Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller

by Linehan, Amanda

“Raven,” Lola said as she sat down in one of the mismatched chairs, “we’re looking for someone. Someone who’s not human, but not a vampire. Do you know of him?”

  Raven lifted her head and looked directly at Lola, and then at both me and Matt. Her eyes settled on me for longer than I liked.

  “Victoria knows,” she finally said.

  “No, she doesn’t. That’s why we’re here. We saw him the other—”

  “Victoria knows!” Raven said again and jumped up toward me. She grabbed my arm and her hand felt like a claw against my bicep. “You know,” she said again and smiled.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, finding my voice. “I don’t know. That’s why we’re here. We need you to help us find him.”

  “Can’t,” Raven said, still smiling, but in a small way. “Can’t.”

  She turned toward Lola then and seemed marginally less agitated.

  “Lola, dear, look to the fog.”

  “The fog?” Lola said.

  “Yes, follow the fog,” Raven said, sitting down at her table again. “It’s time for you to go.”

  “But—” Lola started to say, but a wave of Raven’s hand said she was done answering questions.

  Raven lit another cigarette and began muttering softly to herself once again.

  PART FIVE

  1

  Another week passed, which was about the time I needed to recover from our visit to Raven.

  We had no luck with trying to find our mystery man or deciphering Raven’s statements.

  If you asked me, I thought she was putting it all on (which is what I generally thought about Raven) and didn’t know up from down.

  But Lola thought otherwise. And either way, we couldn’t figure out what she was talking about, so we were just plain stuck.

  I got hungry again during this time and so did Lola, so we went out to hunt, which, for some reason, I didn’t relish as much as usual. Not that it didn’t satiate me because it did, but something was just different.

  Matt stayed behind as he didn’t feel the need to feed yet, and that might have been awkward anyway.

  I hoped Lola and I would see the strange man again when we were out hunting, but there was no sign of him.

  I didn’t know what else to do in the way of finding him, so I eventually dropped it all together and hoped I never saw him again.

  Matt and I had settled into a routine, which was comforting and horrifying all at the same time.

  Immortality was proceeding as normal. I would have counted off the days had there been anything to count to.

  One afternoon while I was reading, and Matt was doing push-ups in the space behind the couch, there was a knock at the door.

  I was startled for a moment and then got myself up and over toward the door.

  I never liked people just showing up at my apartment. It made me nervous. Not that I looked any different from any other woman my age. But still.

  I looked through the peephole, and the first thing I saw was the hat. Then the jacket.

  I turned around and got Matt’s attention and communicated that he should go into the bedroom and shut the door.

  He got up silently and did what I asked of him. Then I opened the door.

  “How did you find me?” I asked when there was finally no barrier between us. I was not friendly.

  “A friend always knows,” he said and smiled. “May I come in?”

  I stepped aside and let him walk past. He moved in the same stiff manner he had when I had seen him at the bar, and once again my stomach turned with revulsion.

  “Who are you really?”

  “Victoria, you’ve known who I was almost from the minute you saw me. There is no way you couldn’t have known. It’s the same way that I found you here. We’re connected.”

  I didn’t want to say it out loud. That would make it real, and too vivid for me, honestly.

  “But how can that be? You’re not even a vampire.”

  He smiled and took off his hat.

  He had just tuffs of thin hair, here and there, and his scalp was dented in places. Where it wasn’t dented, it was scaly. There were places where it looked like the flesh had melted into other parts, and in general it looked like he was being held together by the finest threads.

  Based on his appearance, I decided to amend my question.

  “What are you?”

  “I am the first immortal creature who does not need to feed.”

  2

  The order is ruined.

  Raven’s words rang through my head as I stared at the man in front of me who appeared to be rotting before my eyes.

  And who was immortal, but didn’t need to feed.

  The words rang true before I even had a chance to question them. That’s why I had felt so disgusted.

  He was an abomination. An anomaly that shouldn’t exist. He had tampered with something. Some process. No doubt a product of whatever gift he had—or has still. I wasn’t sure.

  “How is that possible?”

  “I searched and experimented until I found a way,” he said, almost wistfully. Then his eyes took on a different quality, and the fire inside of them burned me as I made eye contact.

  “The enzyme. In our blood, in our fangs, in our bodies. The one that creates. For many, many years, I wondered if it was possible for it to be... self-creating, I guess you could say.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, and despite myself, I was actually curious.

  “If you feed on someone, and you don’t drink them dry, the enzyme travels from your fangs into the human’s blood stream and turns their blood, making them crave blood in turn. Creating a vampire, in other words.

  But,” he said and began to pace the room. Oddly enough, his movements looked much more fluid than they had even a few minutes ago, “what if the enzyme that resides in your body could simply keep regenerating itself, so that when it was activated—by something—it would create again.”

