Spiritride

by Mark Shepherd

  Lucas woke with a start, shivering. He was damp with sweat and . . . something else. Light headed, he sat up on the edge of his bed, realizing what that something else was. Sex ed had been very specific about that. He felt unclean.

  He bathed himself thoroughly and meticulously, as if he were covered with hazardous, radioactive material. The dream had already faded, but he retained a brief image of the vampire in the mirror. Male or female? He wanted to believe the vampire was female, but he couldn't be sure. Something told him the sex of the vampire was the least of his concerns.

  My first orgasm is about vampires. What is wrong with me?

  After the vampire dream it became difficult to look people in the eye, for any reason. He felt that if he did anyone could look into his soul, and see the dark secret he kept there. He started wearing only dark clothes, and sunglasses regardless of the weather. He welcomed cloudy, rainy days and hated the sun.

  He started going to the Axe. There, listening to Bauhaus and smoking clove cigarettes, he felt less alone than before. But he spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him.

  Some of the kids rode motorcycles; Suzukis, Yamahas, Kawasakis, a Triumph or two, a Beemer. He yearned to ride on one. Lucas thought that some time soon he would be able to open up, and attempt contact with these strange beings. He wasn't quite ready, and was content to simply stand in their presence, listening to the music, and watching them ride their motorcycles. But one night, when he wasn't there, the police raided the Axe and closed it, shutting the door on any hope that he might find someone he could talk to.

  Meanwhile, his grades had turned to shit. Straight D's, as in Dogturd, he thought dismally, as he tore up his grade card. School had no meaning, and when the Axe closed, nothing else did, either.

  He woke up one morning, wet from another vampire dream, uncertain what day it was.

  What does it all matter? he thought, staring at his face in the mirror. Not knowing when it had happened, he saw that he had quit living. That day he pretended to go to school, but came back after his parents had left for work. On the way back he bought two bottles of Nytol, the quick working kind, only vaguely aware of what he was about to do.

  I don't belong on this planet. The logical thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get the hell off it, he thought, going through his parents' medicine cabinet. Here it is . . . only a few left. Lucas dumped the bottle of Valium out on his hand. Fifteen . . . sixteen . . . twenty. That will have to do.

  It would be six or seven hours before anyone came home, possibly more if they went somewhere else, the store or something.

  Off. This. Planet. He stared at his bedroom wall for a good hour, thinking absolutely nothing. Then he went to the kitchen and poured a glass of 7-Up and white wine over ice. With his cocktail he chased both bottles of Nytol and the twenty Valium, wondering how long it would be before Scotty beamed him up.

  * * *

  "There's probably a lot you won't remember," the nurse said as she checked his IV. She reminded him of Praga Kahn of the Lords of Acid, tall and lanky with long black hair. He could have sworn he saw her wearing white stiletto heels with her nurse's uniform.

  He felt pretty shitty. His throat felt like it had been scraped out with a potato peeler.

  I remember, he thought. I wish I didn't.

  The nurse came back in with a doctor who looked frazzled, but attentive.

  "I'm Doctor Vaughan." The doctor fixed him with an unnerving stare.

  That name sounds really familiar. And I've seen this man, somewhere, before. He looks so surprised to see me awake, Lucas thought. That bugs me.

  "So, how do you feel?" the doctor asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

  "Terrible," Lucas said. "Sleepy. What time is it?"

  "Four," the doctor replied. "In the afternoon. This is Wednesday."

  At least two days had passed. Just as well, he thought, those were two days I didn't have to deal with. Or will I?

  Doctor Vaughan took a seat next to the bed. He looked tired, truly tired. "What happened?" he asked.

  At first the question seemed ridiculous. I swallowed a bunch of drugs, that's what happened, Lucas thought. "It sounds stupid, but I don't know what happened. I remember what I did. I don't remember why."

  Doctor Vaughan nodded, as if he understood the explanation. "You're lucky. The combination of diphenhydramine and Valium caused you to go into a deep sleep. It wasn't quite enough to kill you, but you could have been a vegetable. Brain dead, but alive. Your parents would have had to decide whether to turn off the life support."

  Lucas didn't know how to reply to that. Failure wasn't one of the things he'd planned on. For Mike, it had been so easy, he'd thought.

  "How close did I come?" he asked.

  "Closer than you think. You were in a coma for over a week."

  "Oh," Lucas said. This is the second Wednesday. Nine days. Not two.

  "Another week, and we would have thought about whether or not to keep you as an expensive plant."

  "I'm not a plant," Lucas seethed. This is not what's supposed to happen . . .

  "You almost were," the doctor said, but now he looked more tired than anything. The nurse had left again, and now returned to whisper something in the doctor's ear.

  "I'll be back in a few minutes," the doctor said, getting to his feet with extreme effort.

  Lucas lay staring at the ceiling. A goddamned vegetable. That's what I would have been . . . no, was. Then he remembered the dreams, the nightmares, of darkness, disembodied voices. Dreaming. I would have been a vegetable, dreaming nightmares. Forever. Or until Dad decided to pull the plug.

