The Vampire Henry

by Michael S. Walker

  She started going to bars and drinking, trying to cover the hole in her with noise and partying. She let men take her home. She let women take her home. She searched in vain in those crowded, dark clubs for some kind of epiphany that would deliver her from the grinding, pointless routine that life had become for her. For some soft touch that might make the winter in her soul melt, might make her thrive again. But there was nothing. She would stay with someone for maybe a few weeks. A month tops. And then they would always stop seeing her, stop calling her, sick of her moods, of those times when she would abruptly just go into herself, stop talking. Stop trying. Or they would be more damaged than her. Users. Abusers. And she would end it. Every corner of the world seemed to be filled with cracks and dirt. Every elaborate structure seemed to be a house of cards, ready to topple with the smallest wind, with the least provocation.

  She wanted, deep in her heart, to be with her parents again.

  Through her twenties she managed to just squeak by financially, working any job that did not require much in the way of an emotional commitment from her, that did not require her to come out of her shell and cooperate too closely with others. Or bump heads with them either. Mail clerk here. Maid here. Waitressing, although she often got fired from jobs like that for arguing with customers.

  She was in a slow downward spiral Sometimes she tried to fight against it. Sometimes she thought about going to school, making something of herself. Getting that education degree and becoming a teacher. But she never got beyond dreaming of it.

  The tsunami of doom in her life was all too too much.

  And somehow, raggedly, the decade of her twenties came and closed, a slow excruciating nightmare that she just wished she could wake up from. When she was really in the trough, she thought about killing herself. A few times she had even held a knife to her wrist. But the fear of pain, and of blood, had always bested her.

  That was when the vampire came into her life.

  And everything changed.

  And nothing changed.

  His name was Charles Robinson Serling. And he was old. VERY old.

  He remembered the American Revolutionary War. He had been a child in Maryland when it ended, when the separate colonies had become a new nation. He remembered George Washington riding into his village on a white horse, looking like some god come down from Mt. Olympus.

  So there are some pretty long-lived vampires out there after all.

  The night that Charles Robinson Serling turned her was kind of a blur in her mind. He had approached her in a bar, when she was three sheets to the wind, bought her a drink, offered to drive her home. She remembered that she had been struck by the intensity of his eyes, by the whiteness of his skin, by the way his clear voice seemed to be able to penetrate through the fog of booze she had brought down around herself.

  “Maybe this is the one…” she had thought.

  So she left the bar with him. She thought it kind of weird that he was driving a recreational vehicle, a brand new mobile home. No one had ever driven her home in one of those before. He told her that he was on a year’s sabbatical from a college position teaching history, was traveling across the country researching a book about culture in rural America after the Civil War.

  That was all bull shit.

  But he had been around for the Civil War.

  As soon as they were in the giant RV, he had his arms around her and was kissing her, fondling her breasts, running his long fingers through her hair. She remembered that when it was happening, when he was leading her back to the tiny bedroom in the vehicle, some small voice in her head was telling her no no get out of here. Maybe something instinctual, left over from when we were hunted by saber-tooth tigers. But she hadn’t listened. He had gotten her down on the narrow bed, and she had started fumbling with her panties under her skirt, anxious to have him inside her at last.

  And that was when he had sunk his fangs into her neck.

  She did remember the exquisite pleasure of that, like some violent orgasm slowed down, sustained, coming over her in warm, almost unbearable increments. She remembered clutching the back of his head, drawing him closer to her neck, thinking “At last…at last…at last…”

  And then, she blacked out.

  When she woke up, she was a vampire. And she was on the road, headed west with Charles Robinson Serling. That had been two months ago. Another blur in her life.

  Serling had been ready to drain her, give her the death she secretly desired. But something had stayed his hand. With her high cheekbones and red hair, she reminded him very much of the only woman he had ever really loved when he was human. Some cooper’s daughter in the village where he was born. That had been over two hundred years before. He told her that he had turned five or six people in his time as a vampire. He wasn’t very forthcoming as to what had happened to those other vampires and Sara hadn’t asked.

  Over time, as they sped westward, she became afraid of Charles Robinson Serling.

  The first night she was a vampire, he taught her how to kill. The savagery with which he brought down their prey, some unlucky frat guy they picked up in a bar, shocked and repulsed her. He had almost torn off the poor guy’s neck to get to the blood, and then when she had demurred from drinking at first, he had grabbed her head and pulled her down to the gushing wound, until she had had little choice. He was like that always when he killed. The façade of gentlemanly manners, all his erudition would suddenly vanish, and there would be a beast attacking, tearing. Granted, that was what vampires did, and when she wanted to feed she did. But she could still empathize with other human beings. Still feel compassion for them.

  Serling had been a vampire for so long he had forgotten how to do that. He was a sociopath really--a shell filled with nothing but hunger. The idea of all the history he had seen in his long life fascinated Sara and she had tried, a few times, to get him to talk about himself in more detail. But he really had no nostalgia for the past at all. Everything in his life was geared toward the kill, the logistics of the kill, getting to the kill. He was an automaton. A shadow whose whole life had been burned away by the fires of time. A zombie more than a vampire.

