“He hobbled like a grotesque marionette toward me. But not directly toward me, no—he paused, bobbing for a moment, at what must have been a body some feet away. Then he lingered longer over Tom, leaning close, maybe taking his scent. His eyes were dry slits, his black lips were drawn back over long teeth like a Jabberwock. He…worried the air over Tom’s shroud with long, white nails. Then he swiftly fell upon me.”
Stephin finished his drink.
“He must have been looking for soldiers like me, dead but not yet departed. The war must have given him fields of fallen apples.”
He looked for a while at the empty glass, then balanced it on the top story of a book stack like a water tower.
“This is not a story I enjoy telling. Do you understand why I thought you might find it instructive?”
Doug didn’t, but he wasn’t in the habit of admitting that sort of thing.
“Sure,” he said. “But…there’s something I’m wondering about. I’ve done a lot of reading on vampires. Not just Dracula—lots of things. And there are a bunch of stories of vampires looking like the one who turned you: plump, and reddish or purplish. Long teeth and nails.”
“Yes,” said Stephin.
“But the books I’ve read just dis…dismissed those stories as a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose. When a dead person starts rotting, he often gets all bloated with gases like that. So it makes him look well fed, but it’s just gas. And the skin around the teeth and nails shrivels up, and that’s what makes them look longer. Stuff like that. If someone was dug back up when they looked like this, they could get mistaken for a vampire. But since I know a bunch of vampires now, and they just look like normal people…”
“You think I’m lying,” concluded Stephin.
“No! No, just…Why would your vampire look like that, if the rest of us don’t?”
“Exactly my point. You wanted to know the rules. I believe, sometimes, that the rules can change. That the rules are not rules at all. Why did ‘my’ vampire look like that?” said Stephin, sitting low and deep in his chair. “I have no idea. Maybe because he thought he should? Maybe because that was what the world believed of vampires in his day? I only know that I didn’t become just like him. I was no treat in my early days, let me assure you, but I was never as loathsome as he. Then the years passed, and a notion of a different kind of vampire captured the popular imagination, and I sloughed off my dead skin, bit by bit. That’s a metaphor, you understand. Do they still teach metaphor?”
“Of course.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I thought perhaps school was all music videos and telephone messages. They teach books? I see from your face they do. So, shortly after our Mr. Stoker published his stuffy little book, I finally emerged, a fucking butterfly.”
Doug assumed this was sarcasm. Stephin was clearly a moth, circling a dim light in a dusty closet, chewing holes in the world. Metaphor! Doug wanted to leave.
“So you see?” said Stephin. “I changed. The conception of what a vampire is, what he looks like and how he behaves, changed. It can change again. No rules.”
Doug frowned, then realized he was frowning, and stopped. The whole idea seemed too unlikely. Too metaphysical.
“I wonder if we don’t all have this kind of influence over each other,” said Stephin. “Do you know that everything in the universe has its own gravity? It’s not just planets that exert this force—it’s anything with mass. You have your own gravity. So does a feather.”
“I already knew that,” said Doug. “We learn it in school. From books. But you have to be as massive as a planet or a moon or something in order to have enough of a gravitational pull that anyone’d notice.”
“Yes. Precisely. But there are other laws of attraction—are there not? The sort you don’t learn about in school? How often do we find ourselves pulled to other people, becoming a different kind of person whilst inside their aura? How often do we remake ourselves to suit the expectations of society?”
Doug shook his head, which felt suddenly numb and elastic. He was possibly drunk. “I’m sorry. This sounds like touchy-feely crystal bullshit.”
He was met with silence, and Doug imagined he’d probably said something he shouldn’t have. He avoided the other man’s face until it was too obviously deliberate, then was treated to a look that could sour milk. Stephin made a little cage of his fingers.
“I was a devil. I mingled with worms and dank earth. I slept as if dead by day and wandered by night, and by night I was diverted only by pretty screams and blood. A devil.
