The Vampire Henry

by Michael S. Walker

  “It could be fun,” Sara says. And I’ll have to admit, watching her walk around the house in the skin-tight cat suit she’s opted to wear (replete with ears) is going a long way toward convincing me it might not suck too bad.

  So now we are on our way to Juan’s house. Strange that he has lived across the street from me for a year or so and I have never seen the inside of his house. Ever. But lots of people have lived on this street for a long time, and I don’t even know their names or care to. My father did, of course. He went out of his way to be “neighborly” with everyone around us. Help them clip their shrubs. Drive them to places if they were in need of a ride. Etc. Etc. And then he would come home and beat the living crap out of me.

  “OK, Henry. Try to be nice,” Sara says, as we stand on the porch waiting for Juan to let us in. Loud music is coming from inside. Just one enormous bass throb. It’s literally making the porch shake, like we are in the middle of an earthquake. Already I wish I could just change into a bat and flutter away.

  “I’m always nice,” I lie.

  The door opens. It isn’t Juan at all. Standing on the threshold is a tall black girl: she must be at least 6’2 or 6’3. An Amazon. She’s dressed in a long tattered white thing, a shroud I guess, spattered all over with fake blood. The sight of her makes me start to salivate.

  “Hey,” she says, before we can introduce ourselves. “Come on in.”

  Sara and I step into the living room. The music is unbearable. You feel it more than hear it. In your bones, your teeth.

  Juan is sitting in a chair on the other side of the room. He’s wearing a black body suit with a human skeleton embossed on the front of it. Mr. Bones. He appears to be completely wasted. His eyes are closed and he keeps rolling his head around in approximate time to the music. He’s clutching a bottle of Captain Morgan in one beefy paw.

  There’s no one else around. Just me. Sara. The girl.

  And Juan.

  Some off the hook party.

  Of course…

  “Are we early?” Sara shouts at the girl, who’s just standing there glassy-eyed, looking at us. Besides being extremely tall, she has like the biggest lips I have ever seen on a human being. Really. You could balance a set of encyclopedias on those lips and still have room left over for Shakespeare. And they are so shiny. I imagine if I got close to them, I could see my reflection in there.

  “What?” the girl says. She appears to be pretty out of it herself. Not as completely as Juan, of course. That’s a whole different level of wasted.

  “Are we early?” Sara says again.

  “I don’t think anyone else is coming,” the girl says, simply. She starts wandering around the room, like a somnambulant Lady Macbeth, looking for something.

  “Where the fuck did I put my smokes?” she shouts at us, as if Sara and I might have a clue.

  Juan opens his eyes and takes a weak swallow of rum. His eyelids flutter rapidly, as if they were tiny little hummingbird wings struggling to keep him aloft. He looks at Sara and me, trying to figure out who we are, as if our costumes have made us totally anonymous.

  “Wha…wha…?” he says, trying to keep his tongue from escaping the confines of his mouth.

  “It’s Sara, Juan,” Sara says. “Sara and Henry.”

  “Sara…? Henry…?” he repeats, as if he were a small child trying to learn new words.

  This party was a bad idea.

  “He’s been drinking all day,” the girl says. And then when he realized nobody was gonna show, he hit the rum pretty hard.”

  “Nobody’s coming?” I say

  “Don’t think so. ‘Cept us, the girl says. “Ahhh.” She plucks a pack of Pall Malls from the top of a giant TV, its screen blaring some sort of action/war movie, the sound muted in favor of the bass drone that is still threatening to bring down Juan’s house like the walls of Jericho.

  “Why is nobody coming?” Sara says.

  “I dunno,” the girl shrugs. “I don’t think nobody likes ‘em.. Fuck. Now where’s my lighter?”

  I can see that.

  Juan starts laughing, spitting rum all over the dirty carpet.

  “Henry the Vampire,” he mutters, pointing in my general direction with his free hand. “Henry the vamp…vamp…Vampire.

