by Adam Rex
“Um…I like Meat Cake and this one graphic novel called Ghost World. And a lot of Vertigo stuff. Especially Sandman, but of course that’s not a series anymore.”
“Yeah, I liked Sandman,” said Jay. “I have a few collections of it. Now that guy writes movies and books and things.”
“Cat is having me read it right now,” said Sejal. “I like it okay so far.”
“It gets better, I swear,” said Cat.
“It’s gets better for a while, but…” said Doug, “Neil Gaiman doesn’t know how to end things, you know? He builds everything up to this huge battle in Dreamland and then, poof, it doesn’t happen.”
“Um, spoiler alert,” said Jay.
“It doesn’t happen because a big battle would have been juvenile,” said Cat. “It—Sejal, cover your ears and hum for a bit unless you want the ending ruined.”
Sejal covered her ears and sang something Indian with lots of syllables.
“Okay,” said Cat, but she couldn’t continue without laughing. Sejal laughed back but didn’t stop singing. “Okay. The Sandman doesn’t fight because he’s ready to die. The mess he gets himself into is actually this huge plan he’s been setting up for centuries without even realizing it.”
“I know,” said Doug. “I know. Because he’s depressed, and he doesn’t want to be the Dream King anymore, but he doesn’t have the guts to just off himself.”
“He feels too responsible for his kingdom,” said Cat, her voice getting sharp. “So he has this…secret plan to remove himself and be replaced with someone better, but the only way he can do it is to…not even let himself know he’s doing it and…I’m not explaining it well.”
“Because it’s dumb,” said Doug.
“It’s about him realizing he’s not a good person,” Jay mumbled. “He knows deep down he should change, but he’s too proud to admit he was ever wrong.”
“Yeah,” said Cat, and she smiled at Jay.
After a moment she threw a pillow at Sejal, and Sejal stopped singing.
“What was that?”
“Jana Gana Mana,” said Sejal. “It’s the Indian National Anthem.”
“You guys are probably right,” said Doug. He got down on the floor with Sejal. “Jay’s always right about this kind of thing.”
Cat put some music on. “I promised pizza,” she said. “Is Agostino’s okay?”
“You don’t have to do that,” said Jay.
“Whatever, I’m doing it.” She checked her phone. “I’ll be right back, I’m not getting any bars in here. Sejal, come with me.”
Sejal and Cat walked back down the hall, followed by the dog. After the front door opened and shut, Jay rounded on Doug.
“Don’t you think you’re…I appreciate it and all, but don’t you think you’re laying it on a bit thick?”
“What are you talking about?”
“All your flattery. It sounds fake.”
“God, there’s no pleasing you,” said Doug. He’d actually been enjoying it, being so complimentary. He’d noticed there was a way you could do it that made you look even better than the person you were complimenting. But it kind of ruined things if the subject of your praise was going to be all ungrateful about it.
“Just act normal,” said Jay. “Except don’t make fun of me as much. That’s all.”
“Well…you act normal. Except not so retarded. Then there won’t be anything to make fun of. And you’re acting totally weird, too.”
Jay frowned. “No, I’m not.”
“You are. You’re all, ‘I like Sandman, too, Cat. We have so much in common. Watch me code on your computer with my dick.’”
“Shut up.”
“Screw this,” said Doug, and he shuffled out to the front door. Cat and Sejal were coming back in as he reached for the knob.
“Oh! Hey,” said Cat. “They’re really backed up because of Labor Day. So the pizza won’t be here for an hour.”
Doug looked at his watch. “I have to leave in an hour. To see this…mentor guy by Clark Park I’ve been seeing.”
“Mentor?” said Sejal.
“Uh, yeah, he’s like a career counselor. You know. Helping me figure out what to do with my future.”
Cat announced that she was going to see how her computer was coming along, and left the two of them alone in the hall. Now the stale house air seemed to crackle and bloom. He wanted to seize Sejal and hold her close. He wanted to shrink her down and carry her around in his tiny pockets.
