Late Night Partners

by Fennel Steuert

  Mab shook her head. “No, that would be what the humans do with concrete for people in that neighborhood your new little friend lives in. They are all more substantial than some slumbering giant. Argall is simply trying to make sure that we never have to feed on anything substantial again. That creature can still have the life it’s had for thousands of years, and a select group of us will be nurtured for possibly centuries.”

  “The company can be better than it’s ever been,” Argall said. “We’re cutting costs. Plus, we’re finding ways to change the nature of what we are, to make ourselves the best of all worlds.”

  “We were supposed to be doing that for everyone,” Doris said. “Whatever is down below precedes all of us – and yet it has let us live on top of it. Do you not care the least bit about that?”

  “You have a heart that the humans rarely manage,” Argall said. “It gives my own short shrift. But turn to your left and see the stature of our newest guest.”

  Down a stairwell that had been dwarfed by the adjacent slope, an older man with an afro slowly made his way down. Doris couldn’t immediately place the man’s scent, but it was familiar.

  The crowd behind Argall and Mab applauded.

  “Wait,” said Roger. “Is that … Is that my uncle?”

  “That is no longer some lowly human, afraid of the world,” Argall said. “Nor is he some mindless ghoul. Through modern science, however, we’ve been able to make ours the single wondrous element that belongs to those atrocious things. With a simple bite from myself – an easier process than any of us ever had – that once-deficient being has been turned into one of us. Sadly, it seems he was still human longer than one would like.”

  Doris, wide-eyed, felt Gesine loosening up on her shoulder as she stood on her own. Herself, Doris turned to Roger and mouthed the words, “I’m sorry.”

  Roger took out the garlic powder. Almost as quickly, he let it fall to the ground. He was having a hard time catching his breath.

  “Applaud this.” Simon gave the crowd the finger.

  On the other side the well-dressed vampire in wingtips moved toward Simon, its pupils making it appear to be anger personified. He stopped at the line that Mab and Argall were holding as the latter shook his head.

  Simon walked straight over to Roger. He stood in front of his great nephew, looked him in the eye, and sighed. “It’ll be okay, Rodge. I followed the sound of the heartbeat here. Obviously, my life is a bit more complicated now, with the hearing giants’ heartbeats and all. But hey …” Simon shrugged.

  Roger shook his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, then he managed a fleeting smile.

  Simon glanced in Doris’ direction. “Hello again.”

  Doris reached out and squeezed his shoulder. There wasn’t much else she could do to help any of them at the moment. Nor was there a way to get past all of the other vampires and see if the lore was accurate – that the giant was a creature on a sort of mental plain. Doris felt such a being could be reasoned with, even if it took centuries.

  Hello, she thought. Is there anybody down there?

  There was no response.

  Simon, meanwhile, nodded glumly at Gesine.

  “Hello,” Gesine said. “This is only a marginal improvement to our odds. I’ve been in this situation before … I do not want to go through it again.”

  “Whoa,” Roger said suddenly to the air in front of him. “You too? You really get around, huh?”

  Doris’ eyes honed in on the space where Roger was speaking. Nobody was there.

  “Uh, son,” Simon said. “You okay?”

  “No,” Roger said. “But besides that, you really don’t see him?”

  Argall pinched the bridge of his nose and turned around. “They’re going to try to stop us. I’m sorry that some of you may get blood on your nice clothes, but there’ll be plenty to drink later. And my esteemed colleague will come to her senses, eventually.”

  Roger looked at Doris and then Gesine, who squinted. “There is someone there. A brown-skinned man. He looks like one of the custodians.”

  All of a sudden, the gears on the oil well-like machine puttered to a stop. The custodian became visible to everyone, vampire, ghoul or human.

  “Enough,” he said. Only he wasn’t really talking. The scentless construct was miming the act. The words were going straight into their heads. “You’ve made my visage stronger. It will not last, but my rise is eminent and I will no longer need to exist through my mind’s eye.”

  As the whole cavern began to shake, the pump from the well went flying up into the air like it had been kicked skyward.

  Argall pushed Mab out of the way as a concrete boulder came down from overhead. It landed on him, and Doris could sense him struggling beneath it. The well-dressed crowd that had behind Argall dodged the falling debris. With their red eyes zipping around like mosquitoes, they made their way to the stairwell.

  “There is so much life that is built on top you,” Doris said to the giant’s visage.

