by Atha, DL
I leaned up against the bedframe and let the tears run down my face, not bothering to wipe them away or to try to shut them down. There was no one to see them anyway, no human for whom to act human. No one to notice that they were bloodstained. No one to be embarrassed for.
But it was useless to cry. I needed help, and sobbing out my own blood was not going to help me at all. It would just make me hungrier, and I was really beginning to feel it. A pain in the pit of my abdomen burned like a coal of fire. Asa had never mentioned this kind of burn, but he’d probably never burned. He’d only consumed.
Through the red haze of my tears, I could see the blurred outline of the bag Asa had left on the bedpost. All that remained of him on this earth was waiting for me in that bag. It was rather plain looking really. Heavily worn, the brass eyes were beginning to pull away from the leather, but the material remained intact. It was zipped. Of course it was; Asa was not one to be open with anything. Even in death, the bastard left me struggling to know him.
And opening it, it was just as I’d expected. Absolutely sterile. There was nothing in here to identify the man, to separate him from anyone else. A well faded but expensive pair of jeans and a couple of shirts and some underclothes. One shirt was very worn, but the other was tailored, obviously expensive, and essentially unworn. Pressing it to my face, I could pick up on the soft hint of a human, the spoils of a recent crime. He’d never worn it, or I wouldn’t have been able to make out the previous owner’s smell.
I threw the clothes on the bed and swept my hand around the base of the bag, coming back with some cash, a woman’s wedding band, a few other assorted pieces of jewelry, and a couple of watches. A pocket watch was among the collection. Not having been re‐wound, the watch had stopped on March 2. Five days back. Asa had killed the owner of this watch while staying with me. My hand felt dirty just touching it, so I laid it aside with the clothes.
I ran a hand around the lining of the bag a final time and found an unexpected ridge. The lining shredded with the flick of a fingernail, and I found a fragment of the human life that Asa had left behind a century ago. A picture. An ancient tintype so faded that I could barely make out the image in the light filtering in from the outside.
Walking out of the cellar, I leapt up to the knoll to study the picture in the ambient light of the star‐lit sky. A woman sat straight in a high‐backed chair, her hands folded in her lap. The length of her dress skimmed her shoes and masked most of her curves. And still she was beautiful. Soft and feminine. On her left hand was a gold band. She wasn’t smiling, but despite that, I could see the kindness in the gentle set of her jaw. Her eyes were soft and understanding, the kind of eyes that could make you tell her anything. Eyes that you couldn’t shock and that held no judgment no matter what you confessed. It had to be his mother—the one human Asa had kept any affection for.
Next to her stood a handsome man; Asa before he’d changed. Before he’d lost all humanity and his conscience. One hand was resting on her shoulder, and he was smiling. He looked happy. When she died, she’d carried his soul with her into the grave. A part of me could understand why he couldn’t come back from that kind of loss. Could I if I lost my daughter? I wasn’t sure.
Back in the cellar, I laid the tintype and the jewelry aside and gave the bag another close inspection. One more ridge was palpable behind an inner pocket, and I ripped the rest of the lining out. A business card twisted into the air, and I plucked it from the breeze before it fell to the ground. It appeared fairly new and written on its back was a phone number. I didn’t recognize the area code, and there was no name with the number. The front held the logo of a bar in Denver.
Why would Asa have a phone number? He’d obviously tried to conceal it. But from who? From humans in the event that he was discovered? Was he protecting the identity of the owner of this number or the owner of the bar? After having spent a week with him, I couldn’t imagine him having formed any kind of cordial relationship.
Slipping the business card into the other back pocket of my jeans, I threw the old bag into the corner of the cellar and stepped back out into the pasture. My every desire was to go back to the house and join my sleeping family. And I seriously considered it, my heart trying to convince my brain that I’d be safe in a closet in my own home.
My internal bickering was at a stalemate as I sat down on the grassy hilltop overlying the cellar and watched the darkened windows of my house. The distance was too great to listen for their heartbeats, but in a window, I saw the shadow of my mother. Featureless and dark, I could make out only that she watched for something. Most likely for me, her lost daughter. She searched the darkness for a handful of minutes before giving up and returning to bed.
