The Howling Twenties

by Fennel Steuert

  “As I said,” said Robin, “your butcher shop run-off isn’t enough.” He snapped the book shut, and lifted it up a bit, like he was cheering a drink.

  “Why didn’t you give her your blood?” said Roger. “I mean, I don’t know if that would even help. But ...”

  Robin folded his arms. “She wouldn’t want my blood. I’m sure she wouldn’t want yours, either, but probably for different reasons.” He sounded a bit sad.

  Roger pulled his sleeve up. He moved next to her on the bed, then shifted so that he was able to extend his arm in front of her.

  “Doris,” said Roger. “If you can hear me, and if you want my blood, please ... feel free.”

  Doris sat up a little. Roger turned his head at the sound of Robin quickly leaving the room. When he looked back at her, Doris was grinding her teeth. Her eyes were open, but she was looking away.

  “Roger,” she whispered. “Just hand me the bowl … I’ll be fine.”

  “Will you, really?”

  “Yes,” said Doris, pushing Roger’s arm away. “It’ll just take a while.”

  Roger rubbed a spot on his arm. She was still pretty strong.

  “Just go,” said Doris. She laid her head back down and closed her eyes. Her teeth shifted like they were a muscle in the midst of a spasm.

  “I get it,” sad Roger. “I’m sure you don’t want me to see you like this, but, Doris, with all these vampires around, do we really have ‘a while’?”

  Doris opened her eyes. The pupils were red and wistful. “I don’t know.”

  Roger smiled, in a deflated way, and held his arm out.

  Doris slowly sat up. She scooted over on the bed. Roger took the spot next to her and gave her his arm closest to her, the left. She lowered it and held his hand. Suddenly he had a croak in his throat that he couldn’t quite swallow. Doris squeezed his hand. Roger lifted his free hand so that the palm faced upward. He lifted the arm up further toward Doris’ face.

  Doris used her other arm to bring Roger’s arm closer to her face. She put her forehead on the flesh there, before she slowly lifted her head and bit down his arm. It felt like getting stuck with four needles. Like any reasonable person, Roger was not a fan of a single needle; he was able to rectify the fear because the pain was quick and less than what he feared. Like it did with a single needle, the fear subsided with Doris as well, but Roger immediately felt the way she was draining the blood from his arm. In a manner of several seconds, she had taken a quarter of the blood in his arm. He felt like passing out, and it was only when he squeezed Doris’ hand that she pulled back.

  Her hand quivering, she rubbed the blood that trickled from the open wounds her teeth had made. She ripped a piece of the sheet off and tied it tightly around his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” said Roger sleepily. “Ripping the sheet when there are bandages in the bathroom medicine cabinet?”

  Doris did a double-take at him. That’s how she seemed to be able to see him again, instead of the blood running in his veins.

  “Did you just come out of the rain?” she asked.

  “No, I showered with my clothes on. So I could rush over here garlic-free. Redhead’s orders.”

  Doris slowly nodded.

  Gesine appeared at the door. “Mab’s in the basement. She has one less finger than before.”

  With a sigh, Doris stumbled out of bed and rolled her head around her neck. “You should get some sleep,” she told Roger.

  He let himself drift out of consciousness.

  ***

  Doris has never met any other members of Robin’s order, but nearly a century later, they were all pretty much as pale as she’d once imagined. When Robin requested that no one leave the house for a while, she and Gesine immediately challenged him.

  Robin, who seemed to have claimed the half-way landing of the house’s stairwell by sitting there all the time, said Doris’ name ruefully. “You know how strong Gesine can be, given enough sustenance. Mab and Argall have a small army of her kind ... outfitted with those little enslavement machines. That means she has the world when the sun is up.”

  “You’re probably going to mesmerize the tied-up human,” said Doris. “What about Mab?”

  “Mab is one of us,” said Robin. “But between her and Argall, their company is due a takeover.”

  “It’s my company, too,” said Doris.

  “Yes,” said Robin. “In a way. We commend you for doing all you’ve done, just the two of you, so tangentially.”