“And then came our friend Dracula, and the world changed its mind. The memory of my life came back to me. The memory of my death, and what I’d lost. Tom North came back to me. There are so many more of them than us, Doug. They have a planetary influence. And the vampire was only ever what they needed it to be.”
Doug breathed and forced his head to clear for a moment. “Can you stop being a vampire if you kill the one who made you?” he said quickly, before his mind went soft again.
Stephin raised his eyes. “Ready to leave the belfry, so soon?”
“I’ve seen movies and read stories where you kill your vampire sire, or kill the one who started that vampire lin…lineage, and you change back to normal. Does it work? If so many people think it works, then maybe it works. Tell me.”
Stephin stared for a long time, face blank as an old hat, while Doug fidgeted. Stephin could probably figure things out about Victor. He’d tell Signora Polidori or Borisov. Doug had been stupid to ask.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing firsthand,” Stephin said finally, “but I’ve come across such stories myself. I can tell you that I know with great certainty that Miss Polidori’s sire has gone to his final death, but she remains, up in her gilded birdcage.”
“But did she kill him herself?” said Doug, determined to see this line of questioning through now, screw the consequences. “Maybe you have to be the one who does it.”
“Maybe. Maybe you’d even have to kill an ‘okay guy.’ One who was out of his mind when he made you,” said Stephin. Then he was quiet again, and appeared to be thinking. Doug let him think, and felt his body sag and marinate. But then the sun set outside and the night filled him up like his whole body had a hard-on. Stephin must have felt it, too, because he breathed suddenly and spoke.
“I think you would find it useful to do a little genealogy. Find out more about your vampire family tree. I will consider this question of yours and do my own study. But offhand, I’d say do nothing to the boy who made you. I think you want the head of the family, so to speak.”
“I guess—I guess the real question,” said Doug, “is why would any vampire make another?”
“Why?” Stephin repeated. “Loneliness, of course.”
“But I mean…why would a vampire create a younger vampire if there was a possibility the young one might end up destroying the old one?”
Stephin stared. “If you can explain to me how this is different from parenting in general I might know how to answer that.”
23
GREAT WHITE HUNTER
HE HAD BEEN right, he thought, on the long bike trip home: getting low on blood was like being drunk. Drunk and hungry. Being drunk and dry at the same time must feel terrible, he thought. Drunk but sanguine—that felt a little better. He let his bike drift from side to side, giving in to the weightlessness, softening his eyes until everything was smoke and blurred edges. Then he was nearly clipped by a car.
“Dumbass!” shouted a boy riding shotgun.
“Nice poncho!” shouted a kid in the back.
Screw you, thought Doug. This poncho is for safety. You’re supposed to wear white when you bike at night. I shouldn’t even have to explain this to you, but I do because you’re all a bunch of fuck-wit future short-order cooks. You’re a bunch of burger flippers. You’re a bunch of batter-dipped fry guys, he thought. Besides, it was easier to just wear the poncho than try to fit it in his pocket.
He ra
mped up onto the sidewalk and gazed into the park, through the hedges and tall trees, the statuary, the…deer.
There was a deer in the park. A West Philadelphia park, empty at night but for a man asleep on a bench and, over there, a deer. Doug stopped his bike. The deer, which may have been watching him pass, turned and stepped unhurriedly toward the far road. Doug trundled his bike around and pedaled back to a gap in the hedge, then into the park. The deer answered by bounding across the street to the south park, its hooves drawing a crisp, thrilling percussion out of the cracked pavement. Doug stood up on his pedals, shifted gears, and chased.
The night made him strong. He could feel it seep into his legs, an eldritch power, his prize and his curse, gained in a dark bargain with shadowy forces that he may better exact his vengeance on…this deer. Maybe he could pretend the deer was a mugger.
It dashed through the children’s playground, and in that spray of sand and Tinkertoy architecture he lost it. At the far edge of the park he slowed and looked around.
There was a bewildered-looking guy on the sidewalk, and Doug asked, “Did you just see—”
“Yeah, man!” he answered, and pointed down a side street. “It went that way!” Doug thanked him and pushed off again.
