LATE NIGHT PARTNERS
A TALE OF VAMPIRES
AND TWENTY-SOMETHINGS
FENNEL STEUERT
Text Copyright © 2016 Fennel Steuert
All rights reserved. DRM free, but no part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the author.
Cover artwork: Copyright © 2016 Lena Finch
Typographical design: R. Pinero, font used is Rudelsberg – a creation of Dieter Steffman.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and entities portrayed in this novella, excepting incidental references to cultural figures or products used fictitiously, are imaginary. Any resemblance to events, locales or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Contents
1 Bitten
2 ‘Nice to Meet You’
3 Language
4 Inter-complexion Dynamics
5 Shaky Ground; What Else Is There?
6 Respite
7 A Relationship of Convenience
8 Night Falls
9 Gesine
10 Finale
Epilogues
Thanks
More fiction by Fennel
1
Bitten
Colonial #
Though they said she never was human, exactly, Doris had held onto the belief otherwise – even as she sat in the back of a wagon with a few pigs being taken along the road southward.
It was a slow ride. She contemplated running, but where could she go? The man at the head of the wagon had a dog with him, and he would certainly set it loose on her. She tried to imagine that being bitten wouldn’t be that bad. This only made her blood run cold, and with that came a kind of numbness, until something large swooped down from a tree onto the man at the reins. His gingerly whistling turned to a yelp. As the dog barked and the pigs squealed, Doris took off.
Behind her, the dog let out a quick and final screech.
Doris ran faster, ably dodging the star-lit silhouettes of the trees. But what was along the ground was another thing. She stumbled over rocks and roots, until something on the ground sent her tumbling to the dirt. When she looked up, all she could see was the silhouette of a man in a tricorn hat. And then the entirety of existence was the fiery pain where his teeth tore at her neck. Her last sight was the bleeding wound formed as the man pressed a pointy finger along the inside of his arm.
Doris had been black, first and foremost, in the North where she trudged through life enslaved; and within that, a woman who – through a sad approximation of luck – had an overseer wrought with despondency. While he mourned a lost love and the state of the world, she would do his cooking and he would nod sadly as she served him meals or let him know that she finished an errand. Sometimes, on her way to the well, she would see a man by the road, Henry, along with a few others as they built a stone wall; and she might make her way down there and talk about the weather.
But eventually her overseer let his holdings diminish. His former in-laws sold her off at auction, onto that road that went through the woods.
Doris sprung up amid the leaves as if it all had just been a nightmare. She flailed and lashed about until she realized she was by herself. A few feet away from her, the legs of a large spider were frozen in mid-crawl. Now that she had calmed down, the spider slowly inched away.
Getting up was like unfolding herself, but the more she walked, the less stiff she became. The air was cold enough that she should have been shivering. Doris automatically headed back in the direction of the place she considered home, even if it was a mere speck of what a home should be.
Though she was never able to quite catch her breath, Doris walked at a pace that frightened her a little. She’d covered a lot of ground before the pains kicked in and a waft of copper in the air seemed like her whole reason for being. Afterward – after she tripped her way through the forest, following the scent to the man and the deer he’d shot down; after the man turned his lantern at the sound of her hand dragging along the bark of a nearby tree; and after he made to maneuver the rifle with the sling, and she ran at him and tore at his neck instead.
After all of this, after a brief moment of feeling free from the hunger pains, she felt an overwhelming sense of despair. Whatever she was seemed ungodly – maybe as ungodly as those who had enslaved her, if she could be reduced to craving blood. She ruminated on this and then thought, No. Perhaps not.
The closer she got to town, with it sparse collection of lanterns, the more she got the sense that the ground had a faint kind of heartbeat. The thought that the world itself had a heart made her laugh out loud. She paced back and forth, alternately chuckling and crying, even as the sky went from black to dark blue to purple. Something about dawn pushed her away from it, down toward the faint lights.
What was she to do now?
***
Present ^
In a crowded city, there was the world as Roger knew it – and the neighborhoods that were a bit less dense. Roger’s great uncle Simon didn't live in any of those, and when he last ventured out to one, it was on a summer night when an old friend had called him after coming out of the hospital. The man had been there, recovering from a stroke. It had always been hard for Roger to imagine a Simon who ventured outside at night, passing crowded corners on the way to quiet streets where no one like them, or his friend for that matter, was supposed to be. But that's what Simon did.
Simon told Roger that in his friend's final days he had the occasional problem of having to prove, among all the newcomers, that he too lived on his street. That got to Roger a little, even before he’d moved in and his uncle asked him to help put the tenth lock on his front door. Locks four through nine came, all at once, after that night.
