The Howling Twenties

by Fennel Steuert

  The Howling Twenties

  A TALE OF VAMPIRES

  AND EMINENT PAIN

  FENNEL STEUERT

  For family & E.

  Text Copyright © 2018 Fennel Steuert

  All rights reserved. DRM free, but no part of this publication may be reproduced without permission from the author.

  Cover artwork: Copyright © 2018 Elissia Illustrations

  Typographical design: Elissia Illustrations. Font used is Langdon – a creation of XLN Telecom, public domain font.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and entities portrayed in this novella, excepting incidental references to cultural figures or products used fictitiously, are imaginary. Any resemblance to events, locales or actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  1 Ill at Ease

  2 Pairs

  3 Ragtime

  4 Bloodletting

  5 Walking

  6 Barks

  7 High Score

  8 Houseguests

  9 Hiking

  10 The Gnawing Twenties

  11 Prep

  12 One Wolf and Many Wolves

  13 No ‘Us’

  14 Hostile Takeover

  15 Weight of Pumpkins

  16 Measures

  Epilogue

  More fiction by Fennel

  1

  Ill at Ease

  Somehow being co-CEO was even more empty than it used to be. Argall only snapped to when he was being ferried to work.

  He felt ill at ease, sitting in the backseat of the car with the tinted windows, and compared to the driver, tiny. Thankfully, the brute behind the wheel had been brought to heel via the wonders of modern times; otherwise its physicality might surpass his own. Its bite was already the gift of strength, however blank that strength might have been. Hadn’t he tried to help his kind’s bite mean something more than that?

  Argall should have felt fine. His spine hadn’t been bothering him for a while. Perhaps vampirism would not beat the newest fusion of metals along his backbone. Perhaps his spine would not re-twist back into its original shape.

  He would beat the curse of his gift someday. He would be like Mab. Vampirism had made her close to perfection, however inelegant she had once thought herself. Who needed the sun when you could see Mab’s hair for eternity?

  Red. The color of blood. There was some in the wine bottle in the backseat with him, but when he drank it, he felt nothing. His stomach remained empty. Like the seat next to him.

  Where was Mab? She’d always been reliably there, unlike his maker, Doris. The thought of her made him so angry that he could feel his fangs. Or had they already been protruding? He couldn’t make them go away.

  Argall needed blood.

  There was an ample store at company headquarters. Doris’ blood drive initiative had seen to that. But Argall wanted it fresh from the vein. He would tear into the first employee he could get his hands on.

  Argall tapped his foot. “Can’t you go any faster?”

  He almost laughed. The metallic device on the back of the ghoul’s head suppressed its already dim sense of anything. Too much independent thinking and it would find itself in a world that was unbearably loud.

  Argall’s heart fluttered. His limbs shook uncontrollably. Somehow sunlight was getting through the tinted and UV-protected windows. But he wasn’t burning up. All the light did was make things glow – most especially the device. That shimmered like the frequency it was tuned to was visible.

  If only every pack animal could be lobotomized in such a merciful way, thought Argall, with their dimly-lit brains still whole.

  If three-hundred-plus years of life had taught him anything, it was shells with dimly-lit brains running amok did the world no favors.

  It may not have glimmered, but the brute had a neck like any other human-shaped being. What must a ghoul’s blood taste like? Argall wondered.

  “Nope.” The voice seemed to come from everywhere. Argall found it vaguely familiar. “He’s still not getting it.”

  Everything went dark, and for a tiny instant, Argall felt the intense pain resume. How could he forget it? He felt like some giant had tried its best to squash him but had settled for just keeping his body under its heel.

  “He’s in pain.” Another disembodied voice. “It’s hard to see any mind in such agony.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said the first speaker. “It’s a real tragedy.”