  “It wasn’t just me and Gesine,” said Doris. “Not for the last couple of months, anyway.”

  Robin smiled a bit. “We’ll wait here for reinforcements. It will probably get pretty dicey in the neighborhood around here. Most of the vampires in your company are newer. They and the ghouls will probably give us a wide berth because we have Mab.”

  Doris walked to a nearby vampire who had picked up a framed picture of Roger’s great uncle Simon. She snatched the frame and put it back on the mantle.

  “That’s a funny way to say ‘thank you,’” the man said with a Dutch accent. “You’d be dead-dead if it weren’t for us.”

  “She didn’t say thank you,” said Gesine as she walked into the kitchen. When she got in the Dutchman’s face, he sat down on the couch and made a show of twiddling his fingers.

  Perhaps Robin still had a fondness for Gesine his illustrious merry men and women respected, thought Doris.

  She left the living room. In the kitchen, Desmond was sitting at the table and staring at the door that led to the basement. Doris touched his shoulder.

  “Glad to see you up,” he told her. “Listen, I don’t know what to do. I mean, Gesine told me not to worry, but … a woman – a woman vampire – took the tied-up guy downstairs, and, well, I’ve got a dog to walk tomorrow.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Doris, “but it may be better for you to stay here in the meantime.”

  Desmond nodded sadly. Doris went to the door of the basement and opened it. The only sound she could hear was creaking and a man breathing slowly somewhere downstairs. The stairs did not creak as Doris went down them.

  Mab sat up, resting her head against the freezer. She was tied up in chains that had been doused with garlic water. Her eyes were red, her fangs protruded, and she was quite pale. There was a trail of dark blood by the spot on the floor where she lost a finger.

  “Doris,” said Mab. “So glad you could find the time to visit me as you wander around your new queendom. Do you want to hear something funny? That strawberry blonde woman over there? Her name is Emilia. Maybe you don’t quite know about Europe’s history to get why that’s funny. I mean, such a great, grand figure, here in the dungeon of your friend’s what? His family estate? The crypt where his great uncle had whiled away an increasingly fearful and meaningless life?”

  Doris stared at Mab blankly. “You only know one ‘Emilia,’ and that’s because of that book I gave you.”

  On the other side of the basement, the vampire Emilia stood the man with the gray temples up by the basement’s lone support beam. There was even less light on that side of the room. The only thing that the man with the gray temples would be able to see were Emilia’s glowing eyes. His eyes were open, his face was blank.

  Doris wrapped her arms around each other. “Emilia, is it? Please be careful. He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Mab laughed heartily.

  “That,” said Emilia, above a whisper, “is the woman who tried to kill one of her own kind.”

  “You mean Doris?” said Mab.

  Emilia’s head spun in Mab’s direction. “Your devoted fool is buried underground. She did not slay him. Perhaps you think she should have put him down in the traditional sense?”

  Mab yawned mockingly. “Maybe you think the world should serve another mindless titan, instead of it serving the world?”

  “Mindless? One can not dominate anything so expansive as what is you two tried to.” Emilia’s red sid
e-eye faded as shes resumed her whispering.

  Doris knelt down beside Mab. She picked up the empty bowl by her. It smelled like the animal blood from the freezer.

  “Do you think Argall is as crushed as I am?” said Mab. “About you turning on us, I mean.”

  “You once walked the streets of London at night as a woman,” said Doris. “A woman who was poor. None of this is funny … how we can’t quite feel how hard things were when were alive, or the little that was good, but this has all seemed so pointless to me without trying. Gesine tries …” Doris shook her head. “I still haven’t given up on either of you.”

  She went back up the stairs.

  “Make sure your friend doesn’t eat any more of my fingers!” yelled Mab.

  5

  Walking

  Sometimes Lorraine had nightmares. She and Roger hadn’t made it from the office building’s eighteenth floor.

  They were dragged through the dark by things she couldn’t see.

