Howard didn't say much for a while after that. He looked sick. Now he was the one who was scared. I was enjoying myself, shocked and ashamed that I was, like when you jerk off for the first time, but I enjoyed it anyway.
"They smeared his blood on my forehead, making signs, and then we all prayed, and we had to cut up his body and bury it under the basement floor, and some of it in the back yard, and it all had to be done before sunrise. And, you know ... I was late for school that day."
I flashed a quick smile at Howard. He turned away as if I'd hit him.
I reached into the knapsack and touched.
We really were in the middle of nowhere now, alone in the darkness, in the pouring sleet and rain, with just the occasional car going by in the opposite lane. Outside, when I pressed my face to the glass, I couldn't find any warmth, any people, just miles and miles of muddy fields. Howard kept looking at me from the side, then looking away, and I knew what he was thinking. He was sure he'd got himself a cute little psycho, another Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahlmer in the making if not in actual fact already. Maybe what I was telling him was true, kind of, only it wasn't my mom and I'd done all those things myself.
After what must have been hours we came to a little town where there was a diner open. Howard pulled into the parking lot, then got out. He leaned back into the car.
"You got to do anything?"
"No."
"You hungry? You want anything?"
"Uh, no."
He was shaking, and not just from the cold. "Well, I gotta … I have a lot of things I have to do."
I rested my head on my knapsack and smiled at him. "I'll be here. I want to be your friend."
He turned from me and ran into the diner. I sat there in the car, rocking back and forth gently, remembering, or making up my story, dreaming dreams of blood. I reached into the knapsack once more, and touched.
When Howard came back, maybe an hour later, he was the one who was quiet. He put a paper bag on the seat beside me. A burger and fries, for me. I didn't touch them. But I did reach out and take Howard's hand in mine.
"You're cold!" he said.
"Where are we going?"
"Just going. Maybe we'll find a motel."
He'd done what he had to do and decided what he had to decide, and we weren't going to the police, and he wasn't going to drop me off at the nearest mental hospital. At least not right away. Fine. It would be long enough.
"I forgot to tell you the rest of my story," I said.
"Yeah. You did."
"It got a lot worse when Mr. Andrescu arrived. He came in the night, for one of the ceremonies, and as soon as I saw him I was afraid of him, because he was ... massive and hard, like a white marble statue that's come alive, and his eyes, there was something about his eyes like no eyes I'd ever seen before. Mom was afraid of him too, and the other ladies, but they went down into the basement with him anyway. I think the Devil sent him. I really do. I think they prayed to the Devil and that's why Mr. Andrescu came, but maybe they didn't really believe he would. Mom was crying. She told me to go up to my room and lock myself in, and barricade the door. She said she loved me, and gave me a hug and kissed me, and I tasted her tears, and there were so many things I wanted to say to her, hurt and angry things, but then she broke away and ran down into the basement with Mr. Andrescu and the rest. All that night I heard the screaming, not Mr. Andrescu, but the ladies, and when it was getting almost light Mom came to my room again. She had on her bathrobe and nothing else, and her face was like it had been when Dad beat her up. There was blood allover, but she didn't seem to be hurt, other than on her face, I mean. She said I had to help her because she was tired out and her arthritis wouldn't let her do everything that needed to be done. So down we went, and I had to help her bury Mrs. Walker, the lady from down the street who worked at the grocery store. Mrs. Walker's throat was all ripped out, and her heart was gone too. And we had to bury Mr. Andrescu in a box below the cellar floor. That was a lot of digging. Mom and the other ladies helped, but I did most of it. I didn't go to school at all that day, and when the job was done we all just slept and when it got dark again Mr. Andrescu was there and so was Mrs. Walker, and both of them were saying how darkness was so much better than light, and how we would all be in darkness one day and rule the darkened world – crazy stuff like that."
Howard jerked the wheel and banged on it so hard the horn blew.
"I'll say it's crazy. I don't know what really happened, Larry, or what those people did to you – and I think it must have been really terrible – but I do know that you are talking crazy stuff, because dead people don't come back to life or sleep daytimes in coffins under your basement floor – you're talking vampires, kid, and they only exist in movies. I think maybe you've seen too many movies, and your head is all screwed up and you don't know what's real and what isn't anymore."
