“Drink?”
“Maybe later,” I say.
She stands with a grin and leads me across a red and black and white oriental carpet to a bedroom, hidden behind a pair of black-slatted rice-paper doors.
The room is dark, only lit by candles. We kiss at the edge of the bed. Careful of my wounds, I shrug out of my jacket and start to unbutton my shirt, but she pushes my hands away and does it for me. She stops, seeing the gauze straightjacket around my torso.
“What happened?”
“Bad paper cut,” I say.
It earns me a smile. “Oh, tough guy, huh?”
I shrug.
“Well you should be more careful opening envelopes.”
“Good advice.”
“So you’re okay?”
“I’ll live,” I lie.
“Can you—I mean, do you still want to?”
“Sure. Just so long as you’re gentle.”
“I make no promises,” she says, pushing me down onto the embroidered comforter with a mischievous grin.
I watch her make the kimono disappear into shadows and I know that somewhere God exists. She comes to me, gentling in between my legs. She stares down at me, red locks hanging in her face. The unread contract sits between us again. This time I pick up the pen and sign my name.
In blood.
Afterward, we lay in a tangle of bed sheets and limbs. The smell of spent passion hangs like cordite in the air. It hasn’t been like this for a long time.
Hell, maybe it’s never been like this.
“You’re amazing,” she says breathlessly as I roll off of her slick and hungry flesh for the fifth time. “I’ve never met a man who could keep up with me. I mean, even on coke or meth, all the guys I’ve been with have needed to rest in between. How do you do it? Are you using tantra?”
“Something like that,” I say. I could tell her that as a vampire I have some control over where the blood in my body goes, but I don’t. I feel her shiver against me and reach down to pull the rumpled comforter over us. “Cold?”
“Just a chill. It’s strange. Even after all that, your skin is so cool to the touch. Cold almost.”
Her words snap me back to reality, reminding me of all the myriad reasons this will never work out between us. It also reminds me of another thirst that will soon need quenching.
“Let’s go again,” she whispers in the dark, rolling over and reaching down for me.
Feeling the approaching sunrise counting down like a time-bomb inside me, I gently set her grasping hand aside. “Can’t,” I say. “Time’s up. Gotta go.”
She gives me a disappointed “No,” then a “How come?”
I stand and play a game of hide-and-go-seek with my clothing. “I won’t lie to ya, doll. The truth is if I’m not home by dawn, well, I’ll turn into a pumpkin.” Reesa giggles. “You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
She shakes her head like a little girl. “No.”
I pull my pants on. Propped on one arm, she watches me. “So was this just a—you know—a one-time thing?”
“Weren’t you counting? It was a five-time thing.”
She laughs again. “You know what I mean.”
“You tell me.”
“I’d rather it wasn’t.”
“I guess I’d rather that too.” I mean it, even though I know all this has us on the dead-end express straight to Nowheresville.
“Good.” Looking tired-eyed now, she bites the head off a yawn and says, “Maybe next time we can try your freezer out.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Oh I dunno. Might be kinky.” She gives me that too-cute smile as I shrug into my jacket with a wince.
I tell her we try doing what we did tonight in there and the only kinks she gets will be in her neck. Then I bend and kiss her goodbye and leave her smiling in the dark.
17
Gas as a form of execution was first conceived by a toxicologist by the name of Dr. Allen McLean Hamilton. The initial idea was to simply gas condemned inmates while the poor dumb bastards slept in their cells. When that didn’t prove workable, the sadistic powers-that-be settled on the gas chamber. Seen by some as more humane than shooting, hanging, or electrocution, the idea caught on. It became the main form of execution for San Quentin penitentiary in 1938.
