"You look like you're in a bad way, friend."
The undead thing nodded. He still wasn't breathing. Bad camouflage: the creature was seriously ignorant of the laws of supernatural selection.
"I can fix you up, if you can meet the price. You do have it, don't you?"
The revenant stuffed a pale hand into his pants pocket; the fist emerged bristling with deutsche marks. Following a dim memory from his previous existence, he rolled his victims after he finished draining them. He had no intrinsic understanding of money, except that it made good bait.
I smiled and nodded in the direction of the alleyway. The revenant complied, his movements insectile.
Once we were in the solitude of the alley, the revenant hissed; his pupils dilating rapidly until they swallowed the entire eye. He expected me to scream and try to escape. Instead, I grinned, baring fangs as sharp as his own. The growl percolating in his chest became a confused whine. This had never happened before, and the revenant was unsure as to how to proceed.
"C'mere, dead boy."
The derelict tried to flee; I grabbed a fistful of greasy hair and jerked him back into the alley. There was a wet tearing sound and I found myself holding a snarl of matted hair and dripping scalp. The revenant fell among the overflowing garbage cans, disturbing a small army of rats. He hurled one of the writhing bags of fur and teeth at me. I batted it aside with a swat of my hand. The undead thing leapt at me, shrieking like a tea kettle. His ragged nails raked my face, leaving wet trenches. I stumbled backward and instinctively tried to shield my face with my forearm.
The derelict grabbed my wrist in an attempt to throw me off-balance. I lunged forward, slamming him against the cold brick wall. Pressed belly to belly amid heaps of rubbish, we resembled low-rent lovers enjoying a sleazy tryst. I kept my left forearm wedged under the revenant's chin, forcing his fangs away from my face. The beast reeked of clotted blood and dried feces.
The thing whined piteously when he saw the knife, the blade forged to resemble a frozen silver flame. I realized I was grinning.
The blade went in easy, piercing skin and muscle like rotten sailcloth. The knife slid home between the fifth and sixth ribs, puncturing the heart as if I'd jabbed a pin into a toy balloon.
The revenant yowled and thrashed like a landed fish, but showed no signs of dying. Frightened for the first time since the fight began, I stabbed his chest three more times. Nothing. Obviously the old legend concerning impaling a vampire's heart was unreliable. I began plunging my knife into every organ I could think of, clinically, at first, but with increasing frenzy as I realized I was beginning to tire. The Other laughed at me as I stabbed the struggling revenant. She was amused by my ignorance.
Don't take it too badly. It's your first time, after all. The first time is always messy and clumsy. You've got to expect it to be bloody. But it leaves you with a taste for more…
"Get out of my head, damn you!" The knife buried itself in the revenant's neck, severing the spinal cord.
The screams stopped as if I'd pulled the plug on a stereo system. The derelict's eyes disappeared into their sockets, retracted by withering eye stalks. Repulsed, I stepped back and let the thing fall; his limbs curled inward, like the legs of a dead spider. I moved away quickly, clapping a hand over my nose and breathing through my mouth. It didn't help.
"Mein Gott…"
It was Ghilardi. He stood at the mouth of the alley, staring at the corpse as it continued its accelerated deterioration. The body bloated and grew black, its head resembling the release valve on an overinflated tire.
"How long have you—"
"Since he screamed. I was afraid for… Jesus!" Ghilardi's face was the color of oatmeal. The corpse exploded with a ripe gush of gas. Ghilardi vomited before he could finish his sentence. I grabbed his good elbow and hurried him onto the street.
Ghilardi was visibly shaken. The vampire-hunting fantasies of his youth were full of adventure and suspense. They never mentioned the stink of putrefaction and the taste of vomit.
I looked at my hands; they were trembling, but not out of fear.
It leaves you with a taste for more…
"… you're hurt." I realized Ghilardi was speaking to me. "We'll have to see about those gashes on your face."
We halted beneath one of the remaining functional streetlamps so he could examine my wounds.
"Gashes?" I replied dreamily. "What gashes?"