We drove on, through the darkness and the storm, quiet again. I listened to the night and heard its voice, but the night was empty. There was only Howard. I slid over beside him and put my arm around him. He slid his arm around me, under my jacket, under my t-shirt.
"You're so cold you'll get sick," he said.
I leaned my head on his shoulder. "Can we still be friends?"
He swallowed hard and nodded.
"Yeah. We can be friends."
"You won't hurt me?"
He drew away quickly and gripped the wheel hard with both hands. "Oh, Larry ... the ones I'm with, I never hurt them, never. I give them money and new clothes, whatever they want, but I never hurt them..."
"Then we can be friends?"
"Like I said, yes."
"Because Mr. Andrescu hurt me quite a lot. First he hurt Mrs. Dade and Mrs. Lovell and Mrs. Freeman, like he had Mrs. Walker, and we buried them all, and they all came back, every night, and sometimes there were others who came for the ceremonies, who died; but in the end it was only me and my mom living in the house by day, and I wanted to run away so bad, but Mom said no, because Mr. Andrescu could follow me anywhere and I mustn't make him mad. So Mr. Andrescu came for me in the end, one night, and he tore my bedroom door right off the hinges. I thought his eyes were on fire. They were like a wolf's eyes, all glowing with light. He carried me downstairs like I was a baby, crushing me. His arms felt like cold stone, but alive. "Your mother saved you until the very last," he said to me, "but now you are mine." I screamed for her, but she didn't answer, she didn't come and help me, and then she was there in the basement with all the other ladies. She hugged me one last time, and cried, and said how sorry she was that it had turned out this way, that she didn't want it to, but there was nothing she could do. I didn't believe her. I knew she could have done something. But she didn't. I cried too, and held her, and she was warm ... then Mr. Andrescu pulled me away and he hurt me so much... They tore my clothes off and hung me up by the wrists from the pipes in the ceiling ... and first Mr. Andrescu cut open my legs and caught the blood in his hands. He drank some and gave it to the others, and they all drank, even my mother, though she wasn't dead yet, not like the others. If she had been, she wouldn't have been able to help herself, but she wasn't. They hurt me more, beat me with pieces of electrical cord ... and they cut designs, sigils, into me with knives, and all of them were covered with my blood, rubbing it all over themselves and moaning. I screamed for my mom to help me, but she didn't, she didn't because she'd already sold her soul to Mr. Andrescu. Only when he was going to cut my heart out with his knife did she do anything. She tried to pull him away. She said he'd promised not to do that, and he only laughed and said it didn't make any difference anyway. I suppose it didn't, in the end."
Howard was the one who was crying, in the end. "You really are crazy, kid. You really are. You need help. Well we'll be friends and I'll see that you get help. I will. I promise."
"Look. There's a motel. Let's stop."
He glanced at his watch. "Nearly four in the morning. I guess we should."
"Yeah," I said.
> And in the motel room, I showed him the marks Mr. Andrescu had made on my body, the sigils, and the ragged holes in my hands and feet. He and the ladies had nailed some boards together and actually crucified me in the basement. When I was hanging there, almost dead by feeling so much pain, Mr. Andrescu appeared out of a red mist, his eyes burning. He seemed to float in the air. He could make me like himself, he said, and I could live forever, and I wouldn't hurt anymore. Yes, I said, yes, please, make it stop, please, make it stop. And I called out to my mother then, but she didn't hear me, and Mr. Andrescu's arms crushed me like stone. I remember his eyes, gleaming in the red mist like two moons behind a thin layer of cloud.
When I told Howard all of my story, and even opened my knapsack and showed him what was inside, he was the one who did the screaming, but only briefly, before he died. When somebody knocked on the door and asked if we were all right, I said we were, it was only a bad dream. But it was the kind of bad dream that never ends, not for me, not for Howard, a dream he would go on dreaming too and try to understand, as I have tried to understand.
"It's not your fault," I told him. "It really isn't."
