“I might have started anew and redeemed myself then, but I was not that wise. I will spare you the specifics—you may not have time to hear them anyway, Robert Anderson Blossom. But the night came when my own folly led me to be alone, with not even faith to shield me when I met the vampire who changed me.
“And at the next sunset I awoke and knew that I was damned.”
“So, you’re going to make me like you?” Bob asked in a trembling voice.
Ezekiel shook his head slightly. “That remains to be seen.”
“I don’t understand. You’re soulless and evil. You’re just drawing this out to torture me.”
“Do not be so foolish to think that you know me,” Ezekiel said sharply. “You do not.”
Bob coughed, and his body was wracked by a deep shudder.
“If you’re here to kill me, get it over with!” Do anything, Bob thought, just stop trying to jawbone me to death.
“And what good would that do?”
“You ain’t here to do good!”
“You’re not listening to me, Robert Anderson Blossom. I have told you, if you live or die is your decision. I will not interfere.”
“You keep saying you’re going to tell me how to save myself, but I ain’t hearing it!”
“Then stop interrupting me and listen, fool!”
Bob started to say something else but stopped himself.
“When I woke that evening and found myself in the condition you see here today, but I was given a gift of immeasurable value. The vampire who sired me was one of the savages who inhabited these shores when the first Europeans arrived. The red men did not call these ones vampires—they had their own secret words for my kind, which they never spoke to the white man. The savages knew about vampires, however, and their medicine men fought against them to protect their people. And one of those medicine men had come upon my sire as he sat watch over my corpse, waiting for me to rise.
“This medicine man shot a wooden arrow shaft through the heart of my sire—turning him to dust. He then waited for me to rise in my sire’s place. We were in a cave, sheltered from the sun, which would have destroyed me instantly.
“When I woke, he was there with me. I attacked him as my new vampire’s instinct commanded me. But he overcame me—he was a great warrior as well as medicine man. I did not speak his language, so his purpose was at first unknown to me. But for some reason that I could not ascertain, he did not want to destroy me.
“For seven days he kept me his prisoner. We fought many times, as I wanted only to escape and begin to prey on human kind as is my nature. But slowly, over the course of days, he communicated to me that I had a choice. I don’t know why he chose me for this gift. But using signs, and expressions, and drawings that he scratched in the floor of the cave with his bone knife, he explained to me that if I followed the path he opened for me, I might someday be restored. I might earn my own salvation.
“The path would not be easy and it would not be fast, and that much has proven true, because more than 200 years later, I still seek that which the shaman told me I might find.”
Bob’s head drooped forward. The poison was making him dizzy and faint. He tried to concentrate on the vampire’s words. But consciousness was slipping away from him.
He struggled to lift his head.
“What’s this got to do with me?”
“The medicine man told me a word—practically the only one he spoke to me,” Ezekiel said slowly. “I shall speak that word now, and you will tell me if it means anything to you.”
Bob waited, his breath ragged as he struggled to keep breathing.
“Croatan,” Ezekiel said quietly.
There was something, but it was just outside Bob’s consciousness. He tried, but he couldn’t remember anything.
“I don’t know…”
“Are you certain?”
“I heard it or read it somewhere, or something…”
“When they found the empty settlement at Roanoke, it was written on a tree,” Ezekiel said.
“Is it the secret word you was talking about that the Indians had for vampires?”
Ezekiel shook his head.
“It is the true name of a spirit. When I speak it to the face of one inhabited by this spirit, I shall call him to battle, and when I have overcome him, I shall be free.”
“Good spirit or bad?” Bob slurred.
“Good and bad…these words don’t have meaning beyond the meaning we give them. You thought the girl was good when you were using her, did you not? You think it’s bad that I’ve come to you to take revenge for her.
“Croatan cannot be restrained with such meager concepts.”
“So, I take it I ain’t the one you’re looking for.”
“Yes and no,” Ezekiel said. “No, I can see that no spirit came forth when I spoke its name. So, I shall not enter that battle, which will be my last, this night. But you are the man the witch sent me to find. So, I suppose, I shall now deliver her retribution and be on my way.”
The vampire sounded vaguely disappointed, as if Bob was now barely worth his consideration.
“But…but, you said you’d tell me how to save myself,” Bob slurred. His heart was hammering in his chest, but each breath was harder to draw than the last and his vision was blurred.
“That is not precisely what I said. But it is of little matter. Do you desire salvation?”
“Yes,” Bob croaked. “I don’t want to die.”
“Not the same thing at all. Whether you live or die is nothing to me. Do you desire salvation?”
“If you mean, do I want to go to Hell, no, hell no!”
“But you do not believe, Robert Anderson Blossom. If you do not believe, why do you believe you’re in danger of going to Hell? Surely the existence of Hell is dependent on the existence of Heaven.”
“I ain’t got the strength to argue with you,” Bob said, his voice barely audible.
“Do you desire salvation?” Ezekiel repeated.
“Yes.”
“Are you a righteous man?”
Bob shook his head.
“No. I’m a sinner. I’m a thief and a fornicator.”
