by Rachel Caine
“Will that stop him?” I say.
“What?”
She must know something that I don’t about the saw-tooth vampire. I’ve never seen her eat. She must be starving herself so she will not appear to be food. Looking at her now, she seems near dead, lethargic and desiccated. “Can you eat semen, will eating semen stop the vampire? Will it stop saw-tooth?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and she looks down and pushes on a thick purple vein that runs along the bones on the top of her hand.
“But you think so?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“I don’t think I can cum.”
“Just do it. Under your blanket, in your hand. I’ll eat it. Please, I’ll eat it.”
“The drugs keep me from getting hard.”
“I want you to try. Do it to my picture.” And she places the red crayon drawing in front of me.
My penis is like a dead mouse. Saw-tooth appears at the door.
“What are you guys watching?”
“A movie,” I say, and I look at the blonde, who is now fully wrapped in her blanket and staring at the picture of herself.
“Did I tell you that I might get out this week?”
“Yes.”
“What are you guys doing?”
“Just sitting here, that’s all.” And then the blonde says, “We need time alone.”
She has bird bones. Hollow. Easy to snap. You could pick her up with one hand. Because her bones are hollow, her bones can be filled. You could fill the hollows of her facial bones with lead, and she would never be able to lift her head. She would crawl across the earth grinding her face into whatever it passed over. Then she would be no flesh, just bone, then bone opened to the hollow, for all the lead to leak out, then she could lift her head again. But her face would be gone, just open bone.
Saw-tooth looks confused. “You don’t want me in the room with you? Why not? Why don’t you want me here with you?” He starts to shake. At first it is barely perceptible. “What’s wrong? What did I do?” He covers his ears with both hands. His arm hair is standing on end and his veins are bulging blue. His neck throbs and his face has turned bright red.
“Nothing,” says the blonde, and she folds her picture and slips it back into her blanket. “Never mind, just come in.”
“What’s wrong? What did I do?” he says again. Saw-tooth extends both arms in a juvenile, questioning gesture. His eyes are open as wide as possible. His mouth seems to chew his tongue and the vibration of his body fills the room, passing through the air and to the walls and the plastic of the chairs, and then it penetrates me. The hairs on my arms start to shake. I can feel the organs in my body.
“Just come in,” says the blonde.
“I wanna know,” he says to the blonde, his eyes fixed on her, his voice the steady volume of polite conversation, “what I did.”
“It wasn’t about you, Jeffrey,” she says, “it was about us.”
Everything in the room seems covered in a cold dust. It makes me itch, makes my skull tingle. Jeffrey stands there, staring at her. I try to speak and all that comes out is the warm air left in my lungs. Nothing in the room changes. The dust seems to be eating into my skin, boring into my muscles. I want to squirm but cannot. Somehow, I get a few words out. “You didn’t do anything,” I say. “Come in and sit down.”
Saw-tooth looks at me, looks past me. It feels like several minutes. He rocks on his heels. “Okay, fine,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say.
The blonde does not speak. She gets up to leave. Saw-tooth sits down in her chair before she can exit the room. He is sweating. I am cold.
“I can try harder next time,” I say to her as she walks out the door. “What if I eat it myself, will that stop, you know?” She turns and looks at me angrily.
“You can’t eat it, it’s for me!” she says, her lips pulled back. Her teeth look blue.
I am afraid to sleep. At night I walk up and down the hallway. I can see everyone lying in their beds. I cannot hear saw-tooth, but I expect to, soon. The loop I walk does not change. The rubber hash marks on my socks do not change. Everything here is curved, blunted. My sink. The central station where the nurses sit. The chairs are all injection molded plastic, rounded. The tables in the social and dining room are round. The social room is also the central room, and it itself is circular. Only two wings break the circles, the male wing on one side, the female wing on the other. I walk loops down and up the male wing. I am thirsty to talk to my ex-wife. The TV room is oval. There is a sign that demands that the patients do not move the chairs. I walk loops up and down the male wing. I don’t know what will happen when I am sleeping, or when I wake up. I continuously imagine saw-tooth, on me in my bed like a giant white spider, so much stronger than he looks, his jaws going for a clench of muscle and bone and sinew on my neck, sucking the life from me. I am afraid to sleep.
I open my eyes as I lie in bed and saw-tooth is standing in my doorway staring at me. I feel cold. I cannot move. I have been lying naked in the snow. I very much wish I could close my door.
“You sleeping?
“No.” My ability to speak surprises me. When he wants, saw-tooth takes my voice.
“You looked like you were sleeping.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“I can’t sleep either. I don’t remember when I slept last. I’m tired but I don’t sleep.”
“How long has that thing been in you?” I ask.
“Always.”
“How do you get it out?”
“It doesn’t come out, you can’t get it out. You can only make it quieter. You don’t want to try to get it out. That is what my mom did. It’s quieter now. I’m better.”
“Were you hungry for her? Did you feel hungry for her?”
“She made it come out. She did it. I can’t control it.”
“Where did it come from?”
