by Joe Humphrey
“Does it matter? Everyone deserves to die. Everyone will die. There is no deserves. All of these people are dead already. That’s what you have to learn now. When you live forever, everyone else is already dead. What difference does it make if they die this week or next week or next year? They’re dead regardless.”
“It makes a difference to me if they die with a knife in their throat that I put there,” Charlie said.
“That’s why we’re careful to pick and choose the ones we take. Listen, yes, the fact of the matter is that the world is a better place without that man in it. He lived far longer than he deserved to.”
After some thought, Charlie nodded. Caroline smiled, but only briefly. Her face fell again and she put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders.
“But you listen to me, this is important. There are others out there like us. We'll come across them from time to time and you will have to — no, need to interact with them. Not everyone shares our idea of who and how and when we kill. It’s not our responsibility or our job to weed the world of bad people. That’s something I choose to do because it makes me feel good about myself. It makes the doing of it easier. That said, there will be times when you have to do things you never thought you would do. Even more so, you will have to be complicit in letting other people do things that you would never do yourself.”
“Will you protect me?” Charlie asked. The rest of it was too much to deal with, so she chose not to think about it. What mattered was whether she was taken care of. That’s all she’s ever wanted.
“Yes doll, yes I will, and I will teach you to take care of yourself,” Caroline said, embracing her again. They stood there like that for a long time under the water. Charlie noticed two things standing there in the shower. The first was that Caroline no longer felt cold to her. The second, more distressing thing, was that she no longer smelled like vanilla and popcorn. She smelled like nothing at all.
- 7 -
Charlie was surprised to find that the other side of Caroline’s bedroom door had three different locks on it. The normal bedroom door push-and-twist on the knob, a deadbolt, and a long bar that ran up the center of the door and, when lifted and rolled, fell into holes in the floor and top of the frame. Caroline flipped on a light switch and Charlie was able to get a look at the room itself. It was strikingly modest compared to the surreal collection of tacky Americana that decorated the rest of the house. There was a queen-sized canopy bed in the middle of the room with a gauzy curtain on runners, drawn back to the headboard. A painting of a sunrise peeking over a desert mountain range faced the bed. To her right was a large, ornate wardrobe. Caroline walked up to it and opened the doors. Inside the wardrobe hung a collection of dresses, most in the same fifties/early sixties style that Caroline seemed to favor. She pushed the dresses aside and held her hand out to Charlie.
Charlie wasn’t sure what to do with this. She didn’t know what Caroline wanted from her.
“Go on,” Caroline said, smiling. Charlie leaned in and looked inside the wardrobe. Behind the hanging dresses, the back of the wardrobe was gone and there was a door in the wall. She reached in and turned the knob and the door opened into darkness.
“There’s a light switch to your right,” Caroline said behind her. Charlie felt around on the wall and found the switch and flipped it.
There was an entirely new room on the other side of the wardrobe. Charlie stepped in and tried to get a handle on what she was seeing. It was a bathroom — or it was a bathroom. The toilet and sink were gone, but the pipe fixtures still poked out of the wall. There was a small glass shower stall in the far corner. There were gaps in the wallpaper where the sink, toilet, and cabinet had been. On the floor was a queen-sized mattress, dressed with a sheet and pillows.
“I had to do the renovations on this one myself,” Caroline said, startling her. She’d forgotten she was there. “It’s a little harder to find trustworthy contractors for secret rooms.”
“Is this where you sleep?” Charlie asked. Caroline smiled at her.
“No sweetheart, it’s where you sleep. I sleep in the bedroom,” She said, hooking her thumb at the door back into the bedroom.
“Oh,” Charlie said, not sure what to think about this development. “What about the bedroom I woke up in? The kid’s room?”
“You don’t want to sleep in there. Not for the long-term. It’s not for us. We’re better than that,” Caroline said with a sly grin that somehow made Charlie feel both reassured and more confused.
