One Foot in the Grave - The Halflife Trilogy Book I

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  “My name is Merlene,” she said, “and I’m married to a lycanthrope.”

  The rest of the people in the circle answered in unison: “Hi, Merlene!”

  “I guess most of you know me from before,” she continued with a wan, twitchy smile. “You were in my first support group back when Howard was bitten and we were trying to adjust to all the changes that were taking place. You all were great. . . .”

  “So were you, Merlene!” someone called out from the circle.

  She drooped a little less. “It was an adjustment. Actually, the children handled it better than either of us. They thought it was ‘cool’ that Daddy was a werewolf.” She tried a little laugh. It took a little effort.

  “I quit coming to group because I thought we had worked everything out. That was two years ago—”

  I allowed my mind and my eyes to wander.

  Four days had gone by since I had last slept and I had used that time productively: I had typed, scanned, or downloaded all the pertinent materials I could find on the subject of vampires and the occult into my notebook computer. That was the easy part. Now I had to recombine and cross-reference everything into a huge database of information. And then I would begin to cross-correlate to identify consistencies and inconsistencies. And, finally, I would have to separate the wheat from the chaff, the facts from the fiction.

  With any luck it would keep me extremely busy for many days to come.

  “There was a time when he’d never change voluntarily,” Merlene was saying, “only during the full moons, and then he’d stay in the house. But then he started wanting out—just for an hour or so, you understand. I think he was just running around the neighborhood then, working off a little nervous energy. . . .”

  As my eyes wandered around the room I was surprised to see another familiar face. Lupé Garou was sitting in on tonight’s encounter group session.

  She hadn’t gone with Mooncloud and Bachman on the Doman’s little retrieval mission, after all. Pagelovitch had sent Luis in her place as she was still relying on a cane when they left. Now she seemed to be fully recovered, though we hadn’t actually spoken since Deirdre had died in my bed.

  Come to think of it, she was the only one who hadn’t come around trying to tell me why it wasn’t my fault and how I shouldn’t feel guilty. At least some people knew how to respect a person’s privacy.

  “ . . . gone all night!” Merlene was clearly upset and the therapist, a tall, rawboned blonde in a tee shirt and sweatpants stood up and put her arm about her. “Now he goes on these weekend camping trips. . . .” She sniffed.

  I stared at Lupé until she finally glanced in my direction. I crooked my fingers in a small, unobtrusive wave. She looked away.

  “ . . . checked his rifle. It hasn’t been fired in months! How can you spend every weekend, off in the woods hunting, and not use your rifle even once?”

  “Have you confronted him on this issue?” another group member asked.

  Merlene’s hands were rubbing and clenching each other as if she was auditioning for the part of Lady Macbeth. “He’s always dismissing me with comments like: ‘What would you know about it?’ Or: ‘You can’t smell a thing with that little bitty nose, so don’t be telling me about whether or not this gun’s been fired!’ ”

  I looked down at the floor, wishing I’d never agreed to attend these group sessions. At the time it seemed a way to do a little more research and get the Doman and Suki and Dr. Burton off my back.

  Someone else asked if Howard had become abusive lately.

  “Well, I don’t know that it’s really abusive,” Merlene whined, “but—well—he never likes—normal—sex anymore.”

  “You know you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” the group leader murmured. “But it might help if you could be more specific.”

  “Specific?”

  “Like what you mean by abnormal.”

  “Oh.”

  I looked at my watch: at least another twenty minutes were left for tonight’s session.

  “He never wants to do it like we used to,” Merlene explained nervously. “Now Howard says it’s the missionary position that’s unnatural. . . .”

  That did it: I was out of here! I tried to ease the folding chair back as I stood, but one of the legs snagged a loose floor tile and it tipped over with a metallic clatter.

  Since a quiet, unobtrusive exit was now impossible, I turned and walked briskly toward the door.

  “ . . . so when the neighbor’s dog had puppies. . . .”

