Throat

by R. A. Nelson

  “O’Connor’s!” I said, looking at the tasseled menu in front of me.

  “You know it?”

  I nodded excitedly. “I’ve passed the billboards plenty of times.”

  “You’ve never been?”

  “Life in a single-parent family.”

  “With six we don’t come here often, but we all love it.”

  The wood around us was dark and heavy and elegant, and a fire was burning in the big stone hearth. After being outdoors so much, I felt completely out of place, but I didn’t care. I flipped through the menu, marveling at the choices.

  “Why don’t we start with an appetizer?” Sagan said. “You like lobster dip?”

  Did I.

  We had a baby spinach and strawberry salad. Then a crab bisque that was a kind of thick soup that nearly lifted the top of my skull off. An hour later I was popping the last little bit of blue-cheese-encrusted garlic prime rib into my mouth, practically moaning with pleasure. I didn’t have words for the experience. Afterward I could only lean back in my chair and sigh contentedly.

  “So you liked it?” Sagan said, grinning.

  “Like is too small a word. Thank you.” I squeezed his fingers.

  “And for dessert …”

  “Oh my God. I’m stuffed.”

  He checked the time on his cell. “Okay. I was thinking maybe an ice cream cone after the movie.”

  “Movie?”

  Being in a theater was an even bigger shock to my system. All those heads, people laughing, gabbing. So normal. I felt like I needed six more eyes. We were about twenty minutes into the movie before I began to settle down. My alertness made me realize just how paranoid I had become.

  It was a good show, something called Karma Chameleon, all about a girl who figured her karma was responsible for screwing up her love life. I thought it was cute and sweet that Sagan had picked a chick flick. So I never told him I would have rather seen the sci-fi epic where zombies overrun the very first city on the moon.

  The theater was only about a third full—everybody else was catching lunar zombies—and most of the audience looked as old as my mom. I wondered what they thought when Sagan leaned over the popcorn tub and kissed me. Then he did it again.

  After that I didn’t think about anybody else at all. Not even vampires. We were just a boy and a girl in a dark room.

  When we got out of the theater, most of the shops were closing, so there weren’t as many people around. A shaggy-looking guy with a guitar and a small amp was playing ancient tunes in front of a synchronized fountain. We chose a spot just far enough away to hear without paying attention. Of course I could have listened from the parking lot.

  “You probably think I’m crazy, don’t you?” I said, taking a lick of ice cream.

  Sagan smiled and kissed me on the temple. His lips were cold from the rocky road. I gently pushed him away to look deeply into his eyes. He blinked first.

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said. “I think you’re different. Different is good.”

  “But maybe I’m not different,” I said. “Maybe I’m just like everybody else … only something happened. Something beyond my control, and it changed me. Changed me in a way that nobody would ever believe.”

  “Okay,” Sagan said. “Can I guess what the change is?”

  “If you want to. But you’ll never guess right.”

  “Hmmm … you’ve got some strange new disease nobody ever heard of, cooked up in a government lab.” He glanced at the balled-up napkin in my hand. “I’m … probably infected right now and don’t even know it.”

  I laughed. “Next.”

  “Let’s see. A genetic experiment in … human enhancement. They were trying to design this perfect new species.…”

  “Perfect? Please.”

  “Girl DNA mixed with … I can’t think of an animal that would be right. A cheetah? But where’s your spots? Wait. That’s a leopard, isn’t it?”

  I giggled. “Or a dalmatian. Nope, not even warm.”

  “You’re killing me, you know that?”

  “You’ve said that before. Okay,” I said, laying my head on his shoulder. “How about this. As long as you don’t bug me to death about it, I promise I will tell you. Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “I don’t know. It depends … on a lot of things.” Like me staying alive.

  “Why did you frown just then?” he said.

  I turned away. “I’m sorry.”

  He touched me on the chin, lifted my head up with his finger. “Hey, it’s all right. It’s going to be okay. Look … Emma. Tell me something … a secret about you nobody else knows. Not the secret. You know what I mean.”

  I looked off into the distance. I’d never really been the secret type until recently.

  “Okay. As far back as I can remember, I have always been kind of desperate … desperate to believe life is more interesting than it really is. You know what I mean?”

  Sagan nodded.

  “That’s why I’m always going on about history. I kind of use it as my evidence, you know? Of what life can really be. Does that sound totally stupid?”

  “No.”

  The shaggy guitar guy—somebody was actually watching him now. A single man, short but powerfully built, wearing a little hat that barely covered the top of his massive head.

  “When you think about it, we have more in common than you realize, Emma,” Sagan said. He was holding my fingers. “Stars … some of them are already dead by the time we get to see them. We both want to be in places that are already gone.”

  “Except … my place has people.”

  “Don’t screw up the moment.” He pointed at the sky. “Maybe that star right there—maybe it once had life orbiting it? Maybe they were just like us. Only a trillion miles away and a million years ago.”

  “You think too much,” I said. “But I like it.”

  “Both of us want to go to places where neither of us can go, because it’s basically impossible,” he said. “Why do you think that is? Why don’t we want to be here?”

  I snuggled against him. “I don’t know. Right here, right now … is there anyplace else?”

