raised by wolves

legbreaker part 6

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:53:11 -0500

I find the first of them downtown. The files Lusky gave me are some real professional work. I look right to the addresses. It’s still early. Thugs only go out at night. I hail a cab.

I knock on the door and the thug who blasted The Boss opens the door. He’s still got a length of bandage around his hand where The Boss got him with his straight razor. His numb eyes go wide when he recognizes me.

“You!” is all he manages to utter before I’m driving my fist into his face. It makes a sound like two steaks slapping together while porcelain breaks in the background. His head snaps back and there’s a spray of blood with teeth in it. This gets on my shirt, which is one I just washed. I bend down and hoist him back to his feet. He’s out cold. His eyes are rolled back into his head and his tongue droops out of the corner of his mouth. I punch him again and let him fall to the ground with a sound like fruit falling down the stairs.

I close the door and lock it, then I light a cigarette.

I don’t give him a chance to talk. I torture him, break his fingers, then his knees, then his elbows and then his toes. I stuff a sock in his mouth and duct tape it there to keep him from screaming. After the second knee, he’s bawling like a baby. I spend the afternoon kicking him around the apartment. I find a cabinet full of wrenches and screwdrivers and pliers and then I use those on him, too. He looks at me so pathetically.

I finish him off by picking him up by the neck and pitching him like a baseball out the window. He falls five stories and lands on a parked car. A woman screams, just like in a movie. I leave the apartment fast, but calm, before anyone thinks to even look up. On the ground, there’s a small crowd gathered around the trashed car and the trashed thug.

I don’t believe it, but he’s still gurgling. Someone is screaming to call an ambulance. I step close to the thug and lean in close.

“You got it easy,” I whisper in his ear. I reach into my waistband and pull my gun. “The others won’t be so lucky.”

I pull the trigger. I pull it again to make sure. The small crowd is growing, and now there’s more people screaming. I hail a cab.

I’m gone.

It’s about 7 pm when I’m through. This leaves me with fifteen hours to find out what’s so important to Lusky about the shares. It’s going to be a long night.

I tell the cabbie to drop me somewhere with cheap coffee. None of that chain crap. I like my coffee with a layer of grease on top, from a pot that hasn’t had more than a light rinsing between brews in years.

He lets me out on a corner and I pay him. It’s a little diner, Maura’s. I drink two pots straight and leave a big tip.

I arrive, once again by taxi, at the corner closest to The Crab. The lights are all out and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone inside. It’s been closed ever since The Boss went. I wait for the cab to pull away, then walk around to the back door, the staff entrance. I reach up to the top of a light fixture over the back door to grab my key. I figure it’s easier to leave it here, and no one could reach up there without bringing a step stool. And besides, who would want to break into The Crab?

My key is missing.

I lunge for the door, but it’s locked. I reach up and check again for the key, but it’s really not there. Frantically, I check my pockets. I grab ahold of the door knob, almost reflexively, and give it a good yank. It pops right out, the lock inside snapping clean from its fittings. The door swings gently open.

I pull my gun from my waistband and step cautiously inside. It’s dark.

Moving in the dark through this hallway is easy. I feel like a bat, navigating by sonar. I listen. I move as quietly as I can towards The Boss’s office. When he was alive, I would never have dreamed of going into his office without permission. But The Boss is gone. He would understand.

The first sign of anything amiss is a thin line of light projecting from the crack under the door of The Boss’s office. Someone is here. I can almost smell them.

I press close to the door. There is a soft, trembling sound, almost like coughing coming from the other side. Whoever it is, isn’t moving around. They aren’t moving anything else, either. Sleeping? Waiting? How many? These and other questions flood my mind, but my body knows what to do. I should always remember to listen to my gut. My head gets clouded so easily. Lugs like me should always listen to their guts.

I kick the door to splinters and get ready to make a mess.

Sitting in The Boss’s old chair behind his heavy oak desk is a woman with a scarf wrapped around her head. A pair of dark sunglasses are on the desk in front of her. She’s holding a small square wooden object. A picture frame. She screams and drops it, and the glass shatters.

“Don’t shoot!” she shrieks. “Please don’t shoot!”

I don’t. But I keep the gun trained on her. She knows the drill. She puts her hands up. She looks at me and I see her lips tremble. She’s older. I can see the wrinkles at the corners of her glassy gray eyes and her thin mouth. She’s been crying. That was the coughing sound, I realize. Buy why?

I stand silently, utterly still. I see her bloodshot eyes down the barrel of my gun and I decide whether to waste her or not.

“Who are you?” I demand, finally breaking the silence.

She replies by bursting into tears.

I haven’t got time for this.

“Who are you?” I say again, louder, more forcefully and she drops her arms. She covers her face with her hands and sobs like a fire hydrant in the summer.

“So you really don’t know?” she manages to squeak out between sobs. “You really don’t know?”

There is a look of utter defeat on her face. The color has all gone out of her, the way The Boss looked all done up in the hospital. She sobs.

“Don’t know what? Lady, what are you talking about?”

“Oh, Arthur,” she sobs. The hair stands up on the back of my neck. My name is Arthur. My real name is Arthur.

“Oh, Arthur, don’t you recognize your own mother?”

legbreaker part 5

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:00:00 -0500

The Pallid Mallard is a squat brown building down town with neon signs advertising all sorts of stupid expensive beers, and big sandwich boards outside advertising lunch specials that are still overpriced. My stomach growls. The door jingles when I walk in, and the girl at the desk in the front’s eyes go wide when she looks at me. She’s a pretty little brunette. She looks scared to death. I smile and ask to be seated with Mr. Lusky. She swallows hard and squeaks out: “Would you like a menu?”

Against my better judgement, I say yes. She hands me one and then tells me to follow her. She leads me through the restaurant with it’s low-hanging orange light fixtures and the smell of fried food. I’m so hungry at this point I could eat the upholstery on the booths. She leads me down a small flight of stairs and I almost run my head right into the ceiling. This I assume is the private lounge. The Crab had a Vee Eye Pee area, where The Boss and his friends would bring girls from other clubs back to dance after hours. I don’t see any girls, but I can only guess that it’s because the Mallard isn’t closed.

At the other end of the room, opposite the small flight of stairs is our Mr. Lusky. He’s dressed in the same gray he was the day of the funeral, and he’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s dark down here. He’s idly twiddling a french fry between his fingers. Then he looks up and sees me. I see his eyebrows raise and the fry falls back to the plate.

“Well, well, well,” he says and stands up, side-stepping around the table. “I didn’t think you would come. This is a very pleasant surprise Mr…Legs, was it?”

I nod and he reaches out to shake my hand. I don’t shake hands unless I’m going to break someones arm. After an uncomfortable second, Mr. Lusky drops his arms and exhales heavily.

“Please, have a seat,” he says, motioning to the table. He takes the menu from the girl, who is still standing silently a few feet from us.

“Thank you, Rebecca,” he says and hands the girl a small wad of bills. “You’ll let me know if anyone else comes in to see me?”

“Yes, Mr. Lusky,” she squeaks like a dog toy and then quickly shuffles away, back up the stairs.

Mr. Lusky smiles. “She’s a good girl,” he says. “It’s always a pleasure stumbling upon truly reliable help.”

He looks at the menu in his hands and then back at me. “Were you thinking of eating? Not that I mind, I was just curious. I would be more than happy to pay for your meal, just for the simple fact that you actually showed up. What do you say?”

I want to tell him he’s just said the magic words. I still can’t imagine what this whole meeting will be about, but now I’ve got a free meal coming to me. Maybe I’ll get the open-face sandwich after all.

“I say that sounds excellent, Mr. Lusky. Thank you very much.” I smile and take a seat. Lusky reaches into his pocket, and I can hear a faint buzzing sound come echoing from far away up the stairs. About a minute later, a waitress comes to take our order.

“Whatever he wants, put it on my bill,” Mr. Lusky says. The girl nods and pulls a pad of paper and a pen from her apron. I open the menu and read off anything that sounds appealing.

I get the appetizer combo, which is onion rings, french fries, jalapeno poppers, chicken fingers and mozzarella sticks, an order of stuffed grape leaves, a vegetable quesadilla, a gyro, a plate of nachos, a hamburger cooked medium rare with everything, a cobb salad, a whole apple pie and finally the open-face sandwich of my dreams, salami, mayo, mustard, onion, sauerkraut, hot sauce, heaven.

Mr. Lusky almost falls out of his seat laughing when I conclude the order, his face turns red and sweat beads up on his forehead.

“My God,” he says after the waitress scurries off. “Skipped breakfast, huh?” I smile.

“Well, I suppose I brought it on myself, telling you I’d foot the bill. But I don’t mind. They usually comp my meals here anyway.”

I should’ve asked for a glass of water. Mr. Lusky leans forward, breaking out the same conspiratorial tone he used at the funeral.

“You see, I’m a very important man. Well, not so important as some, but certainly important enough. There are circles I travel in that afford me quite a bit of influence on certain matters. Real estate is one. This is one of the only restaurants in town that I don’t own. I suppose that’s why I still come here. Shipping is another. I own a fleet of trucks that moves forty thousand tons of products along the coast every four hours. Fruit, vegetables, consumer electronics like computers and televisions. All good, honest enterprises, I assure you. But as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’m also involved in a number of…shall we say…less wholesome endeavors as well.”

This sounds like a familiar pitch. I’m going to knock it out of the park. Just like Babe fucking Ruth. I let him talk.

“Your former employer and I were in the midst of brokering a deal in which I would gain a share in his night clubs in exchange for a share of one of my shipping companies, a convenient front for…well, whatever it was your employer wanted a front for. Unfortunately, now that he’s gone, there’s no one to secure the deal. We had a gentlemen’s agreement, sealed with an honest hand shake, but a hand shake is not enough for the courts. Not in this field.

“I want you to take over the deal and see to it that I get that share in your former employer’s clubs. I’ve done some research into you, Mr. McGinnis—err—Legs…and it seems to my men that you’re just a spook. Appeared on the scene some years ago as Mr. Marini’s head enforcer and that’s all besides your name. Your real name, that is.

“As you know from attending the funeral, Mr. Marini had no next of kin. No one to claim his assets. No one to see to it that his business ventures continued to be taken care of.

“What I want you to do is become Mr. Marini’s next of kin to facilitate the deal we had in place before his untimely demise. In exchange, I’ll give you the names of the men who killed your boss. I know he meant a lot to you, and I feel it’s the least I can do. I would take care of them myself, but I find myself under a fair amount of scrutiny lately because of some certain less-than-legal trafficking operations going on under my watch.”

“What do you say?” he asks. “You’ll be the sole benefactor. You’ll inherit a veritable empire, and all you have to do is go to an office, file some paperwork under a prepared false identity, and easy access to the men who killed your boss. You stand to benefit greatly in exchange for just a small favor to satisfy an agreement between two businessmen—two gentlemen.”

He sits back and waits for my answer. The food comes out, carried by what looks like the entire staff. Three girls all in black, all carrying trays of my lunch. It reminds me of a movie I saw where a medieval Indian king or sultan has a whole feast carried to him on gilded platters by slave girls. They put the trays down and I start eating, letting Lusky sit in silence to wait for my answer.

All the time while I’m eating, I can feel Lusky grilling me from behind those sunglasses. He’s impatient. I see sweat beading up on his forehead while I eat. He’s nervous. He wants me to accept bad. There’s more going on here than he’s telling me.

I weigh my options between bites. I don’t know how he set it up for me to claim to be The Boss’s next of kin, but I can only assume he has people. This could also be a trick. I have to find out what about the shares in the clubs is so valuable to Lusky. I also have to find out how it is he knows so much about the men who killed The Boss when I’ve been in the dark for a whole week.

I scoop up a bit of meat and cheese on the last corner of the last nacho and put it in my mouth. It gives a satisfying crunch. I chew and swallow and then tell Lusky I’ll do it.

But I don’t want any funny shit. I tell him if he’s screwing me, I’ll find out. I tell him I don’t get screwed. I tell him if he’s trying to set me up, he’d be better off trying to snuff me here and now than setting me off like a rabid dog to sic some hapless yanks.

