The Society of S

by Hubbard, Susan

  “Vampire,” I said.

  “Vampire Griselda joins the Lounge Wizards,” he announced.

  The clues seemed too easy to me. Wizard Lemur, the one who’d announced me, also read the clues; he was the group’s leader. Each time he read one, I moved instinctively as it directed. “Where the tallest tree doth grow / To its right side you must go.” That sort of thing. After a few minutes, I felt they were all watching me.

  The treasure turned out to be a six-pack of beer hidden in a pile of dead branches. As I lifted the beer, the others cheered. “Vampire Griselda secures the treasure,” Lemur said. “Which we hope she’ll share.”

  I handed him the six-pack. “I never drink,” I said, “beer.”

  The wizards took me home with them.

  I rode with Lemur (whose real name was Paul) and his girlfriend, Beatrice (real name Jane) in Jane’s beat-up old Volvo. They looked like brother and sister: multicolored hair cut in layers, skinny bodies, even the same frayed jeans. Jane was a college student. Paul had dropped out of school. I told them I’d run away from home. They said it was cool if I “crashed” at their place — an old house in downtown Asheville. They said I could have Tom’s room, since he was on tour with his band.

  And crash is what I did, almost falling into the bed I’d been assigned. My body felt weary and excited at the same time, tingling from my head to my toes, and all I wanted to do was to lie still and take stock. I remembered my father describing his change of state, how he’d felt weak and sick, and I wondered why I didn’t feel weak. Maybe because I’d been born half vampire?

  Would I need to bite more humans? Would my senses become more acute? I had a hundred questions, and the only one who could answer them was miles and miles away.

  The days passed in an odd blur. At times I was intensely aware of every detail of the place and people around me; at others, I could focus only on one small thing, such as the blood pulsing under my skin; I could see the blood move through my veins with each beat of my heart. I stayed still for long periods of time. At some point I noticed that my talisman — the little bag of lavender — no longer hung from my neck. The loss didn’t matter much to me; one more familiar thing was gone.

  The house was poorly heated and sparsely furnished with battered furniture. Paint was spattered on the walls, especially in the living room, where someone had begun to paint a mural of a dragon breathing fire, and quit before the dragon’s tail and feet were finished. Others had penciled in telephone numbers where the rest of the dragon should have been.

  Jane and Paul accepted me without questions. I told them my name was Ann. They tended to sleep late, until one or two in the afternoon, and stay up until four or five a.m., usually smoking marijuana. Sometimes they dyed their hair, using Kool-Aid; Jane’s current color, lime green, made her look like a dryad.

  Jane’s school was “out on winter break,” she told me, and she meant to “play hard” until classes resumed. Paul apparently lived this way all the time. Some days I barely saw them; others we spent “hanging out,” which meant eating, or watching movies on DVD, or walking around Asheville — a pretty town, ringed by mountains.

  We spent my second night in the house gathered around a small television with the other Lounge Wizards, watching a movie so predictable that I didn’t pay attention to it. When it ended, the news came on — a signal for everyone to talk — but Jane nudged Paul and said, “Hey, check it out.”

  The newscaster said police had no leads in the case of Robert Reedy, the thirty-five-year-old man found murdered in his car the day before. The video showed police officers standing near the red Corvette, then a pan of the woods nearby.

  “That’s near where we were on Sunday,” Jane said.

  Paul said, “Blame it on the werewolves.”

  But Jane didn’t let it go. “Annie, did you see anything weird?”

  “Only you all,” I said.

  They laughed. “Kid’s been in the South like three days and she’s y’alling already,” Paul said. “Go, Annie.”

  So his name was Robert Reedy, I thought. And I killed him.

  They passed around a pipe, and when it came to me, I decided to try it to see if I could lighten my mood. But marijuana didn’t work for me.

  The others engaged in long, rambling conversations. One began with Paul’s inability to find his car keys, the others chiming in suggestions for finding them, and ended with Jane repeating, again and again: “Everything is somewhere.”