  I want the hell out of here, he thought with steel plated conviction.

  He heard voices in the hallway: the doctor's and his father's. He'd know that casual disinterest anywhere. His ears perked when their discussion mutated to an argument.

  ". . . he is not okay," Vaughan said emphatically. "Physically it looks like he's going to be fine, but I'm not so sure he's not going to just turn around and try it again."

  He has a point, Lucas thought. How to convince them he wasn't going to try to do himself in when he wasn't certain himself?

  "Don't be silly," Alvin Tatum said. "These things . . . happen. Lucas was just goofing off, like teenagers do. He's already been here a week. I think he should go home today."

  "Your son tried to commit suicide," the doctor replied, his anger rising. "If you think this is normal, that nothing is wrong, you are sadly mistaken. It is the tip of an iceberg. It's a symptom of a greater problem."

  Got that right, thought Lucas. But he had no idea what the problem was. He didn't know why he didn't care about living. An image of his comatose body hung before him. He imagined being one of those fuzzy ball things from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the version with Leonard Nimoy and Donald Sutherland. Growing, pulsating like an exposed heart, he saw himself bursting forth from the gelatinous shell, standing, then walking. His mind would be dull and uncomprehending, following signals blindly from some unseen force. Not a nice existence.

  The reality would be much worse; he would be dreaming, big black nightmares with no end. Perhaps in these dreams, which would become more lucid as he got better at having them, he would realize that he would never wake. He would scream futilely at the walls of the dream, knowing his real mouth was frozen, unmoving. He would scream, but nothing would happen, no one would hear him except himself.

  Despite the argument in the hall, Lucas drifted off to sleep. This time it was a real sleep, and he knew he'd wake up.

  Evidently Doctor Vaughan had won the argument, because it was Thursday morning before Lucas' stepfather returned for him.

  "Up and at 'em, boy." Tatum's greeting was infused with his usual good cheer. "Time to go home."

  Vaughan arrived as Tatum was helping Lucas dress.

  "I must reiterate," he said, "that this is not a good idea. Lucas should be kept for observation for at least another day."

  But Tatum would not be moved
. "We'll observe him at home." He smiled at Lucas. "He'll be fine. A couple of days off from school and he'll be good as new."

  Doctor Vaughan stopped by the house on Friday while Lucas' folks were out.

  "I want to show you something," he said.

  For a while Lucas thought Vaughan was taking him to school, but instead they turned into Sunset Memorial Park Cemetery, which was right across the street from his high school.

  "I've never been in a graveyard before," Lucas said.

  "This won't take long. I don't spend much time here, when I do come," the doctor said, sounding sad. He stopped the car on the narrow road that wound through the cemetery.

  "This way," Vaughan said, leading him through the grave markers. Lucas remembered reading somewhere that one shouldn't step directly on the grave, so he did his best to stay between them. Somewhere down there, six feet under, were boxes of dead people, he realized.

  They stopped in front of a tombstone, small and new.

  MIKE VAUGHAN

  MARCH 13, 1980 – NOVEMBER 20, 1994

  Lucas stared at the marker, the name sinking in, like a thin veil dropping over his head.

  "He was my son," Doctor Vaughan said. "Did you know him?"

  He looked up at the doctor, feeling weak all over again. "I need to sit down."

  "Then sit," the doctor said, helping him down. Vaughan joined him on the grass, right at the foot of the grave.

  "Yes, I knew him," Lucas said. "Why wouldn't you let me talk to him?"

  Vaughan stared at him. Then understanding softened his features. "I thought your name was familiar."

  They both looked at the grass between them, which had recently been mowed. The smell was refreshing, reminding Lucas that it was spring.

  "He was on medication. Anti-depressants," said Vaughan. "He didn't want to talk to anyone, not even you." His eyes wandered to the grave, and his lips pressed together. "Not even me."

  Lucas felt numb, inside and out.

  "We were trying a different drug, something we hoped would make him snap out of it. It didn't. It made his depression much worse."

  Lucas shifted position on the grass. Looking at Mike's grave, Lucas started to feel grateful that his own attempt had failed. "I was depressed, I saw no way out," he said, more to Mike than to his father. "I was so certain I was doing the right thing."

  "If you're depressed, you are not thinking clearly," Vaughan pointed out. "You can't do your best thinking because you're impaired."

  They sat quietly. The doctor looked down again, his half hidden face unreadable. Is he blaming himself for what happened to Mike? he wondered. Does he really think he had something do to with it?

  A gentle breeze caressed the graveyard in the bright afternoon sun, spinning the pinwheels people had placed on graves. Flowers were everywhere, it seemed.

  A hawk called overhead, and he glanced up to see the great bird kiting gently in the wind. The greens of the grass, the trees, and the vivid colors of some of the fresher flowers stood out as if highlighted with a special marker, one which underscored the beauty of everything in nature. Lucas took a long deep breath. As he exhaled he felt an enormous load slide off his shoulders.

