Chapter 10: The Spuds
Up on the bridge I saw a hushed crowd peering down, running the length of the span. The sundogs that had followed me this far bounded up to the road and raced without care to the bridge’s centre to peer and bark down through iron railings that lined a sidewalk up there.
The road over this bridge was no highway, I gathered – this was a lonely place where such things as them and myself could meet and conduct business, the desolate and remote atmosphere compromised by those damn humming powerlines. Two yellow streetlights gave me more light than I needed to assess the mob, and by ears alone I heard the holy trickles hitting the river.
One face up there was familiar: my dormitory’s crone, my evictor. That white man I had noticed in my dream vision carrying all the water bottles had joined her, and I noticed that he was actually emptying one of his bottles into the river. So maybe this was only two-thirds spud magic.
Finding a dry scab on land with enough dead sticks for dry footing and enough space to pace, I stopped and called up to them after stuffing the deer scalp fully inside my shirt.
“Come on in! The water’s fine!”
I had decided, through my torturous hours of wading and burning in their holy water, that I would keep a sharp tongue and a flippant mind for these hunters whatever the outcome, even if they got me. Especially if they got me. I had been slowly gathering a lot of insults and accurate insults for their faith during this time of waiting as well, deciding that the mindset of righteous, human anger and hate might get me through another trap meant for a pure, fully-turned vampire who had no care for righteousness.
How dare these fools call themselves representatives of any god? Pedophiles and enablers to pedophiles, homophobic homosexuals and virgin sex instructors – bah! Liars, even the best of them, pretending to know and know exclusively when there were wendigos and manitous and Deer Women and Fox Men and their goofy story about the ‘virgin’ Mary was one of a thousand tall tales.
Get down here so I can clobber you. I tried to send this thought, not bothering to shout it – my newer instincts said that they might be ready to resist a taunt in their ears, but a little whispering temptation in their minds and hearts might feel like their own idea.
Yes, you holy shits, I am arrogant – come down and destroy me for being so arrogant. Water’s only ankle deep, and it will probably empower you. I hated your retarded cult in human life – never getting stem cell cures with you fuckers still making your noise – and now it is even sillier to me.
“Silence monster!” a woman shrieked up there, more than a minute after my spoken words.
I thought at them harder, raising my eyes to make eye contact with individuals on the bridge’s rail one by one. So you can hear me, a little, and maybe you can tell if a thought is yours or if it’s one of mine creeping in. Go ahead, you can tell the difference, little cowards. You’re afraid, other hunters said you need a little practice, feed them this juvenile vampire, you kids still have your training wheels. I identified the nun who had called me monster and decided to give her a mental beam of particularly gleeful derision. Little penguin, or fatso penguin, ha ha. HA HA HA!!!
The fat penguin backed out of sight. My psychic taunt didn’t get any more words of reply, but there was a shuffling up there, maybe a low murmuring as they huddled and prayed among each other.
It was too late in spring for the water to rush me out, and if they retreated up to another bridge to pollute the river I’d still be able to travel far up this boundary, there were no long patches of solid, deep water stretching for many kilometers until Lake Waposwa, where clearly the monster hoped for sanctuary. It would have to be stopped less passively.
I collected all this with, ironically, the late realization that these thoughts were not entirely my own, and that from now on I could never be totally sure how much of my own intelligence was really my own or just stolen from others.
“Jean-Claude can do it,” a voice finally said, above the murmuring.
Unless his last name is van Damme, he’s fucked.
Jean-Claude came down anyway, of course. There were more than two minutes of murmuring and preparing the fighter for the ring, pumping him up or giving him some last-minute observations, but before the man separated from the pack I knew that they’d chosen a representative to finish me off. This wasn’t anything like routine business, I gathered – was Jean-Claude new to this?
It was something like this – and I realized with a pulse of surprise and excitement that there was no visible aura around the man coming down to meet me on the half-dry river, nothing like Deer Woman. He was a mortal, with blood, definitely worth dancing with.
The Catholic mob kept whispering their words of encouragement and the champion left the bridge to my left, coming down the grassy slope on the west side to the shore to wade into the river.
