The following night I emerged at sunset, wet and stinking. Just as I had been able to tell in the dark room of the warehouse, I somehow knew that the sun had set and it was time to move. I crawled from my cramped hole and began to walk back in the direction of the exit. I dragged my left hand across the tunnel wall until it brushed against the metal-runged ladder I had used to climb down that morning, then climbing to the top of the ladder, I pushed the cover aside and hoped I wasn’t about to stick my head up into an oncoming truck.
The street was clear for the moment. I scampered out of the sewer and dashed for the nearest dark alley, not bothering to replace the manhole cover. The open hole might cause a serious accident if a car happened to drop a wheel into the opening as it drove by, but I had bigger problems than fixing a road hazard I had just created. I needed to return to the office building. I needed to see Andi.
Slinking and darting from shadow to shadow, I worked my way back to the warehouse without being seen. When I reached the building, I pounded on the door calling out Andi’s name. She did not answer. I listened at the door for any movement, but could not hear anything. Andi could be standing on the other side of the door and I would never hear her, but this silence felt more ominous to me.
Unsure what to do next, I began searching the wall for the loose brick where Andi had discovered the key to the building. It was a desperate act, but I had to at least look. If Andi was inside with the bolts secured, I would never get in. But maybe, if she had left, she might have put the key back for whoever had originally left it there. I located the brick and, using my fingernails to grip it, rocked it free of its housing. Without much hope, I looked inside the small concavity.
Dumfounded, I saw a glimmer of silver. The key was there!
I grabbed up the key, slammed the brick back into its recess, and had the warehouse door open in an instant. I spent the next fifteen minutes searching and researching the building. I looked and smelled through every room, every closet, and every open space above and below ground. On my third circuit through the building, I had to admit defeat.
Andi was gone.
Her clothes and possessions were also missing. I risked once more going outside just long enough to confirm that her car was no longer in the parking lot. Andi had left, and it appeared she was not planning on coming back.
Thankfully, she left my clothes behind for me to find. I washed, showering quickly in scalding hot water to scrub off the dried blood and sewage, then changed into clean pants and a shirt. With nothing more to do, I pondered where to go next. I knew of no place that was safe, and I did not know anyone that I could contact without raising questions I was not prepared to answer. I decided to spend one more day at Darius Metallics, not because it was safe, but because I had no other ideas. Maybe by the next night, I would figure something out.
Thus began the most difficult period of my existence. The next night, I left the warehouse as I had decided. I locked up, put the key back in its hiding place, and set off on foot. I didn’t even have a cell phone to call a cab, so I was stuck walking. My bloody clothing I left on the floor in the front lobby of the warehouse. I figured the Friends of the Night could clean it up. Or the cops might find it and the owner of the building could try to explain how they got there. I didn’t much care which.
Although I still didn’t have anywhere to go, I knew I couldn’t stay where I was. Even hanging out in the same city could be dangerous. Andi, the cops, the Friends, all might have reasons to come looking for me, and most of those reasons did not have outcomes that were in my best interests. I needed to be gone. I needed to disappear.
I spent the next eight months traveling aimlessly from city to city, hiding in sewers, caves, condemned buildings or whatever I could find. I had nowhere to go, but I felt driven to keep moving. Travelling somehow felt safer than remaining in any location more than a few days at a time. Transiency came with its own risks, however. On a few occasions I found myself trapped outdoors during the day without shelter and I was forced to dig with my bare hands and bury myself underground to hide from the sun. For sustenance, I fed mostly on animals, being too afraid to hunt human prey. I admit there were times that hunger, desperation and anger pushed me past the point of caution and I did take a human victim. Each time I killed however, I immediately moved on to a new location. I did not want the police hunting for me, so I was careful never to be responsible for two deaths in the same place.
Twice while I traveled, I crossed the scent of other vampires. I fled these areas as fast as I could, not wishing to cause any confrontation. Andi had explained to me that vampires could be very territorial, and in my weakened condition I knew I would not last long in a fight. So, although I would have greatly benefitted from the assistance of someone with more experience than I had in the realm of survival as an undead creature, rather than risk contact I decided it was best to simply move on.
With no permanent place to stay and the need to hide from the sun each day, I was constantly filthy and stinking. This state actually served me pretty well most of the time. People, especially those living in the larger cities, have become blind to the homeless and destitute masses that live on their streets. They do not like what they see, so they choose not to see it. Except for a rare Samaritan that would pause long enough to drop a few dollars in my lap, I was completely ignored by the throng of humanity that passed by me each night. My squalor made me invisible.
Still, whenever I had the opportunity, I tried to wash up and change into clean clothes. It never lasted, however. It seemed that every time I managed to buy or steal a clean shirt, I spent the next day hiding in a sewer or deep underground in a muddy hole. The same was true of bathing. And the opportunities to wash were few and far between. Especially after I stopped using public restrooms.
I had to stop using them. I couldn’t bear looking in the mirrors.
When Andi had taken me to the small farmhouse, and later to the warehouse, I had wondered briefly why the bathrooms did not have mirrors. I discovered the reason for myself in the most unfortunate way.
