Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2)

by Michael G. Williams

  I pulled up and parked in a Visitors space then stepped into the shadows to begin a perimeter of Marty's building. I had not, of course, announced my imminent arrival. It wasn't necessarily meant to be a pop quiz, and I wasn't looking for some special reason to find Marty with his metaphorical pants around his ankles, but I like to catch them when they're their real, natural selves. It gives me a better chance to decide what I think of them based on who they really are, what they're really like. Marty had a lot going for him in that department already, to be honest. He's not particularly social but he's got it together enough to maintain a lease on an apartment in a building full of mortals and not attract attention. That's good work, in my book. On the other hand, he doesn't seem like he's been a vampire more than fifteen years. It might just be that he's still in the habits of the living or this era has changed little enough in that time to suit him so that he doesn't stand out much yet.

  There was a light on in his bedroom but nowhere else and I didn't hear any moans or screaming, which almost always counts as “so far, so good.” I stepped up to one of the windows and tried to peek inside but he had the same full-window blinds most vampires use if they don't have a more permanent lair. If his senses were worth a damn then he might hear me out there, too, but I'm as good at staying quiet as any of us, so we might balance each other out. The back porch – just slightly above ground level due to a weird dip in the landscaping, low wall, easily leapt in a hurry with zero risk of injury to one of us but high enough that a human would think twice about running straight for it – was tidy, one chair, one table, one ashtray with about a thousand cigarette butts sticking up out of it in a mounded heap. There was a book face down on the small table, smudges of ash half-wiped from the back cover. No dust jacket and lots of small print on the back so I lifted myself just slightly onto the exterior of the porch railing and leaned over to look at it: Advanced Understandings of Statistics - Theory and Application. It was a late-80's printing of a textbook; no change there.

  I went on around now to the front door and rapped slowly and distinctly with three even knocks. I could hear some music inside, muffled by the door – reinforced, and I'd bet it was a homemade job his apartment complex management didn't know about. It was being played very softly to begin with so that a mortal didn't stand a chance of complaining about it but I had no trouble making out the words: and then thought this’ll never end, this’ll never end, this’ll never stop.

  After half a minute – all of us are good with the passage of time, at least in terms of measuring it – I saw the light coming through the peephole dim and heard a gasp, then heard a hand clap over the mouth that had gasped. I lifted one hand and waved and tried to smile. I'm no good at smiling: the Grinch with fangs when I try to look casual. The peephole stayed dark, then light again, then the music stopped.

  I stopped trying to smile and reached out to knock with another three simple raps, faster this time. The peephole flickered, like maybe he thought about putting his eye to it then decided against it. Everything was very quiet on the inside. I leaned against the door jam and put my face in the corner where the door opens.

  “Marty,” I said, so quiet that I knew he would be able to hear me but no one else would, “I believe you probably remember me. I’m Withrow Surrett. I ask that you open the door, invite me into your home and allow us to spend a little time together.”

  Silence on the other side of the door, though after a moment I could hear breathing. He was so young he still breathed out of habit.

  “Marty,” and now my voice was much quieter, “I can hear you. I know you can hear me.”

  More mostly-silence.

  “Marty?” I cleared my throat and spoke even more quietly. I could hear his breathing get closer as he put his ear right to the door to hear me. “What's the square root of nineteen thousand eight hundred twenty four?”

  The breathing stopped. After seven seconds, the locks started to turn. The knob turned. I stood back to show a little respect. The door cracked just a half-inch. “One hundred forty point seven nine seven seven two seven two five four three eight four three - “

  I held up a hand and stopped him. “Good enough. I took another step back, then bowed very slightly at the waist. “Withrow Surrett. Is this the home of the one known as Marty Macintosh?”

  Marty hesitated, still only looking at me with one eye before he stepped back, closed the door, undid the chain latch, opened it more widely, then bowed from the waist. “I am Marty Macintosh,” he stammered, nervous. “Withrow Surrett is welcome in my home.”

  I let the corners of my mouth tug upwards just slightly and then held out a hand for Marty to shake. He stared at it before doing so. “Good to see you again, Marty. Still on the counting thing, huh?”

  “Five fingers on the one hand, five on the other,” Marty said, watching our hands shake each other way past the point of politeness or custom. “Together they form two hands of ten fingers, turn-the-table asymmetry. They're the same hand, opposed.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder and sighed. Maybe Marty wasn't doing so well after all.

  Eventually, he got out of the way so I could walk inside. The place was dark but I could smell and see and taste thick dust everywhere. Marty wasn't going out much. The dim light in his bedroom had a blue-white glow that made me think it was a television set left on. It didn't flicker. Maybe he'd paused a tape or something. I had to wonder at Marty sitting around watching musicals with the volume down low but then I've read there are a lot of connections between mathematics and music theory. I couldn't harmonize my way out of a wet paper sack so it's all Greek to me. Marty is one of the counters. You might've heard the old legend, though it's fairly obscure these days: throw down rice or sesame seeds or kernels of corn or whatever in a vampire's path when he's chasing you and he'll have to stop to count them before he can continue his pursuit, giving you time to get away. Marty is one of those. Counters are actually just obsessed with numbers somehow; only a few of them are actually obsessed with counting. Sometimes it only takes them in spells, sometimes it's a specific kind of thing they can't resist counting, sometimes it's everything they see. I don't think it's anything special or supernatural. I think they're probably just people who had some latent obsessive-compulsive disorder or whatever and the trauma of getting turned made it come out or made it worse, or whatever. It brushed up against some switch in their mind and flipped it on. Of course, I'm no psychologist either, so maybe I'm full of horseshit. I don’t claim to know.