With amusement, ire, and maybe suicidal euphoria on my face, I faced the oncoming warrior for Christ, my very first vampire hunter. He wore jeans and a sweater, no robes or armor. They walk among us, heh heh, I thought playfully. He could have been younger than myself, upgraded from altar boy, a man with almost military-short hair and a large, sharp nose, his lips pressed thin. Yes, he was as inexperienced as myself.
Something was held in his closed right hand, while his left hand was empty. I detected no bulges at his hips, and I was fairly certain that the weapon would be another icon primarily, nothing so plain as a gun. An icon to pin me, and maybe a tent peg after that – a silver tent peg wouldn’t need to be hidden from any of the clueless humans.
Again, I realized after the thought that I was skimming this telepathically from Jean-Claude’s mind. His boots would hammer the peg home once it was mostly inside.
He hit wet gravel with those big country-boy boots and started slogging over toward me, pumping his right fist up and down in a slow, measured, soothing jog.
(no fear no fear no fear)
“Ah,” I muttered, wincing. I felt a nail scratching a chalkboard in my mind. They had mantras and prayers to boot me out from collecting their secrets.
He was about thirty meters away now, close enough for all the detail of a face-to-face meeting for me, passing under the powerlines. I liked the look of that thing in his right hand less and less as he approached.
As the distance between us closed, I belatedly tried to remember my reading of Salem’s Lot, more than five years ago. Barlow had treated that priest like a bitch … but how, exactly?
Jean-Claude had come to my small delta of dry gravel in the riverbed. Too late.
“Where is your sword?” I asked.
The young man said nothing, pausing on the first step on dry land, looking at me with eyes half-narrowed, trying to be tough.
“Where is your crossbow?” I asked.
Metal finally flashed in Jean-Claude’s left hand, a long spike of silver that made my eyes water and my vision warp if I stared directly. His lips were flat, working not to smile or grimace. He lowered himself and stalked closer, the thing in his right hand still hidden.
I had thought up some more half-clever taunts, but a silence came over me, heavy and cold. Making noise would expose my own nervousness, so I would be silent. I hunched slightly, wondering when and where to spring, feeling my fingertips humming with eagerness – they could dig in like an eagle’s talons, I knew, if I could actually get that close. But what had he brought against me in his right hand?
Enough. I reached down to the riverbed and cast the first stone, baring teeth as it flew to bang against his knee. Jean-Claude blinked, coming to a stop, looking down with a look of confusion … and then he smiled. I hadn’t hurt him at all, and even a normal human throw should have done that.
Shit.
“Do I have to be without sin for that to work?” I mumbled.
“Hm,” he replied. He was thrusting his right hand forward, still closed.
(in the name of the Father-)
His mental voice now came to my ears against my will, a headache like a spike prodding my temple.
(-the Son and the Holy Ghost!)
Jean-Claude now opened his right palm and marched forward, almost close enough for a normal strike. Metal dangled, two trinkets clashing together.
One was a small crucifix, engraved with a little figurine of a suffering Jesus upon it in the microscopic detail of vampire senses. This hurt a little, like stubbing your toe.
The other item affixed to the hunter’s rosary-keychain-lanyard with an open locket, bearing mother and child for the brief moment that I could bear to look at it. Because this hurt far more, that locket, that mother and her baby boy Jean-Claude.
This was a fifty-foot belly flop, with all the stinging afterward.
Though nothing hit me I was struck backward – I felt my heels drag in the loose wet stones where the water sloshed up, felt my soles singe and burn in the sanctified water. I reached out for purchase, to keep from falling on my back and burning myself more, and almost ended up crawling on my belly.
That silver tent peg flashed under the distant streetlights, given a glow of its own in my heightened senses which widened further. Jean-Claude’s swing to plant it in my chest through my fox pelt was calm and competent, not a wild lunge, keeping his balance. He’d done some sparring in a ring, I gathered.
Me? I’d done karate as a kid, some generic mixed martial arts, nothing after age fifteen. I tried to slap the peg away, and it pierced my palm with effortless stigmata.
We both stopped moving, me done reeling, Jean-Claude done swinging. I had caught his finishing weapon, and it was serrated. It was meant for one-way movement, lest a shallow stab let the vampire live and pluck out the spike from the chest.
The new pain – the crackling, electric pain, as if the silver was hooked up to a car battery – shook away all the stinging of the earlier pain.
