Nocturnal

by Mark Allen

  One year passed into another. Danae kept singing at the club. I kept collecting for Gino. Thomas was still a prick, and Aldo was getting old, tired. Gino just kept being Gino. More gray hair, more lines on his face.

  I started getting a hint of trouble on the horizon. Thomas became quiet, withdrawn. He still followed orders, but his eyes were getting dangerous. After years being around dangerous men, I knew when things were about to explode.

  I tried talking to Aldo about it. He told me if Thomas was going to make trouble, the best thing to do was stay out of the way. I argued that any trouble Thomas made would be directed at me. Aldo just shrugged, shook his head sadly, and told me he was retiring. Gino had already okayed it, and he could not protect me any longer.

  I started carrying a loaded revolver that very day. Even though I was a gangster, I always had my guys backing me. Like I said before, most people just paid the money to keep in business and avoid trouble. Old man Scarpaccio notwithstanding, high-order violence was not my strong suit.

  So Danae and I made a plan. If Thomas made trouble, it meant an all-out war against Gino. Aldo would be of no use. I found out later that Aldo had made a side deal with Thomas to stay out of it if Thomas would simply not kill him in return. I am sure that it sounded like a good deal to Aldo at the time.

  Poor bastard.

  Anyways. Back to the plan. I had found out that interracial marriage was legal in France. Had been since 1833. Both Danae and I had been saving our money for months, squirreling it away. For now we had a concrete goal. We were going to elope, book passage on a steamer ship to France, get married, and live happily ever after.

  Unfortunately, happily ever after only happens in fairy tales.

  One week later, Thomas walked into Gino’s place with three men from a rival gang Thomas had struck an alliance with. They stood at the table where Gino was eating his eggplant parmesan.

  Thomas pulled out his revolver, and put a round right through Gino’s face. The old man tipped over backwards in his chair and spilled onto the floor. Thomas then put two more rounds into his chest.

  Aldo was sitting at the bar eating some minestrone. Thomas put the gun on him as he walked towards the exit. Aldo sat where he was, his hands up. Thomas got close, told him to stay out of it since he was retired, and eat his soup. Aldo turned back and put another spoonful in his mouth. Then Thomas shot him in the back of the head, splashing Aldo’s brains into his soup bowl.

  All the noise finally brought the fat cook out from the kitchen. He froze in shock behind the bar. Thomas told him to back into the kitchen. The cook disappeared. Then Thomas and his new associates left the club.

  And came looking for me.

  As Gino and Aldo were being executed, I was in bed with Danae in a small room on the second floor of Bumpy’s place. Bumpy had softened his stance regarding our relationship once he realized we really cared for each other.

  Bumpy was a good sort. I always liked him.

  An urgent knock came on the door. Bumpy himself stuck his head in before we could respond. His face was drawn, his forehead sweaty. He relayed the news.

  I threw the sheets off me, grabbed my clothes. Danae did the same. I told her we had to leave town, head to France right then, that night. I told her to pack a bag, bare essentials only. I had to get back to the club, to my room off the kitchen. I had over four thousand dollars in cash hidden under the floorboards in the corner. And this was when four thousand dollars was a lot of money. I told her to go out front. I would use the fire escape. We would meet back in one hour. There was a freighter leaving for Europe on the morning tide. Three hours tops and we’d be aboard, making good our escape.

  Happily ever after, right?

  She was scared, of course. She could barely hold her hands still long enough to button her blouse. I smiled, reassured her everything was going to be fine. I had no intention of fighting Thomas. If Thomas wanted control, that was fine by me. I just wanted out.

  She nodded, tried to smile back at me, but failed to be convincing. She put her shoes on while I tucked in my shirt. She smiled and waved as I threw my tie around my neck, allowing it to drape down both sides. I grabbed my coat and threw open the window. She closed the door behind her as I climbed out.

