The Vampire Henry

by Michael S. Walker

That meant you took the box to aisle A-1. Then you walked over six sections. You counted up from the bottom three shelves and then you counted six places from the left where the section started. And you stuck the product.

  That was pretty easy.

  But then you would come across a box like this:

  A1 (2) 6-3-6

  What this meant was that after two sections in aisle A-1, there was a break and then another section of shelves began. You were supposed to count over two and then from there count 6-3-6. And I would often get tripped on that and just start looking around for a place to stick whatever I had in my hand. First empty slot, I would just stick it and move on. And one time, the boss caught me sticking a toilet paper roll dispenser where a wicker basket was supposed to be displayed.

  I got written up for that.

  The last straw happened one day in early July. It was absolutely verboten to smoke in the building, and once the overnight shift started you were on lockdown until you clocked out. There was no way I was going to tough eight hours without a few smokes, and I often snuck off to the head to light up. So I was coming out after one of these forays, and there was the boss by the water fountain, glaring at me. I mumbled hello and started off toward the sales floor. He stopped me, grabbing me tightly by the arm.

  “What were you doing in there?” he said.

  “Ummm, pissing, I believe,” I said.

  “Don’t get smart with me. You were smoking. I know you were smoking.” Still holding me tightly by the arm, he dragged me back into the head. He looked in the toilet. I hadn’t even bothered to flush the butt.

  “That’s it, Henry. You know it’s against the rules to smoke in here. You’re fired. I’m going to escort you out of the building right now.”

  With that, I snaked free from his grasp. I grabbed him by the throat and lifted him as high into the air as I could. His feet were at least two feet off the ground. His milky blue eyes bulged and he began to turn red and cough. I held him like that for about ten seconds and then put him down again.

  “That suits me fine,” I said in my best vampire voice.

  He really smelled like fear then, as he grabbed his keys and unlocked the front door for me. As soon as I was outside, I lit up another cigarette, relishing the cool night air on my skin.

  I haven’t had to go looking for a job since then, which is sweet. Two days after I got shit canned at the department store, I took out this guy who ran a comic book shop about three blocks from my house. He had ten thousand dollars in a money clip--a fat bundle of one hundred-dollar bills. There was no way he had made that from selling issues of Batman and The Incredible Hulk. Not in that neighborhood. As I drank him down, I discovered the real source. He had been selling drugs out of the basement of the store--methamphetamines. All together now I have like twelve thousand in a shoebox in my bedroom closet: money from victims, money from my tiny writing sales. I’m trying to be the frugal little vampire, make that money last. Like I said, I hardly ever turn the lights on. In the winter, I plan to run the furnace just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. I still hardly ever bathe. I really should have insurance for my truck, but I don’t. Hope I never get pulled over. And of course, I don’t buy any groceries. Hopefully I can make the money last a little while. While I write. While I drink.

  Sometimes I pull that shoebox down and just look at the bills, stir them around.

  It really is a funny little world.

  Chapter Eleven

  “So, where are you going on this fine evening?”

  I’m coming out of the little convenient store where I buy my smokes (a luxury I can’t seem to shake) thinking about maybe having a drink later on. It’s been a week since I took out the mugger and the lust, the need to kill, is becoming palpable again. It’s an unseasonably hot night, must be in the high 80s at least. People are sitting on their porches trying to stay cool: barbequing, bullshitting, listening to music.

  I turn around and there’s a young girl leaning up against the side of the store. She looks like she’s twenty, possibly younger. She has long dishwater blonde hair that she has done up in some kind of bun, an elfin face. She’s wearing a leather mini with zippered pockets, a wine-colored wife beater. She looks at me and smiles, showing very bad teeth.

  “Pardon me?” I heard her the first time. I walk over to where she is standing, appraising her smooth white legs. Not too bad. A little thing though. Probably not much blood in her. But a nice cocktail.

  “I said, where are you going on this fine evening?”

  “Home,” I reply, still taking in her tiny, sexy body.

