September 6th was not fun, nor the 7th, where the sky rained but didn’t rumble with the coming of a thunderbird. The next day, waiting for those berries from the first night of the fast to kick in, was edging from arduous into tortuous. I was trying to distract myself rather than ‘transcending’ the addiction (if there even is a difference).

During the nights I let myself move around, since the fasting didn’t mean there should be no change of scenery. Exercise would probably make things worse – but maybe, if I still had something to call a metabolism, it could be accelerated by exercise, and the berries would kick in early. It was time for some burpees.

Fuck. I was huffing out St. Elmo’s fire in the four hundreds, halfway in. Had I weakened? Crippled myself in the lake?

In Algonquin I had been working hard, but I had been well-fed every day. Now I knew that I needed to work out under a different kind of pressure.

When I was human I occasionally experienced flashes of trichotillomania, which is the compulsion to rip or pluck out your own hair. It’s a variant of biting your nails or (for the ex-smokers) touching your face and lips or worrying a toothpick in your mouth. The stress and anxiety of the fast were starting to bring that compulsion back hard in the pre-dawn of September 8th, and I suddenly wanted to tear into that little pink spot on my shin – something bad had to be in there! And this time I could heal, so I could dig and poke and stretch until whatever it was was all out! Pus, a crooked hair, a twisted little twin – whatever it was I wanted it gone!

I stared down at my leg, half pulling up the pantleg of my jeans, dimly aware that this was a reflection of my inability to dig out Nocome. The more pus or the longer the ingrown hair the more clean I would feel afterward, and I could imagine a lot of awfulness churning underneath that minor blemish on my skin.

I bit my lip, harder and harder, staring down at my shin, and soon I tasted blood.

“Wendigos,” Nancy said faintly, “are often depicted with missing lips, as they have chewed them away.”

More exercise then – I couldn’t be trusted to be still for a minute. If I didn’t have the same raw power to exert, I could still be a gymnast and a tree climber, sharpening balance and grip.

I had already noticed that I did not always have all the weight that I should – I knew that I could slip through a crack in a door or window when the invitation was made, like that general who tried to run through a wall because atoms are made of empty space. Between full weight and zero weight was a misty uncertain territory to explore. I could with some preparation stand on a thin branch at the top of a tree without bending it – something like holding my breath allowed me to take the weight away, and like a held breath my time was limited before I needed to ‘exhale’ and restore all of my human weight, crashing out of the tree. But with ‘breath control’ I was soon managing silent and incredible jumps with launch and landing points too small or frail or slippery or vertical or upside-down for any human with any equipment to manage, part gecko and part flying squirrel and part lemur.

“If it bleeds we can kill it, heh heh.” I distracted myself with related movie quotes to keep my teeth away from my lips, though over and over again I was nibbling at my own tongue.

I was also now a contortionist – another kind of ‘breathing’ that I slowly discovered over the tortuous, crawling hours between berries let me compromise the solidity of my body, and I could twist and untwist myself in nightmare forms that I ought to try on some deserving human one day, crawling down stars upside down and snarling like little Regan. Part gecko and squirrel, now part octopus, slinking around the trees in my copse through impossible gaps without rustling a leaf, and then adding speed to maneuverability to slice through the canopy in absolute silence. I had done a little of this all the way back in Quebec by instinct, but without the panic of a hunt on my heels I could actually notice what the hell I was doing.

I rediscovered isometrics and did all the ones I knew, then added the ones Simon knew. I could adopt poses impossible for humans (well, outside Circe de Soleil and maybe a few yogis), and tortured new tendons and ligaments one by one. This was one of the only exercises I could do between dawn and noon, and the soreness didn’t completely leave at midday.

One thing with zero success: telekinesis. I’m sure some stories have vampires with that, but if it was even possible it was too advanced for the moment. I made all the hand motions there are at rocks, twigs, leaves, and they did nothing.

Just before Anne came to feed me a fourth time on the 8th I was practicing my falls in the light of dusk – if I took my weight away just before I struck the earth from a great height it was like trying to smash a piece of dry ice that boils away before it even hits the ground, puffing up and then just trickling down. Or that was the goal – I could reduce the impact considerably by defying Newton’s laws, though I still bounced at the end.

And the moment I stopped moving, expecting Anne at any moment, the thirst grew like a fiery tree from my throat to every extremity. None of my work had brought the berries into my system faster.

Well … this sucks.

But I saw something similar coming toward my copse across the fields. Anne wasn’t all of herself either – so I guess she wasn’t cheating with her own fast. I hadn’t looked at my reflection for many months, but this was close as we shared the same burden.

She was still mostly a woman of flesh and blood, but in half of her face the flesh had gone glassy and red blood flowed visibly in and out to the eye. I could see the squiggling vessels in her cheek and lips and the muscles around her right eyeball as if she was partly diaphanized, which is how they sometimes display animal bodies in museums (thanks Nancy). To my unassisted powers of comparison the window inside her head was a growing patch of that ‘Body Worlds’ plastination exhibit, and from the right angle I saw the grotesque line of her clenched teeth, the look of a zombie Anne Shirley.

“Here’s the berries,” she said dully, the tongue squirming visibly.

“Th … thanks,” I said, already gobbling. After I had inhaled almost all of them I lent her a passing thought.

“Anne, what are you subsiding on for this fast? Unless I look like you, it’s not enough.”

“You look nasty,” Anne said, not extending the description or colouring it the way she would have yesterday. Today I was just ‘nasty’. “Your right foot’s all bloody.”

Hey, it was. After stuffing the last of the berries down my gullet I rolled up the pant leg and saw that I’d gored and scratched the little pink spot on my shin after all. The superficial wound was painless, and my thirst had taken away any notice of the dribbling down my leg – it had also taken away my concentration enough to let my subconscious do the picking for me. I’d rubbed and scraped and torn myself there against tree bark and stones, finally scraping the region below the skin.

“Odd. It doesn’t hurt, I don’t think it slowed me down … but it should be closing up. I hope these really are blackberries that will kick in soon.” Although I had the juice in my mouth and my thirst was deceived for a moment, the rebound would be ferocious. “But what’s your diet like right now?”

“None of your business,” Anne muttered. Oh yes, I was getting the real woman out of her.

“Well, if it’s getting as bad as that, maybe you should drop your pride and concede,” I said happily, cranking my hip to start drinking from my wound from my own heel. I don’t think it would count as cheating. “You see, I don’t really care how bad I look – and when you’re bored enough you start hurting yourself in new ways. Heh heh.”

Anne stone-faced me for a long while, and then a smile came to her face. Not an idyllic child’s smile, but a cunning smile. I noticed that not all of her hair was red anymore, with patches of brown coming in, and all the changes on her right side had distracted me from noticing that her left eye was no longer blue, but deep brown, almost black.

Almost like mine, I suddenly knew, because there is one reflective surface that can show my image back to me: the eyes of another undead fiend.

I set my bloody foot down, and stood over her, trying to be intimidating.

“Maybe it is my business. Are you still feeding on children, just more directly?”

The Anne-thing didn’t lose that cunning smile. Boy was I stupid – I’d already been poisoned.