  Out on the fire escape, with her safely on her way, I took a deep breath to calm myself. Gino was dead. Aldo was out of the picture. There was nothing standing between Thomas and me.

  I have to admit, I was afraid.

  Once my own pulse began to stabilize, I climbed down the swaying metal ladder and jumped the few feet down onto the dirty, uneven alleyway. It was raining that night, and the cobblestones were slippery. I stumbled, went to one knee.

  I stood up and took about three steps, then heard someone call my name. I froze in place. I recognized the voice.

  Thomas.

  I turned slowly, keeping my hands very still. Thomas and a thug I had never seen before stepped forward out of the shadows. A third guy materialized out of the gloom at an angle behind me and moved slowly to the right.

  Ambush. And they had me dead to rights in a crossfire.

  Holding his gun on me, he cordially informed me of Gino’s untimely death, and of Aldo’s, then informed me that from now on, he would be in charge of things. He asked me what I thought about that.

  I told him congratulations. It was all his. I had no intention of interfering. I just wanted out. I would leave Hoboken right then, that night, never to return. I promised I would be out of the country by sunrise.

  He smiled a cruel smile, asked me if I really thought that would happen. He had me where he wanted me, and giving me a pass was not in the cards. I decided I would die fighting.

  I moved diagonally to my left, while reaching into my coat pocket for my gun. Thomas fired, missed. I got my gun out, brought it up, fired.

  Once.

  Twice.

  I missed both shots.

  Then it felt like I got hit in the chest with a sledgehammer.

  Stunned, I staggered backwards, fell down into the mud and drainage that trickled down the center of the alleyway. My gun clattered to the ground, out of reach, useless.

  Thomas and his men walked up on me. I will never forget lying there, looking up at a black velvet sky, my chest on fire, my breath coming in ragged gasps as my lungs filled with blood. And then those three faces appeared, hovering over me, angels of death. Not what I wanted to see in my last moments on earth.

  I croaked Danae’s name.

  Thomas assured me he would personally inform her of my unfortunate demise. And that afterwards, he was going to find out what it was about her I was so attracted to.

  Enraged, I tried to sit up, but could not. One of the thugs asked if they should kill me with a second shot, but Thomas said no, no need to waste the bullet.

  Let me suffer.

  They turned and walked away. Leaving me where I lay, like a piece of human garbage.

  So this was how my life would end.

  All my decisions, all my choices, all my actions, had lead me to point, that alleyway, that night. And all my hopes and dreams, all my pursuits of better days, of a peaceful life in France with Danae, flitted away with each drop of blood that flowed out of me.

  And I realized how stupid I had been, about all of it. A life of crime always ended one of two ways: either jailed for life, or like where I was right then, dying violently and alone.

  Tears of rage ran down the sides of my face. I kept trying to get up, but it was like someone had nailed me to the ground. As my eyes rolled around in my head, I saw the gloom and shadows swirling both from the amber lights of the rooms and buildings nearby, but also from my own fading consciousness.

  I sensed movement, vague and ambiguous. Then I realized someone was moving towards me. I assumed Thomas and his goons had come back to finish the job, or to just taunt me while I died.

  But no.

  It looked like a woman. Swirling, silent, ethereal. Beautiful. An angel, perhaps? But no. Of course,
no. She was quite real, just no longer of mortal flesh.

  My vampire mother.

  Her skin was pale; the palest I had ever seen. White. And thin as gossamer. I could see tiny blue blood vessels spreading upwards across her cheeks. She looked freshly young and impossibly old at the same time. She walked steadily towards me, but she moved in a way I had never seen a woman move. Not faster, not slower. Just... different.

  Unnatural, somehow. Like she was not walking at all, but gliding.

  I found out later that she had simply happened into the alleyway just as I was jumping to the ground. She had hidden in the shadows and had watched events play out. She did not interfere. Not her business.

  She showed no fear or angst as she knelt down beside me. She seemed well acquainted with the sight of blood. My strength was slipping away quickly. And yet, she did not make haste. She looked me up and down like she was examining a specimen, with a cool sense of detachment.

