Chapter 59: Apollyon
To make sure the temptation was unbearable, they had put Dr. Pawel Fidyka across the hall from the closet where uprooted elderberries were packed from floor to ceiling in laundry bags, stinking and dribbling dirty water down into a drain. Not very sanitary.
And as I rummaged and slit open the bags to find my particular clump of dirt among the thousands, it got harder and harder to focus. It felt like Nocome was growing eyes on the back of my head. Eyes and teeth. The Movember man that I would called Angel Eyes from now on had cooperatively leaned against a wall with outstretched arms, still holding his empty leash in his right hand. He was panting, and when I looked at him between bags of berries I could see his breath. Nocome was making it cold in here.
I thought the tutelary was properly scared – by now I had crossed through many doors and halls and corridors to get here, all without challenge. My mental drumbeat of anger had kept me to a human pace and human strength in muscling him along, but it had paid off.
Nocome’s greed-sense which had locked onto my elderberry in Lambton was flickering, as she kept trying to twist my head around and look for the helpless man just meters away, so full of life and experience we could use.
“If he says no, we’re leaving.”
Angel Eyes twitched, his blind eyes rolling.
“I wasn’t talking to you. I’m sorry about the dogs. And the nine-year-old girl.”
Angel Eyes thought, blinking his useless eyes for a moment, and then said. “The man died.”
“What?”
“He was in critical care right after the attack, but he died after five days. And we were lucky, with so many sundogs – there could easily have been more. And that was just her then, November 16th.” Angel Eyes managed to look right at me at least with the point of his head, and his savage smile was aimed close enough. “Every day to the solstice would make her stronger, they said – so tell me, what’s one life to put a stop to something like that?”
Fuck. He was trying to crack my anger, and it was working. I was starting to breathe heavily myself, the air becoming molasses and a burning tickle starting at the back of my nose, and I still didn’t have my elderberry.
“Nocome, focus! Like we said! All business comes after this! And you! Put this up your hipster pipe and smoke it: that man is not one life, but all the lives he would have saved after today!” But in the magical/moral exchange of blows I had only blocked, not countered, and the block still hurt my arm, still made me inch back. My anger tank was starting to sputter.
“He will bring them down on us as soon as he can,” Nocome said in my head. “Let me eat him instead.“
“No!” I struck the tiled floor with my fist as the other hand still rummaged through dirt and seeds and rotted berry pulp. The hit cracked the tile instead of my hand – that was bad. Vampire strength meant vampire weakness. I felt like I was in a microwave that was slowly powering up, every stone in this hospital radioactive to my normal self.
Jim Henson! I got this far and I’m not stopping now! They deserve to come crawling to their bosses in their failure, every last middle-management fuck!
The next blow to the floor hurt a little, strength going back down, that cooking sensation fading. Crisis averted – for this minute. But after less than twenty more seconds of searching I had another problem.
“Let me eat him!”
“Find the fucking berry!”
“If you do not let me eat him I will take you and claim ten lives!”
Whether it was her plan all along, or just the hunger talking, Nocome wasn’t being a team player anymore. It made me angry – but this anger was fully selfish.
“You will not take … anyone … without my permission. Cunts do what I say! They all do now! All the stupid bitches like their hot vampire men while nice guys finish last! Now I am strong and pale and chistled and I don’t have to take no for an answer from any dumb bitch, they will all do what they are fucking told-” I gasped, trying to get out of the ravenous hunger, aware that I was shouting and that my voice was hers, but not hers, but our voice, the one voice that all hosts prior to Nocome had spoken in as well. I had caught Nocome’s hunger, giving it my personal spin.
Silver lining: the berry I wanted was now practically glowing, because I had the wendigo’s greed-sense now. If I put this sense on a victim in the woods they’d never escape me, no matter how hard they ran, no matter where they hid.
I tore through the unopened laundry bag and gutted it, letting the brown slop spill all over the floor, clogging the closet’s filthy drain.
I had it! My jaws opened wide.
(no kavdlunait give the hunger back to me do not eat DO NOT EAT!!!)
My jaws snapped shut, dried husk of berry now dripping with wet earth but staying outside my mouth.
“NOW GO!” Nocome screamed in my head, in pain like the circling wind outside. “Ask the doctor and then GO! I can’t hold it for long!”
Angel Eyes had cringed and curled up in a corner when I had started shouting in that other voice, the voice that had howled across the Canadian north for a thousand years, chasing after the doomed and lost. I barely looked at him as I stormed out with my elderberry clenched in my fist in a wad of soil. I stuffed it in my pants pocket, and then practically walked into the door between me and the comatose Dr. Pawel Fidyka.
I wanted to tear the door down. My nails hovered across the milled wood while my lips struggled to speak slowly.
“Doctor? Can you hear me?”
Trying to make my gentle psychic tap on the shoulder now was like trying to write inside a car roaring down a bumpy road. Each word was delayed and sputtering.
“You have … toxic shock syndrome … yes … just a second please. I’ll see what they wrote.” I opened the small room smelling of disinfectant and plastic, wiped my dirty hands on my pantlegs, and frantically started rummaging a second time through the notes that had been left on a small table next to the patient’s head. I think some colleague had thought that he might still be capable of hearing and had tried giving Dr. Fidyka some form of closure just in knowing where he was and what had happened – but he needed a psychic whisper to get the message across.
Trapped in the coma, the doctor still wanted to try and diagnose himself and get his odds. This was getting excruciating. How many minutes since Angel Eyes had said that my doppelganger had been found out – ten? Fifteen? But I couldn’t rush him!
