Count On Me

by Abigail Graham

“Chris, stop! Stop it! Christine!”

  Even though she was taller and outweighed me I pinned her to the floor, ignoring her attempts to push me away as I grasped her jaw in my hand and pushed her head back, and plunged towards her neck.

  “God, please don’t! I’m sorry!”

  She… she apologized to me.

  “Help! Help me! Daddy!”

  Her words turned into choked gurgles as my teeth closed on her skin.

  I tried to stop, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t in charge anymore. All I could do was make my jaws tremble as I felt my teeth digging in, the pressure welling until I took a bite out of her throat and then the blood came, gushing hot into my mouth, and I gulped it down but there was too much. A red stain spread across the white carpet as I gnawed on her throat and gulped down the gouts of blood until she went still beneath me.

  When I pulled back, I was in control again, and when I fully saw what I had done I screamed and screamed until it hurt, until I was rattling the walls, and threw myself away from her.

  This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It was a nightmare. I was still on the plane. I worked myself up about how horrible the trip was going to be and now I was having a bad dream on the airplane and any minute Andi would shake me awake and tell me we were landing and I would make sure it wasn’t real. I’d find something for us to do, keep us together until we could go home and be safe and I could put this horrible dream in the past and be safe with… with him.

  For a moment I could feel him, but I didn’t know his name.

  Andi lay on the floor, dead, her eyes locked on nothing. She didn’t look scared, she looked deeply confused, confronted with something she did not understand. I looked away from the ruin of her throat.

  Then Vincent grabbed the back of my head and turned me to look.

  “Eyes open, or I’ll peel your eyelids off. They grow back.”

  I looked.

  “That is what you are now.”

  He pulled me up onto my feet and pushed me into a bathroom as big as a small apartment, and there he tore off what was left of my bloodstained, ripped, scorched clothes and shoved me under the spray. The water was steaming, scalding, but it was just water. All feeling on my skin was dying. The whole world felt like paper.

  I killed my best friend. I worse than killed her.

  7

  “I tried to stop,” I burst out, sobbing. “I tried and I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t stop. I tried so hard,” I plunge my face into my hands. “You son of a bitch, why did you make me remember that?”

  “Christine,” he says, rising.

  “Get away from me,” I hiss, crawling to the other side of the bed.

  I grab something, a vase, and hurl it at him. He plucks it from the air and drops it on the bed where it lands with a soft thump as he comes around the other side.

  “Christine, I can’t let you hurt yourself.”

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I wail. “Just put me out in the sun or drive a stake through my heart. I can’t. I can’t.”

  “Andi wouldn’t want you to-“

  I grit my teeth and snarl at him. “How would you know? You didn’t know her.”

  He stops, and his hands fall to his sides. The look of utter despair clouding his features shocks me into stillness. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and his touch is soft and warm. There’s something in me and my head swims. I can feel it moving around, like there’s something soft and weak crawling in my chest, but the other feeling is there too.

  It’s like when Vincent bit me, that scratchy, insect-ish feeling that moved down my throat now crawling around in my chest, scratching at soft places with hard sharp limbs like blades. My legs begin to tremble.

  He looks at his watch.

  “Come with me.”

  He takes my arm and pulls me into the bathroom, and wipes my cheeks clean. I didn’t even feel the blood leaking from my eyes. There’s a cold pit in my belly, the thirst taking shape, but all I can see is him. He’s so alive. He’s pale but there’s still blood under his skin, he has stubble, I can feel his breath on my cheek as he cleans around my eyes until I pressed them shut and let him wipe away the blood before it dries.

  “Put on some clothes. Don’t think about anything, just get dressed for me. Then, step out into the hall.”

  “The hall?”

  I think about the collar squeezing my neck.

  “You can pass the door.”