  She took my dripping red hand, closed her eyes. She gasped in surprise, breathed in, her breasts rising against the thin material of her blouse. She said she knew I was a criminal, but that there was good in me, too. She said I was dying, but what if I could get revenge on the men who had shot me? How would I like to live forever, and never have to worry about dying again?

  Is that something I would want?

  I could not speak at that point; I was too weak. I simply closed my eyes and nodded once.

  Her eyes sparkled in the night, glassy black, bottomless, soulless orbs. Her mouth opened and I saw fangs. She descended and sank her teeth into my neck. It happened so fast, I did not have time to feel the pain. After she had drunk from me, she cooed me like a mother with a frightened child. She soothed me and stroked my hair. She assured me that death would be only temporary, that one must die in order to be reborn.

  And that is the last thing I heard as a mortal man.

  The whole vampire motif of having to remain dead for three days and rising on the third night as a vampire is bunch of hooey made up by religious fanatics in Europe in the Middle Ages. It was conjured up to be an unholy correlation with the scripture of Jesus Christ rising from the dead on his third day. It was just another way to push the narrative that vampires were of demonic origin and inherently evil. Fear is the most efficient form of enslavement.

  True, I have met some vampires who actually fit that bill. But most of us just want to be left alone. And for the record, I never went to hell. I do not remember ever meeting the Devil, and I have never, to the best of my knowledge, ever seen or been seen by a demon.

  Just wanted to put that out there.

  The reason why I intervened on your behalf should be obvious by now. You are a good man in a dangerous line of work. And you are my great, great Grandson. I could not sit idly by when I had to power to stop a terrible fate from befalling you. If you were a bad person, a drug dealer like you pretended, I would have let nature take its course.

  You look outraged. You should not be. Would I have stood by and let you die if you had knowingly followed a dark path, even though you ware my direct descendant?

  You bet I would. And I will tell you why.

  Every man must take responsibility for his actions, his choices, his decisions, his life. You make good choices, you reap the rewards. To the victor go the spoils. But the flip side is if you make bad choices, you shoulder the burden; you take the blame.

  But either way, everyone gets what he or she works for.

  I woke up in a morgue, disoriented and quite naked. I was resting on a slab in the city morgue. This was the next evening. A new vampire does not get bitten and change all in one night. It takes closer to twenty-four hours. The change from human to vampire is a process, and like I said before, you have to die before you can be reborn.

  I took the first of many nightly gasps of cool air flowing into deflated lungs, filling them with earthly atmosphere, and filling my chest with pain. I tried to move, but I was stiff, like I had been in bed a week. I finally swung my legs over the side of the coroner’s table and pushed myself into a sitting position.

  I looked around the room. Things seemed different somehow. Colors seemed to be more muted, but I saw clearly in the dark room. There was no light source. I looked over my shoulder, saw a closed door that lead out to the entry room. Light shown a yellow sliver under the door. Someone sat at a desk outside, scribbling reports and filling out forms. I knew he was there. I could smell his scent; could hear his scribbling as the pencil brushed across the paper. And internally, I felt a rhythmic beat.

  Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

  It was the beat of the Coroner Assistant’s heart.

  New and powerful instincts kicked in. I leapt off the table and landed on my feet, nimble as a cat. I scanned the room, my eyes adapting remarkably well to the darkness. My tongue flicked across my new fangs.

  And then I saw her, the mysterious woman from the night before. Standing still and small, for she was a petite thing, in a far corner. She watched me, smiling with approval. She nodded encouragingly.

  I asked her exactly what was happening? How could this be? What had she done to me?

  She held a bundle under her arm, pressed tightly to her body. She told me I would need these and held out the bundle, which proved to be a change of clothes and an old pair of shoes.

