Thirst

by Pyotyr Kurtinski

  “You all know Capt. Blood. I’m the foremost blood painter of the day. I’m a pioneer in the use of blood rather than paint. I’ve fought the good fight against all those who would deny the artist the right to use blood as an artistic medium. People have been using blood in this way since the mists of prehistory, but now we must go beyond that. Blood itself is a means of expression in itself. The cutting that causes blood to flow is forbidden by law, but what do fearless artists care about the fucking law?”

  Capt. Blood got a big hand here. Van Diemen joined in the applause, and beside him, Draculina gave out with some fearsome howls. After the applause died away, Capt. Blood told the folks they hadn’t come to listen to a lecture. They had come to see blood in action and that was what they were going to get it. In the course of the evening, there would be demonstrations of blood painting, body painting with blood, and sculptures created by fast-dying cement mixed with blood instead of water. There was another burst of applause at this point, and after it faded, Capt. Blood said the first demonstration would be a beautiful young man drinking his own blood.

  “Put your hands together for this one,” Capt. Blood said, sounding a little like an old-time Borscht Belt comedian.

  The light in the big room was a thin, hemophilic red, but suddenly a spotlight snapped on as a well-built young man came out onto the stage wearing nothing but a loincloth. He had blond hair and his hairless, perfectly tanned body glistened with oil. In one hand, he carried a rubber strap like those junkies used and a huge hypodermic in the other. The audience gasped as the man reached into his loincloth and produced a champagne glass.

  “Take it off!” Draculina shrieked, but she was shushed and booed.

  Working expertly, the young man tied off his left arm with the length of rubber and plunged the enormous hypodermic into the bulging vein. Then he began to draw off about four ounces of blood. Van Diemen felt Draculina’s hand on his leg, but he made no attempt to remove it. By the time the young man had emptied the hypodermic into the champagne glass, she was stroking Van Diemen’s crotch through his trousers.

  Up on the stage, the young man raised the glass of blood and cried out, “Here’s lookin’ at ya!”

  Just then four men and two women in the audience jumped up, all shouting, “Hold it right there! This is a raid!” At the same time, there was the crashing sound of sledgehammers breaking down the front door. The lights came on, and the audience sat or stood in shock. Some wanted to keep their pictures out of the papers; others wanted to get them in. Some of the undercover cops were up on the stage putting the cuffs on the young blood drinker and Capt. Blood, who was quoting the Constitution and otherwise giving them a hard time.

  “Ain’t this a hoot,” Draculina whispered to Van Diemen, keeping a tight grip on his hand.

  Van Diemen would have enjoyed the excitement more if the lights hadn’t been so bright. His earlier weariness had been replaced by enthusiasm, but even so, he knew he would have to feed soon. Draculina still looked pretty good under the real lights.

  “It’s a delight,” he said.

  “Everybody be quiet,” a uniformed lieutenant called from the doorway. He stepped aside to let a big man with a bulldog face through. The second man wore the insignia of an inspector; his gold-braided hat glittered as he walked. He stopped halfway to the stage.

  “Take those two away,” he told the cops standing beside the blood drinker and Capt. Blood, who was still carrying on. “ADA is standing by.”

  “Nobody else is under arrest,” he announced, turning to the crowd. “You can leave after you give the officers at the door your names and addresses and provide proper identification. You must have some identification. That’s all.”

  The inspector walked out, followed by his attendant lieutenant. People began to leave the library, going toward the front door in single file. Two cops waited there to carry out the inspector s orders. Blood fans were coming down the broad staircase, some grim faced, some laughing. But whatever they were doing, the party was over.

  “I don’t have any identification,” Draculina whispered to Van Diemen at the door of the library. “What’ll they do—arrest me?”

  “What’s so bad about that?” he whispered back. “Good publicity. You’ll be on TV. They won’t hold you.”

  Draculina still had a tight grip on his hand. “Yeah, I know that, but I been saying a lotta mean things about the cops on TV. Suppose he has me searched? I got some cocaine on me. I’m on probation.”

