The Vampire Henry

by Walker, Michael S.

  Yeah, he’s nice enough. Except when his whore is around.

  Harry’s shacked up with this young girl named Terry. I’m not sure what Terry does exactly except sleep around with lots of guys. She’s not a great looking girl by any stretch of the imagination. She has these thin colorless lips. And this uncute dimple in her chin that looks like someone poked their finger at her there repeatedly until it just stayed that way. And she wears glasses that are too big for her angular face. But she does have a spectacular ass. And she likes to show it off all right. Whenever I see her, she’s always wearing tight tight jeans.

  And whenever I see her, she’s always shaking it for some guy. Some guy who is not Harry.

  Like tonight. She’s playing pool in the bar with this guy. He looks like the porn star Ron Jeremy if he happened to belong to a biker gang. It doesn’t look like Terry is concentrating too much on the game. Too busy shaking that ass to every song that comes on the bar’s jukebox. Too busy dancing around with her pool stick, making the biker dude miss easy shots as he stares at her sweet little body.

  And Harry is going crazy with jealousy. Just like he always does. He’s silently fuming behind the bar, wiping down the counter every ten seconds or so with a cloth. He’s already gotten in a shouting match with some drunk about paying his tab, 86’d him. At any moment, I expect him to leap over the bar, punch out the biker and punch his woman too. His bad ju ju is wafting through the tiny place like black smoke.

  It’s at this auspicious moment, a vampire walks into Harry’s Place.

  I have my back to the door, sitting there, pretending to drink a 7 and 7. But I hear the door open. And then my vampire senses throw out fireworks like I have never experienced before. The hairs on my arms stand up. My canine teeth are literally pulsing. I can smell her (and it is a woman) as she stands in the doorway of the club. The smell of her cold flesh is screaming in my nostrils, my brain. I can even smell the stale blood of a not-so-recent kill on her breath.

  A vampire. A vampire in Harry’s Place.

  In all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine…

  “Hey, are you comin’ in or what?” Harry barks at the vamp. Still pissed at his woman and taking it out on the natural (and supernatural) world.

  The vampire doesn’t say anything, but I hear her footsteps under the blare of the juke as she walks slowly, tentatively, into the club. It feels as if my entire body is going to short circuit with the next step she takes. I try to imagine what she looks like. I’m hoping she doesn’t have a green face and a blue body.

  And then she’s sitting at the bar, about three stools to my left, and surreptitiously I take her in. No she does not have a green face. Bone white as a vamp’s should be. Not a bad face at all, to tell you the truth. I like what I see. She’s got these really high cheek bones, giving her an almost oriental appearance. Almond-shaped eyes under long long black lashes. She has a lot of wavy red hair. An elegant neck. She’s beautiful really. But I’ve never seen someone with such a lost, sad look on their face. It’s like she’s walking in a fog of downers or something.

  I don’t even think she knows there’s another vampire sitting next to her.

  Harry comes up to the vamp to take her order. He’s not even looking at her. Still looking over at the pool table, where his woman is grinding it out to a CCR song.

  “Yeah? What do you want then?” he asks.

  She doesn’t say anything. Just stares straight ahead at the beer taps, as if they were the most fascinating objects on earth. As if they held some kind of special significance.

  “Lady, what do you want!” Harry barks.

  She snaps out of it, looks at him with hazel eyes, eyes that seem clouded over with cataracts of grief. I just want to go and hold her. Tell her it’s going to be OK.

  “Want…?” she says, as if it is the first time anyone anywhere has asked her this question.

  “Yeah. What do you want?”

  “I want…” she says, and then her voice falters. I half expect her to end her sentence by saying something crazy and improbable like “I want someone to be nice to me.” Or “I want someone to tell me what the moon means.”

  Actually, she does finish by saying something crazy and improbable.

  “I want a damn sandwich,” she says, almost defiantly.

  “Lady, this is a bar. Not a restaurant. I don’t serve food here. I serve drinks. You want a drink or what?”