He gives me a look like he would never have even thought of a double cross. He assures me my best interests are in mind, as well as the best interests of The Boss’s business. He hands me a manilla folder. Inside are names, addresses and photos of the black guys in the van, as well as the whereabouts of their employer, a Mr. Von Tier.

“Thanks,” I say, closing the folder and standing up. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” Lusky says. “You need to be at the executor’s office tomorrow morning. 10 AM, no later. I swear I’m not here to screw you. Like you said, if I was trying to get you snuffed, I’d just get it out of the way now. But there’s no reason for me to do that. Unless you try to screw me. 10 AM. Got it?”

He’s shaking back there in that booth. I smile at him and lean down over the table, real close, close enough that he can smell the nachos on my breath.

“Got it,” I tell him and scoop up the last bunch of french fries from his plate. I eat them in one bite and make my way out of the Mallard, up the stairs and out the door, back into the daylight.

Now I have the names. Now I have a place to start. From here on, it’s easy.

They all think I’m just some goon. I might be, after all, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I’m doing.

It doesn’t mean I don’t know how to make them squirm.

legbreaker part 4

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:43:57 -0500

Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day. It’s the only one I usually cook for myself, and I make certain to make it count.

Two pots of coffee, four slices of toast, four eggs with cheese, six pancakes with maple syrup, a muffin or a danish, a half gallon of skim milk, a half gallon of orange juice or apple juice, a bowl of grits with butter and brown sugar, a plate of bacon and a stack of sausage links usually holds me over until lunch time.

After breakfast I do sit ups and push ups for at least an hour and then stretch and take a shower. These things help me make sense of the day. My head clears when my stomach is full and my body is working. It feels wonderful to have my head so clear, like looking at the horizon from the top of a cliff in the desert. A cool breeze blows and you can hear the gentle hum of a serene, far-away nothingness.

There are times when I wish I could stamp out that humming, when I wish I could turn off my mind for good and not ever have to worry about anything ever again. But I know that’s really not how it works, even when things are too difficult for me to understand all the way. It makes my head hurt, but I know if I don’t worry about the way things are around me, there won’t be anyone else to take care of it when it all goes wrong. This is what The Boss liked best about me, I think: perseverance.

“That’s our Legs,” he said once, after I came back to The Crab with shards of shrapnel stuck in me from a grenade that went off on a particularly hairy assignment. “Takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.”

He was sitting in the back room playing cards with some of his associates. They all had a nice laugh at that one. The Boss was always making jokes that got the whole room in an uproar.

“Nobody solves a problem quite like you, Legs” he told me when he realized I was bleeding under my jacket. “Go on, Natalia’s in the back, she’ll get you fixed up.”

Natalia was a doctor from somewhere far away, Russia or Ukraine or something. She was tall for a woman, with brown hair that fell off her head like a huge cascade of liquid chocolate, filled with flecks of gold dust. She always wore very low-cut shirts and would take pains to bend down as far as she could when she was fixing you up, just to tease you. She would laugh when I blushed and say things in that other strange language, and go on about how she loved big strong men. I think Natalia liked me a lot.

One day Natalia stopped showing up at The Crab. The Boss never made any mention of her again. The next time I got hurt, he sent me to Dr. Cord, a skinny black guy with glasses like telescopes. He fixed me up fine, but it wasn’t the same. I could tell Cord was scared of me while he was working. I took extra care not to get hurt after I realized Natalia was gone. It was a shame, I liked her. But that’s how things work.

By the time my cab arrives at the Pallid Mallard, breakfast is a distant, unsatisfying memory. I should have made the whole dozen eggs. Or maybe french toast would have filled me up better than pancakes. But it’s too late to care about it now. I’ve heard the Mallard has really good open-face sandwiches, with corned beef and sauerkraut. I lick my lips. I step out of the cab, which creeks unapologetically as I remove my extra weight from it’s axles. I pay the cabbie and tip well. He smiles with a big gold tooth right in front and says, “Thanks, boss.”

I tell him The Boss is dead. My name is Legs.

He drives off and I go inside.

legbreaker part 3

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0500

The next day after I ripped a bunch of tubes out of the machines I was hooked up to, I go with Gracie to the I See You, a place in the hospital where only people who get hurt the worst go. They don’t allow visitors, but even with a big stupid bandage around my head, I’m big and wide and people usually let me go where I want.

There’s the Boss, sitting in bed like a cardboard cut out. He’s all flat and looks like he’s in black and white. A tube is stuck in his nose. And another in his mouth. Cables fly out from under his clothes in all directions. More tubes under the flimsy hospital sheet. A machine next to the bed beeps a steady, slow rhythm, and another machine sucks air in and then blows it back out, hhhhhhh-psssh.

I feel all choked up.

“Oh, Boss,” I say. It doesn’t sound like me though. Must be something in the air, making my throat close up and making my voice squeek. Like helium. I turn to tell Gracie, but I forget what I was going to say because she’s doing the Russian dolls thing with my hand again. My throat gets tighter. I have to breathe in hard through my nose. My eyes are watering.

“Oh, Boss,” I say again. I can’t stand looking at him, so I look at the floor.

Gracie squeezes my hand like a soft breeze and says, “Oh, Legs.”

The Boss died later that night.

Two days later was the funeral. Me and Gracie and a couple folks from Cosmo’s #2 were the only ones who came. Lots were invited. The only people I didn’t recognize were a woman in sunglasses who stood far away, and a man in a gray overcoat with slicked-back black hair who arrived just as they lowered The Boss into the ground.

The man in the gray overcoat came up next to me and watched the coffin disappear beneath the soil.

“You must be Legs,” he said, calm, voice cool as a straight razor. I don’t like that tone.

“Who’s asking?” I replied. I was still upset about the whole thing, though my throat had stopped clenching up by then. I leered down at the man over the collar of my coat.

“I was an associate of Mr. Marini. Er…Cosmo. I’ve heard a lot about you, young man, and I have some interesting information regarding your…uh, former employer.”

“Go screw. The Boss’s dead. That’s all I need to know about ‘em. He was a good man and now he’s dead.”

I clenched my fists in my pockets. Something about this guy made me want to slug him. You ever meet someone like that? Something about their voice, or the shape of their head or the dumb animal way they look at you, just makes you want to cave their head right in? This guy was that.

The guy in the gray overcoat exhaled sharply and cleared his throat.

“I can see that you are upset, and I understand. I am just as upset. Cosmo Marini was a good man, I agree. And that is why I have come to you. A good man dead deserves vengeance, don’t you think?”

This got my attention. But I still wanted to slug the guy.

“You think I’m not taking care of that?” I said, not ready to play it easy with him yet.

“Not at all. But it strikes me that with my information, you would make much haste in such a task.”

I looked back at the black hole in the ground. Everyone else had gone. A few yards away were a couple of men and a backhoe, ready to cover The Boss in dirt for eternity. A moment passed silently and I felt like a tidal wave had hit me in slow motion. I closed my eyes and breathed deep.

“Tuesday, 12 o’clock. The address is on the back,” the man said, interrupting my daydream. He thrust out a small white business card with the name Salvatore Lusky in fancy gold print. This Salvatore then made his hasty departure, back to a car on the other side of some nearby trees.

The address was a bar downtown. The Pallid Mallard.

Tuesday. 12 o’clock. I’d be there.

legbreaker part 2

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:25:24 -0500

When I come to, it’s all sterile white sheets and a curtain and the buzzing of complicated machinery. Hospital. Haven’t been to one of these in a while.

Someone’s talking.

“Well, Mr. McGinnis, welcome back to the world of the living,”

It’s a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. He’s wearing glasses and looking at a clipboard.

“Legs,” I grumble. He raises an eyebrow.

“No, you were shot in the head, Mr. McGinnis, your legs are fine.”

“My name. My name is Legs.”

My head hurts. It’s hard to think. Not that it was particularly easy before. This doctor is making my head hurt.

“Oh,” he says, finally understanding. “Well um…Legs. You’re very lucky. The bullet took off a chunk of your ear and part of your skull, but your brain was untouched. You’ve already been through surgery and you’ll make a full recovery in just a couple days,” he smiles and takes a step closer to me. He snaps his fingers in my ear. I flinch reflexively and glare at him. He nods.

“And you haven’t suffered any hearing loss, either. Very lucky indeed.”

He taps his pen against the clipboard and says he’ll come back to check on me in a couple of hours. He tells me there’s a little button to push if I need anything, food or water or maybe a newspaper. I ask when I can leave and he tells me tomorrow.

“Oh, and one other thing,” he says. “You’ve got a visitor. A Miss…Partridge? Perkins? There’s a little blonde girl here to see you, I didn’t catch her name.”

“Parker,” I tell him. It’s Gracie. She came to see me. I can’t help but smile.

“Right, Miss Parker. Would you like me to send her in?”

I nod, or try to, but my neck is very stiff. I wonder how long I’ve been here. The doctor winks at me and says he’ll send her right in.

A little while later, there she is.

“Look at you,” she says. “They fixed you up good, huh, you big lug?”

Gracie. What a doll. Five-five, a hundred and twenty pounds. I could lift her up with one arm like you’d lift a bag of groceries. She’s got her hair pinned up in a cute little bun with chopsticks stuck in it. She’s wearing a brown fur overcoat and black heels. I smile.

“Hi, Gracie,” I say, but my voice cracks like it used to when I was a kid, before my growth spurt. I cough and clear my throat and she smiles.

“Easy, killer,” she says and comes to stand next to me. She takes my hand in both of hers and it reminds me of Russian dolls. “You don’t have to talk or anything, I didn’t expect you to be awake. I hear you’ll be fine in a couple days though,” she says and smiles wide, full red lips peeling back like curtains on ivory piano keys. I nod and tell her I feel fine now, even better with her there. She squeezes my hand and smiles.

“Yeah, well, you aren’t going anywhere, least not til tomorrow.”

When she smiles, she shows her dimples, the left one with a tiny black speck in the center.

“You’re very lucky to be alive,” she says after a pause. “I’m glad they only grazed you. You can hardly tell there’s anything wrong with your ear,” she goes on, but stops and then blushes. “Not that there’s anything wrong with it at all, I mean…You know what I mean, Legs.”

She purses her lips and slightly narrows her eyebrows. I smile and tell her I don’t mind. Not like I’m the one who has to look at me.

“Who put the nasty idea in your head that you’re so ugly, huh?” she asks and gently strokes my hand. I shrug. No one, I tell her. That’s just the way it happens.

She frowns. “You’re a silly fool, Legs,” she says just above a whisper.

I tell her I know.

“And you’re not ugly. Whoever told you that is the ugly one,”

Normally I don’t take to people talking to me like that, insults are always out of line; coming from Gracie, though, it doesn’t sound unreasonable that I might be a fool. I try to think, though my head still hurts and my ears start to ring, to prove that I’m not a fool, about the first time I heard someone call me ugly.

“It was the Boss,” I say.

“Who?”

“The Boss. Mr. Cosmo. Mr. Cosmo told me I was ugly. But he didn’t mean it bad or anything,” I hesitate. It never occurred to me that he could have meant it as anything but a statement of a fact. I didn’t mind being ugly. That’s just how things were.

Gracie’s turned red again.

“Well that horrible man got what he had coming,” she says. I ask what she means and she looks at me, eyes suddenly wide and round and mint green, like lifesavers caught in headlights.

“They didn’t tell you?”

I ask, tell me what? And she covers her mouth with her hand.

Legbreaker part 1

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:00 -0500

They call me Legbreaker because that’s what I do. If you don’t pay the Boss on time, you get a leg broken. If you don’t pay the Boss on time next month, you get your other leg broken. If you’re still behind after that, well…don’t get that far behind.

It’s hot. I’m sweating like a waterfall in the doorway of The Crab. The place is actually called Cosmo’s #3, but it looks like a giant crab, so people call it The Crab, and there’s two other clubs called Cosmo’s already.

Cosmo’s the Boss, but everyone just calls him the Boss.

I pitch my cigarette and go around back to look at the ocean and wait for the band to get here. It’s some honky-tonk southern blues band or some shit. Four guys with trumpets. They’re supposed to be pretty good. I can’t remember the name of the group. Billy B and the something or another. I light another cigarette.

I wait.

