Voice of the Blood

by Jemiah Jefferson

  I didn't buy any of the books.

  Later I saw the year's summer blockbuster film, didn't take in any of it; sneaked out halfway through the climactic chase-and-explosion scene to masturbate in the bathroom. I was too distracted to come, and I finally hitched my jeans, flushed the empty toilet selfconsciously, and returned to the theater only to catch the credits.

  I had some tacos.

  I was hoping I'd run into Lovely in Hollywood; perhaps he'd be hanging around Retail Slut panhandling, smoking a fat spliff in the parking lot of the McDonald's, being romanced by a suave Latino orchestra cellist; but I didn't see him anywhere. I wished that he had a cellular phone that I could call and make sure he was all right. Most likely, I conjectured, he's just gone home with some silky gothic mister, and they were spending the day in bed feeding each other Cap'n Crunch and watching Bela Lugosi movies. I could see him—laughing, worrying, getting high, and then laughing again.

  The sun was beginning to sink at last; it was past eight o'clock. I caught the bus to the stop a few blocks away from the Rotting Hall, and walked the last few blocks in a state of impatient agitation. Never mind! I'm a failure as a human being! Get it over with! The blond woman who worked at the heavy-metal club waved at me as I passed, and I waved back.

  Inside there was more silence—a heavier one this time. Everyone was gone, I could feel it. A single candle, new and as thick around as my arm, burned with a flame straight and true; the light was still and even. Slowly now, I mounted the stairs.

  Up in the office, Daniel was reading aloud from a wide book; he didn't look up at me as I came in, but continued reciting:

  "Curly-locks, Curly-locks, wilt thou be mine?

  Thou shalt not wash the dishes, nor yet feed the swine;

  But sit on a cushion, and sew a fine seam

  And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream,"

  I stood there.

  "How was your day?" asked Daniel.

  "Kind of a waste of time," I confessed.

  "No, that's all right. I just wanted you to make a go of it. I didn't want you to feel cheated out of a day. Don't worry, it won't seem like a waste of time." He turned round and smiled at me. "Come here, don't be a stranger."

  He settled me into his lap and kissed my cheek tenderly. I put my arms around him and embraced him tightly, sighing, butterflies in my stomach. "I love you," I whispered.

  "Good." He smiled. "Come, let's get started."

  I took off the tennis shoes and massaged my tired feet. "My neck's all stiff," I grumbled, then took the rat pocket watch from my pocket and gave it to him. "Here, hang onto this for me."

  "Good idea. Here." He handed me a glass filled with a dark, cloudy liquid. I sniffed it. "It's wine," Daniel said. "With a sedative. It works faster in wine. Drink it."

  I downed the glass. It was bitter and sour, but unmistakably wine with something in it—perhaps an opiate, which would explain the bitterness. He began to massage my feet for me. He had fed in the meantime, but not much; his flesh was supple, but white as ice, and his hands were only lukewarm on my hot feet. "What would you like to listen to?" he asked.

  I laughed, faintly goofy from the draught of wine. "I dunno… that mix tape of yours with the Peter Gabriel and the Bowie instrumentals…"

  "Actually, not a bad choice." He hopped up and slapped on a tape. "This will flip over automatically. How do you feel?"

  "Kind of… buttery…"

  He kissed my throat, then my mouth. He was flavorless. I clung to him anyway, seeking something indefinable in his cheeks and tongue. I tried to prick my tongue upon his fangs, but he drew his head away and regarded me without expression.

  The music swelled and my skin, for a moment, began to crawl in time to the music. In another moment this sensation was gone.

  He helped me into the bathroom. My legs didn't work very well. He pinched the skin of my arm, and I moved and said "Ouch," but I didn't really feel any pain—well, a pinch, that was all. Daniel took off his shirt. "Feel my heart," he said to me. I felt for it and felt nothing, then a slow, steady throb and retreat, throb and retreat.

  "Is what you gave me going to kill me?" I mumbled thickly.