Like a sentry, I watched the house for what was left of the night, knowing that my life was becoming too narrow, knowing that I was losing myself, that every aspect of the life I’d lived was slipping between my fingers.
Just before the sun gilded the distant mountains, I crept into the cellar. As much as I hated the idea, hated the thought of laying where Asa’s cold dead body had slept, I knew that it was for the best. After running into Detective Rumsfield in the woods, I was more sure than ever of how deeply obsessed he was with this case. I could envision him knocking on my door and demanding that I come to the station. My mom would point to my bedroom at a loss as to what else to do. He’d pull the door off the hinges and drag me outside to his patrol car. I wouldn’t even get to see the shock on his face when I burned in his hands.
So I prepared myself mentally, dug into the same dirt that had covered Asa, and waited for the coming dawn.
Chapter 7
I woke to the smell of clotted blood. Cow’s blood. And it was revolting even to a blood drinker. I tried to bury my face in the blankets lining my hole, but it didn’t help. The cellar wasn’t airtight, so the scent seeped in through the crooks and crannies. But the worst of the odor was coming from the hem of my jeans. Dried and stiff, the denim scratched against my ankles where they’d soaked up the blood the night before as I’d slit the throat of a cow in the pasture. The memory seemed remote now, like it had been days ago that I’d stooped to such measures and not just the night before. Maybe I was subconsciously dissociating. Maybe I was just losing my mind.
The animal had been terrified, running to the far side of the pasture as soon as I’d emerged from my hidey-hole. I’d been dangerously hungry and on a timeline. Not that I wasn’t dangerous right now, twenty-four hours after my botched kill, but I’d been more on edge last night. I’d hatched a great plan after the failed evening with my mom and the run-in with the detective. I’d decided to kill a cow for its blood, and it had to be done and over with by the time Ellie came home. Then I could finish a relaxed evening at home with my family. Wouldn’t that look good on a to-do list hanging from the fridge?
I’d looked first to the house before my bovine attack, grateful to find all the windows darkened except the porch lights. No one was home. Thank God. If I remembered right and hadn’t lost too much track of time, tonight was the parent‐teacher’s conference and book fair. I’d signed up over a month ago to volunteer, and Ellie and I were supposed to have worked the booth together. That had been when I was normal. When I didn’t live like an abandoned animal in a forgotten den or chase frightened animals around in muddy pastures for the blood running in their veins.
The animal had fought, its large girth making it difficult to catch and hold. But finally caught, I managed to find a good artery, my mouth filling with hair and dirt, and I’d drank mouthful after another of sickeningly sweet blood until I could take it no longer. I’d puked it up onto the ground beside the animal in a dark maroon swath that stretched for several feet away from the animal’s heaving form. It hadn’t died as easily as I’d hoped. I’d crawled away in desperation, hoping some distance from the animal would help me keep the blood down. It hadn’t worked. I’d heaved until every last drop soaked into the ground. Finally, I’d pulled myself up to stand, long
wispy trails of drying blood waving in the wind, but I didn’t bother to wipe them away. I’d just gone back to the cellar and spent the rest of the night trying to forget this had ever happened.
The house was still dark that night when I’d crawled back into the cellar. And I mean that literally. I crawled, still vomiting up bits of dark blood, back into my hole. For once, I’d been glad Ellie wasn’t home. I was happy to look towards the house and see only the glow of the night‐lights. The last sight I wanted my daughter to ever see was me hunched over a dead animal, blood smeared across my face and dripping from my hands. Better an animal than a human I had thought, which was why I had gone after the cow. Lesson learned. Animal blood was not the same.
Tonight, my thoughts were more of the same, like selected movie frames in a repeating loop. What I craved was one normal moment with my daughter, but the crater in the pit of my belly felt like a hot coal and a hollow emptiness at the same time. I tried to picture her, to think about what she’d be saying after a day of school and imagine her face as she talked excitedly about her friends in classes.
