He said the name to himself and shivered: Missing Mile.
Nothing crossed his dark room and let himself into the hall. His parents were out somewhere—a consciousness-raising group, a holistic health class, an expensive dinner with other people like themselves. Their bedroom door was ajar, and the room within smelled of perfumed soap and aftershave. The odors struck him as stinging and chemical. They said his room smelled bad.
His fingers searched the bottom of the dresser drawer, familiar by now, and found the note at once. Its presence in his hand was comforting, its ink faded, its edges soft and ragged from all the times he had held it over the past three years. He slipped it into his pocket. He considered the collection of crystals on top of the dresser, then picked up the one he liked best, a piece of rose quartz. He curled his hand around it. No, he decided; it was too tainted with Mother’s touch, with her antimagic. After a few minutes of hunting he found Mother’s cache of emergency money in her jewelry box and took that instead. A hundred dollars. It wouldn’t last until he got where he was going, but it would help. After that—Well, after that I’ll find something else, he told himself.
Next he used the phone. Jack wasn’t home, but Nothing called around and found him at Skittle’s, the pizza shop downtown where his friends hung out at night. “Can you drive me to Columbia?” he asked.
“Gas isn’t free, dude.” Jack was eighteen, had a fake ID that got him served at the liquor store, and considered himself the lord of the local scene.
“I can pay you. I have to catch a bus. I’m getting the hell out of here.”
“Folks giving you too much shit, huh?” Jack didn’t wait for an answer. “Okay, I can take you tonight. Five bucks for the gas if you got it. Meet me here at midnight.”
How far could you ride a Greyhound for ninety-five dollars? Far enough to start with. “Thanks, Jack,” he said. “See you at midnight.”
“Hey, Laine wants to talk to you,” Jack said, but Nothing was already hanging up.
Back in his room he huddled under the quilt. It was only nine o’clock; he could sleep for a couple of hours before walking into town to meet Jack and the others. But his mind would not shut down. His eyes would not stay closed. Even the whiskey didn’t help; he realized he was maddeningly sober.
He rolled over, hugged himself, then felt under his mattress and pulled out a single-edged razor blade. Gently, lovingly, he pulled the edge across his wrist. A thin line of crimson welled up, beading and running, bright against the pale tracery of old scars. Nothing lay under his charred quilt in his own safe room for the last time, and he sucked at his own blood because that was what comforted him, what he had always done when he grew too lonely, too hungry for something he did not know. He lay there with his mouth tight against his wrist, praying to the juju in his room: Come with me. Stay with me on the road until I find what I’m looking for, because now I’m going to be more alone than ever.
At last, when his lips were stained red and a thin pink line of blood and spit trickled from the corner of his mouth, he was able to sleep.
7
I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.
Wallace shut his eyes tight and shook his head. “Begone, Jessy,” he muttered. “Torment me no more.” His hands came up hard against the side of the brick building that housed Christian’s bar, and he pushed himself away from the wall and staggered out of the alley.
The palms of his hands stung dully. He had left some of his skin on the bricks, and he could feel dust and grime embedded in his lifelines, his heartlines. The pain did nothing to soothe his mind, nothing to stop the cursed past from rushing back. The streets and alleys and buildings around him swam and grew dark. Now he could actually see Jessy, see her as she had been that day….
“I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.”
It was all she had spoken of for weeks. Finding a vampire to bite her, turning into one, drinking the blood of others (her lovers, Wallace supposed, the lovers he didn’t know) and turning them into vampires as well. Her things spoke of this obsession too. Jessy had always been quite a reader, turning the pages of Charlotte’s Web and the Bobbsey Twins books with scowling concentration, but now the stack of books by her bed was all vampire stories. Dracula was there, dogeared and heavily underlined. Wallace had looked at the book one night while Jessy was out at one of her haunts. Some passages were circled over and over, in pencil and lipstick and what looked like blood.