  "It won't even put you to sleep right away." He laughed. "I need you awake for this. You're just feeling the rush. Chloe concocted this for this purpose specifically—it's a general anesthetic, but in a low dose… or something. I was thinking about something else when she described it to me." He closed the door, but the stereo was right against the wall on the other side and I could hear the music just fine. I liked this tape because it had This Mortal Coil on it—at least that's how he described it—but to me it was the voice of the Cocteau Twins, hopelessly expressive, singing an old song I felt I should recognize but didn't. It had the feel of the supernatural about it. Daniel was stroking down my throat with the tip of one of his claws; it felt cold and dangerous. He pinched me again, and I barely registered the sensation.

  Under the single fluorescent light his face was intent, too thoughtful to be demonic. He knelt at my feet and pulled out my arm and rested it on my lap, between us. "Where is Chloe?" I asked.

  "She's at home," Daniel said.

  "Can I talk to her?"

  "No," he replied. He stroked the pale flesh of my forearm.

  I closed my eyes, for I could feel that sensation; just nothing of his pinches and prods. I could still feel the gentleness.

  Then I felt something very odd—a tearing, a slicing, and then hot and cold at the same time. I opened my eyes; with a scalpel, Daniel had opened up an incision three or four inches long, longways down my forearm. I felt the hot blood soak into my jeans. Very slowly, the pain sensation swelled up, but bumped its head against the glass ceiling of anesthetic. Nonetheless I cried out.

  Daniel put his mouth to the wound and sucked swiftly, and then the pain seized me in its teeth and shook me viciously. I hurt too much for tears. His mouth slid around in the mash of blood and tendons, drawing it into himself with the steadiness of a nursing child. He was not wasteful—the only blood I had wasted was that from the initial cut, that blood running down my jean legs and coating my left foot in a sticky syrup. My body tried to pull away from Daniel, but he wouldn't let go, and my other arm was no good; it might as well have been filled with rags. I lay back and keened like a dying coyote.

  I screamed until my throat ran dry. I didn't know you needed blood to scream. The room had dissolved into chips of white and dark, growing larger and darker by the millisecond. "… Oh Daniel…" I whispered. "I'm dying…"

  "Soon," he agreed. His voice came from far away. "Now."

  I felt that I had his permission to die. But he pushed something into my mouth that ran a cool-hot liquid down my throat. For a moment I thought he was feeding me water or wine so that I could continue screaming, and I thought, how compassionate! But this was thicker, saltier, sour, and bitter; semen? Why did it continue to flow? I choked and moved my face away.

  "No! Damn it, drink it or you'll die, do you hear me? I know it's nasty! Keep drinking, you're almost there."

  I wanted to refuse, wanting no more of this sickening elixir, but I hadn't the strength, and the stuff poured into my mouth, over my cheeks. I opened my eyes and found I could see quite clearly, if somewhat distortedly; Daniel held his wrist to my mouth, slit crossways with the same knife as he'd used to open me. My arm lay motionless, useless, but beading up with tiny grains of flesh as his drops of his blood fell into the wound. His blood was fresh and red, fat with mine. I felt its heat clearly now, and I swallowed and swallowed, feeling the fluid fill me, fill a strange and awful void.

  Daniel pulled back from me and hit the far wall, stumbling. Now he was high on the anesthetic; his pupils in the green absinthe irises swollen. His arm left red swathes on the white tiles. I stared at him, then back at my arm. It felt like it was being burned with drops of candle wax. The swellings I took to be new flesh I saw were blisters; they grew, and under my gaze they burst, spilling drops of reddish pus al
ong the skin.

  Nausea began to rise in my belly.

  Daniel stood up straight and staggered towards the door. "Christ, I'm sick," he mumbled in a blunted voice, and went out the door.

  He left the light on.

  I heard it lock from outside. The song playing on the tape—had been playing for the last six or seven minutes from the time that he'd cut me—was "Blackbird" by the Beatles; the tape seemed to be stuck. I slid onto the floor from the toilet seat. "Daniel?" I called out to him.

  Book Three

  The Circus Movement

  * * *

  Chapter Thirteen

  First there was the nausea.

