Blood Oranges

by Kathleen Tierney

  But me, for the first couple of years I dealt with the boredom by hanging out in the Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street. The librarians didn’t mind, just so long as they didn’t catch me sleeping. They knew me by name, and every now and then, this one particular librarian, she’d recommend a book she thought I might like; usually, she was right. I couldn’t have a library card, of course, since I didn’t have a permanent address (never mind it cost a hundred bucks). Anyhow, there you have it, the mystery of my literacy solved. Also, the Athenaeum’s restroom was a good place to wash up every now and then.

  The heroin didn’t come along until three years after I took to the streets. Not a long story there, and I won’t try to make it one. It was a snowy day in November, and I was camped out in an old textile mill, wrapped in stolen U-Haul moving blankets and a sleeping bag I’d found somewhere. And Jim, this mostly Portuguese dude, with a green Mohawk and duct tape on his boots, he told me he could keep me warm. He cooked my first dose over his shiny silver Zippo, and shot it into my arm. Next day, he came back to the mill and taught me how to do the deed for myself, and sometimes he’d even get generous and slip me a free Baggie, if I’d blow him or jerk him off. He knew there was no turning back for me, and I knew it, too. Jim, he gave me wings (that was, by the way, drug slang a long time before Red Bull came along). He showed me how to fly.

  I stopped going to the library. I almost stopped eating. Whatever money I could scrounge went to smack. The days blurred together. But it was good. Or at least it was better. Lots of times I thought I’d get lucky and OD, or get a bad batch—a ten-cent pistol, in junk-speak. I never scored from anyone but Jim, and his junk was always clean. I took up with this chick from Wickford who was also a junky. We were both always too fucked up for sex, but it was good to be close to someone on the freezing nights. Her name wasn’t Lily, but that’s what she liked to be called, so that’s all I ever called her.

  And now, at long fucking last, I’m coming to what the vampire referred to as the “interesting portion” of my sad, sad tale of woe and misfortune. The night one of the nasties came creeping up from the sewers and the subbasement and the basement of our abandoned mill by the Woonasquatucket River. We’d both shot up, and were cuddled together in our grimy blankets. There was a smoky barrel fire stoked with pilfered plywood and two-by-fours crackling and burning brightly, so we had a little heat, a little light. The redbrick and mortar walls were washed with dancing shadows, and watching them caper and prance about made for an entertaining diversion. Near as we ever got to the movies or television. Point is, neither of us saw it coming. The ghoul, I mean. Didn’t even hear its hooves on the concrete floor. One moment, Lily was there in the blanket with me, next moment she just fucking wasn’t.

  I turned my head, slo-mo like, because everything’s slow motion when you’re that fucked up. And there it was, crouched over her. I knew she was already dead, considering it had bitten off the top of her skull and was making short fucking work of her brain. There was blood everywhere. I’d never seen so much blood, and I’d seen a fair bit of bleeding in my sixteen years on earth. Far as I could tell, the bastard hadn’t noticed me. Or it just didn’t care, was just saving me for dessert. Oh, by the way, I call them ghouls after a story by H. P. Lovecraft, “Pickman’s Model,” because they sort of look like the corpse-eating, subterranean creatures he described—shaggy, gangly, hunchbacked beasts with vaguely canine faces, wicked overbites, and the sort of hooves that horses have. Not cloven, that other sort. I have no idea what they call themselves, if they call themselves anything at all. Maybe the demonologists have a name for them, but I ain’t no demonologist and never will be.

  I pulled one of the burning boards from the barrel and beat the thing to death. Shouldn’t have been that easy, but I think maybe the ghoul was too dumbfounded to fight back. Five minutes later, it was sprawled there by Lily’s corpse. I held her all night, and the next morning I burned both the bodies on a rubbish heap out behind the mill. I don’t think anyone else saw any of this shit. No one even asked where Lily had gone. It was like that. My compatriots came and went, and the disappeared were just a fact of life.