Maybe Mr. Andrescu could explain it all to him, tell him how we change, how I was still changing, how I hadn't run away from home at all, but had gone out into the world because Mr. Andrescu sent me, to propagate our kind. Those were his very words. And I had. I had made Howard like myself.
He was my first. I was still changing, from the boy my mother had sold in a useless attempt to save herself and Mr. Andrescu had murdered, into someone else, who went on, remembering and dreaming and continuing the story; the boy who wanted to go on loving his mother despite what she had done and somehow couldn't.
I tried, though. That was why I kept her head and carried it with me in my knapsack. In the daytime, when I slept in the sheltering darkness, I spoke to her in my dreams, and told her my story over and over, and she told me hers.
ROCK AND ROLL WILL NEVER DIE
E. J. GOLD
I DIDN'T WANT TO KILL Jim Morrison, but he insisted. Now, of course, he's a vampire, too.
He still looks as good as the day he died; the bald spot hardly shows, and his food disorder is finally under control.
Hendrix and Joplin took it very gracefully – they knew I didn't want my victims to die, but how could I help it? If I bit them only once, they'd live forever; but my need for blood is, as you well know if you've studied the ancient lore, insatiable – at least by human standards.
Joplin's been in Ogden, Utah, since the day I killed her. She loves it there, where the bats fly free, and has been using the name "Harriet Sopworthy," up until last Wednesday, when, due to some misunderstanding about cattle mutilation (if we could live on cows' blood, would we have had so many problems with the living all these centuries?) she developed a sudden need to travel.
Hendrix is still an assistant copy editor at Time-Warner. He races boats, and recently released a new double album "Shock Absorber" on Yarrow Root, a small Indie label out of Duluth, Minnesota. Brian Epstein did the liner notes. Morrison was one of the lucky ones. He'd signed an Automatic Resurrection Pact years before, so he was back on his feet in minutes, and as a rock star, the thing with the sunlight didn't affect him much; he was used to working nights.
Paul couldn't have been dead more than a couple minutes. He stayed on his feet the whole time, and wrote two songs the same afternoon, and nobody but a few gossip columnists ever knew the difference. And it's wrong to say that Paul is dead. He's very much undead.
Brian's every bit as undead as Paul; he's now the proud proprietor of a small but very exclusive antique shop on London's West End.
I was originally born into a nominally Jewish family, in French Hospital, New York, seven days after Pearl Harbor, for which I was not responsible.
Even though we weren't practicing Jews, it was definitely Judaism that saved me from a horrible fate worse than death; the first time a victim came after me with a crucifix, nothing happened.
I doubt that she understood me when I said, "Sie gar nicht helfen," and took her life's blood.
Passover? From Passover I knew nothing until spring of 1957, when I was sixteen, and had been invited to share a Seder – that's a ritual Jewish dinner you have at home with relatives and prayer.
I'd always thought of Passover as a sort of Jewish Easter. I spent this one with my cousins Sandi, Ricky, Henny and Keith, and my wonderful and loving Aunt Greta and Uncle Floyd.
I can't even say "Floyd." It was my uncle Floyd who, on his seven-hundred and thirty-fifth birthday, just as he and his new bride Marcie (also a vampire) were about to fly off to Europe for the weekend, suddenly wants to be called by his middle name "Cliff." Who can remember "Cliff?"
Don't get me wrong. Not all my relatives are vampires. My cousin Audrey (who moved to Ireland and currently lives alone in a small, cramped damp and moldy cottage in County Wicklow) is the only one of us who actually left in her Will that she explicitly refused to be buried facing Macy's.
My entire family, of course, expected me to become a doctor. What else? I was obviously too intelligent to be a lawyer, and nobody but a nudnik would want a dentist in the family these days.
The thing is, just plain "doctor" wasn't enough for them; a regular doctor is always on call, has to work nights – and what marriage can stand that? Believe me, grandchildren are always at the root of any Jewish family planning.
My parents wanted me to be a specialist, focusing on diseases of the very rich. But who had the time (I had to work for a living during my middle teens) or the money (for a decent medical school with postgraduate work it cost a hundred-thousand even then).