  And Sara still wanted things other than blood. Conversation. Music. Friendship. Love. She wasn’t exactly sure what ghost, what spark had made Charles Robinson Serling turn her into a vampire--some last connection to the human race. But whatever it was had quickly vanished.

  And Sara found that being a vampire, having the power of a vampire, did not finally free her from her bouts of depression. Being a vampire even exacerbated the times when she was down. She was dead. Her heart no longer beat inside her chest. It was what she had longed for. But she was no closer to being with her parents then when she had been alive. Worse. She would never ever see them again. She would go through all of eternity drinking blood, probably becoming, after a few hundred years, the same unfeeling creature as Serling. The thought horrified her and she would sink deep down. She would try in these times to refrain from drinking human blood, subsist entirely on animals. And Serling would laugh at her, call her a real drag. He would go off and hunt by himself, something he began to do with more and more frequency, even when she was feeling quite herself.

  And then, a few days before, he hadn’t come back at all.

  He left her, vanished like her parents, rode off into the blood wilderness of America, left her here with some clothes he had bought her, a little bit of money. She was glad to be free of Serling, of course, but she really didn’t know how to survive as a vampire. Everything just seemed entirely impossible.

  And so she had decided, just tonight, she was going to do it. Walk out into the sunlight. Burn like a flame.

  And see her parents.

  She had not counted on another vampire walking into the picture.

  But here I was…

  “Henry, what time is it now?” she asks.

  “5:15,” I say. “Are you sure that…?”

  “Shhh. Your place? How close is it to here?
” she asks, urgently.

  “Not far. It’s about three blocks west of here actually.”

  “Will you take me there?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “For now. Do you have anything…do you have anything to drink there?”

  “Yeah. A few pints.”

  “OK.”

  “OK.”

  Later, we are lying on my bed, naked. I’m on my side watching her as she sleeps, taking in the contours of her body: the mountains and valleys of a new world. She is really beautiful. I’ve been with a few beautiful women in my time, but that was different. They were all prey. The sex was just a warm-up, foreplay leading up to the main bout--draining their bodies of blood. I’ve only been with one other vampire, of course, and that was Emily. And Emily could not hold a candle to this girl in the looks department. She’s on her side also, lying toward me. I have one hand on her hip and I am admiring the shape of it, the whiteness of it. Her breasts, which I sucked on earlier, are small. She’s almost flat chested to tell you the truth. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve never been much of a breast man. More ass and legs. And her legs are long and tapered. I just want to lick my way down the never-ending expanse of them, down to her graceful little feet.

  She stirs on the bed, mutters some dream language. I notice that her chest is rising and falling. That she is breathing. Like I said before, vampires don’t really need to breathe. It just seems to be an automatic thing we never seem to shake. I never looked at Emily this way when she was sleeping so it startles me to see that, even in sleep, a vampire still breathes. And dreaming? That’s interesting too. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt anything. It had to have been when I was still human.

  I marvel at this woman. 24 hours ago she did not exist in my life. Wasn’t even, if I did dream, a dream. Now she is here, naked in my bed. I’ve made love to this woman, been inside her. And she doesn’t even know me, really. The story of my life, the story of my becoming a vampire, that could all be a bunch of lies for all she knows. I marvel at her ability to trust me, after all she has been through. I could, if I wanted, grab her by all that red hair, drag her down the stairs, fling her out on the porch and watch her burst into flame. Or whatever the fuck happens. The only experience I have ever had is my damn burning hand.

  But that isn’t a possibility.

  I’m addicted to watching her sleep…

  Chapter Fourteen

  (Thoughts of A Dirty Old Vampire—On Love)

  Let’s talk about love for a little bit, ladies and gentlemen. I seem to be in the mood.

  There’s been a dearth of it in my life, that’s for certain. I’m pretty certain my father never loved anyone in his life but himself. Maybe he didn’t even love himself. But he was certainly fixated on his own misery to the exclusion of everything else. To the family he had built. To the son he had created. Maybe back then, when he was knocking up my mother, the thought of having a kid that he could use as a human punching bag crossed his mind. Has anyone ever been that perverse? Maybe he was just thinking hubby + wife = baby. Just another obligation on the long, rocky road to hell. I don’t know.

  My mother, like I said, tried to love me. One of my earliest memories, a vision that can still sometimes chip at my vampire heart, was of her tending to me when I was very young. Probably three or so. I had the flu and a high fever. She sat by my bed singing some gentle, wordless lullaby as she applied a cool washcloth to my head. All the beatings my father gave to me over the years do not take up as much room as that act of kindness in my mind. But, like I said, my mother never once stood up to that monster when he was hurting me. Self-preservation always always trumped any tenderness she might have felt for her baby boy.

