Limbo's Child

by Jonah Hewitt

  “In an alley?! You gotta be kidding me?!” Schuyler laughed some more and pounded his fist on the seatback.

  “Yeah mate, pretty pathetic.” Miles tried to laugh, to make it a joke, but all these years later it still didn’t feel like a joke. It was not a pleasant memory, and he had relived it every day since. Miles trudged on in the tale. “I figure he just needed to get over a dry spell. Once he got a bit a blood in him, he was fresh as morning dew and ready to fight again. He had his row with the other vampire right then and there too. Murdered the blighter, tore him limb from limb, right in fron’ a me, and then, he just left me and walked away like I was an empty bottle.”

  “Wait…wait…wait…” Schuyler was beside himself with delirious laughter. “He didn’t try to turn you?”

  “Nah, mate, the bloke was surprised as all bloody heck when I showed up livin’ the next day.”

  “Then how did you turn?” Schuyler was incredulous. “How did you do it?”

  “Whaddya mean, turn?” Tim piped up again.

  Schuyler sniffed. “Geez, I keep forgetting you’re a noob and not a regular Renfield. Look, not just anyone can be a vampire, dude, you have to have the gift.”

  “The curse, ya bloody well mean,” Miles interjected. Schuyler just shot him a dirty look and went on.

  “Look, you can take a quick bite out of anyone, and it won’t kill him, but if you drain him dry, that’s the moment of truth. At that moment, when your lifeblood is gone, you’re utterly helpless. Most just pass on, just like if you cut their veins open and let the blood all out, but some…some…get to make the choice.”

  “The choice?” Tim was obviously confused, but he was trying to understand.

  “Yeah, it’s kinda hard to explain, but at the very last moment, you can feel your soul leaving, and at that very moment…you make the choice – to stay, or to go.”

  “Go where?” Tim said.

  “Beats me,” Schuyler absentmindedly said as he picked more lint off his jeans, “Beyond, Elsewhere, Limbo…I dunno…who cares, really?”

  “Did…did you see a light, or a tunnel?” Tim asked cautiously.

  “Nah, nothing like that,” Sky replied, bored.

  Miles winced a little at Schuyler’s answer. Miles had seen a light. He had never thought that it might have been different for Schuyler.

  “So…no pledge to some dark lord, no drinking the master’s blood?” Tim nervously ventured.

  “You read too many novels, guy, that gothic stuff’s just window-dressing,” Sky replied nonchalantly. “Some old-school vampires are still kind of hung up on ceremony, though. I’ve seen Wallach do it that way a time or two, but I managed with just Starlight, I mean Ulami, a lava lamp and some incense.”

  Miles had to suppress a smile at the thought of Sky turning into a vampire under the glow of a lava lamp. He could imagine them sitting cross-legged on the floor holding hands humming “ohmmm.”

  Sky turned around to look at him as if he could read his thoughts before going on. “Anyway, the real key is the will to survive at all costs. When you reach the end of your mortal life, and you feel it slipping away, and you know you would do anything to stay alive…”

  “Anything?” Tim asked frightened, sidling a little farther away from Schuyler as he spoke.

  “ANYTHING,” Schuyler said enthusiastically, baring a little tooth in the process, “Then that’s when you become a vampire.” Sky leaned back and smiled a broad, satisfied smile and put his hands behind his head as if basking in the sunlight of some great, personal reverie. Of all the things that Schuyler had ever done in Miles’ presence, this was the most unnerving.

  Tim gulped and the car went silent for a while.

  “Not everyone can or will do it though,” Schuyler went on, “Even those that think they will often don’t and just slip away. Starlight…um, I mean…Ulami had me all psyched up and ready for it, so I was there right away, but this dumb mick,” Schuyler pointed to Miles, “This dumb mick somehow got through on his own.” And then turning to Miles said, “How did you do it?!”

