I could see a pout coming on so I waved it off. “I’m sure no one else remembers.” He smiled and I laughed again, but only half-hearted. “You’re, um, you’re not thinking about trying to go, you know… ” I cleared my throat. “…Public.”
Roderick turned now to look at me again – finally. “Of course not, don’t be absurd. The world that will accept us is a very different one from this.” He waved a hand at life in general, out there somewhere, vague and all-encompassing. I didn’t dare to suppose what he meant, but he let me know on his own. “This world is way too at odds with its own inherent injustices. It thinks it can solve its problems by people being nicer to one another. It hasn’t yet realized that one day the nice people will simply have to make the not-nice ones stop.” He paused. “It will be a world that’s okay with us outing ourselves as manipulators and attackers and killers because it has made peace with that part of its own human nature. They’re going to have to accept all the humans they don’t like before they can accept all the people like us who simply used to be. They’ll have to be ready to accept that we aren’t just monsters in opera capes. We’re humans who’ve been given fangs.”
Another hour passed in total silence. Smiles would move around in his sleep or paddle his feet a little while he chased something in his dreams. He moved from Roderick’s side to mine and back again while owls hunted in the silence around us. Occasionally I would hear a heat pump kick on at some house nearby, fighting back against the insistence of a November night in the mountains. Roderick continued to stare off into nothing, smoking a long chain of cigarettes, sometimes lighting the new one off the dying embers of the last. I fiddled with the puzzles from time to time but mostly we waited for the other to say something in particular. I marveled at the experience, to be honest. Humans are always eager to have something to prattle about no matter how stupid it makes them sound. Vampires usually don’t like to be around one another for long. We have something like a community, sure, with a set of semi-official rules of behavior and some social niceties we at least try to look like we observe, but we don’t exactly throw a lot of bat mitzvahs. We mostly do enough socializing to figure out who’s the local boss and how to stay off their radar and then we go back to living our own lives while paperwork piles up for the fake ones.
My visit to Roderick in Seattle had been a shock to the system. It turned out vampires don’t work that way in the Pacific Northwest. They aren’t quite the Brady Bunch but there is a strong social element to their iteration of the culture of attempted immortality. It’s a long story, but my visit occurred during something of a crisis they were having Roderick was involved, and I had the opportunity to meet a lot of vampires by my standards: half a dozen or more in just a couple of weeks. They weren’t all friends or even polite but their boss – Emily – she seemed to take a genuine interest in their affairs. I don’t know if I would say she was concerned with their wellbeing – what’s wellbeing to one of us? – but she gave a damn. She promised she’d keep an eye on Roderick for me. I hadn’t even known he was a vampire until then. Agatha told me I should go out there and kill him, but I’ve already covered how she feels about having a mortal relative become an undead colleague. I considered it, to be honest, but seeing how they operated changed a lot of how I viewed my place in the world. I had just killed off Bob Three to liberate myself, to make myself the local boss so people would stop fucking bothering me, and there I was with a whole new passel of binding complications. I’m not always thrilled about that, but I turned out to resent having a cousin around a lot less than I’d thought I would. Now here we were, silent, together, on the same side. I still didn’t completely understand why he had picked now, and here in Asheville rather than home in Raleigh, to visit me: not like it was so unbelievable that he would repay the compliment of a visit but rather because my gut just told me there was something going on. My gut is always telling me that, though. In some ways, opting to enjoy Roderick’s company rather than overanalyze his motives was me choosing to try – just once – telling that suspicious little voice in the back of my head to go fuck itself in hell.
“What did she tell you to make you say yes?” Roderick’s voice was soft and a little dreamy but his eyes seemed to be focused off in the yard. I supposed he’d spotted the owl. It sounded like it was nearby. One of the bits of vampire folklore that gets passed around is the notion that birds of prey are drawn to us because they can sense the presence of a successful predator who isn’t direct competition. Places where we are, the reasoning goes, must be places where it’s safe for a creature to hunt.