Kept hidden away in the prison basement like a shameful family secret, the San Quentin gas chamber looks like what it is: a death room. No way anyone would mistake it for a sauna. Just the sight of its octagonal six-by-eight witch-skin green metal walls is enough to make you go all weak in the knees. You enter it through an airtight oval door—the kind you see on submarines. The first thing you notice going in is that there are two chairs instead of just one, presumably in case the warden should find himself in a Noah’s Ark kind of killing mood. Through five large square windows, stone-faced witnesses watch as the guards belt you into the chair with worn leather straps.
You wonder how many others the straps have been used on. You wonder if they fought. You wonder if you should. Something just doesn’t seem quite right about going without a fight. But you don’t. There’s no point. Fighting makes about as much sense as jumping off a cliff and flapping your arms on your way down. So you don’t. You let them. You let them belt you in. You let them do all the things they need to do to make you dead.
Glimpsed through perforations in the seat beneath you is a metal bowl. It holds a mixture of sulphuric acid and distilled water. Above it, a pound of sodium cyanide pellets hang in a gauze bag like a condemned man.
When the guards are done with their ministrations, they exit the way they came. You sense how goddamn glad they feel to be getting out of there. How glad they are they aren’t you. The rubber sealed steel door shuts with a nasty vacuum-packed whisper. A clang would be more welcome. A large locking wheel seals you in like Amontillado in his cask, and all there is left to do is wait. So you wait.
Pretty soon the bag of pellets splashes into the bowl and the acid water and cyanide mix to create tendrils of hydrogen cyanide gas that crawl up to you like ivy through the perforations in the chair. You know you’re about to die, but somehow you don’t really, can’t really believe it.
They’ve advised you that it’s in your best interest to breath deeply from the start. Get it over quick. Shorten your suffering. But you don’t. Maybe you didn’t fight, but goddamn if you’re going to just suck it in like fresh air on a breezy summer day. So you hold your breath. You hold it despite the burning napalm kiss of the gas on your skin. You hold it even as your closed eyes sting and tear. Even though it makes no sense and there’s no goddamn point.
You hold it.
Until your lungs are bursting and you can’t anymore. And then you suck a lungful of hellfire and brimstone and then the real horror begins. Like a sucker punch to the gut, your ability to breathe is cut off with that first breath. It hurts. Goddamn it hurts as it burns you from the inside out. But it doesn’t kill you. Doesn’t even put you under. What it does is cause something called hypoxia, which is just a five-dollar way of saying it cuts off oxygen to the brain. Hanging or shooting would be faster but those aren’t options. Not humane enough. So, wide awake, lungs on fire, you asphyxiate. Every muscle in your body contracting and convulsing to beat the band as the toxin invades your bloodstream and your veins ignite like fuses on powder kegs. Wide awake, fighting for one more breath that never comes, you die.
The state of California put me to death at ten A.M. on March 14, 1946. No one claimed the body. No one came to the funeral service. They buried me six feet deep in the prison cemetery in a pine-wood coffin. I was thirty-three years old.
Becoming a vampire isn’t like they make out in the pictures. The pictures make it seem like you get bitten and alakazam—instant vampire. Wrong. Dead wrong. The way it really works is like this: first you get bit, which transmits the infection, then you become a carrier until whatever point you die, then, depending on how long you’ve been a carrier, there is a gestation period of
complete unawareness, and then slowly, gradually, like a newborn infant, you begin to become aware of the world around you. The subtle light in the darkness. The smell of damp earth and your own decay. The cramped confines of your pine-coffin womb. And of course, an evergrowing, ungodly, unimaginable thirst. It’s the thirst, building like pressure in a teakettle inside you, that ultimately compels you to break free of the grave and rise and hunt.
Scared and confused, I rose three months after my death like Jesus from his tomb. Free, I collapsed on the ground beside my grave, weak as a newborn foal, to find that the whole world had changed while I’d been away.
Or maybe it was just me.
Though my sense of touch was now deadened with unsettling leprotic numbness, each of my other senses had become a hundred times keener. A thousand. Thick clouds obscured the moon, making the night black, but a new-found infrared vision allowed me to see despite this. I could hear the beating hearts of life all around me. I could smell the blood pumping through arteries and veins. I was aware of the world in a new and predatory way. Every living thing seemed mine for the killing.