Now, when I don't need it, with the knowledge of anatomy I've garnered from countless victims, and the geriatrics (you wouldn't believe the problems, of which anemia is the least) I picked up everywhere from Dr. MacDougall to Susan Powter, even without medical school, I could be a doctor.
I could be a doctor, if I wasn't so squeamish about blood, but I am. I suppose it's some form of guilt.
I can't imagine where such guilt could possibly come from. But by the time I waded through three failed marriages (I eat lots of late-night snacks) and dozens of weekend Life-Repair Seminars at Esalen in Big Sur (I had to drop a rock on Dick Price's head from above – a super-feat for a tiny bat – to make it look like an accident, as if he'd been hit by a falling stone while meditating under a cliff) in the mid-70's, the guilt got so bad I couldn't stare another jugular vein in the face.
But who cares why the guilt. I'm a vampire, and that's that. I guess it was some sort of genetic Jewishness, even though we weren't practicing Jews, that began to assert itself at about the twentieth victim. I think Hefner went through pretty much the same thing.
It wasn't guilt that drove Jim Morrison into Judaism. It was fear of the Cross. After those horrible attacks by a mob of rabid crucifix-bearing, born-again Christians in Tyler, Texas back around 1974, he converted.
But that didn't last long. I met him at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens on a cross-country feeding expedition one summer night in 1983; he'd left the Yeshiva, following a bloody run-in with an inter-ethnic mob on the corner of King's Highway and Avenue L.
Apparently, he'd sounded the wrong click. When the debs flashed their long, wavy stainless-steel blades, he'd flashed his fangs.
He always fancied himself to be heavily oriented toward the darkside, but the fact is, Jaimie was more an anti-establishment rebel than a Satanist, though he'd hate it to become generally known, and Christianity was the only establishment he'd been taught to see.
Believe me, even Alice Cooper (who never felt a thing and was already thoroughly undead by the time he walked into the Psychedelic Supermarket on Las Palmas where I stalked victims during the Summer of Love) couldn't have spooked these Bushwick Babes, and the whole gang came after him waving everything they had on chains around their necks.
Morrison finally got smart. Now, you couldn't get him with a cross, Star o
f David, mezuza, chai, figa, corno or mojo bag.
Hazel wand? Blasting Rod? Athame? There's no piece of religious hardware known that can stop him now. Not even a silver bullet. He's switched to Zen.
What are you asking? Of course I can fly like a bat ... and don't try to trick me into shapeshifting into something small, so you can smash me with some nearby heavy object like that telephone over there on the night table.
I'm unkillable. I've had plenty of time to learn how to be. Besides, I don't mean you any harm. Actually, you're going to be immortal. And when you're immortal, after I've drunk your blood, you'll learn how to be unkillable, too, and you may even learn to like it.
You want to know about flying skills? I'll tell you about flying skills. They came in very handy, I can tell you, when I put Lynyrd Skynnyrd, Rick Nelson and Jim Croce on "empty" in midair. It wasn't easy to get out of Nelson's private aircraft, and I crashed with it.
Naturally, everybody survived, if you call this living.
Elvis was an easy kill, a pathetic creature, lying there on the bathroom floor with a bible clutched in one hand and a bottle of Demarol in the other. I told him to get plastic surgery, but as you well know, he's been spotted just about everywhere.
He can't seem to stay away from populated areas where he'd be easily recognized. The King always did have a big appetite, even after he hit the drugs, and to a vampire, blood isn't just chopped liver.
Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper? They were before my time. They were taken out by Myrna Loy. I only happen to know because it was she who robbed me of my daylight life, in the anteroom of the Temple Beth-El on 14th and Second Avenue. We met there every Saturday morning snuggling happily together as she sucked on my vein and drained me to chalky whiteness in the darkness of the cloakroom.
As far as my mother and father knew, on Saturdays I was safely tucked away on some side balcony (I always thought superman was skinny until I reached puberty and was allowed to sit in the Loge) at one of the 14th Street movie theaters (which still had live, onstage vaudeville between the cliff-hangers and the short subjects).
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