  I thought it was brought on by the sight of those nubby tumors on the edges of my wound, and later as it continued, by their breaking and releasing their cargoes of reddish-yellow effluvia; then I realized that that couldn't be all of it. I felt like I'd eaten a combination of devilled ham and broken glass. I lay on my side on the floor tiles, holding my belly, wondering if I should try sticking my finger down my throat and vomiting.

  I didn't need to bother. Even in my fetal position on the floor, I let loose a projectile stream of viscous, dark red goo—Daniel's blood, flooding my stomach. I sat up. and opened the toilet lid belatedly, and another round came up. This time random bits were strewn through it, anonymous and pink. It could have been from my lunch. I hovered at the edge of the toilet, gripping my belly with fingers so tight, I knew I would leave ten bruises.

  The tape stopped.

  There could be no mistaking this time; the blood was bright red, not dark, and there were translucent shreds of flesh there—the lining of my stomach, the delicate orchid mucous membrane. I screamed, choking on it, feeling blood fill my nose.

  At almost the same time I felt a great spasm grip my lower intestine, and I convulsed, filling my jeans with a thick, foul, heavy liquid substance. I untwisted myself long enough to unzip my jeans and kick them halfway down. More blood—darker this time, but undigested. I bled freely from the mouth, from the anus, from the urethra.

  I screamed again, this time out of anger, and pounded the door with my bare foot. "Daniel! What the fuck is happening! Daniel! What the fuck!" I began to cry, but it was so bitterly painful to do so that I wanted to stop. My tear ducts were on fire. There was no reply. I hoisted myself up on the toilet and the shower rod, and looked at myself in the mirror. I wept tears of blood and salt water; my eyes were rheumy, yellowed, the irises gummy, the lids slack.

  "Daniel! Let me out of here!"

  Nothing.

  I retched again, terribly. Red vomit stained my arms, my legs, blood squished between my toes. The anesthetic effect was gone—I felt the loss of my stomach lining, the lining of my colon, my villi, the fine skin between my throat and my nose, eaten away as if by acid or flame. My teeth suddenly filled my mouth like a spoonful of pearls; I couldn't spit, but had to let them drool from between my lips.

  I scratched at my leg, itching from the coat of blood, but my nails felt funny—soft, bendable. I looked at my hands with what sight I had left. The fingernails were loose, falling out, leaving raw bleeding beds. I tore at my legs anyway with them; the skin was shedding itself in big sheets, first the dead skin, then the pink new skin underneath, and finally the pale fat, the muscle. I was losing me. All that I was came apart at the scams. I felt more surely than anything I'd ever felt that I was going to die, in this most horrible way, a fate I wouldn't have wished on my worst enemy, tens of billions of cells screaming out as they were torn from each other.

  I thrashed around blindly for a long time. I felt the mirror break, my forearm thin-bone with it. No matter. My hair came out in fist-sized balls and stuck to the blood that had been my face, then was washed away clean by the blood. My body was dissolving. My eyes had finally run away from their homes, coursing down my face like melting pudding.

  I swam in it.

  And then, there was nothing. First no pain—a blissful cessation almost all at once—the death of the minor nerves, then the major ones in their turn. Then there was simply nothing.

  I was thankful.

  I woke up feeling cold.

  At first I couldn't open my eyes; they were stuck together. Instinctively, like a newborn child, I scrubbed my fists against the lids and felt a strange crackle, as if my eyes were sealed shut with the finest cellophane.

  My first sights were blurry, and mostly red, with a great pale form to my immediate right, where my head lay against the foot of the toilet. I blinked; tears squeezed out of new tear ducts and coated the eyeballs. I felt this with great wonder and pleasure. When I opened my eyes again, I saw with incredible clarity; again, mostly red, but this time made up of many distinct shades of red; rust red dried to a crackle on the side of white porcelain, black red of the clotted surface of the pool where I lay, vague pinkish shapes splattered against the broken tiles of the shower.

  I sat up.

  Then I realized I was a whole body, an entire corporeal form, a human form; two legs, a torso, breasts, collarbones, two arms with hands and fingers and fingernails. The fingernails were very short, barely covering the nail beds, but they were a very distinct silvery color with pink half-moons.