  “But I’m already a vampire. Why would my enzyme create me all over again?”

  “Because, if you—in some sense—became a vampire over and over again. Say once per day. You would never have to feed on human blood—”

  “Because I would simply regenerate myself over and over again,” I said, finishing what I thought he was going to say.

  He smiled and nodded, indicating I was correct.

  I was still a little confused, though, and I ran over this process in my mind, getting the gist but not fully comprehending it. But one thing I was beginning to understand was what his gift was.

  “You’re a patterner.”

  His raised his eyebrows at me in surprise. He didn’t expect me to know that.

  “That’s right. And what does a patterner do? We fit things together. Two different, but alike things that fit together in a certain way.”

  “And our enzymes have a pattern to them,” I said and wasn’t sure how I came up with that.

  “That’s right,” he said, slowly, looking at me almost suspiciously. “But my biggest question was what is the pattern to the pattern?”

  I started to get nervous and wasn’t sure why.

  “I asked the question that every patterner would ask. What fits the pattern? And so I began to look, and to experiment.”

  I thought back to the night of my creation and remembered my slaughtered family and the missing animals, and something clicked with me in that moment.

  “I couldn’t figure out what it was that our enzymes would fit with. I procured as much blood as I could. I tried different natural substances, bled myself and combined my own blood with these things, and for many, many years, nothing happened. And then I had an idea.

  “What if I was looking in the wrong places? Assuming that vampire blood would have to be combined with something external to fix it? Assuming that the key to our lock was outside of us?

  “No. It was inside of us.”

  Chills crawled up my spine as I began to get an idea of where this was going.

  T
he idea of feeding on another vampire would never even cross most vampires’ minds, never mind having the actual desire to do so. Basically, it was considered cannibalism. I had never once heard of a vampire feeding on another vampire.

  “Inside of us?”

  “Not only do enzymes have patterns. They have particular patterns. When the enzyme from your body transforms a human into a vampire, your enzyme imparts a...code to the developing enzyme of the new vampire. Their enzyme is created from your enzyme.

  “Every vampire’s enzyme is unique. A specific personal identifier. But...vampires from the same line are all derived from each other.

  “If you could somehow combine the blood of one vampire with the blood that contains one of its derived enzymes, you could almost think of it like the original vampire is feeding on itself.”

  At that instant, I communicated to Matt to get ready to come out here when I gave him the signal. Matt was young and in a normal circumstance might not be a match for this man, but he was in a weakened state and I didn’t think he could take both of us. He thought he had me cornered in my apartment.

  I was somewhat surprised he hadn’t sensed another vampire here, but this also led me to believe that he was barely hanging on right now, and I had the feeling that he thought I was his key to strength.

  “Victoria,” he said, and he drew my name out like he wanted to savor it, “if one feeds on one of his own creations, the derived enzyme in that creation’s blood will sustain the original vampire over and over again, effectively causing that vampire to be recreated every single day and eliminating the need for human blood. In effect, to remain immortal, without paying the price for immortality.”

  Of course, I realized that something had gone wrong with his calculations as he had clearly already fed on one of his other creations. And now he wanted me.

  “I get the sense that something went wrong,” I said.

  “Well, there have been...unfortunate side effects.”

  He took off his jacket. The one I had originally thought was way too heavy for the weather, and underneath, it concealed the same manner of decay that his hat had.

  “Apparently, the self-regenerating process wears the body down, but fresh blood from another creation usually does the trick.”

  He came at me quickly, but not faster than Matt was able to make it out of the bedroom and put himself between us. He must have been watching because I hadn’t communicated anything to him.

  My creator’s eyes got wide as Matt put a hand against his neck and lifted him off the ground, flexing his newly formed vampire muscles.

  “Get out. And don’t come back,” Matt said, halfway between a growl and a whisper as he set the man back on the ground.

  “Your creation, Victoria?” the man said, looking pleased and shocked at the same time.

  “Yes,” I said, though I didn’t know why I was answering him.

  “You could join me,” he said. “You alone, outside of me, know the key. The key to perfect immortality.”

  From where I was standing it didn’t look so perfect.

  My creator gathered his coat and his hat, looked at Matt and proceeded toward the door. It seemed he didn’t think he was up for a fight.

  “Just one more thing,” I asked, purely out of curiosity. “What happens to your creations? The ones you feed on? Do they...die?”

  “Oh no. You know the laws as well as I do. Vampires do not die,” he said and then paused for few seconds. “They fall into vampiric sleep. Forever.”

  “They can’t be awakened? Not even with human blood?”

  “No. I’ve tried. They remain asleep.”

  “A trade,” I said. “Your perfect immortality, as you say, for their entrapment.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” he said, putting his hand on the knob. “Think about what I said.”

  He gave one last look at Matt, opened the door, stepped through it and was gone.

