“’Bout them kicks then?’” Yuri eyeing his shoes.
“Nigga dem things ten years old.” Luke pronouncing judgment, Marquis and Yuri laughing. Luke—who called himself Terry’s friend—making no move to intervene, only making things worse. DeAndre not sure whether he should laugh or cry or what, finding it hard to maintain a calm demeanor, thinking he’d best start walking now, be on his way.
Yuri slapped the book out of his hand.
“Now what’d you go and do that for?”
Marquis still mimicking him, not even finishing the sentence he was laughing so hard.
“Yur. Chill.” Luke sounding bored. “Shorties’ Torell’s brother.”
“Yeah, well, fuck that Torell nigga.” Yuri’s peanut head poked out the top of his counterfeit Karl Kani t-shirt. “And fuck you too, shorty.” DeAndre bending down to pick up his book, Yuri calling him shorty. “Yeah, what chew lookin’ at? What?”
DeAndre deciding discretion the better part of valor in this particular situation and he walked away, his book pressed to his chest in both hands.
Yuri calling after him, “Betta have my dolla I see yo’ ass later.”
Luke calling after him, telling him tell Terry he’d stop by later to chill.
DeAndre tried to control his breathing, not about to let them see him shaking. Forced himself to walk off, not run. DeAndre couldn’t and wouldn’t kid himself. He wasn’t like these other boys. And he didn’t want to be.
Days like this, DeAndre Watkins felt the streetest thing about him was his name.
Lost in his thoughts, clutching his book, DeAndre wasn’t paying attention to what was right in front of him and almost walked into the man.
“Wuz’ up, DeAndre?” Dodd was in his thirties, a hard man recently back from prison. Dodd wore a black denim jacket over black jeans, his face bearded with short kinky hair. Dodd one of the few older folk who called DeAndre by his name and didn’t try and stick some nickname on him, call him shorty or son.
DeAndre believing he’d heard once that Dodd was some kind of friend of his momma’s.
Like Old Toke.
DeAndre nodded to the man, walking past, Dodd saying to him, “That bullet-headed nigga mess with you—” meaning Yuri “—you come tell me, hear?”
Still walking, DeAndre turned his head and nodded again, then turned back around where Dodd couldn’t see his tears. He headed home.
Dodd walked up to the three young men on the street, little more than kids themselves. He ignored the short one in the counterfeit t-shirt who’d knocked the book out of the kid’s hands, ignored him for the moment. He addressed the tallest and toughest looking one, cat wearing his shades on top of his head. “What ya’ll messin’ with that kid for?”
“We aight,” Yuri went to speak up, Dodd saying “I ain’t talkin’ to you” without looking at him. Dodd still staring down the tall one, the kid looking at the ground, drawing his lower lip over his upper.
“It’s like he said,” the one with the bun said. “We aight.”
The leader.
“We just toughenin’ him up is all.” The tall one said looking down.
“You is, is you? What you know ‘bout tough? Who hit your face?”
Marquis sputtered, going to say something about Dominicans from up out of Washington Heights, but Luke was speaking with the man, speaking of DeAndre, “He ain’t got no daddy is all—” the man cutting Luke off with a pointed finger, with “And you ain’t his daddy, hear?” Dodd’s tone shutting Luke up, Marquis shifting his weight anxiously from one foot to the other.
“Toughen him up,” Dodd said it with disgust, staring at Marquis again, Marquis still looking at the street. “Toughen him up. Oh, you is, is you? What’s that—” reaching to cup his own ear the way old people might, “speak up son.”
Marquis with his bruised face muttering something about you should have seen the other motherfuckers.
Dodd exasperated but in control. He was a man, after all, and these were just boys. And he’d come here for more than just a reprimand. So he got to it.
“Either you niggas know how to drive? I’m lookin’ for a nigga want to make a little extra cheddar.”
The short one with the little head volunteered, a little too fast for Dodd. “How ‘bout you?” He asked Luke.
“Me?”
“Yeah. Can you drive?”
“Word.”
“Okay then. We gonna talk, little later on, you and me.”
“Yo, what about me?”
“What about you nigga?” Dodd asked him and Yuri had nothing to say to that.
The hard man in the denim suit walked away from the three boys. Marquis stood there prodding an empty fast food bag with his foot.
“But I can drive.”
“Chill, Yur.”
6.
4:12 P.M.
“You do not remember me,” Rainford’s voice cut the silence in the room, “do you?”
“I remember you just fine.” Boone was stretched on the rack, naked save for a loin cloth, all muscle. The room cold, the lights harsh. “You bloodsucking cunt.”
“This is the thanks I get.” Rainford sighed for the benefit of the other vampires present. “Tell me, Wells,” the Dark Lord spoke to a tall, thin vampire with a crew cut, “Is it no longer customary to acknowledge a debt with gratitude?” It was a rhetorical question and the vampire called Wells did not answer. He stood there gripping a Russian knout, the rawhide thongs raw and mean.
“Is it me or does this entire generation feel entitled?”