His great uncle had been on his way to the friend's house when he noticed a shadow swooping toward his own from the opposite end of the street. Simon knew, of course, how this sounded . . .The other shadow coming face to face with his own; it pointing up. His eyes could have easily been playing tricks on him. But the scars from when he raised his head were very tangible. Something had fallen down on him and clamped its teeth around his neck. With the life pouring out of him, Simon flailed around enough to graze a nearby car. His friend heard the alarm go off. Weak heart beside, the guy was the only one who went outside before it was all red and blue lights. He died of a heart attack on the pavement, and Simon was found unconscious with blood all over him. They'd tested the blood, and made sure to inform Simon when he woke up that it was all his own.
Roger had been dwindling in a shoddily converted attic apartment when his great uncle called. He didn’t know who it was at first – the voice was so raspy – but the repeated use of the word locksmith made it much clearer.
Roger and Simon were, as far as either them knew, their last living relative, and though Roger had visited his great uncle every other week, he’d never believed that Simon’s neighborhood, so close to his own, needed three locks for its doors. Sometimes it had simply been hard for Roger to be near Simon’s head-space and its almost commonality with those who were scared of “bad” neighborhoods, even if such came together in a way that was far less removed.
In a world that had never made his great uncle think it had a place for anyone hapless who looked like he did, the man just had his throat gnawed on. And his only other friend in the world was dead. So Roger oversaw the installing of the six additional locks, then moved ten blocks and swapped shoddy attics. He’d been jobless for a few weeks, anyway, though the dog-walking business his friend Desmond had asked him to join was probably something he would have taken some time from, had such been an option.
Roger spent the first few weeks helping his great uncle acclimate. Whoever had jumped on him had been quite heavy, an
d health-wise, it was like Simon had been hit by a small car. His great uncle was physically weaker, in need of a cane to get around. The man had generally been quite the agnostic, but now he was instructing Roger to put crosses on the walls – spots directly across from the windows. They figured the prices on crosses were quite marked-up for what were just pieces of wood, so Roger had to make some himself. While his great uncle watched TV, he sat down on the floor and filed down the middle of the legs from old chairs. Using what were less than pointy stakes, and sometimes the odd umbrella, Roger clasped a pair together with shoelaces.
On his way to the fridge, Simon stopped and looked over Roger’s shoulder.
“I hope we never need to know if those work or not, but it’s good to have them.”
“Yeah,” said Roger. “Sure.”
Soon thereafter Roger found himself standing by the front door and holding a netted bag full of garlic. He’d been lingering in place for about five minutes, and in that time, his great uncle came and stood just beyond the doorway, wobbling a little with his cane.
“I know,” Simon said, scratching at the white heap of bandages on his neck. “But it’s something else that’ll maybe keep those things away.”
With a nod, Roger smiled weakly and walked over to the nearest tree a few houses down. The tree, tall and freshly leafless, was in front of an abandoned house where there were six guys, each of whom stood around in their respective spots from the curb to the peeling remnants of a chain-link fence. They all seemed to know each other, but were all presently at an ebb in their conversations. Half of them had become enthralled by their phones; the others were watching Roger as he walked closer to them.
There was a section of the tree where the trunk split intro three pieces; it was the best place to get a foothold, but presently one of the men was standing in front of it. The guy had a faint beard connected to a faint layer of hair up top. He held a thin can of some energy drink and was nodding to himself, when Roger said, “Hey, could you excuse me for a moment?”
The man did so, slowly, and the rest of his group continued to look elsewhere, except for one guy who glanced at Roger with a tenseness that froze his eyebrows. But this dissipated as Roger climbed the tree and placed the garlic where its largest branches met the trunk.
“What the hell you doing?” the man with the energy drink said. “I know that’s not for some make-believe shit, so … hey, you’re not trying to keep folks of a certain pigment away, are you?”
Roger hopped down and brushed his hands off. “No. Is that a thing? ‘Cause my hands do burn.”
The men who had been on their phones had since pocketed them. Now they had the same bemused look the man with the energy drink gave as he rolled his eyes. “Maybe your hands burn some,” he told Roger.
“The garlic actually is for vampires,” Roger said. “But not ‘vampire’ vampires – more like the kind that buys some of these old houses for nothing, then they make them into, like, everything.”
The man with the energy drink turned to his tense acquaintance. Less visibly balled up now, the tense guy’s eyes had rolled over to their corners and stayed there.
“Hey, Issac,” the man with the energy drink said. “You’re seeing some chick from nice estate land. She hate garlic?”
The tense guy grimaced at the man, then he turned and nodded toward the garlic. “That’s all about the old dude that got bit,” he said, “and that was just someone high on meth or something.
“Probably.” The man with the energy drink nodded, then slowly glanced up at the garlic. “What about the ghost of that janitor that folks say they’ve seen on the sub-levels of all them nice condos? Or that chick with the long hair who attacked those shoppers? They had some big dudes with them, and those mofos got their bones broken.”
They’d all looked up at the garlic by the time he finished talking.
By putting it there, Roger thought he was just making his great uncle feel a little better – albeit in a typically embarrassing fashion. But maybe he was also adding a bit more fear into a world where any strength not easy to quantify – well, that had to be downright unworldly.
