Farmer moaned pleasurably and reached for her but she caught his hand and held it firmly on his thigh.
“Don’t squirm around now,” she said. “This won’t take long. Not very long.”
She licked his neck.
I couldn’t believe it. Farmer’s dirty old neck. I’d have licked the sidewalk first. And this woman—I looked at Joe but he was watching the woman run her tongue up Farmer’s neck and still no expression on him, as though he were watching a dull TV program he’d already seen.
Farmer’s eyelids were at half-mast. He gave a small laugh. “Tickles a little.”
The woman pulled back and then blew on the spot gently. “There now. We’re almost ready.” She took the box of heroin from his lap.
I didn’t want to see this. I looked at Joe again. He shook his head slightly, keeping his gaze on the woman. She smiled at me, scooped up a small amount of heroin and put it in her mouth.
“Fucking lowlife,” I said, but my voice sounded far away. The woman nodded, as if to tell me I had it right and then, fast, like a snake striking, she clamped her mouth on Farmer’s neck.
Farmer jumped slightly, his eyes widening. Then he went completely slack, only the woman’s mouth on him holding him up.
I opened my mouth to yell, but nothing came out. As though there was a field around me and Joe that kept us still.
She seemed to stay like that on Farmer’s neck forever. I stood there, unable to look away. I’d watched Farmer and Joe and the rest of them fix countless times. The scene played in my brain, the needle sliding into skin, probing, finding the vein and the blood tendriling in the syringe when it hit. Going for the boot because it made the rush better. Maybe this made the rush better for both of them.
Time passed and left us all behind. I’d thought it was too soon to fix again, but yeah, it would figure that she’d have to get them while they were still fucked up, so they’d just sit there and take it. Hey, was that last fix a little strange?—Strange? What’s strange? Nod.
Then the woman drew her head back a little and I saw it. A living needle, like a stinger. I wished I were a fainter so I could have passed out, shut the picture off, but she held my gaze as strongly as she held Farmer. I’d come to see Joe and this was part of it, package deal. In another part of my mind, I was screaming and yelling and begging Joe to take us both out of there, but that place was too far away, in some other world where none of this was possible.
She brought her mouth down to Farmer’s neck again, paused, and lifted her head. There was a small red mark on Farmer’s skin, like a vaccination. She swallowed and gave me that professional smile.
“That’s what he came here for,” she said. “Now, shall I do the next one, Joe, or would you like to?”
“Oh, Jesus, Joe,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.”
“I don’t like boys,” he said. And blinked.
“Oh, Jesus—”
“Well, there’s only one girl here for you.” She actually crinkled her nose.
“No. No, oh, Jesus, Joe—” I grabbed two fistfuls of his bathrobe and shook him. He swayed in my grasp and it felt like I was shaking a store mannequin. Even in his deepest junked-out stupor, he’d been a million times more alive than he was now. My late brother, Joe, the original lost boy now lost for all time, the disposable man finally disposed of.
He waited until I stopped shaking him and looked down at me. I took a step back. A dull television program he’d already seen. “Let her go, okay?”
“Now, Joe,” she said, admonishing.
I bolted for the elevator but the doors didn’t open. She had the power over them, over everything, junkies, me, even tollbooths. I just stood there until I felt Joe’s hands on my shoulders.
“China—”
I jumped away from him and backed up against the elevator doors. There was a buzzing in my ears. Hyperventilating. In a moment, I was going to pass out and they could do whatever they liked. Standing between Farmer comatose on the couch and the kid, who was sitting like a junked-up lump, the woman looked bored.
“China,” my brother repeated, but he didn’t reach for me again.
I forced myself to breathe more slowly. The buzzing in my ears receded and I was almost steady again. “Oh, Jesus, Joe, where did you find these—these whatever-they-are. They’re not people.”
“I didn’t really find them,” he said. “One day I looked around and they were just there. Where they’ve always been.”