  “Do you have any food here at all?” she asks. What the hell is she trying to do? She’s a vampire, just as sure as Milton Berle was a crossdresser.

  Harry waves his hand toward a rack of snacks behind him, next to the cash register.

  “I’ve got chips. Chips. Doritos. Pork rinds. That’s it.”

  “Ahh,” the vamp says, looking at the rack and then closing her sad eyes. She sighs. “Let me have some chips, I guess.”

  Harry shakes his head, goes to the rack and pulls off a small bag of potato chips. He tosses them on the counter in front of her.

  “Dollar,” he says.

  The vampire looks at the chips thoughtfully. She reaches into one of the front pockets of her jeans and extracts a handful of change. She counts it out, while Harry glowers over her trying with extreme difficulty not to lose his temper. He turns back to the register to deposit the money and the vamp goes back to looking at the chips, staring at them as if she were staring at a loaded gun. I watch this as if I were watching a Shakespearean tragedy take place on a stage somewhere.

  Then the vampire rips open the bag of potato chips. She pulls one of the chips from the bag, pinching it between her thumb and first finger like some strange bug she has just plucked out of the air. She holds it close to her nose and smells it. I can see her grimace as she does.

  Then, she puts the chip in her mouth and tries to chew it.

  She struggles valiantly with the act of eating for about ten seconds or so.

  Suddenly she’s coughing, sending bits of potato chip sputtering all over the bar. Her mouth is open, her face distressed. She’s making all sorts of loud retching noises. She slides down from her bar stool, clutching her forehead. She staggers around, facing toward me facing away from me. Then she’s bent over, still making horrific noises. Like any second she’s going to lose her vampire lunch.

  Harry whirls around from the cash register. Looks at her.

  “That’s it. Get the fuck out of here lady if you’re gonna get sick! I mean it. Get the fuck out!”

  The vampire waves a hand weakly in Harry’s direction, as if she were trying to brush the sound of his strident voice away from her. Then she turns and staggers out the door.

  And is gone.

  I sit there for a second thinking.

  Looking at my untouched 7 and 7.

  Then I’m out the door too. Out into the dark.

  The vampire is still there, in front of the door of the bar. She’s bent over, coughing, one hand on the thigh of her faded blue jeans. I never thought that my first encounter with one of my own kind would run something like this but here it is. A car speeds past us, heading toward downtown, and some punk leans out of the passenger window and yells “Slut!” at the top of his lungs. I look up for a second to see his face, as contorted as the figure in Munch’s The Scream. Then gone. The vampire woman doesn’t seem to notice. She’s still bent over. The coughs have been replaced by sobs, however.

  She is crying.

  I inch my way closer to her.

  “Miss?” I say. “Do you want some help?” Her red hair is quite beautiful. I just want to reach out and touch it.

  She doesn’t seem to hear me. Or she pretends not to.

  “You’re…you’re a vampire,” I say, stupidly.

  Suddenly she comes to life. She stands up and looks at me, looks through me, her fragile face twisted with fury, her eyes still wet with tears.

  “Yes…yes…I’m a goddamn vampire. Now just leave me the FUCK alone…”

  And then she disappears. With vampire
speed she retreats from me. I watch in disbelief as she runs into an alley beside the bar, her lithe body a blur.

  A crazy fucking vampire.

  I stand there for a second wondering if this bitch is really worth the effort. I think about going home, drinking a pint of blood, maybe writing a long poem about women/vampires with red hair. Always trouble.

  I look at my watch. It’s 1:45.

  Fuck it.

  I run down the alley after her trying to smell her out. There’s a whole maze of alleys and side streets behind the bar and it’s hard to discern her scent from the myriad smells: garbage, dogs, mud, rust, brick, flesh. Almost impossible. She could have gone anywhere. I dart down one alleyway, backtrack, start down a gravel street that dead ends into a hurricane fence. Nothing.

  Just when I’m about to give up hope and go home, I pick up the scent of her about four blocks north of the bar. The smell of her dead flesh. Grace notes in the poor nighttime symphony. I follow her trail like a man possessed now, over some railroad tracks and down a street with rotting brownstones, government housing.