Soon after my abandonment, I sought out a gas station restroom to clean myself up. I had recently fed from a stray dog and I wanted an opportunity to wash my face and rinse the matted hair from my mouth. When I entered the restroom I noticed a dirt-streaked mirror hanging over the sink and I stepped over to stand in front of it. The myths I heard as a child say that vampires do not cast a reflection in mirrors. The truth is perhaps a bit more complicated. And disturbing. As I stood in front of the grime-coated glass I could see my reflection just fine. But the creature in front of me was not the same Gregory that had peered back at me while I got ready for my date with Andi those many weeks ago in my own apartment bathroom. No, that Gregory was long dead. What I found now was his walking corpse.
My eyes, once pale blue, were milky and clouded, covered with thick cataracts. The skin of my face also appeared to be coated with a thin layer of something shiny and slick, like melting wax. Most disturbingly, my throat lay open like a gutted fish where Andi had fed from me. Flaps of skin and flesh hung in tatters around the edges of the gaping hole that she had chewed into me. And the wound she created looked like it had begun to rot and fester. The monster glaring blindly at me from that filthy mirror was something that might have crawled out of a moldering grave after being dead for weeks, maybe months. I was staring at my dead body as it would have appeared had I been allowed to properly die that night at Andi’s hands.
My hand went to my neck to feel the injury, but I touched only smooth healed skin under my fingers. I did not know why this was happening, but I did finally understand why vampires avoided mirrors, and I resolved that I too would do everything in my power to avoid gazing into one again.
After eight months on my own, I received my first true stroke of good fortune since Andi had turned me out of the warehouse. It happened while walking slowly through the downtown slums of San Francisco; a filthy squalid city in California. In body and spirit I was as dirty
and bedraggled as the rest of the homeless flotsam flowing around me. The joys of immortality had worn thin for me, and on several recent occasions I had seriously considered sitting down on a hillside somewhere and watching the sun rise over the eastern horizon.
As I lumbered along, contemplating my own misery, I noticed a well-dressed man strolling toward me. He was of average height, with a stocky build that reflected muscle long ago turned to fat. A sharp blade of a nose dominated his pale round face, a face that had probably once been handsome before the jowls had softened and good living had erased his jawline. Sparkling brown eyes peered out from under an unruly shock of black hair that had fallen down across his forehead. He wore a form-fitting gray suit with black shoes, the leather soles of which clicked on the pavement with each step he took. He was remarkably ordinary, and nothing about him should have demanded my attention.
Tonight, however, I was immediately drawn to him. He seemed very pleased with himself and his life, and he hummed quietly while he strolled the night streets. His very presence and attitude offended me. I thought, why should anyone have the right to be so happy when my life was a bazaar of cruelty and self-imposed suffering? My every conscious moment of existence seemed a living nightmare of hiding and cowering, and this pathetic bag of blood had the nerve to be humming, completely oblivious to the horrors of the world around him. His joy had become a personal affront. I decided I could not permit him to continue so blithely. Would not. If I must suffer then so too would all those around me.
I had felt these moods come over me before, and I knew where it was leading. There would be another death at my hands and another city would have to be abandoned. I didn’t care. I let my anger fill me. It felt better than the self-pity.
When he passed, despite the presence of other people on the street, I grabbed his suit coat. I pulled him off of the sidewalk and dragged him several steps into a deserted side alley. He stumbled along behind me, initially too confused by the suddenness of my actions to attempt to resist. By the time he realized the seriousness of what was happening I had him pinned to a concrete wall only partially out of public view behind a large garbage dumpster. The other passersby on the street at the time kindly kept walking, ignoring my interaction with one of their own. An important lesson I had learned from my time skulking in large cities was that most people knew how to mind their own business around someone else’s misfortune. No one wanted to be drawn in to a situation that might create personal peril. It was easier to keep moving.
I held the man pinned in front of me and bared my teeth. They had grown much sharper over the past months. Like Andi’s, they were not fangs and looked normal from a distance, but on close inspection, an unnatural serration could be seen along their edges. I paused for a long moment, glaring at him but not moving. Letting him look at me. I wanted him to see his death coming and I wanted him to be afraid.
For a moment, fear did register in his eyes. But then, inexplicably it faded. He smiled at me.
“Do you fear the day?” he asked.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I blurted peevishly, angry at his unexpected reaction.
His smile faltered slightly, but he repeated his questions. “Do you fear the day?”
“Of course I do. But what do you care? You’ll never see another one.”
I pushed his head to one side and tore the collar of his shirt away from his neck. I froze with my mouth open inches from his throat. For a moment I couldn’t move. I was terrified that what I was seeing couldn’t be real and at any second it was going to disappear. Like a dying man in the desert, I was staring at what looked like water, but if I dared pursue, it would fade like the mirage it truly was.
Scars covered his neck and shoulder. Layer upon layer of them. I turned his head the other way and found more of the same marks. He unbuttoned his cuffs and pushed up his sleeves to bare his wrists. The scars covered him here, too. And they were not just any scars. They were bite marks.
I held him out in front of me once again. “You’re a Friend of the Night. Aren’t you?”