“Maybe I should blow off my appointment,” he said. He couldn’t remember how to stand. What did he usually do with his hands? “The company is better here.”
Sejal was looking at a potpourri arrangement on the side table. “Your future is important,” she said.
22
ORIGIN STORIES
YOUR FUTURE is important, Doug thought as he biked the last few blocks to Stephin’s house. What did that mean? Important because she wants to be a part of it? He wondered if it was possible he was going to marry Sejal. He pictured the ceremony: huge families, lots of pink and red and orange, flowers everywhere, molting flakes of gold. Sejal with painted hands, in some complicated outfit, wrapped up like a present. Doug with a big mustache for some reason.
They get married and then they live together in some cramped little New York apartment. The trains rattle their knickknacks every fifteen minutes, but that’s okay, they have each other, taking long walks by the river and breakfasts in the park.
They don’t move to New York, they sail the world instead; and at each port of call the local constabulary calls upon them to solve mysteries in their own playfully pugnacious fashion.
So far away was Doug that he almost missed Stephin motioning to him from a bench in the park across from his house.
He had on a wide-brimmed hat that Doug thought looked effeminate. Like something his mother would wear to garden. But then he remembered his new, complimentary outlook.
“I like your hat,” he told Stephin.
“I like your hooded poncho. I believe we share a bad habit of not feeding enough? I am a bit sensitive to the sun.”
“Why did you meet me out here, then?”
“Because I believe, regardless, that I need to get out of the house. Can we walk and talk?”
“Sure. Um…is it okay if we don’t meet too long today? I have a lot of homework to do.”
They walked deeper into the park, away from the house, past groups of kids playing with foam swords. It looked to Doug like the sort of game he and Jay and Stuart used to play. He had to resist an urge to shout at the kids, “Run! Vampires!”
“I don’t doubt you have homework,” said Stephin, “but that’s not really why you’re impatient to leave, I think.”
“How do you know that?”
“I’ve been watching people a long time. I’m good at reading them. And you’re a teenage boy, which makes you about as challenging as Dick and Jane.”
Doug huffed. “Fine. It’s a about a girl—big surprise, right?”
“What’s her name?”
“Sejal.”
“Hm. A little padma from the subcontinent, eh?”
“Mmmm, sure. Yeah.”
“Does this Sejal also know about your condition?”
“About being a vampire?” asked Doug. “No. No, definitely not. I wouldn’t tell her. It would be dangerous.”
“And yet how very dangerous not to. Can you afford not to tell her? If you truly care? The Vampire’s Dilemma—you must have these kinds of human connections to retain your humanity. And yet they’re impossible. And without them you’ll become nothing but a hunter and a hermit.”
And a fucking downer, thought Doug. And a completely depressing pain in the ass.
They circled the park, twining in and out of its concrete paths. At all times Stephin seemed to be distantly watching his leprous house.
“So,” said Doug after a long silence, “did you ever have…someone? Were you ever married?”
“I never
married. But, yes, there was someone.”
“What happened?”
Stephin cracked a rare smile. “What a question. He died.”
“Oh. Sorry.” He? You’ve gotta be kidding me.
“We’ve been away long enough,” Stephin said, then turned abruptly toward the house.
Inside, seated again in the small study, Stephin seemed more animated.
“So it occurred to me after your first visit that we’d spent the better part of the hour not talking about anything. I blame myself. This time I’ve made a list.”
Doug straightened.
“First, Miss Polidori has been most insistent that I glean certain information from you. Her ghoul Asa has been at my door twice in three days. Someone should do that man the favor of killing him, and I mean that in the friendliest sense. So. Perhaps you’ll tell me about the hazing that got you into our little fraternity.”
“Um. You mean…you want to know how I became a vampire? Like my origin story?”
“If you don’t mind telling me.”
“I guess I don’t.”
“Spare no detail, please.”