  I quickly change out of my sleeping clothes, into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt and those sneakers. My fingers tremble when I touch the doorknob. I can feel the collar move, like it’s thinking, but nothing happens. I step out the door and he’s waiting, standing in the hall wearing a jacket and a wool hat, his dirty blond hair tucked up under it and poking out around the fringes. He offers me a hand.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I take it.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Outside for a walk. Here.”

  He hands me a blood pack. I want to throw it away, feeling the cold softness of it in my hands, but I rip the cap off and drink it anyway.

  “Don’t watch me.”

  “Okay.”

  He turns away until I’ve drained it and takes it, and leads me down the hall. He tosses the empty bag into a garbage can at the top of the stairs and leads me down a grand staircase into a huge formal parlor. This a big house. Not rich-big, but it was built by somebody with some money.

  I look around and feel a stir, like echoes of a conversation I can’t quite hear. There’s a grand piano, a wall of pictures, and antique furniture. I run my hands over the wood on the back of a chaise lounge. My fingers naturally find a worn place, like I’d done this before.

  “Come on.”

  He tugs my hand and opens the front door. The moonlight spills through and I look up at the sky and stop.

  There’s so many stars. We must be out in the country. Light spills across the whole sky in a stunning profusion that I can barely believe, the only competition the light of the moon itself. All around it’s dark. The house is surrounded by woods. As my eyes adjust the world comes alive in silver hues. I haven’t been out in the real dark for a long time. In cities, the only difference between the night and day is the color of the sky and the depth of shadows in alleys.

  Another tug and I start walking. My hand swings, holding his. It feels so natural, his skin is so soft. It must be cold. There’s color in his cheeks and a puff of mist in front of his nose every time he breathes.

  Not mine, though.

  I don’t breathe. I’m a corpse.

  As I walk I realize I’m not paying attention to the winding path of worn stones that leads away from the house towards the woods. It’s like my legs know the way. It must be winter, now. There’s a dusting of snow here and there. I feel strange as I walk, something moving and swirling in my stomach. There’s something about the blood I swallowed. He’s still holding my hand. He stops and looks down at me and I look back up at him.

  He smoothes my hair over my shoulder and I freeze. The moon is at his back, and the stars.

  He burned me. He put this thing on my neck, but he looks so kind.

  “Are you alright?”

  I shake my head. “No. Where does the blood come from?”

  “What blood?”

  I scowl at him. Something in my expression amuses him. He cracks a smile, just a little.

  “It’s just blood. Nobody died to give it to me.”

  He’s lying to me. I know he is, but when I look in his eyes I get nothing, just a kind of buzz. He’s keeping me out.

  We keep walking. Into the woods. I’m not afraid. He isn’t either. I can see it in the way he walks.

  “What happened to your friend was not your fault.”

  I stop and pull my hand out of his. I think about running and the collar squeezes my neck. I push that thought out of my head.

  “You weren’t there,” I say, softly, staring down at the frozen leaves coating the stones. “I saw her face as I was kill
ing her. Like she wanted to know why I was doing this to her.”

  He puts his arm around my shoulders. I just stand there.

  “I’m sure she was confused, and very scared, but there was love between you. Monsters like Vincent hate love. It frightens and confuses them.”

  “Why?”

  “Love is a kind of magic,” he says, pulling his arm from my shoulder as he looks me in the eye. “Some say the most powerful kind. It may seem like hate and fear rule the world, but it was love that made it, love that keeps it going around.”

  “All you need is love,” I say, and laugh softly to myself.

  There it is again. Echoes of something just out of my hearing.

  “I didn’t get to ask my question,” I say. “I told you about my first kill. I get to ask something now.”

  “Go on.”

  I take a deep but unnecessary breath. Old habits die hard.

  “What happened to Andi after she died?”

  “You’re asking me if there’s an afterlife.”

  “My mother said…” I trail off, freezing in place, eyes wide and fixed on nothing.

  My mother said all good girls go to heaven.