“There he is,” someone says. It’s the Boss. He’s short, shorter than me, which isn’t saying much. They used to tell me if I didn’t stop growing I’d get too big for this small town. Then when the town got bigger they used to say it was the mayor redecorating for me. I know they were kidding, but it made me feel good. I was relieved I wouldn’t have to move somewhere with higher ceilings. I like it here.

“Band showed up yet, Legs?”

The Boss just calls me Legs because he never knows who’s listening. He pretends it’s not short for what they really call me because he doesn’t like the ugly side of this business. He lost his taste for it some years back. I suppose that’s why he hired me. He brushes his mustache away from the corners of his mouth and runs a comb through his greasy hair. I tell him no, the band’s not here yet. I’ll see them in when they show up though, I assure him. He nods and slaps me on the shoulder like a friendly uncle from out of town.

“Thanks, Legs. So where’s your girlfriend tonight, huh?” he asks with a grin and nudges me in the ribs with his elbow.

“Who?” I say, acting like I don’t know.

“You know who!” he says and digs his elbow in harder. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s certainly not comfortable. “That little blonde gal you were sitting with the other night. You know the one,” and he makes a shape like an hourglass in the air with his hands. He whistles and winks at me. “Ass like an ocean liner? Mole on her cheek? Ring any bells?”

I smile and try to keep myself from blushing. He’s talking about Gracie.

“Sorry Boss, can’t say I know who you mean.”

He laughs. “Sure, sure. Can’t expect you to keep track of every piece of tail that comes in the door, huh? Our man Legs, a face like yours and still you get more gals after you than anyone I seen in thirty years. And you can’t even remember her name!” he slaps me on the shoulder again and we laugh.

It’s funny when things like this happen. The Boss can call me ugly and stupid all he wants, but I know he doesn’t mean it. He wouldn’t keep me around if he didn’t like me. And besides, what’s it matter if I’m ugly and stupid? I’m happy enough. I do good work that I’m good at. The Boss knows it.

Anyone else called me ugly or stupid though, well…I’d show them how I got my name but quick.

“Legs, you got a smoke for me?” the Boss asks. I nod and hand him my pack. He lights one and hands the pack back to me and winks. “I owe ya, kid.”

He takes a long drag and we both see a white van roll up. It must be the band.

Four black kids in suits hop out of the back, leaving two in the front seat. Maybe they’re getting dropped off. They’re holding hard black plastic instrument cases, two shaped like trumpets, one shaped like a saxophone and one shaped like a trombone.

“That’s him!” the one in the driver’s seat yells out the window. The four outside the car exchange an odd look among them, then drop their instrument cases and pull guns from their waistbands.

This, I was not expecting. Shots rain down, shattering glass and splintering wood on the back of the club. The Boss yells something profane and drops to his knees clutching his guts. I see a flash of white, and then black, and then I’m on my side and I can’t move. I see the Boss bleeding and the black kids moving closer. The Boss pulls a knife at the last moment and cuts one of their hands. The black boy curses and spits on the Boss and then kicks him squarely in the neck.

“This is it,” he says, reaching down and plucking something off the Boss’s immobile form. It looks like a necklace. I wonder why I can’t move. These guys need a beating bad, and for the first time ever, I can’t give it to them.

One of them sees I’m still alive. He can tell I want them bad.

“What about this freakshow?” he says, pointing at me with his gun.

“Leave it,” another says. “Headshot. He just got death spasms. We gotta roll, man, fuckin’ yesterday, get me? 5-O’s showin’ any minute.”

The one pointing the gun at me spits on my shirt and puts the piece back in his waistband. The four of them climb back into their van and are gone in no time.

In the distance, I hear sirens.

ashes part 14

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0500

Back on the surface, it’s pretty obvious our cover is blown. There is a horrible black vortex ripping down the hall in front of us. People are screaming and running, just like Santiago and I. We don’t have time to be discrete, and so we join the throng and hope that they picked the right direction. The floor behind us gives out and crumbles away into that magical void that things don’t come back from. A man running behind me loses his footing and vaporizes before he can hit the floor. He opens his mouth to scream, but the sound is sucked out of him. I keep running. I notice Santiago is gone. I call his name but, blind with panic, I can’t convince myself to stop running.

I feel the floor giving out under me. I leap and dive and tuck and roll, back on my feet. At the end of the corridor, I see something that looks suspiciously like daylight. I pray the comet hasn’t fallen from the sky. Not yet.

I feel a cold wind on the back of my neck like fingernails made of ice. I stumble at the last moment on a dislodged piece of ceiling, and drive my face into the mud just outside the complex. By the time I roll over to get my bearings, it’s as though the complex was never there. There’s a sound like a vacuum seal being broken, and then simple nothingness. What an odd sight, hundreds of vampires standing by the sea in the morning. I don’t see Santiago. I lay flat on the ground and stare up at the wretched blue sky. I have a vision of a cigarette burning all the way down to the filter without a single drag being taken. I wish for the simple annihilation that the sun could have brought me before this whole mess. It’s true what he said, that old monster. Not existing would be much easier than dealing with this.

But nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I’m roused from my nihilistic daydream by strong hands gripping me around my shoulders and pulling me to my feet.

“Is this him?” one of the guards asks. I don’t bother looking up. I feel so drained.

“Yes, it’s him. Put him down unless he can’t stand.”

Her voice sounds so far away. The heavy grip eases up off my arms, and I feel my knees wobble, but I stay standing.

“Sergei? Earth to Sergei, come in cosmonaut,” she says and there’s a white hand like a feather tickling at my forehead, running fingers through my hair. It’s Sophie.

“Sergei, you saved us.”

This is the last thing I was expecting. Torture, vilification, execution maybe. Certainly not “you saved us.”

I look up at Sophie with tired disbelief. She says it again, that I saved them. I shake my head.

“Santi’s gone. He didn’t make it out.”

Her eyebrows shoot up so fast I think they’re going to fly off her face.

“Mon Dieu,” she says and shakes her head. She puts a hand on my shoulder and pulls me close to her. I can’t stand it. I don’t want to be touched. My skin feels like a prison. I want to tear at myself and explode outwards, out of this horrible undead shell. I rest my face in the crook of her neck and she strokes the back of my head comfortingly.

“Come,” she says, releasing me when she realizes I’m not going to break into tears. “Sit.”

We walk to the car. She sits on the hood and explains what happened after I got the axe in the head.

The guard hit me and Santiago took him down. He then ripped Solomon’s insides out and threw Sophie face first through the nearest wall. She assures me she’s fine, not that I asked or cared at this point. Solomon is fine, too, she says.

After we disappeared, Solomon began calling his own abilities into question. He had never had any experience with or talent for magic until comparatively recently. Being a vampire, and a simpleton, he never questioned that his influence and ability were never any effort. When he tried to move the meteor of his own accord and nothing happened, he realized I was right and that, whatever it was, we were heading for a trap. Then the complex started collapsing. The sun turned red in the early morning sky, and the howl of ancient demons flooded everyone’s ears.

“I don’t know how you did it,” Sophie says. “I don’t know how you knew, but you were right. We’re in your debt, Sergei. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”

I sigh. “Don’t worry about it.”

I get in the car and turn the key in the ignition. “See you around,” I say to Sophie and unceremoniously peel out to meet what might be the last stretch of daylight I ever see.

I stop in a coffee shop. No one sees me. I drink three cups and eat a donut and leave without paying. No one says a thing. I drive all day, back to the city, back to my hole. I stop at a Mexican corner store and buy a portrait of the virgin. When I get home, I draw a mustache on it and hang it on the wall next to my book case.

That night I have dream that I’m a fly caught in a web. I hear the old witch cackle. In my dream she says, “I don’t know how you did it, little Cyril. You escaped both traps, his and mine. You are a special lad, little Cyril. There is a place for you yet in this world of men and monsters. You have earned it.”

In the dream the spider sinks its fangs into me and sucks me dry.

When I wake, the sun has gone down.

I find myself overcome with a terrible, familiar thirst.

ashes part 13

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:03:12 -0500

“What happened to you?” Sophie asks. Santiago and I have just burst into the chamber where we last left Sophie and the puppet Solomon. She’s sitting on his lap, and he’s smiling that vacant smile.

“Your new boyfriend is a fraud,” I say and point at Solomon. “No offense,” I add as his smile turns to a look of intense consternation.

“And we’re all walking into a trap. If the ceremony tonight is allowed to occur, we’ll overrun the whole planet. Don’t you see?”

Sophie and Solomon look at me like I’m wearing clown makeup and have just told them I can turn lead to gold with my farts.

“Isn’t that the whole idea, Sergei?” Sophie asks.

“Are you kidding? If we’re allowed to keep walking in the day, we’ll kill all the humans in a matter of weeks. Who will we feed on when they’re gone? The hunger hasn’t faded, and it never will! You’re signing up for madness, starvation, damnation! Can’t you see?”

Sophie puts her head in her hands and sighs heavily.

“When did you lose your mind, Sergei?” she asks. “You don’t think they’ve got a contingency for this? Solomon has thought this all through many, many times. We’ve been harvesting the humans for decades leading up to this. There are storehouses in the depths where the human cattle are being bred. We’ve got enough blood stockpiled to last us indefinitely. Humans will always bleed.”

There’s a cold feeling in my stomach. It’s like opening the emergency exit in a plane at thirty thousand feet. A whoosh, a breeze, cold, empty and falling. I’ve been set up.

“I’m sorry, Sergei,” Sophie says. Before I can ask what she means, I’m being clobbered on the back of the head and everything goes black. I wake up to Santiago shaking me.

“Sergei, come on! Move your lazy ass, we need to get out of here!”

Everything goes in a blur. I see what looks like one of the huge guards, except all his insides are on the outside. Solomon, the gap-toothed moron, or something that looks like him is shredded and strewn about. Santiago is covered in black blood. I don’t think to ask what happened to Sophie.

We run in a direction picked entirely at random and don’t stop until we’re thoroughly lost.

“What happened?” I ask, slumping against the nearest wall. My head is spinning. Something hurts, but it seems so far away, like an old telegram telling you about a stubbed toe. Santiago reaches down behind my ear, like a magician preparing to produce a coin, but instead it’s the end of an axe. It’s got my blood all over it.

“They got the drop on us, Sergei. It’s only a matter of time before they track us down. What are we going to do?”

I’m still transfixed by the sight of the axe. I must be getting old. No one used to be able to sneak up on me. I reach behind my ear and feel the wound, deep, dark, cold. My hand is covered in black when I look at it again. I touch the wound again and a shock of electricity shoots through me, making me kick my leg involuntarily. Motherfucker axed me in the brain. I puke a little and wait for the wound to start healing so I can think straight again.

“Sergei, we don’t have time for this. What are we doing here? What is going on? That thing in the basement, the giant crystal, what was it? We are so fucked.”

He’s getting hysterical. I touch the wound again, and now it’s almost gone. I can see clearly again. It almost doesn’t hurt any more.

“We’ll kill the magicians,” I say matter-of-factly. Santiago doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

“The who?” he says, raising his eyebrows.

“The magicians. The fuckers in the cocoons. The ones powering the magic in this place, the ones that are being used to bring the comet down. The old man, the creature in the basement, that was the sorcerer the Spider Lady told me about, the first vampire. He’s using the other magicians, the ones he’s got charmed and tied up down there, to succeed where he failed originally. If we kill them, he’ll have no batteries. Dead in the fucking water, got it?”

I can see Santiago is having second thoughts. Sophie’s remark about the blood stockpiles has made the idea of a world run by our kind sound infinitely more appealing than running around in this bizarre dungeon hell, getting hacked at by guards.

“Have you lost your mind, Sergei? This is all so far out. I can’t wrap my head around it. You aren’t crazy are you? I just want to go home at this point. I want to crawl into my bed and sleep, and damn the sun and the moon and everything else. I want one quiet night. If you’re insane, just say so and we can go home.”

He looks at me in a way that is much more serious than I am comfortable with. I shake my head slowly.

“I’m not insane, Santi. You’ve trusted me this far. We’re almost out of the woods.”

He looks at the floor and appears to deflate. His shoulders drop and his hands fall at his sides.