  Argall was back in the car. The brute was turning it at a corner a few blocks from headquarters. Argall’s mind felt like it was heaving, like it was the only thing that could. Through the tinted windows, he tried to scan the faces of the people on the street. He seemed to have a kind of face-blindness. He couldn’t fathom the last time he tried to look at the face of any human passer-by, anyway.

  The car moved down into the parking garage, into complete darkness.

  Suddenly Argall was in the elevator. He pressed the button for the top floor. After he slicked his hair back, he remembered to press the button for any other floor as well. Argall hoped, faintly, that whoever was passing by wouldn’t be one of the few humans he liked. Since Doris had taken Lorraine, there weren’t very many. A new woman who always wanted overtime seemed exceedingly human ...

  When the doors opened, Doris and the twentysomething human she’d employed were standing there together.

  “His name is Roger,” said the speaker with the vaguely familiar voice.

  Argall found it sickening. Doris had her arms around Roger’s waist. The side of her head was nestled on his shoulder. She looked up at Argall with red pupils that seemed to glisten.

  “Going up?” said Roger.

  His nails now claw-like, Argall lashed out at Roger’s throat.

  But Doris acted just as quickly. She caught Argall’s hand, though her head remained on Roger’s shoulder. Her other hand continued to hold on to Roger’s waist. She sleepily forced Argall’s arm back to his side. Argall couldn’t seem to use his other arm at all.

  He had always thought it would happen this way – that, in a contest of strength, she would edge him out.

  Doris raised her head off of Roger’s shoulder. She slowly shook it no.

  The elevator’s doors closed, and it moved upward.

  No matter, thought Argall. Blood. It was the only thing he needed at this point. The eighth floor door opened, and Mab was there … Just not his Mab. This one covered her red hair beneath a bonnet. She had a layered, tattered dress. She felt as human as the drones in slacks or pantsuits whom were hurriedly doing nothing behind her.

  Argall seemed to be getting shorter. He had to look up into Mab’s brown eyes. He couldn’t remember ever having to do that. He’d only been shorter than her for a decade or so, in all the time he knew her. And he’d soon taken to straightening his spine.

  Now Argall wanted to turn away from her. But couldn’t.

  “‘Ello,” she said. “This crowd reminds too much of the finer folk back home. Is it all right if I go with you?”

  “No,” said Argall. “You should stay on this floor.”

  Mab took a few steps, anyway. “Well, that’s too bad then, in’it? You ain’t the lord of me.”

  “Please,” said Argall. “I’m not trying to insult you. It’s not at all because I’m better than you.”

  Why was the universe no longer working for him at all?

  Looking Argall up and down, Mab withdrew. “Oh, so it’s because I’m better than you? Fine, Mr. Addle Pate. I’ll gladly wait for anoth’a, then.”

  The doors closed. Argall pulled back the sleeve of his suit jacket and shirt. He bit into his own arm. Nothing.

  The elevator beeped sporadically, and when the doors opened all
the way at a top, two older black men were standing there. One was in a janitorial suit, and the other was the last human being Argall had bitten. Simon Greenblatt.

  “So maybe he’s not entirely an asshole,” said Simon, “so what?”

  Argall tried to take a swipe at him, but suddenly he felt that tightness all around him again. And the starvation. It was overwhelming.

  “You really don’t seem to think much of brutes,” said the custodian. “But given the chance you choose that path yourself.”

  “It’s a brutish world,” Argall interjected.

  “And I’m supposed to be what?” said the custodian. “The biggest brute of them all? Mindless, with blood for the taking?”

  “Yes,” said Argall. It seemed like he could smell Mab again, or what her scent was the last time he was next to her and they trying to celebrate the tapping of a titan. “Your blood was like a deposit of oil. Whatever you are, nothing else remains like it that walks on this earth. There’s nothing up there for you. But if you’d gotten up, you would have killed thousands upon thousands.”