I took my time responding. I knew exactly what he meant and I knew the answer but I didn’t know if it would sound stupid. I didn’t know why he wanted to know, either, though I supposed it was simple curiosity. A man with no legs wonders what it would be like to walk again; an orphan vampire who claims never to have known his maker – not able even to remember or describe them – wonders what it would be like to have a choice. “It wasn’t just one thing,” I finally murmured. My voice was tight. I’d never talked about this with anyone. No vampire had ever offered me her own reasons, either. I didn’t even know whether having been offered a choice by Agatha was unusual or was standard operating procedure. I wondered if Roderick’s question meant most of us do get that choice. I wondered if that’s how it worked in Seattle. I wondered if he simply assumed that everyone else gets a choice but he didn’t because he knew he was a weirdo. “She asked me if I wanted all the time I could want to practice my art. That was the thing that got my interest at first.”
“That’s a pretty good carrot,” Roderick said. He smiled a little, but it wavered. This question was important to him. He couldn’t cover over it with the spackle of careless flippancy.
I smirked back at him when his deep green pupils shot over at me in the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, you could say that,” I said. “But the other thing she said was that it would make being alone forever into a virtue.” My voice stopped all of a sudden. I couldn’t imagine myself saying that to any vampire in Raleigh. Seth – this sullen “kid” with a build like a running back who looked like an ‘80s punk band and talked about as much as two mimes – was my second in command there, the closest thing a boss gets to have to a work buddy. I certainly trusted him to keep an eye on things downtown and tell me about any new vampires who rolled into his particular view, but I was never going to have a sleepover rap session with him. I gulped hard. I didn’t have the capacity to get out more words all of a sudden. I don’t even know what I would have said, anyway.
“That’s an even better one.” Roderick didn’t smile. He didn’t look over. He kept gazing out at the owl or the woods in general or maybe simply the night itself. I read a thing on the Internet one time, a blog post in which a vampire talked about the night as being like a great work of art: no matter how long or often we study it, we find something new waiting for us there. That’s one thing about the modern era: young vampires use the Internet like crazy. We’re going to have a whole different culture in fifty years and ones like Agatha are going to have a hell of a time understanding it. Maybe Roderick was right. Maybe one day we’d be getting endorsement deals; or maybe the old ones like Agatha – like The Transylvanian – would swoop down from their mountaintop castles, their ruined estates, their penthouse suites rented under another name and kill all the Rodericks and the Marty Macintoshes. I wondered if Roderick would drag me kicking and screaming into that future with any success – so far he had – and I hoped so because I wanted to be on their side if I had to be on any side at all. “What was the stick?”
“The stick?” My voice gurgled up through a crack in my reverie. “There wasn’t one.” I laughed, a single chuckle. It made me think of Mary Lou Reinhart and her short, sharp bark of a laugh when she mocked one fool notion or another. “She didn’t need one. I was interested in having eternity to paint, sure. I love painting. I love making something and wondering if this is the one that’ll be truly eternal. I love to think
something of mine could wind up on the wall of the Met or the Louvre or, I don’t know, anywhere could be pretty cool: the wall of a good coffee shop, the side of a rental truck, a postage stamp. The walls of rich people’s houses pay pretty well, sure, but to put brush to canvas and create something completely new and have someone else want that idea in their lives? That was fantastic.”
