Desmond let out a weak laugh that was dashed as they both moved out of the way for a small entourage of pale, neatly put-together women and men who were on their way somewhere else altogether, simply avoiding the rain.
“Anyway,” Roger said out in that rain. “Yeah, of course we’re still friends.”
The rain became heavier, and though Roger initially tried to sway himself toward the canopies above some storefronts, they quickly ran out. He was soaked by the time he was nearly home. The block was empty, and though the sun had yet to officially set, it might as well have been a few hours into the night.
As he passed the tree, Roger took a look up at the garlic. The rain seemed to have taken a few cloves with it.
He kept walking. His phone rang again, but he ignored it. He was practically home, after all, and the air smelled crisp and soulful. There was the foot-high remnants of an old stone wall along the edge of Simon’s small front yard, and what was a little more dampness? He was about to sit there when a woman behind him said, “Hello.”
Roger’s eyelids clenched together. His body jolted back up to standing.
“Hi,” he said as he turned around and stumbled a little. A few feet away from him, he made out a woman in the shadow of the alley.
“Um, can I help you with something?”
“I was with a friend of mine,” the woman said, and then paused, as if the presence of this friend was vital. “… We wanted to check on Mr. Greenblatt.”
Roger looked around. There was no one else in sight. From the alley, he could hear the rain dripping down from the roof. “How do you know Mr. Greenblatt?”
“I was at the hospital,” the woman said. “How do you? Know him, I mean.”
“He’s my great uncle.”
“They still have those?” the woman said. “Great uncles.”
Roger craned his head a little. “Uh, yeah, I suppose there’s still a few great versions of a lot of things.”
“Does he need any help?” the woman said, the mirth gone from her voice.
Roger put his thumbs in his pockets. “He’s got me. I don’t know that there’s much more that I can do.”
“Well then, what help could be beyond you, giant that you are?”
Her words, in and of themselves, could have been a bit mocking, but something about her voice assured Roger that she was just teasing.
“What’s beyond me?” Roger said. “Well, let’s see … Making the whole world a better place, just like that.” He shook his head. This is a nice distraction, he thought, but it’s just that; I’m better off getting back to ordinary. “Really, I think I’m as much help as he needs. He’s retired, and he never really liked to get out all that much.”
“Who among us really does?”
“Well, most of the world is outside … I don’t know. I guess it is hard – not being someplace where you get to be on top of generations of bullshit...”
The woman cocked her head the tiniest bit.
“As opposed to what we do here,” Roger continued. “Swim in it, now with blood-sucking monsters apparently.”
“So he thinks some kind of monster did that,” the woman said, straining her eyes. It seemed to Roger that she was talking to herself. The light from the house’s windows made her eyes glisten a little bit as they looked toward the ground, then they quickly shot toward the window. Roger glanced there and saw the curtain draw back as Simon stumbled away.
Roger heard the tumblers on the locks unfurling themselves one by one, and he felt like he should have been awaking from a dream, that the woman would not be there when the door was open. But she still was.
“Get in here now,” Simon said, trying to catch his breath. “Both of you!”
Roger sighed. “I’m sure she doesn’t want to—”
“No,” the woman said. “That’s all right.”
When they went inside, Roger only locked a few of the locks. Simon, however, made sure to go through each of the rest. Roger guided the woman toward a seat in the midst of a bunch of legless chair seats. His eyes scrunched up in embarrassment as she took the seat, then he opened them and got his first real look at her in the light. She had brown skin and thick hair that she had tied back, though what was untied contained a million curls. Her eyes were dark and almond-shaped; they seemed quite cold and then, as she looked at certain things in the room, quite warm.
Over in the living room, Simon had been watching an old kung fu movie. Their houseguest watched as a woman in pale-makeup flied through the air, bicycle-kicking a bumbling man and then tripping him with her extra long sleeves.
Roger’s eyes were drawn to the makeshift cross above her head. He hoped she wouldn’t notice it.
“You need to get your friend a ride,” Simon said, securing the last lock. “Walking around out there at night ...” He shook his head.
Roger deferred to the bandages on his great uncle’s neck for a moment, then he intended to tell him the woman was more a friend of his rather than himself. But when Simon walked over to the woman, he regarded her with no sense of familiarity. His great uncle did tend to have a sort of tunnel vision, though.
“What’s your name?” Simon asked. He extended his left hand, and the woman shook it with her two gloved hands.
“Doris,” she said.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Doris. I’m sorry if the place is a mess. But … well … ” Simon’s eyes shifted toward the floor.
“It’s quite nice,” Doris said, leaning in closer to him. “… It has a thoughtful, lived-in quality.”
Simon looked up with a nod, his brow wrinkling a bit before he smiled.
“Uh, Roger,” he said. “You are going to help get this woman a ride wherever she needs to go, right? Or wait, she can spend the night if she needs to.”
Roger’s eyes nearly drooped to a close as he looked at his great uncle.
The woman smiled a tiny bit. “I can get myself a ride,” she said.
Simon nodded. “Well, you can watch this movie with us while you wait. It’s a good one.”