Wallace began reading, but after a few paragraphs he was too disgusted to continue. He hadn’t known the novel was pornographic. He touched the marks on the page. They were blood. Jessy’s blood. She had been cutting herself to get at it. Wallace found razor blades between the pages of the book. There were other novels that looked just as lurid, and a vial of some sort of red dust that must have come from one of the voodoo shops in the French Quarter, though he’d told her not to go to those places. There were all the posters from the movies she saw, cruel eyes and gaping, razor-toothed mouths all bloody, and the walls and ceiling festooned with black lace…
“Daddy.”
Wallace forced his eyes open. He was not at home, standing in the hallway outside Jessy’s room. He was weaving down Bienville, breathing in the cool night air, heading for the river. But the past sucked him in again, and it was that day….
Jessy was calling him. For ten years they had been alone except for each other, ever since the day Wallace had found Lydia in her cooling red bathwater with her forearms slashed open from wrist to elbow. He was Jessy’s father, and he had to go to Jessy when she called. She might need him.
“Daddy,” she called softly. “Daddy …”
Wallace looked at the old sign on Jessy’s bedroom door—a cartoon rabbit in rainbow-spattered overalls painting the words GENIUS AT WORK—then turned the knob and stepped out of the dark hallway into brightness. Jessy’s room always caught the morning sunlight.
She’d just come out of the shower, and her skin was as pink and white and dewy as spring. Her hair fell wet and straight along her cheeks. As he stared at her, she let the green towel fall from her breasts. Wallace had not seen his daughter’s body since she was a young child, plump and androgynous, with pink buttons for nipples and a tiny clean fold of a sex. But now her breasts were round and smooth, with a girlish heaviness to them, and Wallace wondered how it would be to cup their weight in his hands, how it would taste if he took one of those creamy strawberry peaks in his mouth and sucked.
“I’m going to be a vampire, Daddy.”
He could not find his voice. There was no spit in his mouth. “Put your clothes on, Jessy.” It was a dry whisper, weak and useless.
“I’m going to bite people, Daddy. I’m going to feed on them. I need blood. Hot… rich… red blood. I need your blood, Daddy. I’m hungry. Your Jessy’s hungry. Come to me.”
He did not know how he got to the bed. Surely if she had not cajoled so, if she were not his daughter, his only joy, if he had not always tried to give her everything she asked for… surely if he had lain with some other woman in the ten years since Lydia was gone… surely then, if the ache in his groin had not come bursting forth, he would not have let her lay him out and undo his trousers and straddle him, slipping around him as smooth and tight as sea anemones. Surely he would not have groaned and squeezed her heavy soft breasts between his fingers and thrust up and up into his daughter’s wet-velvet heaven until she bent over him and he felt a metallic sting as of a razor blade beneath his jaw. Jessy fastened her lips there. He felt her throat working as she swallowed. Then a black and crimson mist began to drift into the edges of his vision.
He awoke tangled in Jessy’s rumpled sheets that smelled of girl-skin. There was a nick on his throat, no worse than a bad shaving cut, smeared with dried blood and spit. He did not wash it. Jessy was gone.
After a few nights he began to look for her in all the places she had mentioned. All the nighttime haunts, the dark bars and clubs in the French Quarter. He did not know what he would say if he saw
Jessy. He had begun to feel as if the thing that had happened were his fault, as if he had seduced her. As if he had forced himself into her. He did not know whether he would be able to meet his daughter’s eyes. But that did not matter, for he never saw Jessy again.
More and more often during his search, he found himself drawn to the place called Christian’s, the dark bar with the stained-glass windows that threw colored shadows onto the sidewalk. It was a little place way down Chartres, away from the life of the Quarter. He came here because he knew Jessy had liked the place, and he decided he might as well have a drink or two or three. He watched the bartender. Christian moved behind the bar, mixing drinks with detached expertise, answering his customers’ chatter politely if rather coldly. Unless someone spoke to Christian, he was silent.
When Wallace watched Christian, studied the impossibly tall, gaunt, pale figure always dressed in black, the idea of Jessy’s vampires no longer seemed quite so preposterous. Something about Christian frightened him. Wallace thought of himself as a religious man, but when he was in that chilly presence, God’s warmth seemed to shrivel inside him. One night their eyes met across the bar, and Wallace felt his spine turn to ice. The coldness in Christian’s eyes—that awful, empty coldness, like winds blowing across barren plains—was more convincing than all Jessy’s talk, her books and movies, her fevered drinking of blood.