  As soon as I hit the hallway I began running.

  I didn’t get far.

  The Doman and Suki walked around the corner, coming toward me. Between them was an old man with broad shoulders, skinny arms, and long, disagreeable fingernails. He wore camouflage fatigue pants and an M-65 field jacket with a rust-red beret. On his feet were a pair of iron boots that fairly rang as they strode across the floor.

  The Doman frowned as he looked at me and I felt a sudden compulsion to turn around and go back into the therapy session. I reversed my course.

  “Ah, Mr. Csejthe,” the group leader said as I reentered the room, “since you’re already up, why don’t you go next?”

  I was stuck. Since my escape strategy required a more cooperative demeanor, I couldn’t very well refuse.

  “My name is Chris,” I mumbled, “and I . . . have a drinking problem.”

  “Hi, Chris,” the group chorused.

  While I explained just exactly what it was I drank and how I perceived the nature of my problem, I watched Pagelovitch, Suki, and the old man walk around the outside of the circle of chairs and stop to speak quietly with Lupé. As they spoke, she became visibly upset and, before I knew it, they were escorting her out of the room.

  “Yes, Barnabas?” the group leader was saying.

  A smallish, fine-boned man wearing a Savile Row suit was on his feet, leaning forward with both hands resting atop a stylish walking cane.

  “I’m afraid I don’t see the problem, here,” he said. “Christopher, you are a vampire and you just admitted that you enjoyed the taste of human blood. So I fail to apprehend your real concern.”

  “I think Chris’s concern,” the therapist said, “comes from two issues. One, that he hasn’t fully crossed the Rubicon in regards to his transformation. And two, that there are various moral and religious issues in his background that he is having trouble addressing.”

  “I think I’m hearing a third issue here, as well,” said a grey-haired, matronly woman to my left. “I think ‘choice’ or, rather, the lack of it, is a large part of this young man’s problem. You don’t like losing that sense of control, do you, hon?”

  “Uh, I think self-determination is essential to a life of worth.” And one’s privacy was something to be guarded from well-intentioned but nosey encounter groups.

  “Oh, come now,” replied the man with the wolfhead cane, “does anyone here really believe in self-determinism once the strictures of fate and the grave take hold?”

  “Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede. . . .” I murmured.

  “No, I think there are choices of a sort,” somebody else was saying, “but we must acknowledge the limitations on such choices that life—particularly this form of unlife—requires.”

  A small child said, “I’d say this is primarily a problem of acceptance, wouldn’t you, Chris?”

  The therapist turned to me. “What do you think, Mr. Csejthe? Can you at least acknowledge that you are irreversibly in the process of transformation and that you must face spending the remainder of your existence as a vampire? Can you accept that your choices will be defined within those parameters?”

  Everyone was looking at me with expressions of expectancy.

  “At least try to acknowledge the fact of your condition,” she prodded. “Admit that you are now defined by a new set of circumstances.”

  “All right.” I cleared my throat and they leaned forward in their chairs.

  “I suc
k, therefore I am.”

  Obviously, I had a long ways to go on this acceptance thing.

  Something was wrong.

  More than a week had passed and Dr. Mooncloud, Elizabeth Bachman, and Luis Garou had not returned. Lupé and Suki were nowhere to be found. The Doman was extremely busy and could not be disturbed.

  But there were undercurrents that suggested preparations were being made, councils of war held. And, in the meantime, I’d been assigned a babysitter.

  I couldn’t go anywhere, now, without being accompanied by a great bear of a man, named Ancho. Ancho was big, hairy, and had long, clawlike fingernails. If you looked at him long enough you might begin to suspect that he wasn’t quite human.

  And, of course, he wasn’t.

  “Salvani,” the aguane replied, when I finally broached the question to her.

  “What’s a salvani?” My temper had recently improved: Dr. Burton was prescribing some potent sleeping pills that turned my days into dreamless blackouts approximating sleep.

  “Perhaps you are more familiar with the term ‘vivani’?”

