Vampires Save the Night, page 5
Then, there was a grim-looking young man a bit over five and a half feet tall with slicked back blonde hair and a determined look, briefcase and three-piece under an obviously expensive overcoat. The young man had graduated from the Sloan School a mere matter of months ago and was desperately trying to prove to himself that he could do the actuarial work he had been assigned with the consulting firm. Even while maintaining an outward appearance of a downtown power player, his thoughts were contained simply by the desire to shake off the day and his overcoat and embrace his boyfriend. The simplicity and sincerity of the affection he felt in those thoughts was a sweet respite.
There was a portly man in work-clothes who was in a hurry to make a stop at Jack’s Joke Shop — out of his way, but he had promised his nephew a pressurized can of malodorous spray. Childless and unattached, the man had devoted himself to the welfare of his brother’s family.
Overhearing these thoughts was particularly bitter-sweet. He thought of his own uncle, those random, furtive gifts that always seemed just on the wrong side of good-natured mischievous fun, and the roaring laughter that always preceded the inevitable consequences of deploying itch powder, a nickel nailed to the floor, a fly in an ice cube.
Thinking of his uncle, he drifted back to his own carefree memories of high school – and of his first encounter with the “people who could hear.” He was full of his own self-importance as a high school senior basking in the California sunshine, on the way to the big city of Boston for college. On the morning of one of his last days in high school an earworm had dug itself a burrow in his mind, but he couldn’t remember hearing the tune or the words on the radio.
“Salamander, Dock, Kitty-Cat.” The odd sing-song kept running through his mind. He had no idea why or what that meant, but there was a tune to it.
Late for school, he gathered an overfull backpack, and stepped outside the door of his home, leaving behind muffled sounds of his younger siblings being prodded to get ready for school. He fell into a gangling stride, up one hill of neighborhood houses, down another, across a busy street. All the while, the same three-word song was running through his mind. Running against a flashing “Don’t Walk” signal, he cleared a crosswalk just a block or two from his high school, when he noticed a disheveled man in a long black coat, apparently waiting for the “Walk” signal to cross in the other direction.
Their eyes met, and he felt the attack as a withering blow. He knew now that this kind of fight opened both parties to a direct contact between minds, with a single victor the invariable result. He saw another childhood (and could feel the strange man inspecting his own early life), a small town in Germany, growing up, being conscripted into a vast army, battles, ultimate defeat. He saw a young man discovering a talent for “hearing” and putting it to use in business and love. And he saw an endless line of other people who could hear, one after another, tracked down with an odd sing-song tune, flushed out with a bird-call. Each had their own lives, childhoods, careers, and loves before meeting the man in black. Each were lead down the dark path toward a stroke, each giving up a lifetime of experience and skill. To the victor, the spoils of a lifetime, and the man in black had the advantage of hundreds of lives in his memories. Each victory had made the man in the coat stronger.
As darkness gathered at the edge of his sight, the center of his vision was dominated by lank gray hair and eyes shining with malice. The entire world pulsed with crimson at each strained heartbeat, and something in his own mind was stretched to the ultimate limit beyond which there would be no recovery. Maybe it was just dumb luck, but at that point, the man in black simply collapsed, the attack failed, the attacking mind shattered, blood seeping into the structures holding the rueful advice:
“Never let one get strong, never let one find you ….”
The trick was to lay low. The ones who could hear were a deadly menace to each other, and he had stopped wondering how it could be any other way. In the entirety of the memories and experiences he inherited in that moment, there had never been an instance in which two who could hear had coexisted for even the shortest periods. There was no hiding anything between any two of them. Both knew when an idle thought was in earnest, when a fantasy was an instance of an unfulfilled reality. The basic monstrosity of the human spirit was laid bare between any two people who could really hear each other. Time and again, his new memories confirmed that it is only the lies we tell each other that make it possible for any of us to share each other’s company.
And so, he walked away from that crosswalk, allowed the dying man’s thought-accusation of murder to recede into self-pity, then self-loathing, then silence. He heard all of that clearly, and for the first time was conscious of the frantic thoughts of the people about who were also yelling, “Are you OK, CAN YOU HEAR ME? Call an ambulance, give us room ….”
Yes, he thought, I can hear you. I will always hear you.
It was not enough to simply hide one’s thoughts, he learned in that attack. Silence implied awareness of sound. The only way to hide was to discipline himself to thinking the ordinary thoughts of the day, a constant chatter of inanity within himself, while he let the words and feelings around him fall into his mind and stay there, stuck, without reflecting any awareness of what he was hearing in his mind. An idle, unaware echo had brought the man in black and his “Salamander, Dock, Kitty-Cat” ditty. Any phrase that was random enough to pick out from a crowd’s burbling thoughts paired with a sing-song tune would mark a target. Over a half-century of stalking and murder were lodged firmly in his memory as reward for accidentally vanquishing the man in black, and he had been determined in that instant, so long ago, that he would never be in the business of laying in ambush, awaiting an unsuspecting but blossoming person of hearing.
