She looked at him. “It happened because you let it,” she said.
Dodger asked to be let outside. Brian opened the door for him to let him run around the front yard. There was a leash law here, but Dodger was well known by the neighbors and generally tolerated. He walked out of the house with considerably less than his usual enthusiasm. He lifted his leg desultorily against a shrub, then walked down to the road and followed the sidewalk further into the neighborhood. He did not come back.
Over the next few days it put its hooks into them, and drew them in tight. They found it difficult to leave it alone. Its flesh seemed to pump out some kind of soporific, like an invisible spoor, and it was better than the booze—better than anything they’d previously known. Its pull seemed to grow stronger as the days passed. For Amy, especially. She stopped going out, and for all practical purposes moved into Toby’s room with it. When Brian joined her in there, she seemed to barely tolerate his presence. If he sat beside it she watched him with naked trepidation, as though she feared he might damage it somehow.
It was not, he realized, an unfounded fear. Something inside him became turbulent in its presence, something he couldn’t identify but which sparked flashes of violent thought, of the kind he had not had since just after Toby vanished. This feeling came in sharp relief to the easy lethargy the angel normally inspired, and he was reminded of a time when he was younger, sniffing heroin laced with cocaine. So he did not object to Amy’s efforts at excluding him.
Finally, though, her vigilance slipped. He went into the bathroom and found her sleeping on the toilet, her robe hiked up around her waist, her head resting against the sink. He left her there and crept into the angel’s room.
It was awake, and its eyes tracked him as he crossed the room and sat beside it on the bed. Its breath wheezed lightly as it drew air through its puckered mouth. Its body was still bruised and bent, though it did seem to be improving.
Brian touched its chest where the bruise seemed to be diminishing. Why does it bruise? he wondered. Why does it bleed the same way I do? Shouldn’t it be made of something better? Also, it didn’t have wings. Not even vestigial ones. Why were they called angels? Because of how they made people feel? It looked more like an alien than a divine being. It has a cock, for Christ’s sake. What’s that all about? Do angels fuck?
He leaned over it, so his face was inches away, almost touching its nose. He stared into its black, irisless eyes, searching for some sign of intelligence, some evidence of intent or emotion. From this distance he could smell its breath; he drew it into his own lungs, and it warmed him like a shot of whiskey. The angel lifted its head and pressed its face into his. Brian jerked back and felt something brush his elbow. He looked behind him and discovered the angel had an erection.
He lurched out of bed, tripping over himself as he rushed to the door, dashed through it and slammed it shut. His blood sang. It rose in him like the sea and filled him with tumultuous music. He dropped to his knees and vomited all over the carpet.
Later, he stepped into its doorway, watching Amy trace her hands down its face. Through the window he could see that night was gathering in little pockets outside, lifting itself toward the sky. At the sight of the angel his heart jumped in his chest as though it had come unmoored. “Amy, I have to talk to you,” he said. He had some difficulty making his voice sound calm.
She didn’t look at him. “I know it’s not really him,” she said. “Not really.”
“No.”
“But don’t you think he is, kind of? In a way?”
“No.”
She laid her head on the pillow beside it, staring into its face. Brian was left looking at the back of her head, the unwashed hair, tangled and brittle. He remembered cupping the back of her head in his hand, its weight and its warmth. He remembered her body.
“Amy. Where does he live?”
“Who.”
“Tommy. Where does he live?”
She turned and looked at him, a little crease of worry on her brow. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just tell me. Please.”
“Brian, don’t.”
He slammed his fist into the wall, startling himself. He screamed at her. “Tell me where he lives! God damn it! ”
Tommy opened the door of his shotgun house, clad only in boxer shorts, and Brian greeted him with a blow to the face. Tommy staggered back into his house, due more to surprise than the force of the punch; his foot slipped on a throw rug and he crashed to the floor. The small house reverberated with the impact. Brian had a moment to take in Tommy’s hard physique and imagine his wife’s hands moving over it. He stepped forward and kicked him in the groin.
Tommy grunted and seemed to absorb it. He rolled over and pushed himself quickly to his feet. Tommy’s fist swung at him and he had time to experience a quick flaring terror before his head exploded with pain. He found himself on his knees, staring at the dust collecting in the crevices of the hardwood floor. Somewhere in the background a television chattered urgently.
A kick to the ribs sent Brian down again. Tommy straddled him, grabbed a fistful of hair, and slammed Brian’s face into the floor several times. Brian felt something in his face break and blood poured onto the floor. He wanted to cry, but it was impossible; he couldn’t get enough air. I’m going to die, he thought. He felt himself hauled up and thrown against a wall. Darkness crowded his vision. The world started to slide away.
Someone was yelling at him. There was a face in front of him, skin peeled back from its teeth in a smile or a grimace of rage. It looked like something from hell.