Wallace could not forget those eyes. When he’d seen them again tonight, he had felt the same icy hand, the same helpless fury. Wallace believed in vampires now.
Tonight, though, he would not be helpless. Fifteen years ago he had been afraid. His fear no longer mattered, not now. The finger of God had touched him, a fearful, excruciating touch that wrenched his insides and sometimes drew thin dirty blood from them, and soon he would be with Jessy. Tonight he would avenge her, and he would have his memories of her again, his memories of a child who danced and laughed, of a child who loved him, who was not a dark creature of sex and blood. He would eradicate his damnable sin. He would redeem himself.
The air sobered him. He drew himself up, refused to sway, refused to let his dizziness and fear overtake him. Tonight belonged to him, and to Jessy.
He walked toward the river.
8
Twig kept up a steady string of curses as they drove into DC. The streets seemed skewed to him, the signs indecipherable. Finally he turned the wrong way down a one-way street, screeched to a halt in front of a fancy hotel, and said, “That’s where we’re staying.”
Molochai waved the parking valet over, and Twig presented him with the keys to the van. “Remember which one is ours,” he told the valet. “We want this van back, not some pussy Volvo.”
The lobby was all plush and marble opulence, red-carpet gaudy splendor. They appreciated it not a bit. As they checked in, Molochai gaped up at the three-tiered crystal chandelier, and Twig palmed the desk clerk’s cigarettes.
Their room was not as gaudy as the public facade of the hotel. Here on the twentieth floor there was only pale carpeting as thick and rich as whipped cream. Zillah slipped his shoes off and wriggled his toes in its creamy depths. Here were only deep, cloud-soft beds and sofas that one might drown in, falling forever, never to be seen again. Oh yes, they could have fun here.
He drifted to the window and pulled aside heavy draperies. The city gleamed far below, green and white, immaculate. The crazy pattern of the streets was a puzzle that wanted deciphering. In the center of it all the Washington Monument soared up, as clean and stark as a bone. Zillah smiled a small secret smile. The city was delicious. All cities were delicious. They had only to wait until nightfall.
From behind him came a great howl of delight as Molochai and Twig saw the whirlpool bathtub. Zillah turned to see them ripping at each other’s clothes, throwing shirts and sneakers and socks all over the room in their haste to get undressed. He watched them for a moment, still smiling, then untied the purple scarf that bound his ponytail and began combing his hair with his fingers, smoothing its silky length, untangling the snarls made by the wind on the road. Hair slipped between his fingers, tumbled down over his shoulders.
Molochai and Twig stood together by the whirlpool, naked as babes, waiting to see what Zillah would do. Zillah slipped out of his trousers and jacket, pulled his loose black T-shirt over his head. He wore no underwear; none of them did. Slim as a girl, he stood looking at Molochai and Twig, his skin creamy pale, his hair the color of coffee with milk.
They moved toward one another until their shoulders were almost touching. All three bodies bore the marks of various piercings, tattoos, and scarifications. Living so long in the same unchanging flesh made them restless; they were compelled to change it themselves. Age did its own decorating of human bodies—wrinkles, wattled flesh, random sproutings of coarse yellowish hair. Molochai, Twig, and Zillah were much more pleased with their own methods of decoration: silver rings, intricate patterns in ink or raised flesh.
Twig had twin strands of barbed wire tattooed on his wrists, twining up both arms, and two long thin pieces of metal that pierced the thin skin of his stomach just below the rib cage on either side, capped with nuggets of bone he had saved to have honed and fitted. Zillah wore silver hoops through his nipples; Molochai’s were pierced with safety pins, from one of which dangled a polished fingerbone. All three had foreskin-rings (because of the circumstances surrounding their births, few of their race were circumcised as babies). They had linked these together to pose for a series of studies by a famous photographer of erotica, Zillah standing on an inlaid-teak stool that brought his ring up to the level of the others’.
