Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “Matt, I want to explain.” I either tell him the truth, manipulate his mind, kill him, or let him leave without answers, most likely never to return.

  As if I could kill him in cold blood. And as for mind control, I want a lover, not a slave.

  “Derek, you must be some kind of sick fuck, and I guess I’m damn lucky to be alive today. Or are you plannin’ to finish the job you started last night?” He turns toward me now, in a defensive posture, his eyes snapping around the room for something heavy to brandish.

  “Will you listen to me?” It’s been a good century since Derek Maclaine has begged. I move toward him. I want to fall on my knees and wrap my arms around his waist and press my face into his little beer belly.

  “Get away from me, Derek. Don’t touch me.” That’s fear in his eyes now. “Are you gonna let me leave or not?” He’s picking up a letter opener.

  I step back from the study door. My head’s hanging the way his did last night after his long and sweaty bid to escape.

  As he strides past me, there’s that musk-scent again, that scent that always makes me want to lick his skin. He’s weaving as I follow him down the hall—this stress combined with last night’s blood loss is taking its toll—and he almost stumbles over the edge of the front hall carpet. Bob’s standing before the front door, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. My guess is he’s got a knife in his boot.

  “Bob, Matt wants to go back to Charleston. Will you drive him?”

  Bob’s eyes widen with disbelief. I’m letting him go? With memory obviously intact? I can tell he’s thinking about those sunken unmarked graves in the woods out back.

  “Yep, sure, Derek,” Bob mutters, stepping away from the door.

  At the top of the front porch steps, Matt turns. “By the way, you can relax about one thang. I ain’t talkin’ to the cops. With my reputation as the big queer singer, and them rat-gobbled boys bein’ Bates’s gaybashin’ cronies, well, I reckon I’d be in as much hot water as you. Oh, and, Derek? Stay the hell away from me.”

  He’s off the porch before I can respond. He wobbles a little as he heads for the driveway, and Bob grabs one arm to support him. Sekhmet knows Bob has practice escorting good-looking men who are dazed with blood loss.

  In the tower room, I watch the headlights of Bob’s Jeep descending the dark side of the mountain. No appetite tonight. No need for a feeding jaunt. Instead, I sit in candlelight and rock. I pray to the Horned One. I remember the wet curls of hair between Matt’s buttocks. I remember Angus, who left me still loving me, who lent me the names of the stars.

  The Harvest Moon, then Mabon. For what harvests I have been permitted, I give thanks. Bob and his little Bear-coven share an Appalachian feast of corn on the cob, fried green tomatoes, half-runners, and country ham, while I claim my usual indigestion and sip supposedly medicinal Merlot. After dinner, they light beeswax tapers amidst the standing stones and arrange the altar. I sit in the cricket-nervous night outside the circle, glad to watch the ritual but with no desire to participate. Tonight, the autumnal equinox, the darkness and the light are wrestling equals. It is a balance only the seasons achieve, and briefly at that.

  I cannot bring myself to return to Charleston, so I fly east once a week instead. No more trucker deaths along I-81, however. Sadness has eroded my hunger. When I bury my teeth in a man now, I think of Matt’s frightened, outraged face. You’re a killer, Derek. In the sleeper cabins, I drink from them carefully, and when they pass out from blood loss or slip into the sleepy exhaustions after orgasm, I hold them in my lethal arms and stroke them with the tenderness I had hoped to shower on Matt. I listen to the breathing it would be so easy for me to end.

  On e-mail, the usual queries and weekly reports from the publishing house. Never a note from Matt.

  Bob’s contacts keep him informed of relevant news. Matt’s kept his word. No witnesses have come forward. The bashers’ bodies have been identified through dental records. No explanation yet as to why the rats devoured them. Another mystery, bound to be preserved in local folklore along with such West Virginian legends as the Mothman, the Lady of Bluestone Lake, the turnpike’s ghostly hitchhiker, and the Braxton County Terror.

  Every night I think about bat-winging my way to Charleston. I fear for him. I want to shadow him in the night, protect him from whatever dangers remain. I want to hover above his bed, a moonlit mist, and guard his sleep. I want to bury my face in his chest hair. Derek, stay the hell away from me.

  Perhaps I should go to Manhattan soon. Spend the winter there. Or return to Vienna. Or Zermatt, that storybook village. Or Santorini. Or Provincetown, so peaceful off season. The whole world will be my distraction.

