by Alice Bell
I sat back down. Through the window the sun lit the late afternoon a warm yellow.
I had to write something. Anything. I’d promised the girls. I stared at the second hand on my watch. Five minutes, four and half… three minutes.
I pressed my pen to the paper and wrote one word, consisting of one letter—I.
I forced myself to finish the sentence—I dreamed of love. The words flowed then. My hand moved down the page faster and faster. When the first workshop girl showed up, I’d filled three pages in three minutes. I wasn’t proud of my meager offering but I was relieved to have written anything at all.
Sitting in our circle, we talked about surprise, surprise by what we wrote, of how we wrote and when and why. “Did anyone else write about love?” I said.
“I purposely avoided it,” Chastity said. Her sister snickered.
Autumn Jones lifted her hand. “Guilty,” she said.
I was about to direct the girls to pass their journals to the person on their right but Autumn was seated to my right and I wanted to read what she wrote about love. So I switched directions.
Autumn stared at me. “What?” she said.
“We’re going this way,” I said.
“Wait… are you sure?” she cast her gaze around, as if imploring the other girls to help her.
“Don’t you want me to read yours?” I said.
Her skin was mottled. She looked on the verge of breaking out in hives. “I just—I didn’t think I’d get you.”
“There are no rules, Autumn. You won’t be in trouble for what you wrote.”
“I know. But it’s embarrassing.”
“Which means it’s good.” I was now more eager than ever to read her diary. I had to give a little tug to get it out of her hand.
Later, it felt strange to be driving home so early when it was still daylight. But I was struck by the sheer blue of the sky. It was a color so pure, it made my soul feel like a physical entity that could be caressed.
Night came cool and glistening. I didn’t go to the bar. I was actually tired at an appropriate hour for once in my life.
I wanted to start a new ritual and go to bed like a normal person. I put on my softest white gown and stood at the kitchen sink, listening to the coyotes yapping, before opening the bottle of Lexapro. The childproof cap didn’t outsmart me this time.
I tapped two white tablets into my hand and choked them down with water.
Upstairs, I turned on my bedside lamp and fluffed my pillow. I crawled into bed and opened Autumn’s diary.
She had her own voice. There was a poetic cadence to her prose, while it moved along quickly, with broad brushstrokes. I made a mental teacher’s note: Evocative and compelling.
The first few entries were short and nothing to do with love. She compared her life to an emo-song I wasn’t familiar with and talked about living in poverty in a trailer park. Her anger at her mother resonated, and also her adolescent dramatization of it. You could tell Autumn’s mother was a larger-than-life figure to her.
Aren’t they all?
Autumn’s mother worked as a psychic, giving readings in their trailer and writing memoirist books for aspiring empaths. Having a mother with these apparently real gifts of acute insight felt terribly invasive to Autumn and caused her no end of humiliation.
And yet as I read her girlish musings, I couldn’t understand what had embarrassed her so when she learned I’d be the person reading her diary. Her sentences were finely wrought, her scenes shining with wry wit. Honestly, her diary was so well written, I thought it was publishable. Surely, she would want me, her teacher, to see her talent. And then, I came across an entry titled: A Stranger in my Bed.
My stomach dropped. Oh, Autumn. Not a stranger. You deserve true love.
The passage was so full of longing and loneliness, I could have cried. I knew the same loneliness.
It seemed that while minding her own business at home, Autumn happened to encounter an incredibly tall, dark and oh so handsome stranger; he walked right up onto her porch and into her life… to… let’s see—what? Steal her cat?
She’s definitely making this up, I thought, relieved. I smiled and settled in for a sexy bodice-ripping read, like the kind in the subscription paperbacks my grandmother kept stacked by her bed.
I greedily turned the page. My smile quickly faded when things took a shocking dark turn. The description of Autumn’s handsome stranger, the cat-napper, immediately invoked Devon, right down to his big black boots: “Eyes as dark as night and six feet of sexy in faded jeans and big black boots.”
My pulse raced. My mouth was so dry I could barely swallow.
In the next paragraph, my worst suspicions were confirmed. The stranger had smooth olive skin and full lips that turned up at the corners, “as if enjoying a private joke at your expense.” His voice ‘caressed’ and ‘carried a hint of culture.’
She’s making it all up, I told myself. Didn’t I tell the girls not to write boring accounts of their daily lives? Autumn was doing her homework, exactly as I’d assigned it.
Besides, what were the odds of Devon and Autumn meeting?
What were the odds of Devon and I meeting? Yet, we had. Hadn’t we?
I too had fallen under Devon’s spell. My face got hot as I remembered. I’d succumbed to my most secret desires in his presence. I remembered how I’d begged him to make love to me, even after watching his skin heal miraculously over the cut I’d watched him slice across his arm.
I shuddered.
Pay attention, Scarlett. It’s a silly school girl fantasy. Why would Devon want to steal Autumn’s cat? You see, it doesn’t make sense.
But I read on, breathlessly and jealously. Autumn wrote: “I want to burn his image onto my flesh and wear him like a tattoo. He looks at me like he could eat me up.”
Pornographic words leaped off the page. My eyes burned.