“I never saw them before.”
“You never had to. People like me and Farmer and whatsisname over there, the kid, we’re the ones they come for. Not for you.”
“Then why did I find them?”
“I don’t like to think about that. It’s—” he fumbled for a moment. “I don’t know. Contagious, I guess. Maybe someday they’ll come for everyone.”
“Well, that is in the plan,” the woman said. “There are only so many Joes and Farmers in the world. Then you have to branch out. Fortunately, it’s not hard to find new ways to reach new receptors.” She ran a finger along the collar of her dress. “The damnedest things come into fashion and you know how that is. Something can just sweep the country.”
“Let her go now,” Joe said.
“But it’s close to time for you, dear one.”
“Take her back to Streep’s. Stacey and George’ll be there, maybe Priscilla. You can bring them here, leave her there.”
“But, Joe,” she said insistently, “she’s seen us.”
“So you can get her later.”
I began to shake.
“Joe.” The stewardess smile went away. “There are rules. And they’re not just arbitrary instructions designed to keep the unwashed multitude moving smoothly through intersections during rush hour.” She came around the coffee table to him and put her hand on his arm. I saw her thumb sink deeply into the material of his bathrobe. “You chose this, Joe. You asked for it, and when we gave it to you, you agreed. And this is part of the deal.”
He pried her hand off his arm and shoved it away. “No, it’s not. My sister isn’t a junkie. It wouldn’t go right, not now. You know it wouldn’t. You’d just end up with a troublesome body to dispose of and the trail would lead directly to me. Here. Because everyone probably knows she’s been looking for me. She’s probably asked half the city if they’ve seen me. Isn’t that right, China.”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“You know we’ve got the cops.”
“Not all of them. Not even enough of them.”
The woman considered it. Then she shook her head at him as though he were a favored, spoiled pet. “I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, I hope you know that.”
“I know it,” said Joe.
“I mean, in spite of everything you said. I might have decided just to work around the difficulties. It’s just that I like you so much. You fit in so well. You’re just so—appropriate.” She glanced back at the kid on the couch. “Well, I hope this can wait until I take care of our other matter.”
“Whatever you like,” Joe said.
She turned her smile on me again but there was a fair amount of sneer in it. “I’ll be with you shortly.”
I turned away as she went back to the couch so I wouldn’t have to see her do the kid. Joe just stood there the whole time, making no move toward me or away from me. I was still shaking a little; I could see my frizzy bangs trembling in front of my eyes. The absurd things you noticed, I thought, and concentrated on them, out of focus against the background of the fabulous antique bar, trying to make them hold still. If they stopped trembling, then I would have stopped shaking. The kid on the couch made a small noise, pleasure or pain or both, and I looked up at Joe, wanting to scream at him to make her stop it but there was nothing there to hear that kind of scream. The kid was on his own; I was the one who really hadn’t known that. We were all on our own, now.
The dead eyes stared at me, the gaze as flat as an animal’s. I tried to will one last spark of life to appear, even
just that greedy, gotta-score look he used to get, but it wouldn’t come. Whatever he’d had left had been used up when he’d gotten her to let me go. Maybe it hadn’t even been there then; maybe he’d been genuinely concerned about the problem of getting rid of my corpse. Junkies need love but they need a fix more.
Eventually, I heard the kid slump over on the couch.
“Well, come on,” the woman said, going over to the bar to pick up her coat. The elevator doors slid open.
“Wait,” Joe said.
I paused in the act of going toward the car and turned back to him.
“She goes back to Streep’s,” Joe said. “Just like I told you. And you pick up Stacey and George and Priscilla and whoever else is around if you want. But you fucking leave her off. Because I’ll know if you don’t.”
I wanted to say his name but I still couldn’t make a sound.
Hey, Joe. What the hell.
If you have to ask, babe, you don’t really want to know.
“All right, Joe,” the woman said amiably. “I told you I’d do it your way.”