“What will you sacrifice to win your salvation?”
Bob shook his head.
“The money’s in a tin box in my truck,” he said.
Ezekiel was silent for a moment. The wind howled outside the tent. Rain fell in sheets hissing against the sodden canvass. Bob looked up and saw the vampire’s angry face hovering above his.
“I told you that all your money would not begin to pay what you owe,” Ezekiel hissed.
“What else do I got?”
“You must give of yourself.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Will you surrender that which you have used these many years to steal from the poor. Will you surrender that which you used to seduce poor Annabelle?”
“I don’t…”
“Your voice.”
“But how…”
“Do you sacrifice freely?”
“I don’t…yes! Yes. Take it. I don’t want to die…”
“I told you. Whether you live or die is nothing to me.”
“I don’t want to be what I am, but I don’t know how to stop!” Bob cried out.
As Ezekiel’s teeth sank into Bob’s throat, the preacher’s scream died in a wet gurgle. The pain was beyond anything he had ever imagined and seemed to last impossibly long.
The world tilted, and Bob was vaguely aware that he was no longer sitting in a chair. He was on his back on the damp sawdust of the tent floor. Ezekiel’s face hovered over his, the frightening jaw of glittering teeth stained red with Bob’s blood.
Bob tried to speak, but he couldn’t. Breathing was difficult. He felt like he was drowning, sinking in a sea of his own blood.
“Farewell, Robert Anderson Blossom.”
The face disappeared and darkness washed over the prone figure of the Rev. Robert Anderson Blossom, lying in a growing p
ool of crimson.
Part IV: They Shall Speak with New Tongues
Bob opened his eyes, vaguely aware of the gray light of dawn coming in through the big tear in the canvass overhead. His throat was more painful than anything he’d ever experienced. He opened his mouth to call out for help, but no sound came out.
“He’s in here!” said a voice from outside.
“Oh my God! There’s so much blood!” someone else said.
Bob tried to turn to face them, but moving was too painful.
“He blinked! He’s still alive. Somebody go for the doctor—and the snake bite kit. Look at his hand. I think he’s been bit!”
“Bob, can you hear me? Don’t try to talk. Just hang on, we’re getting help. You just hang on, you’re going to be fine.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t be askin’ him questions, woman. Can’t you see his throat is all torn up?”
* * * *
They just call him Old Bob. He’s an old mute who lives down under the freeway overpass in a cardboard box. He’s got a little chalkboard hung around his neck, so he can write things down when he needs to communicate.
He’s old, chin covered in grizzled white beard, his blue eyes rheumy and clouded.
Whenever the social workers came down to try to talk him into moving to the shelter, he’d shake his head and refuse, writing “I must tend my flock,” on his board, and it’s well known that he spends almost none of the money he gets panhandling on himself. He’s always buying food for anyone who’s hungry, medicine for anyone who’s sick.
He’s just a crazy old man who imagines himself a minister. Nobody pays him any mind.
When Old Bob got pneumonia, the social workers took him to the charity hospital. When the nurses peeled off his filthy old jacket and shirt, they saw the ragged scars on his throat.
“Is that why you can’t talk?” the nurse’s aide asked when she brought him his bedpan.
The old man nodded and gestured for his chalkboard.
“This was my gift,” he wrote.
“A terrible wound?”
“My salvation,” Bob wrote.
“But you can’t speak,” the girl protested.
“When I spoke with my voice, my heart was empty.”
The girl reached under the rough white sheet to take the bedpan away.
“Well, you just take care and get better then,” she said. The girl left without giving another thought to the old hobo with pneumonia.
Late that night, when the ward was silent except for the snores of the few other patients, Old Bob lay still, looking at the crackled paint on the ceiling over his bed. The hospital was comfortable—warmer than his cardboard shelter, and the bed was certainly softer than the pile of old sacks he usually slept on. But he had the sense that he should stay awake now. This wasn’t the time to sleep. Something was about to happen.
He glanced over to the window and saw the dark figure outlined in the moonlight beyond.
“Come in, brother,” he said softly, strangely unsurprised to hear his own voice for the first time in 30 years. Bob didn’t hear the window open, but a moment later, there was a tall, gaunt man standing by his bed.
“Speak up, friend. The Lord is with you.”
“I can talk again, how’s that?”
“Perhaps, you’re dreaming.”
“Of course,” Bob said, a small smile crossing his lips. “But you will keep your voice, down, won’t you? Wouldn’t want to wake my fellow charity cases.”
“Of course,” Ezekiel said softly.
“You ever find that Croatan fella?”
Ezekiel shook his head. “I still search.”
“I know you will someday. I got faith in you.”
Ezekiel smiled, an expression that seemed unfamiliar on his dour features.
“So, you got a lot like me?” Bob asked. “You go around doling out salvation by tearin’ out folks’ throats?”
“No, you’re quite unique Bob Blossom. Would that all my endeavors were so successful.”
“Bob, you called me ‘Bob.’ What happened to Robert Anderson Blossom?” Bob asked.
“He died,” Ezekiel replied simply. “Bob is who you are.”