  Miles shrugged, “I dunno really.” Miles looked down at the floor of the car. “I was sixteen…and I just wasn’t ready to go yet. That’s all.” But that wasn’t all. Miles remembered everything. He wasn’t sixteen. He was ten days short of sixteen. He was looking for work but there was nothing for a mick straight off the boat. He stumbled into the wrong alley at the wrong time. Wallach pounced on him before he even had a thought to turn around and run. After Wallach had dispatched the other vampire, he came back to gloat over Miles. He remembered vividly the smug look on Wallach’s face as he looked down on him. He just laughed and stepped over Miles’ body. Miles lay against the wall, and he could feel his life going. He called out to God and St. Jude and whomever he could think of, but there was no answer. Then he saw the light. He knew instinctively what the light meant. He clawed on the alley floor, desperate to hold on, desperate to live. He only just had something to live for, but it was enough to make him hold on. He felt the light tugging at him and he turned his face to the ground. Then there was a wrenching, like the light took a part of him away.

  And then suddenly he stood up, as if nothing had happened. He had patted down his body and looked around. His mind was suddenly clear, and he wondered if it had all been a dream, but a short walk later, he knew it wasn’t. No one looked the same anymore; they all looked different somehow. And when he looked at people, dockworkers and ladies, gentlemen and drunks, he felt not curiosity or indifference or interest of any kind like before. The only thing he felt now was hunger. When the dawn came that first day as a vampire, he felt the dawn burn like a thousand suns. He barely had had time to scramble into a store cellar along Front Street where he stayed hidden ‘til dusk.

  He was alone and confused and didn’t know what to do. He spent all the next night searching for Wallach to try to find answers, and when he somehow found him, sitting in a posh tavern downtown, he forever remembered the look on his face – shock and revulsion. From that night on, more than a hundred years ago, Wallach hardly looked at him again, but handed him off to a series of lesser vampires to tend him. Schuyler was just the latest of many. It had been a miserable existence, and he had regretted fighting against that light every day since. No one but he and Wallach knew how Miles Killam, a boy fleeing Ireland for the land of opportunity, had come to be a vampire. Miles had been too ashamed to speak of it, and only now that Wallach was dead had he dared.

  Miles shook himself from his memories to see Schuyler smiling at him while slowing shaking his head back and forth as if he had finally put down the last piece in a very complicated puzzle.

  “What?” Miles didn’t like Schuyler’s expression at all.

  “You are such an IDIOT!” Schuyler said suddenly. “I mean, I always knew you were a dumb mick, but I didn’t know how dumb until just now.”

  “Leave me alone.” Miles knew it was a mistake to share this with Schuyler.

  “I never could figure out why Wallach kept a loser like you around, but now it all makes sense!”

  “It does?”

  “Yes!”

  “How?” Miles was perplexed.

  Schuyler laughed hard. “You still don’t get it!! Man you are soooo….stoooopid! All this time I thought Wallach hated you because you were a no-talent screw-up, but that’s not true at all! “

  “It isn’t?” Miles was confused.

  “No!” Schuyler bellowed, laughing. “Well, you ARE a no talent screw up but that’s not why he hated you.”

  Miles just screwed up his face at Schuyler. Now he was really confused.

  Schuyler looked at Miles for a moment as if he just realized he had to spell it out for Miles.

  “Don’t you know anything about vampires?!! Look, dude, a vampire master gathers his powers from the vampires he controls, the vampires he’s turned. Every vampire has some weird, psychic bond with the ones he’s turned. Those vampires, in turn, turn other vampires who turn other vampires, yada
yada, on and on, all of them passing a bit of their power up to the top…it’s the ultimate pyramid scheme when you think about really.” Miles was still lost, but Schuyler went on, “Anyway, the strongest bonds are supposed to be between the first generation, just one step between the turner and the turnee.”

  “So?” Miles tried to sound indifferent but failed as the “so” squeaked out nervously.

  “So?!” Schuyler laughed, “So YOU and Wallach are only one generation removed! That means that Wallach must’ve been drawing a fair amount of power from YOU.” Schuyler reached over the back seat and thumped his lollipop hard into Miles’ chest to drive the point home.

  Miles just stared at Schuyler in shock. Schuyler went on.

  “Furthermore,” Schuyler continued in a mock academic tone, “Wallach drained you dry to try to save his hide when he was really desperate. So there has got to be some real powerful juju going on there too.”