Doug looked at his fingernails and told Stephin about the cabin in the Poconos, near Hickory Run, and the vampire that had come at him through the trees. The vampire was naked and wounded; the vampire held him down and fed. Then there was a bat where the vampire had been, and Doug told Stephin of the coyotes and what came after. When he finished, Doug had been speaking uninterrupted for seven minutes, and even now Stephin said nothing. Doug looked up.
“I am quiet,” Stephin said, “because I’m trying to remember if you’ve always had such trouble with pronouns or if you’re merely trying not to divulge that your corruptor was another boy?”
Doug sighed. “Yeah. Another guy.”
“Is this so terrible?”
“It wasn’t a gay thing or anything. He’d just been made a vampire himself and he was out of his mind.”
“In the Poconos. Near Hickory Run.”
“Yeah. He’s an okay guy. We’re sort of friends. I hope you don’t have to tell anybody I told you. I don’t want him to get in trouble.”
“He attacked you,” said Stephin. “Killed you.”
“Yeah…but he didn’t do it to be mean or anything. He’s not a big dumb monster like some of the guys at my school.”
Stephin smiled—a joyless sort of half smile, like a smudge on an otherwise unused sheet of paper. He rose and faced a dusty sideboard topped with glasses, plus an old clock that never changed and a small telescope. “All teenagers are monsters. Misunderstood, hated, blamed for the evils of the world. Also, reckless, selfish. With huge appetites as they slowly change from innocent things into something new. Did you know there’s a part of the brain, the part that makes plans, considers consequences? It’s sort of the part that makes us responsible and less destructive. Teenagers don’t have that part of the brain.”
The eyepiece came off the telescope and, aha, there was liquid inside. Stephin poured himself a very full tumbler of something brown.
“That is, they do, of course, but it hasn’t finished growing yet. It hasn’t developed. It’s not entirely human. Would you like a drink?”
Doug nearly answered that he wasn’t allowed to drink alcohol, but stammered out a “sure” instead. He wasn’t allowed to drink blood, either, but here he was.
“Mescal,” said Stephin, and handed Doug a glass of it.
Doug sipped cautiously and was immediately glad he did. It was like drinking a campfire.
“So, teenagers,” said Stephin, “they careen through life, self-centered, driving too fast, cursing those who care for them, gorging themselves on the world…how is it not monstrous, how they live?”
Doug nodded. He knew kids like that.
Stephin settled again in his warm, leathery chair with his warm, leathery drink.
“Second,” he said, consulting his list, “is for me to discover if you’re aware of a basic…cable…television vampire hunting show that’s been airing a sort of docudrama about you.”
Doug stiffened. “Oh. You know about that?”
“Not a bit of it. That’s just what it says in Miss Polidori’s note. I don’t own a television. ‘Basic cable television vampire hunting show?’ That’s at least three words I didn’t realize you could use together in a sentence.”
“It’s a pretty good show,” said Doug. “You should watch it.”
“Is it a hunting show for vampires or a show about hunting vampires?”
“The second thing.”
“Hmm.”
“It’s on tonight,” said Doug. “I’m going to watch it, of course. Find out what they know. But…they picked up my trail in San Diego, and all the commercials for this week’s episode make it look like they’re still out there.”
“I’ve admitted this is not my area,” said Stephin, “but it’s my understanding that most television programs are filmed in advance. Could they not be here right now? Could they not be right outside my door?” Doug didn’t answer, and Stephin continued. “I believe I’ll do a little research into this show of yours. In the meantime, take care, lie low, caution, and so forth. If these hunters come for you, you can expect no help whatsoever from the rest of the Delaware Valley Society Vampires.”
Doug nodded.
“And,” Stephin said while frowning at his list, “and for number three I seem to have drawn a picture of a tiny goat with a party hat. Give me a moment while I try to remember if this was significant.”
Doug fidgeted. He wondered if he needed blood again, so soon. This drink was really going to his head.
“No. I believe it’s just a goat,” said Stephin.