  And that’s how it began. Suddenly, I knew there were monsters in the world. Real monsters, straight out of the storybooks. And one of them had come along and killed Lily, whom I might have loved, if I hadn’t always been so wired up on the Judas. After that night, everything changed. Well, except I stayed on the streets and was still a junky. So, strike that. Everything didn’t change, but suddenly I found I had a murky sort of purpose. The night after I burned Lily and the ghoul, I went down into the basement of the mill and found another one of the ugly sons of bitches. It was sleeping in a corner, huddled in an oily heap of rags and burlap. I cut its throat with a broken whiskey bottle and left it there. I wrote Lily’s name in blood on the wall above it. And I signed my name. So, that was the night I started the war. I suspect all I wanted was for them to get pissed and kill me, too. I certainly didn’t have anything to live for, except the rush from shooting up. But that’s not what happened. Oh, they came after me. But I kept killing them. It was the first thing I’d ever been good at, and the more I killed, the better I got. At first, I killed to get even. I killed and called it payback. But after a while, I was just killing because it felt good.

  Pretty soon, no one wanted to be around me, and I didn’t see much of anyone but Jim. I don’t think the others knew about the monsters. I just figure they all saw something spooky in my eyes that made them uneasy, and some of us were more interested in staying alive than others. I didn’t hold it against them. I did, however, do a pretty respectable job of making sure the nasties stopped snacking on street kids and bums and winos.

  And that’s how it started.

  I know. Not as cool as Wolverine or the Incredible Hulk’s origin stories. But it’s all I have. The vampire already knew most of it the night she dragged me back to that moldy basement and dumped me on the dirty mattress. Though, while I lay there hurting, vomiting, wishing she’d be done with it and do me, there was this one incident she insisted on coming back to again and again. I’ll get to that shortly.

  * * *

  “You’re not going to bleed to death,” she said. “I took care of the stitches myself. You’re fortunate it didn’t hit an artery.”

  “Yeah. Lucky me.”

  By this time, seemed like she’d been yammering at me forever, and I asked, “Isn’t it dawn yet? Aren’t you up past your bedtime?”

  “You still haven’t looked at me, Quinn.”

  I wiped at my mouth and muttered something else about sunrise, which I prayed to that Big Daddy in the Sky Catholic God—in whom I do not actually believe—that sunrise truly was imminent.

  “Why haven’t you looked at me?” she asked.

  “I’ve seen more than my share of vampires, lady,” I told her. “So, you’re just going to have to forgive my lack of enthusiasm on that count.” But that’s another thing about the undead, and I’ve always figured it was because they don’t cast reflections: They love to be looked at, and they get positively fucking gaga if you tell them what you see. Even if you’re honest, and the best you’ve got to say is that you’ve seen much worse. Or much better. Either way makes them happy. I think they just want to be reassured they still have faces.

  “I did save your life,” she reminded me, and now her voice was all silk, all peaches and cream.

  “That remains open to debate,” I replied, just then realizing some of the mold stains on the mattress were actually bloodstains. I also saw a cluster of fleshy white mushrooms sprouting from a crack in the floor, and they seemed to glow faintly in the gloom.

  “Please,” she said. “Look at me.”

  “Do you say please very often?” I asked her, then rolled over onto my right side, turning my back to her. I’d rather stare at the puke pail than give her—give it—the glance it so desperately desired.

  “No,” she replied, though I hadn’t expected an answer to what I�
��d considered a rhetorical question. And I especially hadn’t expected the detached sort of resignation in her voice, resignation and maybe a hint of melancholy, too. Like a child who’s finally realized it’s not getting what it wants. I admit I felt the tiniest, most useless twinge of satisfaction, that even in the sorry state I’d found myself, I still was able to cause the creature discomfort.

  “Fortunately, I’d not expected gratitude from the likes of you, Miss Quinn.”

  “Miss Quinn? Thought we were on a first-name basis,” I muttered, “you having saved my life and all.” She didn’t take the bait, and for a moment I squinted silently at the pail and the shitty gray wall beyond it. I spotted more of the tiny white luminescent mushrooms. Now that I’d noticed them, they seemed to be everywhere.

