The next morning, before the sun broke over Crossman Peak, I awakened slowly with the sense that I had been sleeping alone. I listened for the familiar and reassuring sound of Jonathan's breathing. I heard none. Quickly, I rolled over to see an empty, rumpled bearskin. Jonathan's Appaloosa was still tethered to the palo verde, his medicine-pouch still dangling from the saddle horn. My roan mare was gone. I drew my breath in sharply and leaped up, naked, twirling around, squinting to see if I could make out his large frame in the dull early light. Panicked, I searched the camp floor for scuff-marks, or horse's hoofprints which would give me a clue to his leaving. His clothes and saddlebags were gone, yet the dust and dew on the camp floor were fresh and undisturbed. I searched the horizons back and forth, searching for any trace of movement, any glimpse of a man on horseback, any shadow, any glint of light that would tell me where I should follow, how I should pursue... The skyline revealed nothing, nothing but empty, motionless space. Everything was silent and calm in the blue morning light. Even the wind and the birds were still. And I knew, as I sunk back onto the damp bearskin, that I was alone…I knew, as I drew my knees up to my chest, that this "alone" would be my alone for a long, long time … I knew, as I stared into the blank air, that I would have to live my life, my lives, alone, untrusting and wary, shrouded in secrecy, and that, alone, I would endure the many, many tests of my own becoming…
I knew that this alone … would be alone for … ever…
VII.
…Spiraling blue light…sharp flashes of red…
Damned lights! They're here already! What a scene. I'm so fucking tired of this shit. I'm so intensely tired! But this shit's over, baby, it's over. I'm just going to answer the door. Just open the motherfucker up and watch as their poor little, fucking brains overload on high. Fucking hysterical drag queen vampire leaping all over their sorry asses! Just sucking their sorry, fucking hearts out! I'll put up a good fight and then I'll just lay back and let them finish it. All their training in the police academy, all their training in medical school, all their training in forensics … shot … not even worth a shit in the woods!
No, I really never did have a shred of common sense after all!
Maybe one of them will flip out – you know, totally lose his nut. Maybe just one of them will… know, really know what they're up against. Maybe just one of them will know how to do it, really do it. They'll just say that I attacked them … they'll report that it was either them or me-you know, instant vampire justice ... like all those sick, stupid movies, but this time, one of them will know, and they will be successful, they will know to cut and separate my neck between the third and fourth vertebrae, they will know to pack the uncannily bloodless wound with gunpowder and they will know how to fix the fuse. It will be messy, but it will be final. And they will be heroes, and they will be condemned to their lives of puking tabloid headlines and insulting, inane talk shows!
And I, I will be released ... liberated from ages to come of disbelieving doctors and stunned nurses; of cheap, selfish upwardly mobile ghosts driving Italian sports cars who pretend to be alive. I will be forever excused of playing balance-the-scales with the true homicidal bloodsuckers of this world: The lumber lords, the strip-mining and oil bosses, the investment speculators, the chemical engineers, the pharmaceutical executives – never again to see their shocked, pale faces as the last ounces of their sick, greedy lives are consumed before their eyes like so many ounces of Pepsi! I will no more have to endure living my lives in multiple states of perpetual sexual limbo, bouncing between the radiant truths of my soul, the incandescent desires of my heart, and the strange, slimy clay of my flesh...
And I will be freed at last from the grief of losing another true and real love, of planting the fragile essence of my innermost being into the deepest bed of another's soul for nurturance and warmth and absolute union, only to have that vital trust crumble and dissolve – in a matter of seconds – into a dark, yawning well of vast and cold oblivion. Freed, freed of wanting, wanting more, and more ... always more...
Two-Spirit. Two-Spirit ... Ha! Three-Spirit ... Four-Spirit ... I've lost count.
