Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  The same, small hand again grasped at his; the boy’s sallow face followed, emerging from the blurred shadows of the tunnel. He cawed in alarm and flinched violently, tearing his hand away. He stumbled backwards where four small bodies met his. They grabbed at his coat, barking and screeching. He felt their pinches through to his skin and deeper still, as if they were kneading the flesh to pliable tenderness, preparing to flense it free from the bone. A weary ache surged through his back and legs and between his ribs. He felt caught amongst them; when he twisted and pulled away from one he moved more deeply into the clutches of another.

  He resisted the urge to bat them away. His arms felt too leaden to indulge the instinct even if he’d wanted to. He looked to the dim glow up the track with diminishing hope. His stop. If only he could make it to his stop. He began to plod toward the light. Each heavy, clumsy step required mammoth exertion. Five sets of hands pulled him in five different directions. The strength of his dull will urged the over-sized, imitation rat king down the track. He glanced down and saw their mouths open and close, saw the strain in their necks, but he could no longer hear them. He could sense the roar swimming in his ears but couldn’t partition the sources or parse any significance from their pleas and complaints. Gradually, the light swelled and details of the station began to emerge. He saw stairs leading up to the platform on the side of the tunnel and moved towards them. His legs burned with protest as he hauled himself up from step to step. His thighs trembled; he felt his joints creak. His encumbrances threatened to topple him. But every time he was sure he would fall, there came a prod deep into his muscle tissue that spurred his legs to spasm and push ever upward.

  Suddenly he was on the platform. He looked for an exit sign but couldn’t see one. He was moving, stumbling forward. He knew he wanted to move away from the tracks but found himself drifting closer to them. He knew he had to look for a red sign to get out, but his vision spun; he could feel his eyes shake in their sockets as they cowered behind twitching lids.

  The children grabbed at him and mutely wailed and called on their gods of nonsense. One tried to wander off the platform and down onto the tracks, forcing him to reach out and bring it back. A train charged into the station, screeched its complaint, and stopped. I am so tired, he thought. They are killing me. They got on the train, two cars up from the last. He stumbled through the small maelstrom. He collapsed on a bench as the small fingers pulled him like taffy. Forward in the car, the big man in the hood kneeled over the prone form of the veteran, his shoulders bouncing up and down like a slow jackhammer. The man was calling something to him. Do you have a cell phone can you call 911 hey. Hey. He wondered how many more stops he had to go before he could get off and go home. The lights flickered as he let his head fall back on the seat.

  A Matter of Mirrors

  One hates to become a living cliché (yes, yes—or an unliving one), but it has become de rigueur for any vampire who has reached his or her sesquicentennial to write something of his or her experiences. I have observed this dissemination of half-truths and fish-stories with mild amusement. I admit that romanticizing our existence conveniently inspires the young and foolish to seek us out and offer themselves freely to provide succour. It’s a bit like having the pizza drive itself to your door before you call in the order. But I have never been one of those vampires who celebrate the psycho-sexual elements of the kill. Honestly, how can one get so excited about lunch? Nevertheless, I now find it necessary to hold this amateurish scrivener in my thrall so that he may detail one defining incident in my existence for reasons that will become apparent.

  I have no desire to write a series of novels about my life and death and un-life/un-death—having to grapple with the dissonant nomenclature of my existence is cause enough to be happy that a ‘short story’ should prove sufficient to my purposes. There is the added benefit of not having to spend too much time manipulating this writer’s mind: while his predilection towards dallying in his subconscious makes him the ideal candidate for this exercise, that same characteristic makes me feel languorous and dizzy the longer I maintain control. Also, I have read some of his other work, and I worry that his muddled aesthetic judgment will compromise my intent. He tends to omit proper endings, and in this case, that simply won’t do. Left to his own devices, I imagine he’d finish the story when the lights come up in the hall of mirrors and leave the reader to wonder what the hell happened next.

  Ah, yes. There is a hall of mirrors, and therefore a carnival. I guess I’m supposed to build tension and couch my ‘reveals’ with more skill, but I admit I’m no better a storyteller than this glorified typist I command. Besides, as soon as I mentioned the carnival, you would have intuitively leapt two steps ahead to the inclusion of that particular structure anyway, clever reader that you are.

  A great deal of my disinclination towards writing stems from having so little of interest worth detailing. While I have culled thousands of humans, I was never terribly artful or terribly beastly about it. And while I amassed the acumen provided by patience and compounded interest, I never enjoyed the success necessary for some ostentatious lair with a bevy of devotees. I liked police procedurals on TV and the occasional bubble bath. Was it so wrong of me to be so like you? It is true that most vampires have strong personalities, mostly due to the selection process whereby one is ‘turned’. Though there are no bylaws for membership in my somewhat exclusive club, people like me are more likely to end up as food than join the night legion. So how is it that my sire chose to turn me? As an impulsive and promptly regretted decision following a series of tedious circumstances that are not germane to my tale, that’s how.