“He rips off my clothes. I take him eagerly, all hard heat and throbbing ache. We do it for hours. He fills me, like the moonlight. Again and again...”
Devon
The bookstore was across town, not far from Scarlett’s. I’d passed by it many times. It was an extension of the big store downtown, a low slung brick building whose entrance was crowded with untamed shrubbery. In curling cursive letters a wooden sign said: NEW AGE. And beneath that: Occult Science, Mysticism and Metaphysics.
It was quiet inside. A couple checked out at the counter and I slipped past, heading to the back. I scanned the titles on the shelves marked Metaphysics. I hoped I’d get some kind of buzz when I came across what I was looking for. Some of the stuff was far-out and went against my basic beliefs, whatever they were. Couldn’t work in real life, I thought. The irony didn’t escape me.
I discarded whatever didn’t seem immediately relevant, though I wondered why I was so impatient. I guess I had all night and the night after for the rest of my endless life.
I went down the aisles getting more and more discouraged. My gaze fell on the book, Self-help for the Bleak. Well, there you go, I thought. Ask and ye shall receive. I found it lodged between—It’s a Jungle Out there, Jane: Understanding the Male Animal in your Life and How to Survive a Robot Uprising: The Coming Rebellion.
Footsteps approached. I could tell it was the woman from behind the counter by her lavender perfume and the faint scent of patchouli in her hair. I’d hardly glanced at her when I entered but as soon as she got near, her presence pricked my skin. I couldn’t detect a heartbeat, nor feel her pulse, which caused my own pulse to race.
She was gorgeous. Her hair was long and black with a streak of gray in front. She had fine lines around her eyes. And laugh lines, a betrayal of human frailty which I found attractive. Her tight-fitting orange dress showed off her curvy shape. A baby blue amulet lay in the shadow of her cleavage.
I tried not to stare but there was something both erotic and frightening about the sheen of the gemstone, as if it possessed a secret power. She closed her hand over it and whispered,
“Hail fair moon, ruler of the night; Guard me and mine, until the light.”
A shock wave coursed through me. What the fuck was that? Should I be afraid?
Was that why I couldn’t hear the inner workings of her delicious body? She was protected?
She looked about forty. When our eyes met, she stiffened. With an air of determination, she closed the gap between us.
Sweat broke out on my brow.
What if I was malformed in some way? Damaged goods? It didn’t seem right that I could vacillate from one extreme to the other―powerful and powerless.
“Can I help you?” She touched my arm for the briefest moment and her touch sent a shiver over me. Not the sexy kind, more like she was probing me with a wand, awaking unused circuits.
I took a step back. “Uh… just browsing,” I lied. I’d come in search of help. I was desperate for it. But suddenly I was afraid. What if I was beyond help? A hopeless case?
A frown creased the woman’s forehead. “The paranormal section is the next aisle,” she said.
Is it that obvious? Or do most people come in secretly yearning for the paranormal section?
I waited for her to explain herself, but she said nothing. Her observant eyes held mine. I stood there, like a fool. Once again, I considered making a break for it but stayed rooted to the floor. There was an awkward silence.
“What’s your name, love?” she said, finally.
“Devon.”
“Hi, Devon. I’m Erin… Erin Jones. I don’t mean to be invasive but I’m afraid it’s my nature. I can’t help knowing things, rather uncomfortable things, I’m afraid.”
I swallowed.
“I’m a medium,” she said. “And I’ve done work as a psychic.”
Uh… okay. “Aren’t they the same thing?”
“Not quite.”
Again, the quiet hovered, almost looming. I felt a sense of dread and also urgency. Something told me I was about to get the help I sought. I wanted to hurry and get it over with because I knew for a fact I wasn’t going to like it.
“Devon,” she said, at last. “Are you in trouble?”
“You could put it that way,” my voice came out croaky. I felt at her mercy. Mercy in the truest sense of the word.
“You’re looking for answers?”
I nodded, reluctantly. A strange buzzing, like a warning, hummed in my ears. An electric chime announced a new customer. I was both afraid and worried that I’d been saved by the bell. But Erin Jones, the medium and psychic, said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Talk about my own personal nightmare? It wasn’t high on my list of priorities. Couldn’t we do this without talking? If she was psychic?
What I wanted, all of a sudden, was to feel Erin’s arms around me, to breathe in her untouchable essence.
She averted her gaze, as if she knew.
I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I’m looking for someone,” I admitted. It seemed a safe enough place to start and I knew I had to start somewhere. “My girlfriend.”
Erin’s eyes came back to me, eagerly.
“She disappeared years ago,” I said. “Recently, I found out… a friend—well, someone I know—thought they saw her in the psych ward.”
“You mean… Coffeen Sanitarium?”
“Right.” I thought of the pictures on the internet. Coffeen was a three story neo-Colonial complete with columns. There was a tree lined yard, artificially green grass, and a fountain. The place could have passed for a grand hotel. Almost.
“It’s no accident we’ve crossed paths,” Erin said. “Come with me.”
I followed her past the check-out counter and through a doorway into a small room crowded with cardboard boxes and a seriously messy desk. The desk looked like a trash heap. Erin started rummaging through the debris. Pens rolled off and dropped to the floor, along with some pages that fluttered out of a stack. I picked them up.
