Lydia wants to be more than friends. Mitchell has a run-in. Things begin to come apart.
Perpetual and profound thank-yous to WhiteHare, SunnyFla, Jac_E, Aquamarine Jo, and crazy-idea-inc.
I've become a caretaker of lost souls. I'm surely unqualified for this job: I've barely shaken myself free from Roger, and I'm still learning to negotiate things for myself.
There is a physical sensation, like driving over gravel, of the supernatural dissolving into the ordinary, the secrets just out of reach, leaking drops of meaning I can't quite grasp. I notice things that aren't there. Or shouldn't be. My pulse increases slightly when I walk past television sets, afraid they'll spontaneously come to life and speak. Mitchell says one of the cashiers at the grocery, the sullen one with the scarred arm and the odd musky smell, is a werewolf, and he knows that Mitchell knows. Every month at full moon he changes into a wild animal who could tear any of us to pieces, and doesn't remember a thing the next day. We avoid his queue at the checkout.
They've opened me in a way that humans can't. We enter a communal space apart from hard surfaces and sharp edges, where mind and body are permeable, feelings have colors and tastes, everyone's thoughts are audible. We're no good at concealing ourselves.
I sink into Stephanie's awareness without meaning to, hearing the vicious whispers: Mitchell is unattainable, he'd kill her rather than be with her. I'm a fool or a martyr.
She has it wrong. Mitchell thinks they are too alike, that she would pull him back into the depths of addiction. She's also got this in common with him: she wants people to love her. I find I love them both. I do my best to see them clearly, the shapes they take when free of names and containers.
Mitchell is all seething red and black, bound in wires, tendrils of rage and hunger working themselves free and then dropping off, bleeding, only to grow back and start the process again.
Stephanie drifts in an acrid cloud, its colors beautiful, but if you touch her it burns. It clings to her, dissolving anything nearby, making surfaces spongy and unstable.
These two, just a woman and a man, friends of mine, reaching through unbelievable circumstances to find me. Is this a dream or an hallucination? Am I awake? Or is there some other way of thinking about this, unbound by normal explanation but just as real as this ashtray, this teacup, these fingers interlacing with mine?
In the middle of the night he holds my wrist, feeling the blood flowing beneath the skin, taunting himself, testing. I see his eyes half close in the dim light, and he bites the inside of his lip. This game should frighten me but it doesn't. He seems more like a child when he does it, the exaggerated concentration, the touching need for approval.
I still don't know if he sees me as an idea or as a person, his fragile temptation, his taskmistress, tour guide to the humans, teacher, gatekeeper. This love is complicated with fear and doubt, unreasonable need, irrational trust. He's just a bloke. He's not.
When something good happens, a productive day at the studio, learning a new chord on the guitar, waking up with sun filtering through the curtains, going for a walk someplace green and leafy, sitting under a tree eating chocolate and baguette, weekend trips for no reason at all, sleeping in, drives in the countryside, anything, there's always, at some point, the quiet blissful smile of someone who thought he'd never do any of these things ever again, astonishment and wonder written on his face, a condemned man set free. I love him so much then.
Sometimes he still brings me flowers, never those blood-red roses, but daffodils and tulips, carnations and lilies. Some days I want to give him armful after armful of poppies, my poor brave wounded boy, my haunted bitter old man who shares his ghosts with me. I know that if I did, he'd only smile and ask me what he's supposed to do with them all. Give them to Stephanie, he'd say, she'll appreciate the gesture.
The downpour begins while I am walking home. I duck into a cheap cafe. I've never been here before, though I pass by every day. It's larger than I expected, with hard fluorescent light washing over at least ten greyish tables with mustard-yellow plastic chairs, their metal-rod legs bent double like giant hairpins.
I take a table facing the door and watch people dash in, folding their umbrellas and breathing into their hands to thaw them. My wet coat squeaks against my chair when I sit down. Rain splatters from the awning, a sound like a television tuned between stations. My tea is still too hot to drink but the cup warms my hands.
A young man stands outside holding the door while a girl steps out from under his umbrella into the cafe, pushing back the hood of her raincoat to reveal a cloud of dark ringlets. He shakes off the umbrella and follows, slipping his arm around her waist and grinning like a rodent.
How did Nick and Lydia find me here? They express their amazement (feigned, I'm sure) at such a lucky coincidence, and claim the table beside mine. Lydia drapes her raincoat over a chair. I greet her with an awkward A-shaped hug. Nick leaves his overcoat on top of hers and joins the queue of soggy people waiting for service.
Lydia lights a sweet-smelling brown cigarette. "How have you been, baby?"