  A man edged past them talking into a tiny cellular phone. “William Kuntzler,” he was saying. “I want to talk to William Kuntzler.”

  “I think you’re in trouble,” Van Diemen said to Draculina. “Come. We’ll go upstairs. Don’t argue.”

  Holding her hand, he dragged her against the tide of people coming down from the upper floors. A cop tried to stop them, but Van Diemen said the lady had forgotten her bag. The cop had seen everything and all he did was grunt.

  When they got to the top floor, which had emptied out by now, Draculina said peevishly, “What’re we doing up here?”

  Van Diemen told her to be quiet. The room they were in had blood paintings in the walls; the French windows leading out to a sort of widow’s walk were open. Van Diemen went outside and looked down at Riverdale Avenue. It was a cold night and the crowd had thinned out, leaving only the hard-core celebrity watchers. Many of the fancy cars had gone; a fair number remained, some of them with chauffeurs behind the wheel or leaning against the side of the car. Van Diemen went back inside and found Draculina snuffling and bright eyed, as if she’d been doing some of her cocaine.

  “Naughty,” he said.

  She giggled and began to dance around. Van Diemen gave her a chop in the back of the neck and caught her before she fell. There were too many policemen down there to have her screaming when he transformed into a bat. Now it was done, and he seized her with his great beak and flew out the French windows and away from the house. He’d been wasting too much time. He had to feed soon.

  He wanted to find a quiet place where he could strip Draculina, rape her, and feed on her. If it had been summer he could have taken her in any secluded place. But this was a hard, cold night, and although the cold meant nothing to him, he liked his victims to be warm. Suddenly, as if inspired, he thought of the Poe cottage set down in the middle of the Grand Concourse.

  Van Diemen landed behind the little house with Draculina in his beak. Cars went by on the Grand Concourse. The fenced-off plot of land on which the cottage stood was free of derelicts that night because of the cold. Van Diemen left Draculina lying in the bushes and went around the side of the house to reconnoiter. A tiny guard hut had a man dozing in it. A radio played soft music. Van Diemen knocked on the side of the hut. He had to knock again before the guard came out, grumbling to himself. Van Diemen seized the unwary man, dragged him back into the hut, and fed on him. Draculina was waiting, but he couldn’t help himself. He had to feed.

  When Draculina came to, she was lying naked on a handmade rug in front of a very small fire. She sat up saying, “Hey, where am I? How’d I get here?” The cocaine hadn’t worn off yet; so she wasn’t frightened, just puzzled.

  “You’re in the Edgar Allan Poe cottage on the Grand Concourse.” Van Diemen smiled at her. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Oh, yeah. I was raised right around here. I was in here on a grade-school tour.” Draculina moved a little closer to the fire. “Mind if I ask you something? Whore you?”

  “Mr. Poe,” Van Diemen said. “But don’t be afraid.”

  Draculina blinked at him in the firelight. “I’m not afraid of you. We’re all crazy. So how are things, Mr. Poe?”

  “Call me Edgar.” Van Diemen stood over her. “I’ll call you Annabel, if you don’t mind.”

  A little fear showed in her face for the first time. “Anything you say, Edgar. You gonna rape me, Edgar? Well, listen to me. You don’t have to rape me—see?” She lay back on the rug and spread her legs. “My mot
her always told me if a man wants to rape you, don’t fight it. He’ll do it anyway. So let him do it and maybe you won’t get hurt.”

  “Is that what your mother thought?”

  “Yeah, Edgar.” Draculina’s voice trembled as the cocaine died in her. “She wasn’t wrong, was she? I think you’re a nice guy.”

  “Your mother was wrong and so are you,” he said, then bared his sharp teeth.

  Draculina tried to scream, but he was too quick for her. His hand clamped over her mouth. Renewed by the guard’s blood, he tore at her with his teeth while he raped her; even before he ejaculated, he knew she was dead.

  By the time he got home, it was too late to do any writing.