  Instead of talking, I spent the rest of the night staring at the pattern of the threadbare carpet on the floor, sure that the design must contain an important message.

  On subsequent evenings, I always declined the pipe.

  Paul said, “Annie doesn’t need to smoke. She’s naturally stoned.”

  When I look back on my time in Asheville, I associate it with a song that Paul frequently played on the house stereo: “Dead Souls” by Joy Division.

  I slept little, ate less, and spent hours doing nothing but breathe. Often, usually around three a.m., I wondered if I was ill, or even if I was going to die. I didn’t have the energy to look for my mother. I wondered if I should go home and try to recuperate — but what would my father think of me?

  Sometimes I wandered to the window, sensing someone out there. Sometimes I was too frightened to look. What if Reedy’s ghost waited for me? When I did look, I saw nothing.

  Each morning, the wavering reflection of my face in the mirror hadn’t changed; if anything, I looked healthier than I had when I left Saratoga Springs. So, I spent most days alone in my haze, or hanging out with Jane.

  Jane’s idea of a good day was to sleep late, eat a lot, then stroll around Asheville, periodically talking to Paul on her cell phone. (He had a part-time job in a sandwich shop, and each night he brought home free food.) She’d perfected the art of thrifting (scouting secondhand stores for treasure); she could walk into a store and scan racks of clothes so quickly, with such precision, that in seconds she’d say, “Velvet jacket, third aisle center,” or “Nothing but rags today. We move on.”

  We’d move on to coffee shops or “New Age” bookstores, where we’d read books and magazines without ever buying any. Once, Jane shoplifted a deck of Tarot cards, and I felt something stir in me. Was it conscience? I found myself wanting to say something to her, tell her to take them back. Instead, I said nothing. How could a murderer preach right and wrong to a shoplifter?

  A few times a week we went to the supermarket, and Jane bought groceries. When I offered to help pay, she usually said, “Forget it. You eat like a bird, anyway.”

  I normally didn’t eat much, but once in a while hunger came over me in waves, and then I devoured whatever I could find. I’d been raised a vegetarian, but now I craved meat — the rawer and bloodier, the better. One night, alone in my room, I ate a pound of raw hamburger. Afterward, my energy surged, but a few hours later it plummeted. There must be a better way to manage things, I thought.

  Sometimes we got together with wizards and werewolves to role-play. The players had crafted identities much more intriguing than their actual ones. Why identify yourself as a college dropout or a mechanic or a fast-food server, when instead you could be a wizard, werewolf, or vampire?

  One night we met the group at a club downtown. The place was like a warehouse, a long building with high ceilings; techno music echoed off the walls, and dim blue lights illumined the dance floor. I leaned against a wall to watch, then found myself dancing with a boy no taller than me — a sweet-faced boy with beautiful skin and dark curly hair.

  After we’d danced awhile, we walked outside into an alleyway. He smoked a cigarette, and I looked up at the sky. No stars, no moon. For a moment I lost all sense of who I was, or where I was. When I came back to myself again, I thought of the scene in On the Road, when Sal woke up in a strange hotel room and didn’t know who he was. He said that his life felt haunted.

  “What are you?” the boy with the curly hair asked me, and I said, “A gho
st.”

  He looked confused. “Paul — I mean, Lemur, said you were a vampire.”

  “That too,” I said.

  “Perfect,” he said. “I’m a donor.”

  I folded my arms, but my eyes were on his throat — his fine, white-skinned, narrow throat.

  “Will you sire me?” he asked.

  I wanted to correct his terminology. I wanted to reason with him, to scold him for playing with fire. But more than any of that, I wanted blood.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” he said.

  My mouth opened instinctively as I bent toward him, and I heard him say, “Wow. You’re the real thing!”

  That was the night I learned restraint. I took only enough blood to dull my hunger. When I pulled away from him, he looked up at me, his pupils dilated, an expression of ecstasy in his eyes. “You really did it,” he said.