  I felt my face. It crackled too. I was all red all over. For a while, I didn't understand why I was so red and crackly; then I touched the liquid in which I bathed. Blood. My first word, my first comprehension, the first thing I really understood.

  I began to itch. I was tingling all over, especially in my armpits and between my legs. I lay there for quite some time rubbing the mound of my pubis, enjoying the pleasure I got from rubbing the itch, until I felt it grow strange. I looked at it. Hair was growing there; so fast that I could see it gradually lengthening, growing thicker and curly. It too was red, the red-brown of the dried blood on the sides of the toilet.

  Scratching my head, I slowly stood up. Where the mirror had been, there was only a fragment of silvered glass; enough of it so that I could see myself; red and wild-looking, but quite whole. I touched my face, pulled down my eyelids so that I could see the clean pink undersides, opened my mouth to look at my teeth—new and white and straighter, the canine teeth pointed sharp. When I closed my mouth I bit myself, and tasted my own blood.

  A sharp pain went through my spine. Hungry. I began to shake. I became sad, and cried; it felt plaintive to me, but it sounded dreadful; a primitive wordless howl. That made me angry. I had to get out and get something to eat, something to drink, something… something out there that I could smell…

  Door.

  Then no door. I bashed my fists against it, and the door came off its rickety hinges and collapsed into the outside. I hadn't meant to hit it that hard, but when I looked at the fallen door, the imprints of my fists stood out clearly, biting through the white paint into the wood itself.

  I recognized the room and I smelled Daniel's smell on everything, but it told me nothing; he wasn't there. My anger grew. I would have shouted out his name, but I couldn't think of it; I couldn't think of anything.

  Escaping, I walked slowly down the stairs, getting used to the feel of it. Everything was dark except one doorway where a dim yellow light shone out, clearly outlined on the graffiti-marked stairwell.

  A young girl stuck her head out into the stairwell. "Hello?" she called softly.

  In the next instant she was beneath me; I tried to tear open her throat, but my fingernails were still too short and soft, and I merely sunk my fingers through her neck until I was gripping the corrugated pipe of her larynx in my hand. She didn't even have time to scream; her eyes rolled in panic, then slid up under her eyelids. I ducked my head and took a handful of her fluids, supping it from my fingers. I bent over her and put my mouth over the huge wound.

  Maybe a minute later, I sat back and took a breath. The girl was cold as a stone, blue, shrunken like a voodoo fetish. There was barely any blood to seep out of the slack artery that had so recently fed me. I recognized her face at last; it was the little girl who had b
een Daniel's breakfast all those afternoons ago. She was just barely fifteen; she had been miserable that Daniel's huge party had overshadowed her birthday so much that everyone forgot about her.

  I thought I might puke, but already the blood that I had drunk was in my veins, refreshing my tired heart and feeding my brain. I could think now, recognize things, remember what had happened to me and what was happening now.

  But already I wanted more. That was simply an appetizer; now that my body knew more than ever what it needed, I became a turmoil of sickness and nausea and pain and sensation. This is no good, I thought. What if it's always like this? What if I always need more? This is going to be hell.

  I covered the body with a flowered cotton bedsheet, turning away from the dark stain that slowly rose up to dampen it, and ventured back into the hall. More lights? I sought more lights. More people who might help me. I won't kill the next one, I promised myself. I can't kill my friends like this.

  I came upon Mimsy sleeping in Lovely's and my nook under the second-floor stairs. He looked like an angel, asleep; like Daniel. I bent down to kiss him, thought, Maybe just a quick taste, something to get me to the next one. I won't hurt him.

  The taste of his skin was exquisite. I didn't even remember touching my tongue to the soft perfect fuzz of his cheek, the slightly roughened skin of his chin. I rested my nose against the yielding flesh of his neck. My teeth found their way to the visible pulse of his carotid and pressed it gently.

  He never woke up. Perhaps if he had, he might have been able to stop me; or the shock of his eyes opening and a scream of protest from him might have reminded me of the time I'd spent gently absorbing the warm flow of blood from him to my mouth. But I never thought anything until the pulsing was long gone, and I realized that I had been sucking the blood from the artery because it was no longer coming to me of its own volition.