“But it wasn’t enough.” Roderick had slung his legs over the arm of his chair and now he twisted around in it to look at me.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t look back at him. I couldn’t meet those orphan eyes. “So she went for the gut shot. She got me with the promise I could be by myself, too, and be praised for it. That was something new. That was something different. Lots of people become famous or respected or successful painters. Not a lot of them do it in their own lifetimes, sure, but it happens. I felt like I could just gamble on being one of them if I really had to. Back then, though, there was so much…” I flexed my fingers and closed my hand on nothing. “Social pressure. The war was over and Our Boys were home and I hadn’t been one of them – thank Christ – and there was all this rah-rah home team bullshit in the air. I don’t mean about the war, I’m as glad as anybody we beat the Nazis, sure, but I mean about everything else. Everyone just wanted life to go back to normal, emphasis on “normal”. Square pegs didn’t get a lot of love. Tribal identity was big. Conformity was big. We were ramping up for the Red Scare. It was the era that gave us McCarthy, you know. I’d hear talk about San Francisco and New York and San Diego and anywhere else lots of soldiers had settled when they got back from the war: of gay bars and handsome sailors dancing in the half-light, all scared to death someone had seen them walk in and twice as scared someone would see them walk out together. I knew I wouldn’t strike gold with some G.I. Joe in polished shoes and a jaw that could cut cold butter, though. There I was, fat and gay and angry at a world that valued baseball over Art degrees, estranged from my family, living in an apartment over an appliance store, waiting for the world to change. Along comes someone who listens and pats me on the shoulder and doesn’t use a Bible to do so, and she tells me there’s a community where I’ll fit right in because I don’t have to talk to anybody if I don’t want to? She was describing a life I didn’t know was possible. She changed the world for me, just like I’d been waiting to happen. I said yes, then. She made me think about it for a while, an insanely long six months, and she rode my ass to lose some weight or get a haircut or something but I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted her to open that door into whatever secret world she offered me so I could disappear from this one.” I put a hand over my mouth for a moment to make myself stop talking.
Roderick watched me the whole time, unblinking, and when I was done and enough time had passed for him to be sure I was all talked out, he twisted back around into his lounging slacker position. “Thank you, cousin.” That’s all he said before we were silent again for a long time.
I went back to my Sudoku and slotted numbers into their places, working my way up in complexity until Roderick left two hours later. I didn't see him out, I just nodded and he went out the screen door on the porch. Smiles licked his hand and swept past him to come lay down next to me; he’d been napping by Roderick for a while, something I genuinely took as a sign of Roderick being okay in the end. I heard Roderick's rental rocket start up with a high whine and drive away. I went to bed early and lay there for forty five minutes waiting for the sun to come up. Vampires don't sleep, not real sleep. The day sleep isn't like nodding off; it's death. It's turning into a corpse while the sun lights the sky. That's mighty mystic, if you ask me, but there's no two ways about it and there's no pseudoscience in the world to explain it away. The sun came up, my eyes slammed shut and when I opened them again it was the next night, shortly before six in the evening.
The newspaper said the cops were still looking for Cliff. One deputy had said he might be armed and dangerous but the detective working the case, some asian lady with a funny little H' in her name that I knew meant she was of Hmong descent – they’d supported the US during the Vietnam War, and a ton of them were settled in North Carolina after – she'd said he was simply a person of interest and that if he was seen by anyone they should call 911. “He might be wounded, sick or in danger,” she said. “We want to help him however we can.” She was certain she would never see him again, or not alive, anyway. I could tell that from the way she spoke about him. “He might need our help, but that's our job. Certainly no one should try to be a vigilante or a hero.” She knew these people pretty well to say that. She knew there would be people out there who would shoot first and ask questions later.
I folded up the newspaper, watched Smiles finish his bowl of chow and then clicked my cheeks to get his attention so I could load him into the car and go pay some calls.
5
The funny thing is, in all of Western North Carolina – everywhere west of Hickory, to be honest – I had two vampires left on my list. Bob had known of three vampires in this entire third of the state. Well, not a third. More like a quarter. Down East is pretty big territory. Still, this wasn't exactly one neighborhood or one city and all I had were a vampire in Black Mountain and a vampire in Waynesville. I couldn't believe there weren't any vampires in Asheville itself. It's a city with a population in six figures. That basically begs for at least one vampire in it, maybe a couple of vampires and their well-trained spawn still learning the ropes. It was just big enough for the occasional slip-up without attracting much attention. I simply refused to believe there weren't any vampires there. If the vampires here were hiding The Transylvanian from Bob, it occurred to me, from whom might Bob Three have hidden vampires he knew about, but no one else? For that matter, given he'd come from a long line of Bobs, maybe his maker had hidden one from him. Or farther back that that, maybe. Maybe there was some ancient old vampire in the middle of town who was so good at hiding and so terrified of the modern world that no one knew he existed at all. Hell, he could live in the sewers if he needed to. Plenty of rats and other things down there to feed on when push comes to shove.