  There it is. I can feel her, but I can’t see her. I know there was a soft touch once, a pair of strong gentle arms that wrapped around me when I was scared or sad, hands that fixed my lunch and bandaged my scraps and brushed my hair, but the knowledge is empty and hollow, like the papery touch of an old wasps’s nest. There’s nothing inside it. No face, no name. No sound of her voice or color of her eyes or hair.

  I had a mother, once. Most people do. That’s all I’ve got.

  “Christine?”

  “It’s nothing. Answer my question.”

  “The afterlife.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “If there are vampires,” I say, walking to take my mind off that hollow feeling, “what about other things? Ghosts? If there’s ghosts there must be an afterlife, right?”

  “There is something in us that is more than our flesh,” he says. “We’re more than just our bodies. Where we go after that, I don’t know. I hope it’s someplace good.”

  “It’s not,” I say. “It’s like when I’m sleeping. There’s just nothing. Or worse. I don’t even know if I want there to be something after. I can’t think of anything worse than seeing her again, after… after what I did.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  I stop in mid step and look up at the sky.

  “I remember pieces. Flashes of things from before, enough to know who she was. I remember sitting next to her in fourth grade. I remember when she told me she went on her first date and when she called me to tell me her parents were getting a divorce, but it’s like seeing it through a glass. I can more feel it than see it.”

  “That’s a start. More will come to you.”

  “Is this you? Is it magic?”

  “Partly,” he says. “We need to get back to the house.”

  As we start the walk back, I look over at him. He’s not looking at me now, but staring down at the ground in thought.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “First you almost kill me. Then you put me in that room and start playing the interview game with me and making me remember things. Why?”

  “You need to remember.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking. Why are you interested in me? Who am I to you?”

  He stumbles and his breath catches. I can feel him tense up. He takes a few rapid steps away from me and looks off into the woods, facing away. From the mist I can see he’s breathing hard. The wind catches it and carries it off until it fades into nothing. In his pockets, his fists are clenched.

  Part of me wakes up for a moment. A distant part I’ve forgotten, but it’s the part that knows when a man is looking at you that way. He’s clenching his fists because if he doesn’t he’ll throw his arms around me. I don’t need to read his mind to see that.

  That same part of me wants to. It might feel like going home.

  He turns away.

  “I want to tell you, but I can’t. You’re not ready. It would ruin everything.”

  “Why?”

  “I need you to trust me.”

  “Why should I? You shot me in the back with that thing, and the sun. That hurt. Do you know what it feels like to choke on your own ash?”

  He looks at me and then looks at the ground.

  “I’m doing this for a reason, Christine. It will all make sense. We can’t stop now. We’ve gone too far. There’s further to go, but when we make it you’ll understand.”

  “Just leave me alone.”

  He sighs.

  “As you wish.”

  I press my lips shut and start towards the house. He follows a few steps behind, not speaking. Like a good pet, I head right up to my room and he closes the door without following me inside. I open the wardrobe and I feel an urge to tear it all out and shred it with my bare hands, just ruin everything. These aren’t my clothes. They’re someone else’s, not mine. I take the bag with the prom dress and I hold it in my fists and get ready to shred it in my fingers, and stop.

  I can’t do it.

  I drift back to the bed. I flop down and wait for it.

  Day comes. I can feel it outside, feel the sun rising to steal my soul back for another day, and then I’m gone.

  When I wake up there’s a cooler sitting on the bedside table, but that’s not what catches my attention first. There’s a warm spot on the bed next to me.

  Like someone was lying there.

  With a shudder I get up, and open the cooler. I’m so worried about the blood I don’t notice until I’ve halfway finished gulping down the frigid gore and trying not to choke. The bookcase is packed full of volumes, wedged in tightly together like bricks without mortar. The dresser, whose top was formerly empty, now holds a television and a blu-ray player sitting next to it. I look around the room and the only sign of him I find is a folded piece of notebook paper.

  Rest tonight. We will resume tomorrow.