  Marty's place, as I said, was dusty and didn't smell like it'd been aired out recently, but we don't sweat or produce skin oils or the like, either, so it didn't smell like a human hovel. It just smelled like a house that’s been shut up. There was dust caked on all the living room furniture except for one chair and it and the TV had been positioned to face one another. The rest of the furniture was just for show. Hell, maybe the rest of the furniture came with the place. I looked around, sniffed the air then pointed one thumb at the sliding glass door out onto the porch. “Smoke?”

  “Sure,” Marty said. He's a small white guy with dark hair, pale skin, an extremely thin build and great big eyes: what they call “black Irish” though I'm given to understand that's not an OK term to use anymore. He patted his pockets for a second. “Sorry the place is such a wreck. I didn't know you were coming.”

  “Just happened to be in town,” I said easily, walking towards the door I'd indicated. “It's been a while, figured I'd say hello.”

  “Seven hundred thirty days, one hour, twelve minutes.” Marty said it lightning fast, then closed his mouth and looked a little embarrassed. I raised both eyebrows and nodded.

  “Like I said: a while.” I opened the glass door, which wanted to stick halfway down its runner, so I gave it a hard yank and something made a bad noise and the door slid open. Marty looked slightly stricken and pointed at the far side of the door from the handle.

  “My... that's my security bar.”

  I looked over
my shoulder and saw what had made it stick – a length of solid steel that had been laid in the track to keep the door from opening more than an inch or two. Wow. He considered that security?

  “Oops,” I said with a more genuine smile than I'd had when I was still out front being looked at through the peephole. “Guess I hardly know my own strength.”

  Marty swallowed – goddamn, so young – and nodded. He even tried to laugh. It sounded strangled. I walked on out onto the porch, settled my hips into the corner of the deck and watched him. Marty followed me after a second and closed the door behind him, then tried to decide whether to sit or stand.

  “Please,” I said after a few moments, “Sit down if you want to sit down. This is just a friendly visit.”

  Marty nodded and perched on the edge of the resin chair, as anonymous as the apartment itself. He lit his cigarette with a hand that only shook slightly and pulled his arms tighter around himself, another very human sort of action but habit couldn't possibly make him feel cold. He was nervous. I decided to step lightly but with determination. I pointed at the twisted metal of the security bar and asked, “Much crime around here?”

  “One hundred twenty seven police calls in the last five years,” he said automatically. Numbers helped to soothe him a little bit, and he sat back, finally lighting his cigarette. “Forty three break-ins, thirty two automobile accidents, the rest pranks or mistaken calls.”

  I nodded. “A cat sets off the car alarm, that kind of thing?”

  Marty nodded. “Seventeen times.”

  I smiled a little more. “So the bar is...”

  “It makes me feel safe,” Marty blurted out. “I get scared. I'm just...” He licked his lips, took a long drag, licked them again. “One.”

  I looked out across the back corner of the lot. There was a little creek back there that had run dry in the drought we'd experienced for the last, oh, decade. All the recent rain had washed clean away over ground so hard and dry it might as well have been a concrete culvert. Climate change, you know. It takes a certain length of perspective and attention span to notice it happening, but it's happening. My breath had misted a little when I talked, at first, but now I was starting to leak heat all over the place in the chill November air and my breath was misting less and less. “There was a murder down in Hardisonville the other night,” I commented. “Is crime getting worse around Asheville in general?”

  Marty licked his lips again. He was so incredibly pale, even by our standards. His lips were actually dry. He didn't feed enough, or at least hadn't recently. I wondered: if I opened his refrigerator would there be bags of blood or would there instead be a couple of bottles of ancient condiments? “There have been eighty three murders in the greater Asheville region in the last five years, up from an average of forty six every five from 1975 to 1995.” Marty seemed to flinch a little when he said it.

  “And were there any...” I paused and then went on. What the hell. “Any among anyone you know?”

  Marty looked up briefly, nearly met my eyes, then didn't. “No.”

  I scratched my goatee briefly and wondered what about me had Marty so scared. He'd been like a nervous little rabbit the last time I'd been here, too, but not this bad. Might just be the passage of time, might be me. I guessed my physical size might intimidate him, but normally a fat guy like me doesn't scare anyone by making them think they'll get beat up; normally he scares them as an example of what might happen if they let that gym membership lapse. I decided to keep circling the crime - crimes in general - as long as that made him jumpy. The doctor asks you where it hurts and then pokes you until you yelp. I wasn't trying to torture Marty but I could tell I'd started waiting for him to say something and I didn’t know whether that was because some instinct registered that he had something he wanted to say or instead that I felt like there was something he wanted not to say. “What kinds of murders?”

