The Vampire Henry

by Walker, Michael S.

  I get out of bed naked, pad over to the window drapes, try to pull them closer together and blot out all that damn light. It’s no use. When it gets to be daylight, I’m going to have to hide in the bathroom or something. Damn. I should have just stayed at Dawes’s place in his nice dark basement. Rather than follow my stupid libido.

  I sigh and get back into bed.

  “OK,” I say.

  “OK what?”

  “OK. You got me. I’m a vampire. Emily Diller turned me into one. You know all. So what?”

  She looks at me with admiration. Far more admiration then she did at the reading actually.

  “So what? That’s awesome.”

  For a poet, she has quite a way with words now.

  “It’s a pain in the ass sometimes too,” I say.

  “Have you…have you killed a lot of people?” she asks, touching me tentatively on the shoulder, as if at any moment she expects me to turn into a bat and fly up to roost on the ceiling.

  “Why? Are you gonna turn me in? I’ve…I’ve killed.”

  “Emily never did.”

  “I know. I know. Buddhist principles and all that noise. Hey, you keep talking about Emily in the past tense. Did something happen to her?”

  Now she stubs out her cigarette, fishes her pack from the nightstand that flanks the bed. Starts up another one with long fingers. Chips of violet nail polish on them. She shakes her head and exhales a plume of smoke. “No one knows. She just…disappeared. About a year or so ago.”

  “Disappeared?” Poor Emily. Maybe she was out staring at the ocean and totally forgot that the dawn was coming on. Or maybe…

  “Yeah. I may have been the last person to see her alive.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She was publishing a whole series of poems I had written back then. Stuff based on the Buddhist Suttas. We became pretty close. Actually…we became lovers for a short time. But that didn’t really work out. I like dick too much and women are too complicated.”

  “Do you…do you have any idea what may have happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. All I know is a couple of days before she disappeared, she came over to my house. Said she had to go to LA to meet somebody. Wasn’t sure when she would get back. She looked pretty stressed.”

  “She didn’t tell you who it was?”

  “No. Somebody she knew from Texas. That was all. When she didn’t come back after a week or so, I went to the police. They traced her via her credit card to a motel in Hollywood. Found her car parked there. But they never did…find Emily.”

  Damn. Someone I once loved. Someone I was once inside of. Someone whose fingerprints are still all over my life. Every single night. Emily. Gone from the earth. I’m out of smokes and so, without even asking, I stretch over Jill’s naked body and grab her pack. And still the light from the outside buzzes its way deep into my sad brain.

  In the morning, I have a dream about Emily. I’m sleeping by myself, in the bathroom of the motel room. There was nothing else to do. Too much fucking light in that bedroom. If I had stayed there, I would have been fricasseed for good.

  Anyway, in the dream I’m in back of Emily’s house. Like I was that first night she turned me. Out there in my boxers under that colossus of a moon. And Emily is coming toward me. She has her arms open. Her mouth is smeared with dark blood, just like it was when she took that coyote down. And she is naked.

  “Henry…Henry…” she calls. She opens her mouth. Her canine teeth start to grow.

  And then, from out of nowhere, someone or something grabs at her, whisks her away before she can even touch me. Something cold and evil drags her through the brush toward the mountains. And now she’s screaming…

  “Henry…Henry…!”

  And she’s gone. I’m alone, standing in the wilderness, shivering. Afraid and alone.

  Emily.

  And then I wake up.

  So Jill gets me to the airport about an hour before my flight.

  I get my boarding pass, drop off my one cheap suitcase, and she walks with me across the concourse toward security.

  “So, if you are ever back this way…maybe you could come to San Diego and stay with me a couple of days?” she asks hopefully, taking me by the arm.

  “Doubtful,” I say.

  “What are you working on now?”

  “Just staying alive,” I say. At the moment, I am worried about Sara. I tried calling her earlier on Jill’s cell phone but still there wasn’t an answer. Where the FUCK could she be?