  Ten

  The killing of Tracy Lee Dembroder was on the front page of the three New York City tabloids. Van Diemen put the Times aside because the story would be in the Metro section, and he would get to it later. As usual the Post tried to outdo its rival rag, the News. Its headline read: Sex Sucking Vampire Kills. The News posed a question: Vampire Murder? Newsday, not a tabloid except in page size, stated: Police Suspect Vampire Cult In Gruesome Murder.

  All the newspapers used the word vampire, Van Diemen noted with interest. Only the Post had no doubt about the nature of the killer, but that hardly mattered; the member of the Fourth Estate had vampires on their tiny minds. He turned to the Metro section of the Times and read of the supposed vampire murder in Greenwich Village. Cautious as always, the reporter downplayed the occult link to the crime, but the bizarre was news, after all, and the reporter couldn’t afford to leave it out, no matter what point size the type was.

  Using a long-bladed paper shears, Van Diemen clipped out the stories as he read them. Later they would be pasted in one of the scrapbooks he kept on reports of vampirism in all parts of the world. Nearly all of what was printed was rubbish, but now and then, he happened upon something that caught his interest. He liked to keep up with what the world thought of vampires, and what better way to do that than to read the newspapers?

  Well, the press couldn’t say he hadn’t given them something to write about. New York led the world in murders committed—about 2,200 a year and rising—but only a handful were newsworthy. If one drug dealer killed another, what was so interesting about that? Or if a babe in arms was shot out during an exchange of gunfire, who could get excited about something that happened every other day? No, it was the unusual, the bizarre, the forbidden that sold newspapers. Cannibalism was okay. Sex combined with cannibalism was even better.

  Van Diemen liked the Post, by far the worst newspaper in the country, perhaps the world. It was so unabashedly tasteless and unreliable it would print anything. Many of its writers were young, ambitious feminists straight out of college. Credit for the vampire story was given to Ronni Lev and Peggy Locklin, with research by Barry Pollock. Van Diemen thought it was a fine story, not one bit more idiotic than the stories in the other papers. There were some amusing made-up quotes from detectives who asked not to be identified, as well as a statement by the editor of Vampire News, a quarterly publication. The editor didn’t think it possible that any of his readers could be involved.

  Van Diemen put the clippings in a drawer and the gutted newspapers in the wastebasket. The press would try to keep the vampire story alive as long as possible, but it wouldn’t be easy. The police had nothing to go on, and though they would never admit it, they would remain completely in the dark as the days went by and the trail grew cold.

  What trail? Vampires left no fingerprints: After passing over, such mortal encumbrances disappeared along with bodily functions. The old man with the killer dog had seen Van Diemen, but that didn’t mean anything. If that man came forward, which was unlikely, all he could tell the police was that he had seen a tall, handsome man on Thirteenth Street around the time of the murder. He couldn’t very well say weirdly handsome because Van Diemen knew there was nothing weird about him. He looked like young Tyrone Power, a slightly dated look he had to admit, but there was nothing he could do about that. Anyway, if the old guy told the cops he’d seen someone who looked like Tyrone Power, they wouldn’t give much credence to his story. Any guy who let himself be pulled around by a Rhodesian Ridgeback was sure to be nutty.

  Van Diemen was pleased by all the newspaper fodder about vampire cults. It muddied the waters, threw up a smoke screen, and kept the authorities busy. He had no doubt that such cults did exist, some harmless and some not. The harmless cultists dressed themselves up like good old Draculina, chanted in candlelit basements, burned incense, drank red juice, and did no harm to anyone. The dangerous freaks, on the other hand, did plenty of evil, and it was rumored that one group on the Lower West Side preyed on the prostitutes working near the Holland Tunnel and Times Square. Rumor had it that these victims were hung by the heels. Then their throats were cut, and their blood was collected in a bucket. The average body held about six quarts of blood, which wasn’t much to go round in a thirsty crowd.

  Van Diemen was shocked and angry when he heard of such goings-on. Such behavior was depraved, disgusting, entirely reprehensible. That he himself was a blood drinker had nothing to do with the situation. He drank blood to sustain his eternal life; without it, he would wither and die. It was as simple as that. But these creatures, these make-believe vampires, had no need to do what they were doing. They had no more a need for blood than for the cocaine with which they rotted their jaded, already demented minds. They gave vampirism a bad name, and there were times in the past when he’d been sorely tempted to do something about their odious activities. At the moment, however, he was glad he hadn’t.