“Fine,” he says eventually. “What do we do then, fearless leader?”

We gather our wits about us and make our way back to the elevator. We duck and sneak and dodge guards at what seems like every turn. Some of them we have to take out, spearing them through on their own horrible axes. One by one they become ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It is one thing to murder humans. Killing your own kind is something else. Not nearly as satisfying.

Finally we retrace our steps back to the top of the elevator. It’s just as we left it, mustachioed virgin and all. I take a deep breath.

“They might be waiting for us at the bottom,” I tell Santiago. “You don’t have to go. If I fail, I guess I was insane and it doesn’t matter. If I succeed…”

I don’t know what happens if I succeed. Santiago frowns. “You’re trying to ditch me, now? I can’t back out of this now. We’re both dead if you’re crazy. We’re probably both dead even if you aren’t. I’m coming along.”

He steps up to the altar and puts his feet into the outlines. The platform jerks and begins to sink.

“And besides,” Santiago says, sinking into the floor. “You couldn’t drain all twelve by yourself, and I haven’t eaten all day.”

He winks, and down we go.

Back in the huge chamber with the giant red crystal, there’s no sign of him. Him, the ancient monster. The first of our kind. It must be him. Nothing else could explain such power. We move cautiously towards the nearest cocoon.

“Bottoms up,” I tell Santiago and sink my teeth into the charmed sorcerer’s neck. Blood that runs with magic has always been a favorite of mine. There is a sweetness to it like forbidden fruit. You can feel the magic in it like a warm blanket that covers you from inside. I drain this once-powerful magician and let him fall to the floor. The arc of red lightning no longer dances from his head. I move onto the next.

And the next.

Nine magicians in and I’m starting to get a stomach ache.

“Let’s just snap the other’s necks,” I tell Santiago as he wipes a cascade of electric red blood from his lips. He nods.

Snap. Snap. Snap. And then a scream, a howl not of this earth.

It’s him.

“You fools!” he bellows. “Oh, no, no, no! What have you done?”

We turn to face the terror that we expect to come raining down on us, but instead we see the very image of defeat. The man, the creature, the first, has dropped to his knees in the doorway of the chamber. He looks blurry around the edges. His form seems to be in flux between that of the regal young man and the horrible broken monster. His skin moves in white ashen patches. His bones protrude at random, moving in all the wrong ways. I think he’s crying.

“This curse…” he says finally. “There is no way to break this curse.”

He looks at us with hollow black eyes. There is such pain in them, I feel my cold black heart might break.

“I was mad, power mad. I tried to damn the world in my own name, to carry my legacy on through to eternity. I hoped to arrive at heaven’s gates and spit into God’s face, to tell him that his legend was nothing compared to my own. But this curse…What I have become…There will be no heaven. There will be no hell. There will only be this, forever, until eternity. And God will laugh at me and spit in my face for my blasphemy, for my arrogance, for my stupidity,”

He clutches his face in his hands and falls forward. He sobs unabashedly.

“What creatures you are,” he begins again. “What creatures you are, to love your curse so much. Surely you would rather not exist than be what you have become? Does the curse not eat at you, as you eat at the humans? Do you not feel horror at every moment of your being?”

Santiago and I exchange worried glances, then look back at him. We shake our heads. He laughs.

“No, I suppose your curse is different than my own. You are merely side effects, victims of a crossfire. Innocents lost in the middle. Oh, you poor fools,” he sobs again. He breathes in deeply.

“Well, go on then,” he says. “Finish it. Perhaps I will be rewarded for my mercy,” he laughs. “No, there will be no reward. But mercy you shall receive.”

He nods and motions to the last of the sorcerers, a weak arc shooting away from him towards the giant red crystal. I nod to Santiago, who is standing closest to the cocooned figure. He snaps the neck cleanly, quietly, and the body slumps to the floor.

I notice that the creature is smiling. This isn’t good. Now he’s laughing.

Far away, but urgently close, a rumbling noise like a million storm clouds booming in unison. The ground lurches away under my feet, and I leap for Santiago to steady myself. The walls shake. The rumble gets louder, closer. The giant red crystal sways from its impossible fixture on the high ceiling, and falls with a noise like a glassware factory falling down the stairs.

“Oh fuck!” is the last coherent thought I remember expressing before a surge of animal instinct wells up in me and sends me running blindly for the nearest exit.

I could kick myself for being so stupid. Sure, Sergei, kill the magicians. Stop the ceremony and bring this massive magical construct crashing down around you. Two birds with one stone. I’d laugh if I wasn’t so furious.

At the elevator, rather than waiting for it to slowly and precariously take us to the top, Santiago and I climb up the walls of the shaft. It takes some time. I make the mistake of looking down and see the reality below collapsing away into the void. I scream, panicked, and almost lose my grip. Santiago pushes past me and yells something I can’t hear over the thunder and fury and the unnatural sound of something being sucked away into nothing.

ashes part 12

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:00:00 -0500

“Jesus Christ, that was unreal,” I grumble at the bottom. I step on my cigarette and look around. The chamber we’ve arrived in doesn’t look much different than the one we left somewhere above, except the lighting is worse and there’s a damp antique basement smell. Santiago puts his cigarette out and we resume snooping.

Eventually, down the dusty corridors of this basement portion of the complex, we hear footsteps. We press ourselves to the nearest wall and listen. There’s a voice.

“No sign of the intruders, sir, aside from the cigarette butts at the base of the elevator. They must have gone back up,” the voice says, sounding muffled and distant. It must be one of the masked guards like the ones upstairs.

“You fool,” says another voice which sounds like sandpaper and broken glass. “How could they have given you the slip so easily? I told you they would come. You’re supposed to be one of the best, aren’t you? I should slit your throat and hang you up to drain for a while.”

An awkward silence.

“Sir, I’ll send another patrol out,” says the first voice.

“Yes,” replies the second. “Yes you will.”

The footsteps are coming right for us. Santiago and I scurry up the walls and hold ourselves to the ceiling. We hold our breath and blend with the shadows and cobwebs as a huge guard built like a refrigerator, carrying a gigantic axe with a spearhead on the back end rushes by under us, like we’re not even there. We hear the hum of the elevator a little while later.

“Do you think he was talking about us?” Santiago asks me once the silence has gone unbroken by the sound of more guards coming to oversee our execution.

“No, Santi, he must’ve been talking about the other intruders.”

Santiago scowls at me in the dark on the ceiling and I can’t help but smirk. He makes it too easy sometimes.

We get down and cautiously head in the direction from whence the guard came.

Now here’s where it gets a little strange.

As we move down the corridor, my stomach begins to ache. I feel it flip-flopping back and forth, like doing somersaults or spinning around in circles. I feel a cold sweat appearing on my forehead.

“Sergei,” Santiago says. “Something is wrong here.”

I nod but something tells me to press on. I feel dizzy, but the feeling in the back of my neck says there’s a reason for this.

The reason is this:

Around the next bend is a vast room with high vaulted ceilings and lit by torches. Arranged in a circle are people wrapped up in what appears to be cocoons. From the heads of each an arc of unnatural red lightning dances towards a huge red crystal hanging like a chandelier in the middle of it all. It’s huge and the color of blood. In the far corner, at a small office desk is a horrible creature, a twisted parody of the shape of a man. It is rifling through papers, charts, graphs, comparing and contrasting data of a sort I couldn’t begin to guess at. It does not appear to be wearing any clothing. It’s skin is white like ivory or cocaine, sick, deathly. It’s bones protrude in strange places. It looks broken.

Santiago breathes in a little too deeply and the creature whirls around.

For an instant, I see huge black eyes like bottomless pits, a flash of teeth like daggers, dry blood caked at the corners of pallid lips, a sunken chest and protruding pelvic bones. Then it changes.

Where the creature stood before is now a man who looks at first glance remarkably like Santiago. It’s really just the long black hair. His nose is bigger than Santiago’s, and his chin much more prominent. He is wearing a regal black robe with a high purple collar. The huge black pit eyes have turned red.

“You,” he hisses. “I knew you would come.”

I open my mouth to attempt a quick witted explanation, but it is no use. The man, the creature, whatever it is, has already set upon us.

With a simple gesture, Santiago is sent flying off down the corridor we just snuck up. The man picks me up by the neck and pitches me headlong into the opposite wall. In a moment of clarity as I pass through the middle of the bizarre congregation, I realize that the cocooned people must be the source of the magic I felt upon our arrival, and what made my stomach spin as we approached. Magic never had much of a positive effect on me.

And neither has having my head smashed against a wall.

I cough and sputter and try to turn around to face my attacker.

“Wait,” I say, but it’s no use. The man is on me again, lifting me into the air by my throat. Being a vampire, I don’t expressly need to breathe, but being unable to at my choosing is no less unpleasant than it was when I was alive.

Once again, I’m being hurled through the air. I don’t think I’ve been this disoriented in decades. I try to focus, and my concentration holds just long enough to prevent me from taking the full force of my flight on my head. I turn and hit the wall with my shoulder and back more than my face. I land hard and slump over on the floor.

“You,” the man hisses. “How foolish! I was expecting something more substantial.” He snarls and then shouts to no one, or no one that I can see at least, “Is this the best you’ve got?”

I cough. “Who are you talking to?”

The man looks alarmed that I’m still talking.

“Really?” he says to the ceiling. “You would use my own kind against me? Is there no depth to which you will not sink?”

His own kind? I think to myself. So, he’s a vampire. Is he a vampire? My head is still swimming, but I’m beginning to get my bearings.

“You’ve only made my job easier, old witch!” he shouts. “I was worried that not as many would show up. But the stragglers will be minimal. Especially if you saw fit to send more after me. I cannot be stopped! It is already too late!”

This last bit is what I like to think of as “famous last words.” He’s in such a state, mad with the thought of whatever his plans are coming to fruition. Like a fucking TV villain. Fucking monologuing assholes.

I pick up a piece of the wall that dislodged itself when I made impact. I rush at the yammering idiot and plant the stone squarely on the crown of his head. It sounds about how you’d expect the collision of head and stone to sound, kind of like billiards. He doesn’t move though. He laughs instead and turns to face me, red eyes glowing like the inside of a volcano.

“What type of thug are you? Is this a joke? You hope to stop me by simply battering me?” His voice rises to a shrill, manic pitch. As this happens a wave of energy ripples off of him and sends me flying once again. I’m getting sick of this. It’s time to get out of here.

I land hard, but get to my feet as quickly as I can. I’m out of there fast. I find Santiago still slumped over down the corridor. I hustle him to his feet, slapping him about the ears to bring him to his senses.

“We have to go,” I tell him. He nods and we shuffle off as fast as we can, battered, bruised, confused. The sound of the man’s horrible laughter echoes down the corridor behind us.

On the elevator back up to the surface, Santiago asks me in no uncertain terms what the fuck is going on.

“That’s him,” I say. “The magician. The one from the legends. The first. No one else could be that strong,” and Santiago looks at me, dumbfounded.

“The story the Spider Lady told me. The first vampire, summoned the meteor. I thought I told you this already?” He shrugs. I groan. “We have to find Sophie and get out of here. That’s the short version. Something very bad is getting ready to happen here. Did you see the cocoons?” He nods. “I don’t know who they were. Powerful magicians, held in thrall is my guess. No one being could be powerful enough to warp a place of this size. But a vampire can charm as many as they want. He’s using them like batteries for this place, and for the ritual tonight that will keep the meteor in place.”

Santiago’s eyes are glazed over. I don’t know if he’s heard a single word I’ve said. It’s a long ride up.

I want to find the Spider Lady and wring her neck. I should’ve known this would happen. She wouldn’t have brought up some legend, some obscure story from before time without purpose. Sure, to explain the meteor, but I walked right into this. I feel like such a retard. I light another cigarette. When it’s done I pinch off the end and stuff it in my pocket instead of leaving it on the floor.

Santiago holds his head in his hands and slouches.

“I’ve never been hit that hard, ever,” he says with defeat in his voice. “What are we going to do, Sergei? We can’t stop something like this.”

I shake my head. “We have to do something. She wouldn’t have sent me if there was nothing I could do.”

