by Unknown
“But I don’t know — I’m no scientist, kid. All I know is people don’t see us because they can’t see us. Not until they get tired, David, lose their focus. And even then, not everyone sees what you can see. We’re free, brother. There’s no Van Helsing, no rules, no rhyme or reason. No one knows to come after us. Freedom. That’s why you do it. Or, you know: stay at your desk, hope for a stroke to end your misery suddenly before too many more years pass … Whatever you like. Ask me, it’s not much of a choice, D.”
David stared at the snow on the ground, listening to the traffic in the distance. “What would I have to do?” he said quietly.
“Blood, baby. You know what vampires do: you got to do it to be it.”
David felt the cold reaching through his coat, finding him as the breeze picked up. After a moment, he said, “I’ve got to be getting back.”
“Yeah,” Karl whispered. “That paperwork ain’t going to do itself.”
Friday went well.
The client and his wife came in, got their personal accounts out of the way, and then dug into the corporation and trust. David had explained the need for the settlor of the trust — a third party who had not attended the meeting — to provide photo ID in this era of rampant fraud, and the clients — much to David’s relief — hadn’t squawked. They also cooperated when David told them he’d need to see last year’s tax return for the holding company — to prove its continued existence. Little details like that could derail a signing and, even though it wouldn’t have been David’s fault, he would’ve been held accountable. A multi-million dollar account had hinged on the unpredictable reactions of clients who didn’t understand legalities and didn’t care much about them. David had been burned by irrational reactions before, and every complex account held the potential for such setbacks; every new relationship introduced variables beyond his control, putting David on the brink of catastrophic failure.
Hence the sleeping pills.
But Friday had gone well. At least until 2:33 PM, when David’s boss shot him an email:
“i just talked to stela jonson she says she didnt get her monthly eft amount yesterday???????? how the fuck does that happn. get yr head out of your ass … … send the money”
David stared at the screen: how the fuck does that happn.
how the fuck does that happn?
It happens because I’m fucking exhausted, you illiterate bastard, thought David.
David’s cubicle was a few feet away from his broker’s office and the open door. They could just have spoken, but they rarely did: all communication was via email. David had long since stopped saving the abusive emails with an eye towards launching some kind of complaint: assistants never won those battles, but they could — and did — lose them big. David breathed in deep through his nose, counted to seven.
And Karl came around the corner.
“Jesus!” David said aloud. Behind him, one of the other assistants glanced up from her computer screen, confused by the outburst. “What’re you … how did you get in?”
“I waited at the door, somebody let me in. You don’t look so hot. Late night?”
“You know it was.”
“So. What do you figure?”
“David?” The girl behind him spoke up. David ignored her as though she was the thing no one else could see.
“What do you mean?” David said, his mouth suddenly dry.
“Come on now. Blood, baby. Blood.”
David swallowed. In his peripheral vision, the white wall to his right seemed to flex and warp, then snap back into place with an un-wall-like plasticity. Glancing at his desk, he saw a large, polished granite paperweight that held two pens and a brass-plate inscribed: DAVID MOORE, COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNER, 1999. Karl saw the glance, lifted his eyebrows.
“That would do,” Karl said quietly, eyes blazing. “For a start.”
David stood and picked up the paperweight. The wall bowed again, and his desk seemed to ripple, momentarily disorienting him. His face felt hot — almost feverish. He braced himself on his heels, uncertain of his balance. The paperweight was heavy, broader than his palm. He hefted it, breathed in deep through his nose. Then he left his cubicle, crossing the few feet to his broker’s office.
Mr. Cavanaugh looked up from behind his desk with a scowl. To his right: his computer screen; beside that: a classy black and white headshot of his much younger wife. “Not now…” he snarled, but David never broke stride.
Rounding the desk, David took the granite plank in both hands, raised it back behind his right shoulder, then swept it down and across, shattering the orbital bone of his broker’s left eye with the crisp wet crunch of snapping celery. The man rocked back in his swivel chair, whining as blood bubbled from the vicious gash.
Karl came to the doorway, crossing his arms, and leaning against the frame.
David pulled his arms back then struck again.
Then again.
Mr. Cavanaugh slid from his chair, sprawling on the carpet as Cindy Carswell began to scream.
“Better hurry, David,” Karl said. “Drink and cross over. They’re coming.”
David reeled, feeling the room swaying around him as though the ground beneath his feet was shifting. He could feel himself crossing; it was happening. The world was tilting.
All he needed to do now was drink.
David knelt — his knees sounding out with a loud, sclerotic popping — and got down on all fours, straddling Mr. Cavanaugh’s hips. The man’s eyelids twitched, and his breath came in rapid, panting gasps. David hesitated, hearing the sound of running footsteps, and then leaned in closer, pushing his face into Cavanaugh’s throbbing neck.
I don’t have fangs, David thought as he fixed mouth to throat and realized how difficult this would be.
“They’re coming, D. Choose.”