  “Sixty four shootings,” he said after running his fingers against one another for a moment. “Five stabbings. Three strangulations or smothering deaths, one poisoning.”

  “Ah, yes,” I sighed. “Guns are so easy. Everyone watches too much TV.” I chuckled. “Poisons are so much classier, and a knife?” I drew a breath and whistled. My own had stopped misting entirely. It felt downright comfortable out here and it was at most forty five degrees. “Well, a knife says you mean it. You've got to get in close with a knife. Nasty work.”

  Marty shuddered just slightly.

  “Other kinds of crime? Assaults?”

  “Concentrated in specific areas, they're the most common crimes reported in Western North Carolina as a whole. If you do the numbers,” here Marty's voice got a little stronger. “There are more assaults per capita than any other crime when counted in a two-mile radius from the center of any city or town of more than fifteen thousand people.” His eyes flickered over and he spoke even more easily. “Outside that radius they're domestic violence. Assault by a stranger happens where there are sidewalks, mostly.”

  “And in rural areas, they happen at the hands of someone the victim knows?”

  “Oh, yes, definitely. Almost always.” Marty licked his lips again. I could hear his tongue rasp against their parched surface. He was starving. He locked himself away in his house behind a steel bar that would keep people out, and watched movies and listened to music and read crime reports or statistics texts and slowly starved himself half to death. For right then, though, what I knew was that I'd started to crack open his shell and I thought I had just a whiff of the scent of what he wanted to say but couldn't.

  “And what's the most interesting kind of crime?” It was a nice, open-ended question. Let's see how he likes that, I thought.

  Marty's eyes cut to one side and then the other but his head didn't move. There was no sound except the burning of tobacco and occasional road noise from out on US 25, reflected and scattered by trees and distance. I didn't say anything else, waiting, watching him fight something inside.

  “Disappearances,” he finally said. It sounded like it hurt on its way out. He panted a little when he said it.

  “How do you mean?”

  “They usually end up falling under domestic violence,” he half-whispered. “In the last few years, though, they've picked up. People just vanish.”

  “Thin air?”

  “Yeah.” Marty was licking his lips between every other breath now. “They don't show up to work or they miss a meal or they forget to call mom on her birthday and that's what it takes for someone to notice that they just aren't here anymore.”

  The missing. There are millions of them every year in America. They’re one of my favorite advances of the modern era. I could go on about them for hours. In some ways, they’re my numbers, my counting obsession. They’re the rice thrown in my path, the mirror that casts no reflection. My brain gets hung up on them. “Where do those tend to happen?”

  Marty struggled, staring at his own hand; took a drag; then stared at his hand again. “Oh, you know,” he mumbled. “Around.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Around where?”

  “Specific places.”

  “Such as?” I could feel the thread of meaning. It was right there. It was being woven in front of me. I couldn't tell what it meant, but I could smell that a true answer to my question would be significant and Marty also knew his answer would be important. He was trying to tell me something he couldn’t come right out and say.

  “I could show you. I have maps. Online maps. Internet maps. The computer.” Words came out of him like wobbling birds in a gale, clustered and uncertain.

  “Show me,” I said. He stubbed out his cigarette and got up and walked inside. I followed him. We walked down the “hallway,” in scare quotes by virtue of its being three feet long, and into his bedroom. The blue-white glow was gone now, replaced by a red and green and yellow continuous fade-and-brighten cycle. It wasn't a TV with a paused movie; it was a computer monitor that had gone into screensaver mode. It was a huge computer monitor. There
were stacks of printouts and file folders on the desk next to it, some in a big box made out of an upturned cardboard container lid labeled INCOMING and more in a matching homemade tray for OUTGOING. I flipped one open; it was a medical history.

  “I do at-home records transcription,” Marty said. I had no idea what that was other than being this. “Doesn't have a schedule, no office, but I get decent pay for what it requires. I've done forty seven records tonight.”

  “Already?” I had no idea if that was a lot, but it’s always better to sound impressed than not when trying to crack open someone’s shell.

  “I type really fast.”

  I nodded. I bet he did type really fast. He pressed some keys in rapid succession and the screen cleared to a desktop image of the moon high over a mountain somewhere, the picture engineered to make the moon bigger than she really is. Maybe it had been edited, I thought. People can do that, I've seen some of the Photoshop competitions online but I don't understand how or what they exactly do. I don't even own a camera.

  Roderick has seven of them, and a little laptop computer he named “Toto.”

  Marty pressed a few more keys, clicked something with his mouse, and a web browser opened. I do know what the internet is and I know there are web browsers and I have a computer at home in Raleigh that I can just barely get working enough to do some crosswords and some Sudoku puzzles and read my email. I even read a couple of blogs without ever commenting. Roderick says blogs are over and I should get on this Twitter thing but I don’t want to say anything. I want to listen. I am a user and I know that and am OK with that. I will never be a producer of the things people look at online. We are consumers first and foremost. A vampire who remembers that will last longer than one who doesn’t. The world can make more of itself all it wants. Our job is to skim off the top.