Zillah put his hand on Molochai’s shoulder and pushed gently down. Molochai knelt before him and embraced Zillah’s narrow hips. His mouth brushed soft skin and silky hair. He put out his tongue and felt Zillah shiver. Then Zillah’s hand was under his chin, cupping his face and tilting it up. Molochai looked up into Zillah’s eyes. Green. Glowing, melting green.
“Molochai,” said Zillah.
Molochai was lost in the luminescent sea of green; he could not answer.
“Molochai.”
He shook himself. “What?”
Zillah’s face was calm. A small smile played about his lips. “Do you want something from room service?”
Molochai stared up at Zillah for a few moments. Then he hugged Zillah tighter, and it was as if two jagged edges fitted together inside him. He turned and saw Twig standing jealously alone, watching them. They each put out an arm to Twig, and he came to them.
“I want champagne,” said Molochai. “And I want whipped cream and kidneys and chocolate truffles and baby’s-blood ice cream.”
They stood together, naked and embracing, the three of them as much a family as anyone could be, anywhere, ever.
In the foamy waters of the whirlpool Zillah pulled Molochai and Twig to him and dipped his tongue into their mouths, sweet with cake and cream, sharp and sour with champagne. Once more they began their game of spit and skin and passion, of slippery hands and soft bites, and sometimes harder bites. They played the game they knew so well, the game they had played for such a long time, and when they were done Molochai and Twig snuggled against Zillah in the steamy swirling water, their heads on his shoulders, their hands linked across his chest.
The three closed their eyes and dreamed their warm bloody dreams. For a few hours they could rest, and then it would be time to go out and party again.
* * * * *
When night folded like a deep blue cloak over the city, they roused themselves from their wet languor and began pulling on black shirts, black socks, dirty black sneakers. They favored black clothes because dark red stains would not show on them. Zillah put a tiny silver ankh through his ear-lobe. The other two wore large dangling crucifixes in their ears.
Twig, smearing on eyeliner in front of the bathroom mirror, found a raw red crescent on his chest. “You bit me,” he complained to Molochai. “I’m bleeding.”
Molochai, still half-naked, came clos
er and licked the blood from Twig’s chest. When Twig’s nipple puckered at the touch of the rough tongue, Molochai snapped at it. “I’m hungry” he said, and this time there was something in his voice that told them he would not be satisfied with sweets and chocolate.
When the sun set, Zillah sent the valet to get their van. They drove to Georgetown, taking wrong turns, being stopped by streets that suddenly turned one-way, weaving around and around traffic circles, swaying against each other every time the van navigated a curve. They had drunk more champagne back at the hotel, and by this time they were too blasted to care whether they got lost.
By persistence and luck they arrived in Georgetown before midnight. The sidewalks swarmed with people: tourists out for a big night, students wearing school sweatshirts, a group of black kids with roller skates and stocking caps spray-painting arcane graffiti on a wall. Molochai pressed his face to the window. “ ‘Fresh,’ ” he read before the van was past.
Twig licked his lips. “They better be.”
“Trendies.” Zillah waved his black-nailed hand in an elegant gesture of dismissal. “Trendies, all of them. We’ll find better ones later, after these are home in bed.”
They parked beside a fire hydrant. Zillah took a satchel full of empty wine bottles from the back of the van and gave them to Twig to carry.
Molochai looked at the block of shops. A lingerie boutique, a newsstand, a vegetarian cafe. It might have been a street in any city in America. “There’s no magic in this town,” he complained.
Zillah touched Molochai’s lips with the tip of a sharp nail. “There’s magic in every bloodstream.”
Molochai nodded sullenly. He was hungry again. There might be magic in every bloodstream, but the bloodstreams in the French Quarter were tastier.
It was Twig who found the girl. He had a nose for Indian curry. The window was painted CALCUTTA PALACE in a flowing strange script. Below it a sign said CLOSED, but the door swung open when Twig pushed at it. The inside of the restaurant was decorated like some fantastic far eastern fairy tale: red silk drooping from the ceiling, purple velvet covering the walls, tables lacquered in black and gold.
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