The rack was a rectangular wooden frame with rollers on either end. Boone—all 250-plus pounds of him—was draped across it, legs fastened to a fixed bar, his hands tied to a movable bar, wrists and ankles fastened to rollers. The rack was elevated at a 45 degree angle to the ground.
“The fuck should I be thanking you for?”
Rainford came and stood over the rack, looking down on him. “Your life, for one.” The vampire made no move to work the handle and ratchet, to increase the tension on the chains that secured the hulking young man. “Tell me, how much do you remember of your little tète-a-tѐte with Kreshnik?”
“Hmmm, let me see.” Boone scrunched an eye closed like he was thinking hard on it. “I remember his head exploding like a fuckin’ piñata.”
“It is as I hoped,” Rainford spoke to the other vampires. “His lucidity and alacrity remain untrammeled. Would you not agree, Pomeroy?”
Coifed with a pompadour, the third vampire in the room lisped, “And such a magnificent physical specimen.”
“I get your dead dick hard, do I?”
“One of the most terrifying exercises with the rack,” Rainford informed Boone, “is to force another to listen to its use.” Rainford’s hand brushed up and down the handle. “Cartilage and ligaments pop when they snap, like taking a pin to a balloon. To say nothing of the crepitation of bones. Music to some ears,” Rainford looked to Wells with the heavy whip, “though not to mine.”
As he spoke, Rainford circled the rack, in no great rush. “I must confess, I do find this whole endeavor quite distasteful. I trust your dishabillment accords you no great discomfiture, yes?”
“Know what I think?” Boone figured the old vampire was referring to his lack of clothes. “Think you fags just like seeing me hanging here half naked.” Boone directed his next comment towards Wells—
“He does anyway.”
—and Pomery tittered, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Your homophobic jibes might work well with middle-schoolers,” continued Rainford, “but I assure you they fall on deaf ears here.”
“Christ you talk like an educated Nancy.”
“Touché.”
“Douche. How ‘bout you’re gonna torture me, get it over with already. I got shit I got to do.”
“Wells.” Rainford spoke its name and the vampire placed the heavy scourge on the floor. “A purely symbolic gesture on our side, Boone. The laying down of one device, a
symbol of torture and torment, a deliverer of pain and distress whose sole purpose is to instill fear and dread and break the human spirit—” Pomeroy had produced a softcover book, an elementary primer with a capital and small case A on the cover “—and pick up another, a symbol of edification and knowledge imparted.”
“You’re gonna teach me to read?”
“A mere symbol, Boone, nothing more and nothing less.”
“You’re gonna what, teach me? The fuck can you teach me?”
“I could tell you of a multiplicity of Russian torture contrivances,” Rainford leaned in. “Not least of which, from my experience, would have to be the Street Sweeper’s daughter. Fascinating, yes, but inconsequential at this juncture. Some other time.”
“You just sound like some crazy old fuck. You got Alzheimer’s or something?”
“You have no concept as to the vampire aging process.” Rainford stood back up to its full height, grey blue eyes locking Boone in their gaze. “We are not immortal in any true sense, though our lifespans would appear such to human kind. We are beings capable of existing hundreds of years. We age, yet we do so slowly, imperceptibly. Until the end. Towards the end the process speeds up. A few generations, and, well, as they say, nothing is forever.
“I, for example, am 326 years old.”
“How old’s Hitler youth there?” Boone spoke of Wells with his crew cut. “He go back to the First Reich?”
“Forgive me, I did not make proper introductions. Boone, this is Wells, my personal bodyguard. And this young child of the night so impressed with your anatomy is Pomeroy, my factotum—”
“That mean he’s on bottom?”
“—and you’ll be meeting Colson soon enough. Exigencies upon my time will call me away shortly, but rest assured I will leave you in capable hands.”
“Jesus Christ! Are you going to torture me or what?”
“No. I thought that was apparent. Quite the opposite in fact.”
“Then let me down off this fucking thing.”
“That would not be a wise decision on my part.”
“Why not?”
“Tell me, Boone. If I freed you from the rack, what would be your first course of action?”
“I’d kill your dead ass.”
“Which is why you will remain immobilized for the remainder of our time together this day.”
“You mean this shit ain’t done yet? Fuck!”
“I am 326 years old and I have spent the majority of my existence in the form of a youth, a boy.”
“Yeah, yeah. You told me last time you were turned by the Italian, about the Jew and his Jew kids tried to kill you—”
“You were listening!” The Dark Lord sounded pleased. “Yet Boone, our last conversation was so abruptly ended by your departure…”
“Oh shit no. Here we go again.”
Rainford gestured to Pomeroy and the vampire wiggled its fingers over a steno pad. “One of Pomeroy’s various capacities in which he serves me,” Rainford mentioned to Boone, “is as my personal amanuenisis. In case you were wondering.”
“That mean he pisses on you or somethin’, doesn’t it?”