I smelled her before I saw or heard her. The stink of her sweet decay filled my nose as she materialized from the lowlaying fog that had settled around the cheap, state-funded headstones.
Coraline.
“Hello, lover.”
Her voice came from behind and carried a corpse-cold smile in it. I turned my head to look, but because of the cloud cover and her lack of body heat, she appeared as a dead spot in my infrared world. Like a black hole, I could only tell she was there by the lack of light that formed the shape of her.
I tried to sit up, but my atrophied arms buckled under me, and to my embarrassment, I found myself face down in the dirt again. Coraline came to me then, cooing like a new mother.
“It’s okay, baby. Don’t struggle. You’re weak. That’s normal.”
She settled down beside me and propped my head in her lap and brushed crumbles of sandy dirt from the cheap suit the state had buried me in with one bone-cold hand.
“Don’t you worry, darling, your Coraline is here now. I’ll take care of everything.”
“What have you done to me?” My voice sounded like it had been passed through a cheese grater.
“Nothing you didn’t want me to. They were going to kill you, Mick. You didn’t want that and neither did I, so I made you immortal.”
“You made me a monster.”
She shrugged. “Semantics.”
Her nonchalance made me feel sore—real sore, if you want to know the truth—and if I’d been stronger, I might have hit her then. I don’t believe in hitting women as a rule, but then Coraline no longer qualified. She had become something else. Something dark and predatory. Something awful.
So was I.
“Anyway, baby, what’s done is done. This is how it is. We have to focus on the future. We have a lot to discuss, you and I, but first you need your strength and for that you have to feed. You are thirsty, aren’t you?”
I said nothing; just stared up into the void. Above, a cloud drifted and a cat’s-eye moon winked through, affording me a glimpse of Coraline’s face. She smiled down at me, as beautiful dead as she ever was alive. More.
As I watched, she lifted her shirt and exposed her full round breasts to the chill night air.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re my baby bird,” she said. “I’m going to feed you until you’re strong enough to feed yourself. After all, a growing boy needs to eat.”
Bringing one erect nipple to her mouth, Coraline bit into it with one crescent-moon fang and squeezed it to make the blood flow. Then, a maternal smile on her face, she pulled my head to her and gently pressed her cold, blood-slick breast to my lips.
The idea of drinking blood, especially her blood, and in this way, revolted me. I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t. But in the end, the irresistible smell of blood and my own voracious thirst won out. They always do. And she was right; after all, a growing boy needs to eat.
***
Coraline took me back to the room she had taken at a fleabag motel, just up the road from the prison, where the visiting family members of inmates often stayed.
Upon checking in, she had used the coercive power of her own hypnotic gaze to impress upon the night manager her fervent desire that absolutely no one enter the room for any reason for the duration of her stay. He had agreed to see to it no one would, and had even chivalrously offered to move the oversized oak steamer trunk she had brought along into the room for her.
We spent the next few days dead to the world in that trunk, and the nights in a lustful Gordian tangle in the bed. Though our lovemaking was different now, newly tinged with darkness and blood and violence, it was every bit as passionate as I remembered. Though I hated to admit it, it felt good to be back in her arms. It was like nothing else mattered. Maybe nothing else ever had.
We holed up in the room until I was strong enough to travel and then we started back up the coast to the City of Angels. To Brasher and the nightmare that awaited.
Coraline had taken care of everything just like always. While waiting for me to rise, she had rented a Spanish-style bungalow only a few short blocks from the Venice neighborhood where we’d spent our early days together. She even equipped the joint with all the comforts of home: blacked-over windows, a refrigerator for storing blood, and a large, comfortable padded coffin. Over the next two weeks she came to me while she was supposed to be out hunting for Brasher. It was almost like old times.
Almost.