  “My friend here was just lonely,” said Simon. “What’s your excuse?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Argall as the world around him began to turn dark. “You’ve been a vampire for such a short time … Many of our kind feeds thoughtlessly. They know our bite bestows no gift, and I do believe what we have is a kind of gift. As much as its a curse. If all vampires had a bite the equal of a ghoul’s – if just a bite did the trick – then we would have to rely on stores of blood. Our kind is too selfish to do otherwise, to want to elevate all we bite to our status. Human lives would be taken even more sparingly.”

  “No offense with your back thing and all,” said Simon, “but your mind is like a pretzel, too.”

  “Yes,” said the custodian. “But what on this world isn’t a little misaligned?”

  Argall had been off about the intense pain. It was something he hadn’t felt for weeks. He felt his eyelids push away small bits of dirt as they opened. He could see it coming in his mind’s eye – blood trickling through the ground. Somehow it trickled into his mouth.

  ***

  Doris could no longer get into the company headquarters. She had gotten quite used to the sub-levels that ran beneath the building, and it hurt to be without a place to reside that was so tailored to her. But of all life’s possible pains at the moment, that was a trifle. She had Gesine, even the company of a couple of humans now and then. Roger and Desmond had taken to buying bloody cuts of meat from the local shops. The runoff was sufficient for her, and the meat itself was certainly raw enough for Gesine. Still, it was unusual that she didn’t feel the weight of it – how the vampire she had sired, however warped by hubris he may have been, lie crushed beneath a hundred feet of earth.

  When it was very late, Doris would go to the site where Mab’s warehouse development had been. Bulldozers that were operating earlier would be silent and frozen. Each time she did this Doris could tell the earth had shifted to reveal a new layer, but the ground level never seemed to get lower.

  One night, Doris paced absentmindedly on the sidewalk across the street from the old warehouse site. She noticed an empty storefront had been rented. In its window, a sign read “mox adventu” – an approximation of “coming soon” in Latin. It was easy enough for Doris to dismiss in these trendy times when everything old had some kind of fresh repackaging, even if that repackaging was ancient obscurity. But still, Doris sometimes hoped that life offered more than coincidences.

  In the hours before dawn, Doris had recently taken to sneaking around to the rubble itself. It snowed the last time she closed her eyes and put her hand along the ground. She hoped she might be able to talk to the custodian, and then she would feel bad for not hoping it could be Simon, Roger’s great uncle. She got nothing, though, but colder hands.

  She wanted to be able to see the bulldozers at work herself, but how would that be for Mab?

  2

  Pairs

  Doris and Gesine had been staying in the house on the dead end street for a couple of months now. Doris, afflicted with vampirism, and Gesine, with her ghoulism. They’d been there for Christmas, which Doris strangely found herself marking more than the night that preceded it, the longest night of the year. Now it was February. Already covered lightly in a gray slush, the city was being blanketed by white.

  Earlier that day, Doris was lingering half-asleep in the basement when she heard Roger, Desmond and Gesine out back. Gesine was putting snow chains on the motorcycle she had taken from somewhere or another.

  “I still don’t feel comfortable riding with you on that thing,” said Desmond. “Not when the roads are icy. I’ll probably get a cab home later, but it’s very considerate.”

  Considerate? thought Doris. Gesine liked the quiet mockery of snow chains – the way they ate at the slabs of concrete that passed for land in the new world that had decimated hers.

  There was silence, or the local approximation. Doris could hear some car driving nearby with what seemed like a thousand people gallivanting inside.

  Yes, Roger, thought Doris. They want to hear what you think. Despite herself, she supposed she that did, too.

  “It still beats the train,” he said. “Unless Doris is with me … She’s good at getting elbow room.”

  He knew she could hear him. Doris tuned out, thinking that she was only really with Gesine for better or worse. What good could she bring to anyone else, really? Mab had a dozen vampires with stakes barring her from any entryway into the company she’d co-founded. When night fell and Desmond was out dog sitting somewhere, the house had gotten so quiet that Doris figured Roger was reading somewhere. She changed into a summer dress, put on her boots and then a navy blue overcoat that had belonged to Simon, Roger’s great uncle. Roger had let her have it.