  Back in the parking lot, I leaned against the Jeep. Sagan put his arm around my waist.

  “You know, you keep giving me the best days of my life,” I said. “I’ve never been on a date before.”

  “I kind of guessed that.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. You just kind of reminded me of myself a year or two ago. I didn’t really date much in high school. Mostly a little bit of ‘friend’ stuff, you know? Hanging out with the editor in chief of our school newspaper because I was managing editor. Or a girl from the chess team. That kind of thing.”

  “You were on the chess team?”

  “Yeah.” He puffed up his chest. “Wanna make something of it?”

  I swore. “Probably in the band too. Don’t tell me. You played the tuba, didn’t you? No! You dragged around one of those portable xylophones and—”

  He kissed me.

  “Mmmm. You don’t kiss like a xylophone guy.”

  Sagan wrapped me in his arms from behind. I could feel his mouth in my hair. Every sensation was heightened to the point where I could barely stand it. Was this because I was a vampire? Or something else.

  “You’re a huge distraction, you know?” I said.

  “That’s my job.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Just keep telling me that.”

  We sat in his Jeep a very long time, talking and making out. I didn’t want to go. Finally the parking lot was empty except for us and a street sweeper that was zipping closer and closer to the Jeep, trying to give us a hint.

  “Sagan,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If you could live forever, would you want to?”

  He put his hand on his chin and leaned away from me. “Well … geneticists say we’re only about fifteen or twenty years away from basically beating all disea
ses, extending the life span indefinitely. Sure, who wouldn’t want that? There are so many things I want to see, want to do.”

  “But really think about it,” I said. “Forever. It never ends, okay? I know that sounds stupid, but think about what that means. Isn’t it kind of scary? If you take it literally? To keep on going and going.”

  “You mean like, what will we finally come to? What will we become?”

  “I guess, yeah.”

  “I don’t know. I like what we are.”

  I was definitely becoming a night owl. After Sagan dropped me off, I wasn’t remotely sleepy. Being with him was like taking a drug that left me burning and alive. After lying on the air mattress for over an hour, thinking about nothing but him, I cursed and dropped down into the grungy little room, looking for something to do to pass the time.

  My mind screamed for a laptop—I couldn’t remember ever feeling so disconnected from the world.

  I sat at the moldy desk and took Manda’s picture out, looking at it. After a while I put my hands on an imaginary keyboard. Started typing in keystroke combinations that were so familiar to me, they didn’t even feel like a memory. This felt more like patterns I had been born with, patterns built into my fingers before birth.

  Patterns.

  The desktop felt spongy, almost wet, but my moving fingers barely noticed. I kept up my imaginary typing. And then I didn’t notice anything at all.

  When I looked up again, the vampire was standing in the doorway, framed by his lavender glow. My heart jumped out of rhythm. He was watching me, one corner of his jagged mouth turned up in a pleased little smile.

  I had no weapons in here. Only things like batteries and bags of clothes.

  I watched him, reflexes screaming. If I rushed him, hit him hard enough, maybe I could knock him off the tower—I tried to stand, but I couldn’t move.

  My hands were still lying on top of the desk. It’s happening again, I thought. Another seizure. I struggled inside the cushiony prison of my mind, curses rattling through my head. Wirtz came closer, filling the room. He studied the walls, the desk, the furniture. My eyes were the only thing alive in my body; I swiveled them left and right, doing my best to follow him, see what the vampire was looking at.

  Wirtz reached for the filing cabinet drawers, fingers stopping just short of touching the handles. “You wouldn’t want to open this for me, would you, Mädchen? So that I may see what is inside?” He laughed, an awful sound, like stones laughing. “I didn’t think so.”

  The vampire suddenly leaned across the desk, the raw-looking wound on his scalp right in my face. My breathing stopped. I knew he was only an image, but my body didn’t know.

  “And what are you doing here?” He straightened up and my breathing started again. “A … room,” the vampire said. “Industrial. Old. No Verzierung … ornamentation. I would say this is somewhere in a … business? Am I guessing correctly? An abandoned business in Huntsville, Ala-ba-ma, where you have chosen to hide. With bags from … let me see, what is this … U-ni-ted Outfitters and Nord Creek. Interesting.”

  Now something else caught his attention. Manda’s picture on the desk.

  No, I thought. Leave her alone. I’ll kill you.

  The vampire looked at the picture a long time, smiling. At last he backed away from the desk and sat down in midair.… Wherever his physical body was, there was something to sit on.

  “I want to tell you a story, Mädchen. A story about Zubehöre—attachments. One of the first of my children I ever … turned … was a young girl named Ava. Not very many years older than yourself. She answered my Call, even though at the time I did not know how to give it properly. I had stumbled upon this myself. My skill was simple, rudimentär. But Ava came, in spite of this.

  “I took her on her first Blutjagd. We shared our private spaces during the long days underground. Time became meaningless to us. There was only the time I spent with her.

  “One night I awoke and Ava was gone. I could not understand this. Had someone come and stolen her away? She would no longer answer my Call.