  Eventually. Something keeps me here. I cannot leave just yet. I want to see autumn in Appalachia. The crimson seeds of redtop grass. The burnt-orange immolations of the sugar maple, that great bonfire the leaves achieve in their dying. The scarlet of the staghorn sumac. The first frost, its crystalline rat teeth gnawing the last of the tomato vines. The sound of Canada geese mustering over German Valley, heading south in wavery alphabets.

  Mid-October. Bob’s standing by my coffin when I rise this evening. Always an indicator of trouble. He’s been into the moonshine.

  I raise one worried eyebrow as I clamber out. It’s hell to get out of a coffin on a dais. No undead dignity there.

  “They caught up with him, Derek,” Bob mumbles.

  “What are you talking about?” My guts suddenly feel like a bag of gravel, stretched and sagging as an oriole’s nest.

  “Matt. It’s in the Gazette today. He and his band members got jumped in an alley after another Eppson Books performance. There were ten of them this time. Matt and Ken broke a few heads, but they were beaten pretty badly before that Tae Kwon Do banjo-picking buddy of theirs cleaned up the entire alley. Ken’s not so bad—his family took him home to Montgomery to recover. Matt’s in the hospital in Charleston.”

  There’s a cold rain coming down tonight, and I streak through it like a black comet, gnashing my fangs with impatience and rage. Beneath me the Alleghenies slip by in a wet black blur.

  The Kanawha Valley’s clotted with fog, a convenient veil through which I flap about the hospital, peering into windows, snuffling the air, till I find him and slip, gray mist a few shades darker than tonight’s drizzle, into his room.

  The usual complex apparatus. Medicine was so much simpler—and inadvertently murderous—when I was first alive. Little bouncing lights and beeps. Tubes, a bag of glucose, humming machines I cannot name. Matt’s got a bandage wrapped around his head. One arm’s in a sling. He’s fast asleep. Someone’s left a floor lamp on. The bed across the room is, thankfully, empty.

  Solid again, I bend over his bed. There’s a big tuft of fur curling over the top of his hospital smock. I reach down and stroke it with my fingertips.

  Rivulets of blood in my beard, damn it, diluted with brine. It’s the only way a warrior should weep—when there are no witnesses. I can’t help but smile at my own archaic sense of honor.

  Matt sighs once, rolls his head against the pillow. His eyes open.

  I freeze. It was a mistake to touch him. I’d forgotten those long eyelashes. I’d forgotten how full his lips are, framed by that great goatee, half-hidden by his thick mustache.

  “Derek?” He must be too drugged to be afraid.

  “It’s just a dream, Matt.” I’m lying again. Centuries-old habits are hard to break. I need to pull a mist-shift fast and get out of here.

  “No, it ain’t,” he whispers, grabbing my hand. “You’re here. Why are you here?”

  “I know, I’m sorry, look, I know you told me to s-stay away, but”—I’m sputtering now, like some inarticulate adolescent—“I had to, uh, I had to see how you were.”

  Matt tries to sit up, winces—“Goddamn!”—and lies back down.

  “Derek,” he begins again, eyes glazed with medications that have left him somehow limply relaxed though still lucid, “I been waitin’ for you.”
/>   “Why?”

  “’Cause I figured you’d be lookin’ to kill me.”

  I pull my hand from his. “I could never hurt you, Matt.” I want to believe that’s true. I want him to believe that’s true.

  “Derek, you got blood on your face.”

  “Those are tears.”

  “You cry red? Look, man, be honest with me. Did you really kill those guys that night? I still cain’t believe it.”

  I sigh. “Yes.”

  “And that was my blood on the sheets? Why did you bleed me?”

  I can’t bring myself to answer, but somehow he makes the intuitive leap.

  “Jesus, Derek, did you drink my blood?”

  “Yes.” I can’t meet his eyes.

  He’s silent for a full minute, head turned to watch rain beat against the dark hospital window. He swallows hard.

  “So, like, you’re . . . what? A psychopath? So why ain’t you gonna kill me, now I know all this stuff?”

  “Because I . . .” It’s been too long since I’ve had any reason to say that word to a man. I try again. “Because I care about you. A lot.”

  “You kill folks and you care about me?”

  “Look, someone I knew a long time ago told me about clan mentality among mountain people. For my family, I fight to the death, and I do my best to destroy my enemies. You’re a hillbilly too, Matt. You should understand. Hatfields and McCoys, and all that. This is just an extreme form . . .”