  Something would bite them, tear pieces from them, then the only way they would see their bodies is “skeletally,” their heads on the top of their x-ray lit bodies. Lorraine would often grasp at Roger’s hand only to find a doorknob, and she would pull it back, and be back in a small stream of office workers in the stairway, knowing that she was leaving him behind to be consumed in the dark.

  The bar was close to where Lorraine lived. Since she had resigned from her job at the company, it had become a place to go to think – about how lonely she felt, about pumpkins, even wonder about the potential of isolated elements of vampirism to help humankind. What other company was working on anything so tangibly next level? She’d always wanted to help find the cure for the ailments that seemed to represent existence itself, but she had become convinced most companies had more interest in pills that helped people live longer, however miserably, instead of cures.

  Lorraine usually got coffee, but one night the bartender told her they were fresh out. To stay, she bought a glass of white wine and lingered at her usual table by the window. She swirled the wine around in the glass, wondering how two of her three blood-sucking bosses, Mr. Argall and Mab, had fared?

  Which one of them had disappointed Gesine? Who had stopped the titanic thing underground from throwing an entire city off its back and thus … well ... probably being very disappointed with this world of very, very small people?

  Had it been Doris? Or, were Argall, Mab and whoever they deemed worthy now feeding off it?

  Lorraine looked down at her right foot. Her last date, which had taken place at that bar, said she could barely tell it was more curved than what was ordinary. It was surprising how inhuman such a thing could make Lorraine feel, even though also thought it was relatively trivial when measured in a broader way.

  “Do you smell that?” the woman also had said. “The food here must have a lot of garlic.”

  It didn’t. Lorraine wasn’t sure she would have kept going to the bar if one night, while she was sitting by herself at a window seat and half-watching the rugby game on the TV screen, when Gesine had ridden by in a flash on a motorcycle.

  For a split second, it seemed possible that Gesine had noticed her. But maybe that was wishful thinking. Gesine had never made Lorraine feel particularly different. Unless Gesine was hungry, and sometimes even then, often everyone in the world seemed like they were in the background to her.

  Lorraine kept coming back to that bar, even if it mean she had to tramp through the mounds of snow at the curb. The sidewalks around where she lived where always clear, precisely because they shifted everything to the curb – where the perfectly-abled were supposed to easily get around a mound of snow.

  She took comfort in black coffee, and the wins of the All-Blacks, which however silly it may or may not have been made her think of a team composed of people like the African-American man who wandered quietly wobbling on her street, before the police quickly snatched him up. Lorraine thought she could be on that team; she covered her not quite so straight foot in black boots, and she had black hair, at least …

  Sure, Lorraine. Sure.

  One night Lorraine was on her way home when her phone began to vibrate in her bag. It was rare that she got calls anymore, and she’d been crossing the street when the shaking happened and her heart almost burst because the sun wasn’t up and she was alone.

  She fell on her right arm. Her bag didn’t give her much cushioning, and neither did the gray mush of snow which just made her throbbing arm wet and even more uncomfortable. After a moment or two, she realized that no one seemed to be coming up or down the sidewalk. And the world wasn’t shaking – the earthquakes really had stopped – but her phone still was.

  Lorraine rolled over so that she could use her good arm to sit up. She was sure it was just her parents, anyway.

  “When are you coming home?” one of them would say.

  But Lorraine figured she might as well as check. The call had come from Roger Greenblatt. It had just been a dream – her letting him down, but she felt like she had let all of them down: Doris, Roger, and Gesine.

  She slowly picked herself up as a man and woman with fancily-tied scarves passed by, looking at her expressionlessly.

  The woman pointed toward a headscarf on the ground that Lorraine only then realized was no longer holding her hair back.

  She called Roger back.

  A woman’s voice answered. “Hello?”

  Lorraine recognized it. Doris’ voice.

  “Oh,” said Lorraine. “Hi.”

  “Hello,” said Doris. “Can you walk a dog for a friend of mine?”

  “Uh, I don’t know ...” said Lorraine a bit crestfallen. “A dog? Well, I guess that’s a perfectly safe thing to do, right? I Just don’t know if I can find the time. I’ve got a headscarf to wash.”