“My dad. He gave it to me. He’s dead.”
The blonde, saw-tooth, and I are in the television room. I cannot get warm. Out in the common room, a man in scrubs is singing/screaming “Bohemian Rhapsody.” I don’t know how he is staying warm. I haven’t seen the “actor” all day, and it is bothering me. Last night, lying in bed, every time I shut my eyes I could see saw-tooth. Where was he when he was not speaking to me? I could see him, gnawing on the actor’s spine. I could see him filling his stomach with the actor’s blood. I am so cold I cannot move my arms or legs.
Saw-tooth is talking. “I’m better now, I think, the doctor said they might be able to let me out in the next few days. Do you think I’m better? Do you think they will let me out tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I don’t know what day it is. My head is mud. The blonde does not talk.
“Why are you in here?” says the saw-tooth to the blonde.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” says the blonde.
“You don’t?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, Okay,” says saw-tooth. Even feeling like I do, I wonder if this refusal is going to set him off. His entire body is a compressed coil. He twitches, and with every no a great unwinding takes one more step towards reality. His breastbone protrudes like the air has been sucked from him and he wiggles his fingers. I would be too weak to stop him.
“When you get it, in your room,” says the blonde to me, “keep it in your hand and come find me. Then you can watch me eat it. Keep it warm.”
“Okay, I’ll try harder.”
“I need it,” she says.
Saw-tooth smiles, like he can read our minds.
I need to call my ex-wife. What time is it? I’m not sure that she will pick up a call from an unknown number. I plan to leave a message asking her to pick up the next time I call. She has an out of town number, so I need to have one of the nurses behind the counter place the call. I think they like me well enough, but I feel like doing this is an imposition. The chairs by the phone are difficult to sit in. Th
e cord for the receiver is only a foot long. Maybe eighteen inches. The length makes it very hard to talk on the phone. I realize I do not have her number memorized. I do not have my things. I cannot call. Please come and get me, I say, crying, please, please. I’m not as crazy as the people in here.
“How did you get here?” asks the blonde.
“I was trying to get away from my ex-wife. I wasn’t feeling well, and when I’m not feeling well, I have a hard time around her. Bad things happen when we get together. Things that I don’t want to happen. She brings things out of me.”
“How long were you married?”
“Three years.”
“And she left you?”
“Yes. I’d changed. I wasn’t the same person. It was good that she left.”
I open my eyes. I am in bed and saw-tooth is standing in my doorway. He is rocking his upper body. When he is in my doorway the bed does not feel as slippery. I feel stuck in it.
“Are you awake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think I am better?”
“I don’t know. What are you going to do when you get out of here?”
“Eat.”
“Are you a vampire?”
“My mother said that to me. Said I was a vampire. She said it a couple of times. I don’t know because my father is dead. Do you need me to drink your blood? I’m not supposed to.”
I think for a moment. “Please don’t drink my blood.”
Saw-tooth laughs a ripping laugh. “I like you… I wouldn’t do that!”
“Would you do it if I asked you to?”
“I’m not supposed to do things like that. I’m not supposed to let it out.”
“I just want to know what you want. So I can help. Do you ever do what other people want?”
“No. But I have a hard time controlling what I want… It makes me feel so much better to do what I want.”
“Do you want to watch me sleep?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I deserve you.”
“It’s hard to sleep.”
“It is.”
“The blonde lady told me that you and me and her are all the same.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know what that could mean.”
“She said you would know what it meant. Said she was sure of it.”
There is a window at the end of the hallway on the men’s wing. The window is not literally seamless, but it is seamless. On the wall of the wing, someone is tracing a door that they will never walk through. Jeffrey is a vampire. I am sure of it. “Jeffrey is a vampire,” I say to the doctor. “A heavily medicated vampire. He even confessed it to me. How many of us in here are? We aren’t going to make it out.” She increases my antipsychotics.
I can see Jeffrey, I can see the top of his strawberry head and one of his dried apricot ears as he bites into my neck. I can feel his jagged teeth ripping my artery and a hot flow of blood and his hot little tongue, his tongue stabbing me. I feel myself getting colder and colder, I need more blankets. All the blankets slide off of me.
“What can I do to help you, Jeffrey?”
“Just don’t help it come out.”
“I won’t, I promise.”
“But I think it might come out soon.”
“Why?”
“You know what it feels like to get mad. Like you’ve got this terrible itch, and if you scratch it, it will just get worse. Once there was a woman who couldn’t stop scratching her itch and scratched through to her brain!”
“When I get mad it feels like all of me is on fire. And I can put the fire out, I can pour water on it, and the more water I pour, the better it feels. But later I realize that the fire was really water, and the water was really fire. And that is where the terror comes from. Do you understand?”
Saw-tooth looks almost gleeful. “A doctor once told me that burning and itching were the same thing,” he says.
I will not let myself sleep. I keep my pills under my tongue and spit them out when I can get back to my room. To get them down the sink I have to let the water run for a long time. I realize I can spit them into the toilet.