  “Oh,” she says. “You want a lil’ company?”

  “Maybe,” I say, smiling back. “How much is it going to cost me?”

  “Depends on how much company you want,” she says, detaching herself from the wall and putting her hands on her hips. She’s got to be only 5’2…5’3. And right now she’s wearing strappy pumps that add a few inches to that.

  I get closer. She smells like talcum powder and sweat.

  “How much for a b.j.?” I ask.

  “Ten.”

  Cut rates. She could probably sell it for more than that. She’s a lot prettier than most of the prostitutes I see canvassing this neighborhood. Maybe she thinks she’s hooking in Mumbai or something. I can certainly relinquish a ten spot. No worries.

  “OK,” I say. “You wanna go to my place? It’s like three blocks east of here.”

  “All right then baby,” she says, a little too brightly. Nothing to be done with the teeth but knock them down and give her some dentures. But the body still is good. “Oh, and buy me a pack of smokes? I’m fresh out.”

  We go back into the convenient store to get her cigarettes. The store is run by this Middle-Eastern guy named Culler. Something like that. I think he’s from Saudi Arabia originally. Usually he’s pretty sociable when I come in there, tries to engage me in talk about football or the weather. As soon as he sees me with the whore, he goes cold, throws out all kinds of silent hate vibes. He’s probably had run-ins with her before, had to chase her off from tricking outside his establishment.

  We get her a pack of Winston 100s and get the hell out of there, start walking back to my place.

  “If you got twenty, you can fuck me mister,” she says as we walk.

  “I’ll think about it.” As a matter of fact, I’m thinking about it a lot. I can’t wait to get this young thing back to my place, see what damage those lips can do to my cock. “What’s your name?”

  “Brandy.”

  Of course it is. The queen name of all the white trash. Brandy. Brandi. Brandee. I put my hand on Brandy’s ass and give it a playful squeeze. The Gods are smiling tonight. On all lucky bastards who have ten dollars in their pocket.

  We make it back to my place.

  “You want a drink or something?” I ask, turning the lights on. I can see now that she is wearing a lot of makeup. A lot.

  “Maybe later,” she says. “Why don’t you take your cock out for me?”

  “I will, if you take down all that hair for me, baby.”

  “What?”

  “I wanna see how long your hair is.” There is quite a lot of it. She probably hasn’t cut it in quite a number of years.

  She sighs. “It’s your dime, handsome. It’s gonna take me forever to put it back together, sooo…”

  “I’ll make it worth your while, Brandy.”

  As she loosens her hair for me, I slide down my jeans and boxers. My cock is already semi-erect, jerking in anticipation of the great unveiling.

  Her hair falls down to her ass, slowly, like some waterfall in heaven. It’s beautiful. There’s so much of the stuff. I just want to grab it in my hands, pat it, caress it. Hoard it away somewhere.

  “You like?” she says.

  “Very much,” I whisper. I am now rock hard.

  She gets on her knees and crawls toward me. Her breath on my genitals. Warm kisses. I take strands of her hair in my hands, run my fingers through tha
t impossibly silky forest.

  Then she has my cock in her mouth, taking me down into her. She’s really not very good. I’ve had better head from amateurs. But her hair is beautiful and everywhere, like some kind of canopy she is hiding under. I keep at it with my fingers, as if I were Rumpelstiltskin trying to turn straw into gold. I can feel my orgasm building.

  “I’m gonna cum baby. I’m gonna cum…” I say, sculpting angels with her hair.

  And just like that, I shoot, holding her head hard to my groin. She swallows it all down, drinking with exaggerated enthusiasm.

  Finally I’m dry. Spent. I disengage from her mouth, stagger back a few steps.

  “Did you like that baby?” she says.

  Strands of her hair have fallen across her eyes, and she whisks them away with delicate fingertips. She looks very sexy kneeling there like that, her face still flushed from her recent ministrations. I think about spending the extra ten.

  “Very much,” I say. “How much…how much would it cost me if I wanted you to spend the night with me?”