"Oh, same as ever. You?"
Lydia moves in her chair, a slow undulation that reminds me of a cat rubbing against someone's leg. She closes her eyes and her smile grows wider and wider. "So fantastic. Could not possibly be better. I can't understand why you don't want what we've got."
With her transparent pale skin, elegant arched eyebrows and great masses of unfashionably curly dark hair cascading down her back and framing her face in a dark halo, Lydia seems more like a watercolor princess than a real person. She shatters this illusion by belching like a drunk, then giggling snortily when I wrinkle my nose in disgust.
After recovering her composure, she continues as if nothing happened. "See, I keep wondering: if you love your boy, why don't you want the real him? He needs his family. And you know, you could be part of the family too. Easy-peasy. We'd be friends again."
A short laugh catches at the back of my throat. Vampires have a million ways to avoid mentioning what they really do and how they do it. Also, I ought to tell her about the smudge of lipstick on her front teeth.
"I don't want to be a killer. And I wouldn't stay with someone who was. And Lydia, we were never friends."
She takes a long thoughtful drag from her cigarette.
"I always wanted us to be. I looked up to you. When I first saw you with Roger, I thought you the most glamorous couple I'd ever seen, so fearless and talented and intriguing. I never dreamed Roger would be interested in me. I learned a lot from him. Real things. True things. "
"Like how to get his trousers unzipped? How to kick people when they're down?"
"No, I learned that love has no boundaries. He never belonged to you. I never belonged to him. I thought you finally understood."
"Lydia, free love is a lie. People don't work like that. Musical beds and random shags are too much trouble. People want someone to curl up beside and ask how their day was, someone safe. Someone who feels like home. The rest of it is all nerves and meat. "
"You're wrong. What a tiny world you live in. Such a waste. We are capable of so much more. You're afraid there's not enough love to go round."
"That's exactly something Roger would say."
Lydia runs her tongue over her front teeth, then she rubs them with a finger until the lipstick smudge is gone.
"Forget Roger. Let's talk about us now. You and me. We can have anything we want, anyone we want. "
I glance over my shoulder. Nick is in the middle of the queue now, with six or seven people still ahead of him. He's going to be there awhile.
"Lydia, what I really want to know is: did it hurt?"
"What?" The change of subject throws her off for a second. "Oh." Her eyes squeeze shut, and her fingers touch the place where her neck meets her shoulder, the palm of her hand resting in the hollow above her collarbone. She squints under the fluorescent light.
"Yes. It hurt. But not as much as you might think. Dying wasn't so bad. Coming back was."
"That part is worse? I had no idea," I lie. "How so?"
"I can't... I mean... " She blinks hard, inhaling sharply through her teeth. She's watching Nick. "Nicky says you don't get to be immortal for free. But it's worth it. It's all worth it. Everything's marvelous."
The cafe is crowded with customers escaping the rain, and their echoing chatter seems to fill all the space in the room. Lydia lights another cigarette and leans toward me. I taste clove.
"It's fizzy, you know." I can barely hear her over the din.
"What is?"
"Vampire blood. That was my last thought as a human. Fizzy. "
Nick is nearly at the front of the queue.
Mitchell said I needn't stay up waiting for him, so I go to bed early.
I dream that Lydia has huge black eyes and great fairy wings. She flies up to my window, breaks the glass, climbs inside, stands over my bed and taps me with a magic wand while whispering in my ear. "It's for your own good, baby."
And then I'm hanging upside down from the ceiling by a rope around my feet. Except I don't have feet. Or hands. In the mirror, I've become a wrinkled white larva, dangling by a silken thread, rotating slowly in the draft from the broken window.
When the telephone wakes me at 2 AM, I need to extricate myself from tangled sheets before I can answer.
"It's me. I'm at A & E."
"Christ. What's happened?"
"Albert. But don't worry. He's okay, he's okay. He's lost a bit of blood but he'll recover. He was attacked but I got there in time."
"Right. An attacker. Anyone you know?"
The pause is long enough for me to breathe in and out three or four times. A vampire then.
"Josie, it was Robbie."
Robbie! Mitchell is fond of saying that all vampires are arseholes, but I still can't picture shy, stammering Robbie, provider of carefully sliced limes and patient guitar instruction, ambushing anyone. It's been weeks since we've seen him, but I thought he'd been hiding because of his falling out with Stephanie.
"Didn't he know who Albert was?"
"He knew."
"And what did he think, that no one would mind? Fucking idiot!"
"Not really." He sounds very tired. "Doesn't matter. Listen, we'll talk about it when I get home, okay? James is here now. Albert will be fine."
