by Mel Nicolai
In the living room, the TV was on, but the sound was turned all the way down. Like the night before, Francine was asleep on the sofa. She was lying on her left side, her back to the TV, with the same old blanket pulled up around her shoulders. I knelt beside her and listened to her breathing. There was a slight wheeze when she inhaled. When she exhaled, her breath smelled surprisingly fresh, as if the vitality of her body had resisted the decline of her spirit.
I lifted the blanket away from her shoulders. She was still dressed in her work clothes. The motion of the blanket released the scent of her body, unmasked by perfume. Even after a century separating me from my human past, certain sensations, particularly odors, still occasionally ambushed me, transporting me back to that other life. The sweat of this young woman’s body was momentarily transfixing. A hundred years ago, I would have been entranced by it. But those were only memories. However precise they might be, they were drained of emotional content, irrelevant to my current concerns.
Gently, I placed my left hand at the base of her neck, and with my right hand simultaneously pinched her nose closed and covered her mouth. There was a moment of sleepy resistance, then her eyes sprang open. When I turned her head, rolling her onto her back so she could more comfortably see me, her eyes flared even wider with panic. She tried to inhale, but only created a vacuum pulling against the palm of my hand.
People don’t always behave predictably in a situation like this. Some are fighters and will take the struggle to the bitter end. There was a time when I judged the fighters to be worthy of higher regard. They didn’t just give up after a brief, token struggle. I couldn’t understand someone who wouldn’t fight for their own life; who acted as if resisting death were no more than a formality that had to be gotten through, and the sooner the better. But I no longer felt that way. I knew from experience that fighting could be a form of acquiescence, and what might first appear as passivity could in reality be the most stubborn resistance, a desperate tactic driven by a fierce determination to prevail. The latter was fairly common among women. Smaller and physically weaker, women have had to find more subtle ways to turn the tide in their favor.
Francine, however, neither fought nor feigned. I wondered if her passivity was a symptom of her depression. Maybe she had already thrown in her cards and was glad to let unconsciousness insulate her from the only thing she now expected from life: more pain. Whatever the reason, she fainted straightaway. When her body went slack, I removed my hand from her face. She inhaled once quickly, then her breathing steadied. I lifted the blanket and draped it over the back of the sofa, then picked her up and carried her into the master bedroom.
I laid her on the bed and undressed her. She had a lovely body. Her skin was very pale, almost white, with small breasts and small, pink nipples. There was a tattoo of a ladybug on a leaf on the left side of her abdomen, just above her pubic hair. An inch-long scar paralleled her left kneecap. Her feet were small, the toes slender and straight, as if they had never been tortured by stylish shoes. They smelled of sweat and leather.
I picked her up again and carried her into the bathroom, laying her gently in the tub. I expected her to wake up when her bare skin made contact with the cold porcelain, but she didn’t. I turned on the water, adjusting it to a comfortable warmth, and watched as the water line slowly edged its way up her torso. When the tub was about two thirds full, I shut off the faucets.
There was nothing left to do except finish what I had come for. Yet, I hesitated. It wasn’t the woman’s naked body that gave me pause, but my own lack of reaction to her body. I should have been used to it, but it still intrigued me that the human female, though no different in form than a female vampire, did not arouse in me the slightest sexual desire. The woman before me was undeniably beautiful. I could appreciate her beauty, but I felt no desire to possess her physically. I was as sexually indifferent to her as I would have been to the beauty of a flower or to some finely crafted objet d’art.
I had come to think of this absence of feeling as a symptom of the distance separating me from humans; a distance that time had steadily increased. But lately I’d begun to wonder if I might not have it all wrong. Maybe I wasn’t being honest with myself. Maybe my detachment was a way of protecting myself, not from the gap separating me from humans, but from the narrowness of that gap. As the years passed, I had told myself I was moving farther and farther away from humanity. I believed this growing separation was inevitable, a result of the physical conditions of my existence. I lived far longer than humans. I was not vulnerable to human diseases. My senses were far keener and my physical prowess beyond comparison. And on top of all that, I drank human blood, which reduced the human population to a food supply.
But at the same time, as the essential differences between human and vampire became more inescapable, I was gradually growing more conscious of an equally inescapable similarity; a similarity that would never go away. We, vampires and humans, both tell ourselves stories about ourselves, and about each other. I could not evade the fact that this was a part of me that was fundamentally and permanently human. This process of story telling was the very tool I used to understand those things that supposedly distanced and distinguished me from people. In other words, the explanations I gave myself of how different I was were themselves an ineradicable mark of sameness.
I had a knack for dawdling over this sort of speculation, but I had to cut it short. There were more immediate concerns. Taking Francine's left hand, I held her arm above the water’s surface and, with the razor blade I had brought along for the purpose, made a deep incision along the length of the vein in her wrist. There was a brief pause before blood began to pulse out of the cut. I leaned over and placed my lips around the opening, taking what I had come for. When she was close to death, I lowered her arm into the water.