His smile returned in full force. “Yes. I am a Friend of the Dark.” He said, emphasizing the difference in the name. I didn’t care if he called himself a howling, three-legged dog, I had at last found someone who could help me. “By your appearance and your response to my greeting, I’m guessing you’re a rogue. How long have you been on your own?”
“Eight months,” I said, my voice shaking. “Eight long months.”
I don’t know why I answered him so honestly. Maybe it is only a testament to how far beyond hope I had gone that I would consider this man a safe confidant so quickly into our first meeting. But the tone of his voice held more kindness than I had received in almost a year. Regardless of the reason, I immediately trusted him and placed my fate into his hands.
Fortunately for me, this man’s motives were not sinister. In my state at the time, I would have been an easy victim for whatever sadistic tortures he might have had in mind. Instead, he arranged shelter for me and allowed me to feed on him. I stayed in the city for a month. Not a long time in the scheme of things, but a great deal longer than I had stayed anywhere previously. And in that time I learned enough to enable me to survive, if not always comfortably then at least successfully. My benefactor taught me how to create false identities and credit histories for bank accounts and credit cards. This gave me the ability to accumulate financial resources. I would no longer be dependent on the amount of cash I carried in my pockets to purchase clothing, housing, and other basic necessities.
“Birth certificates are surprisingly easy to falsify,” he told me one evening. I had just taken a small amount of his blood to sustain myself and we were now settled comfortably in a hotel room paid for by the Friends. My rescuer was lecturing me on the methods he used to start two new identities for me; methods I could also follow later on my own.
“Particularly those issued in foreign countries,” he continued. “No one knows what they are supposed to look like so the authenticity of certificates created outside of the US is almost never challenged.”
He proved this point to me the next evening. With only a fabricated Canadian birth certificate and a good story, I visited the local Department of Motor Vehicles. Fortunately, it being early January, the sun was down before the branch closed its doors. I had one moment of queasy doubt just prior to walking into the DMV and, when I paused, he stopped next to me, his brow furrowing into an expression of concern.
“Yes?” he asked.
“I….” I hesitated even to say what I was thinking, but I needed to know before I willingly stepped into the building in front of us. “I don’t know if I should do this,” I finished weakly.
I turned to face him directly. “Look,” I said. “I’ve seen myself in a mirror, and it’s not a pretty sight. When they take my picture for the ID card, what is it going to show? Me, or something … else?”
My new friend’s expression smoothed into a broad smile as he realized where my concern lay. “Don’t worry about that,” he reassured me with a hand on my arm. “Old style photography equipment might have been a problem. In the cameras they used to use, the ones that had to go through a development process, pictures would come out blurry and messed up. You never could get a good picture of a….” he paused and glanced around, suddenly furtive. “Vampire,” he finally whispered.
“But,” he continued, his voice shifting back to normal volume, “everyone uses digital now. Not a problem. Pictures come out clear as a bell, and everyone sees exactly what I’m looking at in front of me. Trust me,” he told me, turning me back toward the front doors. “It’s going to be fine. Just tell them what I told you to say.”
I squared my shoulders and decided there was no reason not to trust him. I walked through the doors and stepped into the queue forming at the reception desk. When it was my turn to speak with the elderly female receptionist seated behind her glowing computer screen, I told her I was new to California and requested a ph
oto identification card to use during my stay. No embarrassing or difficult questions were asked and I exited the building twenty minutes later having completed the first step to becoming someone else. Gregory officially no longer existed.
Foreign birth certificates were not the only resource I was pointed to. Real US certificates for children that were born alive but died within days after birth were a gold mine for building new identities. The document was legitimate, but there was no one alive to challenge your ownership of the name. Social Security numbers could also be requested using the US documentation.
With a birth certificate, social security number, and DMV issued ID, it became a simple matter to create a credit history.
“Go to different department stores and make small purchases,” my savior had lectured me on the topic. “Request a credit card from the store. All they want is a name and an address to send a bill to. So, you’re going to want to get a P.O. Box to give them. Never give them your actual address. Then after you pay off the store cards, you order a few low limit credit cards through the mail. Again, you want to make a few small purchases and pay them off to show you are a reliable client. Then building on the established credit of the smaller cards, apply for larger credit limits through the major card companies.”
I did exactly as he said. I even took and out a small bank loan that I immediately paid back, just to build a visible payment history. This didn’t all happen during the few weeks I was in San Francisco. The process takes time and cannot be hurried, but I found that as long as bills got paid, eventually no one cared or bothered to check if the name on the accounts was real or not. It took time to establish each new person but, when completed, the new identity was completely reliable since all documentation, besides the original doctored birth certificate, was real. This procedure took a great deal of practice to perfect, but it has held up for me over many applications.
During my time in San Francisco, I also learned how to manage an investment portfolio to build on any assets collected and to provide future funding when needed. Not that I had any money to invest, but it was still useful information. Further along this vein, I also discovered how and where to safely – relatively anyway – sell stolen property that came into my possession without resorting to pawn shops or back-alley sales.
When Darkness Comes Page 11