  “Appears you’d have it otherwise,” she said, and then she changed the subject. “Aren’t you wondering what the beast was doing so far south?”

  And now that she mentioned it, yeah, I was. I’d been wondering that since I first got word of the attack over the police broadband. “Never saw a loup this far south,” I told her. “Or so near Providence, for that matter.”

  See, the local dogs, they tend to stick close to Woonsocket, or what’s left of Woonsocket, a rundown strip of factories and crumbling mills hugging the polluted waters of the Blackstone River in the northwest corner of the state. Woonsocket has been loup-garou turf since way back in the seventeenth century, when they arrived with the French-Canadians who first settled the area. And, usually, they keep to themselves. The dogs, that is. They’re not the sort to mingle.

  “Any thoughts on that?” I asked.

  “None. Unless it was fate,” she replied.

  This being a fairly cryptic statement, and the vampire having set my mind to chewing at the problem despite the pain and chills and nausea, I raised my head and looked at her. Immediately, she smiled and glanced shyly at the floor, the floor or her bare feet.

  “What do you mean by that? Fate.”

  Now, that’s what I said, and I did want to know, but mostly I was thinking how she wasn’t in the least what I’d expected. You don’t see many vampire children, like maybe there’s some sort of prohibition against them or something. But she didn’t look much older than eight or nine. I knew better, how looks can be deceiving and all. She was an old one, at least two, two hundred and fifty years. Only a few strands of pale, gossamer hair remained on her scalp, and her skin was getting that jaundiced look that afflicts the more venerable of the bloodsuckers. Her canines and incisors, the color of old ivory, protruded very slightly over her cyan lower lip, and her nails were long and brown, two other signs of advancing age.

  Oh, there’s another myth. Forget all that crap you might have read about immortality and vampires who are thousands of years old, who saw medieval Europe and ancient Egypt and Rome, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and whatever the fuck. Not true. Sure, they get more time than living, breathing people, but not that much more. Three or four centuries tops. Then, well, I’m not sure. They just seem to fade away. Maybe there’s only so much walking around a reanimated cadaver can endure before it finally comes apart at the seams. Even now, I really don’t know, and if I’ve ever met anything that does, it hasn’t bothered telling me.

  I gawked at her, marveling—even through the agonies—at how something could simultaneously be so loathsome and so beautiful. She could have been cast from porcelain. She sat on a tall wooden stool, a strange doll wrapped in an antique gown of threadbare, moth-gnawed lace and crinoline. I thought she might shatter if she tumbled off the stool and landed on the floor. I didn’t even blink until my eyes began to water.

  “A first-name basis,” she said, “that would require your knowing my name.”

  “I suppose it would,” I replied, and I wiped at my eyes, but I didn’t look away.

  “Mercy,” she said. “My name’s Mercy Brown.”

  When I laughed, she raised her head and fixed me with those inky black eyes. Vampires, they’ve got eyes like a shark’s, black and nothing but black. Eyes you can fall into, and never find your way out again, eyes like a labyrinth, and you just fucking know there’s a minotaur waiting in there. “No you’re not,” I said. “To start with, you’re too old. For another, they dug up Mercy Brown and burned her heart.”

  Another aside. Though lots of people don’t know about it, New England has its own vampire legends—Rhode Island, in particular—just like Hungary and Transylvania and places like that. Mostly, these tales date back to the 1890s, and mostly they’re just stories superstitious Swamp Yankees hauled over from the “Old Country.” Mostly, these so-called vamps were nothing more than tuberculosis victims. Sometimes, the disease would wipe out a whole family, as was the case with a girl named Mercy Brown. But there were stories of specters rising from their graves and stealing away the health of those they’d once loved. Finally, after Mercy’s sister and mother died, her father and some of the townsfolk in Exeter, where this all went down, they exhumed Mercy’s body, found the corpse suspicious, cut out her heart and liver, and burned them on a stone not far from her grave. The doctor who’d attended Mercy during her illness, and who was also present during the exhumation, correctly diagnosed her condition as “galloping consumption,” but no one much listened to him. Supposedly, the Mercy Brown affair was one of the things that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula. Anyway, you can still see her grave in the Chestnut Hill Cemetery. You can even see the stone where the organs were burned to ash. But if you believe Mercy was a vampire, you might as well start believing in Bigfoot and the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.