But he did need to look out for himself. Since high school, he had been using the echo-test to feel out the presence of anyone who was learning to hear. Sometimes, he discovered children as young as five or six. Once, he had detected his CHERRY SALAMANDER SHOE echo from a professor of chemistry at the university. He dropped the class as a result, and within a week, had dropped out of the university itself, cutting ties with family, home. Better to hide in plain sight, use his talent and skill to make an invisible living than to be backed into a corner by another person who could hear.
Better to not have to kill.
He knew how hard disappearing had been on his parents, on his friends. He could still feel their thoughts, when they came to the city to see for themselves the last places their son had been seen. Those memories were a dull ache, like when he had a toothache as a child and could not resist probing the cavity with his tongue. He made the pain come again and again. How terrible is it for a child to know the anguish of a parent?
He needed to find the source of the echo, but he was so tired. And, after finding, assess if this was an immediate danger, or something he could just put behind him, move on to a new city. The whole thought of moving on had frozen him in place.
“These gray days really take a toll on me,” she said, startling him from his reverie.
This was bad, being snuck up on like this, not hearing her thoughts as she approached and sat on the unoccupied side of his bench. He cursed himself for letting his guard down.
“Could be warmer, but I like the gray,” he said in reply, listening intently for her thoughts in the crowd, but he heard nothing. She was dressed in a suit of clothes that placed her in an office of some sort. A maroon blazer, long gray, woolen skirt, umbrella by her side, just in case it was going to rain, and a blouse with ruffles that were fashionable a decade ago and had obviously seen most of those years in hard service.
“Did they say anything about the next Red Line heading toward Harvard Square?” she asked politely.
Her thoughts gave away … nothing.
“No, Miss. This here is where the Green Line will pick up. You want to check the signs over there,” he said as he motioned further into the station, and down a set of red-tiled stairs. The silence of her mind seemed to spill out, quieting the crowd as well. He had not heard the absence of this sound as clearly as this for years and years.
“Well, that is a relief. I am not familiar with this area of the country, not at all.” She looked sideways at him, expecting something.
“Glad to be of service. Guess I am going to be on my way.” He stood and paused. “I hate to ask, but it has been a long time since I’ve had anything to eat. Can you spare some change, even the smallest bit will help.” He looked deeply into her eyes and forgot that the thoughts of the crowd had faded.
“Let me see what I have,” she said, rummaging in her purse. She looked up and said, “Will this do?”
She held out an empty hand, and he looked from her hand back to her eyes, puzzled. “Um, excuse me?” he managed to say.
She responded, “Cherry, sauerkraut, shoe,” with the same sing-song intonation he has been using as bait. Hearing it aloud was strange, and at first, he did not place the phrase. When he realized what he had heard with his ears, his eyes widened, and he took a quick inward breath.
“Please sit. There is no need to run anymore. We have been looking for you for a long time.” She allowed a general mental image of well-being and honesty to escape her mind.
He sat warily, responding with a sincere desire to not hurt her. He knew with all the experience lodged into his consciousness by the ragged old man in black that he would destroy her if it came to a mental fight.
“I know, I know,” she said, gently patting his arm. “You are the one who can hear and are also the one who will not fight. We have heard of you. And we want you to come and join us.”
His mind was filled with incredulity. “You can’t mean we, can you?”
“Listen carefully. Not with these,” she motioned to her visible ears, peeking out from her shoulder-length brown hair. “With this,” as she tapped her forehead. He heard nothing. Not the crowd, not her. “You are with the ones who can hear. But we are also the ones who make silence. The silence that gives us a chance at the peace that is always out of reach. Would you like to learn? With us?”
He thought that over. And thought to himself, why should they bother? Why should he bother?
“You have hundreds of our kind trapped in your experience. The hunter who you took down, he took them from of us. Surely you know that.”
He nodded.
“Give them back to us. Give us back our aunts, our children, our friends. The people we never knew. Even the hunter is one of our own. We want you to share. We want to share with you. You can have a home where you need not sleep away the days, avoiding your fellows. You can be with us.”
She could hear the temptation growing in him, the chance to end the wandering, the hiding, the furtive vicarious pleasures of a life lived at one remove through everyone else’s eyes. She heard his decision.
“Welcome home,” she said, and thought.
And the bustle of the station returned. They stood, and he followed her up the stairs, through the turnstiles, and out into the open where the sun was just breaking through the clouds.
