TITLE: "Normal again" (8/8) part Vb
(Because of length, cut in six? parts.)
AUTHOR: Richard Bachman
EMAIL: bachman_rchard@hotmail.com
SITE: nope
FEEDBACK: Give it to me luv, you know you want more of this.
DISTRIBUTION: Do whatever you like poodle. As long as Richard is mentioned I'm fine.
SUMMARY: based on the episode Normal Again. Instead of Buffy, Spike was poisoned by the demon and his consciousness was transported into an alternative reality where he found himself incarcerated in an asylum.
THANK YOU: For your patience, your support and your comments on the story.
ACT 8: Solace (part 2)
SCENE 16
"You should keep him here. It would be better considered the instable state he's in."
Giles watched thoughtfully how his pupil helped their patient off the spot where he had been sitting for the last five hours; wide eyed, not moving, hardly blinking, with only his soft, incoherent mumblings assuring them that he wasn't completely gone already. With Mike's help, she moved William into a wheelchair.
"I want to bring him back to his own room." Buffy said, her eyes restless. "He might snap out of it if he can see something familiar to attract his attention. This room is too bare. There's not even a window in here."
"I don't think the accommodation has anything to do with his relapse." Giles opted, trying to sound gentle. "Neither will it help to move him around the entire institute. He's not a withered plant who needs a good spot in the sun to get better!" He lifted his glasses and swallowed uneasily, when he saw how she furrowed her brows in dismay. "Perhaps the last comparison was rather inconsiderate of me, but surely you do see my point in -"
"I'm getting him out of this room, Giles." She turned the wheelchair around, letting William face the door. "With or without your permission."
"Buffy." Giles' hands reached out and grabbed hold of the arms, leaning on the chair with his whole tall weight. "You shouldn't do this. It's not wise. William has attacked someone only yesterday. He had threatened to kill his own brother! It would be better to keep him in isolation."
"It wasn't his fault! Something happened to him. Something awful to make him act -" She wanted to tell him, but then calmed down and managed to swallow her words. This wasn't the right time. She still needed to speak to Liam first. Perhaps, after the dreaded confrontation with the older sibling was over, she could inform Giles, bring it to him tactfully. She sighed and gazed up to her mentor. "He shouldn't be punished. He should get help. You of all people have to understand. You were the one who taught me this."
There was a slight furrow in the doctor's brows when she so shamelessly pleaded on his decency and good heart. It was true, he knew. All she did, the way she acted, was the result of his teachings, that a patient should always be treated with compassion and kindness, however disturbed their actions were, since only their illness could be held truly responsible for their wrongs. Buffy had been a good student. "All right." He sighed, and pinched his nose-bridge for felt a mild headache coming up. "But keep his room locked until we're sure he's no danger to the other patients. I don't want that Walsh woman's predictions to turn out right, for God's sake."
SCENE 17
Bloody hell, how did I get myself into this bleedin mess? And when did I start caring again? Wasn't I all over that whole keeping myself alive obsession months ago?
The Tower lived up to his infamous reputations. To only describe it as dank and dark and bloody awful was just a horrible understatement. The gaols were large and depleted of any windows, which meant no daylight, only the dim glow provided by oil-lamps. I didn't really mind that of course, but there was also no fresh air, which did bother me since the cell I was in smelled like the stables, with the stench of sweat and human waste so thick that you cut it with a knife. The place was cramped with frightened prisoners, huddled together like bruised fruit. The floors were bare, there wasn't even straw there to provide at least a bit of comfort or warmth. Some of us were chained up. Hands cuffed and tied by manacles, a collar of rusty metal leaving a red inflamed mark running across the neck. Only the real troublemakers were dealt with in such a manner, and I myself earned this special treat after I tried to shove my dinner-plate right into one of the gaolers' skull. He didn't die of his injuries, rather unfortunately, and I ended up getting beaten into a bag of purple bruises and splintered bones by him and his happy mates. They left me afterwards, dangling in half upright position with my rags dripping blood.
The problem with getting chained up and being chastised was that they expected you to die of neglect afterwards. They didn't feed you. Didn't bring you a drop of water to drink, and most of the wretched prisoners who were in the same peril as I was had to lick the brown drops of damp off the mouldy walls to quench their thirst. Off course they did die eventually. All of them did, of starvation or illness or by hanging themselves on their chains in desperate misery. All of them died, except for me. As a presumably immortal vampire, I only became weak (or weaker) till I could hardly lift an eyebrow without passing out. The thirst for blood had finally become something overwhelming, a huge hunger that clutched into my intestines like a vindictive claw-thing. Gone was my detest for human blood, all that I could think of was a good gulp of that crimson goodness, running smoothly down my throat to put the rampant grumble in my stomach at ease. I tell you, I was bloody well cured! If only it could have happened to me earlier, before I got myself into this mess and became too pathetic to do something about my renewed blood-thirst.
After a while, as with most of the starving humans, the hunger became less and less with the passing of weeks. I no longer tried to get a sip out of the free roaming prisons who were constantly prancing in front of me like a tasty, maddening herd of docile life-stock, always an inch or a feet too far away and with my cursed body too slow to pull them nearer if they did make the mistake to come within my reach. I was a constant drooling loon. By the time I was in there for a month, the hunger died a silent death and I just sat there on the dirt covered floor, my numb arms dangling somewhere above my shoulders, not even able to prevent the needy tossers from snatching the last threads of clothing right off my pitiable form. I lost my shirt to a crazy old hag with a one-toothed grin who tore it to pieces and wrapped it around her feet. My shoes were the next things to go and one day (or night, there was no certain way to tell in here) I woke up from a feverish slumber only to find greedy hands pulling on my soddin trousers. After that was gone too, most of the prisoners lost interest in me and just left me alone, even if I did occasionally burst into a mad kind of laughter or drowned myself in hysterical tears. You learned to ignore naked crazy folk in here. Surrounded by them, you see. Couldn't afford to be too distracted all the time.