  I’m actually thinking of not draining her. She’s so young. And right now I’m in love with all that hair. I just want to cover my sour body with it like some kind of shroud, fall asleep forever.

  “Oh, we can negotiate that,” she says beaming, getting up from the floor. “Could I maybe have that drink now?”

  “Sure,” I say. I pull my pants back up, buckle my belt. I was going to try and write later on, but what the hell. It will keep. “What do you want?”

  “Do you got any Jack?” she asks.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll have a Jack and Coke then.”

  “OK.”

  “I need to use the bathroom. Where is it honey?”

  “Upstairs. End of the hallway.”

  “OK. Then I’ll be right back and we can party some more, baby.”

  “Ok. And Brandy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Leave your hair down, OK?”

  She laughs at that.

  “You really like my hair, don’cha sugar?”

  “I really do.”

  “Lots of guys do. I haven’t cut it since I was fifteen.”

  She goes upstairs and I go out to the kitchen to make her drink. I have a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi in the refrigerator. It’s been there for God knows how long and it’s flat as hell, but I mix it in with the Jack, put a few ice cubes in the glass. I stir it with my finger. Then I take it back in the living room and set the glass on the floor next to the canvas chair.

  Brandy is not in the bathroom anymore. I can hear her moving with my vamp ears. I can hear her trying to be quiet as a mouse. She’s in my bedroom. She has the closet open. She has my shoebox open. She’s…

  I run up the stairs in a rage, as fast as the comic book Flash, stop in the doorway. And there she is, the shoebox on the floor. She’s crouching down over it, stuffing one hundred-dollar bills into the pockets of her miniskirt.

  “You godamn whore!” I growl.

  And before she can protest, before she can say anything at all, I have my fangs out and I am on her, sucking down the little bitch’s blood. She moans in pleasure as I take her into me, dropping a hundred-dollar bill to the floor, going limp.

  God dammit… I can’t believe she was out to steal from me. And I was going to let her live too. To hook another night.

  It does not take long to drain her dry. Like I thought, she doesn’t have much vino in her at all. Maybe five pints. And of course, I get her whole life story in the bargain. Another sad, dysfunctional one. A silent movie about abuse. She had a brother who was five years older than her, started doing things to her when she was nine. Forced her at knife point to suck his cock. Then, when she was fifteen, she was raped in a vacant lot by some guy, only three blocks from her house. Sad sad sad. But still…

  Turns out she hasn’t even tricked before. I’m her first.

  And her last.

  Sad sad sad. But she was trying to steal from me. Nothing really to be done.

  I drop her body to the floor. The long hair covers her face--a hirsute mask. I pick it up, drape it over my fingers like Spanish moss.

  “Rumpelstiltskin,” I whisper.

  Chapter Twelve

  Thoughts of A Dirty Old Vampire (On Vampires)

  When I got back from California, I did a lot of reading about vampires. I wanted to know what people believed and what jibed with my own experience. I spent two or three hours every night at the public library, reading the books they had on bloodsuckers. And I bought a lot of other books too. Or stole them. And I have to tell you, about ninety percent of the stuff written about vampires is complete and utter bullshit. The irrational fears of medieval peasants. Panic in the wake of the Black Death. Superstitions. Fairy tales.

  Throughout recorded history, there have been stories of vampire-like creatures. In India there are wall paintings depicting vampire-type gods with green faces, blue bodies, and fangs. These date from about 3000 B.C. or thereabouts. India has a lot of vampires. In the Vedas there are vampires called Rakshasas or “destroyers.” There is also a vamp called Langsuir, a beautiful woman who died of grief in childbirth. She wanders the earth sucking the blood of children through a hole in the back of her neck.