I shuddered a little and Smiles picked up on the apprehension in my thoughts when I did so, whining briefly and then sticking his head up against the glass of the window on his side, watching out the side of the car.
Waynesville was slightly closer and so that's where I went first. The vampire on my list was one I hadn't managed to track down last time, no more than to leave her a message on her answering machine and, when I got back to Raleigh later, find one from her on mine in return. So, she'd been alive as of then. Just not very talkative. That's fine, I don't want them as friends, I want them to know I'm in charge. This time I'd done a little more leg-work ahead of time, though, and I had tracked down from Bob's other diaries that she worked in a rest home in Waynesville.
A rest home. How perfect. Tons of people laying around waiting to die and they get replaced all the time. She probably pulled down just enough money working the night shift, with a shift differential, to get by in almost total anonymity. I shuddered again. If someone had walked up and described that to me and asked my opinion I'd chuckle and say she sounded like the perfect vampire – quiet, unobtrusive, surrounded by no one who would remember her – but arriving there on my own somehow made it horrible. It was impossible to avoid imagining myself in the same life and that made me think one more sunrise might sound like a good idea.
I pulled off the highway and drove through Waynesville – a one-horse town to beat the band, just a small Main Street strip and some houses perched on the sides of steep slopes and back roads – and eventually found the improbably named Shady Spot Assisted Living Estate. That was an ambitious and corny name, all at once, and I shook my head. Sometimes, I think, the universe needs a better editor. The place itself was an aging brick building, one story, tiny windows spaced evenly down its side with individual air conditioning units in each one to crowd out any light that might manage to get in. The yard was neatly kept and th
ere were some benches and an abandoned croquet set outside. It looked weathered and forgotten. I doubted seriously that anyone in a joint like this was up for a game of croquet of an afternoon.
It was the tail end of visiting hours by now – nearly half past eight when I got there and the sign said Guests Welcome From 8:00 A.M. To 9:00 P.M. I didn't hurry, though. A place like this, some hole in the wall where people are sent when their families are too exhausted or strapped for cash, wasn't going to have a lot of staff or a lot of give-a-damn left.
I opened the white, wooden, heavy door in silence, stepped inside and stood there sniffing the air for a few seconds. I wrinkled my nose up hard; I could smell death, slow death, agonizing death. Some of them had started to decay around the edges and they weren't all the way dead yet. How she managed to work here was a question I couldn't imagine answering on my own. Maybe she got used to it. Maybe she thought it smelled good. I cringed. I'd left Smiles in the car and all of a sudden I wished I'd brought him inside. A great big Doberman might stand out in someone's memory, though, even one of the ones here, but now that I was inside I felt confident none of them would have a clue what was going on. I walked back outside, half-jogged across the parking lot and opened the passenger door. Smiles slid out and onto the pavement, sniffed the air and didn’t like it.
Together we went back inside and he growled once, deep and low and long, before I shushed him. I steeled myself and sifted the smells until I caught that scent of vampire – clean, coppery smell, sharp as a knife – and I followed it down to a room at the end of the hall. There was a small sign on the wall with an arrow pointing that way that read QUIET WARD so I kept going at half-pace. As we passed each room, every door half-open, I saw people in what were clearly their last weeks, maybe days, maybe hours. Finally my nose led me to one room in particular and I stood in the opening, hands in my pockets. Smiles seemed to know there was nothing in this place as dangerous as the vampire he could also smell. He didn’t turn to watch my back; he pushed aside to stand guard in front of me.
Tooth & Nail (Withrow Chronicles Book 2) Page 13