Mitchell trudges in three quarters of an hour later, peels off a bloodstained shirt, dumps it in the bathroom sink and leaves the water running.
I pour him a drink while he sits at the kitchen table. His white undershirt is dusted with specks of dried blood. I rub his shoulders anyway. It's like touching a marble statue. He reaches back to put his hand over mine.
"You don't have to do that. Just be still a minute, please. Sit down or something."
I sit at the table opposite him, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. "Tell me what happened."
"We were at the gallery taking down some paintings. Robbie was hiding. He pushed Albert up against the side of the van, looked me straight in the eye and said, Hullo, Mitchell. Then he went after Albert."
"You mean he bit him?"
A nod. "I pulled Robbie off him. Robbie fought me, can you believe it? I told him to walk away, but he said no, and what I was going to do about it."
"What did you do? "
"What I had to." He exhales loudly, and looks away, tight-lipped. The muscle in his temple is twitching the way it does when he's upset.
Robbie's dead.
It's suddenly very cold in here. The lights go out. A mug flies off the kitchen counter and smashes at his feet. Stephanie's footsteps crunch and drag the shards across the floor.
"Stephanie. There was nothing else I could do."
She stands in the pile of broken china, her mouth a grim line.
"Why is he gone while you're still here? It isn't fair."
"No. It isn't."
I'm not so grief-stricken. Mostly, I'm angry. "He was a stupid bastard. Why did he drag us into it?"
"His other mates wouldn't help him. What he did was an arsehole move, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was someone else's idea."
I've some idea who he means.
Mitchell throws back the rest of his whiskey. "And on top of all that, I've been sacked."
"But you didn't do anything wrong! You saved Albert's life! I'll speak to James."
"Don't bother. I would have quit anyway."
I'm so frustrated I could scream. I want to tear flesh, spill blood, destroy buildings, claw out my own eyes. I can't fix anything. We're falling apart.
Mitchell has been resolutely searching for work. He's picked up a few overnight hours loading refrigerated cargo at a warehouse. It's not much but it gets him out of the house.
He's working tonight, and I've just had drinks with James and Albert, who's healing up fine. He brushed off my apologies for the incident, joking that scars add mystery, which is good for his career. They're still looking for a new assistant and lamenting the loss of, as James called him, "their irreplaceable invisible muse". But they wouldn't have him back.
I'm tipsily fumbling with my keys in front of the door to my flat when it swings open on its own. I expect Stephanie to be there, tutting at me for keeping too many keys on my ring.
It isn't Stephanie, it's Lydia.
"Hello, baby. Let's have a chat."
"Why do you keep following me? Leave me alone."
There's no subtle way to fish a stake out of a ladies' handbag. I really should've kept it in my pocket. She slips an arm around my shoulder.
"We're down a team member, you know. Nicky's promised not to touch you, but I haven't. And nothing would make Nicky happier than to rescue Mitchell from this... madness. "
"Listen. We don't want what you're selling. I'd like you to go now."
"But how can you bear it? Him moping about, you off at work every day... it's all backward and upside down, isn't it? "
Tears are prickling at my eyelashes and blurring my vision but I'm not going to let her know it.
"Poor baby. Let me help you. We can give you a sense of purpose. We'll be a family."
"Stop that. Vampires are no kind of family."
"So judgmental. That's what's hurting you: monogamy and humanity. Look at you. You're miserable. You don't need to be. We've got love that goes on forever. There's enough for me, Nicky, both of you, and more besides."
Enough love to go round. Right. I'm trying to remember what it felt like - urgency and wonder, sweet electricity - but I'm only tired and sore, drained dry, with grit behind my eyelids and a hollow ache in my chest. What have I got left?
The grief erupts from nowhere. It practically knocks me over. I sink to the floor, resting my face on my arms, sobbing, shuddering. The room pitches and rolls.
What if I were to let Mitchell finish me? Would my ghost stay with him? Would I sit on the sofa beside Stephanie as he avoids our eyes and brings us cup after cup of tea we can't drink? Or would there be a sudden pain, that familiar crushing black empty cold, and then nothing?
Someone is on the floor with me. Fine dark ringlets brush against my cheek. A soft hand smooths my hair out of my eyes. Smell of sandalwood and clove. She eases me backward and cradles my head in her lap. Cold fingers stroke my temples.
"Come here baby. Let me fix it."
Her breathing goes strange. She nuzzles my face and gently bites my earlobe. It makes me shiver, but I'm not afraid. Her mouth, soft and jagged at the same time, slides from my ear to just below my chin. The fangs scrape lightly over my skin without drawing blood. She stops but the sensation lingers.
