TheVampireandtheMouse

by Robin Stark

  As I got started with my work, Legs said, “Oh, here she is, we can ask her now.”

  I looked up. “Huh?”

  “We were talking about men we’re seeing,” The Princess said, in her measured voice. “We were wondering if you’re currently seeing anyone.”

  “Yeah,” Panda Eyes agreed. “I reckon you are, because you’re a good-looking girl. But Andrea thinks you’d get too nervous around guys and wouldn’t be able to talk to them.”

  “That is not what I said,” Legs said, reddening.

  “Yes it is—”

  “Hush!” Legs went on, “All I meant was, you don’t seem like the outgoing type. So we were just curious if you’ve got a boyfriend we don’t know about. We really don’t know that much about you, Kirsty.”

  This was exactly the kind of bonding session I could’ve done without today. I felt my face going red, and I thought of red, and— He was covered in red, covered in red that I did to him, and I stabbed, and I stabbed, and he lay down and he bled and the blood went into the concrete and he died and it’s my fault and I’m a killer, a killer, a killer.

  “Kirsty,” The Princess said. “Are you okay? You look ill.”

  Oh how I would have loved then to say I was ill and gone home. But then that would have made everyone suspicious, and what if Benjamin hadn’t got rid of the body properly? I could almost hear Legs, in her excited voice, “Oh yes, she was acting strange the whole day, officer.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “And no, I’m not seeing anyone. I’m not seeing anyone at all.”

  Inside, I added, Except for the man I killed, but that’s only in my dreams.

  They went on, and on, but I started to answer in animal-like grunts, and they went back to work. It is hard to maintain the illusion of normalcy when you’re a killer.

  * * * * *

  When work was over, I rushed home, closed the curtains, hugged Blinky, and turned on the TV, but I couldn’t concentrate. The colors flickered and the sounds undulated but the meaning behind those flickers and sounds was lost on me. My mind was still processing what had happened and what could happen.

  But also, I thought of him.

  Him, him.

  He’d come when I needed him and he’d taken care of it and he didn’t even know me. I wanted to thank him, but somehow I knew I’d never see him again. Something had compelled my fellow traveler to help me but that was it. We were done. Well, that’s what I thought as the sun fled, and outside the street turned quiet and dark.

  Then, knock, knock.

  I went to my door and looked through the peephole and there he was, wearing a gray jumper and faded blue jeans. I opened the door and he smiled. We stood like that for maybe a minute, him smiling and me staring, until he said, “Invite me in.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, flustered. “Come in, come in.”

  He walked in and I closed the door behind him and led him into the living room and we sat down. He reclined on the sofa as if he lived here and looked at me with those dark eyes. “It’s all done,” he said. “Oh, and the witness, the fat one, he won’t be bothering you.”

  I found I couldn’t look at him, so instead I stroked Rocky and stared down at him as he arched his back and mewed loudly. “What did you do?” I said quietly, afraid of the answer.

  “He won’t be bothering you,” Benjamin repeated, and tried to smile. But there was a nervousness in that smile.

  We were silent for a long time. Benjamin clicked his tongue and Rocky left me and went to him and climbed into his lap. He stroked him and rubbed him under the chin. Rocky squeaked and licked his hand. This made me less suspicious of Benjamin. Rocky is normally a mean cat and won’t let anybody apart from me stroke him. He licked Benjamin’s hand again and then climbed off him.

  I looked at Benjamin and he shrugged. “Animals like me. Anyway, I imagine you have some questions. Let me save you some time and explain everything.”

  * * * * *

  When he was done, I got a drink. Red wine, filled to the brim. I drank half of it in one gulp and then returned to the living room. Ben (he didn’t mind Ben) was a vampire, he told me. He’d found me by smelling the strand of hair he’d taken. He was six hundred and twenty-seven years old. He’d drunk Rat’s blood and dumped his body in the ocean, which was at least one hundred miles away, by running there, carrying the corpse.

  “A vampire,” I repeated as I took another gulp.