“There’s a hatch in the ceiling that leads into the attic if for some reason you need to get out or hide and the door's locked. A fire or an attack or some such nonsense.”
“An attack?” Charlie asked, perhaps louder than she'd meant to. It never occurred to her that someone might attack them.
“It’s not likely. People are pretty oblivious to most things. Especially when it’s something they don’t know they're supposed to be afraid of. If we’re going to be attacked, it would probably be because they think we’re homosexuals. Either way, I’m only letting you know that in an emergency, that’s a way out. As you saw, the bedroom door is locked up tickity tight!”
Caroline said this last part with a snap of her fingers. It was corny but made Charlie smile.
“When are we going to deal with Reggie?” Charlie asked. Caroline waved her off.
“Don’t you worry about him. I’ll put him under the house for now and we’ll get rid of him tomorrow night. I’ve got a cooler we can put him in until then so he won’t start stinking.”
The casual way she talked about disposing of a human being made Charlie’s head spin. She still felt like she was dreaming. It had only been perhaps three hours since Caroline got her out of bed and she’d met Reggie, but Charlie was exhausted. She had no idea what time it was, only that it was dark outside.
Actually, even that much she was unsure of. For the first time, Charlie realized that there were no windows in Caroline’s house. Certainly not in the converted bathroom they were in or the bedroom they’d just left. As far as Charlie could remember, there weren’t any exposed windows anywhere in the home. A thought occurred to Charlie.
“What happens if we go in the sun?” she asked, the reality of never seeing the sun again still not quite sinking in. Caroline put her arm around Charlie’s shoulder.
“We should go to sleep. There’s plenty of time for questions and answers. All the time in the world. But it’s late and you’re about to experience the best sleep you’ve ever had,” Caroline said, guiding Charlie to the mattress. Charlie went willingly, dropping the robe and crawling naked under the covers. After what they'd already been through together, modesty seemed a little silly.
That point solidified when Caroline dropped her own robe, unwrapped the towel from her head, and shook out her hair. She locked the door, turned the light off, and knelt on the mattress. Charlie rolled over when she felt Caroline scoot up next to her and slide under the sheet. Her new friend pressed herself against Charlie’s back, draping an arm over her stomach. Charlie was glad for this. The prospect of sleeping in this strange room with its bare spots on the walls and shower stall was a little too much like a jail cell and it frightened her. With no windows, the room was soaked in absolute darkness. Charlie could feel her eyes trying to find something to focus on, so she closed them.
Caroline whispered to her and it sounded giant in the smothering quiet of the secret room.
“The bedroom is where I usually sleep, but I’ll sleep in here as long as you need me to. I know it’s a scary time right now and I’m here for you.”
“Thank you,” Charlie said, soft enough that she wasn’t sure if Caroline heard her. She felt Caroline’s fingers lightly tracing the scar along the bottom of her belly.
“Did it hurt? When they took your baby out?” she asked. The question seemed unusual coming from her. Charlie was used to Caroline having all the answers and being her guiding voice in the darkness.
“I think so. It’s hard to re
member. I passed out and then they drugged me up pretty well, but yes, I’m pretty sure it did,” Charlie said after some thought. It was something she didn’t like to think about, but it felt good to have someone ask. She put her hand over Caroline’s to stop her from touching the scar. It tickled and she just wanted to be held.
As sleep crept up inside her, she realized all the things she could smell. It was less like smelling and more like tasting the air in the room. She could smell the water in the pipes behind the wall. She could smell cleaning products, Windex and Pine-Sol, the soap that had been on their bodies and their shampoo, the detergent that washed the sheets. She could smell Reggie’s cologne, and the minute traces of his blood still under the corners of her fingernails. It was the lack of vanilla and popcorn that really stuck out. That smell that was so instrumental in comforting her when she was at her worst was gone. For the first time since she left the hospital, Charlie wondered if she’d made a mistake. After all that they’d done together, fleeing the hospital, burning down the house, drinking blood, and killing Reggie... all of that and it was the lack of that smell that finally made her question it all.
