My terrifying dreams must have been caused by starvation and dehydration, because they never came back after that week in the mountains. I remember what it felt like, what I've done, and what I'll do again. I've tried to forget about them but I can't.
We're almost there. Herrick has been uncharacteristically quiet during the drive, and I'm grateful for the silence. I figure he's been concentrating on not ramming into things. Now the girls have woken up, and Jenna leans over and whispers something to him. He grins widely, nods, and banks the car into a hard right turn, narrowly missing getting us broadsided by a taxicab.
We park on a street lined with blocks and blocks of unmemorable gray low-rise flats. "A little pit stop for supplies," Herrick says. "Jenna's got a mate with anything we could possibly need!" He hops out of the car, walks around to Jenna's door to let her out. They disappear into the vestibule of one of the buildings. I'm not even sure which one. In the back seat, Stephanie is rummaging around in her handbag.
Half a minute later, Herrick comes back, opens my door, leans in, and says, "Mitchell, may I have a word?"
I get out of the car and we go a little distance away. "So... now?" I ask.
"Not yet," he says. "We'll have another munch later. 'Til then, lighten up! Enjoy yourself! You do remember what that's like, don't you?" He puts his hands in his coat pockets, turns and walks off. A second later, he's back.
"Oh, I nearly forgot! Do you happen to have any cash? I'm clean out."
There's a thickish stack of crumpled notes in my wallet. I give him the whole thing.
With a serious expression, he unfolds the money, licks his thumb, faces all the notes the same way, sorts them by denomination, counts them, folds them exactly in half, and secures them with a clip fished out of his coat pocket. The whole routine takes maybe fifteen seconds.
"This'll have to do," he says, putting the roll in the pocket of his trousers. "Back in a jiffy! Go keep that nice girl company. Show her a good time!" He goes back inside the building.
I stand on the path for a minute, collecting myself, enjoying the quiet. Then I go back to the car and slide into the seat next to Stephanie. She's still hunched over, digging through her bag. Her dyed-blond hair, which looks to be growing out from a shorter style, hangs in uneven lengths that hide her face.
"Hi, it looked a little lonely back here," I say. I'm trying to sound casual and cheery. Have I mentioned that these kinds of situations make me uncomfortable?
She sits up and gives me a fake-innocent look, her eyes narrowing slightly as she smiles. In the dim light, her green eye shadow makes her face look bruised. The roots are showing in her bleached hair. "Well, hello there," she says. "Always nice to have some company. Like a smoke?"
"Why not?"
She's very close to me, warm, fidgeting, a little sweaty. I suppress the urge to push her out of the car and drive away. It's worked before, but might not work again.
She tries to roll a cigarette, but is not having much luck in the half-light from the streetlamp. Her hands are not so steady and the tobacco keeps sliding out of the paper.
"Can I give you hand with that?" I've had a lot of practice at rolling cigarettes in the dark. She gives me the papers and tobacco and a thumbnail-sized block of hash wrapped in foil, and as she leans toward me I get a whiff of flowers and skin. There's filmy light around her, zigzagging and flickering red, orange, and black.
"Jenna usually rolls them," she says, "I'm useless at it."
It's good to have something to do with my hands. I roll a few joints, using up the hash, and give them back to her. She stashes all but one, which she puts in her mouth. I offer her a light.
As she holds the cigarette and exhales, the floppy sleeve of her blouse slides down to her elbow and I see she has marks all down her arm, scars and burns and bruises. The scars give off a faint but familiar blackness, rising from her like curls of smoke. Her hand shakes a little. She's a junkie, I think.
I nod in the direction of the house. "What are they scoring in there?"
"Some smack, more hash, maybe some speed for your mate."
"Ah."
During the war, we'd all dipped into the morphine from time to time, and even for vampires, it takes the edge off. On smack, I still crave blood, there's no escaping it, but for awhile it takes away the painful wrenching emptiness, calms the violence, helps me forget, lets me feel almost human. I could easily develop a heroin habit, but the vampire organization prevents it. A few vampires on serious drugs could wreck our relationship with the police and the stability of our group. Herrick is really pushing the limits tonight. I wonder if the rules are different in London.
She must see me looking at her arm, because she passes me the joint, pulls her sleeves down to cover her wrists, and shivers.
"It's a little chilly in here," she says. I offer her my jacket. She drapes it around her shoulders and shifts closer to me. "Thanks. You honestly don't mind, do you?"
"No, It's no trouble. I don't really feel the cold."
I don't have to be touching her to notice that she's actually warmer than normal. Her pulse is dull and fluttering, and under her flowery perfume she has a faint metallic smell like donated blood after the life's gone out of it. To be honest, she's not very appetizing; she's kind of twitchy and uncomfortable. It's okay, though. She'll be fine once she has her dope. I'll wait.
"Are you all right?" I ask.
"What's it look like to you? Do I look all right?"
"Not really. You look like you need a fix." No reason to pretend otherwise.
"Well I do. It's no fun."
"Tell me about it."
She thinks I actually want her to tell me. She takes a drag on the joint and studies my face. I look young and unmarked, my teeth are okay. I have on expensive clothes. I'm clean-shaven. I don't look like I'm jonesing, and thanks to the girl earlier this evening, I'm not. I listen to that not-quite-right pulse while she talks. It drowns out most of what she's saying.