He awoke to the feel of cold grass, cold night air. The right side of his face burned like a signal flare; his left eye refused to open. It hurt to breathe. He pushed himself to his elbows and spit blood from his mouth; it immediately filled again. Something wrong in there. He rolled onto his back and laid there for a while, waiting for the pain to subside to a tolerable level. The night was high and dark. At one point he felt sure that he was rising from the ground, that something up there was pulling him into its empty hollows.
Somehow he managed the drive home. He remembered nothing of it except occasional stabs of pain as opposing headlights washed across his windshield; he would later consider his safe arrival a kind of miracle. He pulled into the driveway and honked the horn a few times until Amy came out and found him there. She looked at him with horror, and with something else.
“Oh, baby. What did you do. What did you do.”
She steered him toward the angel’s room. He stopped himself in the doorway, his heart pounding again, and he tried to catch his breath. It occurred to him, on a dim level, that his nose was broken. She tugged at his hand, but he resisted. Her face was limned by moonlight, streaming through the window like some mystical tide, and by the faint luminescence of the angel tucked into their son’s bed. She’d grown heavy over the years, and the past year had taken a harsh toll: the flesh on her face sagged, and was scored by grief. And yet he was stunned by her beauty.
Had she always looked like this?
“Come on,” she said. “Please.”
The left side of his face pulsed with hard beats of pain; it sang like a war drum. His working eye settled on the thing in the bed: its flat black eyes, its wickedly curved talons. Amy sat beside it and put her hand on its chest. It arched its back, seeming to coil beneath her.
“Come lay down,” she said. “He’s here for us. He’s come home for us.”
Brian took a step into Toby’s room, and then another. He knew she was wrong; that the angel was not home, that it had wandered here from somewhere far away.
Is heaven a dark place?
The angel extended a hand, its talons flexing. The sheets over its belly stirred as Brian drew closer. Amy took her husband’s hands, easing him onto the bed. He gripped her shoulders, squeezing the
m too tightly. “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, surprising himself. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Once he began he couldn’t stop. He said it over and over again, so many times it just became a sound, a sobbing plaint, and Amy pressed her hand against his mouth, entwined her fingers into his hair, saying, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” and finally she silenced him with a kiss. As they embraced each other the angel played its hands over their faces and their shoulders, its strange reedy breath and its narcotic musk drawing them down to it. They caressed each other, and they caressed the angel, and when they touched their lips to its skin the taste of it shot spikes of joy through their bodies. Brian felt her teeth on his neck and he bit into the angel, the sudden dark spurt of blood filling his mouth, the soft pale flesh tearing easily, sliding down his throat. He kissed his wife furiously and when she tasted the blood she nearly tore his tongue out; he pushed her face toward the angel’s body, and watched the blood blossom from beneath her. The angel’s eyes were frozen, staring at the ceiling; it extended a shaking hand toward a wall decorated with a Spider-Man poster, its fingers twisted and bent.
They ate until they were full.
That night, heavy with the sludge of bliss, Brian and Amy made love again for the first time in nearly a year. It was wordless and slow, a synchronicity of pressures and tender familiarities. They were like rare creatures of a dying species, amazed by the sight of each other.
Brian drifts in and out of sleep. He has what will be the last dream about his son. It is morning in this dream, by the side of a small country road. It must have rained during the night, because the world shines with a wet glow. Droplets of water cling, dazzling, to the muzzle of a dog as it rests beside the road, unmenaced by traffic, languorous and dull-witted in the rising heat. It might even be Dodger. His snout is heavy with blood. Some distance away from him Toby rests on the street, a small pile of bones and torn flesh, glittering with dew, catching and throwing sunlight like a scattered pile of rubies and diamonds.
By the time he wakes, he has already forgotten it.
Sunbleached
“We’re God’s beautiful creatures,” the vampire said, something like joy leaking into its voice for the first time since it had crawled under this house four days ago. “We’re the pinnacle of his art. If you believe in that kind of thing, anyway. That’s why the night is our time. He hangs jewels in the sky for us. People, they think we’re at some kinda disadvantage because we can’t go out in the sunlight. But who needs it. The day is small and cramped. You got your one lousy star.”
“You believe in God?” Joshua asked. The crawlspace beneath his house was close and hot; his body was coated in a dense sheen of sweat. A cockroach crawled over his fingers and he jerked his hand away. Late summer pressed onto this small Mississippi coastal town like the heel of a boot. The heat was an act of violence.
“I was raised Baptist. My thoughts on the matter are complicated.”
The crawlspace was contained partially by sheets of aluminum siding and partially by decaying wooden latticework. It was by this latter that Joshua crouched, hiding in the hot spears of sunlight which intruded into the shadows and made a protective cage around him.
“That’s why it’s so easy for us to seduce. God loves us, so the world does, too. Seduction is your weapon, kid. You’re what—fifteen? You think seduction is pumping like a jackrabbit in your momma’s car. You don’t know anything. But you will soon enough.”