  “No, I mean writing wise?”

  “That’s it,” I say. “Just staying alive. One word at a time.”

  The flight back home is not as sublime as the flight out. I don’t get a window seat this time. I have an aisle seat. Next to me is a heavy-set man wearing a brown suit jacket that appears to be two sizes too small for him. He has a copy of the Wall Street Journal and he keeps underlining things in it with a ballpoint pen. And he reeks of garlic. That would be hysterical if I were a vampire out of romantic fiction. I would probably be bolting toward the emergency exit. But it still is pretty annoying.

  And then, right before we start to taxi, all the fucking power on the plane goes out. Cabin lights. Overheads. Everything. Nobody says anything, but I can feel the collective panic of forty odd souls as we sit there in the dark, on the tarmac. And I’m panicked too.

  “I’m dead. But maybe this is where it all ends,” I think, waiting for new developments.

  And, just as suddenly, the lights come back on. And then the pilot is on speaker, sounding as casual as if he were chatting at a dinner party somewhere.

  “Folks, ‘fraid we’re gonna be delayed here for a few minutes. Little electrical problem. Nothing really to worry about. Like I said…a few minutes and we should be airborne.”

  And an hour and a half later, we are finally climbing above the clouds.

  Jesus, I need a fucking drink.

  When I get to the house, I sense immediately that something is terribly terribly wrong. The plane is supposed to land at the airport a little after four, but because of the damn power outage we get in at 5:30. I don’t even have time to call Sara from the airport. Just have to flag down a taxi. The clock is ticking toward dawn of course.

  The first thing I notice is that the front door is open about an inch or so. And from outside, I can hear the TV blaring at full volume. What the fuck?

  I go up the steps slowly. I don’t even bother checking the mail, which is something I do habitually. Never know when there’s going to be a check for me from a magazine.

  I’m afraid. Something is seriously amiss here.

  “Sara?” I say. I push open the door, lugging my suitcase into the entranceway. Some kind of western is on the television. It sounds like bullets are ricocheting all over the living room.

  And then, I see it. There’s a trail of what, for a nanosecond or so I think is mud, leading upstairs toward the bedroom and my writing room. Then the smell hits me, making my canine teeth pulse involuntarily.

  It’s blood.

  It’s Sara’s blood. I know.

  In a second I am up the stairs and into the bedroom. The fastest I have ever moved.

  “Sara!” I bellow. “Sara!”

  Another image indelibly fixed to my brain, like the vision of Emily Diller crouching like an animal over her drained prey. Something I would give anything to have deleted from the hard drive of my brain. There is Sara. My Sara. She’s totally naked on the bed. Her hands and her feet are tied firmly to the bed posts with strips of what I recognize as parts of the dress she wore the first night we went out together. When she tried, without thinking, to bring down those two college students. She has been stabbed. Staked. There’s something in the middle of her chest. I draw closer. I feel like I have completely left my body or something. Like I am hovering close to the ceiling just watching, as an automaton with my features draws closer to her prone body.

  And I do draw closer. More bullets exploding in my brain, as
the battle continues on the damn TV downstairs. The TV I bought for Sara.

  I put a hand on the thing stuck deep in the middle of Sara’s chest. There’s dark, dried blood all over her body. Blood at the corners of her lovely mouth, which hangs open, slack. I realize that there’s some kind of insect, a silverfish or something, perched on one of her knees. For some reason, this strikes me as the most horrible thing of all.

  “Sara…” I croak. My voice seems to be coming out of my throat in sharp fragments.

  I think of a stupid vampire movie I happened to see when I was a kid. Some B movie about Dracula. Some unsuspecting doofus comes across the staked bones of the Count in a crypt in BFE. Pulls out the stake. Watches in growing horror as muscles, veins, organs begin to materialize. Coalesce. And once again, the Count rises to hunt for blood.