  I pulled away, wiping my mouth with my jacket sleeve. “Don’t tell anyone.” I didn’t want to look at him. Already I felt ashamed.

  “I’ll never tell.” His hand rubbed at the wound in his neck, and he pulled it away to look at his blood. “Wow.”

  “Put pressure on it.” I found a tissue in my jacket pocket and handed it to him.

  He pressed the tissue against his neck. “That was amazing,” he said. “I — I love you.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  He held out his free hand. “I’m Joshua,” he said. “And now I’m a vampire, like you.”

  No, you’re not, I wanted to say. But I didn’t contradict him. He was only role-playing, after all.

  I might have stayed on in Asheville forever. I had a place to live, friends (of a sort), and a willing source of nourishment. But gradually, I began to emerge from the haze. The way we lived made me more and more uneasy; every day seemed the same, more or less. I wasn’t learning or accomplishing anything. And every night, waiting for me, instead of sleep, was the fact that I’d killed a man.

  I rationalized that he fully deserved it. The assurance with which he’d found the forest road and the way he’d laughed at my struggling persuaded me that he’d done to other women what he tried to do to me. Yet my behavior — purely instinctive — in the end could not be excused. Everything my father had taught me argued against what I had done.

  At other times I questioned the value of that education. What did it matter to know history, literature, science, or philosophy? All that knowledge hadn’t kept me from murder, and it wasn’t serving me now in any practical sense. I’d survived; that was all that mattered.

  During the months of haze, my dreams were murky, often violent, populated by beasts and shadows and jagged trees. In the dreams I ran, chased by something I never saw. Often I awoke with the sense that I’d been trying to call for help, but the words wouldn’t come; sometimes I wondered if the inarticulate sounds that I made in my dreams were actually vocalized.

  I’d open my eyes to the same untidy room filled with the possessions of someone I’d never met. No one ever came to see if I was all right. Those were the times when I longed for the mother I’d never met. But what would she think of having a vampire daughter?

  Gradually, my dreams began to take on more structure — as if I were dreaming chapters of a story that continued, night after night. The same characters — a man, a woman, a birdlike other — moved through a deep blue landscape among exotic plants and gentle animals. Sometimes they traveled together, but more often they were separate, and I, the dreamer, was privy to each of their thoughts and feelings. They were each looking for something never specified; each felt lonely or sad at times, but they all were patient, curious, even optimistic. I loved them without knowing them well. Going to sleep now seemed more interesting than being awake — a good reason for thinking it was time to leave Asheville.

  Joshua was another good reason. He called me his girlfriend, although we’d never kissed or even held hands. I thought of him as a younger brother — pesky at times, but part of the “family.” He seemed always to be around, and he talked of moving into the house. I told him that I needed my space.

  One night after dinner (a burrito for him, a half-pint of Joshua’s blood for me), we sat on the floor of my room, both of us leaning against the wall, dazed. Years later I saw a movie about heroin addicts, and the characters evoked Joshua and me in Asheville, in our postprandial state.

  “Annie,” he said. “Will you marry me?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked so young, sitting by the wall in his scruffy jeans, pressing a paper towel against his neck. I tried to always bite in the same place, to minimize possible infection. I didn’t know then that vampires are germ-free.

  “Don’t you love me?” His eyes reminded me of those of another faithful hound, Wally — Kathleen’s dog.

  “No.”

  I treated him terribly, didn’t I? And no matter what I said or did, he stayed around for more.

  “Well, I love you.” He looked as if he might cry, and I suddenly thought, Enough.

  “Go home,” I said. “I need to be alone.”

  Reluctant, but ever obedient, he stood up. “You’re still my girlfriend, Annie?”

  “I’m nobody’s girlfriend,” I said. “Go home.”

  Spring arrived, and the whole world turned green. The lacy new leaves on the trees filtered sunlight, their patterns reminding me of a kaleidoscope; the air felt soft. I stretched my fingers close to my eyes and watched sunlight shine through them, watched blood pulse through them. I told Jane that the day was like a poem. She looked at me as if I were a lunatic. “I’m majoring in sociology,” she said. “My days aren’t like poems.”