It had never occurred to me before that death could be such an agonizing, horribly slow process.
It must have been somewhere in March or early April, for the cold had finally become bearable and I started to forget that my body was bare and freezing. I had seen her before. Things happened in the dark after the lights went out. She moved through the field of sleeping bodies, showing a type of grace and speed in her movements that I recognized. Bending over the ones who were dying already of illness, or were outcasts, not much cared for if they were gone the next morning. Or she kept herself to the ones who were chained. One night, when it was still very cold and the stones of the walls stuck like clumps of ice into my back, she had walked over to me, her dirty brown dress shifting and touching my bony knees as she knelt down and studied me, as I was some-kind of waxed body in a museum. She had a fair face with large, coal-black eyes, long brown locks kept in an untidy hair-knot. Both her mouth and tongue were tainted deep harlot red, with a thin line of crimson spilling down her chin. I didn't move or talk to her, and she went away after a while as I had hoped she would. Didn't came anywhere near me again till that moment in early in spring.
It had rained so hard that the water seeped into the creaks of the ceiling and ran down in murky streams along the walls. I hadn't felt water on my skin for months and the mud and dirt had crusted on to me like a heavy shield. I caught myself laughing hoarsely like a lunatic and sticking out my tongue to catch the drops. It wouldn't do me any good. I was not dying of this kind of thirst here, but for a moment it was so thrilled that there was a shower inside this wretched place! If only I could see the stars and a slice of moon as well.
If only. Yeah, when pigs soar through the sky.
"I though that you were just too weak to move, but you have really lost your wits, haven't you, luv?"
I blinked drops of water out of my eyes, letting them glide off my cheeks like tears. There she stood in front of me, her brown dress slightly filthier than I remembered. Perhaps there were a couple more of brown stains there. Her pale hands held a mouldy blanket above her head to shield herself from the dripping roof.
"That isn't blood, luv. It's only water. Very filthy water. Even the mutts in the ditch won't give it a try."
I tried to back away from her, hide from her by turning myself to face the walls. Why was she talking to me? Didn't she know she was supposed to ignore me, pretend that I wasn't even there?
"Hey, don't shy away like that, dear heart. Just trying to help."
I wished she would stop giving me cuddly nicknames.
"Don't help." I uttered, my voice hoarse of disuse. It was strange to hear myself speak again. I mean, really speak. In a proper language instead of that gibbering pixies -tongue that I had mumbled for months. "Don't need any."
"I see." She nodded in what I hoped to be an understanding way. Surely she would go away now? But instead, she eyed me up and down. "So this is what? Some act of penance?"
I gave her a puzzled look. "Penance?" I repeated daftly.
"Like the batty martyrs and Saints. Though unlike you, getting pardon for their short list of dull sins must be a doddle. So, are you lost then? Did you see God? Or only one of those vague hovering angel figures?"
"D-doddle?"
"Let me guess. You saw some shapeless heap of light and feathers and turned into this sad wreck of shivering demon in an instance. Am I right or just a bit hasty here with drawing conclusions?"
"Feathers?"
She sighed, rolling up her eyes to observe the dirty blanket. "Look dearie, I'm not trying to have a nice monologue with myself here. Perhaps you did forget how a normal conversation goes. Let me remind you; you were supposed to talk and not just repeat after me like some sort of very selective echo."
"I - I do know how to talk."
"Splendid! So I didn't stumble upon a caveman version of a blood-feeder after all."
"Noting like that."
"What's not so, pet?"
"Wasn't paying penance. I just - I got sick."
"Sick of what? Immortality? Dignity perhaps? Or was it your liberty you got tired of?"
"I - I got sick, of -of feeding." I stuttered, licking my crusted lips. They tasted like dust. "And don't mock me."
I expected her to turn away from me and laugh at my frailty, but she did none of that.
"Explain. I'm confused here. You did say you were not trying to redeem yourself."
"No I'm not. I just couldn't stand the smell of human blood for a while- I mean, I couldn't kill - It hurt when I did. "
"Uhuh" She nodded. "Sounds like guilt to me. That's how it starts, right before the real idiots grab their little whips and burning crosses and begin maiming themselves in name of their Almighty God. "
"I didn't do this to myself! I was thrown in here! Got nothing to do with God or feathers or anything-else." I furrowed my brows, serious as I was.
"Well there must be something wrong with you. You're a vampire! Feeding off humans is your sole purpose of existence! Or there must a be good reason to make it so hard on yourself." She took a deep unnecessary breath to calm down a bit. Old habits of the living died with difficulty. "So tell me, what happened then?"
I swallowed. The drops of water rolling into my mouth tasted like rusty iron. "A clean slate. I wanted to have clean slate."
"Picture me confused again, dearie." She said, a bit agitated. Why was she wasting her time with me? There was no use in any of this.
"I needed to forget who I was." I tried to explain. "Angelus told me so. It was something every fledgling had to do. So I - I became - a murderer."
She didn't say a thing for a while. Just stared at me and raised a curious brow. Then, as if the ice was suddenly broken and a crack of insanity had hit her, she burst into a loud scornful laughter that sent me huddling against the wall in fright.
"You -" She managed to say, her words choking in hilarity. "You ended up like this? All because you were feeling guilty for killing your human family?! For the sake of all the bonfires in hell! You really are a special case, William. Batty as a loon, but so very amusing! A real challenge one might say."