Where had this deer come from? The closest real woodland was a few miles away, and even that was just a thin, fresh strip between two scabrous counties. Like Mother Nature had left her watch on while getting tattooed. It was too unlikely, seeing a deer here. Doug inflated the unlikelihood of it in his soggy mind until it was like mythology, until it seemed to him that the deer could be nothing short of a spiritual messenger or a gift. To catch it would signify something. In the fantasy sorts of stories Doug read the deer would have something important to tell him. Or he would trade its life for a wish. Or maybe it would actually be a beautiful woman, bound to him forever. If this last possibility strikes you as odd, then you have probably never been a teenage boy. There are an uncatalogable number of things that can remind a teenage boy of beautiful women.
The side street ended at a T, and Doug could see nothing in either direction. The deer was somewhere close, he thought. Hiding. He drew a deep breath through his nostrils and not so much smelled as sensed something wild in the air.
Near the T in the road was a gravel path between two houses, too narrow for a car, not quite a driveway. Doug left his bike by the street and crept up the path, conscious that he was approaching a strange house, ducking past a strange window, but the smell was overwhelming. The smell and a rhythmic, chuffing sound like a locomotive. He reached the end of the path. Crouching low, he craned his head around the corner, and the deer was there.
Large. Larger than he expected. It was looking slightly downward at him, fenced in by a postage-stamp backyard, no more than three feet away. Its mouth was white with dry spit. Its belly kept time like a huge, fiercely beating heart.
It was difficult holding it down, but Doug was strong tonight. And after a minute the animal grew calm. Its breathing slowed. Its blood was so much better than cow’s blood, though not as satisfying as human. Still, there was an electricity to this feed that made even those bags of human blood seem a little like dead batteries.
He took more than he usually did. He took as much as he could.
He got a little of it on his poncho, but it wiped clean. That was the nice thing about vinyl.
The deer would never have found its way back home. The deer would have been shot by animal control, or got hit by a car. The deer might have hurt someone.
He was back on track now, tearing through the streets on his bicycle, his body warm and mighty. Was it the blood (or maybe the alcohol?) that made him feel both larger and smaller than himself? Like he was wearing a costume. Like he was looking at the world through eyeholes, narrowly. He really wished he could run into those guys in that car again. Those guys, or some just like them. Any guys, really.
There was a long way home and a very long way home, and Doug took the latter tonight, through streets that began to split and crumble beneath his tires, past the stumps of trees that had been cut down and made into posters for beer and cigarettes. He was looking for a little trouble, but it was only seven o’clock and barely dark, and a short white kid on a bike didn’t attract the sort of negative attention he thought it would. So he’d already crossed the street that formed the abrupt and almost mystical barrier between the have-nots and the haves, and was nearing his own neighborhood, when he accepted that he just couldn’t hold it any longer and pulled up to a MoPo convenience store to pee.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d urinated. It just wasn’t something he needed to do much anymore. Was it because of the liquor? Alcohol made you pee, right? Or maybe because he’d taken too much blood from the deer.
Man, the deer. That whole episode already seemed so dreamlike, so long ago. He could almost wonder if it even really happened. But he could still smell the animal on his clothes and the blood on his poncho. And he was strong.
He locked his bike to the rack and pushed through the door of the empty MoPo, into the skim milk light, the smell of pretzels and freezer burn.
“Bathroom?” he asked the checkout girl.
“By the dairy case,” she answered without looking up from her acrylic nails.
Doug minced through the faintly spinning store and found the bathroom. If he really did need to pee because he’d taken too much from the deer, did that mean he was about to piss blood? His stomach lurched at the idea, but when he finally unclenched the fist he’d made of his crotch, the only thing that splashed against the urinal was urine. He pumped his free hand victoriously in the air.
He washed up and glanced at his reflection in the mirror. Then he took a long look. Here was a nice-looking guy staring back at him. Doug couldn’t quite place the face.