“Nothing of the sort. What if, Nietzsche enjoined us to ask, what if some day or night…
The Dark Lord’s Tale
What if, Nietzsche enjoined us to ask, what if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness, come after you and say unto you: ‘The life you now live and have lived, you will have to live once more and times innumerable beyond that; and there will be nothing new to it. Every pain and joy, every thought and sigh, everything unutterably small or exaltingly great in your life will return to you again, each in the same succession and sequence….The eternal hourglass of existence is righted again and again, along with you—a speck of dust?’
A genius, Fritz, in his own dark, troubled way. Part of his brilliance lay in his ability to confront us headfirst with matters that bore directly on our existence. Thus his madman descends upon the marketplace with his message for the villagers: God is dead, and he is dead because we have killed him. God is dead—the sea is drank up; the horizon wiped clear as if by a sponge. The metaphors—Nietzsche the poet.
God itself as a metaphor—the principal that had ordered our lives gone now, evaporated. An imposition of order on the universe that held fast and true, uprooted and cast aside. Yet Fritz’s power lay not so much in his illustration of the absurdities and whimsies of existence as in his demand that we take responsibility for our lives and our actions.
God is dead and we have killed him: ‘Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it?’ Do we have any choice but to become agents in our own history?
Of course we must.
1882 was an important year in the great man’s life. He would have been thirty-eight years old that October. He had made the acquaintance of Lou Salome: summering with her in Tautenburg; courting her unsuccessfully, his harpy sister Elisabeth an ever-present chaperone. Fritz’s physical ailments were such that he imbibed large quantities of opium and still had trouble sleeping. 1882 was the year his Gay Science saw publication; the year the madman descended upon the market square; the year Fritz asked us to consider the demon and the offer it bore—
The eternal recurrence.
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Alas, that we should recognize all demons that come before us.
That reveal themselves for what they are.
That tempt us.
That we should gaze upon even ourselves and judge verily. For my part, I will not attempt to mask my disdain for his sister Elisabeth. In his last decade, she exhibited the great man like a circus attraction and sold his ideas—like trinkets—to the National Socialists. A demon? Perhaps not, but a bitch, yes, through and through. Better she had stayed in Paraguay, but I digress and get ahead of myself.
Of her, I will have more to say.
I met my master again in St. Petersburg. This would have been in the 1850s, well before the serfs in Russia received their freedom; their manumission would not come to them until 1861. They had built Petersburg out of the bogs, alongside Swedish prisoners of war, laboring year after year, erecting the port city on the Baltic. Together they died by the tens of thousands, as had those toiling at the great Qin wall, as had the pyramid builders.
Steeped upon this terrible human toll, Peter’s eponymous city greeted the world as Russia’s imperial capital for a brief period early in the eighteenth century, and then again, from 1732 through 1918. It was during this later span that my master found me where last he had left me, in this city on the river Neva, built at the cost of untold lives.
In the mornings before dawn, I would stand on the banks of the Neva, lost in contemplation of matters great and small, concerns mundane and metaphysical. The waters flowed past and I considered Heraclitus’ axiom, that one could never step into the same river twice. That there were two million souls in Europe alone at that time, a billion in the world. That for a generation prior, the light and hope of a new world—declaring itself the champion of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness—had been subsumed by a conservative restoration of order encapsulated in their founding document’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property.
Property, that bourgeois watchword—their god.
That the true revolution, aimed at liberty, fraternity, and equality, had collapsed back on the reign of one man, a stunted general at that.
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Above all, I wrestled with my own existence.
My Master, Vinci, had turned me in the Carpathian Mountains. He had taken me with him about the continent and across the oceans to see the world. I had learned to feed. To hide my existence from others. To survive.
When last we’d parted it had been in that very city—Piter as it is called. The Neva flowed through the center of the metropolis. In the winter months she would freeze, not breaking up until April. At that time the mists rose off her waters in the early mornings before the rise of that dreaded orb. The mists hovered like a shroud within which spectral wraiths gathered.
In truth, I was the thing to fear most in that city. I, who fed off Petersburg’s denizens in the blackest night. Though, unlike any ghosts feared to consort above the water itself, I stood on the shore.
Winter is the best time for the vampire, with its short days and lengthy nights.
The nights were made for hunting.
The nights, when I would awake, the thirst for blood strong, my canines aching. The nights, when Petersburg’s citizens would rest. I would visit them along the quays in the maritime quarter; in the squalid sections of the Sennaya Ploshchad, the belly of Petersburg; on occasion I would cross the Neva to take my sustenance on Vasilevskiy Island.
I would visit them in their slumber, waking them, lulling them with my gaze. I would ask entrance to their domiciles and they would grant me such. In the morning they would wake, fatigued and anemic, troubled by half-remembered dreams from the night before. They would wake and I would sleep, sated and content.
Vinci parted my company one night in the 1830s, there upon the banks of the Neva. It was our way between us: he would appear and disappear at intervals, leaving me to my own devices.
In my early days I was his constant companion and pupil, learning what it meant to be a child of the night. As the decades passed his departures commenced, first for days, then weeks and months, and finally years. We consider with antipathy the parent who abandons its child for any length of time. And I would come to have reasons to hold my Master in contempt; however, his absences did not count amongst them.
I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Page 3