"Go away." I whispered, frightened and angered by her sudden change from the deepest of sympathy into full ridicule.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" She said, wiping tears away from her eyes, a huge grin on her harlot lips. "I'm so very sorry. Inconsiderate of me of course. But still, it's so funny! Think about it! A vampire without a soul but with the burden of a conscience? What will the Old Goat come up with next? A charitable stasher? A virtuous whore? A vampire with a soul? Now that would be interesting."
"Please. Go away."
"I won't. I told you I was here to help, sweetcheeks. And that's what I'm gonna do."
I wanted to tell her that laughing at me wasn't exactly helpful, but before I could utter a word, she grabbed a prisoner who was sleeping nearby by the throat and broke his neck with a clean snap. As the body sank limp as a puppet on the wide skirt of her dress, she gazed up at me from underneath lazy lashes and showed a wicked grin. She laid out the dead man before my filthy feet, draping his hands over his chest as if he was resting in his coffin instead of on the bare floor of a prison. Her hands made an inviting gesture as to say that dinner was served, but I just stayed still and glared at the body, my stomach filled with cold pebbles and my mind blank.
"You must eat, dear boy. You're skin on bones."
I shook my head at her. "I'm not hungry anymore."
She grabbed the dead prisoner and bended him so that his neck became exposed. Then she pushed his throat between my lips, and I could feel the warmth of his flesh burning hot against my teeth and the smell of his blood came to me like an intoxication.
"You're still hungry. Trust me on that, luv. Take a sip and see. A lion doesn't need the devil to teach him what to eat."
SCENE 18
"What's wrong with him?" Glen asked. He was standing in the doorway of Will's bedroom, his floppy features perhaps bearing more wrinkles than usual. "Is he all right?"
"He's fine. He will be. He suffered a breakdown yesterday." Buffy muttered, tucking William in with a warm blanket. She was worried. His hands were terribly cold and she wasn't sure if he was running a fever or not.
"Oh, that's terrible. Poor Will! Um, did he eat any of that?" Glen pointed to a bowl still filled to rim with oatmeal porridge standing on the small table at the side of the bed. There was a towel stained with brown mush lying next to it.
"He didn't finish everything. But he did eat a bit." She lied, remembering how he had pressed his lips together when she tried to put a spoon of porridge into his mouth. And anything she did succeed to force down into him, had been retched out immediately.
- Blood - he had whispered to her, as he was drifting on the edge of lucidity. - I need it. Please. I need to feed again. -
"We have to give him some rest now." She said, turning to her other patient. "Don't worry. Will is going to get better soon."
"I hope so." Glen muttered. "Poor guy. And he was so looking forward to catch that Passions marathon with us tomorrow night. It was all he talked about the last couple of weeks." He shook his head, than added thoughtfully. "Do you think he might be able to come and sit with us in the recreation room to watch the show? I mean I know he's a little catatonic right now but he could use something to cheer him up right now."
"He's NOT catatonic!" She said far too loudly before she herself realized. She cleared her throat, apolitically. "I mean, he's - he's very confused right now and totally out of this world, but nothing serious, really." Nothing that I couldn't fix, she thought, or hoped.
"All right then! Will's not catatonic, I got it!" Glen said, laughing nervously. "And I suppose watching Passions with his pales is out of the question here too. I can imagine that. It was rather silly of me to ask." He gave the good doctor a toothache grin.
Buffy looked at him for a moment, her mind hesitating.
"You know what, I think he should. He should get out of his room and get a chance to hang out with you guys." She said, questioning her sanity for making this decision. Any undertaken action, however thoughtless, seemed to her to be better than just to watch him sink further and further into obliteration while she stood nearby so very helplessly. "Just, let me see how he is doing tomorrow. When he's recovering well, we can always wheel him outside and pop him in the front row."
"It would be good for him." She stated, more so to comfort herself than it was to assure Will's worried friend.
SCENE 19
She told me her name was Lucy. I though that was incredibly funny till she whacked me in the face and broke my nose, but she assured me that everyone she didn't kill after telling them her real name called her Luce. She had hot hands for a vampire, and every time she touched me it felt as if I was licked by flames. Luce fed me fresh bodies, and I sank my fangs into her generous handouts with a sort of resentful gratitude. I wasn't sure I wanted to be saved by her after all.
One night she came and threw a prisoner at me. Although her body was limp, the girl was still breathing, and conscious, and her mouth opened and closed as if she was a fish thrown at shore, but she couldn't utter a sound.
"Mute." Luce nodded to the frail thing that I clutched onto with my dirty fingers, leaving red prints in her bony arms. "She won't scream. Take your time, William."
After that girl, all of the humans she brought to me were still alive. Their spines were perhaps broken, their tongues torn out, but they breathed and moaned out of fear when I killed each of them, and their death filled my cold unfeeling body with warmth and a sense of completeness.
I could have lived like that till the day of reckoning came and all the cherubs in heaven started burning and ice-skates were handed out in hell, but Luce wasn't the type of demon to let me do this kind of thing. Although she was a great admirer of the seven sins (Rules! She mocked frequently. Always those silly, utterly futile rules! You do realise that God is a pathological control freak, don't you?) she did make an exception for sloth, which was even in her restricted set of morals, considered a true crime.
"Ain't it about time for us leave?" She mused out-loud on one non- particular day. "The summer is gonna turn out hot this year and I'm not keen on the smells and sights of sweltering human flesh. I've a rather delicate nose, you see."
I was just feeding of a hairy old woman whose white manes were making bloody fur-balls in my throat. I stopped and coughed, eyeing at Luce with a bit of a mad grin on my blood-smeared lips.