  All I knew about sociology was what my father once said: “Sociology is a poor excuse for science.”

  “By the way,” she said, “Joshua called this morning. Twice.”

  “He’s annoying,” I said.

  “The boy makes me nervous,” Jane said. “It’s like you put a spell over him.”

  We were walking through downtown, wearing sunglasses for the first time that year, on our way to a shoe store. Jane always seemed to have plenty of cash, but it was likely that she’d steal a pair, anyway. I felt a sudden claustrophobic sense of oppression — by her, by Joshua, even by the harmless wizards and werewolves.

  “I’m thinking of moving on,” I heard myself saying.

  “Where to?”

  Where, indeed? “To Savannah,” I said. “I have a relative there.”

  She nodded. “Want to go this weekend?”

  As easily as that, the decision was made.

  I didn’t say goodbye to anyone but Paul. “Does Joshua know you’re going?” he asked me.

  I said, “No, and please don’t tell him.”

  “Annie, that’s cold,” he said. But he gave me a goodbye hug, anyway.

  Jane drove fast. The car sped down I-26, and I shuddered as we passed the ramp where Robert Reedy had picked me up.

  “You cold?” Jane asked.

  I shook my head. “Don’t we turn onto 95 for Savannah?”

  “We’re stopping in Charleston first,” she said. “I need to see the rents.”

  “The rents?”

  “Parents,” she said. And she turned the radio on, loud.

  Within an hour we were in Charleston, and Jane stopped the car at a wrought-iron gate. “It’s me,” she said into a speaker, and the gate swung open.

  We drove up a winding driveway bordered by tall trees studded with enormous dewy white blossoms; they’re called Southern magnolias, I learned later. The car stopped before a white brick mansion. I suppose I should have been surprised that she was rich, but somehow I wasn’t.

  We ended up spending the night. Jane’s parents were tight-faced blond-haired middle-aged people who talked and talked about money. Even when they talked about family — Jane’s brother, a cousin, an uncle — they talked about how much money they had, and what they were spending it on. They fed us shrimp and grits, and enormous crabs wh
ose shells they smashed with silver mallets in order to suck out the meat. They asked questions about Jane’s schoolwork, which she answered ambiguously: “Not really,” or “Kind of,” or “Whatever.” She made a point of checking text messages on her cell phone several times during dinner.

  Jane treated them even more contemptuously than I’d treated Joshua. By the next morning, I understood why she shoplifted: it was her way of expressing further contempt for her parents and their materialism.

  Nonetheless, when her father handed her a wad of bills as we left, she took them and stuffed them into a pocket of her jeans.

  “Well, that’s done,” she said. She spat out the window, and we drove on.

  Jane took the Savannah Highway, Route 17, out of Charleston, and after we left the city I got my first sight of the “Low Country.” On either side of the road, reddish-brown marsh grass rippled in the wind. Gray creeks shone like veins of silver in the fields of grass. I rolled down the car window and breathed in the air, which smelled of damp flowers. It made me a little light-headed. I opened my backpack to take a swallow of tonic.

  “What is that stuff, anyway?” Jane asked.

  “Medicine for my anemia.” I lied without even thinking, these days. The bottle was three-quarters empty. I wondered what I’d do when it was gone.

  Jane picked up her cell phone and called Paul. I tuned out her voice.

  We passed a sign for Bee Ferry Landing and a gift shop called Blue Heron; the names made me think of my mother. I hadn’t thought of her much in Asheville, but this landscape evoked her, made me imagine her as a girl, growing up amid the marshes and the bittersweet smells. Had she driven down this road when she ran away from us? Had she seen the same signs I was seeing? Had she felt happy, as if she were coming home?

  We passed the Savannah River, sapphire-blue, and arrived downtown by lunchtime.

  Jane set down her cell phone. “You hungry?” She looked eager to be on her way back to Asheville, and Paul.