He retraced his steps through a swinging plastic door between the dairy case and the bottled water and found the MoPo a lot busier. There were two men near the checkout island and a third standing by the entrance with his hand over the lock. One of the men was pointing a toy gun at the cashier.
No, a real gun, Doug thought as he struggled to decode the situation.
These guys are robbing the MoPo. Oh, hell yeah!
This was important, the culmination of his origin story. This would be momentous. Don’t think, he thought. Don’t think.
He unbuttoned his poncho and pulled the hood over his head as he strode toward the men, arms akimbo. The cashier was fumbling underneath the register drawer. “All of it! All of it!” the armed man shouted. An unarmed man between Doug and the gunman saw him approach.
“Roy,” he said, with a big-eyed frown.
“Hey!” said Roy. “No names! And, besides, uh, that’s not my—” He flinched and turned the gun on Doug. “Who the fuck is this?! Chad, out of the way!”
“Now he said your name, Chad,” said the man by the door.
“You’ve picked the wrong convenience store tonight, gentlemen,” Doug announced in what he thought was an intimidatingly low rumble, like distant thunder. Too distant, possibly.
“What? Man, back off!” said Chad. With outstretched arms he threw all his weight into Doug. Doug sprawled backward, clutching at the counter, anything, to steady himself, to no avail. He was dumped backward onto the floor along with a clattering hot-dog cooker. Time slowed. The situation presented itself with intricate clarity.
“Just stay down!” the cashier shouted. “Let these men go!”
Doug said, “HOT DOGS!” and whipped a handful of the sweaty wieners at Chad’s face. Afterward, he wasn’t sure why he’d shouted it.
“Aah! Hey!” Chad screeched through upraised hands.
“Man, move!” Roy shouted as he pushed Chad aside, but when he raised his gun, Doug hurled the steel hot-dog warmer at his head. Roy fired at the stained dropped ceiling and went down.
The noise of the gun was deafening. Doug had never been so close to one before, and his ears went tinny. But it roused him off the
floor and toward a snack display.
“POP-TARTS! POP-TARTS! POP-TARTS!” he shouted, throwing twin packs of them like shurikens at the heads and throats of all three men. Again with the shouting, he thought. He was reading too many Silver Age comic books.
Chad came close and threw a punch, but Doug found it surprisingly easy to dodge. Then he returned the punch, and Chad folded backward over the snack foods and didn’t get back up. “Ha!” said Doug, then ducked when he realized he was being shot at.
“Roy, let’s just go!” said the man at the door.
“MAGAZINE RACK ATTACK!” yelled Doug, deciding to just go with it. He swung the rack over his head and onto Roy’s, and the man collapsed in a heap. All around them celebrity magazines and sudoku booklets flapped heavily like chickens and then slumped dead to the floor. The cashier was just finishing up a scream. Doug looked over at the doorman, the doorman looked back at Doug. Then he unlocked the door and ran out into the night.
“He won’t get far!” Doug promised, and followed. His poncho billowed out behind him like a great white sail, a sail borne on the winds of justice. That would be a good name for him, he thought, as he narrowed in on his prey: White Justice. No, it sounded a little neo-Nazi. He might as well call himself Nordic Lightning. You can have black superheroes with “Black” at the beginning of their names, but you can’t really do it with white superheroes. “Jewish Justice” just sounds like a law firm, he thought, before noticing he was about to get hit by a trolley.
24
OPEN THE DOOR FOR YOUR MYSTERY DATE
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you guys watch it, too,” said Cat as she squirted another slug of purple goop into Jay’s hair. “I wonder if Doug’ll get back in time.”
“He has been gone longer than he said,” Sejal observed. She considered how awful it would be if Doug had had an accident after she suggested he keep his appointment, and was feeling a little nervy. And this after having a mild panic attack on Friday, at the show. She was taking a full Niravam a day now, and wondered at how bad she’d feel without it. “Isn’t it dangerous to cycle at night?”