All that remained were four pencil-thin, rapidly paling lines of pink.
Ghilardi lost interest in vampire hunting after Frankfurt. I didn't. The mass of hate and frustration knotted in my guts was sated by my hunts. I wanted to feel Morgan's unlife squirting between my fingers, but was willing to settle for killing lesser beasts.
I talked myself into believing it was a safety valve that allowed me to keep the Other in check, that I was performing a public service. Idiot. I was doing it because I got off on it.
I traveled all over Europe—even going so far as to make raids into Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland—while Ghilardi stayed home and filled his notebooks with information relating to the care and feeding of a vampire.
Time begins to blur at this point. Ghilardi warned about that. Vampires can go to ground for years, not because they're superhumanly patient but simply because they have such a lousy sense of time. The years begin to run together. I can recall fragments…
1975: She looked so out of place, wandering among the burn-outs and old hippies. Her blond curls, starched pinafore, and patent-leather Mary Janes made her look strangely archaic, like a child lost in time as well as space. She drifted in and out of the crowd, plucking at the sleeves of passersby.
It was very late for a child to be alone on the streets of Amsterdam, and the neighborhood was not one where mothers normally let their children roam unattended. I was lounging in front of a live-music club, waiting for the band to start playing. Several other patrons milled outside the front door, smoking their foul tobacco-and-hash cigarettes. Inside the club, locked inside a special kiosk, an elderly woman sold state-approved hashish, morphine, heroin, and clean syringes.
Most of the people clustered outside the bar were young. Many were dressed in faded denims sporting "Give Peace a Chance" and "Eco" patches. Amsterdam was a favorite spot for aging hippies fleeing the growing complacency of the '70s and the inevitability of their adulthood. The hippies looked stoned and bitter, as if perplexed by society passing them by. Judging by their accents, a good number of them were American. Amsterdam was also popular among draft dodgers.
The little girl—surely no more than five or six—flitted from person to person, her small voice lost in the noise from the street. I couldn't hear what she was saying, but I had a good guess; "Please, won't someone take me home to my mother? I'm lost. I want to go home, but it's too dark and I'm scared. Please, won't someone take me home? I don't live too far away…"
A tall, thin hippie with long hair and a longer face stooped so he could listen to her. He straightened, toying with the hash cigarette he held in one hand. He glanced back at the doorway to the club, then down at the pale little face. He shrugged his bony shoulders and she slipped her tiny hand into his large one and started down the street…
I followed at a discreet distance, listening to the little girl as she chattered away about her mother, her brothers, and her kitten. The hippie nodded every so often, the scent of Turkish tobacco and hash marking his passage.
The neighborhood began to decline and soon the little girl was leading the hippie through one of the uglier districts in the city. The row houses were red brick and had once been pleasant, well-scrubbed homes, with pleasant, well-scrubbed families living in them.
But that was before the Second World War. Something happened in that neighborhood during the Occupation—something nasty—and the neighborhood never recovered from the wound dealt it by the Nazis. I paused, fascinated by its similarity to the place in Frankfurt. It felt the same.
I shifted my vision,
curious to see what marked this spot as a Bad Place.
The buildings shimmered, as if I was looking through a curtain made of rising heat, and I was standing on the same narrow cobblestone street. A large flag marked with a swastika fluttered over the doorway of the center house. The banner fluttered in a long-ago breeze as unsmiling men dressed in black leather topcoats escorted frightened men, women, and children into the house. The vision burst like a soap bubble, dispersing in time for me to see the little girl leading the slack-faced hippie over the same threshold.
I dashed across the street and up the flight of stone steps that led to the front door of what had been, thirty years ago, Gestapo headquarters.
The hippie must have been exceptionally stoned or too thoroughly tranced not to notice that the little girl's "home" was an abandoned building marked for demolition. I came to a halt in what was once the foyer.
Strips of yellowed wallpaper hung from the wall like soiled bandages. Broken glass and a decade's accumulation of filth gritted underneath my heels. There were discarded wine bottles and syringes scattered about, but the pungent aroma of human piss and vomit was missing; this wasn't squatter territory.