  3

  I thought I was beginning to understand Raven’s jumbled words.

  He had destroyed the order of things. Feeding on his own creations. Taking their lives, in a sense, after already having taken them once.

  I sat with Matt and filled him in on what he hadn’t been able to hear from the bedroom.

  “So if you fed on me, I would go to sleep and you would never have to feed again?” he asked after I was finished.

  “Apparently,” I said and was now thoroughly troubled.

  I realized just how close I came to being trapped in my own nightmare. Asleep forever, but never dead.

  I wondered how many other creations he had out there, and I figured it was probably a lot. He didn’t need me specifically. I had just been the most convenient to him.

  “Come here,” Matt said. He pulled me up onto his lap where he sat on the couch so that we faced the same direction and he was able to wrap his arms around my waist.

  I thought for a few minutes while neither of us said a word.

  “What’s vampiric sleep like?” Matt finally asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never experienced it.”

  “How does it happen?”

  “You stop feeding. You get weaker and weaker and finally you just go to sleep.”

  “What do you think it’s like?”

  I thought about this for a moment, and about what I had been told.

  “Well, from what I’ve been told, it’s like being awake on the inside while not being able to open your eyes or move your body. Your mind is awake, but nothing else. And the time...moves differently while you’re asleep.”

  “That sounds awful. Why would anyone want that?”

  “Because they get tired of it,” I said and felt an arrow of sadness shoot through my body. “It’s a way to pass centuries without having to actually live them. You now, you live through one century you’ve lived through them all.”

  I smiled, though Matt couldn’t see it, like I was making a joke, but I was deadly serious.

  “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know what the number one hazard of being a vampire is?”

  “Sunlight? Garlic? A stake through the heart.”

  I actually laughed at this, and then turned serious again.

  “Boredom.”

  I thought he might protest, question, or at the least be confused, but he just wrapped me a little tighter.

  “That makes sense,” he said and paused. “Are you bored?”

  I didn’t want to answer this because I knew what the next question would be afterward. But I did anyway.

  “Yes.”

  “Even with me?”

  “Yes. Even more so, in a way.”

  I slid off and sat right next to him so I could make eye contact.

  “There’s a reason vampires don’t pair up,” I said. “To love someone, even just to live with someone, doesn’t make you forget. It makes you remember.

  “Drinking, eating, sex with people you’re about to kill. Those things make you forget. But, love. Love makes immortality unbearable.

  “No matter how many love songs say they want their lovers for eternity. That they’ll stay together until the end of time. Nobody truly wants that. That’s the fear talking.

  “Immortality is a boundless cage you cannot remove yourself from. I feel the cage more clearly when I’m with you because, of course, I want you forever. But then I realize that I could have you forever, and when that happens, you become a part of my cage.

  “You’re odd, Matt. To spend your first weeks like this instead of trying out all your new powers, drinking and gambling and feeding for days on end just because you can.

  “Most vampires can’t stand it. But you actually want it.”

  “It’s all I’ve known,” he said.

  “You can go, you know. Anytime. You’re not obligated to me.”

  Matt nodded and then looked at me directly in the eye in a way that would have been uncomfortable with anyone else, but I felt like I could see right into him. And
I had a feeling he was doing the same with me.

  There was a knock on the door, but before I could get up to see who it was, Lola burst through.

  “The fog. I know what the fog is.”

  4

  Lola stood in the middle of my living room, turning around and around. Not fast enough to make her dizzy, but enough to keep her moving.

  “It’s always,” she pointed her arm at one o’clock, “right there.”

  She kept moving clockwise, indicating that she still felt the fog in the same place no matter where she turned.

  “I don’t know why it moves with me,” she said. “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

  She hadn’t said specifically, but I had to assume this was in connection with her gift.

  “So, when you locate. Your target is always still?”

  “Yes. If I were to locate you for instance, I would find you in a specific place. But if I moved, you would still be in the same place, right? I would be moving relative to you. But, with this, I’m moving relative to it.”

  “How can that be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is whatever this is real?”

  “Well...I’ve always felt it, in a way, but I ignored it, figuring it was some kind of blind spot or something. It’s foggy. Just like Raven said.”

  “Is it a person? Place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But Raven said to follow the fog. How can you follow something that always moves with you?”

  “We’d have to pick a spot. Like a ground zero or something. Your apartment, for instance. If I stand here, the fog is in that direction,” Lola said, indicating with her arm.

  “So the question is what spot do we pick?”

  “What do you think, Vic?” she said.

  I looked over at Matt, who had been listening, and had an idea, but I wanted to ask him first.

  “What do you think, Matt?”

  “Well, I don’t know if this makes any sense, but my first thought was where we first met. For me, at least, that’s my ground zero. But then I thought of the clearing.”

  That had been my thought too. It had just popped into my head. Something about the stars...