David bit as hard as he could. Then he started working on the area, gnawing at it, because chewing through raw, living flesh was not easy. He went at it with persistence, with grim determination — the same traits he had once employed in an attempt to satisfy Lola. She may well have been faking her reaction, but Mr. Cavanaugh wasn’t: David tasted blood and swallowed, then began gulping as the horrid wound pulsed with flow.
Men rushed in, grabbing at David’s shoulders and waist, heaving him off.
Blows fell, kicks were delivered: David was pushed onto his back and held down; familiar, but terrorized faces loomed above him as screams filled the office.
“They still see me!” David bellowed. He felt the wet warmth upon his face, knew he must look a sight — worse than forgetting to shave. “They still see me! I drank! I drank! You said I would cross over!”
“I did say that, didn’t I?” Karl called out over the shrill sounds of rage and panic. “Yeah … what I really meant though, I guess, is that I would be crossing over. Listen, David: you’ve been a big help — huge! — and I’m not going to forget this. This blood sacrifice here? I can almost taste it myself David — I’m stronger for it. These clowns all gaping at you now? They’re all thinking the word ‘vampire’, and that word is making me stronger. You’re gonna be in all the papers buddy — helping to shape people’s minds for a new reality — and when enough people’s minds are the right shape? I’m coming on through, D. Believe it. And when I’m all the way real, I’ll come back for you. I will. Your despair has not been in vain, brother. No pun intended.”
David’s shrieks grew incoherent as he struggled against his captors. Karl stepped backwards out of the office, straightened his scarf and watched as David was secured then roughly hoisted to his feet. Karl glanced to his left — across the expanse of cubicles — then did a double take.
One of the assistants was staring at him; directly at him.
She could see him.
Her name was Ellen Anders; she was thirty-seven, and already a little tired. Not as tired as David had been, but she’d do.
Karl smiled, and made reassuring eye contact.
Outside, a
strong Chinook blew a hard, hot wind down 8th avenue, and the city purred as though caressed.
Come to Me
By Heather Clitheroe
The thought comes to her so suddenly one day that it’s painful even to think it. But gradually, she comes back to it, turning the thought over in her mind and gently probing it, as one might touch an aching tooth. Tentatively, carefully. Half expecting it to hurt, yet shocked at the white hot flash that lances through everything. Even good intentions.
I am going to walk into the forest, Jane thinks. And never come out. The voice is, at the same time, not her own and only her own. She does not know where it has come from. Only that it is there, in her mind, and she cannot forget.
It’s simple to say these words to herself, simple to feel them just below the surface of the monologues that run through the days. Running out of orange juice. That man smells bad. I miss Vauxhall. I want to walk into the forest and never come out. And she stops, startled and surprised, jarred out of complacency and half-stunned by the force of it. That’s a stupid thing to think. That’s just stupid.
It returns to her, again and again, and she finds herself saying the words to herself as she walks from her apartment to the little office where she works during the day. I am. Going. To walk into. The forest. And never. Come out. The words flutter against her consciousness in time to the click of her heels on the sidewalk, and she tucks her head down, blinking her eyes furiously. Never come out. Never come out. Never come out.
She leaves for work early in the mornings, before the neighbours start to leave for their own jobs. Early in the morning, with the sun just rising, she can lengthen her stride and almost imagine she is back home instead of in a country where courtesy demands smaller steps, with arms held to one’s sides so they won’t swing freely.
…into the forest…
She remembers that there was a time, once, when she loved Japan. She brought her well-worn copy of Neuromancer with her, and revelled in the frenetic pace of life, the crowd, the exotic smells from the little vendors lining the streets in Shinjuku. She imagined herself in the pages of the story. Those days, she was glad to leave tiny Vauxhall — the short main street with the farm supply store at one end and the fire station at the other, the flat horizon that stretched out and away until it met the sky. She was glad to go, leaving for university; she studied languages. As many as she could. French. Russian. Chinese. And then Japanese. The Japanese department helped her find the job in Tokyo, and she left the skies of Alberta behind her. Long behind her.
…and never…
She remembers that Japan seemed so exciting. She took a flat away from the usual ex-pat haunts, choosing to live in a tiny room above a smoke shop, smiling to herself every time she passed under the large sign that read tobaccoo. Mr. Narita, her boss, was what she expected … so typically the salaryman. She still enjoys the work, translating legal documents into English, and the English into Japanese. She makes enough to pay the rent, to buy a bicycle, and to take trips to the countryside on her days off. She learned Japanese folk tales, developed a taste for manga. For a few years, she knows, she was young and Japan was exciting.
She remembers these things, but vaguely, as she recalls a film she watched the week before.
She thinks she might have been happy once. Not now. She has come to see that the polish wears thin. She developed asthma. Gained fifteen pounds. Mr. Narita started to drink in his office, barking orders to the staff and then began to drop hints about the economy and money.
The sky is overcast, and the wind is dull; she misses the biting cold of the prairie winters and the vivid blue skies, when the air is so icy it stings the eyes and freezes tears. Jane knows she could go back to Vauxhall … or Calgary, maybe. Toronto. But the defeat she’d have to admit feels too great to even admit to herself. I’m not tired of living in Japan, she thinks. I’m just tired of living.
