and white and delicate as needles.

Victoria Devereaux is a vampire.

The thought arrived whole. Behind it came a quieter, worse one: and she is putting herself in the jar.

Dominique backed away without breathing and slipped into the dark conference room across the hall. Voices came down the corridor. Victoria, and a man in a gray suit.

She crouched behind the long table and listened.

"Nationwide release is in forty-eight hours," the man said, "Four million samples have already shipped."

"Good," Victoria exclaimed with a horrifying laugh.

"The earlier formulas, Victoria. The test groups needed to drink," the man started to explain.

"Yes," Victoria said, her voice was soft, almost fond, "The flaw of the old ways. A vampire feeds, a victim dies, a body must be hidden. Or a victim turns, and now there is a witness. So crude, but a woman will spread cream on her face every night for the rest of her life and thank me for the privilege. The blood passes through the skin, slowly, gently. She is changed and never knows it. No one screams."

"And the demographic?" the man inquired.

"Chosen carefully. Women who feel the world turning its eyes away from them. Millions of them, desperate, with money in their hands," She laughed softly, "I found the one fear nobody would refuse to buy."

"How long does complete conversion take?" the man asked.

"Seven days," Victoria replied.

Dominique's blood turned to ice.

Nana had opened the jar seven days ago.

"And after?" the man continued his inquiry.

"After, they will know me. Not as an employer. As their mother. They will hear me in their blood, and they will obey," Victoria proclaimed as her footsteps slowed at the conference room door, "I will never need to conquer the world. The world will purchase my army. It will have it delivered to its door."

Everlasting Beauty

Dominique ran the moment they moved on.

She got as far as the corridor before her elbow struck a metal cart. A stack of glass sample jars slid off and shattered across the marble.

The crash echoed up and down the white halls like a gunshot.

Silence.

Then, from somewhere very close, unhurried and gentle:

"Dominique?"

She ran.

The headquarters she had loved was a labyrinth now. Glass walls threw back a hundred versions of her running body. She took stairs three at a time, and behind her, never hurried, never fading, she heard footsteps and the smooth voice calling her name as if she were a lost child.

She burst into the parking garage and fumbled her keys. Only as she pulled onto the street did she notice the dagger on the passenger seat, snatched from the lab bench as she fled. She had no memory of taking it.

She called Nana six times on the drive home. It rang and rang.

The house was completely dark. The front door stood wide open, and a warm breeze pushed the porch swing softly back and forth.

"Nana?" she said wondering her grandmother’s whereabouts.

The kitchen smelled of copper and cold cream. On the table sat the black jar, scraped empty. Beside it lay the sewing needle, and a scatter of small red spots.

"Dominique? Is that you?" a voice asked.

The voice came from the darkness by the refrigerator, and it was Nana's voice, warm and familiar. It made her want to cry.

Then Nana stepped into the light.

She looked twenty years younger. Her skin was lustrous, her hair thick and black, her eyes bright as new coins. She was more beautiful than she had ever been.

She had blood around her mouth.

"Nana," Dominique whispered. "It's me."

For a moment the woman seemed to know her. Something flickered in those bright eyes, some buried thing that was still Odile.

"Baby," she said, "Run."

"I'm not leaving you," Dominique exclaimed.

"I don't want to hurt you." Nana was trembling now, hands clenched at her sides. "I can feel it calling me. It's so loud. I don't want to hurt you, please…"

She stopped. She turned her head toward the kitchen window, slowly, like a flower turning to the sun.

Someone stood on the other side of the glass.

The change in Nana was terrible in its gentleness. The trembling ceased. Her shoulders lowered. Her face smoothed into calm, blank serenity, and she lowered her eyes like a servant awaiting orders.

Victoria Devereaux opened the back door and walked in without fear, immaculate, unhurried.

"You should be proud, Dominique," she said. "Your grandmother has received the greatest gift my company has ever offered."

"It's a curse!" Dominique shouted.

"It's mercy," Victoria replied as her dark eyes moved over Nana with something like affection, "Every woman fears becoming invisible. I simply made sure they never will."

Dominique understood, in that moment, that the hold wasn't complete. Nana's hands were still shaking. The seven days were barely finished, and some part of her grandmother was still fighting.

Dominique reached into her bag and closed her fingers around the dagger.

She swept the remaining jars from the counter, glass and cream bursting across the tile. Victoria hissed, and for the first time her composure cracked. Dominique lunged.

The blade caught Victoria across the ribs. She staggered, black blood spilling down her white blouse.

"Odile!" Victoria shrieked. "Stop her!"

Nana moved, impossibly fast, faster than her body had moved in seventy years, and for one terrible second Dominique thought she was coming for her.

Nana hit Victoria instead.

The two women crashed through the kitchen table. Chairs splintered. Nana held on, teeth bared, her eyes locked on Dominique.

"Go, baby, go!" Nana shouted.

Dominique ran into the night with the dagger in her fist and her grandmother's voice fading behind her.

The Commercial

Six weeks later, nobody believed her.

The police told her gently to see someone. One journalist wrote back, kindly, that the story would need evidence. A federal hotline kept her on hold for forty minutes. Meanwhile Devereaux Cosmetics issued a polite statement, which stated that a former intern, dismissed for theft of proprietary data, had become unwell. The company wished her the best.

Victoria appeared at a charity gala, photographed radiant and perfect and unmarked.

Nana's house had been empty when Dominique went back, the kitchen wrecked and the back door open on the dark yard. Nobody. No note.

Now Dominique sat alone in the living room with the television on for the sound of other people.

A commercial came on.

Women of every age filled the screen, smiling, radiant, turning toward the light. Wrinkles softened into nothing. Gray hair darkened. One woman touched her cheek and laughed, and Dominique thought, with a small cold shock, that she had heard that laugh before.

Then Victoria walked into frame, pale and elegant in a white dress, and looked directly into the camera.

Directly at Dominique.

Victoria smiled.

"Vita Noire," she said softly. "Because beauty shouldn't have an expiration date."

The commercial ended.

Outside, someone was laughing.

Dominique went to the window. Across the street, her elderly neighbor Mrs. Fontenot stood on her porch in the late light, holding a small package she had just taken from the mailbox. Black and gold. She looked down at it, then across the street at Dominique, and waved happily.

VITA NOIRE — COMPLIMENTARY SAMPLE.

Dominique's gaze slid down the street.

Another package sat on another porch.

Then another.

Then another.

Every house on the block had one.

Slowly, she drew the curtains closed. The room went dim. She stood with her hand against the fabric and her heartbeat in her ears, listening to the silence of the house.

It was not quite silent.

From somewhere behind her, from the dark hallway of the supposedly empty house, a voice she knew as well as her own said gently, "Baby..., I'm hungry."

THE END