I was now in hysterical pain, the kind of delirious pain that makes men laugh, the pain that gives corpses a smile and hanged men erections, saturating and looping on the pleasure/pain scale. Maybe it was enlightening pain, because now I remembered how Kurt Barlow had handled Father Callahan. I pointed at the first-time vampire hunter with my impaled hand, and the young Frenchman saw my changed eyes, my clear and certain eyes, and he cringed back, boots bouncing on the delta of dry pebbles.
I said, “Throw down your symbols, shaman.”
Whatever the silver was doing to me, its electric charge was fading. A nervous ringing followed in which there was no more pain, no more capacity to transmit pain from hand to brain.
I managed to take a sluggish step forward, still pointing with my pierced hand while Jean-Claude flinched again. The impersonal icon of the cross was small potatoes compared to that family heirloom, but though he still bore them at one side they did not water my eyes quite so much any more, and when he thrust them toward me again the hit was not so hard, not enough to drag my heels, more like walking into a plane of glass.
“Put them down.” I half-faked bravado, though it was hard to tell where my words came from as I remembered and realized and intuited so strangely in this over-agonized, euphoric state. I placed my pierced hand over my heart as if making a vow. “With an empty right hand you can finish me off!”
And all my inhuman, unholy instincts suddenly said that yes, he could. Jean-Claude could simply step forward and end my undead being with the ease of opening a door … if his hand was empty.
If he let his icons fall into the mud, the spike would slide in easily – and if he were so aligned, so instinctive, and so wise as to actually throw away his graven images, to let the river wash them away forever, then he could kill me without any spike at all, just with his fist to my chest.
But not if he was told. I had a Terrence McKenna flash: If the knowledge wasn’t earned, wasn’t realized it on his own, he could be no true hunter of things that go bump in the night. They might have told him much beforehand, but this was a vital secret.
Instead, Jean-Claude had another weapon in his left hand. A knife, though a strange knife without the familiar glint of steel or the painful glare of silver. It looked almost like glass, tinged a little yellow, and with more disappointment than shock I caught it in my own left palm for double stigmata.
He leaped back after failing to pierce my heart again, seeming to be expecting … well, something that didn’t happen.
I looked down at my pierced left hand. The blade wasn’t glass, and it hurt a little, but not so much as the silver, passing through so effortlessly, a polite blade that was thin like a leaf.
“Oh.” I sniffed, and then licked the tip, feeling my tongue burn. “Salt.”
Silver and salt. That should have dropped me – I could tell because Jean-Claude’s hair was now standing on end, because now he was dropping his icons but out of shock and hopelessness rather than revelation. I hadn’t won this fight – he had just lost, failing the mental leap that could have made him a hunter without need for a weapon. And even this lesser game with the salt knife had failed – a considerable waste of effort, for it can’t be easy to make an arsenal of salt knives.
“But the water …” he said.
I bore into his eyes with mine, taking from his mind, knowing, constructing … and then laughing.
It varied like hair and eye colour, the vampiric vulnerabilities. That was a big part of the inconsistency in the myths, at least in this Catholic’s way of understanding. Water, silver and salt – most vampires had to suffer under at least one of those three. I saw the lessons drifting through Jean-Claude’s mind – that most vampires had some vulnerability to each, and though a vampire’s weaknesses varied the overall weakness was supposed to be conserved. A vampire totally immune to running water might die at just the touch of silver, and the rare monster without fear of water or silver could not stand a pinch of salt. A vampire that could withstand all three was a true rarity, an albino … but I was no such rarity.
They didn’t know about the water cure. They’d misclassified me, and tried to kill me like a dumb blonde when I had brown hair.
“Catholics should know about the water cure,” I chuckled, but then growled. I was recalling some of that good anger, that human anger, that righteousness. “And the rack, and the pit and the pendulum.”
Whatever had protected Jean-Claude from my first cast stone was a flash in the pan, and just as Deer Woman’s aura couldn’t handle a pissed-off human fist striking because she was a guardian of animals who had skinned a fox, Jean-Claude’s protective forces couldn’t handle a punch motivated by something as human and mundane as a hatred for ignorance and hypocrisy and self-righteousness, a punch from an unbeliever and a skeptic first and a vampire second.