“How can you trust the old witch so much?” Santiago demands. “Isn’t it obvious? What loyalty does she have to you? Who’s to say that she didn’t just send you here to die? What loyalty does she have to the humans either for that matter? What does she care if they go extinct and we go mad?”

And up we go.

ashes part 11

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:59:00 -0500

And so, down the serpentine corridors we crept. The stone walls looked ancient, scarred by time’s insensitive passing. I can’t tell what sort of place this was before the vampire cabal set up shop here. It reminds me of something from long ago, but I can’t put my finger on what.

After a long time creeping up to and peering uneasily around corners, we come to a dead end. The hallway we’ve been traveling down terminates rather abruptly at what looks like an altar of some sort. There are candles burning and various trinkets scattered on the floor, like you would find in an old Mexican monastery. Santiago crosses himself and it’s then that I realize it is an altar like in an old Mexican monastery, complete with the portrait of Mary holding her wretched baby.

“What is this?” Santiago says. “Catholic vampires? Why would they bother putting up a picture of the virgin all the way down here? They didn’t even draw a mustache on her,” he scoffs and pulls a black magic marker from his pocket. “I can fix this,” he says and steps towards the altar. I follow and take a closer look at the trinkets spread among the candles. Tiny sugar skulls, beads, wind-up birds, coins and small things that look like toothpicks. I realize as Santiago presses his marker to the virgin’s upper lip that they’re meant to be tiny wooden stakes. A chill runs up my spine and Santiago steps back, smiling contentedly with his artwork. “Much better,” he says and puts the marker back in his pocket. The virgin now sports a very stylish fu manchu.

“Something isn’t right about this, Santi,” I say.

“What do you mean? Since when does a little good-natured blasphemy bother you?”

“That’s not it. Do you see these?” I ask, motioning to the trinkets. “Stakes. Why are there stakes here?”

Santiago shrugs. “It could be anything. They look like toothpicks to me.”

There is a sound like an industrial size fan starting up. A distant whirring hum. The hair on my neck stands up like soldiers at attention. There is a slight breeze.

“Do you hear that? Do you feel that?” I ask. Santiago looks at me and shrugs.

“Just a draft, Sergei,” he says. “But we should go, before someone finds us messing with their stuff,”

I put a finger to my lips and feel the current in the air. I drop to my knees in front of the altar and put my hands out in front of me.

“You’re doing it wrong,” Santiago says. I tell him in no uncertain terms to shut his mouth before I pull his tongue out. The current, the draft is coming from under the altar.

I fling the trinkets and candles aside, and pull up the blanket at the base of the altar to reveal a stone tile with two foot prints on it. It doesn’t match the rest of the floor. In fact, it looks brand new.

“What is this?” Santiago says incredulously. “How did you know that was there?”

I shrug and tell him it was a lucky guess.

I stand up and contemplate the foot prints and the altar. It’s not a difficult puzzle. I step forward and put my hands on the altar and line my feet up with the footprints. There is a buzz and the ground under me jerks unnaturally. And then I’m sinking.

It’s an elevator.

“I told you we should snoop around! Where do you think this goes?” I ask Santiago. He shrugs, now a good foot above me, up on the regular ground.

“Hop on, man! You can’t chicken out now.”

He rolls his eyes and jumps, causing the platform to sway and jerk. I don’t think the secret elevator is made for more than one person at a time.

And down we go.

I light a cigarette. I offer one to Santiago. He takes it and I hand him my lighter.

And down we go.

ashes part 10

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:28:30 -0500

Sophie smiles at me over Solomon’s shoulder encouragingly. I take his hand confidently and spout some smooth-sounding bullshit about being eager to see what he can do.

“Ah-ha! But you already have,” he said, gap-toothed grin big as a slice of watermelon. “If you have not noticed, the sun no longer holds sway on us. This is but the first of a series that will finally bring our kind to the top of the food chain once and for all. No longer will we be confined to the shadows. No longer shall we allow these sheep, these humans to over-run the planet. They will take their place as simple livestock. It will be glorious!” he declared at last, smiling with an empty stare at nothing in particular.

I did my best to retain my composure. I wanted to demand an answer from him right then, what was the deal? What about the comet? What are you really up to, man? But none of the questions made it out. Instead I nodded dumbly and said, “Yes, glorious. Well I’m certain you have much preparation still before the night’s ceremony. We won’t keep you.”

With only a mild struggle, I convinced Santiago to follow me out of the chamber and back down the corridor that brought us here.

“This Solomon is an idiot,” I said simply. “He is not the source of this magic. There’s something else at work here, and someone isn’t letting on as much as they know. But Solomon believes what he says. You can see it in his eyes. There’s nothing there. Lights on, no one home and all that.”

“Then who?” Santiago asked.

“I’m not sure. We’re going to have to do some snooping around.”

“Snooping around?” Santiago inquired with alarm. “What are you talking about, Sergei? Did you not see the guards? This is not the kind of operation you want to snoop around. This is some medieval shit, Sergei.”

“What are they going to do if they catch us? Kill us? The sun doesn’t work anymore. They aren’t expecting to have to stake anyone. Everyone here is here because they believe in what this Solomon guy says he’s doing. They’re being made stronger, what reason do they have to stick their noses into things beyond the surface?”

“When you say it like that it sounds so simple! Why are we snooping around then? Why don’t we just sign on for the ceremony too? Humans as livestock doesn’t sound too bad, does it?”

“Santi, we’ve been over this. Madness. Extinction. The Spider Lady. Besides, we’re already well below the surface. I feel like we’re in the VIP section now. Somehow Sophie’s got connections. Or else this Solomon isn’t quite as important as they’re making him out to be. We need to snoop. There’s something else going on here, or else the old witch wouldn’t have sent us,”

“Sent you,” Santiago cut in. “She sent you. You just dragged me along.” He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned like a stubborn little boy.

“Please, Santi,” I implored. “Is it so much for me to ask that you trust me? We’re here already. Everything has gone like clockwork, even though we don’t know which end is up in this mess. This is what we’re here to do and it’s going wonderfully. But we can’t expect everything to happen on it’s own. If you really feel that strongly about it, you can wait in the car.”

Santiago rolled his eyes and uncrossed his arms. “Fine,” he spat. “But when those guards catch us and start cutting off our parts and making us watch them grow back, I don’t want to hear you complaining about it.”

ashes part 9

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:00:00 -0400

After the usual hello-how-are-you-where-have-you-been-the-last-odd-decade-or-two’s are done, Sophie tells us in fuller detail about what she meant by “this of all nights.”

“Tell me you haven’t heard? Tell me you haven’t noticed, Sergei!” Sophie exclaimed. She sat atop the bar, sipping serenely from a martini glass. The scene hadn’t changed much. There we sat, drinking casually amid the corpses of men and strippers and waitresses and security. They hadn’t yet begun to stink.

“The sun!” She exclaimed, gesturing vaguely upwards. “It may as well have fallen from the sky entirely for all the good it does against us now!”

I sipped a drink of my own and shook my head. “But what about when the comet passes?”

“The what?” Sophie asked, tilting her head inquiringly. “That’s an odd sort of expression, don’t you think?”

“The…comet?” I said hesitantly, not sure what to make of this. Did she not know?

“If that’s what you call him, that’s fine. The name I have known him by is Solomon.”

Santiago looked at me from the corner of his eye. We were sitting at opposite angles of Sophie, our outline a perfect equilateral triangle. It was dawning on him, too.

“Solomon?” he chimed in helpfully. My head was spinning. I put down my drink. How could she not know?

“Yes,” Sophie went on. “Solomon. Not too unassuming, eh? But they say he is the one who controls the sun. He performed a ritual and a lot of people saw it happen, or thought they saw it happen. And now!” she said, slapping her hand on the bar. “The sun does not harm us. I do not know what to believe, but it is said that tonight he will perform another ritual, one to make us stronger, faster, better than we’ve ever been. All that is required is that you show up. Is this not what you showed up for?”

“We heard rumors. We didn’t know the details, but I had a feeling you would know something and so, here we are,” I said with a shrug.

Sophie smiled at me. She reminded me of a snake, exotically painted in red and black and white scales. “You always had wonderful timing, Sergei,” she said and winked at me as she sipped her drink. She uncrossed her legs and slid off the bar.

“We ought to get going,” she called over her shoulder. “I’m going to clean myself up.”

When she was gone, Santiago looked at me and said quietly, but with alarm: “Who the fuck is Solomon?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anyone called Solomon. How could he be the one keeping us from cooking? The Spider Lady said—”

“Don’t mention her! Christo,” he cut me off. “Do not mention that horrible thing. She’s liable to show up if we do.”

“You’re crazy,” I noted. “She told me it was a comet. What reason could she have to lie?”

“Because she’s a crazy, deceitful monster, Sergei!” his whisper was becoming shriller and louder. I put a finger to my lips to quiet him. He went on, lowering his volume. “She is a conniving old witch, Sergei! She would say anything to watch us dance to her drum. It’s just as likely this is all her doing!”

“Would you shut up?” I implored him, struggling to keep my voice down. “The Spider Lady wouldn’t lie to me. She has no reason. She wants me to find some way to get rid of this comet. She didn’t say how, but maybe this is it? We’re talking about extinction, Santiago, and I’m not risking going extinct. Whoever it is I’m trying to find is crazy, and wants us all to be just as crazy as he is. You remember crazy, don’t you? Loco, comprende? I’m not signing up for that. So keep your mouth shut and let me think for a second.”

We decided to go along with it. We wanted to meet this Solomon if we could. We were certainly interested in the ceremony he planned to perform. If he had passed off the passing of the comet as his own doing, what did he plan for his next trick? Would he be able to make us stronger?

I had to put thoughts like that from my head. I reminded myself that I was plenty strong as it was. To be stronger would be excessive. For any vampire to be stronger is just unfair. And that was the problem. Too efficient a predator and the prey dies out. Extinction. Madness. It had to be stopped. Even if this Solomon was just a quack with a telescope, it was worth a look.

Sophie came back from ‘cleaning up’ dressed like something out of a classic French film. She even had one of those funny little hats.

“Are you not going to change?” she said, looking me and Santiago over quizzically. We were still drenched in blood.

We conceded and grabbed a change of clothes from the car. We changed in the men’s room.

“What do you think he’ll be like, this Solomon?” Santiago asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, dropping my blood-soaked socks into the toilet for some poor forensics expert to find. “I imagine he’ll be charming, old, older than Sophie even. He’ll probably wear a cape or a cloak. He thinks he’s the hot shit, like he’s God’s gift to vampires, especially since he carried off the whole sun thing swimmingly. If he really believes he caused the sun to stop working, he’s either a nut with good timing or he is the actual cause and the Spider Lady lied to me. We’ll kill him either way, for expediency’s sake.”

Santiago flushed the toilet and exited the bathroom without saying anything. I changed my socks and buckled my belt and went.

It’s dark now and we’re driving towards the beach. Vernon’s Point, the place is called. You have to drive all the way up to the end of a long, empty highway an hour from the coast, and then another hour all the way back down on a dirt road through woods and mud and fuckall else. I pull a sweatshirt on over my head and sink down further in the back seat. Santiago insists on driving with the top down with the hope that Sophie’s skirt might be blown up by the wind—never mind that he already saw just about everything there was to see this afternoon.

I look out into the trees as we go, over the back edge of the car. I imagine all the strange things flying past that no one ever cares enough to see. Tiny faces. Sharp teeth. Luminous eyes. Fingers that stretch and terminate in points, limbs long and spindly. I’m dreaming. Sleeping at night. Really sleeping.

It’s been a long day.

When we stop, affixed in my head is the sensation of walking through spider webs in a basement somewhere. I feel them on my face. I sit up straight and brush frantically at my cheeks and brow. Nothing. I look around.

We’re at the end of a dirt road so narrow it’s barely there. The growth is barely thin enough to walk through. I guess that’s the direction we came from. In front of us is the horizon, which I realize is actually a cliff, and then the ocean. There are many people here. Vampires and their thrall. There are body guards and men in thrones with strange facial tattoos and black suits. They drink from golden goblets and there are girls in feathers and not much else serving them and caressing them and I’m beginning to realize I’m out of my depth for the first time in what feels like centuries.