And all I have to do, now, is wait for the knock at the door and calmly rise and walk across the room, straighten my clothes, smooth my hair behind my right ear, and open that door, and it will only be a moment or two before...I will be gone...but this time I will be gone … done … good-bye … for … ever…
EPILOGUE
PATROLMAN EPSILON RADIOED back that a coroner was needed immediately. He excused the paramedics as they stood poised with their gurney and portable cardiac unit in the doorway of room 12A. No need here, the patrolman assessed, to waste resources. Paramedics were in short supply in this part of Los Angeles. There was no need of pronouncing death upon a body that appeared to be dead for weeks, or even months. The coroner would see to that job easily. Yet the disturbing part of this equation was that a near hysterical 911 call had been received a scant fifteen minutes earlier. The emergency reported was of a recent death, a very recent death. Resuscitation may have been possible, according to the sobbing caller. But the body on the floor appeared as withered and dry as a bundle of willow tinder. It could have been years old and, as the patrolman observed, it seemed to age by the second. There were no traces of recent activity in the room, save for an ancient, battered Packard-Bell tape recorder whirring a tail-end of spooled tape, around and around in futile, lopsided circles. Nothing else. No clothes, no news- papers, no food crumbs, no cigarette ashes. The room appeared absolutely spotless, not even a trace of dust, as if swept clean by a harsh, dry wind. The hair bristled on the back of Patrolman Epsilon's neck. He radioed for Homicide-Special Investigations.
The Detective Captain-in-charge demanded complete privacy in the drab hotel room, save for his partner, a dog-ragged lieutenant desperately pushing his pension years. He walked over to the tape recorder, switched it off, and carefully placed the tape spool in a plastic evidence bag. The uniforms and the coroners were ordered to vacate the scene immediately upon Special Investigations' arrival.
One corner to corner view of the spotless room and Captain Bogan knew that all that would bear fruit in this case was the condition of the body and possibly the spool of tape in his pocket. Knowing instinctively that a search for prints, or hair, or disposables would be useless, he knelt near the twisted corpse and straightened its spine so that the collapsing face raised toward the ceiling. He opened the corpse's shirt where his eyes settled on a large, fresh puckering wound just above the body's left nipple. Then he watched with certain expectation as the wound swiftly dried and closed in upon itself. He closed the corpse's shirt and stood up.
"Get Epsilon in here, George. Tell him to supervise this Doe's removal to the cooler. We have nothing here, nothing anymore."
"Sure, John," the lieutenant replied. The Captain-in-charge walked back across the room, his right hand thrust inside of his jacket pocket, gripping the spool of tape until his knuckles ached. He stood at the window staring intently down at the flashing red and blue lights of the patrolmen's squad cars. Then, slowly raising the creaking hotel window, the Captain lifted himself onto the fire escape and stood erect to carefully scan the city's jagged horizon. The Santa Ana winds gusseted the trouser legs around his worn hide boot shafts and tousled his thick, black mane of hair.
The sun was half an hour away from rising upon another day in the old, downtown garment district. A deep bluish-green cast draped over the dingy brick and stucco buildings which lined 7th Street.
Det. Capt. John Bogan slowly searched the skyline, searching for a brief telltale waver of light, searching for the dim shimmer of a fluttering shadow, piercing the smoky, dull pre-dawn. Searching. Searching. His eyes burned a clear blue flame.
A POOR IMITATION
DAVID N. WILSON
I WRITE THIS KNOWING it will appear as fiction. It amuses me. Years passed in the lonely solitude of shadows multiply the need for amusement.
I have seen things undrea
med, lived as a nightmare breath of wind on nights uncounted, run with the wild wolves 'neath glowing moons and viewed them crimson through predatory eyes. I have dined with poets who are now ash and whitened bone, have courted beauty barely remembered to the world through the poor reflection of words – as if viewed through the cracked and broken glass of time-warped windows. I have shared the blood of kings. The tales I could tell – and perhaps, in time, will tell – are myriad and dark. For now, a recent meeting between myself and one mortal woman fills my mind. I am given to deep thought. Nothing else, save hunger, presses me.