Take that, cultist – take it right in the teeth.
My fist closed despite the silver staking the palm, the fingers almost pressing the tent peg all the way through. Because this was a human blow there was only human power behind it – but I’d exercised a little before all this madness, and this was still enough to coldcock the young man, hitting the jaw and transmitting perfectly through all the right nerves. He dropped all at once, as if a puppet master had released him. Maybe one had.
The people on the bridge sighed once, and then they were grave-silent, none of them moving. The dogs didn’t even seem to blink, looking down at me as I looked down at Jean-Claude, who lay supine on gravel and mud. We were both a little dazed, and as his eyelids fluttered his hands shifted, searching for a stake which wasn’t there, and for his lanyard which was there, fallen beside him.
While he was doing this, I was deciding something, preparing a little show for the crowd. Jean-Claude didn’t deserve what was coming, not at all … but they did.
I extracted the silver tent peg and salt knife from my palms, and as the wounds lingered it was straightforward to reinsert both weapons facing in the opposite direction, their points now pointing with the palm.
The thought of not doing what happened next, of letting the fallen would-be-hunter go, was a silly thing. There were so many cringeworthy stories about good vampires abstaining from human blood – as rare as the person who quits smoking and drinking cold turkey, because all you had to do to fall to the habit was not pay attention and your body did the motions on its own.
I wanted to drink. I deserved a drink, after all my hard work. As a human I had been a virgin at an embarrassing age, but night five of vampiredom would be time for this new life’s special fun. Why wait?
When I reached down, Jean-Claude didn’t let go of his trinkets, shaking them uselessly in front of his face with his raised left hand. My right hand, pierced with silver, grabbed his wrist hard and the silver bit into his wrist, where suicides make their cuts, where the nails of crucifixion are sometimes actually driven.
He didn’t scream – I had ‘arranged’ his death like a master of the theatre and my direction was flawless, his body straightforward to manipulate. The inhale preceding the final scream was all the time I needed to seize and piece his other wrist with the salt knife sticking from my left palm, and with this proper grip I pumped my right knee up hard. There was no need for him to stay conscious for this.
Knee hit chin with more than human strength now, and Jean-Claude’s head whipped back as if he had crashed while driving at some ridiculous velocity, rolling eyes skyward and then looking behind himself. His neck was broken by the back of his own head.
Then the linkage between head and body crumpled and kinked like a rubber hose to let the young Frenchman’s skull almost sink into his torso, chin too close to clavicle.
With that proper disposal, it was time to entertain the audience. I held Jean-Claude’s twitching form up by the wrists, my rigid body like a supporting cross. and our four wounds mingled. This finally got outrage from the bridge.
“No, no!” that fat penguin cried.
The dogs howled. Were they angered despite fighting on the Micmac side?
An old man’s voice that would have thundered had it not been choked with disgust and rage rang down. “You are … a foul … sick … fiend!”
My human skepticism might have wondered if feeding was only possible through the mouth, but this improvised transfusion was starting to work … and work more than any meal before.
“Oh-”
Two shots of heroin, one in each arm. I think – I never tried heroin, but it would probably be disappointing after this. This was the pleasure/pain loop again, running in the other direction.
“-faaaaaaaaaa.” I couldn’t even swear.
Power. Life and power, death and power, red power, black-red power, power sucked until the skin turned blue and grey, until Jean-Claude was a dry mummy that I cracked apart with a yank, the shoulder joints exploding like knots of dry wood in a fire, his shirt in tatters. The man’s armless husk collapsed, flaking and dry like an old wasp nest, and in the river it was soon washing away like a sandcastle.
I had taken everything, every part of the body’s blood: the smallest crevice of bone would be bloodless. The rapid extraction had cracked everything. And the way I had taken it, that mattered. I had half-suspected that it would, guided by more awakening instincts that soothed my skeptical mind.
Diving in on someone’s neck would certainly work, but desecration, inversion, sacrilege … that spiced the blood, made the drink hit the brain harder, left the chalice barren afterward. Opium versus heroin. I was seeing stars and was woozy with new power, instant power.
Chapter 11: Scrambling on the Water
Image credits: Aprilwine, Auckland Museum, Judicieux, Rosser1954