An Unattractive Vampire

by Jim McDoniel

  “I will show you.” He cut her off. Yulric raised his hand and passed it through the space in her mind. A hospital room appeared around them. It was very white and very sterile, without any personal touches that might distinguish it from any other room in any other hospital. A TV hung on one wall, sadly turned off. The curtains were drawn on both the windows and the door. The room was dark, brightened only by the reds and greens of various computer displays and a book light being used by a little boy in the corner.

  “Where is this?” asked Catherine, who had never seen a room like this before, except on TV. She checked the patient to see if she was a famous celebrity. She wasn’t, not by a long shot. The woman in the bed looked awful. She was bone thin, and wired up to so many machines, it looked like a plastic squid was erupting from her face. Her hair was matted and scraggly and hadn’t seen product in years. Four years, to be exact.

  “Is that . . . me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Yulric answered.

  Catherine flickered for a moment, her mental image switching between her full-bodied normal self to the wraith she saw lying in the bed, and back again. She’d known that she didn’t look good, but it had never been an issue because she’d never been able to look at herself. It was such a disturbing sight, she didn’t even care that a second version of the vampire was crouched on top of her, looking into her pried-open eyes.

  She turned away, unable to take any more, and found herself facing the small boy. She’d have thought he would stir at the sudden and miraculous appearance of a hideous man and flickering-mind woman in the middle of the room. There he was, though, paging through a biography of Oliver Cromwell like they weren’t even there. She went up and waved her hand in front of his face. He licked his finger and turned the page.

  “This isn’t real,” she said, very disappointed.

  “On the contrary,” corrected the vampire. “This is very real. This is your room, as I see it.”

  “Okay,” said Catherine, “I’ll give you that, but—”

  She was cut off. Catherine’s hand, her real hand, was waving at her. Catherine gaped at herself. “How is that possible?”

  “A vampyr can control the actions of the weak willed,” he boasted. “A person who lies forever in sleep is particularly weak willed.”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied, trying not to take offense. “Great. You can make my weak-willed arm move. Good for you. What do you need me for?”

  “Due to your condition, such control requires concentration and . . . proximity,” he explained.

  “I assume that’s why you’re on top of me?” she added. She made a quick glance to make sure his hands weren’t anywhere they shouldn’t be.

  “Indeed,” he said, choosing to ignore her lack of trust in him, “it would be more beneficial if you could move yourself.”

  “Believe me, I’d love to,” she said.

  “I can show you,” he told her.

  Four words. Four lovely words. Yulric held out his hand. Catherine, shaking with nervous excitement, took it. His other hand reached out and touched the projection of her comatose body. It shuddered, sending the machines into apoplexy. The boy ran over and silenced them.

  “Please, lie down into your body,” Yulric instructed.

  “Um, can you move?” she asked him, referring to his real form, still crouched on the bed. He glowered, obviously having no intention of changing his position. Swallowing the discomfort of his hovering body near her spectral head, Catherine sat on the bed, letting her feet line up with her feet and her legs line up with her legs, or at least where they appeared to be under the blanket. It was weird, as her mental legs took up far more room than her real legs. It felt like trying to squeeze into jeans that were now too small for her, a sensation she was all too familiar with. Once her bottom half was in position, she lay down, slowly at first, then more quickly as her mind abdominals grew tired. She passed through the real Yulric’s body—a cold and endless void filled with screaming maggots and burning flesh—and finally settled her head down into place.

  “Close your eyes,” instructed the Yulric standing beside the Yulric crouched on top of her. Catherine wasn’t sure which she preferred. She did close her eyes, though.

  “Now open them.”

  She did.

  “Now scratch your nose.”

  “Not funny,” she said. At least, she tried to, but she couldn’t. Something was in her throat, gagging her. With a panicked thought to the monsters surrounding her, she scrabbled at whatever it was with her hands . . . and stopped. These were not the hands she was used to. They were paler, more veiny. They had longer nails and rougher skin. An IV stuck out of one of them. They were skeletal and weak and utterly goddamned beautiful.