And then she stops herself. That’s no way to think.
The days seem so dull now that she feels immersed in a monochromatic world, one that always smell of cabbage and vomit, and where she is always too tall, too gawky. Too different. I want to walk into the forest.
She walks a little faster, her heels now stomping against the pavement that has been hosed down in the pre-dawn light so that the noise of her feet on the cement sounds fake; altered. A Foley track.
And then she sees something. Something makes her lift her head and look sharply to the left where she is suddenly quite certain … it’s a fox! There, yes … a small fox, running swiftly through an alleyway, richest red, and black whiskered. It stops to look over its shoulder at her. A fox with amber eyes that could know her, she thinks, could know her aching emptiness and the dullness. There are no foxes in Tokyo. No, but she’s so certain, so filled with a longing to get closer to it.
She changes direction, turning down an alleyway and breaking into a run, her breath catching in her throat until she is forced to stop, coughing, bent over with the exertion. There are no foxes in Tokyo.
She is standing in front of the train station. The wise thing to do — the proper thing to do — would be to turn back down the alleyway and go to work. Mr. Narita won’t arrive until eight o’clock, at least, and he’ll be so hung over he will hardly notice if she’s a little late. She has work to do; legal contracts for an offshore client that are due … due when? Soon. At the end of the week.
For a moment, though, the veil lifts, and the words swell inside her. The train station is in front of her, and it is hammering away at her soul. I will walk into the forest, and I will never come out again.
She buys a ticket for Otsuki, gets on the train, the orange train. The one that will take her west, out of the city and away from the cramped apartment, the drunken boss, and the crowds.
She changes trains in Otsuki, this time the Fujikyuko Line heading west. West, west, towards Mount Fuji. The sun has risen now, and the trains that pass, heading east, are full and she turns away from them, looking instead at her hands in her lap. What am I doing? But the veil has settled over her again, and she is looking through gauze, a sour taste in her throat. I’ll be fired for sure. She does not care.
In Kawaguchiko Station, she stops a moment to look at the sky — the wide open sky — and the thought is so overpowering that she barely hears herself asking to buy a bus ticket for the forest. “One ticket, please,” she says. “For Aokigahara.”
The trees here mass together, so that when the wind blows, they move as one. In this sea of trees, this jukai, all drops away: the sounds of the world are swallowed up, the air is thick and heavy, the silence unbroken but for the gentle murmur of leaves and the creak of branches rubbing one against the other. It is dark, always, in this forest. They say it is haunted. They say it is where people come to kill themselves. They call it the suicide forest.
She has heard this before, on the late night variety shows that turn to the supernatural. Spirits walk in this forest, she knows, or at least that is what she has heard. But the words are still pulsing in her, and through the indistinct fog that she finds herself in, she is walking behind a group of tourists into the forest. They are stopping, taking pictures of the signs along the path. Don’t do it, one reads. Think of your parents and your family. Try counselling first. Please reconsider. She gazes at the signs dully, and walks on, past the tourists and into the forest, stepping off the path and disappearing into the black, silent wood.
As she walks, she tries to think. She tries to reason with herself, but her thoughts are half-formed and clumsy, as though she has had something strong to drink. She pushes on, through the beech trees, her clothes soaked with dew. She shivers, but does not stop. She is searching for the fox, turning her head this way and that, peering through the undergrowth and looking beneath the masses of tree roots that cause her to stumble.
And then, in the shadows, she sees it. The fox, running lightly along a fallen tree. She stops and watches dumbly as it turns to look at her. She catches her breath, afraid to cough, to m
ove. In the dim light she can see the fox watching her too, and it stops, settling on its haunches to consider her. It turns its head to one side; one amber eye gazes at her unblinkingly.
Jane takes a step forward before she realizes what she is doing. The words that have been inside her head these many days suddenly rise to a thunderous crescendo, blasting a channel through the fog, and the veil rolls back again. Her nose fills with the smells of the forest: the clear air, the dampness of the earth beneath her, the lush, heady aroma of sun-warmed leaves and the acrid tang of rot. She is alive, gloriously alive in a way that she has not been for the longest time, and the colours around her are vivid and glowing and she feels a fullness of purpose in the words that have plagued her. “I have walked into the forest,” she whispers.
She blinks. Where the fox was, a woman now sits. A tall, lithe woman with a long, narrow face and amber eyes, with blackest hair hanging loose about her shoulders. The kimono she wears is old, mouldering, but … beautiful. It cannot be described as anything but that, for it is the richest red that Jane has ever seen. Spun silk glints and ripples, shot with gold and embroidered with white flowers. The woman stares at her with her head cocked. “So you have,” she says.
Again Jane steps forward, again her body moving ahead of her thoughts, a vessel empty of will. “I…”
The fox woman sighs. “I called you,” she says.
“Why?”
“I live here.” Simply, as though nothing else matters.