  “A vampire,” he said.

  I finished the glass and returned to the kitchen and poured myself another wine and came back to the living room.

  “A vampire,” I gasped.

  “A vampire.” He smiled. “I can do this all day…all night, I should say.”

  I sat there silently with the wine swimming in my stomach and his words swimming in my head, and thought, I am dreaming. That was the only explanation, I was sure. I would wake up in a cell, and all this would be a dream I’d created to hide the stark, horrible truth: I was going to spend the rest of my life in a cage.

  “You don’t believe me,” he said.

  But his words were quiet and hazy, as though echoing from mist. I was too busy listening to the jailor’s implorations and my fellow prisoners’ screams of innocence and the clank-click as the cell doors slid shut and locked. I was far away, staring up at a grotty, dank ceiling, the springy mattress digging into my back. I was going to be here forever, forever, for—

  Ben jumped to his feet and nodded at my wineglass. “A refill, yes?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, realizing it was empty.

  He nodded, and then, flash, blur. Nebulous mass of moving air. A slight breeze. Was the window open? And then, blink. The glass was full. “How—”

  “Vampire, remember?”

  “It didn’t spill,” I said, which seemed important for some reason.

  “I was careful,” he said. “Now, are you insane?”

  “Insane,” I said, taken aback. Though it was a reasonable question. I’d been thinking the same thing moments ago. “No,” I went on, truly offended now. “Of course I’m not insane. Sorry, but this isn’t normal for me, you know. I’ve never killed anybody before. I’ve never met someone who can move faster than light. I’ve never had to flee the scene of a crime!” My voice got louder, and I bunched my fists up, and the wine spilled onto the hardwood floor. I got to my feet. “Sorry, Ben, but this isn’t normal! This is madness! This is… This is… Argh!”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Ben said. “I want to show you something.”

  Chapter Four

  Ben led me through the streets to a council estate. We walked through a few rough streets filled with kids drinking from cans. Ben took my arm as we walked past the groups. Usually they would shout things at me, like ooh yeah, wouldn’t mind fucking her ha, ha. One look from Ben, however, with his night-black eyes and his bodybuilder-like muscles, and they were grave-silent. One guy, a little older than the others, maybe eighteen, stared a challenge at Ben. Ben let go of my arm and walked up to him, staring him straight in the eye. His friends rose and Ben smiled and said, “Better make it a good shot, ’cuz if I get up you’re all dead.” He said it with such calm, such self-confidence, as if any other outcome was unthinkable. The eighteen-year-old backed away and the others turned with him. Ben smiled and said, “Yep, thought so,” and then returned to me.

  “People like that rely on fear,” he said as we moved through the estate. “Take it away from them and they’re powerless.”

  “What if they had attacked you?” I said, trying to keep fear from my voice. For some reason I was embarrassed by it in Ben’s presence, though usually I would’ve freely admitted that they scared me senseless.

  Ben laughed a low, throaty laugh. “Then they would’ve attacked me.”

  My hand was on his arm. It was big and hard with muscle, and as he curled it so we could interlock arms, the muscle tightened. Finally, he stopped.

  “See that woman?” he said.

  He pointed to a lit window where
a woman with a nasty bruise on her eye was washing dishes. She wore a small smile that looked unnatural on her face, as if she was either forcing it or she wasn’t used to wearing it. She was beautiful, but she had that look of vulnerability that told me she’d been told she was ugly or had been demeaned and bullied, or she had been through something horrible. It was the look girls in school get if they’re bullied. It was a look I’d had many, many times throughout my life.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s the girlfriend of the man you killed. He repeatedly raped and beat her and stole her money to buy drugs. She left him twice, but he threatened her family so she returned to him. He’d beat her for anything, for coughing too loudly, for wearing the wrong kind of makeup, anything.”

  I looked again at her smile, at the insecurity in it. She wasn’t used to smiling then.

  “How do you know all that?”

  “I asked her,” he said. “Well, Detective Chief Inspector Bretel asked her.”