  It was nighttime. She went outside into the alleyway at the side of the house, and it was only there that she could smell Gesine and Roger. Roger was sitting behind Gesine on the motorcycle. Gesine was bathing nearly as regularly as everyone else. For Doris, her friend’s scent had receded as much of the world did in winter.

  “Where are you two off to?” said Doris.

  Gesine started the engine. “I am dropping him off at that crowded, ghostly place … You, I’ll drop closer to where you’re going.”

  Doris stared at them. “You do know where that is?”

  Roger blew on his hands, then patted the seat behind him.

  Roofs were very slippery this time of year, and Doris did suppose that long walks through a lot of people were still incredibly disenchanting.

  Doris clung with claw-like fingers to the back of the motorcycle. Roger clung to Gesine’s waist, and Gesine’s long, black hair whipped all around his helmet – along with the light flurry of snow.

  Doris lifted her head to the sky. It was hard to feel any of the snow falling on her face. The motorcycle was going too fast, and for what? thought Doris. To get “the crowded, ghostly place” – the warehouse Roger worked at.

  Doris resisted the urge to nestle her head in Roger’s back. Even if she was seeking Argall, she wondered if Gesine might linger with her for a bit after they dropped Roger off. Doris’ friend had hardly missed their tangential relationship to her two vampiric business partners.

  “Can you hear me?” said Roger in his helmet.

  “Yes,” Doris said loudly. “Can you? Hear me, I mean.”

  “Yes,” said Roger. “Hear you, I can.”

  “I would stake you if I didn’t need to hold on this thing.”

  “Let’s save stakes for when we really need them,” said Roger.

  Doris had spent a week teaching him how to stake a vampire. She didn’t really need to explain why. But naturally, it had been a hard week.

  “I don’t really like him, like at all,” said Roger. “But I guess you’ve spent a century or two with him around. You don’t have to go there alone.”

  Doris closed her eyes. “Thank you, Ro
ger. But right now ...”

  “Sidewalk,” said Gesine. She’d finally slowed the motorcycle down, and Doris and Roger felt the bump as she turned it up on the sidewalk. The snow chains made a faint-but-constant clicking sound until the sidewalk turned into a thin trail of dirt along a chain-link fence.

  “This is me,” Roger told Doris.

  Gesine turned the motorcycle’s engine off. As Roger and her got off it, Doris slipped forward into the seat proper and lied her head and torso by the handlebars.

  She could hear lots of murmurs coming from the warehouse, some of which were pleasant and some of which were quite tense.

  Watching Roger stoically, she folded her arms.

  “Thanks.” He lightly hit a spot on her shoulder, then walked to a spot in the warehouse’s fence and pulled a piece back like it was a door. Gesine must have ripped it loose.

  He turned around as he walked away from them. “Last chance for me to suddenly come down with a horrible cold.”

  Doris cracked a smile, in spite of herself.

  Roger was probably too near-sighted to see that smile, but when neither she nor Gesine responded vocally, he turned around.

  Doris lifted her head as Gesine walked over to the motorcycle. “You must think me so strange – to still care about them ... Argall and Mab.”

  Gesine put her hand on Doris’ shoulder, or so it seemed until Gesine nudged her further down the motorcycle’s seat. “I’m hungry. We need to make a stop.”

  For about half a century, drive-thrus could be counted on to be close to just about anywhere – more so than shelters, hospitals or blood banks. They were odd curiosities to vampires, whom wondered if one of their own hadn’t come up with them. Doris knew all too well how vamps had walked the roads for centuries, in what for some was a very arbitrary pursuit of sustenance. She could recall a time when the new places called drive-thrus places would find that a worker at the window had vanished. This was preceded by less-than-genuine meal orders from “The Snickering Men.” Roger’s friend had a short chapter devoted to them in her book on urban legends.