"How do you mean us? I can't just leave."
"Course not. " She said in that witty sarcastic tune of hers that I had learned to hate and love. "All this filth and total lack of comfort, the piles of shit in the corners, the constant buzzing of flies and mosquitoes, who would leave all that for just a bit of fresh air or a glimpse of the night's sky?"
"You could leave, I reckon." I felt something heavy sink in my stomach as I told her that. I didn't really want to be left alone in here. "If you play it smart and catch the guards when they're bringing in someone new. You're strong enough to take a couple of them out at the same time. But I can't go with you. I'm all chained up."
She burst into that horrible laughter and set her hands on her broad hips. I hated it when she mocked me like this.
"Stop laughing!"
"Really, dear boy! Sometimes you can be so utterly pathetic!"
"I'm NOT pathetic!"
"Right! Then you're just incredibly thick then! Don't you see, you dupe? Those frail iron contraptions can't hold in you here! Not ever since you accepted my little gift at that first night, really."
"What are you jabbering about? I was too weak."
"And weak you still are, it appears. But it's not your body that's feeble. Nor it is the lack of physical strength that keeps you chained."
"Nonsense!" I muttered. "All soddin nonsense."
She bended down to me, her charcoal eyes shimmering in the darkness.
"Come dearie, be brave for a chance! Get up and walk with me. I'm tired of this hellhole. The stench of human misery starts to soak into my pores."
She offered me a hand. There was a moment of hesitation, but I took it. As she pulled me up, I noticed that she was strong like a wicked bull and I felt the harsh tug of my chains on my wrists and neck. For a moment I pictured my hands and my head being torn from my body, with clean fractures where the rusty iron had cleft into the dead flesh. The collar I wore tightened around my throat like a noose. I had to bloody well do something if I didn't want to end up in pieces.
I tugged on the chains on my wrists, and they snapped without offering much resistance. With my freed hand I broke the manacles, which had me tied to the walls like a beaten dog for so long, and it tumbled down before my feet with a loud rattling.
And suddenly, I was free again.
Luce smiled at me. "Told you so, luv. Don't look so dumb surprised."
After that, we made a real mess in our hated quarters. I bet the walls of even such a wretched place like the Tower had never seen so much bloodshed. But as soon as the last bits of iron were torn from my body, leaving purple scars on my pale flesh, and from the moment Luce told me that we should leave the place in some style that suited our demon nature, I lost control over myself. Everything became a blur, a muddled succession of screams and horrified faces, of empty eyes and drained bodies and seas of blood. In the end, the only thing that really stuck with me from the whole soddin massacre, was that I found back my shoes on the feet of a smelly inmate, whose guts were hanging out of his fat belly. I took them off the corpse and put them back on. I found proper trousers on another dead bloke, and took his shirt as well. The fabric had turned yellowish brown of filth and dirt, but there were only tiny specks of blood on it, so it would do.
When the gaoler came in to bring the prisoners supper, he found a mount of corpses, most of them heavily mutilated, that was already covered by flocks of black flies.
"Dear Lord in heaven!" He sounded like a real wimp who had just wetted himself, and the bucket of slob that was meant to feed the prisoners fell on the floor and spilled over all the nice puddles of sticky blood. "Dear Lord in heaven!" He shouted again, followed by frantic footsteps as the man ran away from the horrific scene, possibly in such a hurry that the bloody git had completely forgotten to lock the soddin door behind him. At least I hadn't heard the rattling of keys.
"Should we make a run for it?" I asked, keeping my voice down. I was lying still on top of two not too disgusting corpses. Wasn't very eager to sully my new gear. Luce lay a few feet away from me, her body resting between the cadaver of a headless inmate and a knot of broken limps that didn't seem to belong to anybody specifically. She moved her lips as she talked, but except for that she looked like a corpse herself, which was of course, the whole bloody point.
"Stay down. It's easier this way." She whispered, and closed her eyes so that she didn't have to stare up all the time and get her eyeballs dried out.
The gaoler came back with five more men. All of them couldn't keep their gobs shut about their soddin God in heaven. One of them said it was the work of the devil. I smiled secretly because I knew Luce would be pleased.
They didn't go through the entire mess to make sure that everybody was really dead. Only poked a couple of bodies near the door with broomsticks. Since none of them moved, they draw the conclusion that there wasn't much left to do but to get rid of the whole stinking mount of decaying meat and give the place a good scrubbing before herding in the next load of prisoners. The men started carrying out the bodies. It took them agonizingly long before they got to Luce and me. I had soddin flies crawling all over my face, making me itch. They took Luce first, holding her under her arms and by her feet and carrying her out the miserable place. The moment I saw her disappear out of my sight, I had to repress the compelling urge to get up and run right after her. Finally, They dragged me up and tossed me on a handcart. The geniuses had figured it would work faster that way, and they piled another three or four corpses right on top of me. I didn't give so much as a sound, though the weight was crushing.
They wheeled the whole heap outside. From beneath the clutch of cold body- parts, I caught sight of the large courtyard, where countless crows hopped over the cobbles and cawed in resentment towards the superstitious morons who had cut their wings.* We stopped in front of a shabby looking cart pulled by two large black horses, pale limps of half naked bodies stacked up on it like badly sorted stocks of fish. Two men grabbed me by my arms and feet and swung me on the cart. I let go of a small moan when I stung my ribs in someone's protruding elbow, but they were too busy to take notice.
It took another bloody eternity before the cart was considered full enough and we finally started to move.
TBC
* It is believed that whenever the crows of the Tower of London depart from the place, the English monarchy would fall. That's why the keepers trim the wings of the birds to keep them on the ground.