I walked at midnight among the refuse-strewn streets of what passes for civilization in this age. I am not certain that this description pleases me, but I will let it stand. The moon shone, three-quarters full, and bright as silvered sunlight. I was well-fed, content to walk and to think. Such a calm, emotionless moment is a rarity to me, and I savored it like well-aged wine. Then I found the girl. The alley was deserted, or seemed so, and I nearly passed it without a glance. A silver glimmer, brighter than that of moonlight alone, winked from the shadows. Curious, I entered the darkened, cave-like orifice. Garbage flowed over the sides of a rusted garbage bin; bottles and cans littered the oil-stained pavement. My eyes traced shadowed shapes, picking my goal from the deeper ebon, where she cowered beneath the pages of a discarded newspaper.
Her eyes were dull; little of the light of life shone from them, and I was puzzled. My senses, predatory and exact, pick details when most would see a blur. I knew she was young ... perhaps fifteen. Her heartbeat had gained a bit in strength at my approach, but only partially in fear. There was something else in her gaze, in the quivering nervous twitching of her skin, something that drew me.
I reached down gently and parted the papers, pulling them firmly from her grasping hands. I searched her eyes more carefully, searched for an answer in her soul.
"What you want, mister?" she blurted, shifting fear to false bravado in the way of the streets. I nearly smiled. I did not answer. I had yet to pinpoint the itching at my senses that her gaze brought. She squirmed under my scrutiny, her fear returning.
"Hey, you wanna party, mister?" she asked, a pleading, yellowish taint filtering through the white-fear surface of her eyes. It was then that I saw it, and I was stunned. The hunger, it bled from her like sweat from a running horse, like the pus from an infected wound. I recognized the hunger. I share it. And yet there was something wrong.
"You do not appear dressed for a party," I observed, my curiosity thoroughly aroused. I have seen my hunger mirrored in other eyes – can still recall the hunger that drank my own mortality, emptying that part of me I can never truly fill. She hungered, this small, pathetic girl, and yet she lived.
"You know what I mean," she said sullenly, casting her eyes to the ground, then sweeping them upward to take in my form, ending in the depths of my own. She was caught as surely as any rat in a trap. I looked away. The pulsing of her blood called out to me, begged me to drink. I was not ready- not until I understood.
"I assume you wish my body?" I asked, watching her reaction carefully.
"No, I mean, yeah ... but don't you 'wish' mine? I mean, I'm broke, mister, and I'm hungry. You ain't a bad lookin' dude, and I really need some money."
"I see your hunger," I answered, holding out my hand to help her rise. "But tell me, for I see that food is not your concern, what it is that you hunger for?"
"What kind of weird shit is this?" she demanded, trying to free her hand. I held on. "I mean, are you some kind of weird cop, or a pervert, or what?"
"I am neither," I answered, pulling her nearer and calming her with a short sip from my eyes. I saw her mouth gape, then grow slack. I looked away again, but now my own hunger rose, unbidden.
"Tell, me," I commanded, "tell me what it is you seek. Quickly."
"I ... I need a fix, okay mister? I need it bad. Leon, he'll hook me up if I come up with the cash. I just want to hit up- have to. You interested? I … I kinda like you, the clothes and all. You seem so … clean."
I nearly laughed aloud, something long passed from my "life." "You know nothing of me," I told her. "You are telling me that a drug has done this to you? You need this drug more than food – or sleep? Why?"
"I need to be high," she nearly whined. "It makes me stronger – smarter. I make more money when I'm high. I get sick when I'm straight for too long. My skin crawls. I can't stand it then. I have to hit up."
I turned once more and gazed into eyes that were a man-made, cheap imitation of the curse on my soul. I felt her weakness, took from her her hunger, and replaced it with my eyes, only my eyes. She moved close against me, and I folded her into my arms, lost in my own need. Memories, as always, filled me as her blood became mine. Her memories.
I saw the needles, the powder. I knew her fear, her shame. I lived her pain and she learned of mine. I saw the yellow sheen of poison drift from her eyes, followed by the pale, lifeless luster of undead light. Her lips curved into a blissful smile of release.
I supported her for a moment, my mind lost on roadways far away. Lifting her limp form in my arms, I strode back through the empty streets, returning to my own place of rest, her weight no more than a feather to my blood-strengthened arms. I placed her gently in a crate beside my own, cushioned on mounds of richest earth. Covering her, I slept.