  “Why?”

  “To show you. Don’t you see? Killing that man, it wasn’t a bad thing. He’d killed people, too, when he was younger. He killed a girl with a baseball bat and another by strangling her. He was released from prison not too long ago.”

  “But killing is wrong,” I said quietly, the blood, the slack-jawed gaze, filling my mind.

  “Yes, yes, killing is wrong,” he said, with a dismissive wave. “But you don’t need to dwell on that. Think instead of this woman’s happiness. Because of you she’ll never have to spend hours cleaning the flat, terrified that he’ll return and beat her until his hand aches because one dish was out of place.”

  I tried to think of that as I stared at the woman, but all I could see was Rat’s reproachful, lifeless eyes, asking me, Why did you do this, darlin’? We just wan’ed to ’ave some fun! My breath came quickly and I fell down. Ben knelt down next to me, but he wasn’t there, he wasn’t Ben. He was Rat, gazing, gazing.

  “Go away,” I spat. “Go away, go away, go away.”

  Rat stared on, unflinching. He wouldn’t go. He would stay there and he would torment me and he would never leave me. His dead lips filled with life and turned upwards into a twisted caricature of a smile. “Darlin’,” he said. “You can’t leave me. We’re made fur each other. Don’t you get it?”

  “Go away,” I screamed, batting the air.

  Somebody far away was talking in Ben’s voice, saying words that held no meaning apart from their soothing sounds. I tried to hear them but I couldn’t. All I could hear was Rat, taunting, taunting. “You stupid slut,” he giggled. “I think we’re going to do this for a long, long time, darrrrrrrrrrrrlaaaaan. We’re gonna dance this dance until the white-suits come an’ take yur pretty little arse away. I hope I’m here when they do. ’Tis gonna be somethin’.”

  Suddenly, a hand was on my shoulder, but Rat hadn’t moved. I looked down at the hand. It was black and big and strong and soft. I put my hand on it and held it tightly. “It’s okay,” the voice said, and now I could hear the words. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  It’s okay. I held on to those words and tried to believe them, tried with every little bit of effort I could find, and slowly, Rat’s words and his face and the pooling blood dissipated, and from one mad place I was pushed into another, from a dead man to a dead man. Ben smiled, and for the first time I saw how sharp his canines were, much sharper than a normal person’s.

  He saw me looking at them and shrugged. “Vampire, remember?”

  I was on my back, though I didn’t remember falling down. I sat up and took a blade of grass from my hair. “I remember.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not really.”

  He lifted me to my feet and wrapped his arms around me. He whispered in my ear, from behind, his breath warm: “I need to tell you the whole truth. I need to tell you who I am. You might not want to see me again after, but you have to know.”

  “What truth?” I said, and found myself nuzzling into his arm.

  “I need to tell you the truth of how I came to be in the underpass that night.”

  “Tell me then.”

  He cleared his throat, and then turned me around so we were facing each other. He led me to a nearby bench and we sat, side by side.

  “I’ve lived for a long time…”

  * * * * *

  Benjamin Bretel had lived for more than six hundred years. He was a farmer when the Black Death (though they didn’t call it that then) surged and wiped out his entire family. “It was a dark time,” he told me solemnly. He caught the Death too. He’d heard rumors of a cure on the shores of England, a cure that made people whisper about the devil. But Benjamin was desperate. His daughter was still alive. So, almost collapsing from the Death, he carried her there. She died on the way. But he didn’t.

  The cure was vampirism. The vampires didn’t ask him if he wanted to turn. They just turned him. They said it was for the best. They said it was the only way he could live.

  Then came the centuries. “How to explain six hundred years of wandering?” he mused. “How can I make a human understand? I was lost, Kirsty. I was lost and I have not been found since—”

  “Since what?” I asked.

  He waved a hand. “Nothing,” he said, and carried on with his story.