  These were Catherine’s real hands.

  She laughed, or tried to. The sound was once more strangled by the tubes in her mouth. With her two real hands, she pulled them out, gagging as she did so and probably scraping her trachea or esophagus or both, but she didn’t care. She was finally going to get out of this bed, just as soon as the vampire got off her.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the Yulric in her mind. Her voice was dry and scratchy, but it was real and she could hear it with her ears.

  Mind Yulric just stood there, staring at her, as unmoving as his real body.

  “Fine,” she said, and with a swat of her arm, she knocked the vampire’s body onto the floor.

  Everything went black.

  Catherine looked around in a panic. The room was gone. The boy was gone. Both Yulrics were gone. She looked down at her hands. They were back to normal. Normal for her mind. Tears welled up in her eyes. Not really, though, since the tears were just imaginary. And with that thought, she started to cry.

  “That would be the problem.”

  Catherine looked up. Mind Yulric was standing over her once more, mocking her with a little wink.

  “Bastard!” she screamed, running and flinging herself at him. “Goddamned bastard!”

  She hit him, but without the will to do much else, she just sort of melted down his front in a pile of sobs. He knelt down beside her.

  “You can only control your body by inhabiting its image in your mind, but you can only maintain that image through my sight,” he explained. Catherine looked through tear-filled eyes up into Yulric’s face. It was cold and hard but free of malice. What she had taken as a wink was clearly something more. The vampire’s left eye remained closed.

  “So”—Catherine cried—“what does that m-mean?”

  “Sacrifice,” said the vampire, his voice echoing through the blackness of her mind. “On both our parts.”

  “What kind of sacrifice?” she asked.

  “The very oldest,” he told her, lowering his gaze. Hers followed suit and fell upon his balled-up left hand, which unfurled to reveal its contents—a clouded eyeball with a pinprick black pupil.

  “An eye for an eye,” he said.

  Catherine understood. This was the price of feeling, of moving, of being alive, truly alive. One measly eye.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  The vampire picked her back up off the floor of her mind.

  “It shall be quick. You will not feel it,” he said as he faded back into the real world.

  “Be seeing you,” she called after him. That single eye rolled in its socket. Catherine smiled and closed her own. Then, she opened them and got up.

  • •

  Back at the Pink House, Yulric and Simon sat at the dining room table and pretended they could not hear the ecstatic singing of their new compatriot as she took her first hot shower in four years. The boy tapped on a laptop keyboard. The vampire rubbed his eye and looked irritable.

  “It is misty,” Yulric complained.

  Simon, completely ignoring the vampire’s moaning, finished his typing. “I’ve arranged a coffin for you.”

  “Comfortable?” Yulric asked.

  Simon raised his eyebrow. “We’re on a budget.”

  “I have three hu
ndred years of back rent and compound interest in a bank in Switzerland,” Yulric pointed out.

  Simon paused in his typing. “Fine. Satin lining, it is.”

  “Can you arrange for it to be picked up and taken to this airport of yours?” the vampire asked.

  “Certainly,” Simon answered. “I just need to know where we’re going first.”

  Chapter 19

  Vermillion (née Rusty) had never actually been to a vampire club before, never inside anyway. That was the unspoken secret he and his coven—correction, his former coven—kept. Every weekend they would go to a vampire club, wait in line, be turned away, and then head for the nearest Applebee’s before retiring to Grimvice’s (née Derek’s) uncle’s comic shop for some role-play. The closest any of them had been to the inside was when Sara (née Sarah) forgot her feminine-hygiene products and had to buy a sanitary pad from the ladies’ room. The bouncer had actually let Sara give her quarter to a much more attractive girl to buy one for her. The girl hadn’t come back, and Sara’s skirt had been ruined, but the quarter had been there; it had seen, and they all had imagined what the sanitary napkin would have looked like. It would have been black.