  Warmer…warmer…warmer…

  Burning up.

  The trail ends at a huge brick building, three stories of eyesore, all its windows boarded up with slats of cheap plywood. I recognize the place. Used to be an apartment building. Until last year when the cops busted a crack cocaine ring that was operating out of there. Now there are all sorts of signs posted on the doors explaining that the building is a health hazard and a public nuisance.

  She is in there somewhere.

  I go around to the back of the structure, where the rusty fire escape snakes up to the top, like a girder in some kid’s crazy erector set. I scan the dirty façade with my vampire eyes. More windows boarded over. Dead.

  Except…

  At the very top, where the fire escape ends, someone has pried the wood off of one tiny window. It gapes open, like an eye in some great creature that is trying to shake off years and years of sleep.

  I walk up the fire escape slowly, patiently, listening all the while for sound from my redhead. Nothing.

  But she is in there. I can smell her.

  I reach the top of the fire escape, peer through the window, sussing it out. A long hallway, flanked on both sides by wooden doors. A thin, threadbare carpet. Snow of plaster everywhere. I can hear colonies of rats moving around in there, nesting in the walls, dining on failure.

  And then, I hear her.

  She says one word.

  “Why?”

  And then she begins crying again. Just like she did outside of Harry’s Place.

  I stand there, listening to her unload for a minute or two. The sound reverberates through the narrow hallway. Crazy. Unearthly. I should just leave her to it. She obviously does not want my help. She needs a shrink. What if I went in there and tried to talk to her? She just might try to scratch my eyes out. And she’s not some ordinary whore.

  No. She’s a vampire.

  A vampire with red hair. And high cheekbones. And a lovely lovely neck.

  “You’re a schmuck, Henry,” I sigh.

  And then, I step through the open window and into the hallway of the building. It’s rather a tight fit for my bulky frame, but somehow, I manage. The place is even shittier once I am in it. Wires dangle down from the ceiling where lighting fixtures used to hang. There’s trash and newspapers everywhere. A rat the size of my hand darts into a hole in the wainscoting.

  Lovely. Just lovely.

  I reach the end of the hallway.

  “Go the fuck away!”

  She is in the last apartment on the left. No longer oblivious to my presence. There isn’t even a door to the place anymore. Just the cracked and peeling lintel of an entranceway. Darkness. But I can see her, sitting on the floor, looking at me with wild eyes.

  I ignore her and step into the room. It’s a small oblong space, probably the living room at one time. Swathes of stained paper are drooping from the walls. There’s a long striped couch in there, its upholstery frayed and ripped. An old fireplace, its hearth now bricked up.

  The vampire in her lair.

  She’s there on the floor, looking at me with untempered hatred. I notice that the corners of her lips are smeared with dark blood. She’s just fed. But on what? I take a sniff. It’s animal blood that I’m now smelling. She’s captured one of the many rats in here and chewed on it. And then I notice a stain on the wall in front of where she’s sitting, a small lifeless form lying where the floor meets the wall. She took her prey, that rat, and flung it against the wall, after she was done feeding on it.

  “For a vampire, you don’t listen too well,” she says. At least she recognizes that I am another bloodsucker. It’s a start.

  “No, I don’t,” I say. “Listen. I don’t know what’s goin’ on with you honey, but I haven’t met another vampire in a long long time. I just…well I couldn’t let you run off like that.”

  “So now that you’re here, what? Are you gonna rape me? Bend me over the couch and fuck me up the ass or something?”

  I shake my head. Did this chick get a hold of some bad hemoglobin or what?

  “I just thought you might want to talk to me.”

  “Why?”

  Why? Why would one dodo want to squawk at another dodo? Vampires aren’t exactly crowding the streets at night. That’s why.

  “Because we are both evil fucking monsters, right?” she continues. “Because we are both murderers who go out every night and suck blood out of people? Just like they were cartons of milk we picked up at the grocery store. Is that it?”