  “Extreme, huh?” He coughs out a dry laugh. “I’d say. And family? I don’t know if I wanna be a member of your family, Derek.”

  A little blood-brine is trickling into my mouth. Cursing silently, I wipe my face. No tears before witnesses. “Those men the other night, the ones whose hate sent you to this hospital bed. Wouldn’t you have killed one of them if you had to?”

  He hesitates. “Well, yeah. In fact,” he admits, with a touch of pride and a touch of shame, “Jonathan tells me a couple of the guys I whipped before I went down are in this here hospital. One of the fucker’s in a coma.”

  He’s a little confused now—the neat edge of morality’s been tattered with pinking shears—and I edge forward. How badly I want to kiss him.

  “No, no, no, Derek. You stay over there. I don’t trust you any farther than I could lob a three-legged steer.”

  Good Goddess, the sheet over his crotch is rising. The boy’s more confused than I am. I can stand this no longer. The suspicion in his eyes is too painful. Besides, I have another visit to make tonight. And I can hear a nurse just outside the door.

  “All right. Do me one favor,” I plead. “Close your eyes. For three seconds. Count ’em. I cain’t do anything to you in three seconds.” My accent’s thickening again, as it does when I’m frightened, angry or amorous. “And hear that? A nurse is right out in the hall.”

  He glares at me. “Please?” I’m about ready to whine. He shrugs, gives me one second’s glance redolent of “You touch me and I’ll whip your ass!” then closes his eyes.

  The nurse, an obese blonde with teeteringly high hair, wheels in the medicine tray, stops by Matt’s bed, and flaps her hand in the air. “Mr. Taylor!” she scolds. “What is all this smoke? Are you hidin’ a cigar in here?”

  There’s not much to Belle. It’s one of a string of small towns along the Kanawha River, along the railroad track. Full of good, kind people, for the most part, the kind of Christians I’ve learned to admire. Rain is tearing down by the time I shift forms in a phone booth like some sort of demonic Superman and start flipping the wrinkled pages. And here are the addresses, both Bates’s residence and his church, the lengthily named Belle Apostolic Holiness Free Will Nazarene Charismatic Church of Christ. As far as I know, they don’t handle snakes like the folks up in Scrabble Creek and down in Jolo. I wonder what they’d do if a slithering mass of copperheads were to join tonight’s service through the unfortunate accident of a cracked back door?

  No time for fun, Derek, I chide myself, batting off again.

  Bates lives in a hovel with a sway-backed roof and white aluminum siding. Got to give it to him, he’s truly not interested in the pleasures and vanities of this world. He’s also evaded the sinful entrapments, the inconvenient handicaps, of an aesthetic sense. I can’t help but smirk, hovering over his plastic collection of yard art, a garish assortment of nailed-down saviors, angels, and haloed farm animals. Of course he’s far too holy to besmirch his lawn with decadent Halloween decorations.

  The windows are dark. It is Sunday night, I realize. I can hear a big dog baying in the backyard, a nasty pit bull by the sound and reek of it, and one bat-fang catches on the lower lip of a grin as I contemplate slashing the beast to shreds and leaving what’s left on the front stoop just to give Bates something to worry about. But I haven’t fed lately—Joe the Hot Cop tied to a chair would be just right tonight—and I’ve got to find Bates and reconnoiter a bit before getting back to Mount Storm before dawn. Gutting the dog will have to wait. For hatred’s gourmets, revenge is a feast to be served in many courses.

  I’ve jetted over just a couple blocks of rain-slick rooftops before I hear the pious whooping of what a big sign proclaims is indeed the Belle Apostolic, Etc. Church. It’s a white cinderblock rectangle with a stubby steeple, and it sounds like it’s packed with people. I land on the dripping gutter, wrap my talons around the rotting metal, swing upside down and peer in the window.

  A lavender-haired woman on the little podium up front is howling away, grimacing her apple-doll face, and slamming at her guitar as if she were trying to punish it. I’m just about ready to swoop off again so as to save my hypersensitive ears when she abruptly stops. An expectant silence falls, and the man himself shuffles down the aisle and ascends to the pulpit. I’d recognize that done-lopped-over belly, lax jowls and greased, dyed-black, Swaggart-style pompadour anywhere. It’s as if someone just struck oil on his forehead.