“Caroline?” Charlie asked the darkness, not sure if she was even awake. She couldn’t hear or feel her breathing, even though their naked bodies were pressed together. After a long moment of silence, Caroline responded in a sleepy voice.
“Yes, doll?”
“You don’t smell like vanilla anymore, or popcorn,” Charlie whispered, not even sure if what she was saying made any sense. She felt Caroline lift her head, interested.
“Is that what I smelled like to you? Vanilla and popcorn?” she asked, no longer whispering, honestly intrigued.
“Yes. It was the best smell in the world and I miss it,” Charlie said. Tears stung her eyes and she wasn’t sure why.
“I’m sorry hon. Once you’re on this side, you don’t get the smell anymore. You are the smell. That’s what you smell like now.”
“I smell like vanilla and popcorn?” Charlie asked. Caroline laughed.
“No sweetie, you smell like the best smell in the world. To them. It’s one of our gifts,” she said, patting Charlie on the hip. “Now go to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow night.”
Charlie took her cue to stop talking and lie there in the dark. A curious thing occurred to her, with Caroline’s cold body pressed against her own. It wasn’t only Caroline who wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t breathing either. She hadn’t even noticed until just then. She sucked air into her lungs, slowly and deliberately, and tasted the smells drifting through the room, and then stopped and released the air. There was no panic. No stress. No worry. Her body just wasn’t interested anymore. She wasn’t holding her breath; she just wasn’t breathing. The empty silence was perfect.
- 8 -
The house was quiet; the only sound came from Caroline’s old-fashioned cuckoo clock, which endlessly ticked and tocked in the living room. It was the first time Charlie had been alone in the house and only the second night since she’d been flipped. She thought about how quickly things had moved. The night before, Charlie took the life of an old man named Reginald, and around twenty-three hours before that, she was a regular teenage girl. An especially sad and broken teenage girl, but certainly not the murderous creature she’d become in just a couple of nights.
She felt no guilt about killing the old man. There were fleeting moments of self-examination, but it only took remembering what she’d seen inside his head to find comfort in her choice. It had been her choice. Yes, Caroline put the old man in front of her, but Charlie had slid the knife into his neck. Charlie stared into his eyes and watched as they shook, wide in their sockets, pleading for something Charlie couldn’t, and wouldn’t, give. He wanted a second chance and there was none.
Charlie, however, had been given a second chance of sorts. Caroline pulled her out of the burning wreckage that was her life and wiped the slate. In some ways, Charlie felt like an Etch-a-Sketch that had been shaken clean. The problem was that instead of a blank screen, she was looking at an image she didn’t totally understand. Unfamiliar and ominous pictographs and symbols scratched into the aluminum powder.
One of the more confusing and troubling aspects of her new state of being was the fact that she may, apparently, from time to time, find herself shoving a kitchen knife into the neck of a human being. That was the deal. Caroline offered her immortality, and Charlie accepted. While it wouldn’t be entirely true to say that the cost was her soul, as Charlie didn’t believe she had a soul to give, it did require her to carve away a sizable chunk of her humanity as she understood it. For instance: the part of her that rejected the idea of stabbing senior citizens in the neck with kitchen knives, that part was gone.
The man deserved to die, of that Charlie had no doubt. In the past, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to do the killing herself, but in the past, she wouldn’t have seen the things she’d seen inside his head. Some of the old man’s memories were benign, some were pleasant, but most were ugly and left her with a deep feeling of hopelessness and despair, like a chunk of ice sitting in the pit of her stomach. The one image that stuck out in Charlie’s head (and floated at the surface for years, every time she considered the morality of what needed doing) was a very clear, very awful memory the man had of touching a young girl. It was this image that flashed over and over in her head and made her wish he was alive so she could kill him again.