Only a couple more things to do, to encourage the police to handle her death as a routine suicide. I cleaned my prints off the razor blade, then carefully pressed the thumb and forefinger of her right hand several times onto the blade, making sure it was covered with her prints, then dropped it into the bath. I had drunk most of her blood, so there wasn’t enough in the bath water to indicate that she’d bled to death. To fix that, I carefully loosened the drain plug so that the water would slowly drain out. By the time someone discovered her body, the tub would be empty and dry. It would look like her blood had simply gone down the drain along with the water.
I went back to the bedroom and folded her clothes, stacking them neatly on the bed. Noticing the photo of her husband on the dresser, I thought it would be a nice touch, in the absence of a suicide note, to use the photo as a poignant gesture of farewell, and moved it to the bed next to her folded clothes. Then I remembered the trunk in the closet. The night before, I’d been about to open it when Francine had gotten up from the sofa and come into the bedroom. I didn't have any particular reason to be interested in the trunk’s contents, beyond a certain fascination with people's mementos. More often than not, what I found curious about the artifacts humans chose to invest with sentimental value was their dreary uniformity, but that never seemed to curtail my curiosity.
It was early and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I turned on the closet light and slid the trunk out from under the hanging clothes. The contents were about what I’d expected, the usual junk stacked in sedimentary layers: a few old toys and memorabilia from childhood, a little league uniform, baseball glove, a box of photos, high school yearbooks, college diploma, and so on. Another little treasure chest of mediocrity. These artifacts were hardly evidence of a unique life. But then, maybe people just needed to remind themselves that they were normal. This guy’s name was Dean, and if the memorabilia could be trusted, he was pretty normal.
There was, however, one item of interest: a manila folder wedged in the back with the word “LIES” printed in block letters on the front. The envelope contained a collection of newspaper clippings and other documents relating to Dean Arnaud’s death. I was curiou
s about what “LIES” referred to, so I sat down on the floor of the closet and began to read.
The newspaper clippings chronicled Dean’s unsolved murder, along with the scandal of an alleged connection to drug trafficking. His body had been found by a maid in a Vacaville motel. Someone had put a single small-caliber bullet in the back of Dean’s head. There were traces of cocaine in the room, both on the nightstand and in the bathroom, and the coroner’s report showed cocaine in Dean’s blood. The whole business was apparently an embarrassment for the Sheriff’s Department. Arnaud was not officially involved in any drug-related cases and was off duty at the time of his death. The sheriff’s investigation was inconclusive. No arrests were ever made.
Along with the newspaper clippings were copies of several letters Francine had written to various officials in local and state law enforcement, as well as to California’s attorney general and the governor’s office. These were emotional pleas to find her husband’s murderer and clear his name. She was positive Dean had not been involved in any form of illegal activity. It was inconceivable, to her at least, that he was either selling or using drugs.
There were responses to some of these letters; all sympathetic and sincere expressions of bureaucratic buck-passing and indifference. In the absence of new evidence, everything that could be done was being done. The case was still open, but due to limited resources and case loads, blah blah blah. There was also a business card for Hamilton Investigations, LLC. The card was paper clipped together with two receipts for services rendered and a photograph cut out of the newspaper.
That was when things started to get more interesting. The face of the man in the photo was familiar, but it took a second to register. His name was Ron Richardson, a local real estate tycoon and building contractor. By all outward appearances, Ron was a respected member of the community, an active supporter of numerous cultural and charitable foundations, a family man with two happily married daughters, and a devout, though sadly divorced, Catholic. Outward appearances aside, he was also a major player in northern California’s illegal drug trade.
Ever since the drug business really started to take off, back in the 60s, traffickers had been a particular interest of mine. I kept an eye on the people who ran these organizations and was in fact indebted to them. I owed a large part of my financial independence to the fact that, operating as they do in an illegal and magnificently lucrative business, they often have very large sums of cash in their possession. Snatching a slice of their pie now and then was an easy way to fatten my bank account.
Richardson had been on my watch list for a couple of years. I’d been playing with the idea of coercing him into some kind of relationship that would allow me to forego the inconvenience of having to steal his money. There were basically two ways I could have gone about this. The less appealing would have been to provide him with some kind of service. I wasn’t too keen on this approach. It went against my general policy of avoiding complicated business arrangements with humans. The other approach was more to my liking: extort the money by scaring him senseless.
Ron seemed to be fairly typical of people in the higher echelons of the drug business. Barbarians, basically, these were people whose arrogance provided them with all the justification they needed to remain indifferent to the damage and suffering their greed inflicted on their fellow humans. In that sense, I suppose he wasn’t much different from your typical businessman. Typically, too, he put considerable effort into promoting his public image. Considering the scope of his illegal activities, quiet anonymity would have made more sense. But Richardson wasn’t the quiet type. His vanity required him to be in the limelight. I was curious how someone like him could manage to keep his public persona so pristine. I didn’t know of any negative publicity suggesting that the police were aware of his drug trafficking activities. This could have meant he was both smarter and more cautious than most. But more likely it meant that he was paying off all the right people.