  Miles’ blank expression told Schuyler he would have to dumb it down even further.

  “Dude! You saved his life!”

  Miles’ jaw went slack.

  “Your lifeblood gave him the power to overcome that other vampire. Without you, he would’ve been toast! There’s powerful, powerful magic at work there, man. You were the secret to toppling Wallach this whole time and you didn’t know!! Man! I can’t believe how dense you are.”

  “But a…master vampire…has power over the one’s he’s turned…” Miles stammered.

  “Yeah, but it’s a two way street, you doofus! I’m not sure how it works exactly, Ulami told me some things, but not everything, but once you became a vampire he couldn’t just kill you, not outright, because he had drawn so much power from you – you more than the others because he used you to survive in a moment of desperate need.”

  Miles’ head was swimming. Was Schuyler saying what he thought he was saying? Miles knew that for a century-old vampire he actually knew very little about how vampires worked; no one had taught him really. Schuyler was far younger and yet knew an awful lot more it seemed, but was Schuyler right, or was he just blowing smoke as usual?

  Schuyler went on, “You weren’t supposed to live, dummy! He wasn’t ashamed of you, he was ashamed that he had to USE you to save himself, and that you somehow managed to turn yourself. He knew that if anyone knew about you, they could use you to hurt him. Get it yet?!”

  Miles’ world was suddenly shifting underneath him, but it hadn’t fully sunk in.

  “Wallach was playing you the whole time!! He kept you around, drawing on that connection, but always at arm’s length so no one would suspect you had this deep, magical bond. Man! What a master player he was!” Schuyler always could admire a good con.

  Miles deflated in the back seat of the Impala. Had the last century of misery and degradation just been a ruse by Wallach to manipulate him? Did Miles really have some magical pull over Wallach and he had never known it? Hadn’t he felt something when Wallach died, and hadn’t Hokharty singled him out before confronting Wallach? Was that what all that staring was all about? Maybe there was a reason Wallach had never taught him the ways of being a proper vampire and he had forced him to schlep along in alleys all this time. Was the whole last hundred years just a horrible joke or trick? Miles didn’t know whether to feel relieved or sick.

  “Boy!” Schuyler exclaimed. He turned around and faced towards the windshield of the car, twisting the stick of his lollipop in fascination. “What I could have done with THAT little piece of info, huh? You don’t think that Ulami and Forzgrim never thought about overthrowing Wallach, do you?” He turned back around to face Miles. “Let me tell you, ALL upper henchmen want to be the top dog someday. If I had known that you were a big source of Wallach’s power, Ulami would have made me her lieutenant, just for that.” Schuyler turned around again and then added almost as an afterthought. “Of course, she and Forzgrim probably would have done terrible, terrible, things to you, just to get the advantage over Wallach, but hey, that’s the game, nothing personal.”

  Miles didn’t much appreciate Schuyler’s professional detachment at the moment. Schuyler just sighed, “Not that it matters much anymore. They’re all dead and we have a new master now.” But as Schuyler stroked his chin, Miles could tell he was still gaming the possibilities of what might have been.

  “Schuyler?” Miles decided to test a theory he had just formulated.

  “Yeah?” Schuyler said distractedly.

  “Did you feel anything when Ulami died?”

  “Nah, dude, I got over that heartbreak a long time ago.”

  That wasn’t exactly what Miles had meant, but he didn’t feel like pressing the matter. If it was true that he and Wallach were linked and that his life gave power to Wallach, he wondered where all of Wallach’s power had gone.

  After a short pause, Tim started up again, “Wow, this whole vampire thing sounds really…complicated.”

  “You have no idea,” Schuyler said around his lollipop.

  Miles just sniffed and wished the conversation had never left the merits of seventies music.

  “So,” Tim sounded nervous, “What’s it like?”

  “What? Being a vampire?” Miles asked.

  “No moron, he wants to know what it’s like to be an Irish, ginger dwarf,” Schuyler laughed.

  Miles stuck his hands in his pockets and just stewed.

  Tim went on, “Yeah, so what’s it like?”