“Thank you,” she murmured, not looking at me.
She unearthed a pair of reading glasses. When she put them on, they were crooked. She took them off, polished the lenses with her sleeve, and adjusted the frames. Back on her face, the glasses were lopsided again, but in the opposite direction. “I hate these damn things,” she muttered.
At last, she seemed to locate what she was looking for in a sheaf of papers. She read through the first couple of pages. “Okay,” she said, more to herself than to me. She turned a page, read some more, before glancing up and squinting through her glasses. “How recently was your friend seen?”
My fingers curled. “A long time ago. Almost ten years.”
“Too bad. If it was a recent sighting, your chances of connecting are better. Though, truth be told, time is an elusive thing. You may have noticed.” She put her hands together, as if in prayer, touching her fingertips to her lips.
Abruptly, like she’d been poked, she glanced down at her desk. “Oh yes. This is my latest manuscript… in progress. I’m still cobbling the pieces together. But there’s a connection here, I’m quite sure. To what happened to your friend.”
My stomach turned.
She handed me the pages bound by a fat black clip. “I don’t believe in coincidences. Do you?”
* * *
I sat on my dumpy sofa. Technicolor images spun out on the screen hanging down my brick wall. The movie cast the only light in the room. On the street below, a car honked and someone cursed. The creatures of the night were hitting their stride.
I turned my thoughts to the manuscript on my lap and lifted off the cover page: Vampires Among Us: A 21st Century Epidemic.
I skimmed over the first few pages of small talk, Erin Jones waxing philosophical about why she’d moved from the bay area. Boring. Like I care. Does anyone? I wanted to get straight to the point—Vampires.
I skimmed some more. Here we go…
The idea of vampirism has been around for ages. The ancient Greeks, Mesopotamians and Romans all had tales of demonic entities who preyed on humans. And, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are familiar with the present day depiction of Vampires: immortal, preternaturally beautiful and paranormally gifted. It is easy to scoff at such ideas but they come from ancient folklore, which, you can be sure, has one foot in the truth.
So you may be asking: What is the truth?
The truth is I met a vampire. Yes, you heard right. I touched her pale flesh and found it warm. I looked into her face and had to say a prayer, so as not to fall sway to the power of her beauty. She told me she could leap tall buildings in a single bound, like Superman. And I believed her. When she left, I saw her disappear into thin air.
I will call her Violet, for the color of her eyes, but that is not her real name. I must respect her privacy. Or she could easily kill me. Supernatural strength is another of her gifts. However, she does not drink blood. Violet feeds off something even more precious than blood. She feeds off human emotion; psychological trauma and pain, intense fear, sexual arousal and ecstasy. Violet is an energy vampire, more dangerous, in my opinion, than the blood-suckers of legend. She confessed to a strong desire, when feeding, to inhale the very essence of a human soul…
My smirk disappeared. Goose bumps rose on my arms. I saw myself slumped on Scarlett’s bathroom floor. I remembered dragging her into bed, clutching her, as if I would die without her. The night we met, her pain had attracted me like a moth to the fire. Her pain was more beautiful to me than a blooming rose or a gold filled sunset. After being with her, I felt powerful.
Now, I was nauseated.
I am a vampire.
No, that’s impossible, a joke.
I was prepared to accept anything else, even demonic possession, which in a sense, I realized, was not unlike being a vampire. I read on with a mixture of horror and incredulity.
While Violet had been human, and turned into a vampire, she said her sire was not. He was born a vampire. And he is not of this world. He is from another realm, the name of which, she claimed, is impossible to pronounce. It can onl
y be spoken in the Tongue of Angels. According to Violet’s sire, Vampires are escaping what is commonly called The Realm to come to our world.
I very much wanted to meet Violet’s sire but she refused to reveal his name, or anything of a nature that could enable my ability to discover his identity.
I had so many questions, most importantly: Why are Vampires leaving their realm to come to our world? I could only guess it is because we humans have become easy prey with the advent of technology and the weakening of our spirits.
My wildest ideas veer toward thinking the 21st century must be a carnival of delights to an energy vampire. However, Violet hinted at more complicated political reasons. I cannot say if she purposely withheld information from me about The Realm, or if she simply didn’t know the answers herself.
Due to her narcissism, Violet could not resist telling me her sire was very important and wealthy. She spoke of him with intense reverence, as if he was a god. She claimed he had great reserves of energy and could go for long periods of time without feeding. However, Violet, being a new vampire, had a strong need to feed. Apparently, without vast amounts of energy, she not only lost her powers but became deathly ill.
There was a roaring in my ears.
I didn’t want to read anymore. When I threw down the manuscript, pages scattered across the sofa. My gaze landed on the last paragraph.
“Humans who have been attacked by an energy vampire will find themselves in a weakened state after the attack. Continued attacks can be fatal…”
THIRTEEN
Zadie
Inka stroked Zadie’s temples ever so softly but her touch suddenly felt like sandpaper.
Zadie sat up and stared at her sire. “Devon has been here?” Her mouth was so dry, she croaked the words.