“Well, thanks for dropping by, brother. It wouldn’t have been a cryin’ shame if I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”
“You are welcome, Bob Blossom,” the vampire said. “Rest now. You are about to begin a new journey—one more amazing than anything you can imagine.”
“I’m dying now—that right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what I figured. Guess it’s about time.”
“Farewell, Bob Blossom.”
“I just go on ahead,” Bob replied. “You’ll be along in a while. See ya later, friend.”
“I truly hope you are correct.”
About Elsa Frohman
I started composing stories before I could read or write. The stories that lived in my head were vivid, detailed and endlessly fascinating—much more interesting than real life. But I was an adult, working as Society Editor for a small-town newspaper in Ohio, before I discovered I could write those stories down and other people might be interested in reading them.
Insanely good luck led to the publication of my first two novels. In 1982, I was assigned to interview a hometown author whose mid-list novel had just come out in hardcover. In the course of that interview I asked him just how he’d managed to connect with a publisher. He gave me the name and address of his literary agent, who he told me was looking for new clients.
I had a horrible, bloated, embarrassingly amateurish romance novel manuscript in my closet at home, and I wasted no time mailing it off to the agent. I blush when I think of that manuscript today. It was hand typed on a manual typewriter, about 400 pages, and so amazingly awful that to this very day, my family teases me by referring to it as “The Laser Gun of the Reporter.”
But luck would have it that the agent was perceptive enough to see beyond the horrible manuscript. He wrote me back within a week and said the novel was absolutely unpublishable, but if I would follow his suggestions, he thought I had potential.
I took his advice, which was specific and practical, and produced a book proposal (three chapters and an outline) that very weekend. It went in the mail on Monday and I had a contract pending with New American Library before the end of the week.
I wrote that novel (Elusive Paradise) and another (A Public Affair) after that. But my luck took another turn at that point, and my publisher shut down the line of books I was writing for, terminating my contract.
I entered a very long hiatus in my writing career at that point. I changed jobs and cities. As my life reconfigured itself, writer’s block descended upon me like a huge blocky thing. I wrote nothing more for almost a dozen years. The stories kept coming to life in my head, but for one reason or another, that’s where they stayed.
Then fan fiction entered my life, along with the world of online communication. In the early 1990s in got a little computer with a 300-baud, dial-up modem, and joined the GEnie online service. My first significant writing project was for a Doctor Who “zine” published by a friend I met online. The process of channeling a story from my mind into print again woke something up in my brain, and I haven’t stopped writing for more than a month or two since.
Several fandoms later, I still find fan fiction the most satisfying of fannish activities. The medium of the Internet has opened the world of writing to a much wider population than ever before. Today, all that’s needed to be an author is an imagination—and a connection to the Internet. You don’t need yellow legal pads, typewriter ribbons, White-out or Xerox machines. The Internet means there are more stories available to more readers than ever before in human history.
The Internet and fan fiction melded to form something new—a world of imagination where everyone’s vision has room to grow. There was fan fiction before the Internet opened to the public, but it was owned by only those who had enough dr
ive to overcome the challenges of paper publication. The Xeroxed and mimeographed zines of the 1970s and 80s were a wonderful, creative outlet. But they were produced by and read by a select few (relatively speaking).
When Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn (not to mention Al Gore) invented the Internet, they probably didn’t realize they were giving Mr. Spock and Capt. Kirk a vast landscape to play out ten thousand variations on Brokeback Mountain in Space. They didn’t imagine that they were making the medium that would make Spike and Buffy one of the most popular couples of all time, or Minerva McGonagall and Severus Snape a couple at all.
Sometimes the unintended consequences are the best consequences of all.
There is no licensing board for writers. A paycheck from a publisher is just money—it isn’t a certification. All that’s necessary to become an author is for the writer to write.
For me, fan fiction has been an outlet for the part of me that compels me to make up stories. I would be making those stories up whether anyone else ever saw them or not. But with this wonderful story-space that is the Internet, I have a place to exercise my imagination and get that most valuable of all paychecks: the reader who says “thank you.”
Fan fiction is the blossoming of a million imaginations. Human beings have told stories since the first caveman built the first campfire. But never before have so many stories had room to expand and take form, and reach so many readers.
I couldn’t be more delighted to have been born in time to take part in the greatest collective expansion of imagination of all time.
ABOUT JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Jacqueline Lichtenberg is a life member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. She is creator of the Sime~Gen Universe with a vibrant fan following (http://www.simegen.com), primary author of the Bantam paperback Star Trek Lives! which blew the lid off Star Trek fandom, founder of the Star Trek Welcommittee, creator of the genre term Intimate Adventure, winner of the Galaxy Award for Spirituality in Science Fiction with her second novel Unto Zeor, Forever, and the first Romantic Times Awards for Best Science Fiction Novel with her later novel Dushau, now in available on Kindle.
Her vampire fiction has been in audio-dramatization on XM Satellite Radio. She has been the sf/f reviewer for a professional magazine since 1993. She teaches sf/f writing online while turning to her first love, screenwriting.
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