Santiago nudges me. “What the hell, man?” he whispers. “This isn’t what I thought it would be like at all.” I nod and motion for him to keep quiet.

Sophie leads us on through the crowd unperturbed, like she’s used to this crowd. I swear I even see one of the men in the thrones nod to her.

Eventually we come upon a small thatched structure. Outside are two very large, very intimidating guards dressed like medieval riot police, with axes, shoulder-mounted flashlights and assault rifles strapped to their backs. They step aside when Sophie approaches and don’t even give Santiago or myself a second look. We are quite out of our depth.

We open the door, and inside is completely different from the outside.

When I pass through the door, my knees go wobbly and my stomach somersaults and twists all around. My head feels like it was shot out of a cannon and my vision swims and blurs most disconcertingly. This is a common effect of very powerful spacial-manipulation magic.

What I mean by this is, the inside of this thatched hut on the top of a cliff by the sea was much, much, much larger than the inside. Passing into this sort of dimensional fold is somewhat stressful on things like matter. It had been some time since I had experienced anything of this sort. Whoever was responsible has a lot of power and a lot of talent at their disposal. This makes me uneasy.

The inside is decked out like a bizarre cross between a medieval castle and some military-industrial hell complex. The corridors and floors are stone but the doors slide away into the walls as we pass with a satisfying hum and a hydraulic puff.

“Solomon?” Sophie calls finally as we round a bend. “Solomon, I’ve brought someone here to meet you,” she says, smiling at me over her shoulder. “I’m sure you’ll love them. They’ve come to see you work your magic.”

Through a final door, we come to a chamber made up like any sort of office you would see in your sad, boring day-to-day existence. Desk. Chair. Stack of papers. Paper weight. Stapler. Computer. Pens. Fax. Scanner. Copier. You name it. This is not how I expected the domain of this Solomon character to look. Much less did I expect that Sophie of all people would lead us right to him, past armed guards and through spacial manipulations. I was impressed.

Solomon did not look at all how I expected him. He was tall and dark, but he did not look old. He was in fact the very image of youth. He could not have been turned any older than twenty. He was tall with black hair tied back in a ponytail. He was broad as a ship’s bow, with hands like ham-hocks and a neck like a tree stump. When he smiled, dusky good looks gave way to an honest oafish smile with a quarter-inch wide gap between the front teeth.

“Ah, Sophie!” he declared. “And guests. Welcome!” he stood and embraced Sophie and kissed her below her ear, then moved and shook mine and Santiago’s hands.

“Friends of Sophie’s are friends of mine,” he said encouragingly, smiling as he shook my hand with both of his. “It is a sincere pleasure to meet you. My name is Solomon. And you are?”

ashes part 8

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:00:28 -0400

The pause, the words, the look are imperceptible to everyone in the place but me, it seems, and the hollering only gets louder as the dance continues.

Finally stripped bare, Sophie stands and twirls herself around a metal pole jutting out of the stage. She moves like a feather, or like water, fluid, weightless. Sublime. And then, she’s grinning down the bar at me and she’s asking for a volunteer. The previously unseen emcee, a short man in an untucked button-up shirt and tie, hands her a mic and she says over the techno-garbage excuse for music: “I need a volunteer from the audience,” and her black-painted lips turn themselves up at the corners, pointed like a flick-knife.

“I need a volunteer from the audience who would like an experience that they will remember for the rest of their lives.”

She says it breathily, heavily, enticingly. She says it the way that makes you excited, and the way that lets you know she’s the one that will be calling the shots. The roar of the attendees reaches a feverish pitch. Sophie winks at me and walks once more to the end of the stage and on to the bar. Every man at the bar is clamoring for her attention, some of them even going so far as to stand up and wave their arms. She passes them all, one by one, looking them up and down, running her fingers through their hair as she passes, discarding them like spent napkins. A perverse game of duck-duck-goose. Then she comes to me, and it seems like I’m the goose. An image of a fried duck in a big black pot flashes through my mind. Her black-painted lips part to show a hint of pointed pearl, and a flash of pink tongue running over them like a slug sliding down a razor.

She picks the man sitting next to me.

She pulls him up, just a regular guy. Dark hair, collared shirt, khaki slacks. He’s had a few and his face is bright red. He can’t believe his luck. I know what’s happening now. I know this song and dance, and when I look over at Santiago, it’s clear he’s got a pretty good idea, too.

Sophie speaks again into the microphone:

“Tell me your name,” she asks the man. He answers: “David.”

“David, how do you feel, being here, seeing me at Rodrick’s for the last time ever?”

He stammers: “I uh uh uh I feel honored uh I guess?” like he’s asking permission.

Sophie smiles and puts her hand on his chest and guides him like a tugboat towards the metallic pole. “Very good, David. I’m glad you feel honored,” she says breathily, moving him slowly and gently, like one moving an antique chandelier. Once his back is to the pole, she slinks around him, never breaking contact, never taking her hand off of him. She pulls his hands behind his back, and he doesn’t protest even a little, just turns a darker shade of red.

“Now David, I’m going to ask you a personal question. And I want you to be honest with me. We’re all friends here, right? This won’t ever leave this room. Will you be honest?”

She puts the microphone up to his face, reaching around from behind him, pressing ever so slightly against his back, soft pink nipples on soft cotton fabric. I’m sure he can feel her. Darker and darker red.

He stammers that yes, he’ll be honest.

“David, do you like it rough?” she asks like a mousetrap flying shut. He falls to his knees then and cries out.

There’s blood pouring out of his neck, but the crowd never saw Sophie take the bite out of him. They’re too busy laughing to see Sophie spit out a piece of neck flesh. They haven’t seen the blood dripping down her chin and onto her naked chest.

The sound of grown men screaming in abject terror is one that is wholly unique. It never sounds the same twice, but it is always unmistakable and it will always bring a smile to my face.

Like lightning, quick, I leap to my feet. The sight of blood, the hiss of severed arteries, it dries my throat intolerably. The thirst. Hunger so abject, so hollowing, so complete, it nearly overwhelms me. It’s all I can do to rip out the neck of the man standing closest to me. The cascade of red flows through a dying gargle, a gasp of terror drowning quickly. The spray hits my face and I lick my lips and sink my teeth into the soft wet esophageal hole and drink. And drink. And drink.

I move onto the next one in short order. A distant corner of my cognizance registers the image of Sophie tossing aside her victim, the man David. Her lily-white skin has turned entirely ruby red. Only her black-painted lips, still smiling sinisterly, give any impression that she was ever any other color. She is beautiful in only the way a woman partaking in wholesale slaughter can ever be. And then she’s gone into the crowd, sending men flying in all directions, their windpipes dangling down their chests from torn necks. I follow suit, wading in like a buzz saw through a butcher shop.

Time passes as in a dream. Days go by as the showers of red turn into a pool at our feet. No one makes it out, though not for lack of trying. One courageous patron attempts to defend himself with a chair, only to have it placed firmly into his middle, impaling him on three of the four legs. I lift him up and open my mouth as blood pours out of him. I drink until my stomach hurts and all the screaming has stopped.

Sound and time and my senses shift back to working normally as the sound of a familiar belly laugh breaks into the silence like a burglar. It’s Santiago, covered in blood, the girls he had on his arms before now strewn about the floor, mangled, drained. He’s laughing.

“My god, Sergei,” he exclaims, motioning to the carnage around us. “I didn’t know you had such wonderful friends.”

He smiles a wide wolf-smile at Sophie, who is still naked and covered in blood. She smiles back, then turns to me and leaps clean across the room and into my arms. She kisses me, and I taste the blood of many on her lips.

“Sergei! I cannot believe it!” she says. “Where have you been all these years? It has been too long! And now, you show up here on this night of all nights! It is truly an auspicious sign.”

I want to ask what she’s talking about, but I’m distracted by the naked skin in my arms and the blood on my lips. Instead I say, “Sophie, this is my friend Santiago. Santiago—Sophie.”

They smile and nod approvingly of one another and Sophie daintily extends her blood-stained hand. They shake and Santiago says, “How do you do?” and, like a real asshole, bends and kisses her hand.

“Yes,” she says, looking down her arm at him. “You’re one of Sergei’s friends all right.”

ashes part 7

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:08:06 -0400

A week later and we’re heading south. The sun shines it’s red-tinted light on us and our car, a white convertible that we picked up from some unfortunate man in the midst of a midlife crisis. The engine purrs like a jungle cat. I’m in the back and Santiago is driving.

“What’s this place called again?”

He’s asking me the name of a nightclub. It’s Rodrick’s. We’re heading there to meet up with a girl named Sophie, the only vampire I know older than myself. From the shores of Europe her family came to the new world seeking a better life, up from poverty and misfortune, the land of opportunity and all that. They never made it. There was a vampire on board, and when the ship, the Merciful Nurse arrived at the port, it was a mass grave that floated. Sophie never told me how she escaped or how she was turned.

“Right. And you think this girl, this Sophie, is going to just invite us to the blood ceremony that will end the world?”

I look up from my book, a slim volume of Hemingway, and shrug noncommittally.

“If you’ve got any better ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

Five hours later and the sun is hanging low and red like a paper lantern. I imagine Japanese characters dancing over it’s surface. One for ‘blood,’ one for ‘hunger,’ one for ‘feast,’ one for ‘the end.’

I’m dreaming. Santiago slaps me on the leg, reaching around from the front seat. He asks me for directions and I tell him, and soon we’re there.

Rodrick’s is the kind of place you’d imagine. Neon signs advertising cheap beer and ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ but it wasn’t always such a dive. New owners took over some years ago and turned it into a titty bar. I get out of the car and stretch and look at the big red and white sign over the door. I wonder if Sophie even works here anymore.

Inside it’s dark, smoky and packed to bursting. I feel uneasy and I don’t know why. Usually I’m very discerning when it comes to things that make me uneasy, able to pick it out—whatever it is—with pinpoint precision and eliminate it as fast as possible. This isn’t something so simple.

There’s loud music and men dribbling cheap beer down their chins. The girls dance and gyrate for tips with tassels on their nipples. They look sick and spent in the black lights. There’s a smell in the air that stings your nostrils like sweat and come and shame. I hate strip joints.

I lose track of Santiago pretty quickly and take a seat at the bar. A young girl in thick glasses and a low-cut shirt smiles and asks what I’ll have. I order a beer and a shot and find myself subconsciously sizing the place up. I’ve got that itch. I’ll need to feed before the night is done.

“Somethin’ on your mind, stranger?” the girl asks in a charmingly faked southern drawl.

“I’m looking for someone,” I tell her. She smiles demurely and replies: “Everyone’s looking for someone. This someone got a name?”

I tell her and she laughs. “I shoulda known,” she says, clucking her tongue against her teeth. “Sophie’s got quite a fan club in these parts. But I’m sure you knew that. She’ll be on in five.”

Before I can ask what she means by ‘on in five,’ the girl is gone, off to serve some drooler another drink. I see Santiago on the other side of the bar, already with two semi-nude girls on each arm and I roll my eyes. He sees me too and winks.

And then the music stops.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” a voice from hidden speakers says. “Thank you again for coming to Rodrick’s. We hope you are all enjoying your evening so far,” a pause for a loud cheer and clapping from the various patrons. “And we hope that you are all ready to enjoy the rest of the evening ten fold!”

“It is almost that special time, gentlemen, the one many of you made special plans for tonight. Those of you unaware, you are in for a treat beyond all treats! Tonight, we are seeing off one of the finest performers Rodrick’s has ever employed. Yes, yes, try not to wail too much, but this may be the last time a performance of this caliber is ever again witnessed on these shores. But, I ramble. You all know what you came here for, and it is our solemn duty to provide it to you, one last time. Ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu…Miss Sophie Black!”

And the crowd is going just wild. Men are standing up and pounding their chests, slamming their bar stools against the floor. The other dancing girls are clapping and smiling and whistling. All the lights go off and everyone shuts up just as abruptly as they started. I feel a very uncomfortable tension in my back and chest, the kind you get when you know something awful is about to happen, like when you might have to run as fast as you ever have without the luxury of looking back to see what horror is nipping your heels.