But closing my eyes only brought images of blood that flowed like waterfalls from opened carotid arteries in faceless people. And then just as quickly, my subconscious would blur those faces to that of my daughter, my eyes would startle open, and I’d ache on the inside in a way that I never thought possible. Vampires had exquisite moments it seemed—powerfully good ones and those that were as equally bad.
I wasn’t completely alone, however. Asa hadn’t changed his rhetoric from last night either. Except now, I could see him, and he was as beautiful as ever. Maybe even more beautiful to my lonely, hungry mind. He leaned back against one wall, his arms held stoically across his chest. The only difference from the Asa that haunted the last few days of my life was that this one smiled more.
“I’m losing my ever‐loving mind,” I said to him. Asa raised one eyebrow and nodded his head. “If I have to hallucinate, why does it have to be of you?” I asked.
“Because you need me,” Asa said, pulling away from the cellar wall as he took a step in my direction. I studied his movements. They were smooth and natural. Not dream quality at all. “It is ironic that you killed me and now have no idea of how to survive. It seems you are the butt of your own joke.”
“Whatever,” I muttered, turning away from him and burying my face in the blankets again. “Surviving is easy. If I wanted to be like you, at least. I’d just start murdering my way through Arkansas. But I don’t want to barely survive. I want to …” I started to say but stopped, closing my mouth against my own crazy talk. The truth sounded sort of ridiculous to me. It would sound like utter nonsense to Asa. And why do I care what he thinks, I reminded myself. Further proof, I was worse off than I gave myself credit for. A glance over my shoulder confirmed that he wasn’t standing where my hallucination had left him.
He’d walked right past his last known location and was knelt down beside my sleeping spot. “And you thought you would perform so greatly compared to me. Disappointed in yourself, Annalice?” he asked. “You judged the Children of Israel and find yourself as lost in the desert as they?”
His body felt real under my hand as I pushed past him towards the door. Outside the cellar, the sky was dark, the sky obscured by a drapery of thick grey clouds. A light rain was falling, just enough to dampen my skin and knock down the odor of the cow blood. I licked my lips for the moisture. They were so dry, but it made no difference, my lips remained just as dry. Parched from the inside.
The light from my house barely reached my skin as I stepped away from the cellar, but it was enough to make me homesick and add to my emptiness. I wanted blood, but I wanted human contact with my family just as much. I walked towards the house, reaching the fence that separated the yard from the field before I stopped. I was afraid to go any farther. The last thing I wanted for Mom to see was her daughter coming in like an animal from the field.
The bay windows of the kitchen faced the pasture, and behind the stained‐glass figures of angels and butterflies, I could see two figures walking around the kitchen. One stopped and peered into the pasture, maybe to look for me. Maybe they were just nervous. I hoped it was my daughter craving my company. I strained to see who it was since my mom was a small woman, only a few inches taller than Ellie, but I couldn’t tell who was who.
At first, it didn’t seem strange to strain, very human and so normal to me, and then I realized that my vision wasn’t as good as it had been, dulled by starvation like my resolve. And the less resolve I had, the more dangerous I became. It was time to eat. If I didn’t, I knew the chances of hurting someone were going up night by night. Asa said I wouldn’t care, but he was wrong. I was still human enough to care, and that’s why I needed to do it tonight. Before I lost the ability to care.
“It is time to hunt,” Asa whispered from beside me. He smiled, his lips parting to reveal fangs that a week ago had terrorized me. Tonight, the sight didn’t produce a lick of fear. They were pure temptation. “Let us start with them,” he said, inclining his head towards the house.
I started to spit out harsh words and threats but then reminded myself that there was no reason fighting with ghosts, or at least what I thought was a ghost.
“Are you real?” I asked him, starting to turn towards him. But then I changed my mind. “Forget it. Don’t answer. I don’t want to know.” There wasn’t an answer he could give me that would make me feel better. If he was alive, then I was screwed, but knowing I was hallucinating wasn’t much solace either.