  With that image in my mind, I try pulling the thing out of Sara’s chest. It comes out easily. It’s some kind of sword. It looks to be very old. It has an elaborate hilt—all sorts of brass scrollwork on it. Maybe Civil War. Maybe earlier.

  I half expect Sara to let out a gasp when I pull the weapon from her chest. To come back to life. But nothing happens. Her eyes are open and she stares up at the ceiling where my soul is hovering. She remains still.

  Gone from this world.

  I don’t remember the rest of this too clearly. I dropped the sword on the floor. Some kind of rage descended on me, like a swarm of angry hornets. I punched a hole in the wall above the bed. And then, I was outside on the porch, ready to run down the street, ready to run as far far as I could from the body, the house, from every damn thing.

  But the survival instinct in me was stronger. It was dawn when I ran outside, and the sun hit my face full on, searing me with flames like from an open furnance.

  I staggered back into the house. Managed to shut the door.

  And fell down in the entranceway like a sorry drunk.

  Like a real dead man.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  (Thoughts From A Dirty Old Vampire—Death Walk Part 2)

  I play a game with myself

  As I walk home

  The graveyard shift over

  With each tired step

  I recite the name

  Of some famous someone

  Who is no longer

  Living…

  Who is dead?

  Sara Miller is dead

  A girl named Daneeka

  Is dead

  Juan Perez is

  A runaway named Mary Ann

  A homeless man

  In a fur coat and a wig

  A mugger

  A dancer in a strip club

  Emily Diller

  Is dead…

  Everyone is dead

  Or is dying here…

  Henry Lovell

  Is dead

  Chapter Thirty

  Later, I don’t know how much later, I wake up.

  “Sara?” I murmur. And then everything comes back into my bruised memory. The levees of grief break all over again.

  I get up from the dirty floor feeling like a man who has aged thirty years overnight. Feeling like a cancer victim who has been almost hollowed out by his invasive illness.

  I go into the living room and switch off the idiot box which has been blazing all this time. Selling its products and its perfect people. All its bloodless little wars. I trail my finger through the dust that clings to its now dead eye. So much dust on everything.

  “Sara?” I plead, half expecting her to answer me, to come running down from the bedroom magically whole, magically real again. But there is nothing but godawful silence.

  I feel tears stinging my eyes now. I can’t even remember the last time I cried over anything. Maybe I never did cry over anything. I didn’t cry when my father beat the shit out of me. I didn’t cry when he tore up my proud little story about a fighter pilot. No. Never.

  I turn and start toward the stairwell now. I follow the trail of blood back upstairs. The trail of new tears.

  As I reach the first step, the smell hits me. Don’t know why the hell I didn’t notice it before. It’s everywhere--crowding out the smell of Sara’s corpse, the smell of blood, the smell of everything else. A vampire. Another vampire has been in our…my house. Another vampire got in here. Killed Sara. Another vampire…

  Serling

  There is a piece of paper nailed above the bed, close to where I put my fist right through the plasterboard. Didn’t notice that before either. I must have really been in a trance. I tear it down now, trying hard not to look into Sara’s sightless eyes.

  It’s a piece of wide-ruled paper, like from one of the composition books where I jot my Thoughts From A Dirty Vampire. Probably came from there. On one side, in small lower-case cursive, someone has written an enigmatic declaration:

  the women was an abomination she couldnt continue to live none of them shuld be aloud to live none of them

  It’s not signed but I have no doubt in my mind now who wrote it. Serling Serling Serling Serling SERLING.

  He was Sara’s maker. And he came back here to kill her. For some twisted, fucked up reason. First a god. Then a serial killer.

  And then, a cold thought comes to my mind. I think about Emily Diller, about her not-so-recent disappearance. Could it be… She told me that her maker was, she thought, this pale nervous guy who handled her daddy’s oil accounts. That kind of jibes with the way Sara described Serling to me but she was wildly inconsistent every time she talked about him. Charismatic. Nondescript. A devil. Could it be..

  I feel in my guts that it is so.