  Something like that. I wouldn’t have put it that graphically. But yeah, she’s in the ballpark.

  “Listen bitch,” I growl. “I don’t really know what your goddamn problem is, but I’m going now. I thought maybe I could help you. I thought maybe we could help each other. I know what it’s like to be alone in the world. I really do. What it’s like…”

  And then I turn and leave the room, start down the hallway, my ears burning, my body tense. Fuck her anyways. Let her chew on rats for all I care.

  I’ve just about reached the open window when I hear her voice, almost contrite now, calling me back.

  “Wait…wait…come back here.”

  I think about just going on, climbing through that open window, jumping three stories down to the street and running away. But flashes of her hair keep going off in my eyes like fireworks. Trouble ahead. Nothing. But. Trouble.

  I turn around, walk down that long hallway, and back into the room again. She’s still there on the floor. She looks at me pensively.

  “Can you tell me what time it is?”

  The last thing I expect to hear her say after all her outbursts, her tirades against me. She wants to know what fucking time it is? Like we’re strangers standing at bus kiosk, waiting for the local to arrive. Amazing. But I look at my watch.

  “It’s coming on 2:30,” I say.

  “And what time…what time is sunrise?” she whispers.

  “Sunrise? A little after 7, I think.” I’m not ever exactly sure what time it comes on, but I’m always at home and in my bed before it does.

  “Will you…will you stay here and…maybe talk with me until it comes up? Until…sunrise?”

  “Sure,” I say. All the arrogance seems to have left her now, like some evil spirit a priest has blessed away. She sounds like a little girl who’s afraid of the dark, asking her daddy to stay with her and hold her hand for a while. “You should be good in here though, come dawn. No light’s going to get at you in here. ‘Course if you want, you could come home with me. My name’s Henry,” I add, stepping closer to her.

  She looks up at me, her face framed by curls of fire. Her expression is now almost beatific, as if she has been through some kind of hell and come to a decision precipitated by days of agony.

  “No, Henry. That’s OK. When it gets to be daylight, I’ll be gone. I’m gonna step outside and see the sunrise. I’m gonna kill myself. I’m sick
of all of this. I’m sick of monsters.”

  So we just sit there in the dark for a while. Telling ghost stories.

  About when we were human. And afterwards.

  Her name is Sara Miller. She’s thirty-five years old. She’s originally from Columbus, Ohio. Her parents both died when she was seventeen years old, died when their plane crashed over the Las Vegas airport. They were going there for a second honeymoon. She was very close to her parents, particularly her father, and their death left her devastated. She laid in her bed for weeks, didn’t care if she lived or died, couldn’t even be persuaded to attend their funeral. One minute her parents were alive. The next they were not. It was like some vast perverse equation, a Fermat’s Last Theorem of Mortality, impossible to solve. When she did finally get out of bed and try to resume her life, her parents’ death seemed to stain every thing she did, every step she took. She would look into her friends’ faces and in her heart wonder if it was the last time she would see them. She tried to go to college, majoring in education, but the work just seemed pointless and absurd and the campus seemed to her this unfriendly hive of juvenile activity. She couldn’t seem to make any lasting friendships. She didn’t want to go through the motions of dating. Mostly she just stayed in her dorm room, crying and watching daytime soaps. She dropped out after her first year. Came home.

  She went to see a variety of shrinks, but none of them seemed to be able to reach in and rescue her from the hole of grief that, with each day, she found herself falling deeper and deeper into. They prescribed meds. They had her describe her feelings in minute detail. They tried to push her toward some emotional catharsis. But nothing. She would sit in their offices and look at those well-ordered spaces as she tried to talk about her grief, look at the various degrees on the walls, at the pictures of smiling spouses and children that inevitably littered their desks. And after a while, all she could feel was hatred. Hatred for those professionals whose lives seemed so perfect and spotless. When had death visited them? How did they suffer? After a while she just stopped going. Stopped taking their medications. She dealt with her albatross of grief as best she could.