AUTHOR: Richard Bachman
EMAIL: bachman_rchard@hotmail.com
SITE: nope
FEEDBACK: Give it to me luv, you know you want more of this.
DISTRIBUTION: Do whatever you like poodle. As long as Richard is mentioned I'm fine.
SUMMARY: based on the episode Normal Again. Instead of Buffy, Spike was poisoned by the demon and his consciousness was transported into an alternative reality where he found himself incarcerated in an asylum.
THANK YOU: For your patience, your support and your comments on the story.
ACT 8: Solace (part 2)
SCENE 16
"You should keep him here. It would be better considered the instable state he's in."
Giles watched thoughtfully how his pupil helped their patient off the spot where he had been sitting for the last five hours; wide eyed, not moving, hardly blinking, with only his soft, incoherent mumblings assuring them that he wasn't completely gone already. With Mike's help, she moved William into a wheelchair.
"I want to bring him back to his own room." Buffy said, her eyes restless. "He might snap out of it if he can see something familiar to attract his attention. This room is too bare. There's not even a window in here."
"I don't think the accommodation has anything to do with his relapse." Giles opted, trying to sound gentle. "Neither will it help to move him around the entire institute. He's not a withered plant who needs a good spot in the sun to get better!" He lifted his glasses and swallowed uneasily, when he saw how she furrowed her brows in dismay. "Perhaps the last comparison was rather inconsiderate of me, but surely you do see my point in -"
"I'm getting him out of this room, Giles." She turned the wheelchair around, letting William face the door. "With or without your permission."
"Buffy." Giles' hands reached out and grabbed hold of the arms, leaning on the chair with his whole tall weight. "You shouldn't do this. It's not wise. William has attacked someone only yesterday. He had threatened to kill his own brother! It would be better to keep him in isolation."
"It wasn't his fault! Something happened to him. Something awful to make him act -" She wanted to tell him, but then calmed down and managed to swallow her words. This wasn't the right time. She still needed to speak to Liam first. Perhaps, after the dreaded confrontation with the older sibling was over, she could inform Giles, bring it to him tactfully. She sighed and gazed up to her mentor. "He shouldn't be punished. He should get help. You of all people have to understand. You were the one who taught me this."
There was a slight furrow in the doctor's brows when she so shamelessly pleaded on his decency and good heart. It was true, he knew. All she did, the way she acted, was the result of his teachings, that a patient should always be treated with compassion and kindness, however disturbed their actions were, since only their illness could be held truly responsible for their wrongs. Buffy had been a good student. "All right." He sighed, and pinched his nose-bridge for felt a mild headache coming up. "But keep his room locked until we're sure he's no danger to the other patients. I don't want that Walsh woman's predictions to turn out right, for God's sake."
SCENE 17
Bloody hell, how did I get myself into this bleedin mess? And when did I start caring again? Wasn't I all over that whole keeping myself alive obsession months ago?
The Tower lived up to his infamous reputations. To only describe it as dank and dark and bloody awful was just a horrible understatement. The gaols were large and depleted of any windows, which meant no daylight, only the dim glow provided by oil-lamps. I didn't really mind that of course, but there was also no fresh air, which did bother me since the cell I was in smelled like the stables, with the stench of sweat and human waste so thick that you cut it with a knife. The place was cramped with frightened prisoners, huddled together like bruised fruit. The floors were bare, there wasn't even straw there to provide at least a bit of comfort or warmth. Some of us were chained up. Hands cuffed and tied by manacles, a collar of rusty metal leaving a red inflamed mark running across the neck. Only the real troublemakers were dealt with in such a manner, and I myself earned this special treat after I tried to shove my dinner-plate right into one of the gaolers' skull. He didn't die of his injuries, rather unfortunately, and I ended up getting beaten into a bag of purple bruises and splintered bones by him and his happy mates. They left me afterwards, dangling in half upright position with my rags dripping blood.
The problem with getting chained up and being chastised was that they expected you to die of neglect afterwards. They didn't feed you. Didn't bring you a drop of water to drink, and most of the wretched prisoners who were in the same peril as I was had to lick the brown drops of damp off the mouldy walls to quench their thirst. Off course they did die eventually. All of them did, of starvation or illness or by hanging themselves on their chains in desperate misery. All of them died, except for me. As a presumably immortal vampire, I only became weak (or weaker) till I could hardly lift an eyebrow without passing out. The thirst for blood had finally become something overwhelming, a huge hunger that clutched into my intestines like a vindictive claw-thing. Gone was my detest for human blood, all that I could think of was a good gulp of that crimson goodness, running smoothly down my throat to put the rampant grumble in my stomach at ease. I tell you, I was bloody well cured! If only it could have happened to me earlier, before I got myself into this mess and became too pathetic to do something about my renewed blood-thirst.
After a while, as with most of the starving humans, the hunger became less and less with the passing of weeks. I no longer tried to get a sip out of the free roaming prisons who were constantly prancing in front of me like a tasty, maddening herd of docile life-stock, always an inch or a feet too far away and with my cursed body too slow to pull them nearer if they did make the mistake to come within my reach. I was a constant drooling loon. By the time I was in there for a month, the hunger died a silent death and I just sat there on the dirt covered floor, my numb arms dangling somewhere above my shoulders, not even able to prevent the needy tossers from snatching the last threads of clothing right off my pitiable form. I lost my shirt to a crazy old hag with a one-toothed grin who tore it to pieces and wrapped it around her feet. My shoes were the next things to go and one day (or night, there was no certain way to tell in here) I woke up from a feverish slumber only to find greedy hands pulling on my soddin trousers. After that was gone too, most of the prisoners lost interest in me and just left me alone, even if I did occasionally burst into a mad kind of laughter or drowned myself in hysterical tears. You learned to ignore naked crazy folk in here. Surrounded by them, you see. Couldn't afford to be too distracted all the time.