His lower lids rose up and stayed shut. Good-bye Joe.
“Too bad you never got to drink your cognac,” the woman said to me as she put on her coat. She nodded at the snifter where it still stood on the bar. “It’s VSOP, you know.”
Night was already falling as she took me back across the river. She put on the Quicksilver Messenger Service tape for me. Have another hit. Neither of us said anything until she pulled up in front of Streep’s.
“Run in and tell them I’m waiting, will you?” she asked cheerfully.
I looked over at her. “What should I say?”
“Tell them Joe and I are having a party. They’ll like that.”
“You and Joe, huh? Think you’ll be able to handle such an embarrassment of riches, just the two of you?”
“Oh, there’ll be a few others by the time I get back. You don’t think we need all that space for just the two of us, do you?”
I shrugged. “What do I know?”
“You know enough.” We stared at each other in the faint light from the dashboard. “Sure you don’t want to ride back?” Priscilla’s friend will undoubtedly have arrived by the time we get there.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know what she told him about me, but it wasn’t even close.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“Real sure.”
She stared at me a moment longer, as though she were measuring me for something. “Then I’ll see you later, China.”
I got out of the car and went into Streep’s.
After that I went home just long enough to pack my bag again while my father bellowed at me and my mother watched. I phoned Marlene from the bus station. She was out but her grandmother sounded happy to hear from me and told me to come ahead, she’d send Marlene out with the car.
So that was all. I went home even less after that, so I never saw Joe again. But I saw them. Not her, not Joe’s blonde or the cop or the guy from Priscilla’s apartment, but others. Apparently once you’d seen them, you couldn’t not see them. They were around. Sometimes they would give me a nod, like they knew me. I kept on trucking, got my degree, got a job, got a life, and saw them some more.
I don’t see them any more frequently but no less, either. They’re around. If I don’t see them, I see where they’ve been. A lot of the same places I’ve been. Sometimes I don’t think about them and it’s like a small intermission of freedom, but it doesn’t last, of course. I see them and they see me and someday they’ll find the time to come for me. So far, I’ve survived relevance and hedonism and I’m not a Yuppie. Nor my brother’s keeper.
But I’m something. I was always going to be something someday. And eventually, they’re going to find out what it is.
SO RUNS THE WORLD AWAY
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of the novels Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. She also wrote the movie novelization of Beowulf and, more recently, she has published the Siobhan Quinn series of urban fantasies (Blood Oranges, Red Delicious, and Cherry Bomb) under the pseudonym “Kathleen Tierney.”
Her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in a number of volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, with Love; Alabaster; A is for Alien; The Ammonite Violin & Others; Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One); Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart; The Ape’s Wife and Other Tales; Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume Two); and Dear Sweet Filthy World.
Kiernan is a multiple recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award, as well as a winner of the Nebula Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Mythopoeic Award.
“Sometime in 1995,” reveals the author, “I publicly vowed to stop writing stories about vampires for at least six years and also encouraged other writers to do the same. Though I am a great admirer of good vampire fiction, a commodity almost as scarce as hens’ teeth, and although I’d written and sold a vampire novel of my own (The Five of Cups), I could see very little sense in fantasy writers continuing to grind out mediocre tales of bloodsucking fiends when the shelves were already hemorrhaging with the things.
“So I did stop. I wrote no new vampire stories for five years (that’s almost six, I tell myself). And then I got an idea, which actually had a lot more to do with ghouls, originally; but, somehow, vampires ended up worming their way in and taking over. I suppose that’s what vampires do. Anyway, that’s how I came to write ‘So Runs the World Away.’