The first floor was a long central hallway flanked by two rooms on either side. At the end of the hallway was a rickety staircase that led to the second story.
I moved cautiously down the hall toward the stairs, glancing into each of the abandoned rooms. None of the rooms had doors. I felt a buzzing in my skull and the curtain of shimmering heat reappeared. The foyer changed; the wallpaper was no longer peeling and a thick carpet ran the length of the hall.
Everything looked very cheery, except for the Gestapo agents putting out cigarettes on a young man tied to a chair.
In the next room a pudgy man in a spotless white smock—like a kindly doctor sent from Central Casting—carefully adjusted the connections on the car battery attached to an older man's genitals. And in the third room a screaming woman was raped by a German shepherd while three Gestapo agents smoked cigarettes and laughed.
I staggered backward, my guts convulsing. One of the Gestapo men—a short, rat-faced man with wire-rim glasses—swiveled his head in my direction, scowling as if he'd seen something.
The buzzing stopped and I was back in the deserted hallway, shivering like a junkie. No wonder there weren't any signs of recent squatting; even the most insensitive Lumpen could feel the evil in this place! I fought to control my trembling. How many other slices of hell did the Nazis leave scattered across Europe?
I turned to look into the fourth, and final, room before ascending the stairs to the second story. The hippie lurched forward, one hand clamped against the wound in his neck, trying to staunch the flow of blood spurting from his jugular. His Hawkwind T-shirt was already muddied beyond reading, and his long, sad face was horribly white.
The hippie wobbled drunkenly for a second, his eyes empty of sanity. His mouth opened and shut like a landed fish. I could hear the high-pitched tittering of a child echoing through the empty house. The hippie pitched forward, collapsing in my arms. I let the body drop onto the bare boards. My hands were slick with his blood. My revulsion was heightened by the thrill sparked by the sight and smell of the red stuff.
The thing was upstairs. I mounted the staircase carefully, grimacing as the stairs groaned and creaked under my weight…
Something small with crimson eyes landed on my back, tearing at my throat with sharp nails and needle-like teeth. I tumbled down the stairs, the hell-child riding me like a demented jockey. Pain raked my shoulders and the back of my neck as the thing tore at me. I had a vision of the unholy creature chewing away at my neck, like a harbor rat on a rope, as I staggered to my feet.
I slammed against the walls, attempting to shake loose the thing clinging to me. Plaster fell from the ceiling in gritty clouds, mingling with my blood, but the child-beast held tight. Desperate to free myself, I did a running cartwheel down the hall and was successful in dislodging my attacker.
The child-vampire lay among a pile of discarded wine bottles and strips of wallpaper. She no longer resembled the golden-haired little girl who'd coerced the hapless young man into walking her home.
When I looked at the child-thing, I saw a hideously withered crone's face set atop tiny shoulders. Her mouth was toothless except for two sharp little fangs, and her eyes glowed like molten steel. The child-thing straightened her blood-soaked pinafore, and stared at me for a moment. Then the little girl was back, weeping and shivering and calling for her mother.
It was a good illusion. The urge to protect children is strongly ingrained in humans—especially the females. I wavered, suddenly overcome with the desire to lift this darling child in my arms and hug her…
Trick! It's a trick! The Other's voice was like ice water in my brain.
"I… I was going to pick that thing up," I muttered aloud in astonishment.
Hissing her anger, the child-vampire sprang at me, fangs unsheathed. The beast was as fast as an ape, but I managed to catch the girl-harridan in midleap. My hands tightened around her wizened neck. There was no way I could get to my knife without exposing myself to another assault, and I was already weakened by blood loss.
The hateful thing twisted and writhed in my grasp, slashing my hands with her fangs and claws. Her eyes shone like a trapped rat's. A surge of hate and disgust swept over me, and I began to throttle the child. Her yowls and curses grew in volume and she kicked at me with her tiny Mary Janes. A reddish froth rimed her lips; a combination of her saliva and my blood.