“There isn’t just, like, a manual I can read, is there?” asked Doug, enunciating hard to keep from slurring. “It’s been really confusing. Getting changed, I mean. Like, after the shock and everything wore off, I noticed I wasn’t branded by Fun-Time anymore.”
Stephin sipped his drink. “‘Branded by Fun-Time’.”
“Yeah. Sorry—like, I worked at this movie theater all last year and part of the summer. And they have the most crappily designed Fun-Time popcorn maker, like it was from before we invented safety. I think Ford’s Theatre made Lincoln some popcorn with this thing.”
Stephin cracked a faint smile.
“It has a big metal kettle where you put the corn and oil,” Doug continued, “and when the corn’s done popping, you pull a handle and the whole thing swings violently out at you and dumps the popcorn below. Every person the theater’s ever employed has caught that kettle on the same spot on their left arms, and they all have a burn there that reads ‘Fun-Tim’ backward. Except me. My burn went away. Becoming a vampire did that for me, at least. But what being a vampire apparently doesn’t do is fix your eyes. I would have expected some Spider-Man moment where I discover I don’t need glasses anymore, but I still do.”
“Bats are not renowned for their eyesight,” said Stephin to his drink.
“I just…want to know how it all works. I thought there would be rules. Some Official Handbook of the Vampire Universe.”
“There are rules,” said Stephin, “and I would swear that they change all the time. I haven’t told you my ‘origin story.’ Are you interested? You may find it useful, and I am just now drunk enough to tell it.”
“Sure.”
Stephin rose slightly and resettled in his chair, then spoke. “I was in the Union Army. During the Civil War. Or do you call it the War Between the States? What have your schools taught you?”
“Civil War.”
Stephin nodded. “There was a man in my brigade, Tom North, who was like the Virgil to my Dante. He attended me in that hell and became very dear to me. You’ll think that he has very little to do with my turning, but this story always begins with Tom North.”
Doug nodded, because it seemed like the thing to do. Stephin wasn’t looking at him anyway.
“Tom had his belly opened for him by cannon fire. It
could have hit me, but he was standing in front. Do you know what I thought?”
Doug shook his head. When Stephin didn’t continue, Doug said, “You probably…wanted revenge. On the Southern soldiers?”
Stephin said, “I thought, Thank the Lord it wasn’t me. Think about that.”
He emptied the glass.
“Anyway, it was moot. I fell not two minutes later.
“The United States Army didn’t know quite what to do with all the dead bodies back then. They thought I’d died. Or perhaps they didn’t, but they knew I wasn’t long for this world and wished to cover me like an old sofa should company come. I don’t know. I was dragged to the center of camp with some of the dead men and covered as the sun set. My head fell to one side. Unable to lift it, I stared around a fold of canvas at the blue body of Tom North beside me, his face open to the sky, frozen as if sickened by what he saw there. Or didn’t see. The length of him was painted with a bright orange stripe of sharp sunlight, and then that color did rise, and fade, until nothing but the tip of his nose still glowed with warm life. And as that little flame went out and night came on I imagined I’d watched Tom give up the ghost that very moment. A minute later they covered him, too.
“Soon the sounds of the camp dimmed and died away. I was forgotten, perhaps, but I could still see Tom’s stiff shroud in the moonlight, could still smell campfire and copper, and I knew I still lived. Then there came into my sideways world a horrible figure. He appeared at the edge of my sight, very tall, I think, unsteady at the knees as though they’d been savaged and dislocated. But what struck me most was his wide, bloated torso, which I believe was quite red, covered here and there with tatters. Atop this, his head seemed tiny and keen, and with his long, thin limbs he looked like a monstrous tick just emerged from the woods.”
At this Stephin focused on Doug’s face for perhaps the first time that day, and asked if he might fix Stephin another drink. Doug rose, thinking that the story sounded just a little rehearsed. Like a monologue. He filled the glass again, expecting as he did so that Stephin would continue, but he didn’t. In fact he didn’t speak again until Doug had retaken his seat and the glass was half empty.