It had never occurred to me before that death could be such an agonizing, horribly slow process.
It must have been somewhere in March or early April, for the cold had finally become bearable and I started to forget that my body was bare and freezing. I had seen her before. Things happened in the dark after the lights went out. She moved through the field of sleeping bodies, showing a type of grace and speed in her movements that I recognized. Bending over the ones who were dying already of illness, or were outcasts, not much cared for if they were gone the next morning. Or she kept herself to the ones who were chained. One night, when it was still very cold and the stones of the walls stuck like clumps of ice into my back, she had walked over to me, her dirty brown dress shifting and touching my bony knees as she knelt down and studied me, as I was some-kind of waxed body in a museum. She had a fair face with large, coal-black eyes, long brown locks kept in an untidy hair-knot. Both her mouth and tongue were tainted deep harlot red, with a thin line of crimson spilling down her chin. I didn't move or talk to her, and she went away after a while as I had hoped she would. Didn't came anywhere near me again till that moment in early in spring.
It had rained so hard that the water seeped into the creaks of the ceiling and ran down in murky streams along the walls. I hadn't felt water on my skin for months and the mud and dirt had crusted on to me like a heavy shield. I caught myself laughing hoarsely like a lunatic and sticking out my tongue to catch the drops. It wouldn't do me any good. I was not dying of this kind of thirst here, but for a moment it was so thrilled that there was a shower inside this wretched place! If only I could see the stars and a slice of moon as well.
If only. Yeah, when pigs soar through the sky.
"I though that you were just too weak to move, but you have really lost your wits, haven't you, luv?"
I blinked drops of water out of my eyes, letting them glide off my cheeks like tears. There she stood in front of me, her brown dress slightly filthier than I remembered. Perhaps there were a couple more of brown stains there. Her pale hands held a mouldy blanket above her head to shield herself from the dripping roof.
"That isn't blood, luv. It's only water. Very filthy water. Even the mutts in the ditch won't give it a try."
I tried to back away from her, hide from her by turning myself to face the walls. Why was she talking to me? Didn't she know she was supposed to ignore me, pretend that I wasn't even there?
"Hey, don't shy away like that, dear heart. Just trying to help."
I wished she would stop giving me cuddly nicknames.
"Don't help." I uttered, my voice hoarse of disuse. It was strange to hear myself speak again. I mean, really speak. In a proper language instead of that gibbering pixies -tongue that I had mumbled for months. "Don't need any."
"I see." She nodded in what I hoped to be an understanding way. Surely she would go away now? But instead, she eyed me up and down. "So this is what? Some act of penance?"
I gave her a puzzled look. "Penance?" I repeated daftly.
"Like the batty martyrs and Saints. Though unlike you, getting pardon for their short list of dull sins must be a doddle. So, are you lost then? Did you see God? Or only one of those vague hovering angel figures?"
"D-doddle?"
"Let me guess. You saw some shapeless heap of light and feathers and turned into this sad wreck of shivering demon in an instance. Am I right or just a bit hasty here with drawing conclusions?"
"Feathers?"
She sighed, rolling up her eyes to observe the dirty blanket. "Look dearie, I'm not trying to have a nice monologue with myself here. Perhaps you did forget how a normal conversation goes. Let me remind you; you were supposed to talk and not just repeat after me like some sort of very selective echo."
"I - I do know how to talk."
"Splendid! So I didn't stumble upon a caveman version of a blood-feeder after all."
"Noting like that."
"What's not so, pet?"
"Wasn't paying penance. I just - I got sick."
"Sick of what? Immortality? Dignity perhaps? Or was it your liberty you got tired of?"
"I - I got sick, of -of feeding." I stuttered, licking my crusted lips. They tasted like dust. "And don't mock me."
I expected her to turn away from me and laugh at my frailty, but she did none of that.
"Explain. I'm confused here. You did say you were not trying to redeem yourself."
"No I'm not. I just couldn't stand the smell of human blood for a while- I mean, I couldn't kill - It hurt when I did. "
"Uhuh" She nodded. "Sounds like guilt to me. That's how it starts, right before the real idiots grab their little whips and burning crosses and begin maiming themselves in name of their Almighty God. "
"I didn't do this to myself! I was thrown in here! Got nothing to do with God or feathers or anything-else." I furrowed my brows, serious as I was.
"Well there must be something wrong with you. You're a vampire! Feeding off humans is your sole purpose of existence! Or there must a be good reason to make it so hard on yourself." She took a deep unnecessary breath to calm down a bit. Old habits of the living died with difficulty. "So tell me, what happened then?"
I swallowed. The drops of water rolling into my mouth tasted like rusty iron. "A clean slate. I wanted to have clean slate."
"Picture me confused again, dearie." She said, a bit agitated. Why was she wasting her time with me? There was no use in any of this.
"I needed to forget who I was." I tried to explain. "Angelus told me so. It was something every fledgling had to do. So I - I became - a murderer."
She didn't say a thing for a while. Just stared at me and raised a curious brow. Then, as if the ice was suddenly broken and a crack of insanity had hit her, she burst into a loud scornful laughter that sent me huddling against the wall in fright.
"You -" She managed to say, her words choking in hilarity. "You ended up like this? All because you were feeling guilty for killing your human family?! For the sake of all the bonfires in hell! You really are a special case, William. Batty as a loon, but so very amusing! A real challenge one might say."