  Now here he was—new beautiful face, new buff body, ill-fitting robes traded in for form-fitting slacks and a shirt best described as flowy, hair cut short and well gelled, eyeliner caked on—waiting to be let in. He couldn’t believe it. Literally, he couldn’t. Despite all the cosmetic surgery and The Doctor Lord Talby’s instructions on proper dress and behavior, despite all the lusty stares he was enjoying by hot girls and hot guys alike, despite it all, he still expected to be turned away.

  The line moved . . . slowly, which was odd. Normally, it was all over in a few seconds. The bouncer would either nod and pull the rope aside or make no motion at all, which was your cue to start toward Applebee’s. The hopeful turned away, those who were too beautiful to need hope admitted, easy. Today, though, it was taking forever, and there was talking up ahead—loud, high-pitched, frantic talking. If Vermillion didn’t know better, he’d swear people were being allowed to plead their case.

  “I nearly had him convinced that I had to run this inhaler to my sister inside,” one rejected passerby told his friend. “He actually checked the name of the prescription before telling me to get lost.”

  “I tried the ol’ lean over and flirt,” said his female friend. “His hand moved for the rope. I think if I’d worn my pushup bra, I’d have had him.”

  Vermillion stopped one of the ecstatic rejects walking away. “What’s going on?”

  “New bouncer,” said the reject, flipping his dyed black hair out of his eyes, which were also black.

  “What happened to Bruno?”

  “Oh, you know . . . nothing,” muttered the reject with a wink-wink at the end. He snickered, obviously assuming that Vermillion would not understand.

  “What kind of nothing?” he pressed, adding a rather pointed wink-wink of his own. The other man’s eyes went wide at the sight of the countersign marking those who “knew.”49

  “You didn’t hear?” the reject leaned forward conspiratorially. “A lich came by a few weeks ago.”

  “A lich?” whispered Vermillion. He’d always thought liches were role-playing-game inventions.

  The reject, who’d thought the same, continued, “It sneaked in, tore the place apart, and killed Bruno and Tony before the real vampires scared it away.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “Yeah,” sighed the reject. “They’re taking up a collection for Tony’s girlfriend up at the front. Give if you can.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  “Anytime,” replied the reject. The two awkwardly stood there for a minute before the reject gave a small wave and walked away. Vermillion kicked himself. He hadn’t been authoritative enough with his dismissal. He’d work on that in the mirror later.

  The line moved forward again, this time dramatically enough for him to reach the stairs.

  A large group must have been turned away. He was right. Coming up the other side of the staircase was his old coven. Vermillion’s heart beat faster. It seemed like a million years since he had last seen them: Grimvice and Ulster, Phoenix and Gorellis. There were his friends, all chatting excitedly about how Phoenix, pretending to faint, had almost gotten them inside. He wanted to call out to them. He wanted to show them what he’d become. He wasn’t really sure why he didn’t, why he watched them walk by. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that not one of them recognized him. “Rusty?”

  Well, almost.

  Vermillion turned back around to find Sara standing up from tying the strap on one of her knee-high boots. Her face was all astonishment—wide eyes, comically open mouth. Even her nostrils were somehow astonished.

  “Rusty?” she repeated, moving slowly toward him.

  Sara was not what anyone would call a conventional beauty. She was a big woman, structurally speaking, very tall, very broad, and pleasantly soft, despite being so literally big boned. She may not have had the symmetrical facial features that inspire misspellings like hott or phat,50 but she was, in fact, quite pretty, if you could get past the lathered-on Goth makeup, which reeked of desperation. She might not have turned your head immediately, but she tended to grow on you over time, until one day, her smile made you wonder why you’d never asked her out. For Rusty, the answer to that question had always been found looking back at him in a mirror.

  “Rusty, is that you?” she asked, adjusting the top of her dress. Vermillion raised an eyebrow, just like he’d practiced, and she realized her mistake. “Sorry. I mean, Vermillion.”

  “Hello, Sara,” he greeted her.