He went to the living room and sat in his seat across from the TV.
Doris turned toward Roger. “Can I use your phone?”
“Sure.” Roger pointed to the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen/dining room. He went and leaned against the lintel that led into the living room. Doris came back a few minutes later. Roger heard her footsteps as she by passed the cross, which she looked at with her head slanted, before coming over to Roger and making an “X” with her index fingers.
Yup, thought Roger, it is possible my cross-making skills are lacking.
“He seems to be in good spirits,” Doris whispered.
Roger squinted at her through one eye. “He’s just distracted. TV helps with that.”
“He’s not just distracted,” Doris said, crossing her arms. “Your presence probably helps more than you know … I just realized that I don’t know your name.”
“It’s Roger.”
“Well, Roger, how are things for you, with what’s happened to your uncle?”
“Great uncle,” Roger corrected.
Doris nodded with a faint grin. “Great uncle.”
Roger shrugged. “I guess I could use a better world, too. But these days I’d probably settle for a job.”
On TV, the snapping sounds that accompanied each action beat seemed to be getting louder. But then that noise seemed wholly disembodied and, then suddenly, like it was on top of them.
“Do you hear that?” Simon said, his chest heaving. He shot up from his seat and stumbled around like the world was spinning. “Something’s on the roof.”
Roger quickly walked over to Simon. He put his hand on his uncle’s shoulder to steady him.
“Everything’s going to be all right,” he said. “It’s just the rain, or ...”
The sound got louder and far more pronounced. Thump. Thump. Roger thought it did sound like someone could be stomping around up there. “… Or maybe it’s a squirrel.”
Doris unfolded her arms and craned her neck upward. “I think it’s just someone throwing rocks. Likely my ride. They’re just ... I’m so sorry they disturbed you.”
The thumping sound had ceased, replaced at the moment by the rustling and pin pricks of rain.
Simon’s chest began to heave more slowly. “If it’s not someone shooting someone else out there,” Simon said, “it’s something else.” He fell back into his chair. It took him a few grabs to get the remote, and when he had it, he cut the TV off.
“I’ll get the door,” Roger said.
It hurt a little – to walk over to the door and have to go through so many locks as the strange woman stood quietly behind him. When he pulled back the doorknob, Roger expected to see a car somewhere in sight. But there were no vehicles. Just a somewhat brown-skinned woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk in the rain. He didn’t know if it was just his less than stellar eyesight, but she didn’t seem to be wearing any shoes.
Doris quickly moved in front of Roger, obscuring his view. “It was nice meeting you.” She pulled the door shut behind her as she walked outside.
Roger could hear the rain falling again, along with some of the snaps-as-blows being traded in the kung fu movie. And then dashing through the rain, the beat of cookie-cutter hip-hop or maybe reggaeton.
“Was her ride out there?” Simon said.
“Yeah,” Roger said. “I think so.” He sadly set about turning all the tumblers on the door’s doors nine locks.
“Bunch of hooligans probably,” Simon said. “Everybody who wants to be somebody throws their lot in with hooligans.”
“What about over on the other side of town?” Roger asked matter-of-factly.
“They live on the shoulders of things that do their hooligan-ing for them.”
Roger tried to fix the almost-cross, but thought that perhaps it was better the way it was. He went upstairs to the attic. After falling back-first onto the edge of his bed, a drop of water hit his face.
He looked up. Between the rafters, there were dents in the roof; one had been punctured all the way through the metal. They were all bigger than anything a squirrel could do. Roger didn’t realize he’d been slipping off the bed until he fell.
Lying on the floor, he gritted his teeth. His left elbow stung with pain. Exhaling, he flexed his arm. Then, slowly, he got up and raised his head closer to the dents. They looked like human footprints.
3
Language
Present ^
Doris was glad to have gotten ahead of Gesine. She put her gloves in the pocket of her skirt and dashed over the fence of a nearby house under construction. With extended fingernails, Doris cut through the rustling plastic over a door-less doorway. It was in the canvassed shell of what would be a very narrow home that Doris waited for the fragments of grainy street light to show Gesine’s silhouette.
Doris squeezed her eyelids shut. She could get a solid sense of her surroundings through the way the air moved, but mostly she was seeking to become even more introverted, and in doing so, dream better. She still could not imagine herself walking in the sunlight.
But if Doris were to spend the next century or so dreaming, or in the dream of some larger being, surely a version of Gesine would appear who could give someone who was practically her sister five more minutes – just five more minutes to feel human.
Gesine stepped through the doorway. Gravel and grass crackled beneath the soles of her feet. She and Doris were both undead, in their own separate ways – both had tough skin and a high tolerance for pain, but they did feel it.
“Wait,” Doris said. “Before you come into a home, it’s customary to brush off your feet.”
Doris listened to the faint crackling sounds that continued as Gesine walked over to her. As happened quite rarely, she also heard a single, faint thump coming from Gesine’s chest.
“Why do you do that?” Gesine asked, her voice a bit above a whisper.