  Another reason I have resisted the prose craze: The ‘lingo’, when written down, appears so very preposterous. The stories my kindred have written invariably detail the ‘rules’ in ever-varying iterations. Can you think of any other entertainment where learning the rules is meant to be a joy integral to the experience? Each author appears to emphasize the differences that favour their strengths and styles as hunters—small wonder, I suppose. Suffice it to say that most of what you’ve read is at least partially true. There is only one aspect of a vampire’s existence that I have chosen to detail; if you’ve failed to note the title of this piece or somehow missed my heavy-handed hints, allow me to state it directly: We are dealing with the issue of a vampire’s reflection.

  A vampire will not appear reflected in a mirror—entirely true. So where does that other old saw come from, A vampire cannot abide its reflection? Some have speculated mistakenly that while mortals cannot see a vampire’s reflection, vampires can see themselves, and hate what the mirror shows them. While I am no vainglorious dramatist, I like to think that I am still a handsome man and I would be only too happy to regard myself if given the opportunity. No, a vampire’s reflection is invisible to the immortal as well as the mortal. The problem derives from what the vampire does see in the glass: the souls of his victims.

  And I mean that, quite literally: their souls. Not their anguished faces in the last minutes of their lives, not egregious displays of goodness and happiness and familial love silenced or destroyed by their deaths, but rather the inner light of their immortality, the aspect of the divine that connects them with all things throughout eternity. There, that is the great secret: vampires call themselves immortal because their physical bodies (properly fed) are undying. And we propagate the myth that our destruction by the prescribed means will cast our souls to Hell. If only. In truth, our destruction means our annihilation. Humans are forever aware of their deaths looming over every act they do, and even the most faithful is afraid of his moment with the reaper and the uncertainty of what follows. Rest easy, fools. Your kind is beloved by whatever creator or will or sentience it is that holds this damnable universe together. My kind faces true death. And the repudiation of our hubris in the glass is terrible to see. Even a brief glance of one victim’s soul sears our eyes and chills our already dead hearts. Imagine my situation in the funhouse.
/>   ‘Well, it couldn’t have been that bad,’ you protest, divining that any sensible first-person narrative can’t end with the death of the narrator, but you’re wrong! I die at the end! Well, I die near to the end. In point of fact, you die at the end—again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

  (I’ll pause here to note that you needn’t worry about going alone into that good night. If it is at all within my power, the halfwit writing this for me will precede you.)

  I hope my lengthy preamble has entertained you, as I must now confess that, though it should do well enough to serve my purposes, the story of my demise is conspicuously lacking in suspense or irony or any other aesthetic one might consider ‘literary’.

  I had resided in the Quad Cities area for fifteen years and was beginning to consider re-location, partly as a measure preventative to my discovery, and partly because the area had only so much to offer one of even such tepid passions as myself. I blame this ‘itch’ for leading me to the carnival.

  Carnivals are for thrill-seeking yearlings. To hunt at one is a rite of passage, a dare, a teenager’s game. I suppose one never escapes from the desire to recapture one’s ‘youth’. The elevated heart rates of the excited patrons create a palpable energy for a vampire. It can be potent and inebriating, and one must keep disciplined or risk making poor decisions.

  The advantage of hunting a patron is that a carny will likely be blamed. Transients come to town, young couple is slaughtered—what else should the local authorities think? Hunting a carny is not explicitly a bad idea, either. Carnies have a reputation for unreliability and groundlessness—if one of their number suddenly disappears, his compatriots will find little sympathy from the local law, who will presume that the victim abruptly quit the carnival despite any protest to the contrary. The problem is that some small trace of Romany tradition still survives in the carnival circuit. A vampire is more likely to be recognized at a carnival than anywhere else—again, it’s partly the fault of my kindred and the attraction of its juveniles to the dangers inherent to the hunt. Obviously, those more adept at identifying a vampire are also better prepared to ward off the predator…or destroy it. I’m actually surprised that the method of my destruction hasn’t been heretofore employed. I’d like to believe that some instinct or lost instruction prevented its use; more likely, there had never been a vampire so preposterously stupid as to put himself in the situation. This is particularly hurtful for me to consider, as I have encountered some stupid, stupid vampires in my years. I suppose one is only resentful of dumb luck until one qualifies for its blessings.

  As you might expect of a mostly-sedentary vampire in a peculiar state of agitation, my mind was deliriously clouded by the excitation of the crowd. Though I might not have been a slavering fiend, I was nonetheless drunk on bloodlust. What reasoning I possessed was errant; I actually convinced myself that I wasn’t indulging in the heady pleasure but rather being properly patient in waiting for the crowd to thin! And I lingered on my prey; indeed, I absolutely mooned over her—that’s right, I chose a pretty, young woman for my victim. You’d think it was my first time. My mind was so muddled that I failed to realise such an exquisite beauty (was she? I can’t remember now) would unlikely be alone at the carnival, and was therefore most likely associated with the carnival. I couldn’t say how early in my pursuit it was that she knew she was being stalked. And whenever she (or her collaborators) recognized the nature of her pursuant, she made no sign. I suppose it’s possible that she ran up to every person she passed, grabbed them by the collar, pointed back at me and shrieked, ‘There’s a vampire after me!’ and I was too infatuated to notice. At any rate, some sign was given, some communication made, and the trap was set. I obligingly followed my prey into a darkened building without bothering to observe into which building it was I blundered.