  “That’s me,” I say. I’m watching the girl as she staggers around the room, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lush lush lips. Her lips look like two soft glossy throw pillows. I imagine what it would be like to kiss those lips, stick my fangs deep into them, drink until they were as dry as desiccated pieces of fruit.

  “How do you know Juan?” Sara asks.

  “Wha…Oh, I work with the nigger at Wal-Mart. Been there for a couple of weeks now,” she says. “He axed me to come and I said yeah. I think he’s funny. Either of you two got a light?”

  I have a Bic and my Marlboro lights on me, but before I can answer she’s turning away from us, showing a prominent caboose.

  “Guess I’ll have to light it on the stove,” she huffs. “Be back. Don’t go nowhere now.”

  She stumbles out of the room.

  Juan starts jabbering in Spanish, swinging his bottle around. It looks like, at any moment, he’s going to fall out of his chair, pass out. Commend his bones to Davy Jones’s carpet.

  “You want that girl, don’tcha Henry?” Sara says, looking at me.

  “Yes. She’s a tall drink of water,” I say.

  “She’s very pretty. Probably a lot of blood in her.”

  “Mostly in her lips,” I reply, chuckling.

  And the girl is back, her cigarette lit this time. She goes over to the TV again. Juan has a whole entertainment center set up: big screen television, CD player, video game console. A little shrine to technology. The girl crouches down in front of it, starts fumbling with some buttons.

  “Love you, Cleveland,” Juan gurgles into his rum.

  “Love you too, Juan,” the girl says, rolling her eyes. “Man, I needs to find a better jam.”

  Onslaught of bass gets replaced by an avalanche of electronic drums. And then some rapper starts shouting tall tales of sexual bravado:

  “I’ll make your exit an entrance

  In a minute babe

  I’ll make your booty so sore

  You won’t know what to say…”

  Somebody gets paid to write crap like that? I really want to go home now.

  “Now that’s a jam,” the girl says, standing up again and moving her hips, her butt in time to the music. That makes it all a little better.

  Juan starts snoring. Juan has fallen asleep, his bottle of Morgan clutched to his chest like a newborn infant.

  “Is your name…Cleveland?” Sara asks.

  “Huh…?” the girl frowns, still working her hips. “Shit no. My name’s Daneeka. Shitbird calls me Cleveland ‘cause one day at work I was wearin’ my hair up and he said I looked like the mascot for the Cleveland Indians. Ha ha…Man, this party blows. Juan! Wake the fuck up!” Daneeka dances over to our sleeping host and continues to shout at him. “Wake up! Or you ain’t getting’ any of this!” She turns around and shakes her ass at him. Juan mumbles something in Spanish and then starts snoring again. “Dumb ass. Man, I wish I had my lighter. We could get high.”

  “Plenty of lighters over at our place,” I say, trying not to salivate again.

  Sara looks at me.

  “OK, let’s go,” the girl says.

  Whatever the hell Daneeka has laced her pot with quickly knocks me for a loop. I haven’t gotten stoned in years but still, even taking that into account, it’s pretty hardcore. Time seems to be moving forward now as a series of snapshots, perhaps being taken by God as amateur photographer. Event. Gap. Event. Gap. Event. Gap. Something like that. It’s both exhilarating and frightening at the same time.

  I’m kissing Daneeka’s lips. Oh, yes…

  She’s naked. The shroud has mysteriously disappeared, like in some kind of magic act. I watch my hand as it cups one of her dark breasts, fascinated by the
contrast between my pale fingers and all that coffee-colored skin. I like my blood like I like my women…Black. Black. Black…

  Where is Sara? Sara?

  Then I’m fucking Daneeka from behind, ramming my cock into her pussy. Still fascinated by my hand on the small of her back, and by a little butterfly tattoo close to the slope of her ass. Barely discernable in all that amazing burnt skin.

  And she’s saying something. English, but I cannot seem to connect the words at all.

  “Brother…pussy…woman…white guy…”

  Sara? Where is Sara?