“Now, if I can only make it another five years …”
“A FALLING STAR for your thoughts,” she says and Gable, the girl with foil-silver eyes and teeth like the last day of winter, points at the night sky draped high above Providence and the wide Seekonk River. Night-secret New England sky, and a few miles farther north you have to call it the Pawtucket River, but down here, where it laps fishy against Swan Point and the steep cemetery slopes, down here it’s still the Seekonk and way over there are the orange, industrial lights of Phillipsdale; Dead Girl blinks once or twice to get the taste out of her mouth, and then she follows Gable’s grimy finger all the way up to Heaven and there’s the briefest streak of white light drawn quick across the eastern sky.
“That’s very nice, but they aren’t really, you know,” she says and Gable makes a face, pale face squinched up like a very old woman, dried-apple face to say she doesn’t understand and “Aren’t really what?” she asks.
“Stars,” says Dead Girl. “They’re only meteorites. Just chunks of rock and metal flying around through space and burning up if they get too close. But they aren’t stars. Not if they fall like that.”
“Or angels,” Bobby whispers and then goes right back to eating from the handful of blackberries he’s picked from the brambles growing along the water’s edge.
“I never said anything about angels,” Gable growls at the boy, and he throws a blackberry at her. “There are lots of different words for angels.”
“And for falling stars,” Dead Girl says with a stony finality so they’ll know that’s all she wants to hear about it; meteorites that stop being meteors, Seekonk changing into Pawtucket, and in the end it’s nothing but the distance between this point and that. As arbitrary as any change, and so she presses her lips against the jogging lady’s left wrist again. Not even the sheet-thin ghost of a pulse left in there, cooling meat against her teeth, flesh that might as well be clay except there are still a few red mouthfuls and the sound of her busy lips isn’t all that different from the sound of the waves against the shore.
“I know seven words for gray,” Bobby says, talking through a mouthful of seeds and pulp and the dark juice dribbling down his bloodstained chin. “I got them out of a dictionary.”
>
“You’re a little faggot,” Gable snarls at the boy, those narrow mercury eyes and her lower lip stuck way out like maybe someone’s been beating her again, and Dead Girl knows she shouldn’t have argued with Gable about falling stars and angels. Next time, she thinks, I’ll remember that. Next time I’ll smile and say whatever she wants me to say. And when she’s finally finished with the jogging lady, Dead Girl’s the first one to slip quiet as a mousey in silk bedroom slippers across the mud and pebbles and the river is as cold as the unfalling stars speckling the August night.
An hour and four minutes past midnight in the big house on Benefit Street and the ghouls are still picking at the corpses in the basement. Dead Girl sits with Bobby on the stairs that lead back up to the music and conversation overhead, the electric lights and acrid-sweet clouds of opium smoke; down here there are only candles and the air smells like bare dirt walls and mildew, like the embalmed meat spread out on the ghouls’ long carving table. When they work like this, the ghouls stand up on their crooked hind legs and press their canine faces close together. The very thin one named Barnaby (his nervous ears alert to every footfall overhead, every creaking door, as if anyone up there even cares what they’re up to down here) picks up a rusty boning knife and uses it to lift a strip of dry flesh the color of old chewing gum.
“That’s the gastrocnemius,” he says and the yellow-orange iris of his left eye drifts nervously toward the others, toward Madam Terpsichore, especially, who shakes her head and laughs the way that all ghouls laugh. The way starving dogs would laugh, Dead Girl thinks, if they ever dared, and she’s starting to wish she and Bobby had gone down to Warwick with Gable and The Bailiff after all.
“No, that’s the soleus, dear,” Madam Terpsichore says, and sneers at Barnaby, that practiced curl of black lips to flash her jaundiced teeth like sharpened piano keys, a pink-red flick of her long tongue along the edge of her muzzle, and “That’s the gastrocnemius, there,” she says. “You haven’t been paying attention.”
Barnaby frowns and scratches at his head. “Well, if we ever got anything fresh, maybe I could keep them straight,” he grumbles, making excuses again, and Dead Girl knows the dissection is beginning to bore Bobby. He’s staring over his shoulder at the basement door, the warm sliver of light getting in around the edges.
The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women Page 62