"Go away." I whispered, frightened and angered by her sudden change from the deepest of sympathy into full ridicule.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" She said, wiping tears away from her eyes, a huge grin on her harlot lips. "I'm so very sorry. Inconsiderate of me of course. But still, it's so funny! Think about it! A vampire without a soul but with the burden of a conscience? What will the Old Goat come up with next? A charitable stasher? A virtuous whore? A vampire with a soul? Now that would be interesting."
"Please. Go away."
"I won't. I told you I was here to help, sweetcheeks. And that's what I'm gonna do."
I wanted to tell her that laughing at me wasn't exactly helpful, but before I could utter a word, she grabbed a prisoner who was sleeping nearby by the throat and broke his neck with a clean snap. As the body sank limp as a puppet on the wide skirt of her dress, she gazed up at me from underneath lazy lashes and showed a wicked grin. She laid out the dead man before my filthy feet, draping his hands over his chest as if he was resting in his coffin instead of on the bare floor of a prison. Her hands made an inviting gesture as to say that dinner was served, but I just stayed still and glared at the body, my stomach filled with cold pebbles and my mind blank.
"You must eat, dear boy. You're skin on bones."
I shook my head at her. "I'm not hungry anymore."
She grabbed the dead prisoner and bended him so that his neck became exposed. Then she pushed his throat between my lips, and I could feel the warmth of his flesh burning hot against my teeth and the smell of his blood came to me like an intoxication.
"You're still hungry. Trust me on that, luv. Take a sip and see. A lion doesn't need the devil to teach him what to eat."
SCENE 18
"What's wrong with him?" Glen asked. He was standing in the doorway of Will's bedroom, his floppy features perhaps bearing more wrinkles than usual. "Is he all right?"
"He's fine. He will be. He suffered a breakdown yesterday." Buffy muttered, tucking William in with a warm blanket. She was worried. His hands were terribly cold and she wasn't sure if he was running a fever or not.
"Oh, that's terrible. Poor Will! Um, did he eat any of that?" Glen pointed to a bowl still filled to rim with oatmeal porridge standing on the small table at the side of the bed. There was a towel stained with brown mush lying next to it.
"He didn't finish everything. But he did eat a bit." She lied, remembering how he had pressed his lips together when she tried to put a spoon of porridge into his mouth. And anything she did succeed to force down into him, had been retched out immediately.
- Blood - he had whispered to her, as he was drifting on the edge of lucidity. - I need it. Please. I need to feed again. -
"We have to give him some rest now." She said, turning to her other patient. "Don't worry. Will is going to get better soon."
"I hope so." Glen muttered. "Poor guy. And he was so looking forward to catch that Passions marathon with us tomorrow night. It was all he talked about the last couple of weeks." He shook his head, than added thoughtfully. "Do you think he might be able to come and sit with us in the recreation room to watch the show? I mean I know he's a little catatonic right now but he could use something to cheer him up right now."
"He's NOT catatonic!" She said far too loudly before she herself realized. She cleared her throat, apolitically. "I mean, he's - he's very confused right now and totally out of this world, but nothing serious, really." Nothing that I couldn't fix, she thought, or hoped.
"All right then! Will's not catatonic, I got it!" Glen said, laughing nervously. "And I suppose watching Passions with his pales is out of the question here too. I can imagine that. It was rather silly of me to ask." He gave the good doctor a toothache grin.
Buffy looked at him for a moment, her mind hesitating.
"You know what, I think he should. He should get out of his room and get a chance to hang out with you guys." She said, questioning her sanity for making this decision. Any undertaken action, however thoughtless, seemed to her to be better than just to watch him sink further and further into obliteration while she stood nearby so very helplessly. "Just, let me see how he is doing tomorrow. When he's recovering well, we can always wheel him outside and pop him in the front row."
"It would be good for him." She stated, more so to comfort herself than it was to assure Will's worried friend.
SCENE 19
She told me her name was Lucy. I though that was incredibly funny till she whacked me in the face and broke my nose, but she assured me that everyone she didn't kill after telling them her real name called her Luce. She had hot hands for a vampire, and every time she touched me it felt as if I was licked by flames. Luce fed me fresh bodies, and I sank my fangs into her generous handouts with a sort of resentful gratitude. I wasn't sure I wanted to be saved by her after all.
One night she came and threw a prisoner at me. Although her body was limp, the girl was still breathing, and conscious, and her mouth opened and closed as if she was a fish thrown at shore, but she couldn't utter a sound.
"Mute." Luce nodded to the frail thing that I clutched onto with my dirty fingers, leaving red prints in her bony arms. "She won't scream. Take your time, William."
After that girl, all of the humans she brought to me were still alive. Their spines were perhaps broken, their tongues torn out, but they breathed and moaned out of fear when I killed each of them, and their death filled my cold unfeeling body with warmth and a sense of completeness.
I could have lived like that till the day of reckoning came and all the cherubs in heaven started burning and ice-skates were handed out in hell, but Luce wasn't the type of demon to let me do this kind of thing. Although she was a great admirer of the seven sins (Rules! She mocked frequently. Always those silly, utterly futile rules! You do realise that God is a pathological control freak, don't you?) she did make an exception for sloth, which was even in her restricted set of morals, considered a true crime.
"Ain't it about time for us leave?" She mused out-loud on one non- particular day. "The summer is gonna turn out hot this year and I'm not keen on the smells and sights of sweltering human flesh. I've a rather delicate nose, you see."
I was just feeding of a hairy old woman whose white manes were making bloody fur-balls in my throat. I stopped and coughed, eyeing at Luce with a bit of a mad grin on my blood-smeared lips.