Our nights were spent making love and planning murder. We decided I should kill Brasher while she was supposedly away on a long-distance hunt. That way he wouldn’t expect anything, and she wouldn’t be around to give anything away should he attempt to probe her mind. According to Coraline, Brasher’s butler and driver were under strict orders to vacate the property each day by dusk so that he wouldn’t be tempted to feed on his hired help when he rose. As a result, the huge house would be empty except for the two of us.
Coraline had thought of everything. One night, a fresh bout of dark lovemaking behind us, she laid out the plan for me as we lay naked on the bed licking our wounds.
“It’s always the same. He makes me lock a victim away in his study every night. When he rises, he goes in there and feeds first thing. He’ll be drowsy after, so that’s when you do it.”
I objected, saying that it seemed low-down and dirty to kill a fella—even a monster like Brasher—in his sleep, but Coraline told me it was the only way.
“He’s old, Mick, but he’s powerful. Don’t underestimate him. If you drop your guard, even for an instant, he’ll kill you. Believe that.”
Seeing the fear in her graveyard eyes where there should be none, I did believe it. She was terrified of him.
“All right,” I said.
Naked against the rickety headboard of the bed, Coraline reached out and grabbed the rumpled pack of cigarettes from the nightstand, lit one.
“The key is in the timing, but if we get it right it should be simple. Just wait until he’s drowsing, then go in and shoot him full of holes.”
“I didn’t think bullets had much effect on vampires.”
“They don’t. Unless they’re made of silver. All undead creatures are allergic to it. It won’t kill him, but it’ll hurt like hell and give you the advantage.”
Smiling a crafty smile, she blew a ribbon of smoke that settled like fog around her boneyard tan.
“Okay, I shoot him. Then what?”
“Then, when he’s wounded, you use the stake. Jam it through his heart.”
“And that’ll kill him?”
“No, but it will paralyze him as long as it’s in there. He’ll be completely incapacitated. Won’t even be able to speak.”
“Fine. Good. But how do I kill him?”
“You have to burn him,” she said.
“It’s the only way to be sure,” she said.
I went to kill Br
asher on a warm evening in June. I left Coraline at the Venice house to await my return. The scent of Honeysuckle filtered in through the open windows of the car as I drove up Sunset toward Bel Air, but all I could smell was blood.
I parked on a squirming Bel Air road and climbed a brick wall covered with thorns and brambles to get at the house. From the shadowed canopy of a jacaranda tree, I lit a smoke and sized up the joint. With its high, ivy-covered walls and irregular stonework façade, it reminded me of a European castle. The arched front door was set back in a recessed alcove. Beside it, a sconce porch light burned invitingly, as if to say I was expected.
According to Coraline, Wilhelm Brasheer was a Hungarian aristocrat with ties to the old country. He had come over to America after being run out of France during the French Revolution. Forced to choose between his fortune and his head, he had wisely left the money behind. Why not? Money comes easy to vampires. What you don’t earn you can always take, which is exactly what Brasher did.
After changing his name to the more American-sounding William Brasher, he had kicked around the east coast for a while before eventually migrating west to take part in the rough-and-tumble early days of the California gold rush. The story goes that after Brasher’s arrival in early 1850, several Forty-niners with claims to large ore-bearing mines mysteriously disappeared. Stranger still, they had sold their claims to Brasher for pennies on the dollar just prior to their disappearances. Questions were asked, but not too many. Brasher had an uncanny ability to talk his way out of trouble, and after all, the papers for the claims were signed and legal. Amassing a fortune that far exceeded what he had left behind in Europe, Brasher had later moved to southern California and never left. The guy sounded like a real charmer. I couldn’t wait to meet him.
I scuffed my smoke out on the flagstone drive and checked the load on the gun for the umpteenth time. Satisfied the bullets hadn’t gone anywhere while I wasn’t looking, I skulked around the side to the darkened service entrance and went in.
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