  “I searched for years, but I was too … unerfahren … inexperienced … to find her. Decades passed. I fathered many more children until at last I became weary of the practice … only wishing to be alone. I came to find myself in the place you would call … Nord Carolina … in the mountains. I have always preferred mountains. More isolated; again, my preference.”

  The vampire’s face changed. I couldn’t read his expression.

  “One spring, by the most extreme chance, I came across Ava again. She was standing beside the old colonial ferry landing on the Neuse River. Watching across the water as if waiting for someone. I watched too. Her golden hair, jugendlich appearance. I felt something I had not felt for … a very long time.

  “Ava recognized me at once, called out my name in a kind of gasp when I approached. We came together in an embrace. I held her close. This way, you know?” The vampire crossed his arms over his large chest, hugging himself. “Close in such a way to never let her go again. Closer still, Mädchen.”

  The vampire drew his arms tighter and tighter around his broad chest. His pale face began to turn red and his jaw bulged with the effort.

  “Harder still. Her eyes … were very large. Harder and harder I squeezed. Until … at last … her bones … began to crack.…”

  The vampire let himself go and his long arms dropped to his sides. He took several breaths, dark eyes lowered to the floor.

  “That is what I came to tell you tonight,” he said. “This is the memory I have to share as a gift for you. All I care for … attachments.”

  Wirtz stood up from the invisible chair. The pale color slowly returned to his face.

  “Bis später.”

  He evaporated into the dark.

  Bis später. I knew what that meant. Papi said it all the time.

  See you later.

  The room was still vibrating with the vampire’s presence. I climbed up to the roof and collapsed on the air mattress, taking hold of the ax. Wirtz had come through so easily this time. Did that mean he was closer? At least he hadn’t picked up any new clues.

  Oh no. The bags. The vampire had seen my shopping bags from the mall. The mall that was only a couple of miles away. He’s tightening the noose.

  I lay there unable to sleep, alternating between terror that he might come back tonight and fury that he was only coming through in images, pictures. This was turning into psychological warfare.

  I ached to take the vampire on in the flesh. I had passed the point of wanting only to survive. I was tired of his games. Wanted to ruin Wirtz, destroy him, crumble him into bits. I had to know more about where he was and what he was doing.

  I found them sitting on the stone wall. From a distance, their lavender glow made them look like Japanese lanterns hanging in the forest.

  “Well, Fresh,” Donne said. “Just can’t keep away from our range, can you?”

  “Bite me,” I said. I didn’t have patience for her crap tonight.

  “I might, but who knows how you will taste?” Donne said. Anton responded with his goofiest laugh.

  “Good evening, Emma,” Lena said.

  “I’ve come to ask you something important,” I said. “Your story about Valentin—you mentioned he once came to you when he wasn’t in bodily form. It started with a W.”

  “Wesentliche,” Lena said. “That is the word you are searching for. What we call the essence.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. I really need to know more about this.… Like how’s it done?”

  Donne snorted. “Oh, is that all?”

  Lena smiled. “Knowledge of the Wesentliche is acquired over time, requiring great patience.”

  “Oh. But what if I needed to know right away? Couldn’t you give me the Cliffs Notes version?”

  Lena gave me a knowing look. “All right. The best way to start is with the Feld.”

  “Feld. That’s another German word, right?” I came over and sat down n
ext to her. “It means ‘field,’ doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Lena said. “But not like a field of clover …” She looked at Anton. “You are better at explaining it.”

  Anton hopped down from the wall and drew a stick figure in the dirt with his index finger.

  “Here, Emma. Let’s say this is you, all right?”

  “Okay.”

  He drew a circle around the stick figure. “This circle is your Feld. But it’s not really a circle because … it’s everywhere, you know?”

  “All around me? Like a sphere?”

  “More than that. Around you, inside you, throughout you …”

  “So the Feld is some kind of … invisible force that is all around me, inside me, etc.?”

  Anton snapped his fingers. “Exactly! Only a force acts upon something else. The Feld just … is. Understand? It doesn’t do anything; it’s just there. All the time. Wherever you go. Your Feld, mine, Donne’s, Lena’s, on and on.”

  “What about the Verloren?” I said.

  “Sure,” Anton said. “Everything has a Feld, even stones.” He patted the Bear. “So there are trillions of individual Felder—or, as you might say in English, Felds. Even much more than that. Yet there is only one Feld. Stay with me, okay? Your Feld is also all Felds at once, all right? They are all connected, making up one giant Feld that goes all over and touches everything.”

  “So we each make up a part of this gigantic Feld,” I said.

  “Yes and no,” Anton said. “Each part also contains the whole, okay? In each of the small Felds there is a … picture … of the whole, you know?”

  “Sounds like a hologram,” I said, remembering something we had talked about recently in science.

  “A what?”

  “A hologram is a … picture, like you said. Only you can cut it up into smaller pieces, and the whole picture is always still there. No matter how small you slice it.”

  “Perfect!” Anton said. “That’s really very good. Hologram. I will have to remember that. So—all Felds are connected, becoming one big Feld. So our actions ripple through everything. Once you learn how to tune into it … you can sense the approach of others by these … ripples. Their Feld announces them.”