  “Brothers and sisters, my text tonight is from Romans,” he begins. Oh, hell, I’ve heard all this before. I want to play. There has got to be a nasty nest of copperheads snoozing near here, or . . .

  The gutter suddenly sags a little beneath me. Derek. I swivel my head. She’s hanging by the next window over, only a few feet away, in an identical position. A bat fully as large as I.

  Great Herne. I haven’t seen another vampire in years.

  Friendly, I think. She’s grinning. Suddenly she swings forward and bumps the window. Hard. A woman inside screams. Another bump, then another. The glass cracks, then shatters. The bat opens her maw and hisses.

  Okay, I should enjoy this game. There’s a skinny man with thick spectacles sitting at the end of the pew, just inside my window. I slam my muzzle against the glass, and it splinters. Shards fly into the man’s lap. I swing forward again, snarling and spitting. He shrieks like a disappointed drag queen denied a coveted crown, leaps to his feet and heads for the door.

  When I turn toward my mysterious compatriot, more than ready to follow such a showwoman’s lead, she flips up and off the gutter like a gymnast—a gymnast with leather wings, snout and claws, that is—and streaks off.

  Faster than I am. My strength is low tonight. I was so looking forward to roping Joe the Hot Cop to an armchair, but I’ve got to see who she is and what she wants.

  She’s heading up the Kanawha River toward Montgomery. We pass the locks at London, the misty lights of West Virginia Tech, Glen Ferris and the broken white horseshoe of Kanawha Falls. At the mouth of the Gauley River, she circles that leaf-bushy islet with its crown of miserable Cofferdilly crosses before heading northeast toward clearer skies.

  Vixen! Hell-harlot! Slow down! By the time we flap past Elkins, an hour later, I’m fagged considerably, and it’s only when we’ve reached the great outcrop of Seneca Rocks that she slows down, circles over the valley in a palpable rapture of flight, and finally settles onto the highest pinnacle.

  I land beside her, and simultaneously we shift: a gasping man and a statuesque woman with an amused smi
le.

  “I gather you’ve fed tonight,” I pant.

  “Indeed. Quite sweetly, thank you. A sumptuous Charleston tri-athlete named Robin. Sorry to lead you on such a long and merry chase, but I assumed you wouldn’t mind it if we ended up here, a few miles from your home. And,” she adds, gesturing over the starlit sweep of the valley below, “I do love a dramatic setting for a dramatic situation.”

  Her hair is short and dark—one version of the most recent lesbian cut—her eyes deep-set, her cheekbones Slavic-high. There’s an Eastern European lilt to her voice.

  “Poland, actually. Krakow. It’s still as lovely as when I walked its streets in the 1400s. I take Lara there occasionally. She loves to buy Polish glass.”

  Twice as old. No wonder she’s stronger than I am. And a mind-reader, of course. I was never too good at that.

  “My name’s Cynthia. Yes, I know where you live. I’ve soared by a few times. I saw you first at Eppson Books, when Matthew Taylor and his Ridgerunners were performing.”

  The lesbian couple in the audience. “Yes, I remember.”

  “I like Matt. He’s adorable, really. Brave little soul. If I fed on men, I’d borrow a taste of him occasionally. As it is . . . well, Derek Maclaine, I’ve been wanting to meet you for a while now. We have several things in common.”

  “Other than bat-winging and blood-drinking? I can guess one other area of shared enthusiasm: you’re a descendant of Carmilla, so to speak? A frightful invert? Bent on eroding the sacred landscape of the American family?”

  “Correct,” she smiles. “I love a well-educated vampire, and you do have their amusing rhetoric down nicely. Yes, I’m a lesbian. My lover Lara runs the post office in Charleston. She’s human, so I understand some of what you must have been going through with Matthew. Especially since last week; while I was enjoying a petite snack at Blackwater Falls, Lara narrowly escaped a couple of pig-eyed thugs who are no doubt connected to the men who’ve landed Matthew in the hospital. She’s quite out, a vocal member of the West Virginia Gay and Lesbian Coalition. She’s spoken before the Charleston city council and the state legislature on the topic of hate crimes, so she’s apparently ended up on Reverend Bates’s list. As for Lara’s attackers, she—how would your potty-mouthed mountaineer put it?—flattened their nuts. Scrambled their eggs. Such a natural weakness in the male armor. Irresistible.”