  He kept out of human affairs. He wandered like a vagrant, watching people live their lives but never getting involved. He saw whole families live and die in what—for him—was a blink of the eye. He saw wars start and finish, innumerable men die. He watched history happen before him. And he stayed apart. He stayed away. He was a lost man—a lost dead man—and he felt he wasn’t worthy of participating in the affairs of humankind.

  And then, as the years rolled on, he saw me. He first saw me when I was walking home from work, through the very same underpass in which we’d met. This had been three years ago, and he had followed me ever since. I tried to interrupt here, but he held up his hand and said, “Just let me finish.” So I was quiet while he told his tale.

  He did not know what he found so attractive about me. He’d watched humans before, but never had he watched one for so long, so attentively. When he woke he would go to that underpass and watch me pass beneath it. And sometimes he would follow me home and stand outside my house. I asked him if he’d been planning to kill me. He looked hurt. “Never,” he said. “I would never hurt you.”

  He said there was some innocence about me that captivated him, something that reminded him of what life had been like before he became a vampire. “I remember once, before I became a vampire, after a long day of work, I watched a bird cross the setting sun, and I smiled to myself. It was so simple and yet so beautiful. This lone bird, a passing shadow across the sun. I never thought I’d recapture that feeling. But with you I got it every night.”

  He watched and he watched. And then, one night, when he was watching, as he always did, he saw Rat and Fat, and he heard my screams. He’d been infuriated. But he had never gotten involved in human affairs. He had never intervened, no matter how much damage we caused each other. So he watched.

  But then something happened, something he hadn’t expected.

  This innocent, beautiful, small woman had killed one of the attackers.

  “It was the most unexpected thing I’ve seen in all my years,” he said. “I knew then that I couldn’t just let you go to prison, especially when this man deserved it.”

  * * * * *

  A range of emotions passed through me then. I was angry because he’d been willing to let these men attack me. I was moved because he’d basically told me I was the first human in six hundred years who’d had an effect on him (quite the compliment!). I was slightly freaked out as I thought back over the past three years and wondered where he’d been lurking. But what I felt most of all was pity. I pitied this man who had been alone for so long.

  But it was too much. It was all too much.

  Ben must’ve seen something in my face, something that told him I was overwhelm
ed. “Let me take you home,” he said.

  “Okay,” I mumbled, feeling surreal.

  We returned to my house. Ben stood at the door and put his hand on my shoulder, a bit awkwardly. I could see that comforting people wasn’t his forte, and I was thankful he was trying. Knowing it was hard for him too made it easier for me.

  “I’ll let you get some sleep,” he said, and turned toward the night.

  “Wait,” I called after him. He stopped and half turned toward me. I tried to form words that would make him understand how I felt. But all I could manage was, “I want to see you again.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, and disappeared.

  I closed the door behind him and lay on my bed. A feeling came over me that I didn’t fully understand or expect. I reached out my arms and wished that Ben were beside me, holding me.

  I turned over and lay on my front, my breasts pressed into the mattress, and fell asleep thinking the pressure was from Ben’s hands and not a hard, worn-out bed.

  The next day at work, The Princess, Panda Eyes, and Legs went at me again.

  This time I smiled shyly. “I might be seeing someone,” I said and left it at that.

  Chapter Five

  Over the next month, Ben came to me every night.

  We walked together in the light of the moon and streetlights. He held me when I cried about what I’d done and he told me it was all okay. After two weeks, as though he’d been holding himself back, he caressed the back of my head and guided me toward him and kissed me passionately. I moved my hands across his strong back and felt the muscles as our lips brushed hungrily. I realized I had been holding back too. Wanting him. Needing him.

  He wanted to do more, but I told him not yet. I wasn’t ready. I had only had two lovers in my life, and I had only been with each of them a few times. I was inexperienced, and being with somebody like Ben filled me with anxiety that made me feel timid and weak. Each night, as he walked me home, he’d say, “Invite me in.” And I’d say, “Not tonight.” That was the good thing about vampires, I had to invite him in each time he visited; otherwise, he was physically incapable of crossing the threshold. He could defy physics, but it turned out physics could defy him as well.