It felt as if all of my willpower were being channeled down my arms and into my hands. The vampire-girl's struggles became more and more frenzied as her eyes started from their sockets. I glimpsed exposed muscle and finger bones gleaming wetly in the dim light, but I did not loosen my hold.
I didn't notice the buzzing, at first, as my attacker's screeching served to camouflage it. But I had the feeling I was being watched…
There was someone standing in the doorway of the room the hippie had staggered from. It was a man in early middle age, his hair touched by silver at the temples. He was dressed in a German SS colonel's uniform, the stainless-steel skull on his hat glinting in the light. He stood holding a pair of black leather gloves in one hand, and it was evident from the look of mild surprise on his face that he could see me.
That face. I knew it. I knew it all too well.
It was Morgan.
The Nazi Morgan flickered, like the picture on an old television set, then disappeared. *"
I looked down at the vampire-child. She'd stopped struggling because her head had come off in my hands. The tiny body lay on the cold floor; a liquid with the same color and consistency as congealed spaghetti sauce oozed from her neck.
I stared at the little head I held in my hands. The child's face had returned.
God, ohGodno. I've gone mad and killed a child. I hallucinated the whole thing. I kidnapped some poor little girl and took her to this terrible place and I murdered her.
The little girl's smooth, baby-soft face turned the color of antique ivory and the skin cracked and peeled like parchment.
I dropped the vampire's head and kicked it like a soccer ball. It bounced once and came to rest against the corpse of the hippie in the Hawkwind T-shirt.
The old Gestapo headquarters did not offer any further glimpses of Morgan, although I stumbled across evidence of far more human monsters. Although I searched the house from front door to attic, I could not bring myself to investigate the cellar. I took five steps into the darkness, then began to shiver uncontrollably. Whatever went on down there, thirty years ago, was unspeakable; it was the source of the evil that tainted the neighborhood like a ghostly cancer. I had no doubt that was where the vampire-child had nested during the day.
I fled the house, choking on bile and fear.
1976: It was the cemetery Morrison was buried in. It was also the same place Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Voltaire, Molière, Sarah Bernhardt, Victor Hugo, Edith Pia
f, Max Ernst, and Gustav Doré, among others, happened to be interred. But as far as the teenagers were concerned, Jim Morrison was the only noteworthy occupant.
Père Lachaise is a fantastic necropolis located on the northeast side of Paris, off the Boulevard de Belleville. It was once the gardens attached to the villa of François d'Aix de Lachaise, confessor to Louis XIV; now it is home to over 20,000 monuments and 800,000 graves.
There are more famous dead people in Père Lachaise than there are live ones in New York City. Sublime masters of the written word lay next to petit bourgeois shopkeepers. Infamous hedonists and adulterers rest alongside proper Christian ladies who would have been scandalized by their proximity to such sin while alive.
Like any great city, Père Lachaise attracts a steady stream of tourists and vandals. The tour guides are fond of recounting how a Victorian lady was so shocked by the rampant griffon guarding Oscar Wilde's tomb she removed the offending organ with a hammer she just happened to have in her purse.
The French are pragmatic in regard to such acts; it's the price you pay for fame.
However, the vandalism perpetrated by the thousands of young pilgrims who flock each year to the tomb of the Lizard King transcends mere desecration and approaches true folk art.
Outside of a modest marble bust depicting the singer at his peak—the nose smashed by a recent incarnation of the Victorian castraterix—Morrison's grave is simple and not very big. The graffiti radiating from the doomed poet, however, is far from simple.
It has been added to over the years, layer by layer, in a thousand different hands and a dozen different languages, until it forms a dense, interlocking mural. Whether the medium is aerosol spray paint, felt-tipped marker, or pocket knife, the messages all boil down to WE MISS YOU.
Once Morrison's plot could no longer contain the scrawled endearments, they began to spread onto the surrounding monuments, until the testimony of the fans' love for their fallen hero obliterated the inscription on the plaque marking the resting place of Abelard and Héloise.
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