The vampire moved in the shadows, and abruptly the stink of burnt flesh and spoiled meat greased the air. It had opened a wound in itself by moving. Joshua knew that it tried to stay still as much as it could, to facilitate the healing, but the slowly shifting angles of the sunbeams made that impossible. He squinted his eyes, trying to make out a shape, but it was useless. He could sense it back there, though—a dark, fluttering presence. Something made of wings.
“Invite me in,” it said.
“Later,” Joshua said. “Not yet. After you finish changing me.”
The vampire coughed; it sounded like a snapping bone. Something wet hit the ground. “Well come here then, boy.” It moved again, this time closer to the amber light. Its face emerged from the shadows like something rising from deep water. It hunched on its hands and knees, swinging its head like a dog trying to catch a scent. Its face had been burnt off. Thin, parchment-strips of skin hung from blackened sinew and muscle. Its eyes were dark, hollow caves. Even in this wretched state, though, it seemed weirdly graceful. A dancer pretending to be a spider.
For the second time, Joshua laid himself on the soft earth, a-crawl with ants and cockroaches, centipedes and earthworms, positioning his upper body beyond the reach of the streaming sunlight. The light’s color was deepening, its angles rising until they were almost parallel to the ground. Evening was settling over the earth.
The vampire pressed the long fingers of one charred hand onto his chest, as delicately as a lover. Heat flushed Joshua’s body. Every nerve ending was a trembling candle flame. The vampire touched its lips to his throat; its tongue sought the jugular, the heavy river inside. It slid its teeth into his skin.
A sharp, lovely pain.
Joshua stared at the underside of his home: the rusted pipes, the duct tape, the yellow sheets of insulation. It looked so different from beneath. So ugly. He heard footsteps overhead as somebody he loved moved around inside it, attending to mysterious offices.
Four days ago: he’d stood on the front porch of his home in the deep blue hollow of early morning, watching the waters of the Gulf roll onto the beach. It was his favorite time of the day: that sweet, lonesome hinge between darkness and daylight, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and free to take it on his own terms. In a few moments he would go inside and wake his five-year-old brother, Michael, make him breakfast, and get them both ready for school, while their mother still slept in after her night shift at Red Lobster.
But this time belonged to him.
The vampire came from the direction of town, trailing black smoke and running hard across the no-man’s land between his own house and the nearest standing building. There’d been a neighborhood there once, but the hurricane wiped it away a few years ago. What remained had looked like a mouthful of shattered teeth, until the state government came through and razed everything to the ground. Their own house had been badly damaged—the storm had scalped it of its top floor, depositing it somewhere out in the Gulf—but the rest had stood its ground, though it canted steeply to one side now, and on windy days you could feel it coming through the walls.
It was over that empty expanse the vampire fled, first billowing smoke like a diesel engine and then erupting into flame as the sun cracked the horizon.
The vampire ran directly for his house and launched itself at the opening to the crawlspace under the porch steps. Oily smoke eeled up through the wooden planks and dissipated into the lightening sky.
Joshua had remained frozen in place for the whole event, save the rising clamor in his heart.
Their mother would be late getting home from work—and even later if she went out with that jackass Tyler again—so Joshua fed his little brother and directed him to his bedroom. They passed the stairwell on their way, which was capped now by sheets of plywood hammered over the place where it used to open onto the second floor.
“You want me to read you a story?” he asked, reaching for the copy of The Wind in the Willows by the bedside. Michael didn’t really understand the story, but he liked it when Joshua did the voices.
“No,” he said, leaping into his bed and pulling the covers over himself.
“No story? Are you sure?”
“I just wanna go to sleep tonight.”
“Okay,” Joshua said. He felt strangely bereft. He reached down and turned on Michael’s nightlight, then switched off the lamp.
“Will you cuddle with me, Josh?” he said.
&nb
sp; “I won’t ‘cuddle’ with you, but I’ll lay down with you for a little bit.”
“Okay.”
Cuddle was a word their dad used before he moved away, and it embarrassed him that Michael held onto it. He eased back on top of the covers and let Michael rest his head in the crook of his arm.
“Are you scared of anything, Josh?”
“What, like monsters?”
“I don’t know, I guess.”
“No, I’m not scared of monsters. I’m not scared of anything.”
Michael thought for a minute, then said, “I’m scared of storms.”
“That’s silly. It’s just a bunch of wind and rain.”
“. . . I know.”
Michael drifted into silence. Joshua felt vaguely guilty about shutting him down like that, but he really didn’t have it in him to have the storm talk again. That was something Michael was going to have to get over on his own, since logic didn’t seem to have any effect on his thinking.
As he monitored his brother’s breathing, waiting for him to fall asleep, he found himself wondering about how he would feel toward his family once the transformation was complete. He was worried that he would lose all feeling for them. Or, worse, that he’d think of them as prey. He didn’t think that would happen; most things he’d ever read about vampires seemed to indicate that they kept all their memories and emotions from life. But the thought troubled him nonetheless.
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