“Roger!”
He looked back toward the house. Roger could see a bit of his great uncle’s fro in their doorway.
He nodded in the guys’ general direction as he slowly walked back. As he was doing so, a car had turned onto the street and went on until it stopped in the middle of the block, The bass from its speakers echoed like a giant’s footprints, setting the tone up and down the street.
“I was fine,” Roger told his uncle in the doorway.
“What?” Simon said. “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”
Once they were inside, Roger reluctantly helped his great uncle with the locks on the door. His uncle got back to watching some TV show amid the different echoes of grandiosity – the sounds that flexed in the space half a block away from some car or home. For himself, Roger went to the attic and tried to read, but found that he couldn’t concentrate. Sometimes, the overproduced beats would flare up, along with the accompanying music, for ten seconds, and then it would go away. Roger would naturally be relieved, only for it to spring back up ten seconds later. And so forth. He was quite familiar with these sounds, but it all felt just a tad bit heavier than it used to.
At some point, Roger went to sleep. When he woke up and went back downstairs, Simon told him the whole area had just experienced tremors.
“Isn’t it always that way?” Roger said on his way to the kitchen.
2
‘Nice to Meet You’
Present ^
Roger had gone out on plenty of errands since he moved in with his great uncle – he read Simon’s letter of complaint to a manager at the bank, then per Simon’s request, he read that same letter aloud over at the branch of Simon’s health insurance company, replacing various nouns, before being escorted off the premises – but the first social outing since then was for pizza with his friend Desmond. The two met up at Vincenzo’s, where Desmond cheerfully devoured all of his slice a minute or two after he got it. Roger was still eating his as they waited for their turn at the arcade machine in the back.
Vincenzo’s Pizzeria, owned by the proprietors of a Chinese food store next door, was mostly empty. At the moment, the delivery guy was moving down the narrow space along the counter. His poncho dripping a bit, he tapped the second player spot on the arcade machine before he went into the back. A man with a fitted, black baseball hat was playing the game, and at that moment he flinched and, in doing so, his character, which had been fashioned after a Chinese female martial arts icon, lost to the blond guy in the tailored suit, who had a crowd of Asian women cheering for him in the game’s background.
“Better luck next time,” Desmond said.
The man put some more change into the machine. “Yeah, all right.”
Next to the first player slot, the second one was sealed by a piece of tape with the words “not working” scrawled across it.
Desmond sighed.
Roger finished his slice. He threw the paper plate out in the garbage bin next to the arcade machine, then took another look at the second player slot; the handwriting on the tape over it looked a little different than anything he’d seen at Vincenzo’s before. He asked Desmond for a quarter, then, with the man in the red hat swishing his head in his direction, removed the tape and put the coin in.
The screen on the arcade machine relayed that “Player 2 had entered the game.”
Roger picked his usual character, a black man with the wing of a bird and the wing of a bat protruding from his back.
The guy in the fitted hat was good at the game. It was a wonder why he didn’t want the competition. He knew all his character’s special moves, while Roger knew just one; he lost the first round and let Desmond play his second.
“Awesome,” said Desmond. The screen erupted into a burst of light from what quickly became a special moves fest. “So how’s your uncle?”
; “He’s okay,” Roger said. “All things considered.”
“Yeah,” Desmond said. “That’s crazy. I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened on the other side of town.”
“That is where it happened.”
“Oh.”
They’d been friends long enough that they never really asked each other how the other one was doing. Desmond had a way of always rounding up things for himself to good, and Roger tried to maintain the perspective that, in this particular universe, managing to be okay was kind of grand.
Round three. Desmond beat the guy in the fitted cap, who then snatched the remnants of the peeled tape from the second player slot and tossed them to the floor. He walked off, newly absorbed by the light of his phone.
From his back pocket, Roger took out a book of haiku he’d been reading. He opened the book up, put it down near the first player controls and had started thumbing through it – Is it a strange world ... – when his phone buzzed. He flipped the phone open and saw that it was of course one Simon Greenblatt, his great uncle.
“Do you know what time it is?” Simon said immediately.
“I have an idea,” Roger said.
“The sun is setting.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “but I think I’ll be okay. I put lots of garlic on my pizza.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to let you in,” Simon said, “if it gets too late.”
Roger sighed silently. “I’ll be there soon.”
“Oh, come on,” Desmond said as Roger flipped the phone close. “I was just about to beat this game … Never even used this character before. That’s a whole new ending.”
Roger closed the book. “I’ll see you some other time.”
As he walked out, Desmond followed him to just beyond the doorway.
“Hey, wait,” Desmond said. “We’re still friends, right? I mean, I’m sorry the job didn’t work out, but it’s just …”
“I know,” Roger said. “I guess I’m just not cut out for it – listening to people go on and on about how their pets should be treated like gods.”
Late Night Partners Page 1