  “Of the Four Seasons fame?”

  She didn’t even blink. “You must be thinking of Frankie Valli. The ones I am speaking of are also called ‘pantegani’.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.” The trick, I figured, was not to blink either.

  “ ’Bregostani’?”

  “About six or seven years ago—maybe.”

  She peered at me suspiciously. “You met a bregostani six or seven years ago?”

  I shrugged. “It was a Hungarian restaurant and they served me a bowl of something that looked like a cross between pasta and borscht. I can’t remember just exactly what they called it, but it sounded something like that.”

  “Ach!” She threw up her hands. “Non! The salvani are from the families of the dusky elves and reside in the lower Alps.”

  “He’s a long way from home.”

  She arched a scabby eyebrow. “Aren’t we all, my dear?”

  I went back to the library to study. While I had scanned and entered a great deal of reference material into my computer, I had focused on occult matters that dealt directly with lycanthropy and vampirism. I had included references to the more obvious members of the enclave, but it seemed that something new was popping up every day.

  Ancho, of course, followed me into the stacks.

  “What’cha lookin’ for?” he rumbled as I puzzled over where to begin my search.

  “Overview material on elves.”

  “Which kind?”

  “That’s just it—” I hesitated, caught in the urge of an impending sneeze from all the dust atop the rows of books and piles of manuscripts. After a moment the unfinished sneeze retreated back into the nether regions of my sinuses. “—I don’t even know how many kinds there are to begin with.”

  “Three.”

  I turned and looked at him. “Three?”

  “Yah.” He shook his shaggy head up and down. “Three. Light elves, dark elves, and dusky elves. I’m one of the dusky clan. So’s my wife.”

  “Your wife?”

  “Yah: Basa-Andrée.”

  I started. “The aguane is your wife?”

  “Yah. You look surprised.”

  What should I say? That she’s ugly and looks old enough to be your grandmother? “It’s just that I’d expect . . . the two of you to look more alike.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Yah. But I think it is good that the aguane look like they do. All salvani I know feel the same. Is not my Basa beautiful?”

  “Um,” I said, “I’ve never met a woman with so devastating an appearance.”

  “Yah,” he said and then slapped his knee. “But trouble with being a water elemental is she is so ugly when she is out of the water.”

  “Um,” I said again.

  “Bet you had a nice shave, huh?” he said, and then roared (literally) with laughter. “Basa say anytime you want nice bath and shave again, you just call her.”

  “Um,” I said like a broken record. Time to change the subject. I cleared my throat. “Why don’t we sit down and you tell me about these three kinds of elves, Ancho.”

  “Yah, okey.”

  I led him to the study table and pulled out two chairs.

  “Are the light elves the good elves and the dark elves the bad elves?” I asked, flipping open my notebook computer and switching it on.

  “Light elves can be good or bad,” Ancho said. “Same with dark and dusky clans.”

  “Then what is the difference?” The prompt came up and I opened my word processing program.

  He smiled and his eyes acquired a distant focus. “Light elves are beautiful like butterflies and moonlight. They can change their form and travel through all four dimensions. They spend much time in other worlds and do not become involved in the affairs of this world much, I think.”

  I was trying to get his answer word for word. As I typed I asked about dark elves.

  He rested an elbow on the table and propped his chin in his hand. “They are more like caterpillars than butterflies. Dark elves are creatures of the earth and make their homes under it. The rare ones who live in human places prefer the cellars or a dark corner. If you see one, it will be the colors of the earth: black, brown, grey—maybe red.”

  “And the dusty elves?”

  “Dusky,” he corrected. “We are the children of Nature and are bound by Her Laws. Our lives are shaped by our homes: trees, ponds, mountains, rivers, herbs, lakes, glens—”

  Out in the hallway a horn began to blare a rhythmic pattern of alarm.

  “Fire?” I began closing computer files.

  The salvani looked grim as he rose to his feet. “Non. Is intruder alert. Come with me.”