  And in high school I was at the bottom of the social ladder, shunned and tormented by my peers. No dances. No proms. No girlfriends. No fervent kisses on front porches or tentative fumblings in the back seat of a car. Lots of pretty girls passed me in the hallways of that place, their eyes fixated elsewhere as I gaped at their beauty. At the cheerleaders on game days in their short pleated skirts. At the popular girls, their skin always impossibly blemish free, beaming their white smiles at a world ready to shower them with anything for the payoff of those smiles. And all I could ever do was slink through the day, thinking about the moment when the bell would ring and I could hurry home, lock myself in my room, and beat off to pictures of them walking by in my mind.

  I got a handjob from a girl before I was even kissed by one.

  I was on a bus going from Washington, D.C. to Pittsburgh. There was some whore on the bus who was secretly trying to sell it on there. It’s amazing the bus driver didn’t kick her off. This big black girl with hoop earrings you could have perched canaries on. Anyway, for five dollars (about half the money I had on me at the time) she jerked me off underneath this dirty windbreaker I was carrying around with me. I had to admire her tenacity ‘cause she kept at it for about fifteen minutes, trying to get me hard. It was the first time someone other than myself had touched the equipment and, I don’t know, it was all too much for me. I was too anxious to get off. The best she was able to do was get me semi-hard before she gave up. She kept my five dollars of course.

  After that, I fucked a few prostitutes. With better success. And became a man. Of course, none of them ever gave the money back either.

  Besides Emily, I was only really involved with one other woman romantically. Her name was Debra and I met her when I was living in this little town in Michigan, not too far from Detroit. I was living above this antique shop there and working in the daytime as a dishwasher at some greasy spoon diner. (It seems that, before I inherited the house from my father, I was always living above some establishment or other.) Debra roomed down the hall from me and worked at a jewelry counter in a Detroit mall. Our landlady owned the antique store. She was this dyke with short salt-and-pepper hair and a sort of hard, boozy demeanor. Anyway, I don’t think the antique business was very good to her because she was always coming down on her tenants about something. Late rent, broken locks, pets that were verboten under the terms of the lease, etc. etc. She threatened at one time to evict me because a leak from one of the pipes in my bathroom sink had somehow dripped down into her store and destroyed a Civil War desk. That was until I threatened to take her to court over it. It wasn’t my fault the pipes in that shithole leaked all over that place. That was why she was supposed to have insurance, damnit.

  Anyway, it was after one of these heated exchanges with the dyke that I first met Debra. She came and knocked on my door just a few minutes after the landlady left in a huff. She had had some run-ins with her as well, and we commiserated over a few beers. Debra wasn’t that attractive really. She had frizzy dishwater blonde hair. She probably weighed about two hundred pounds or so. But I liked her easy smile and the way, when I was talking to her, she seemed to focus all her attention on me. As if real pearls of wisdom were coming from all my bullshit. She really dug the fact that I aspired to be a writer, even though I had published absolutely nothing, was loading dirty plates and glasses in a dish machine five days a week just to make the rent. She herself was studying to be a chef in some culinary school. She had a real passion for French cooking. I asked her out to see a movie and she quickly agreed. I don’t know anything about movies but she was a real buff so she picked it. Some shit about wizards and a school where they trained wizards. I just sat there in the dark theatre, with all that fantasy crap booming on the screen, surreptitiously watching Debra as she gasped and cooed over all the Hollywood fireworks.

  After that we went to get a beer, and as we walked down the tree-lined street away from the theatre, I awkwardly slipped my hand into hers. I had never done that before and I was afraid she would just look at me, scream, and run away. But she gave it a playful squeeze and smiled at me. That memory also has a large brightly lit space in my mind.

  Later that night I made love to Debra in her tiny studio apartment, on a Murphy bed that came down from the wall. I had never been wi
th a woman before who wasn’t a professional and it was a bit strange. Not what I wanted exclusively anymore. Masturbation with a ghost in the room. I wanted to please her. I wanted to make her come. I wanted to give her…love. I spent a lot of time that night between her legs just eating her pussy, which she seemed to love, not even caring about my own orgasm.

  It was good. We made love until dawn, with the birds chirping and fighting outside her window.

  It didn’t last long. A few more dates. A few more times in bed. Debra was bisexual and suddenly there was a former girlfriend back in the picture. And the girlfriend didn’t like me coming around. And then I got fired from my dishwashing job for sneaking off during a shift and drinking at a bar.

  So I moved back home.

  And the rest you know.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I wake up and Sara isn’t there.

  I shake my head and sigh.

  Women. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t kill ‘em when they’re already dead.

  And then I smell her again. She’s in the room where I write.

  I get out of bed and get dressed slowly, check my watch. It’s 7:15 p.m. Not too long now until dark. It’s late September and the days are getting shorter and shorter. It won’t be long now until I (maybe we?) can prowl the world at 6 or 5:30. Always sweet.

  Finally, I’m dressed. I start to leave the bedroom and then have a sinking paranoid thought. It’s stupid but I just can’t shake it. I go back and pull the shoebox out of my closet, count out the money.

  It’s still all there.

  Once bitten, twice shy I guess.