The nurses do nothing here. I lie in bed and saw-tooth stares at me for hours, terrorizing me. I tell the doctor, I tell the nurses, but they do nothing. Absolutely nothing.
“Jeffrey can’t hurt you,” they say.
“He’s going to kill me. I’m sure of it. He puts visions of it in my mind. Of how he is going to do it.”
“Just be nice to him,” they all say.
“I have no choice,” I say.
I have no choice. I am locked with him in a concrete sarcophagus.
The blonde tells me that she has seen me eat pineapple and that it will make my semen taste good. “We need another way to get rid of the vampire,” I say. “What has he been eating? The actor is gone. The man who was tracing lines on the wall is gone. I didn’t see him leave, but they were mopping the floor the morning I noticed he was gone. When will he get hungry again? He must be getting stronger.”
The only coffee we get in here is decaf. It tastes like acid and iron. It tastes so good I drink cup after cup. “You really like that coffee, Mr. P,” says the staff. The coffee tastes like outside, I say. I cannot contact my ex-wife. I have no parents. I don’t know what I have left outside of here, but I need to get back there. There I can have coffee that is not decaf. There I can get food that does not make me want to vomit.
“How did you get here?” asks the blonde.
“I think I was trying to get away from my ex-wife and realized I never would.”
“You got in here the same way Jeffrey and I got here.”
“I don’t know. Am I like Jeffrey and you? How would anyone know? I’ve never drunk anyone’s blood. Have you?” The blonde turns away.
“Would you rather kill yourself than your ex-wife?”
“Jeffrey, he is a different kind of being. A different kind of thing.”
“You don’t sleep. Jeffrey doesn’t sleep. I don’t sleep.”
“Look at him. Listen to him.”
“You’d totally rather kill yourself than your ex-wife. You’re just like us.” And the blonde laughs.
I cannot sleep. I am walking loops in the hall. Saw-tooth is making yipping sounds in the common room. The blonde is curled in her blanket watching television. Why won’t they let me out of here? I don’t understand. I am not a vampire. I am not a vampire. My ex-wife is still alive. I did not kill her.
“How did I get here?” I ask the doctor.
“I thought you knew how. You told me how”
“I’m not sure that was correct. I thought it was correct, but I’m starting to doubt those memories.”
“Why?”
I’m not sure what to tell her. I want to get better, but I also want to get out. It’s no good if I don’t get better, but I’m not as bad as anyone in here. And I really want to get out. I am normal when I am out. I am not normal when I am in here. Locking me up does not make me normal. The space is so small. The drugs do nothing. I cannot sleep. I am trapped here with a vampire who wants me as his friend. But it might be better for both of us if he just killed me. The blonde thinks that I am a vampire too. I do not know why. I can’t tell if she is screwing with me. I don’t know if she has the capacity. But I have not been able to cum for her, and she is angry. I don’t know what kind of thing she is.
“Did my ex-wife put me in here?” I ask. “I keep trying to remember exactly what happened, but I can’t. She should have put me here. But I can’t remember if she did or if I did.”
“The doctor put you here.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody is gone,” I tell the doctor. She sits there, gleaming.
“He was released.”
“How?”
“He is better.”
“How? He sang Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ the day before he left.”
“He liked to sing.”
“Did Jeffrey kill him?”
“No,” she says, laughing.
I am wearing thin, blue, paper scrubs, like the first day I was admitted. Everything is linoleum, plastic, or painted cinder block. I live in a concrete sarcophagus. I begin to rip my shirt off. I begin screaming.
“I hate these fucking clothes. I want a T-shirt. Can’t you please get me a T-shirt?”
“Security!” calls the nurse.
“Where am I going to go?” I ask, still ripping. “I’m wearing a piece of fucking paper! My pants are always falling off. I am not human! I am not human! What do I need to do? I just want a fucking T-shirt!”
I am surrounded by large men. I can feel a great heat through my body, swelling, the first heat I can remember in days, maybe weeks. I would like to kill them all. They drag me naked through the ward, but this is nothing new. Everyone can always see everything here. Some people look at me. Some don’t.
I open my eyes. I feel absolutely flat, dimensionless. Saw-tooth is not gnashing at my window. I was hoping he would be there.
Saw-tooth and the blonde are in the TV room when I enter. Saw-tooth is sitting at the blonde’s feet. She is stroking his hair. It gives me a feeling of comfort.
“What are you two doing?” I ask.
“We’re the only three left here,” says the blonde. “No one else has come in. It’s just us left.”
“Left for what?” I say.
“I’m still gonna get out,” says saw-tooth, and then, “Where are we?”
“Maybe we’ll be here for a long time,” says the blonde.
“This is where they keep vampires, Jeffrey,” I say.
“Are you both vampires too?”
“Yes, Jeffrey,” says the blonde.
“Yes, Jeffrey,” I say. I feel my teeth with my finger for a change, for something jagged. “This is where they keep vampires, Jeffrey, this is where they keep vampires until they aren’t vampires anymore.”
“Will we get better? The doctors tell me I’m getting better.”