  The seat of all European vampire legends seems to be the Slavic countries: Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia. The area is full of vampire stories. A lot of those can be attributed to cases of premature burial I suspect. There was a lot of that going on before science could send out its mechanical and electronic feelers to definitively pronounce the death of the body. Imagine being in a death-like coma, being buried, and finally coming to underground and in a coffin. You would try to claw your way out to no avail, probably blooding your burial shroud and clothes with the effort. And bodies like that were sometimes dug up again, for whatever reason. To a superstitious peasant of say the 14th century or whatever, the sight in that coffin probably looked very suspicious indeed: a corpse in an almost pristine state, suffering from very little in the way of decomposition, with fresh blood all over it. What else could it be but a bloodsucker?

  The fear of people who are different from the norm also got a lot of innocents accused of being supernatural in some way. Of being witches, demons, vampires. In Bulgaria, if you had the misfortune of being born with a harelip or only one nostril, there was a probability you could get staked as a vampire. In northern latitudes, where most people are blonde and fair, being of a dark complexion could make you suspect. And exactly the reverse in southern climes. Always the status quo branding as monstrous that which it does not understand. I think of those women in Salem who burned as witches simply because they chose to live in the woods, far from the vindictive church goers, and maybe gather herbs for medicines. And I think of myself. I have always been an object of suspicion, a monster really, even when I was human, even when my heart was still pumping blood to my brain. I think of all the things that people are passionate about, things I never cared a fig for. I could never see how they could get all crazy about sports, or politics, or religion even. I could never understand why it was deemed patriotic to go off to some foreign country and murder a few weaklings who happened to be sitting on some resources we wanted. I could never understand why people were so afraid to listen to their own minds and hearts, why they were so afraid to say anything that differed from what the herd might say. Why were they afraid of solitude? It never mattered to me in the least. In high school, I hardly had any friends at all--just a few other misfits who tolerated my existence because I was sometimes good for a drink or a laugh. I was looked down on constantly for my appearance, my clothes, my ineptitude at games. I never went to the prom. I was never in any clubs. I was vilified. I suppose if someone back then had had a hawthorn stake, they might have tried to drive it through my heart, pin me to the gymnasium floor or something.

  Anyway, all that doesn’t matter. I don’t dwell on the past. I was talking about vampires.

  Outside of Emily, I have
never met another vampire. Not one. I’m not very computer savvy, but I’ve done a little searching around over the Internet, and all the so-called “real-life vampires” I’ve inspected are nothing more than goth kids who dress in black and like to cut themselves with razor blades. Granted, there is a medical condition called porphyria in which the body is unable to manufacture a component of hemoglobin, and this condition can make people want to drink blood. It also can make them sensitive to sunlight. But it is easy to treat today. No. I have never met another vampire with my powers and desires.

  But surely they must be out there. Emily was turned by one. And the guy who turned Emily must have been turned himself.

  To tell you the truth, I’m not obsessed with meeting another vampire. So what if we are the same physically? So what if we both have to survive by drinking up blood? So what if we both burn in the sun? If I met another vamp, who’s to say he or she wouldn’t be just another shit in the shitstorm? Like someone who makes a living by making thousands of people’s retirement funds go away. Or gets paid to come up with research, full of all sorts of twisted formulae, proving that globalization is a great great thing for Third-World farmers. Or…

  Probably we would just end up getting in some vampire pissing contest. Henry the Vampire vs. Count Yorga or something.

  So no. I don’t care. But sometimes, I do wonder.

  Am I the only vampire in the tri-county area?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Harry is pissed off at his woman. Again.

  Harry owns this little hole-in-the-wall club called the Camptown Club. It’s about a block away from the club where Marie, that stripper, used to dance. Nobody ever calls it the Camptown Club though. They just call it Harry’s Place, as far as I can tell. The bar’s actually changed hands like three times in the same number of years.

  Now it’s Harry’s Place.

  Harry’s this guy, about fifty-five or so. He was a Navy Seal in a previous life I hear. He has a craggy, crooked face and a cold sort of smile that always reminds me of an iguana. He’s usually nice enough, likes to talk with the patrons about sports, hunting. Oh, and the JFK assassination, which he has numerous crackpot theories about, all apparently culled from crackpot books.