  While vampires possess excellent night vision, it provides no special advantage in an unlit, enclosed space. So enraptured was I in my pursuit that I actually felt my way along the wall for a dozen paces and around two corners before I recognized the texture beneath my fingers. All delirium dropped away instantly as I was seized by panic. I turned, but it was too late. All the lights in the building came up simultaneously.

  I screamed and covered my eyes. I heard something scrape along the floor: The maze was being re-set—I could not retrace my steps to escape. I vainly hoped that I might break through the mirrors and create my own breach to the outside. I punched the mirror in front of me and shattered the glass. Burning pain erupted on my knuckles and I smelled my flesh sizzling. As unfortunately might be expected, the mirrors were backed with silver. My hand was shaking and twitching with pain. Another vampire of greater will might yet have been able to follow this course; I knew better of myself.

  I began to scurry through the maze with my eyes closed, feeling my way clumsily around turns. As I went, I continued to hear the scrape of the mirrors being repositioned, not near enough for me to lash out towards, always indistinctly behind or away from me. I collided with the glass barriers face-first several times; each bump sent a jolt of panic through me and I yelped openly. I heard muted laughter. I became angry. They were playing with me. And I knew that they had every intention of destroying me when they had had sufficient fun.

  ‘Come on, then!’ I shouted. I hoped that I could draw them out. If there weren’t too many, perhaps I could gut one and slip past the others before they could recover from the shock. I knew it was unlikely, but I would at least have the fleeting satisfaction of killing one of my tormentors.

  I shouted, ‘Show yourselves, you cowards!’ Yes, I had devolved to parodic villainy, which produced only more robust laughter, closer and all around me, but still indistinct.

  I was mad. I was desperate.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was illuminated by three thousand four hundred and seventy-one souls blended into a light of terrible purity endlessly reflecting upon itself. My eyes burst. You might expect this would grant me a reprieve from my punishment, but it was not so. I was already infused with the light, and my psychic torment only grew more monstrous with the loss of my sight. I mentioned before that the sight of a human soul repudiates a vampire’s hubris of immortality—this is what I then experienced in totality; I was repudiated, though not with a ‘No!’ but with an overwhelming ‘Yes!’ Every aspect of every second of my existence was proven false and weak and pointless, nullified by positivity. I was shown my powerlessness irrefutably: The tiny blemish that was the sum of every black deed I’d ever accomplished or dreamed was swept away effortlessly by the first breath of my first victim; this was but the beginning of my destruction.

  I do not know what happened to my body. I was beyond all physical concern. Did I wither and crumble, or did I shrink and crimple like an ant under a magnifying glass? Or did I simply fade away? I have wondered without answer. I expect that whatever disintegration I experienced happened rapidly, nothing—nothing—like what my consciousness perceived.

  But then, some moments or months into the onslaught, I had a thought—a brief fleeting brush of a thought at the back of my fractured mind, but a thought nonetheless. I don’t know how I managed it; I can only guess that any vampire who might have suffered this destruction in the past had accepted it, or perhaps even thrived in the romance of its torment and, by embracing it, rushed headlong to annihilation. But I was as no other vampire before me: a dull pragmatist. Yes, I believe it was the blasé tediousness of my character that somehow, out of the full swell of all light, allowed me the thought: Eternal torment is not death.

  Immediately following this epiphany there began a gradual dimming of the glare. Eventually, lines and angles and curves appeared; shapes began to emerge, one, then another, then…a million. And a million more—faces, staring at me. Judging, piercing eyes surrounded me in every direction. I thought that a new phase in my punishment had begun, though I wondered at the mildness of it compared to the experience through which I had passed. I dared to look more closely at the faces clo
sest to me. Yes, some stared with obvious anger and disapproval. But others smiled, or swivelled their heads slowly in small circles. I watched a seated woman write in her journal. Another flossed her teeth. A man shaved his beard.

  Yes, somehow, I was in the mirror now—or, more precisely, I was in every mirror. I was in the reverse dimension, present in every reflection—but, of course, as a vampire, I could not be seen. And though I doubt any spiritual magistrate intended this new existence as an accession to my sentence, it was a kind of torture I endured watching you.

  Yes, you, ‘gentle reader’—you, and the rest of your insignificant ilk. Watching you preen and primp and scowl at yourselves, hearing you cry and curse or ‘psyche yourselves up’ with bravado predictions of some dreary connection you might make with another slavering mortal fool, trying to turn away from your endless ablutions, witnessing a boundless gala of limited talent and clumsy lip-synced performances—all these agonies did I bear. But I no longer suffered the sear of soul’s light, and without that loathsome distraction, my suffering begat ire. You, in whom I had never marked interest beyond the passing needs of my appetite, had roused my contempt. And the darkness that you brought forth granted me the focus I needed to grow stronger.