  It wasn’t that he had become more tolerant— far from it. As soon as this Landau business was out of the way, he would make an example of the fraud. At the moment, though, and for the near future, the vampire cults could be of use to him. If the present trouble reached the killing stage, and it would, he couldn’t be flying out to Montauk to dispose of dead bodies. So let the vampire cultists be blamed, or at least come under suspicion, when corpses bearing the mark of the vampire began to turn up all over town. By the time the police got through with the vampire pretenders, there wouldn’t be a phony vampire left in the city. And if they did sneak back, or if a new group started up, they would find the winged avenger on their case. His war would be long over by then.

  Van Diemen was at peace that early December evening. He had fed early and close to home, his victim an exhibitionist skulking near St. Agnes College for Women, and now he was back in his beloved library, behind his writing table. It had been most amusing, the way the flasher had yelped when Van Diemen materialized beside him on the dark street with most of the streetlights shot out. The degenerate creature had mumbled something and tried to run; but of course he wasn’t as quick as Van Diemen. Nobody was. Van Diemen had seized him and shoved him into a niche where a statue of St. Agnes had stood before it was smashed by neighborhood thugs, and there he had fed on his victim. As the dying flasher slumped to the ground and the wind blew his raincoat open, Van Diemen saw that the front of his pants had been cut away so he could expose himself to some young lady without having to fumble.

  Now, sitting in his elegant chair, Van Diemen thought, as he had so often, what fools mortals were. Shakespeare’s words, but they might have been Van Diemen’s own, and without taking anything away from the Bard, he was a pretty good wordsmith himself. Of course, he had read the complete works of Shakespeare, all in one sitting, as a matter of fact. That had been in August, 1836, and there was no need to read the plans again. Once Van Diemen read something, it was committed in toto to his prodigious memory to be recalled at will.

  Among his many accomplishments was speed reading, though that description really wasn’t applicable. What he did was read an entire page at a single glance, mentally photograph it, in fact. With him, there was none of the frantic line scanning and page turning that gave the ordinary speed reader the appearance of someone having an epileptic fit. He didn’t know if this astonishing abilit
y was further proof of his genius, but it enabled him to read more in a month than the most omnivorous reader did in a very long lifetime. It went without saying, naturally, that reading without the fullest understanding was of little value. Otherwise he would merely be a candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.

  No, he understood, completely and critically, everything he read. For instance, he had read Finnegan’s Wake, a book so often described as impenetrable with the same ease that the ordinary reader read a detective story or a silly romance, chuckling at its grotesqueries, frowning at its errors, sympathizing where the verbal flow faltered and the author floundered in a bog of verbiage until he regained firm ground and made a new start. In this manner, Van Diemen had made his way through Homer, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Machiavelli, Milton, and Macaulay right down to Kissinger and Elmore Leonard. The list was endless. He had read many authors and had known very few.

  But Van Diemen had more immediate things to think about. What was Vincent Mara doing? Was he working for Van Diemen? Or was he selling his new master out? Van Diemen had given Vincent a sizable sum of money, but would he think it enough? Greed had no limits, and Vincent was greedy as man or vampire. Still, some men and vampires were capable of putting sensible self-interest before reckless, mindless greed. Van Diemen hoped Vincent was intelligent enough to recognize that betrayal would be extremely hazardous to his health. Van Diemen pondered the idea of flying down to Chelsea to see what Vincent was up to. If he found his servant sodden with drink, he might have to reconsider their arrangement. Perhaps that would be a mistake. Sometimes he was too censorious of the behavior of others, mortal and vampire. Functioning alcoholics did exist, and he hoped Vincent was one of them. He had managed the bugging of Tracy Lee’s bedroom quite well, hadn’t he? Suddenly, the telephone rang, and Vincent was on the line. “Yes, Vincent,” Van Diemen said.