  And then I am at Daneeka’s neck, my teeth sunk into her jugular, drinking. It’s like I’m a cloud hovering above her. Everywhere. Nowhere. And her blood, laced with THC and alcohol is making me even more out of it than I was before. Stoned. So Fucking Stoned…

  I hear Sara’s voice, but I see Juan Perez, of all people. Suddenly there, as if he has now emerged from that cloud that I am. I hear him say “Diablo,” and cross himself. He staggers toward me and the now dead girl, still clutching his bottle of rum, holding it in front of him as if it were a sacred relic, a cross or something that he can use to ward off Henry the Vampire. Henry the Vampire.

  “Hey, motherfucka, I ain’t afraid of crosses,” I start to shout.

  But nothing comes out.

  And then, I pass out.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I wake up, my mouth is completely dry. My temples feel as if some invisible hand were trying to use my head as a stress ball. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Release. Shit. I feel like shit. What the hell did I have to drink last night?

  And then, I remember everything. Those photographs from before flash before my eyes like some kind of demented kinescope. The girl. What was her name? Daneesha? Kon-tiki? I remember getting high with her. Fucking her. Drinking her. Drinking her. That was my undoing. I should have just let her dance her shapely ass back to Juan’s place or wherever.

  Juan…

  Did I dream about him? Coming into my house in his black skeleton body suit, brandishing his bottle at me? Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of…

  Where the hell is Sara?

  I’m on my back, on the floor of my living room, staring up at the cracks in the white ceiling. Painfully, I stir. Get up to a sitting position. Look around, blinking my dry eyes.

  And there is Death and the Maiden.

  Excuse me, Death and the Two Maidens.

  I didn’t dream anything at all. I don’t dream, remember? There is Juan, on his stomach, his body sandwiched between the naked body of Daneeka (that was her name, damnit) and my Sara. They look like a picture of demented familial bliss or something: Daddy Bones, Mommy Cat…

  And their naked, Amazonian baby.

  “Sara,” I croak, standing up now. The lights are still on in the living room from last night. I have no fucking clue what time it is. My wristwatch is upstairs in the bedroom, I think.

  “Sara,” I say again. I need a glass of water in the worst way. And then I remember…yeah, I haven’t drunk water for over five years.

  I stumble over to the prone bodies of Juan, Sara, and Daneeka. It’s becoming readily apparent to me, even though my addled brain is still trying to rev up, what happened last night both before and after I passed out. I was drinking that girl when Juan came into the house and caught me in the act. Juan, who was down for the count last time anybody noticed. Juan, who was mumbling Spanish lullabies in his drunken sleep. And he tried to come at me with a bottle of Captain Morgan. Attack me. And Sara must have killed him. Yes. I see bite marks congealing on his stubbly neck as I circle around the three, thinking what to do next. Sara attacked him and killed him to save me.

  Only, Juan isn’t dead.

  I can see his shoulders and his back rise very gently as he breathes. Sara did not do Juan in at all. She must have started to and then, like me, passed out. That girl, the late Daneeka, said Juan had been drinking all day. Juan’s blood alcohol content must have been too much for her to handle, and she backed away from him before she could finish the job. And then gone down to Slumberland.

  Which means that…

  Someone who is bitten by a vampire and not killed becomes a vampire. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works. Some kind of contagion passed along from predator to prey. Some kind of contagion that then kills the human body and puts vampire in its place.

  And Juan is on his way.

  No no no. This has all gone terribly south. I imagine a whole eternity of having Juan Perez at my side, offering to sell me pints of A negative at discount prices. Trying to get me to go down to the strip club every night for a quick “drink.”

  The horror. The horror.

  I have to finish the job that Sara started. I can’t have Juan coming back as a vampire.

  Quickly now I crouch down, getting between him and Sara. I turn his body over. Sara mumbles something in her sleep, turns away from us.

  And then, Juan’s eyes start to flutter.

  And I am on him. My teeth puncture his neck, making new holes there. He gasps.

  I anticipate that I will feel the usual rush as I feed on him. That I will see Juan’s whole pathetic life flash before my eyes. From barrio to bothersome. But nothing happens. I drink and Juan…expires.