  I had barely parked my hard drive when a great hairy hand closed on my wrist. I had to switch the computer off and lock down the LCD one-handed as he pulled me out of the library and down the corridor. As we neared the elevator there was a curious chuffing sound. The lift was coming up to our floor and as the elevator came closer, the chuffs grew louder.

  “They’re on the elevator!” I yelled at my fuzzy bodyguard.

  He released my wrist and spun around, looking about wildly. Then, decisively, he ripped back the grillwork that barred the opening to the shaft and braced himself in the entryway. “Run away!” he growled. “Hide yourself! Do not go to your room!”

  As the top of the elevator appeared at floor level, the salvani slapped his huge feet on the forward edge of its roof. The motor began to whine as his hands pushed against the top corners of the shaft’s entrance and the muscles in his furry arms bunched and corded.

  “Go quickly now!” he roared.

  The elevator was still ascending, but more slowly now: an inch of the lift was showing above the floor line.

  “You cannot help me!” Ancho’s massive shoulders were rising up to meet the lintel. As they ground against the top of the doorway, a grinding squeal echoed down the shaft from above: the elevator, showing several inches now, began to shudder and slow even more. “It is you they are looking for! Go! Run and hide yourself!”

  The barrel of a silenced gun poked blindly through the widening gap between the floor and the elevator car’s ceiling. A second muzzle with a silencer followed the first. I threw myself to the floor as they began chuffing like an all-out race between two steam locomotives: automatic weapons-fire raked the upper walls and ceiling and ricochets whined down the hallway. I rolled to the side, clutching the notebook computer, and then scrambled on hand and knees down the side corridor.

  I hit the stairs at the end of the passageway and touched every third step on the way down. I almost passed the landing on my floor before I reconsidered.

  Ancho had warned me not to go to my room. But this could be the chance I was waiting for. I already had a knapsack packed and waiting for the right opportunity.

  The passages near my room were empty. I crept down the hall and paused outside my door. Listened. I couldn�
�t hear anything stirring inside, so I opened the door and eased into the room. I left the lights off and made a conscious effort to switch to my night vision. Again there was something like an imperceptible click behind my eyeballs and the room resolved into a greyscale matrix. The only color was the warm reddish flicker of my hands at the edge of my vision. Even with excitement, fear, and exertion pumping the adrenaline, my body temperature was now lower than the human norm.

  I swept through the rooms, packing another change of clothes and a few more items in a gym bag and an over-the-shoulder leather carrying case for the computer. While I was in the bathroom packing toiletries, there was a sound from the other room.

  I moved silently through the bedroom counting on the darkness to be my marginal advantage. Another quick visual sweep revealed no infrared signatures.

  It was time to leave before company arrived.

  As I shouldered the carrying case and stooped to pick up the gym bag I was knocked back against the bed. Something was in the room: a dark shape gathered itself and moved toward me again. Oddly, it gave off insufficient heat to register on my perception of the infrared spectra.

  I fell back on the bed and brought my leg up as the thing pounced. It landed on my foot and I kicked toward my head, propelling it up and over to crash against the wall above the headboard. Adrenaline exploded in my body and the curious time dilation effect seemed to take hold again; perception and reflexes accelerated.

  But instead of slowing down, the dark figure recovered quickly and scrambled to its feet. This time it approached more cautiously and I could distinguish enough of its outline to see that it was human in shape.

  But not human enough to radiate body heat in the ninety-degree range.

  It struck with inhuman quickness, grabbing my arms. I struggled in an iron grip, making no progress until I tucked my head down and pulled so that its chest butted against the top of my skull. I snapped my head up catching my assailant under the chin. Its head rocked back and the attacker fell away, releasing my arms.

  I was probably dealing with another vampire. Since I had not completed the transformation, my opponent was most likely stronger and faster. What had saved me so far was its conceit that humans were easy prey: it hadn’t compensated for the fact that I was no longer fully human.