  Fucking pig vampire Serling.

  And then rage overtakes me again.

  I am going to kill this mother fucker. I am going to take him out of the world.

  For good.

  I don’t even look down at Sara’s body. I start down the stairs again. I can smell his damnable presence everywhere. I want to burn down the house now, just to get the smell of his sicko flesh out of my brain.

  I open the door. It’s early evening. But still not dark enough for me to venture out doors. Damn. I seem to have lost all track of time. What day is it? Thursday? Monday? I don’t even seem to know what year it is any more. I only know one thing with certainty.

  I am going to kill Charles Robinson Serling. Just like he killed Emily. Just like he killed Sara.

  The phone rings and I stand there in the doorway, my hands balled into tight fists. I wait for the machine to pick it up, half expecting that when the beep sounds it will be Serling himself on the other end, gloating about how he was able, easily, to destroy everything I ever loved.

  But it isn’t him, of course. No.

  “Hey Henry. Sorry I missed you. Walter Kellar here. Remember? We talked at Eric Dawes’s party. Anyway, I’m still very serious about publishing some chapbooks of your poetry. Sooo…get a hold of me and we’ll talk about it. OK? The number is 415-291-1067. It’s on the card I gave you too. And yeah, like I said, if you ever get around to writing a novel that would be…”

  I leap across the room to the machine. Tear it out of the jack. Throw it against the opposite wall. It breaks open. Spews transistor guts everywhere.

  I don’t care about writing. Don’t care. I could write a billion words and it will do nothing whatsoever to bring Sara back to me. Nothing.

  And that is all that I want.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Later, when it is safe, I venture outside again, sniffing the air, trying to pick up Serling’s trail. I know that this is impossible, even as I am doing it. Serling is probably hundreds of miles away, in that leviathan of a vehicle he drives. It’s hopeless, for now.

  Sure enough. I smell his cold dead flesh just faintly on the porch, in the front yard. And then, in the street, a few feet from the house, the trail fades into the static of one hundred other smells.

  “Fuck!” I scream, kicking at pavement, tearing lose a chunk of macadam. A dog somewhere begins to bark angrily, echoing my own rage.


  Across the street, a porch light snaps on at Juan Perez’s place. I shake my head, half expecting the door to open now and Juan’s bloodless corpse to come shambling out of the house, ready to bring me down. But Juan’s body is no more…no more. I dissolved it to ash, to atoms. Just like I am going to have to do with…

  “No!” I scream, again. And once again, that dog picks up the desperate song, renews his frantic barking.

  This time, the door to Juan’s place does open. A man steps out on to the lighted, sagging porch. It’s not Juan, of course. A new tenant. He’s wearing a toboggan cap pulled low over a gaunt tired-looking face, a khaki jacket that reaches his knees, stiff new jeans. I realize now that it is the middle of November, and I’m standing in the middle of the street wearing a thin, short-sleeved shirt. I must be quite the sight.

  And the man does stare at me, as he fishes a cigarette from his jacket pocket and lights up a smoke. With nothing else to do right now, I start back to the house.

  “Hey buddy, you OK there?’ the man says, staring at me with slitted, expressionless eyes.

  “No, not really,” I growl, reaching my yard, the old reliable mailbox that once upon a time brought me a modicum of good news from the world.

  “Ok. Well you wanna keep it down now. I got kids in here and they’re tryin’ to sleep,” the man drawls, exhaling a plume of smoke and breath into the cold clear air.

  “Sorry. I will,” I mumble, looking at him. I can just see his pale unshaven neck above the lapels of his old jacket. I watch it twitch and pulse, zooming in on it with my vampire eyes. My canine teeth start to pulse and grow. I realize that I have not had anything to drink in…what? Three days? Right before the poetry reading. I’m really thirsty. It would be so easy to…So easy to…

  I realize that the man is still staring back at me.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” he asks. It’s more of a challenge than a question. He wants to fight someone in the worst way. Well, not tonight.