  I glanced down at myself. I was standing naked in front of a strangely beautiful woman. And yet I had no feeling about it one way or the other. No pride, no fear, no shame, no arousal. It just did not seem to matter. The bullet hole in my chest was healed, scarred over. I felt no pain. I did notice my skin had the same pallor as hers. She assured me this was normal.

  As I dressed, she explained in that strange accent of hers that she had done what I had asked. She had made sure the gangster’s bullets did not kill me. I had died, yes, but I now lived again. But this new existence came with a strange and terrible price.

  I was vampyre now. Like her.

  As vampires, we would sustain ourselves by drinking blood, human blood. We would never get sick . We would never grow old. We would never die. We would heal from injuries, regrow severed limbs.

  We were stronger than humans, much stronger. And faster. Oh, so much faster. But though we could not die, we could be destroyed. Sunlight was Death to us, and we had to, um, “keep our heads”, as it were, if we were to survive. Decapitation will kill me just as dead as sunlight.

  I tucked in my shirt. She asked me if I was hungry. I said yes. She smiled and suggested we exit out the back. We stepped out into an alleyway. I stopped as my senses became bombarded with the sounds, smells, and tastes of the world outside.

  I staggered back initially. It was overwhelming.

  She knew what I was experiencing, and reassured me. She was reading my emotions, my mood changes. She waited a moment for me to take everything in. When I finally relaxed and stood straight again, we went forward towards the street.

  We walked down the street, mingling with the humans. No one seemed to notice us, our pale skin, our hungry stares. She explained that the hunger was an instinctive thing. And she educated me on the basics of this new Life in the Shadows.

  We did not need to feed every night, and we certainly did not have to drain a human to the point of death. If the victim died, we had to sever the head from the body, otherwise that human turned into a vampire that we would be responsible for.

  I asked her how that was possible: that our bite and death would make a new vampire? She replied that it simply was, and had always been so. She did not require a deeper more detailed explanation. She knew it to be fact, accepted it. She suggested I do the same.

  We moved on, down dimly lit streets, scuttling through back alleyways, slinking close to the shadows, slithering into the seedier side of Hoboken. The neighborhood where I had grown up.

  All the buildings looked familiar, and yet somehow different. I recognized the tenement building I had been raised in. The building my mother still lived in. I stopped and looked upward at the
third story apartment where I knew my mother still abided. An orange glow emanated from the window, warming the night around it. I saw a shadowed figure, a woman, step to the window and pause as she looked outside, then pulled the curtains closed with a flick of her wrists that sent the cheap cotton material fluttering.

  It was my Mom.

  I had not seen her in a while. Quite a while, actually. She had aged beyond her years. She was a little heavier now, her hair gray. Ashen skin, worry lines across her face, her eyes rheumy from stress and heartbreak, her back mildly stooped from the weight of the world she carried. I saw, sensed and knew all of this in an instant. And I knew, with a heavy heart, that I had wronged her. I had added to the burdens of her life, that indeed, much of the burden she bore, she bore because of me. How I had disappointed her, wounded her, abandoned her.

  She Who Was With Me read my mind. She admonished me against stopping in to see her. I told She Who Was With Me that I needed to see her, however briefly, to apologize to her, to explain – well, explain what? Came my mentor’s terse response. She told me my appearance, my deathly pallor, sharp fangs that I kept running my tongue over, and my black glassy eyes would do nothing but terrify my mother. It would shock and horrify her. A bad situation made worse, so to speak.

  The vampire beside me gravely warned me to not contact any of my mortal friends, contacts, family, or lovers. Even Danae. I told her I must see Danae. Danae was why I had chosen this path rather than Death. She stood firm, instructing me I must have the strength to make a complete break. My old life was over. A new one had begun.

  The need to feed pulled at me again, became uppermost in my mind.

  A word about the Hunger is in order here. Again, do not believe the baloney you see in the movies or on TV. Hunger does not turn us into salivating maniacal monsters any more than we can turn into bats. But it does become one’s primary motivation.