"How do you mean us? I can't just leave."
"Course not. " She said in that witty sarcastic tune of hers that I had learned to hate and love. "All this filth and total lack of comfort, the piles of shit in the corners, the constant buzzing of flies and mosquitoes, who would leave all that for just a bit of fresh air or a glimpse of the night's sky?"
"You could leave, I reckon." I felt something heavy sink in my stomach as I told her that. I didn't really want to be left alone in here. "If you play it smart and catch the guards when they're bringing in someone new. You're strong enough to take a couple of them out at the same time. But I can't go with you. I'm all chained up."
She burst into that horrible laughter and set her hands on her broad hips. I hated it when she mocked me like this.
"Stop laughing!"
"Really, dear boy! Sometimes you can be so utterly pathetic!"
"I'm NOT pathetic!"
"Right! Then you're just incredibly thick then! Don't you see, you dupe? Those frail iron contraptions can't hold in you here! Not ever since you accepted my little gift at that first night, really."
"What are you jabbering about? I was too weak."
"And weak you still are, it appears. But it's not your body that's feeble. Nor it is the lack of physical strength that keeps you chained."
"Nonsense!" I muttered. "All soddin nonsense."
She bended down to me, her charcoal eyes shimmering in the darkness.
"Come dearie, be brave for a chance! Get up and walk with me. I'm tired of this hellhole. The stench of human misery starts to soak into my pores."
She offered me a hand. There was a moment of hesitation, but I took it. As she pulled me up, I noticed that she was strong like a wicked bull and I felt the harsh tug of my chains on my wrists and neck. For a moment I pictured my hands and my head being torn from my body, with clean fractures where the rusty iron had cleft into the dead flesh. The collar I wore tightened around my throat like a noose. I had to bloody well do something if I didn't want to end up in pieces.
I tugged on the chains on my wrists, and they snapped without offering much resistance. With my freed hand I broke the manacles, which had me tied to the walls like a beaten dog for so long, and it tumbled down before my feet with a loud rattling.
And suddenly, I was free again.
Luce smiled at me. "Told you so, luv. Don't look so dumb surprised."
After that, we made a real mess in our hated quarters. I bet the walls of even such a wretched place like the Tower had never seen so much bloodshed. But as soon as the last bits of iron were torn from my body, leaving purple scars on my pale flesh, and from the moment Luce told me that we should leave the place in some style that suited our demon nature, I lost control over myself. Everything became a blur, a muddled succession of screams and horrified faces, of empty eyes and drained bodies and seas of blood. In the end, the only thing that really stuck with me from the whole soddin massacre, was that I found back my shoes on the feet of a smelly inmate, whose guts were hanging out of his fat belly. I took them off the corpse and put them back on. I found proper trousers on another dead bloke, and took his shirt as well. The fabric had turned yellowish brown of filth and dirt, but there were only tiny specks of blood on it, so it would do.
When the gaoler came in to bring the prisoners supper, he found a mount of corpses, most of them heavily mutilated, that was already covered by flocks of black flies.
"Dear Lord in heaven!" He sounded like a real wimp who had just wetted himself, and the bucket of slob that was meant to feed the prisoners fell on the floor and spilled over all the nice puddles of sticky blood. "Dear Lord in heaven!" He shouted again, followed by frantic footsteps as the man ran away from the horrific scene, possibly in such a hurry that the bloody git had completely forgotten to lock the soddin door behind him. At least I hadn't heard the rattling of keys.
"Should we make a run for it?" I asked, keeping my voice down. I was lying still on top of two not too disgusting corpses. Wasn't very eager to sully my new gear. Luce lay a few feet away from me, her body resting between the cadaver of a headless inmate and a knot of broken limps that didn't seem to belong to anybody specifically. She moved her lips as she talked, but except for that she looked like a corpse herself, which was of course, the whole bloody point.
"Stay down. It's easier this way." She whispered, and closed her eyes so that she didn't have to stare up all the time and get her eyeballs dried out.
The gaoler came back with five more men. All of them couldn't keep their gobs shut about their soddin God in heaven. One of them said it was the work of the devil. I smiled secretly because I knew Luce would be pleased.
They didn't go through the entire mess to make sure that everybody was really dead. Only poked a couple of bodies near the door with broomsticks. Since none of them moved, they draw the conclusion that there wasn't much left to do but to get rid of the whole stinking mount of decaying meat and give the place a good scrubbing before herding in the next load of prisoners. The men started carrying out the bodies. It took them agonizingly long before they got to Luce and me. I had soddin flies crawling all over my face, making me itch. They took Luce first, holding her under her arms and by her feet and carrying her out the miserable place. The moment I saw her disappear out of my sight, I had to repress the compelling urge to get up and run right after her. Finally, They dragged me up and tossed me on a handcart. The geniuses had figured it would work faster that way, and they piled another three or four corpses right on top of me. I didn't give so much as a sound, though the weight was crushing.
They wheeled the whole heap outside. From beneath the clutch of cold body- parts, I caught sight of the large courtyard, where countless crows hopped over the cobbles and cawed in resentment towards the superstitious morons who had cut their wings.* We stopped in front of a shabby looking cart pulled by two large black horses, pale limps of half naked bodies stacked up on it like badly sorted stocks of fish. Two men grabbed me by my arms and feet and swung me on the cart. I let go of a small moan when I stung my ribs in someone's protruding elbow, but they were too busy to take notice.
It took another bloody eternity before the cart was considered full enough and we finally started to move.
TBC
* It is believed that whenever the crows of the Tower of London depart from the place, the English monarchy would fall. That's why the keepers trim the wings of the birds to keep them on the ground.