A spotlight comes on, pointing at the stage which is attached to the far end of the bar, illuminating a stool with an ancient-looking phonograph player on top, the kind with the comically antiquated horn. The music hisses and pops and a man’s voice sings a somber operatic dirge. Behind the phonograph, there is a slight stirring of a red curtain, and then from behind the curtain, like an alabaster snake, a white-gloved hand appears. It moves slowly in time to the tinny beat of the phonograph before slowly drawing back the curtain, exposing the rest of the lily-white arm. The arm reaches around the curtain, running sensually up and down the length of a hidden voluptuous torso. There is the hint of a round hip bone, the impression of a finely shaped pair of breasts, but no skin shown but that on the forearm of the apparently disembodied arm.

And then another arm appears, also white gloved and ghostly, from the other side of the curtain. This one also moves in time with the hissing and popping funereal music, an abstract dance with it’s counterpart on the other side of the curtain. And then a leg joins in. And another. Two long, lithe, chalk-white legs that terminate in red high heels present themselves at an impossible angle from behind the curtain, and the arms never move. A seasoned contortionist would be puzzled and alarmed if they were lead to believe that these two pairs of limbs belonged to the same person—which they did. But the constraints of the physical world are not so rigid for vampires.

As the song nears it’s end, the light goes out and the curtain falls, transforming seamlessly into an elegant red gown draped effortlessly about the figure that had previously hid behind it. The place erupts into a cacophony of whistling and shouting and applause. Sophie stands with her arms spread wide and her head down, black hair obscuring her features. She waits for the applause to stop, along with the last pathetic notes of the sad, ancient opera. And then she begins her act, the real act, the no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing, drool-on-you-dogs strip show. The tinny music is replaced with heavy bass and an electronic drum beat. Some performer you couldn’t remember the name of if you tried raps unintelligibly behind the music and Sophie takes her gloves off. The spotlight is replaced with a strobe and a wild barrage of colored flashes and light beams. Sophie turns and raises her now-bare hands above her head. The curtain, or gown, or whatever it is, falls away from her as if yanked off by an invisible stage crew, hungry for flesh. She looks playfully over her shoulder, licks her lips and winks at no one in particular. From where I’m sitting it looks like she’s winking at me, but I’m certain every other john in the place thinks the same thing.

She turns and the dress falls away completely, leaving her bare and radiant but for a set of practically-nonexistent black undergarments. As the music builds, her dance becomes more manic, more desperate. Gone is the grace and the sensuality, the old-timey charm. It is replaced with an animalistic heat, a hunger too strange to name. I know the hunger’s name. I feel it. Looking at her as she writhes across the stage, arching her back and spreading her legs, I feel my dead blood boiling.

She moves like a snake, the type that swallow men whole, all the way down the stage and onto the bar. The music is loud and thumping in the back of my head and as she gets closer to where I’m sitting, the sensation of wild heat builds and builds, the way you feel an orgasm in the back of your neck well before it’s achieved.

She’s within arm’s reach of me now, and whether it’s the light or the air or something else, Sophie still hasn’t recognized me. She’s down on all fours, writhing, her body like a work of art. Men throw crumpled dollars from all directions, but none of them seem to touch her. She rises to her knees and runs her hands up over her stomach, over her breasts, up her neck and through her hair.

And now, she recognizes me.

Her look of being absolutely in charge, the look a girl gets when she becomes the center of attention in a whole room full of men, fades very, very quickly. Her eyes go wide for just a split second and I see her lips move. Even amid all the noise, the music, the shouting and drooling, I hear her whisper: “You came.”

ashes part 6

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:11:16 -0400

We chuckled and soon fell into the old rituals. Santiago broke out a bottle of ancient wine and we began the process of catching up. We laughed and talked for a long while, and eventually the thirst began to make its presence felt in Santiago’s throat.

“Sergei, my friend, it’s always so nice to see you. What say we step out for a drink? I know this great club, open all night. They have dancing girls with whips and for $50 they take you up on stage, tie you up and have their way with you. They love me there. I have an act where the girls will let me drink their blood. They think nothing of it! A bunch of kinky freaks. What do you say?”

I laughed and weighed my options before realizing that I had forgotten all about what I came to tell him.

“Santi,” I began, but was promptly cut off.

“Oh, come now. I don’t want to hear it. How long has it been? Years? Decades, yet? It has been too long since we went out and had a time of it. The girls will love you there, I bet we won’t even have to pay for our drinks!”

“Santi, really,” I tried again. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

Santiago looked at me with a raised eyebrow, a look of intense consternation, like a cryptographer staring into a matrix of letters and symbols attempting to find the secret code.

“Well?” he said. “Go on. Don’t tell me, wait…You met a girl, didn’t you? You dog!” he slapped his knee and cackled manically. “You old sap, I knew one would get you eventually. That’s why you don’t want to come out. Don’t worry, I’ll keep the girls entertained all on my own. Any that persist, you can just charm away, flick of your finger and they’re gone, right?”

“It’s not that,”

“Well what?” Santiago can be extremely persistent—and punishingly annoying—when he chooses to be. “If it’s not the girl, what can it be? Are you a teetotaler now? You have barely touched your wine, but I know you never liked wine…so not that.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “Would you shut up and listen for two seconds?” Finally. Santiago leaned forward and narrowed his eyebrows at me, but he was quiet.

“It’s just that I don’t think the club will be open yet.”

Santiago’s look changed to one of pure bewilderment. And then he began laughing, slapping his knees with both hands and rolling side to side in his chair.

“Aha! What? What would give you that idea? All doors are open to El Diablo,” he pointed at himself here with both thumbs. “I could show up in the middle of the day, circumstances permitting. They would take it for a holiday!”

And here it was my turn to laugh. Sensing an implied insult, Santiago was immediately back to his strained face of perplexity.

“What do you mean?” he hissed.

I laughed and stood. I walked to the window, stepping over a precarious stack of partially dissolved pizza boxes and crusts as I went and looked back at Santiago.

“That’s just the thing, Santi,” I said with a smirk. “It is the middle of the day.”

I drew back the curtain and flooded the dark, messy living room with the white light of midday. Santiago began cursing profusely and screaming, reflex reactions to what his body imagined would be the flood of overpowering pain that comes with irrevocable oblivion. It never came. When my eyes adjusted to the cascade of sunshine, Santiago was struggling to hurl himself over the back of the couch, but was too busy flailing around in what he imagined to be his death throes to do it effectively. My laughter welled up fresh in my stomach.

Finally, as Santiago realized that the light would not vaporize him and turn him to a smoldering pile of ashes and slimy boiled fatty tissues, he leered at me over the top of the couch, which he had eventually managed to scramble behind.

“Sergei,” he said, voice barely a hoarse whisper. “What the fuck?”

All I could muster was, “You should’ve seen the look on your face.”

When I finally stopped laughing and convinced Santiago that it’s not some new trick I’ve learned, we both took seats on the couch and lit cigarettes. Santiago sat with his head on his hands, mouth periodically falling agape.

“I can’t believe it,” he would mumble here and there as I explained what I had said.

“You went to see the Spider Lady?” he demanded of me when I mentioned her. “Christo, Sergei. You must be mad!”

At the end of the explanation, Santiago looked at me, his eyes wide, trying his best to take in everything that I had laid before him. “Well?” he said, his voice almost breaking. “What would you like me to do about it? I’ve never heard of any vampire cabals, Sergei. I would think you would have a better idea of where to start looking for the likes of them than I; you are much older. I know nothing of magic either, aside from the charms and tricks that come innately. How do you expect me to help you repel a meteor?”

Santiago had a way of saying things that made you feel the utter hopelessness of any given situation. He presented himself as a jolly, devil-may-care type, but it was to hide a deep inner sadness. It was only natural for one so young. The memories of a previous life are strong in the first hundred years. From time to time, they will resurface in the next hundred or so, and after that they will fade to dreams. The dreams at times will be very vivid, and the sensation of needing to remember what the images mean can be extremely depressing. But this fades. Eventually you will forget the sensation of a past life in the way the sunlight fades to darkness. Santiago was better than I was at hiding it, but when a situation got the better of him, it became easier to let it get the better of you, too.

I rested my head in my hands. It was different hearing the madness from someone else. We were up against something neither of us had ever heard of, had ever experienced, had ever conceived or dreamed of. My head started hurting.

“The truth is,” I said, swallowing dryly. “I don’t know what I expect to do. But I can’t do this crazy shit alone.”

We were a little drunk. Santiago hiccupped and chuckled.

“Well man, when you put it like that, fuck it. Not like I had any plans today.”

He filled our glasses and toasted somberly, “To madness!” and then laughed until we couldn’t anymore.

ashes part 5

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:10:00 -0400

The city hummed with activity, a distant humming that reverberates endlessly through your ear canals and makes your head hurt even when you are by yourself in silence. It is different from the silence of the night. So much life all around, so much bustling and moving, so much motion that your stomach starts to hurt from thinking of it, like the insides of a washing machine stuck on the spin cycle forever.

Slowly, invisibly, I made my way across town to the den of a friend of mine. Unless he had awoken from the same troubled sleep with the same amplified thirst as I had, he was very likely to still be asleep.

Santiago was the son of a fascist general in the Spanish civil war. His mother fled to America, and then Mexico, leaving her husband to die at the hands of the anarchists and then became a whore, but raised her son as best as she could on her own and in such circumstances. Santiago showed a talent for painting at an early age, but never had a chance to truly develop his skills for he was found dead on the eve of his twentieth birthday. His mother and those in his village wept and tore their hair for their loss until he rose from the dead and feasted on their blood. Santiago lived as an animal for two long decades before our paths crossed and I saved him from the madness. I taught him to hunt more effectively, and how better to take care of himself. It was a wonder he had kept alive as long as he had, sustaining himself on the mythical diet of blood only. He was skinny and shriveled and hungry, for he did not know that vampires need to eat real food, too. I took him under my wing, and we traveled together for many years, living like kings on the fat of the land—so to speak.

We settled in the city for it’s dense and largely indifferent population, as well as its proximity to the shore, and here we had been as ghosts for this last stretch of innumerable years. We had not spoken in some time, but among vampires this is common practice. Time does not mean so much when time is all you are.

I knocked at the door of a basement apartment in a hive-like development across town, practically a mirror image of my own. I knocked again, louder, hoping to rouse Santi from his slumber. It didn’t work, and so I walked in. The myths of vampires being unable to enter a place unless invited are patently not true—I have known many vampires in my years who have survived as burglars, and indeed, burglary-gone-awry is a wonderful way to explain a ransacked home with a blood-drained corpse as it’s only occupant. And besides, even if the lock was latched, it is no big thing for our kind to move like mist through the crack under a door. Even Fort Knox, human’s gold standard of secure facilities could not keep the likes of us out.

“Santi?” I called into the dark, dusty apartment. There were stacks of magazines and books and DVD cases along with piles of empty chicken buckets and beer cans and wine bottles. A solitary candle burned on a shelf under an image of the virgin mother with Hitler’s mustache drawn on it. Slob, I thought to myself. There was a heavy black curtain hung over the only window to the outside, framed in a rectangle of white light where the sun could still get in.

“Santi?” I called again. “Where are you, pista gorda?”

I found him asleep on a couch in one of the back rooms. There was a drum kit that had fallen into disrepair sitting in another corner, and from there I took a cymbal stand with the heavy metal plate still hanging on it and put it as close to Santiago’s head as I could manage. I couldn’t help but smile as I silently looked for something to strike the cymbal with and found about half of a drum stick.

I began striking the cymbal loud and hard and yelling at Santiago in broken Spanish.

“Despierte, asshole! Chinga tu madre, puto!”

The look on his face as he lunged without sound towards me was priceless.

We tumbled and rolled around on the garbage-covered floor for a while, him cursing wildly and me laughing hysterically. After he realized it was me and not a hunter, he threw himself off of me and let a deeply annoyed sigh escape him.

“Sergei,” he said and cursed. “You scared the fucking shit out of me, man,” he said and crossed himself and spat on the floor. I kept laughing.