Finding Richardson’s photo in Francine’s trunk was an unexpected coincidence, but little more than that. I probably would have dropped the matter had it not been for one other little detail. In the same block letters used on the envelope, Francine had printed the word “BLOODSUCKER” on the back of Richardson’s photo. I sat for a minute contemplating this word, “BLOODSUCKER.” It wasn’t a term I preferred to use in reference to those of my kind. In Richardson’s case the intent was no doubt figurative. The blood Richardson sucked from his victims was in the form of dollars. But it was one of those little blips on the radar that sometimes teased my sense of synchronicity.
Maybe Francine had discovered some reason to doubt Richardson’s public image. Maybe she even had reason to think Richardson was involved in her husband’s death. From a purely practical standpoint, if Richardson was mixed up in Dean’s murder, I might be able to use the threat of exposure to leverage money out of him. Of course, I didn’t need that kind of leverage. I was quite capable of applying my own. Either way, I thought it might be worth looking into. If I could uncover something that might make it easier to extort money from Richardson, fine. If not, it wouldn’t matter. I could fall back on my own distinctive methods of coercion.
I put everything back in the trunk, then returned to the bathroom for a final check on Francine. The water in the tub had already drained down several inches. Perfect. I left by the back door, locking it on the way out so the police would be less likely to suspect she’d had visitors.
Chapter 3
Any traumatic event can leave one feeling like his life has been split in two, divided into a before and after. War often does this to men who have survived combat. Natural disasters or a near-fatal illness can have the same effect. But no matter how traumatic an event might be, it will not break the underlying continuity of being human. Only death does that. Or becoming a vampire.
Being turned severed me from my human past. The split was not total—remnants have survived from my former existence—but the underlying continuity was cut. The first forty years of my life provided the raw material for what I was to become, but the change was so nearly total that the human part of my life seemed to be stripped of significance. Becoming a vampire was a corner around which, once turned, I could not look back. I don’t mean that I lost all memory of my human past. I remembered it well enough. But I couldn’t look back to my former life and hope to find answers about the present, about what I had become. For all practical purposes, the only life that meant anything to me began in 1908.
I was on leave at the time from a small private college in New York where, ironically, I taught humanities. My wife, Rose, and I had decided to spend a few months in Sicily and had rented a small cottage in Messina. Rose was an amateur archaeologist and was interested in the history of Sicily. I had been looking forward to the quiet and relative solitude to work on a paper I'd been writing. Like most academics, I suppose I had a rather inflated opinion of the importance of my own ideas. I took it for granted that my status as a professional gave me an authority that extended beyond the confines of my specific discipline. In short, I was a moderately pompous ass, but with a gift for gab and a quirky personality that made me popular in the lecture hall.
Our first night in Messina, my wife and I were sleeping, each in one of the bedroom’s two single beds. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., something that couldn’t happen happened. Something monstrous entered our room, sank its teeth into my wife’s neck, and sucked her life away.
At the time, I would have denied the very possibility that an extravagant creature from folk tales actually walked the earth the same as I did. My entire adult life, as I saw it, had been devoted to freeing myself from the various fallacies and superstitions of the past. A vampire was a scientific impossibility. Rationality banned the idea from consideration, and as so often happens in this life, reality bit back.
Rose was a petite woman. Her blood failed to satisfy the vampire's thirst. When her heart stopped, it was my turn. I remember having one of those dreams in which so
me disturbing element of the surroundings is integrated into the details of the dream. I dreamed of a weight pinning my body to the bed, a vague irritation on my neck, a swirling descent. Had nature not intervened, those dreamed sensations would have been the final illusions of my life.
At 5:20 a.m., seconds after the vampire had bitten into my neck, the city of Messina was struck by a devastating earthquake. Like most of the buildings of Sicily, our cottage was made of stone. The initial shock collapsed the wall next to my bed, along with the roof it was supporting. I woke wide-eyed just as the whole thing came crumbling down on top of me. I felt the stones hit, but instead of crushing me, there was only the sudden impact of great weight cushioned by something that had absorbed most of the blow. Something on top of me had shielded me from injury. I heard a low, animal-like growl, half pain, half fury, then whatever it was coughed in a single convulsive spasm and a gush of blood sprayed my face. That spray of blood was the baptism of my new life.
As far as I could tell, I wasn’t injured, but I couldn’t move under the weight of the rubble. There was an intermittent stench every time the thing on top of me exhaled. It was making me nauseous, but I couldn’t turn my face enough to avoid it. Then I remembered Rose. In a horror of panic, I tried to free myself, kicking and twisting with all my strength. I managed to scrape the skin off my shins and elbows, but didn’t accomplish anything else. I called her name several times, but there was no answer. The night was silent except for the wheezing breath of my companion and the throbbing of my own pulse in my ears. I tried again to free myself, but it was pointless. The end had come. I resigned myself to the inevitable and soon lost consciousness.
I don't know how long I was out. Pain eventually woke me up. My neck was on fire and I was experiencing an unbearable agitation, like electric heat that seemed to be radiating from every cell of my body. Waves of some nauseating energy swept through me, and I hurt, everywhere. The pain was beyond anything I had ever experienced. My entire body seemed to be generating it, each wave growing more intense, until the agony made me long for death.