  “The longer I wait,” he said, “the more new lives depend on me being the dirt beneath their feet.”

  “I sort of know what that’s like,” Doris said. “Right here, I think we all do.”

  “It’s not great up there,” Gesine said tiredly. “What do you want of that world?”

  The visage blinked out of existence for a moment, then came back. “I want someone to communicate with – a being that has a soul.”

  “All right,” Doris said. “If you’ll have me, I will join you.”

  Roger shook his head. “No … What? How would anything else even survive down there?”

  “I would give my blood willingly,” said the visage. “But you, Doris, do not seem so keen on living. For centuries now, the few beings close enough to me have not had much stock in your world’s ever-growing, gilded constructs, and yet they still wanted to be alive. It has pained me that you don’t.”

  Doris fell to her knees. Is that why she could never see this particular “ghost’? Because it found her too sad?

  “It’s not that simple,” she said

  “Perhaps not,” said the visage. “I can feel that … I cannot say that I would not want to rise to see the sky again some day, but with a worthwhile companion, I would wait. If you want to come, do so now.”

  “Well, there you go,” Doris said. A part of her was on the verge of tears. She turned to Roger and reached her hand out to him. He tried to pull her up, but he wasn’t quite that strong. She supposed she wasn’t exactly trying to get up on her own. When Gesine began to stumble over, rather than have her friend expend whatever little energy she had left, Doris almost pulled Roger down as she grabbed his arm and got up.

  Her fangs were bared; the irises of her eyes red. “This is who I am,” she said. “Lucky to be the undead bridesmaid, if never the bride. I was not meant for the time I was born in, and I’m not meant for this one, either. It’s not as bad as it sounds. The giant’s heartbeat had been my oldest friend. I’ve read whatever I could about it … This should be more like being stuck in some dream world with one other soul, most of the time.”

  Roger shook his head. “You don’t even know for sure? Don’t do it.”

  “Yes,” Gesine said, “do not go unless you want me to come with you.”

  “I don’t,” Doris said. “But I’d like for you to stay with him, and vice versa.”

  The falling debris was getting closer. Over on the slope, the truck was beginning to sink as something that looked like a giant finger pushed its way through the ground. The color was deeply gray, like granite itself.

  Simon clenched Roger’s shoulder. “You heard her,” he said with red eyes. “Not-so-bad dream world. That sounds a bit like TV.”

  He pushed Roger over into Doris and Gesine. “You want good company?” Simon said to the visage. “You got it. Decades worth of thoughts sprung from books and TV, except being black and lonely have helped me deconstruct some of the ridiculousness.”

  The visage nodde
d.

  With that, Simon ran faster than Doris or Roger could grab at him. He leaped on top of the giant’s fingertip as it sunk into the earth.

  “Hey, Roger!” Simon yelled. “You weren’t just my great nephew. You were a pretty okay one. Take care of the old place for me, will you? And I know it’s the hardest thing in the world for people like us, but try to be a little happy.”

  The finger disappeared, and Roger screamed as Doris threw Gesine over her shoulder and dragged him backward. They made their way through the hall of people/paintings, where there were a few empty spaces among them. As everything tumbled down, the rest stood there.

  Her hands full, Doris made her way to the cellar. There, she practically tossed Gesine and Roger outside. She looked up at them, two heaps on the ground above her.

  “Go home.” She pulled the cellar doors shut and went back to help whoever she could.

  Epilogues

  Not quite the ^

  “So,” Roger said, holding up a blue tie. “This one would smell better if I soaked it in in garlic water?”

  “I've told you a dozen times it couldn't hurt,” said Simon. He was sitting in the living room, only half-watching TV. Something weather-related about sunrises. “But never mind that. You should consider a different job entirely. Something with a shorter commute. You shouldn’t have to be out there when the sun goes down."

  Roger slowly nodded. “Or, hey, why go out at all?”

  Simon grit his teeth like he was chewing on something. “Well, for the people you care about, is what I thought – till something made me realize the people I care about are like an endangered species, and I had the same blood running in my veins."

  “All of this," Roger said, motioning at the door, “is just for what? The continued circulation of blood?”

  “I don’t know,” Simon said. “The neighborhood we get to live in is both shrinking and getting just a bit more hostile everyday. And then in a spot that's supposed to be a little better...” He tilted his head so that the scar on his neck was more visible. "It's not that way for my friend or for me.”