  “You ain’t her,” I told the vampire.

  “I’m fond of the name,” she responded, very quietly, so quietly I almost missed the words.

  “You could have said that.”

  “Does it make any difference? Call me the Bride of Quiet, if you prefer. Others do.”

  And no, I suppose she had a point. It didn’t make much difference what I called her or what she wanted me to call her. At that particular and miserable juncture I couldn’t imagine myself going around calling her the “Bride of Quiet.” I’d like to think I have my limits (all evidence to the fucking contrary).

  “It’s rude to stare,” she said, and I forced myself to turn away and lie down again. I was honestly surprised she’d not asked me to offer my opinion of her appearance. It makes me nervous when the nasties deviate from the script. My heart was thudding like a jackhammer in my chest, and I stunk of flop sweat, and I knew there was more to it than the withdrawal. I’ve heard stories of people dropping dead at their first sight of a vampire. It’s an exaggeration I can almost buy into.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. I actually did. I actually fucking apologized to a vampire.

  “No such mea culpa necessary,” she said, delivering the words with an excruciating primness.

  “Also, that’s my bag, right there by your feet.”

  “Yes, it is, Quinn,” and she glanced down at it.

  “But you’re not going to toss it over here,” I said, and it goes without saying I was much too weak to try for it myself.

  “No. Not yet. Maybe later.”

  “Well, you ought to know I don’t feel like I have a whole lot of later left.”

  “You won’t die,” she said, sounding awfully goddamn sure of herself. “At least, you won’t die from the heroin, or from the dog bite.”

  Which brought us back around to why she’d taken on a monster six times her weight, then brought me back to this dump, why I was still talking and drawing breath and hurting like I’d never hurt before. I didn’t say that, but I knew she knew that’s what was going through my head.

  “Quinn, you stole the one thing left that was precious to me. You hunted her down, and you murdered her.”

  “That’s what I do.” Probably not the smartest reply, but it’s what I said.

  “In my eyes, Quinn, this makes mere death a kindness you don’t deserve. Even the curse in the werewolf’s bite, tha
t doesn’t make us even by half.”

  “So, why don’t you tell me what that’s going to take?” But before she could answer, I was hugging the pail again. My guts didn’t seem to care there was nothing left in me to come back up. When I was done, she resumed.

  “Dear,” she said, “long ago I made a wager and lost, and with you I may be able to settle that debt.”

  “You told me you needed a weapon,” I replied and coughed, my throat raw and burning.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Maybe you just want to get even. With me, I mean, not with whoever you lost this bet to.”

  “Yes, Quinn. Maybe I want that, too. It would be reasonable, would it not? After your crimes against me and mine. Fair is fair.”

  I turned my head towards her, and her black eyes were still trained on the floor. She was smiling now, thin blue lips pulled back to reveal those fangs that reminded me of netsuke carvings yellowed by the passage of time. I got a glimpse at her tongue, even bluer than her lips. There are snakes and lizards with tongues that color.

  “I haven’t seen much fair in my lifetime,” I told her.

  “But your lifetime has been so very short, Quinn. And it’s true, I will admit, some of us are more prone to misfortune than are others.”

  I made myself stare at my green canvas bag instead of staring at her. She terrified me, even after all I’d seen. Worse yet, she made me want her, which is one of those things vampires excel at, forcing desire on anyone unlucky enough to get a glimpse of them. I don’t even think they do it on purpose, not most times. They radiate this fucked up sexual magnetism, no matter how monstrous she or he—it—might be, and the creature on the stool was one of the most monstrous I’d ever come across. She turned my stomach, and filled me with fear, and with awe, and made me want her, never mind how perverse the urge might be. But, I will say, not nearly as much as I wanted that bag, the contents of that bag. Right then, I’d never wanted anything more.