  “Henry…?”

  Sara is stirring. I can feel her looking at me as I send Juan off.

  “Henry…?”

  The deed is done. Juan’s tenure as a vampire is over before it has even begun. Vaya Con Dios Juan. Hope you make some friends up there. Or down there, as the case may be.

  “Henry…?’

  I get up. Sara is standing there, still wearing her sexy little cat suit (minus the ears.) She looks worried. As well she should be. This has all turned out to be a colossal mess.

  “Did you…?”

  I feel very sluggish, bloated. With all the blood I have imbibed. The girl’s. Juan’s. I need to lie down again. But there’s too much to be done right now.

  “Is he…?” Sara begins.

  “Yes, he is…” I say. I’m suddenly not feeling very well. The squeezing in my head has now picked up its pace. I’m beginning to feel very hot. What’s happening to me? This isn’t just a blood hangover. I think I’m sick.

  “I thought I killed him, Henry,” Sara says. “He was coming after you with that bottle and…”

  “Yes, I know,” I say, weakly. Something deep in my bowels begins to rumble, and now it feels as if my head has gone into orbit. Nausea. What the fuck?

  “Henry…Henry, what are we going to do? Henry…are you OK?”

  “I don’t feel well…I think…I think I am going to be sick…going to be sick, Sara.”

  And with that, I bound up the stairs. I barely make it to the bathroom, to the toilet. I vomit up a plume of dark blood, almost black, kneeling down in front of the porcelain god. I stare into the bowl, watching as it disperses, becomes a rolling cloud. Juan’s blood.

  And then I vomit again.

  This. Can’t. Be. Good.

  “Shit…shit…” I gurgle, running my hand over my mouth, smearing it with a residue of blood.

  Shit.

  “Henry…? What’s wrong? Are you…? Sara, standing there in the doorway of the head.

  “I’m sick, Sara,” I bleat helplessly. “I’m really sick.”

  “I…I didn’t think vampires could really get sick,” Sara says, her voice tinged with panic.

  “I don’t know. There was something…something in that blood. Something in Juan’s blood.”

  “What can I do, Henry?”

  “Nothing. Yes…Can you help me to the bedroom, Sara? Maybe if I…maybe if I lie down for a little while this will go away.”

  “Anything Henry.”

  I stagger to my feet, drape one weak arm around Sara’s shoulders. She wraps her arm around unsteady hips. My legs feel numb. That rumbling in my belly tears loose again.

  “What do you want to do with the bodies, Henry?” Sara says as she stee
rs me toward the bedroom.

  “Wha…? I don’t know. Put them in the basement. Can’t think about that.” The nausea has passed for now. But I still feel BAD. What the hell was in that blood?

  Sara gets me to the bedroom and I stretch out on the bed. The sheets feel very cool against my body. A modicum of relief. I just want to lay here now until it all goes away. Everything.

  “Henry, honey…Are you gonna be OK?” Sara asks, leaning over me, stroking my feverish forehead.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Thoughts of A Dirty Old Vampire (The Sickness)

  My mother is leaning over me as I lie in bed, pressing that cold washcloth to my feverish forehead, singing to me in a soft melodic voice. It’s one of my favorite childhood songs, one we used to sing together on family outings all the time. That is, until my father told us to shut the hell up, that he couldn’t drive with all our caterwauling. The song starts out like this:

  “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly

  But I don’t know why she swallowed a fly

  Perhaps she’ll die…

  And the next verse:

  I know an old lady who swallowed a spider

  That wiggled and jiggled and tickled inside her

  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly

  But I don’t know why she swallowed a fly

  Perhaps she’ll die…

  And so on. She swallows a bird to catch the spider. She swallows a cat to catch the bird. She swallows a dog to catch the cat. She swallows a goat to catch the dog. Then, when she swallows a horse to catch the goat biology overcomes her machinations and she dies. End of song. Ha ha. The story of the universe, of course. Eat or be eaten. Drink and go home. Get your daily bread by the sweat of your brow. No other way, of course. Sad.