“You should have seen the look on your face.”

ashes part 4

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0400

What the Spider Lady told me was laden with double meanings, conundrums and gypsy-speak. Riddles and word games, most of it, but the important parts were these:

Long ago, an evil magician summoned a manifestation of a dark and forgotten god into our reality. This manifestation, the magician believed, would put him in a seat of unquestionable power for the remainder of time. Instead, the dark god manifested as a light in the sky—a comet or a meteor, whatever you want to call it—and brought with it the curse of vampirism. This magician was the first. Those among his disciples were next. Those in the village they inhabited followed, and soon the long forgotten nation was bathed in blood, like a black tide rolling in to sweep away dry land forever.

But, as things often go with dark, forgotten gods, the magician did not quite get what he bargained for. The comet, which intersected the path of the sun’s rays to Earth continued on an uncharted path across the sky, and eventually it’s influence was lost. The magician and his followers were suddenly no longer able to move in the daylight, and so became the nocturnal horrors of legend. Time continued to relentlessly pass until all but the event itself was forgotten. No names recalled, no genealogies to chart. Just a curse that would last until the end of time, a curse just strong enough to keep vampires from overrunning the planet and finally wiping themselves out when there was no more fresh blood to be spilled.

And now, the meteor had come back. After thousands and thousands of years floating through the abyssal blackness of space, it had returned on the end of it’s long forgotten orbit to block the sunlight and unleash the terror of us on the world once again.

“You hesitate, little Cyril,” the Spider Lady said. “You do not see anything wrong with this picture. Let the comet come, you are thinking. Vampires will certainly do a much better job of running this world than humans ever could, yes? No, little Cyril. Vampires are monsters and you know this to be true. You live with this notion every day, every time you suck the blood from the neck of a living person, you struggle with what you are. And you know the rest of your kind are no better, and in many cases worse.

“Even now, there are cabals assembling, the most ancient of your kind summoning one another and speaking of these legends in hushed tones, fearful that speaking aloud will wake them from a dark and pleasant dream where they will spread and conquer and rule for all time. But vampires, for their ability to resist the lash of ages, are short-sighted. Many others, less discrete, less experienced, but just as strong and vicious and intelligent as you, are making moves as well. Even now, there are young firebrands shrieking for other vampires to rise and take back the day from the living.

“And you must stop them, at all costs.”

A thousand questions flooded through the space between my ears. Chief among them was “Why me?” but I knew better than to ask the Spider Lady such an open-ended question. “Why not?” was next on the list, and the Spider Lady answered it without my even having to speak.

“Because, little Cyril,” she said with a wheeze, “If vampires rule the planet, who will they feed upon? Humanity will be doomed, certainly, and I could not expect you or any other undead beast to care about the plight of humanity, but the vampires will be doomed as well, doomed ten fold even. Have you ever seen a vampire who is unable to feed? Have you ever felt the madness, the fatigue, the constant thirst that stabs at you like a jackhammer until thirst is all that you know? No, you have not. You have been a very lucky little vampire, my Cyril. Others have not. And these others are all that will be left if your cohorts are not stopped from spilling every last drop of warm blood on the planet. You must stop their terrible feast, if only for the sake of sating your own foul thirst. They will not leave you any table scraps, little Cyril.”

The Spider Lady leaned back and folded her arms across her sunken skeletal chest. I felt the feeling returning to my body. The charm was lifted. I took a deep breath of my own accord and thought vaguely of throttling the Spider Lady, but decided against it. I flexed my hands and made my knuckles pop, then stood.

“I’ll do it,” I said finally after a long, tense moment. “I’ll do it, but I’m not going to like it.”

I turned and walked towards the rickety screen door as the Spider Lady laughed.

“No, little Cyril,” she said as I passed through the door. “You most certainly will not.”

The screen slapped shut behind me, and then I was back on my street. I turned and looked to where the small white building had just stood, but there was nothing, just a row of storefronts, all painfully familiar. I spat and reached in my pocket for my cigarettes and looked up at the sun for the first time since practically forever. There was something odd about it, that old ball of fire, something I hadn’t noticed. It’s light was bright and yellow, but the color of the orb itself seemed different. It was the color of butter, fresh yellow butter from a crock on the country side, with just a few drops of blood mixed in to give it a red tint. I scowled and pulled up my hood and began walking.

ashes part 3

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:30:00 -0400

The Spider Lady is something unique in this world. Something horrible that makes your skin crawl, something nasty that makes your teeth chatter, something inexplicable that makes the hair on your arms stand up, something absolutely one-of-a-kind.

In the years I’ve had the misfortune of knowing the Spider Lady, I’ve never been able to figure out what the hell she is. She doesn’t age, at least not properly. She’s looked as old as anything as long as I’ve known her. She doesn’t drink blood. Her skin is covered in tattoos and she dresses like a gypsy circus sideshow. She can go out in the sun. She’s not a vampire and she’s not a wolf.

There is something else, beyond the mysteries of her physiology that put me ill at ease. More than once she has demonstrated the ability to hold my kind under a sort of thrall. The way I can charm a human, the Spider Lady seems to have a similar ability in relation to vampires. More than once in her company I’ve found myself compelled to obey her will. Thankfully she’s only ever used it to shut me up, but it is a powerful sort of magic and absolutely irresistible. It makes me more nervous than I care to admit, and the answers the Spider Lady gives you to whatever question you have is just as likely to satisfy you as it is to drive you mad.

The way to the Spider Lady’s house is this: You must get lost. Pick a direction and walk in it, turn yourself around and walk in another direction. Repeat until you are good and lost. If your question is good enough, or if you are just unlucky enough, the Spider Lady’s domain will appear to you. More often than not, you will not notice anything out of the ordinary, because it usually manifests as a small white building with a neon sign in the front window that reads: Fortune Teller – Mystic – Palm Readings – Tarot.

I lit another cigarette after about five blocks and turned abruptly left. I couldn’t recall what was in this direction, then cursed when I remembered it was the direction of an all-night diner, and that I knew every street between here and there. It is difficult for a vampire to get lost. I turned abruptly again and guessed I would spend the rest of the afternoon doing this, until the sun went down at least.

Around the next bend, I saw a small white building with a neon sign in the window that read: Fortune Teller – Mystic – Palm Readings – Tarot. With a cartoonish slap of my forehead, I walked towards the rickety screen door and walked right in.

The Spider Lady sat in a plush red chair across the table from her crystal ball. The place was done up like a haunted house, black curtains in the windows, baubles and trinkets and sparkling bits of rock were neatly arranged on all the shelves and there were cobwebs in all the corners. The room looked about how you would expect it to from the outside.

I couldn’t help but imagining, as I stood waiting for the Spider Lady to acknowledge me, the image of a fly continuously running into the same web.

Finally the wrinkled old crone spoke, with a rasp in her voice like an engine made of sand being jump-started.

“I knew you would come, my little Cyril,” she says. I hate it when she uses my nickname, and I was about to let her know as much, but with a wave of her hand, I was silenced. “Sit,” she continued, and suddenly I was overcome with the compulsion to sit. My legs took me to the chair opposite of her, and inside I screamed and cursed my rotten luck. This was influence the likes of which I had never experienced.

“Are you worried, little Cyril?” she asked, squinting and leaning forward, her toothless mouth slightly agape, drawing deep breaths. “You should be,” she said. “There is much to worry about in this…troubled time.”

She took a long, haggard breath and then said: “Do I have your full attention?”

With every ounce of willpower I possessed, I gave the faintest, most strained nod of my entire existence.

She smiled like a checkerboard and leaned back, clasping her hands in front of her. “Good. I will only say this once, for time is of the essence. Listen very carefully…”

ashes part 2

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:02:58 -0400

I squinted and marveled at just how different everything looked in the full blaze of daylight. My street was nearly unrecognizable. The buildings seemed taller, the trees more numerous. I kept my head down and squinted at the sidewalk, also bathed in bright, harsh luminescence. I noticed after a few blocks that I was sweating. The sun gave off heat I remembered in an abstract sort of way. I struggled to recall the day, the month, even the year. I decided it must be spring, and supposed that it could get rather warm in the day time, though it was the cool, refreshing nights of spring that I remembered best. I took off my jacket and draped it over my shoulder, resisting the temptation to pull it over my head like a canopy.

After the initial shock, I slipped back into my routine like clockwork. First it’s down the street to the convenience store, buy a pack of cigarettes and then head to the bar. I was startled to see a different clerk behind the counter, and even more startled when she smiled and gave me a cheery morning greeting. Day shift, I remind myself. The clerks do change, even though it’s always been the same tired old black man every time I’ve gone in. The black guy has been under one of my charms as long as I’ve been coming here. He doesn’t see me. When I come in, he can’t help but obey the compulsion to put two packs of Stanton’s on the counter and then promptly forget about them. Vampires don’t pay for anything.

After the initial greeting, the charm took effect on the girl. I quietly wandered around, ate a donut and then took my cigarettes from the counter and left for the bar.

The bar was still closed. Jesus Fuck, I thought to myself. How early is it? I turned and looked for the nearest pedestrian and asked the time. He was a fat man of middle age wearing a baseball hat. “9:44,” he told me, then noticed my proximity to the front door of the bar and helpfully added, “A.M.”

I sneered and thanked him, then pulled him into the nearest alley and sucked him dry. Finally my thirst was sated, at least for the day, and I could start to wake up and think clearly. Like coffee, but brewed by ancient gods from the richest beans ever conceived, steeped to perfection in a warm, living human. I wiped my mouth and tossed the body in a dumpster to be forgotten, and then began thinking.

It took me ten minutes, but finally I came to the conclusion that my only recourse was to see the Spider Lady. I cursed my rotten luck, spat on the sidewalk and pulled the fat man’s baseball cap low over my eyes. I would have to see the Spider Lady, because it was extremely likely that she was the only person who had any idea why the hell I could suddenly go outside in the daytime. But that didn’t mean it was going to be pleasant.

Ashes part 1

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:00:00 -0400

I woke up very thirsty, which is not at all uncommon for a vampire. I stretched and yawned and clucked my tongue against the roof of my mouth, which made a sound like two pieces of chalk smacking together. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. Same dusty basement room as always. Bed, book case, candelabra, tiny shelf. I threw out my TV after I realized it was destroying my sleep schedule. I got up and stretched again, then bent down to touch my toes. I made the clucking dry-mouth noise again and sleepily meandered towards the front door. I wondered vaguely about the time as I walked down the concrete hallway that lead out to the maintenance entrance, a concrete set of stairs behind an ancient rusted door. A regular catacomb. I kicked the ancient rusted door open, like I always do, then promptly hissed, shrieked and leapt backwards, sprawling without a single shred of grace or dignity on my back. This was caused by the sudden cascade of burning yellow sunlight that rushed inside.

I screamed and flailed, expecting my skin to flake away bit by bit, my insides igniting and dissolving me from the inside out. I waited for the rush of mind-shattering pain, the unfathomable agony that is said to occur when our kind enter the sunlight. After all these years, done in by a door. What a joke that would be.

But the pain never came. I covered my eyes and gasped for air and grasped to regain my composure, then rolled over onto my belly and out of the bright white rectangle cast on the floor. I sat up and pressed myself to the nearest wall and looked at my hands in disbelief. The nails were a little long and in need of trimming, hairy, with a variety of small scars and rough patches, but unchanged. There were no burns, there were no marks. The sun hadn’t had the tiniest effect on me, other than, I suppose, giving me a dose of vitamin D.

A million different possibilities flashed through my mind, hurried, dim, like the passing of lights from the back seat of a car. Was I dreaming? Was I hallucinating? Had I gone mad? Had I been mad all along?

Going into the sunlight—or rather, strictly avoiding going into sunlight—is a main tenant of the vampire life style. It ranks almost as highly on the vampiric priority list as the drinking of warm blood.

In a confused effort to make any more sense of the situation, I slowly put my hand into the illumination cast on the floor and nothing happened. No burning. Nothing. I rolled up my sleeve and put my arm further out, and still nothing. Slowly I got to my feet and after a moment of hesitation, jumped into the rectangle. Nervous, I hopped immediately back out. I gave myself another once over, and not seeing any burn marks or my skin turning to ash, jumped back into the light. This time I stayed. I spun around and examined myself.

“What the fuck?” I said to no one in particular.

Unable to explain what was going on, I decided simply to roll with it and walked out to meet the day for the first time in two hundred years.