  “And I really am sorry about all of that,” Roger said. “But does that mean this is all there is? Anything else that could be good here – it’s just another urban legend?”

  Simon turned to watch something on TV about the sun, and Roger went up to the attic feeling okay with all the noise outside swamping any prolonged thought.

  ***

  Present ^

  It was just after Christmastime, and Roger had survived – he’d made it through the holiday he usually spent sitting across from his great uncle as a life-affirming holiday special played on TV. They’d watched them mostly like they were comedies, but there were parts that they would just sit through quietly.

  Maybe such had just been basking in the lack of a deep baseline hammering their eardrums – and, Roger supposed, the company.

  This Christmas, Roger wasn’t a guest. He figured he was supposed to be the host, even though he now had three housemates. Desmond had moved in, along with Gesine and, though she was rarely there, Doris.

  Desmond watched holiday specials as if they were something that hadn’t been repeated two dozen times, which Roger, so stuck in his own head, found more interesting than the shows themselves.

  There were only a few specials Gesine would watch, and all of them had talking animals. Even with animation, it was hard to find a special that had a place that seemed like it would nurture the soul of the undead.

  Doris would sit in a corner, reading the book of haiku she’d given to him as a Christmas present. It was the one he’d lost, and since he read it already, he re-gifted it to her. With Argall out of commission, Doris’ place in her company was tenuous.

  Doris told Roger he still had a place there, but he didn’t really want to go back to what he considered to be Argall and Mab Incorporated, anyway.

  Roger spent the holidays working in a gift-wrapping capacity, and the post-holidays, he spent handling returns. A limbo between employment and outright unemployment.

  One December evening he left work and found Gesine in the parking lot, sitting on a motorcycle.

  “The dealership can do without it for a few hours,” she said though a gray helmet.

  The cold cut through him all the way on the ride home, but it was glorious; Gesine’s mess of black hair swishing around at the city. From a black helmet with the visor wide open, that hair seemed to be the reason his eyes weren’t watering in the wind. With his hands gripping the back of the passenger seat, he held on for dear life.

  In January, he came home and found a note from Desmond that said he should meet them at Vincenzo’s. He took the last gift that was around the plastic Christmas tree and headed over there.

  Desmond and Gesine were in the back, sitting near the arcade machine. A woman in a big hoodie and a man in flannel wearing a Rastafarian hat were at the game’s controls.

  Roger headed over to the register, where the delivery guy was leaning as he stared out through the doorway.

  “Merry MLKmas,” he said.

  “‘MLKmas,’” the delivery guy repeated.

  “Yup.” Roger handed him a wrapped basket.

  The delivery guy smirked. He unwrapped what turned out to be a multi-pack of garlic powder. “Wow, man. How did you know?”

  Roger shrugged. “Seriously, happy holiday, and thanks for your help.”

  The delivery guy waved his hand. “I just let you have lots of garlic, is all.”

  With a knock on the counter, Roger went over to his friends’ table.

  Roger tilted his head so that he could see around her. The player in the hoodie had put the hood down. The hood itself was accentuated with feathers, and there was a striped pattern to the back of the jacket that gave off a “Native American” vibe.

  Scratching his chin, Roger looked down at Desmond’s plate. His friend had gotten pepperoni pizza, but the only trace of the topping was the little circles where they used to be.

  Great, thought Roger. Gesine could tolerate people she found alienating to her core better when she wasn’t hungry.

  “Seen Doris lately?”

  “She was around here somewhere,” Desmond said.

  “Really?”

  Desmond nodded.

  Roger rested his head on the table. He didn’t raise it again until someone shook his shoulder.

  He looked up into Doris’ brown eyes. “Hey.”

  “I heard you from outside,” she said. “I was going to go ...”

  “Go where?”

  Doris shrugged. “I’ll be around, Roger … I don’t know where, exactly. Just ... around.”

  Roger rested his head back down. “Well, yeah, this is limbo. When it comes to things that don’t glow the way things do in some ad, gravity makes them go in separate directions.”

  Doris strained her eyes at him. The irises went red for a second, in a way not unlike blinking.

  “Well,” she said as she sat down, “here’s to better glowing.”

  Thanks

  Family and friends. Always.

  And thanks for reading.

  More fiction by Fennel

  The Howling Twenties: The Doris Cycle Book 2

  Reality and Me All Capeless

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