Her fingers wrap around my wrist. The pulse throbs obligingly against her hand. She draws breath and draws breath but never exhales, a steady unnatural hiss. Her skin becomes even colder.
There's nothing worth saving.
"Go ahead," I tell her. "Just kill me. Don't make me come back."
I'm vaguely aware of something yellow and pink standing over us.
"Talk about pathetic. I can't believe you're going to sit there and let her kill you. I don't recommend it."
Stephanie pulls ineffectively at Lydia's shoulder. "Get away from her! And Josie, you don't want to die, you're just really pissed. Get up."
Stephanie just called me pathetic.
Lydia's grip loosens. What am I doing? Mitchell has told me people would give themselves up to him without a word of protest, and he hated it. This is what he meant. My face grows hot. I shake myself out of the stupor.
"She's right, Lydia. I can't go through with it."
"Can't go through with it? Did you think this was a game? That you can call time out and we'll go back to our playhouses? Sorry. Perhaps you'll thank me later."
"I'm not interested. If you don't go, I will."
"Why haven't you gone, then? This is no place for you. I ought to kill you anyway. Put you out of your misery. I might enjoy that a great deal, now that I think of it. " She crosses between me and the door.
"Get out. Or at least get out of my way."
"Why should I?"
Why should she? I'm not going to plead for my life. I won't give her the satisfaction.
"Because this is my home and I've asked you to. "
Stephanie watches from the corner. "Leave her alone."
Lydia giggles like a schoolgirl. "Oh you're one to talk. Both of you mooning after vampires. You can't resist us, can you? You even came back from beyond for one."
Stephanie snorts in disgust. "It wasn't up to me."
"Nonsense. You're like moths to a candle. If you were ready to go then you wouldn't be here. " She reaches for Stephanie's arm, but misses it by an inch or so. Her fingers pass through the translucent skin, grasping a handful of nothing.
My upper arm is quite solid, and Lydia successfully grabs it.
"And you, Josie, you're at the edge, dangling by your fingertips. You think you might let go. I understand. I felt it too. You want to touch the dark, to taste it. I can tell you: It's delicious. Immortality. Strength. Power. And yes, beauty. My Nicky appreciates it all."
"Nothing I've seen of this is beautiful. It's repellent."
"Then why are you here?"
"Love."
She bursts out laughing, not a giggle but a full blown guffaw.
"Oh, you are hilarious! You don't love him, sweetheart. You're just twisted. Nicky told me when he first saw the two of you, you had Mitchell trussed up and starving! That made you feel powerful, didn't it? I bet you liked that."
She spins me by the arm so that I'm forced to look her in the face. Her dark brown eyes sparkle with amusement. "You've no idea what you're doing. He'll stay on your lead as long as it suits him, then he'll suck you dry."
"You don't know him at all."
"Hah. Him? He's a fucking exhibitionist. He was a showy killer. Now he's a showy martyr. And you get off on it, don't you? What a couple of perverts."
"You have a problem with perversion? That's new."
"Some things are just plain unnatural. Let me set them right. If he won't help you, I will."
Her voice is dangerous. She pushes dark hair away to reveal a pale freckled face gone alien and feral, a demonic china doll.
"No. Thanks. We'll manage." I'm trying to sound calm but I can barely breathe.
In the corner, Stephanie digs through my handbag, tossing out compacts, lipsticks, tissues, a hairbrush, old playbills, grocery receipts, and finally, the stake. With a great lunge, she tries to shove the stake into Lydia's back, but she's not strong enough. It slides from her grip and lands with a clatter. Lydia bends to grab it, but Stephanie kicks it under the sofa out of reach.
The ghost blinks out of sight and reappears beside me. She hands me the stake. "Here, you do it." She's gone again.
Without thinking I thrust the pointy end of the stake at Lydia. I didn't know it would be so easy to put it clean through her.
Her wide-eyed stricken expression reminds me of the naive seventeen-year-old Lydia, when I told her my name was Vera and she hung back and wouldn't smoke Roger's grass. But she stuck around.
"You seemed so sad. I was seriously trying to help."
I think she might cry.
"Oh God. Sorry." I stand up and back away.
"Fuck off." Her face contorts in something like pain or sorrow. "Damn..."
Fissures run down her lovely cheeks. The skin blackens like burnt leaves. A brief flash of light, a gasp of cold air, a nauseating liquid gurgle. Sizzle of falling powder. Her dress collapses, empty.
The stake clunks to the floor.