  I don't have to die, he thought. Whatever it is . . . I can deal with it. He thought about the vampire dreams, the Gothic elements of his life, and the dazzling brilliance of all the living things around him. Suddenly it all meshed, as if a key had been dropped in his lap. Something between all these things connected, and the result would, somehow, bring him closer to whatever it was he was looking for.

  But how to get there . . .

  In that moment, something changed in Lucas.

  He sensed Mike's body, cold dead, and lifeless, somewhere beneath the earth he sat on. Mike's face came back to him with startling clarity, a young kid his own age, full of life and lusty dreams, full of promise. Lucas realized that he had never grieved for his friend, had never shed a single tear.

  "I'm going back to the car," Lucas said, but his voice cracked, betraying the tears he was fighting so hard to hold back.

  Mike's dead. It felt like news.

  Doctor Vaughan stood with him but neither started for the car. Lucas wouldn't remember who reached for who, but in the end it didn't really matter. Lucas found himself hugging Doctor Vaughan and sobbing into his chest. The doctor held him as if he held his own son.

  "I'm sorry . . . I'm so sorry," Lucas managed to blurt out, as the grief subsided. "I didn't think what it would do to anyone else . . ."

  "It's all right," the doctor said, stroking his head.

  During the ride home he learned that there was a suicide prevention hotline in the phone book. They'll talk about anything, the doctor had said, driving the Beemer through Albuquerque rush hour. You won't shock them.

  Lucas had his doubts, but already he was feeling better.

  Chapter Five

  From the glaring whiteness of the Gate's interior, Japhet Dhu drove his elvensteed into the uncertain darkness of the humans' world. The 'steed landed unsteadily, then regained her footing. Japhet heard the familiar sound of loose gravel and the scuffing of hooves against dirt.

  He and his 'steed stood atop a mesa looking down on a brightly lit city, in the blackest of nights he had ever seen. It seemed like a lake of light at the bottom of a canyon, but as his vision adjusted he discerned streets, and moving lights following these streets.

  He turned to face the Gate. He had thought the others were right behind him. Where were they now?

  The Gate glowed a dull orange, still active but diminishing in power. He pulled his sword in case Avalon elves charged through it instead of his own soldiers. The escape had been close, but it had looked like most of his elite forces would make it through.

  Where are they? Japhet seethed.

  The Gate flickered, then blazed white as a mounted 'steed, followed by another, leapt through. He immediately saw they were his men, and drew back to give them room. Japhet counted four, followed by a smaller shadow he recognized as Mort, a demon who was eager to serve any Unseleighe who happened to be in charge.

  A fifth shadow, a robed mage Japhet recognized immediately, crossed the Gate's threshold. His eyes glowed white, and bore directly on Japhet as his 'steed trotted toward him.

  "There are no more, Sire," Nargach told the Unseleighe leader. "At least, none of our elite group."

  "Then dismiss the Gate," Japhet said, "I have the forces I need to rebuild." He spoke with faked confidence. If he showed any weakness in this new world he would lose his command quickly. Nargach would see to that.

  "As you wish," Nargach said, turning toward his magical construction. Japhet saw that the Mage was rattled. His escape must have been made at the last possible moment, as the Avalon forces closed in.

  Nargach raised both arms, murmured something in ancient Elvish; the Gate shrank to the size of a coin, then blipped from existence. They were left with the darkness, the desert, and Japhet's uncertainty as to what to do next.

  He needed time to think, alone and without interruption, and he knew he had to disguise his indecisiveness. Japhet dismounted and stormed off to the edge of the mesa, which gave way to a steep slope. Beneath him, spread majestically, was the human city.

  What manner of power causes these lights? he wondered, sensing no elven magics that might account for the display.

  This he would learn later. Now, he needed to concentrate on inventorying his assets, and determine what he could do with the small group he had.

  The mage. At the very least, I have Nargach, he groused, knowing his presence was a threat as well as an asset. Japhet's succession to ruler of this Unseleighe court had taken place without debate; he was, after all, Zeldan's son. Though it didn't hurt that he had cultivated his own power base while father was away, this particular clan of elves held blood ties, particularly noble blood ties, sacred.

  His remaining three were all seasoned soldiers, skilled in all the tools of warfare, though each with their own special tale
nts. Youthful Rochad was an expert at bow and arrow, while Semion was a champion swordsman. Domnu, the eldest of the warriors, had trained the others to fight in battle with whatever happened to be handy. If he'd had the chance to hand pick his best three warriors, he would have likely chosen these.

  Then there was the oddity, Mort, a demon who had found a place among the Unseleighe, although a tenuous one. Mort had been allied with Morrigan, with whom Zeldan had formed a partnership, and the demon had been included as some kind of bonus. The details were vague; Japhet had been too busy pulling together his own people to pay much attention to their arrangement. What he did know was that as soon as Zeldan fell, Mort had been more than happy to throw in with Japhet.