She had already left the town to see her sister in the city, and, within the week, the butcher joined her. The three of them-butcher, wife, and babe-made the prettiest family you ever did see.
Temperance
She said she was a vampire. One thing I knew already, the woman was a liar. You could see it in her eyes. Black as coals they were, but she never quite looked at you, staring at invisibles over your shoulder, behind you, above you, two inches in front of your face.
“What does it taste like?” I asked her. This was in the parking lot, behind the bar. She worked the graveyard shift in the bar, mixed the finest drinks, but never drank anything herself.
“V8 juice,” she said. “Not the low-sodium kind, but the original. Or a salty gazpacho.”
“What’s gazpacho?”
“A sort of vegetable soup.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“No.”
“So you drink blood? Just like I drink V8?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “If you get sick of drinking V8 you can drink something else.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Actually, I don’t like V8 much.”
“See?” she said. “In China it’s not blood we drink, it’s spinal fluid.”
“What’s that taste like?”
“Nothing much. Clear broth.”
“You’ve tried it?”
“I know people.”
I tried to figure out if I could see her reflection in the wing mirror of the truck we were leaning against, but it was dark, and I couldn’t tell.
The Devil
This is his portrait. Look at his flat, yellow teeth, his ruddy face. He has horns, and he carries a foot-long wooden stake in one hand and his wooden mallet in the other.
Of course, there is no such thing as the devil.
16.
The Tower
The tower’s built of spit and spite,
Without a sound, without a sight.
The biter bit, the bitter bite.
(It’s better to be out at night.)
The Star
The older, richer, ones follow the winter, taking the long nights where they find them. Still, they prefer the Northern Hemisphere to the South.
“You see that star?” they say, pointing to one of the stars in the constellation of Draco, the dragon. “We came from there. One day we shall return.”
The younger ones sneer and jeer and laugh at this. Still, as the years become centuries, they find themselves becoming homesick for a place they have never been; and they find the northern climes reassuring, as long as Draco twines about the greater and lesser bears, up near chill Polaris.
The Sun
“Imagine,” she said, “that there was something in the sky that was going to hurt you, perhaps even kill you. A huge eagle or something. Imagine that if you went out in daylight the eagle would get you.
“Well,” she said. “That’s how it is for us. Only it’s not a bird. It’s bright, beautiful, dangerous daylight, and I haven’t seen it now in a hundred years.”
Judgment
It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them.
It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?
The World
“You know the saddest thing,” she said. “The saddest thing is that we’re you.”
I said nothing.
“In your fantasies,” she said, “my people are just like you. Only better. We don’t die or age or suffer from pain or cold or thirst. We’re snappier dressers. We possess the wisdom of the ages. And if we crave blood, well, it is no more than the way you people crave food or affection or sunlight-and besides, it gets us out of the house. Crypt. Coffin. Whatever.”
“And the truth is?” I asked her.
“We’re you,” she said. “We’re you, with all your fuckups and all the things that make you human-all your fears and lonelinesses and confusions…none of that gets better.
“But we’re colder than you are. Deader. I miss daylight and food and knowing how it feels to touch someone and care. I remember life, and meeting people as people and not just as things to feed on or control, and I remember what it was to feel something, anything, happy or sad or anything…” And then she stopped.
“Are you crying?” I asked.
“We don’t cry,” she told me. Like I said, the woman was a liar.
This is a true story, pretty much. As far as that goes, and whatever good it does anybody.
It was late one night, and I was cold, in a city where I had no right to be. Not at that time of night, anyway. I won’t tell you which city. I’d missed my last train, and I wasn’t sleepy, so I prowled the streets around the station until I found an all-night cafe. Somewhere warm to sit.
You know the kind of place; you’ve been there: cafe’s name on a Pepsi sign above a dirty plate-glass window, dried egg residue between the tines of all their forks. I wasn’t hungry, but I bought a slice of toast and a mug of greasy tea, so they’d leave me alone.
There were a couple of other people in there, sitting alone at their tables, derelicts and insomniacs huddled over their empty plates, dirty coats and donkey jackets buttoned up to the neck.
I was walking back from the counter with my tray when somebody said, “Hey.” It was a man’s voice. “You,” the voice said, and I knew he was talking to me, not to the room. “I know you. Come here. Sit over here.”
I ignored it. You don’t want to get involved, not with anyone you’d run into in a place like that.
Then he said my name, and I turned and looked at him. When someone knows your name, you don’t have any option.
“Don’t you know me?” he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t know anyone who looked like that. You don’t forget something like that. “It’s me,” he said, his voice a pleading whisper. “Eddie Barrow. Come on mate. You know me.”
And when he said his name I did know him, more or less. I mean, I knew Eddie Barrow. We had worked on a building site together, ten years back, during my only real flirtation with manual work.
Eddie Barrow was tall, and heavily muscled, with a movie star smile and lazy good looks. He was ex-police. Sometimes he’d tell me stories, true tales of fitting-up and doing-over, of punishment and crime. He had left the force after some trouble between him and one of the top brass. He said it was the Chief Superintendent’s wife forced him to leave. Eddie was always getting into trouble with women. They really liked him, women.
When we were working together on the building site they’d hunt him down, give him sandwiches, little presents, whatever. He never seemed to do anything to make them like him; they just liked him. I used to watch him to see how he did it, but it didn’t seem to be anything he did. Eventually, I decided it was just the way he was: big, strong, not very bright, and terribly, terribly good-looking.
But that was ten years ago.
The man sitting at the Formica table wasn’t good-looking. His eyes were dull and rimmed with red, and they stared down at the tabletop without hope. His skin was gray. He was too thin, obscenely thin. I could see his scalp through his filthy hair. I said, “What happened to you?”
“How d’you mean?”
“You look a bit rough,” I said, although he looked worse than rough; he looked dead. Eddie Barrow had been a big guy. Now he’d collapsed in on himself. All bones and flaking skin.