  “Oh. My. God,” she said with a hug. It was one of her patented big, tight hugs, which went on a fraction longer than you thought it would. Rusty had always liked that.

  “Look at you,” she continued. “Wow. I mean, wow.”

  She was pressing his pecs with her finger. Vermillion tried not to flex. Too much.

  “What happened to you?” she asked him. “You fell off the face of the earth. We thought you’d gone Darkmyst on us.”

  “You what?” he replied, anger rising in his voice. “How could you even think I was like that traitor?”

  Sara’s face turned apologetic. “Sorry. It’s just no one could get a hold of you for the longest time. So I thought, er, we thought . . .” She trailed off and looked away, ashamed apparently of what she had thought. “But, obviously, now we know where you were—the gym.”

  “Yeah. The gym,” Vermillion said in an all-too-Rusty tone.

  “You look great,” Sara complimented.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You, too.”

  “Oh please.” Sara laughed. “I look the same. You, though. Did you get a nose job?”

  “It’s good to see you,” Vermillion said, quickly changing the subject.

  “Yeah. Hey, listen . . . ,” she began.

  “Um, the line,” interrupted a cadre of Goth schoolgirls in high heels behind him. Vermillion looked to see that the line had moved. In fact, ahead of him, there was no line. The new bouncer motioned him forward, the rope in hand, ready to let him in.

  “Go ahead,” he told the girls. They filed past, being sure to let their chests brush up against him as they did. The last one gave him a little wink.

  “Anyway,” continued Sara, looking after the girls with utter loathing, “we were all heading over to Applebee’s, if you want to join us after you get rejected.”

  “Um, I don’t think I’m going to be rejected,” he said, trying to put it as delicately as possible.

  “No,” she said with a frown, “I don’t suppose you will. Oh well. It was . . . just . . . It was good to see you, Rusty. I mean, Vermillion.”

  She started to go.

  “Wait,” Vermillion called after her. He grabbed her wrist, and electricity shot through his body. He was normally very careful not to touch anyone, least of all Sara. This physical contact, it was . . . nice. By the doe-eye
d look on Sara’s face, she thought so, too.

  “I guess I could go with you guys,” he continued, trying to sound casual. “I mean, I haven’t seen you in a couple of months.”

  “Great. That’s”—she couldn’t seem to find the right word—“great. Grimvice just picked up the new expansion, and we—”

  She was interrupted by the ring of Vermillion’s phone. He checked the ID.

  The Doctor Lord Talby.

  “I’ve got to . . . ,” he said apologetically.

  “Yeah, of course,” she replied with a bit too much gusto. All the nervous energy was apparently going to her head.

  Vermillion answered the phone.

  “Hello, Vermillion.” The Doctor’s smooth, accented voice put a chill in his heart.

  “Doctor, hey,” Vermillion replied cautiously.

  “Excuse me?” said Talby in a sterner voice.

  “I mean, hello,” he corrected himself. “How can I help you?”

  “As ever, it is I who can help you,” said the Doctor. “May I ask why you have not yet entered the club?”

  Vermillion looked around suspiciously.

  “There was a line,” he explained.

  “My dear Vermillion, do we wait in lines?”

  “No, Doctor. Sorry.”

  “Try to remember that for next time,” said Talby.

  “I will.”

  “The line appears to have gone down, though. May I ask why you remain at the top of the stairs?”

  Vermillion’s suspicions were confirmed. The Doctor Lord Talby was watching him. A more thorough glance revealed a camera on the top of the adjoining building.

  “I was, uh, talking. To an old friend.”

  “Indeed? And what does she think of you?”

  Vermillion turned to look at Sara. She was standing a bit off to the side, obviously trying to find ways not to eavesdrop. Currently, she was adjusting her stockings. His mind filled with white noise for a moment. When he came back, he remembered the Doctor had asked him a question.

  “She, uh, she’s impressed,” he answered, barely remembering what had been asked.

  “I should think so,” said the Doctor. “I worked very hard on you. You worked very hard on you. And now you are a masterpiece.”