She must be saying something like, "When I have smack everything is perfect. It doesn't matter what else is happening to me. It's all cool. And without it, life is shit. I hate what I do for it. Endless, painful, frightening shit - lying, stealing, hurting people, running away. Just shit." Maybe she rolls her eyes. "I know it's cliche, but believe what they say about it. It's made me not care about anything else. Jenna is not as far into it as I am, she doesn't know, she thinks I'm just a popper, but I'm worse than that."
(I hear: Thmp swish thmp swish thmp swish...)
"Robbie and I were close, but we never really fucked or anything. We used to shoot up together. He showed me how. He was giving Jenna the wrong idea - he liked a steady lay, but mostly he cares about music and smack. I told him to show her what was what, and he did, though he was kind of a bastard about it. For some reason I feel okay about telling you. Maybe because it's not like you're trying to get in our pants."
"Excuse me?" I wasn't listening, and then she said... what?
Oh. Herrick and I have known each other more than fifty years. Perhaps she saw that we make more eye contact than most men do. He finishes my sentences sometimes. We have developed a language of glances and gestures. Occupational necessity.
"The way he looks at you...the way you look at him... I just assumed... ugh, now I feel like an idiot. I'm so sorry. My mistake. Shit. I apologize."
She puts her face in her hands and rocks back and forth, mortified. She'd thought we were queer. No wonder they'd hopped so carelessly into the car with us. Silly girls.
I look away from Stephanie and laugh. "Er, no. Sorry to disappoint you, darling."
"Oh, I'm not disappointed. Just dying of embarrassment." Nervous giggles.
"No need. It's a perfectly understandable assumption. William and I, we're both so irresistable." I start to laugh again.
Now she's laughing too. She's dope-sick, shaking and sweating, but that little insignificant faux pas really bothers her. I'm almost overcome by how funny that is. Consider: One of us is a pale and sweaty junkie needing a fix, the other is an honest-to-goodness fucking dead vampire, full of blood-lust and waiting to strike like a fucking shark. Ha. A giddy shark in a necktie.
I'm planning to kill her and drink her blood, and she's sitting there craving dope and being embarrassed because she might have hurt my feelings. I can't stop laughing. It's so ridiculous.
I tap her lightly on the nose. "You're being silly. You should stop." I try to look very very serious, but crack up again. So does she. She leans against my shoulder and collapses in fits of giggling.
I'm trying the perspective thing again. Here it is: We're two lowlife characters sitting in the back of a car, waiting for a drug deal to go down. The deal is probably not going to end well. None of it makes a single bit of difference. Really, there's only what's happening this minute, the rest is all just foolish bodies walking around, filling their holes and making messes until they don't anymore. Take some here, leave some there. All the same. All this fussing and yelling, it's just animal noises. Quacking of ducks. Bleating of goats.
I imagine the barnyard noises and screw up my face to hold back another burst of laughter.
And again: I'm thinking, at the end of everything, we all go down the same hole. Imagine a toilet flushing. We work so hard not to get sucked down but we'll end up there anyway. Why do we try that hard? It's so silly. Swim around in the turds if you like, why not? Do the backstroke.
I laugh and laugh.
"No," she says, shaking a finger sternly. "You are the silly one. Cease and desist this instant!" She holds the mock glare as long as she can before losing it and dissolving into hysterics.
Or. How about this: We're two people sitting next to each other in a car. We're complete strangers. Two people keeping secrets, getting stoned, and laughing. Having a nice time. Two people with howling black voids to fill. Two people with mussed hair, kissing, why not? Floating through the dark, with bright jagged outlines. Chilled and shivering. Touching hands. Skin. She's warm and damp, smelling of perfume and smoke, tasting like dried blood and sour wine. We're not overcome with laughter anymore and it's cool. None of it matters at all.
I run my hands up her arms, and the damaged, scarred places are are colder than the rest of her skin. Wispy black mist rising there. It's interesting, the lines and puckers and gouges, like a landscape under my fingers. So many different textures.
I trace a couple of the scars on her wrists. "What happened?" I ask.
"Some bad stuff a long time ago. I thought cutting would get it out of me."
Of course, bad stuff. I don't want or need the details. But I see it clearly - darkness like poison circulating underneath. It mixes with the filmy colors around her. I see where she's cut the escape routes for it, how it must have run out onto her skin. It's fascinating, like a painting, or a light show. I can't look away. I want to taste it. Oh, fuck. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
She looks at me intently. Touches my face. Traces my eyebrows with her finger. Hand on my cheek. "What's wrong with your eyes?"
Shit. "Uh, I had a little acid earlier this evening," I say. Stay cool. Not time yet.
She considers this. "Really, just a little?"
"Half a tab. Things are just sparkling a little." I can't tell if she believes me, though it's more or less true. Bright indistinct red and blue lines. Fragile bones inside skin. Blood and blackness pulsing together. Wine, acid, hash, sweat, kisses, bruises, scars.
"I like to do that sometimes," she says. "Take just a little. Then I lie down in the dark and watch the light on my eyelids and think about very deep and profound things." She halfway smiles. "They're never as profound the next day. It's a lark, really."
There's no freaking out happening. Either she can't see me that well, or my eyes have calmed down. We're good.
Her hands are on me, she's intertwining her fingers with mine. Her glowing yellow orange blue and red lines weaving into black. I don't want to look at her.
A tap at the window. A pale blue and gold face smiles at us. It's Jenna. She seems happier than before.