Charlie wondered what became of the girl. She wondered if it was something that had happened only once, and perhaps she didn’t remember it. That thought almost gave her comfort, even though she was relatively certain it wasn’t true. When stacked with some of the other memories she’d witnessed, Charlie knew there were likely dozens, even hundreds of other experiences just like that one in the man’s life.
So yes, Charlie murdered the old man, as Caroline suggested she should, and no, she didn’t regret it. She didn’t even feel like she should regret it. She understood that similar situations would come up again when she would take advantage of an opportunity to remove an intolerable person from the earth, the way one burns a tick away from a dog’s belly. This thought wasn’t nearly as distressing as it probably should have been. Somehow, in the process of becoming whatever it was she’d become, she developed an innate understanding of her place in the broader scheme of things.
After drinking the old man’s blood, she was energized and revitalized. She felt strong. Not just physically, but a kind of purposeful strength, as though she were invincible. Perhaps, in some ways, she was. There was an immediate connection to something bigger than herself, far more intense and accessible than anything she’d ever experienced in church or any other religious ceremony. In her mind’s eye, she’d seen space, in all its vast emptiness, and the dead light of ancient galaxies flaring across her vision. She’d felt the stirring of massive energies on the other side of the flimsy shell of reality, like water running through pipes just behind the walls. Networks of life shooting off in all directions, intersecting and crossing over in billions of places, all of it connected, all of it older than time itself, invisible to those without the ability to see it, just barely out of reach, and all of it utterly incomprehensible.
Of course, these things were difficult to articulate for Charlie, and if pressed, she would only be able to say that she felt powerful. Powerful and righteous. She understood that she had jumped up a level in the food chain. Not because she’d been told as much (though she had) but because she could feel it in her body. She was stronger than the old man, both physically and in spirit, and she was better than him, in every respect. Morally, certainly, but also just in the natural order. She was better than most people now.
Immortality has a feeling. It’s a specific feeling, like standing on top of a very tall building and looking down at the people and cars below, going about their daily business, completely unaware that you’re three hundred feet above them. Not that Charlie had ever been in a very tall building, but that’s what she imagine
d it was like. Even the first night into her immortality, she could already sense the scope of it. She believed she could anyway. It was also entirely possible that she was overthinking things.
Being alone in the house, she couldn’t help but think and overthink. Caroline had only been gone for an hour or so, but it felt like Charlie had been alone all night. The TV provided no comfort. The only things on that late were talk shows and monster movies, and she was in the mood for neither.
While she didn’t feel guilty about what she’d done, the gravity of it wasn’t lost on her. As hard as she tried, it was impossible to ignore the fact that Caroline was off disposing of a body. The most unsettling thing about all of it was how nonplussed she was. It was peculiar, not worrying about the legal consequences of what she’d done. You would think that after murdering someone, a sixteen-year-old girl would be at least a little concerned about getting caught and held responsible, but the thought barely occurred to her. The fact was that she trusted Caroline completely and with a ferocity that scared her. What choice did she have? Whatever had been done to her left her utterly dependent on Caroline. That was the choice she made, and she did so knowingly. Charlie knew that with all the power she felt inside of her, she was equally as vulnerable, and she desperately needed Caroline to teach her how to survive. How to survive and function in this new life. There was a lot to learn and her first lesson involved killing a man, so whatever came next in that life, Charlie knew she needed Caroline to guide her through it.
The irony of her situation wasn’t lost on Charlie. She’d run away from a home she felt trapped in and a mother who controlled and restricted her, only to land in a home with functionally less freedom and a maternal figure who was, literally, a monster. The difference was that she truly believed that Caroline would ultimately bring her into a bigger, better world. There was nowhere for her to go back home with her mother. That was a dead end. Caroline, on the other hand, could show her things she never imagined. She could teach her to be strong and sexy and confident, and how to take the things she wanted from the world. There was potential for a future with Caroline. Besides, her mother had left. That door was closed before she'd left with Caroline.