  Rest. How can I rest? I rush to the books and look them over. A stir of distant voices flutters in the back of my mind when I look over the spines. I know these books. One in particular catches my eye. The Lord of the Rings. I pull the book off the shelf, out of its slipcase. The cover is green leather, the front cover Tolkien’s own illustration of the One Ring in gilt. I can’t help but run my fingers over the buttery smooth leather. It feels like a crime to open it and bend the spine.

  I almost drop the book.

  There’s writing on inside cover.

  For your eighteenth birthday. Love, Mom.

  I sit down, and I read. I sit in the chair for hours, luxuriating in the words, feeling the pages against my skin as I turn them. I’m smiling in spite of myself, breathing in the loamy smell of Middle Earth as the words paint pictures in my mind of pastoral vistas, sinister wraiths and wizened wizards. Then I hear that voice again. Not his. It’s a recording, a song.

  I put the book aside, careful to mark my page with the note, and get up.

  When I put my ear to the door, I hear it more clearly.

  Elvis?

  That should mean something. I can feel it. I just don’t know it.

  8

  I look around and immediately know that this is wrong.

  I’m not in the bedroom anymore. I’m not even in the house. My bare feet slap on tile as I walk down a wide hallway, under an arched ceiling. To either side, the walls are lined with lockers, stretching on to infinity, broken only by tall classroom doors. My movements are slow, my steps are heavy. I know this place. The chilly air. The smell of chalk and sawdust and cheap disinfectant from the floor, the wafting scents of hot dogs and canned ravioli from a cafeteria I can’t see.

  There’s a weight in my arms and when I look down I’m carrying an armload of books pressed against my chest. I’m not barefoot any more. I’m wearing Mary Jane
s, stockings, a tartan skirt and sweater, the whole getup. Barettes hold my hair in place and there’s a pair of thick glasses perched on my nose, skewed to one side. There’s more books in the bag hanging from my back but they’re not schoolbooks. I carry those in my arms because I have to keep a battered paperback copy of Elric: The Stealer of Souls and the Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition Dungeon Master’s Manual in my pack. Keep them secret. Keep them safe.

  Down the hall there’s a boy standing at a locker. His face is hidden behind the open door as he rummages inside. He’s wearing the male counterpart to my uniform, a jacket and slacks and scuffed dress shoes he’s worn too long, unable to replace them.

  I see a flash of dirty blonde hair, spot a dimple in his ear from an earring when he’s not at school, or around his father. He swings the door shut and turns away from me and heads down the hall, books tucked under his arm, walking with the swaggering gait of a cocky high school football player, but there’s this month’s issue of The Amazing Spider-Man folded in half and tucked in his back pocket, a badge worn with a brusque defiance.

  I go to call his name. I know it. It’s etched in my soul, but the word will not come to my mind. The shape of it will not form of my lips, lips that have felt his touch. He won’t turn to face me. I break into a run, my heels clicking on the floor, for every step he takes I take five and I still can’t catch up.

  I can feel his name, like something I swallowed stuck in my throat. There’s something down there holding it, keeping it from me, something skittery and hairy, holding it in sharp little legs like clawed fingers. When I scream the name nothing but a choked cough comes out and sharp spines rake my throat.

  Something rattles behind me. I look back and all the lights are off. The tiles are broken, cracked, torn out of place. The lockers are coated in rust and filth, the doors hanging skewed from their hinges. Water drips from the arched ceiling and the classroom doors lie on the floor, the glass broken out. The rattle comes again, something between breath and laughter without life or mirth, and I see the shape in the dark.

  So I run, but the world in front of me has changed, too. The boy with the dirty blonde hair is gone, and so are my shoes and my books and my clothes. The tiles tear at my feet, the cold air presses against my skin and sucks the energy out of my muscles. I hear it coming behind me, taking five steps for every one of mine and gaining on me. I can feel her cold breath on my neck as I press against the wall, shivering and whimpering, praying for help, but no help is coming.