Doris lifted her head. “Do what?”
“You close your eyes a lot lately. This world, its bounty of losses to vapidness – can someone who can get around so well in the dark finally be so tired?”
“No,” Doris said. “Maybe … I don’t know.”
“Was the old man still human?”
Doris opened her eyes. She crouched so that she was hugging her knees. “If he weren’t, he would have turned by now.”
Gesine mirrored the crouching.
“I was hoping you could watch over them for a few days.”
Beneath her dripping, matted hair, Gesine’s faded, brown eyes shifted down. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I have somewhere to go.”
“And where exactly would that be? That motorcycle dealership?”
Gesine looked up at the tarp that covered part of the unfinished roof. It flowed with the wind and the sheets of rain. “When you’re around them,” said Gesine, “the way you talk changes.”
Around who? Doris thought. Oh. People, of course. Contemporary people. Gesine had a hard time extrapolating any of them from the surge of paleness that had destroyed much of her tribe, and her condition did not behoove her to kindness. Paleness seemed as much an infection to her as being a ghoul.
Doris shrugged. “Perhaps it does a bit. And so it could be with you, but look, right now, the ground is always shaking at least a little – you can feel that. So can Argall and Mab. Maybe that’s why one of them or their followers thought it was okay to feed on someone and leave him for dead. They just smile politely at me and nod whenever I talk. I don’t know how high they are on themselves, but I do know how inhuman you’re not. If you don’t look after those two, I will. Until the sun rises. Then I’ll get back to that library and try to go through those books with Lorraine, without wanting to drink her blood every moment because I’m so tired.”
Gesine didn’t blink or nod. She said, “Okay,” stood up, then hopped up to the half-finished second floor, and from there, out through the tarp.
Doris sat there in the unfinished house as it rained in a circular spot encompassing her. The water made her hair come alive a little, but she supposed that, no, that really didn’t count.
She left the would-be home’s interior and went around to the side, where she leaned against the narrow structure. She looked out at the street through the construction site’s barbed fencing. The rain had let up a little, and the world seemed functional and orderly, like a freshly wound watch.
Doris remained in the shadows while people passed hurriedly by, usually men with their hands in their pockets – men who somehow seemed to be a bit aimless – or women holding small umbrellas up to the occasional gust. They could have been her descendants, and had she been able to have such, she would have hoped that they could have more than aimlessness and journeys that seemed so solitary. She ran her hand over the concrete mortars, which were wet and cold. The real estate boom that such homes sprang from were different from the old ones, wherein everybody was at least a little poor and looking for a place to do more than survive – all too often with an edge like the titan of paleness.
Some branch of the company she’d helped founded did well by these overpriced shells.
Doris did not feel like clawing at the structure’s exterior and being roof-bound. She let a few cars pass, and then when the world seemed solely populated by static noise, she hopped the fence and walked until she was in view of the nearest tree by the Greenblatt home. It was leafless and whatever windows with a view to it were dark. She approached it until a smell faintly burned her nostrils.
Garlic was strewn somewhere around on the sidewalk. When she had been on this street earlier, she and Gesine made their way through the alleys and from one roof to another.
The smell threw her off a little, and she was surprised when, in her peripheral vision, Gesine hopped down from the tree.
“You should go,” said Gesine, still about two hundred
feet away at the tree. “It’s fortunate that it rained.”
Being slightly overwhelmed by the faint scent of garlic, ironically, was one of the few times Doris felt human. Unless she got closer her friend would not be able to hear her express any such sentiment. She thought that it was just as well, as any such odes to emotion seemed to occasionally make Gesine feel, that between the two of them, she was particularly wanting.
Gesine put her hands in her pockets. “I was going to go to Lorraine’s. She invited me to see a pumpkin she left on her window sill.”
“Oh,” said Doris. She quickly shook her head to and fro, then hurried over to Gesine. “Well, you should go.”
“I will,” said Gesine, “when the sun rises. I’ll find a less obvious spot than this street … It may be very rarely, but there are more humans around here, at least, that can be as interesting as pumpkins.”
Doris felt her lips curl upward.
Gesine’s eyes faded brown eyes seemed to dilate. She looked past Doris all the way up the street. “There’s another one of my kind drawing nearer.”
Doris was a step behind her as they gingerly crossed the street, to the shadowed space between two houses. There, they used their fingers to pierce the brick siding of each house as they pounced back and forth between them, with Doris hearing the prattle on celebrities from the TV of one house and a couple’s tired affection for life with one another, from the other, until they were up on a flat roof.
They watched as a black town car slowly came to a halt in the middle of the street – not far from the Greenblatt house.
A tall man in a gray t-shirt had been coming from the same direction, but as the slow-moving car more or less matched his pace on the sidewalk, he stopped altogether and dropped to the ground. He glanced up at the car’s black-tinted windows, then scrambled to his feet and ran back in the other direction.
Gesine closed her eyes. “The other one knows I’m here …”
“All right,” Doris whispered. “Fight it. You’re here with me. No packs for us.”
Late Night Partners Page 2