Sparing one more glance back at my house, I could see the two figures, grandmother and granddaughter, one at the stove and the other at the kitchen sink. Making lasagna I decided based on the smells coming from the house. Mom’s secret recipe being handed from an older generation to the younger. I could hear Ellie laughing, enjoying this extra time with her grandmother. I wanted to be there with them as a family, but it was impossible, at least for now. I wished them a silent good night and turned towards the back of my pasture.
Chapter 8
Fort Smith, Arkansas lies along the banks of the Arkansas River on the western border of the state and within a stone’s throw of the eastern border of Oklahoma. “Hell on the Border” they called the fort at one time. That had been when the hanging judge, the Honorable Isaac C. Parker, had presided and the fort squatted tenaciously on the border of Indian Territory and civility. It had been a rough and tumble town of hard men and even harder women.
In some ways, the town hadn’t changed. “Hell on the Border” was still an applicable name on a few Saturday nights. Downtown Garrison housed a number of bars, as did Towson Avenue and Midland. The kind of places where remaining anonymous could be bought and sold. And so could anything else for that matter.
I’d worked in Fort Smith many nights as an emergency room physician, and I was familiar with every place in town from the swanky to the downright seedy. They’d each contributed, in their own way, to my job security over the years.
It was to one of the seedier bars that I went tonight. Fast, quiet and unseen, I weaved through the forest, nearly untraceable, I would imagine. What tracker in their right mind would look to the trees for clues? I crossed the mighty Arkansas River by way of the Van Buren railroad bridge around ten p.m. It was a half‐hour after I left my house that I emerged out of the trees to walk across a poorly lit parking lot at the back of a motorcycle bar on the edge of town.
Housed in a long, squat building with windows so darkened it appeared closed a good part of the time, this bar was nearly out of sight and, to the cops, frequently out of mind. Or so they wished. It was a rough place, and I could hear several arguments going on inside. At least one of them would probably end with bloodshed.
The establishment had been temporarily shut down in the past due to the unusual amount of violence. Somehow, the club had always managed to get their license back, and we in the emergency room would shake our heads when the latest disturbance would end up strapp
ed to one of our gurneys in the middle of the night. At one point, I’d gone to the city council along with a few other physicians to try to keep it closed. We’d lost. As it turns out, money is more important than public health. My guess is the owner was good at greasing palms. Tonight, I was hoping the place lived up to its reputation. Dark, seedy and out of the way were exactly what I was looking for.
Two heavily muscled and dangerous‐looking bouncers guarded the door. The policy was pretty simple. The rougher you looked, the quicker they’d let you in. Show up in a dress suit and, like as not, the bouncers would carry you right back to the car, and probably not very gracefully. They’d turn your money down flat. It was better than paying your doctor bills. If you were going in there, you’d better be able to take care of yourself.
I knew I didn’t look the part as I walked up to the door, but I didn’t look good—at least not my usual clean‐cut self. I hadn’t changed clothes, and the bottom of my pants were stained with the cow blood and the mud from the forest. At least the dewy grass from the pasture had wiped the goo from my boots. I was wearing a short‐sleeved V‐neck T‐shirt, which was odd for February, and no jacket. The skin of my arms glistened with the fine mist that had dropped from the overcast sky. My hair was a knotted mess, windswept and damp. Strands clung to the sides of my face and snaked across my neck and chest.
A pair of motorcycles had pulled into the parking lot as I walked up to the front door. I could hear the chatter from the women passengers as they climbed off from behind the two male drivers. Their speech was un‐slurred; they’d make good witnesses so I hung back, letting the women and their dates make it to the entrance first. I needed to remain anonymous. Nondescript.
The smaller, but clearly more aggressive, of the two bouncers stepped forward when he saw me approaching. The muscles of his arms and chest flexed for show as he bowed up for my benefit. When I got closer, I flashed him the briefest of my “I’m going to eat you” gazes, just enough to convince him I could take care of myself but not enough to send him screaming inside. He started to protest, thought better of it, and finally shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “it’s your funeral,” and allowed me to pass.