Through Slats of Bone
By Dex Drury
She drags
fearless sex-scented knuckles over fangs
my lips were scared to bare
I propose
palming an antique band of glamorous gold
no silver to incinerate the soulless
She laughs
impels my immutable body to bed with her aureate
love-caged ring finger engaged
I surge
into sheets fragranced floral/her and funeral/me
hoping we’ll be eternal
She blocks
lamplight flickerings, drops the shadowed sheen
of her silk-shrouded silhouette
I bet
this means yes, and she will straddle my face
presenting peach-sweet femoral pulse feast
She arches
her feet in their heels, my wrist sports her simper
blunt teeth-tips dent time-turgid epidermis
I keen
preemptive consent, but discarded with the shrug of her shoulder
a cold metal circlet strikes my areola
She tsks
shakes her head, rests her foot on my chest
pins our promise in place
I hiss
her wooden spike smokes acrid sulfur
where stiletto pricks skin
She slips
through immortal slats of bone, stakes my heart
and twists
Artie’s Curse
By Scott J. Couturier
Everyone in the building suspected Artie of being a vampire.
I say suspected. It was like a joke. “Oh, Artie, have you noticed how he only goes out after dark? Have you seen how pale he gets? And all the men he has over – can barely walk when they leave.” Of course, then speculation turned to lewd discourse on Artie’s sexuality, his living habits, his past (which no one knew anything about). “Vampire” wouldn’t be mentioned again until it came up in the cycle, to be briefly tossed about, spiteful conjecture with no basis in or desire for certainty, gossip being a means in and of itself.
I, however, had a feeling that everyone joked about Artie being a vampire to disguise their subconscious unease at recognizing his nature. Most people don’t want to believe in vampires, classical or energy, bloodthirsty revenant or debonair Count. Content to consign them to an archetype, a fiction, a make-believe menace dreamed up by quote-unquote primitive peoples, a puppet of primordial superstition once feared, now made to caper and creep for mortal amusement.
I’d always thought of them that way, never much caring for horror movies or books. I preferred the “goofy vampire,” fangs akimbo, eyes slightly crossed, in a ridiculous bat-wing cape and formal dress.
When the whispers first started going around about Artie I scoffed like the most rational version of myself, saying something like, “He’s just a bachelor who – prefers to stay that way. And who knows why he only goes out at night? Maybe he’s allergic to sunlight.”
“That makes you a vampire,” Sue Arden said to me frankly in response. We were down in the apartment complex’s laundry room, changing over our loads. “I mean it, Jane! Only a few months he’s been here, and suddenly we’re dealing with a rat infestation. You had any in your unit?”
“No,” I lied, forcibly cramming all my clothes into a single dryer and fumbling for coins in my pocket.
“Well, one rushed right at me. My husband said it came up out of the toilet! We can’t have that kind of thing happening here, they’ll use it as an excuse to evict us all and tear the place down.”
“Someone should call the exterminator,” I said vaguely, eager to get away from Sue fast as I could. Some, I suppose, would call me unsociable. People make me anxious, they get under my skin. Not their fault, really; I can’t judge others for my own sensitivity. But most people, I’ve found, like to be nasty on purpose, if not all the time then at least some of the time. I’ve learned that trust should be earned, not freely given away. Fuck virginity, but hold trust close. As such, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I found Sue’s banter irritating, her grating voice rising up to flutter around the dull fluorescent lights like a trapped bird.
However, what she said got stuck in my mind – and in everyone else’s. It was like an osmosis of suspicion, the whole building waking up as one to the presence of something uncanny in our midst. Yet, jokes and suspicion took the place of any action against Artie, who for all we knew hadn’t the slightest awareness of the hive furor buzzing around him. He came and went as he always did, every night, slinking out just after the sun slipped definitively below the horizon. He stood a slight 5’6’’, with a balding head and beady, close-set eyes, dull with a blackness that seemed to admit no iris. He shuffled when he walked, almost crab-legged, wearing a long trench coat to conceal his torso and legs.
Of course, some just assumed he was a flasher, an exhibitionist who got his rocks off in the public park and sometimes brought home a like-perverted stranger. But it was the way he never opened his mouth, the way he slinked aside when you passed him in the hallway, his low rasping voice, the way he held his hands like a stalking velociraptor, his extreme paleness. All of it, combined with his strictly nocturnal regimen, convinced me by unconscious degrees that Artie must, in fact, be a vampire, no punch line or chuckle to defuse the revelation.
This got me thinking. Few things did, in those days; I’d recently checked out of rehab again, had kept clean for several months, was trying to “pull myself together,” to “take control.” An arduous process, one I felt hardly prepared for as the world around me went to shit. It’s not easy to stay clean during a pandemic; the boredom admits of only one answer, but I’d promised myself and my mom that I would do better, not fall back into the black hole of old habits and patterns. At the same time, my dreams were haunted by a craving I kept at bay by day by getting stoned out of my head.
Everyone stuck together in our building during 2020; it was hard not to notice that Artie kept going out at night, kept bringing people back to his apartment. I never once saw one of them wearing a mask. In fact, they acted almost giddy, giggling and weirdly deranged when they went in with him, a buoyant attitude at odds with how they slumped out come dawn, pale and trembling and coated in sweat.
“Maybe he’s just a really good lay,” Megan, from floor five, would often say when this point of speculation was reached. “Really, I think you’re all being gross.”
“It’s someone different every single night,” Sue (of course it was Sue) shot back, “and we’re the ones being gross?”