For two nights I stood vigil, departing only when the need to feast grew unbearable, dragging at my flesh like a barbed collar and chain. At midnight on the third day, her eyes fluttered, then opened, and she arose, regarding me with quiet awe. Hunger flickered wildly in the newly cleansed depths of her eyes.
"What have I become?" she asked. "What the hell did you do?"
"You should know..." I answered, "You should have seen it in my eyes. I 'hit up.'" Seeming to contemplate my words, she suddenly spoke again. "I'm hungry. It hurts ... what do I do?"
"Feed," I said simply. I watched her melt into the night and I lost myself yet again to contemplation. So many years my curse has haunted my soul; so many hearts have paid the price of my continuance. In all of those years, man has striven, in his own suicidal way, to recreate my curse. As always, when mirroring powers beyond his ken, man has failed. My hunger is pure, my power constant. His drugs ruin him, even as he hungers.
She is more alive now than before, I think. That is an irony worthy even of my own centuries-honed sense of humor. I am the drug that has set her free. She wanted hunger, it is hers. May eternity teach its lessons. I must feed, then sleep. I am not a mystery…I am a truth. It is man, as always, that is the mystery.
THE CROQUET MALLET MURDERS
KEVIN ANDREW MURPHY
IT WAS FRIDAY, and I was running late. Some genius once said the dead travel quickly, but no one travels quickly in LA, and anyway, I'm not dead-I'm cursed. Big difference.
Not that there's anything wrong with being dead, mind you – some of my best friends are ghosts and zombies-but a vampire (or sangroid as we prefer to be called) isn't dead. Cursed, yeah. Allergic to sunlight? Fer sure. But dead? Hell no. At least not by the laws of the Island of California, or the pronouncements of Queen Calafia and Emperor Norton, and those were what mattered.
When you're a vampire, the worst damned thing about Los Angeles is the Ventura Freeway, or should I say the fucking El Camino Real. Father Serra and the rest of his merry monks warded the whole thing so that folk like me – ie. guys who the damn fucking wonderful Holy Mother Church decided were 'evil' – couldn't set foot on it until after midnight. Or fly over it, for that matter, unless you wanted to risk passing out. It's a fucking public nuisance, and I don't like my tax dollars going towards it, whether or not it's some damn historical landmark from the days when Father Serra and his Franciscan bastards ran around the island terrorizing the natives and staking people like me.
But I'm getting off the subject. I was running late, and I didn't have time to ask a griffin to fly me across the Ventura, or to wait for the Witching Hour to start, so I just got up to
cruising velocity and slammed right across. Kinda dangerous, I'll admit, but it did the trick. Pop-in, pop-out.
By the way, I don't turn into a bat, if that's what you're wondering. One of the few perks of my strain of the curse is that I can fly, and in my own body too. No bats or wolves for this bloodsucker. And since that body weighs in at three-hundred plus, I can get a lot of force behind it. No trouble crossing the Ventura – used to be nose-tackle for USC. Of course, that's also why that bastard Martin put the bite on me, not that it did him much good. (I'm glad they staked him too. No one should have to live with this shit, and the only thing worse than being a vampire is being a servitor vampire. You have no idea how humiliating it is to have to grovel at the feet of the asshole who killed you and go "Yassa massa!" to everything he says.)
But anyway, I got to the roof of the Nikon Tower, turned into mist, and slipped on down the vent to The Outcast Club. That's where I work. Big, fancy bar, small restaurant and dance floor, large balcony and live music on weekends. If you know the LA scene, you know the type of place I'm talking about.
I'm the night bouncer, as I bet you could guess. No one messes with a guy my size, especially if he's got vampiric strength, not that there aren't people who might try it at the Outcast Club. We get all types, so long as they're cursed and not welcome at the other clubs: vampires, werewolves, fox spirits, phantoms. All types, and that means all types of trouble. And what I can't handle with sheer brute strength, I can usually manage by just by taking off my shades and letting 'em look into the ol' steely blues. The vampiric fascination does the rest.
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