  “Seriously?” Schuyler eyed up the Renfield like a piece of meat.

  “Seriously,” Tim replied.

  Schuyler took out the lollipop and held it like a cigarette. “Dude, it’s fantas-”

  “It bloody STINKS!” Miles spat out, interrupting.

  Schuyler turned and gave Miles a look of utter contempt. Then he nudged Tim with his elbow and said, “Don’t listen to him, he’s just upset because he got played for a chump for the last hundred years. Being a vampire is great. You never get old.”

  “You never grow up either,” Miles added.

  “Yeah, well some of us weren’t pimply-faced, ginger dweebs to begin with.” Schuyler didn’t turn around to deliver this insult face to face, but Miles could see him eyeing him in the rearview mirror. Schuyler kept talking to Tim as if Miles wasn’t there, “Dude, you never have to go to school or work. Stay up as late as you want.”

  “Yeah, and spend all day trapped indoors or underground,” Miles interjected. Schuyler just ignored him.

  “You can do anything you want. . .”

  “Unless it’s outdoors and during the day, or y’know, involves other living people.”

  “…and you can jump between buildings, hear a whisper a mile away, it’s like being a superhero.”

  “Yeah, bloody right! Superheroes that suck people’s blood,” Miles retorted.

  “Will you shut up?!” Schuyler was annoyed. “He doesn’t want to hear it from some drunk-sucking alley rat.”

  “Yeah? Is that right? Well why don’t ya tell him about the fact that you can’t taste anything but blood anymore…that ya can’t eat or drink food because your innards are dead.”

  “You never look at the positive side of anything, Miles. There are always trade-offs.”

  “Trade-offs?!”

  “Sure, eternal life is worth giving up a few fattening snacks,” Schuyler said impassively.

  “Saints an’angels! Not having a bloomin’ pulse is a heckuva trade-off, Sky!”

  “So…about the bloodsucking thing…” Tim redirected the conversation before the two started arguing again, “How’s that work exactly?”

  “Whaddya mean?” Schuyler coyly responded.

  “I mean…well…are you guy’s…y’know…vegetarians?”

  “Well that all depends, Tim,” Schuyler said in a mocking tone, “Is blood a vegetable?”

  “No man, I’m serious…you know what I mean… does it have to be…y’know…human?”

  “Well, Tim boy, let me ask you a question. This magnificent land yacht of yours,” as Schuyler
said this he made a grand sweeping gesture with the lollipop. “Does it matter if I put oil or ranch salad dressing in the crank case?”

  Tim harrumphed. “So no substitutions…is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh, you can try it, but you won’t get very far,” Schuyler explained. “It’s not like eating anyway. The blood isn’t digested…it’s more like it’s absorbed.” Here Schuyler did his best Bella Lugosi impersonation, “The veeery life essences of your veektims flow in your veins…muwhahaaa!”

  Tim winced.

  Schuyler just punched him in the shoulder and laughed. “Dude, it’s cool. But you don’t have to kill someone to get by. In fact, it’s better not to – ya get more outta milking the cow than by killing it.”

  “Cows,” thought Miles. That’s all his victims were to Schuyler, mere cattle, livestock for vampires.

  “So…” Tim said nervously, “Have you ever…y’know…” He trailed off.

  “Killed anyone?” Schuyler finished his thought for him.

  Schuyler just waggled his eyebrows at Tim. Tim scooted a little further away from him. Schuyler burst out laughing.

  “Dude! I’m just messing with you!! Don’t worry, I ate before I left, I’ll be good for a couple of days at least…and Miles…well we can always round up a junkie for him.” Schuyler turned around and shot a vile look at Miles. Miles tried to ignore him.

  “Look,” Schuyler began again, “I’m not saying it’s for everyone,” he paused and tossed his head in Miles’ direction as if his tone wasn’t obvious enough to make that clear, “but the life of a vampire is great, and it has excellent fringe benefits, not the least of which is an eternity of freedom.”

  “Freedom?” Miles thought. Miles just shook his head in disbelief. “Is that what they’re calling it now when you are stuck in a car to Harrisburg on a mission of your master’s choosing?”