  “Okay,” said Doris. “Well, I hope you’re ...”

  “No!” said Lorraine. “I was just joking … I can walk a dog for you. And, er, I guess it’s none of my business, but you’re staying with Roger, huh?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So I guess the world hasn’t ended?”

  “No.”

  “But is the giant okay?”

  “Titans usually are, after a fashion,” said Doris. “Here. Talk to my friend Desmond. He’s nice … friendly. But it’s best you don’t come by.”

  “Oh,” said Lorraine. “Okay.”

  It was beginning to get dark when Lorraine went a few blocks over to a slightly more bourgeois street than her own. There, she rang the doorbell of an old brownstone.

  The door opened immediately, and a woman who was on her phone almost handed the leash of a barking Shiba Inu over before freezing mid-reach.

  “You know I hate saying goodbye to you, my prince,” she told the dog, crouching down closer to his face.

  Shiba silently headed out the door.

  Lorraine fake-coughed. “Um, hello.”

  The woman finally looked at her. “You’re not Desmond,” she said, blinking.

  “No, ma’am, I am not. He’s feeling under the weather and asked me to cover for him.”

  The woman nodded. “I guess everybody gets sick. That reminds me. A few months ago I think he mentioned that he had moved. I still haven’t given him a housewarming present.”

  Shiba had been pulling at his leash so that he was practically sprawled on the stairs.

  The woman handed Lorraine the end of the leash. She went into a nearby closet and came out with a basket of dehydrated pumpkin gourds. They were painted red and green. Lorraine had a rotting one in a zip-lock bag inside her purse.

  “Lovely,” said Lorraine. “Do you know where Desmond moved to? I’d be glad to stop by and give it to him.”

  “It’s a really dicey area. The area he used to live in is up-and-coming now, but this one’s more on the edges. A dead-end street on the edges. I don’t like Shiba to go to those kinds of places.”

  Lorraine managed a polite, deflated smile. She slowly went downstairs so Sh
iba wouldn’t fall as he tried to pull her away from the brownstone.

  “Be back at 6 p.m. please.” The woman looked Lorraine up and down skeptically, settling a bit on the slightly wayward curve of her foot.

  “I’ll certainly try,” said Lorraine. “Hopefully my foot will permit. You won’t mind if it doesn’t?”

  The woman’s eyebrows scrunched up. “Excuse me?”

  “If my slight disability causes me to be slightly late.”

  “I guess that would be fine,” the woman said.

  “Great!” said Lorraine.

  Walking Shiba that evening had been fine up to a point. Lorraine kind of liked the way he barked at everyone who passed them by, no matter what they looked like, but when they came to a corner, Shiba tried unsuccessfully to pull Lorraine down a street that led off into an entirely other neighborhood.

  “You too?” said Lorraine. “Sorry, but really, we’re rather lucky to be where someone can be miserable in peace and quiet.”

  Shiba barked at her all the while during their first walk, but Lorraine was back at the dog’s house at five to 6 p.m. She didn’t know if dog walkers got paid by the hour, so she waited until it was 6 p.m. on the dot before she rung the bell.

  The next day, Lorraine picked the dog up and walked for a bit until she felt more winded than she liked. She sat on the bottom step of a stoop of a building with a mock stone fence but an actual doorman. Lorraine rarely walked quite so much, and she felt like she and Shiba should get to know each other.

  Lorraine patted the dog on his head. “You’ve barked a lot today in the most minimal way possible,” she said. “Thank you for that.”

  In return, Shiba barked incessantly for a few minutes. Lorraine tried not to take it too personally; she got the impression that the dog wanted to keep walking. He began to pull at its leash, then it would stop barking and look back at her. When it was clear Lorraine was staying put, he began to bark again.

  “Such a male cliché,” Lorraine muttered.

  The building’s doorman came out, took a glance at her, and decided he was fine with her lingering there. Her ability to be left alone to loiter most places was something she was increasingly aware of.