“Streptococcus pyogenes … 30 percent mortality, you say? How early did they catch it, let’s see, the doctor was-”
When I named the three doctors who had arrived at the diagnosis, in the order of their attention to his file with dates, Dr. Fidyka silently told me that he was a dead man. His faith in the diagnostic skills of the first colleague was evidently not high, and it was often the case that those other two doctors would step in to cover the first. 30 percent mortality didn’t apply to catching the problem this late – now the odds were more than inverted, and the slim chance of survival held no real quality of life at all.
“Okay. Now your choice: do you want to go now, or wait a while longer?”
Dr. Fidyka, first of any candidate, asked me if people liked it when they were taken into my corner of the afterlife.
“Ow ow ow. Ow ow ow.” My fear and rage and frustration were starting to become one thing, one huge and choking knot in the centre of my chest, as the seconds and minutes flew away.
“Survey! Quickly! Do you regret your decision to let me end your lives! Everyone! Survey says …” I was surprised by the results: almost one in four regretted it.
Wait, why was I surprised? If I had told them ‘you will stop lingering in this life, but you’ll be enlisted in perpetual spiritual warfare against an ancient evil bitch with her own army of souls’ who would have said yes? That I had kept most of them relatively happy despite all this was amazing.
I told Dr. Fidyka the numbers. 116 voters, 25 wishing they’d given a different answer on their deathbed – including Abe Bergmann, Helen Forgrave and Naresh Sahili, the last of whom seemed to think that he was being waylaid on his path to reincarnation.
“Please … give your answer … before New Years, doctor.” I was panting, listening hard for footsteps, a whole gang of Movember men looking to kick my ass. Maybe they only fed in November and they still got to stomp around the rest of the year.
The doctor asked if I was in a hurry. I chose my words as carefully as I could – there could be zero coercion.
“My time … is irrelevant. Decide at your own pace.”
Once more, the minute hand on the wall went around the clock. Once I stepped outside of this hospital – hell, this room – it would look like the end of The Blues Brothers.
And then Dr. Pawel Fidyka said yes. He said he was very curious about what the hell was going on in my corner of the afterlife.
Leaning over the short little medical genius, I opened my jaws, leaned in, and felt something stab me through the back of my head. Pure white light came out of my mouth, making an oral spotlight on the doctor’s jugular vein.
The doctor disappeared. The bed disappeared. The building and the city of Toronto disappeared, at least to me. I was tumbling through darkness without a floor.
This has to be death. Perma-death.
I was pulled by something, sucked in toward a growing white and gold light, my face baking, and I tried to clench my eyes shut. I tried to clench my bladder to keep from pissing myself. It seemed I was destined to be urinating when I died.
There was a cartoon-braking sound.
I opened my eyes, and looked down. In the void I was now not alone: there was a small androgynous child looking up at me, dressed in white, hair like yellow fire, eyes like twirling sapphires.
I asked, “Are you dead too-”
“NO.”
Just this word punched me back into the darkness, with deafening wind in my ears. Then I was yanked back to speaking distance.
“No,” the fake child-thing whispered, not blasting me away this time. “I am not dead. There is no death. You know this.”
“I … don’t know crap.”
“You knew that a just wrath would let you move and strike freely like a mortal man. But claiming to be just puts you under our eyes, under our judgement.”
“So I slipped up. Coerced the doctor somehow?” Could I have lost my life, my soul and everything with that ‘New Years’ quip?
“You have not yet been judged.”
“What is your name?” I asked.
The whispering fiery child-thing blinked, and then said, “Apollyon.”
I tried to get word on that name from my inner army out of habit – but of course I was alone out here. Nancy Belmont might know exactly who this was, and so might some of the more religious souls I’d sucked up, but I was in the dark.
“Do I have to … say anything? Testify?”
“You have to be judged.” And the child changed in a great flash of scalding light that made me close my eyes.
I opened my eyes, and looked up. If Apollyon was an angel’s name, this was more like it.
I saw a churning miasma of wings loosely coalesced into the profile of a towering man, much like the thing that had told me that I presumed to know after my hit from the ichthys. At the end of an arm made of swan and eagle and parrot wings all twisted together there was a feathery hand, and in it there was a great key that was solid black but wreathed in lightning.
In this dream or vision or train station between life and death I covered my face, trying hard not to cry.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I am scared.”
“Why are you scared?”
“Because I hated a lot of people who didn’t deserve it.”
“Then why did you hate them?”
“All seven. Jealousy. Lust, lots of lust. Pride would make me say it was not my fault, something with them-”
“You are not a liar. Now I will open the bottomless pit.”
That seemed like a strange way to send off the damned.
I looked up and that electric black key was coming down, a giant key in a giant’s hand. It touched my forehead and burned. I opened my mouth and made a clicking sound.
The key was withdrawn.
The giant being made of glowing and intertwined wings of every kind took a step back in this endless void. Then it started walking around me to get another angle. It came back around and stopped in front of me.
“It is done. You may go.”
“Wait, what did you do-”
But I was back in Toronto, at Mount Sinai Hospital, with a dead man on the bed before me. Thunder roared through the ceiling.
“You may not strike him. You may not hold him here. The bottomless pit has been opened and no dead rise forth to devour him, because he has not put shackles on the dead he takes.”
Shackles on the dead?
Sense rushed back, and the voices of my inner army.
The skinwalkers and others who had come from Nocome told me that they had been shackled by her, but not by me. So when Apollyon had set his key to my forehead they had felt nothing. No one in my camp had felt anything. But Nocome, who put shackles on her dead, had another outbreak of escapees, souls that she had so recently reclaimed from Dr. Starling’s game.
Vampires aren’t supposed to feed like this, I slowly realized, trying to find my feet, my hands, then the door that would take me out of this room with the dead medical genius on the bed.
We’re supposed to feed on less willing victims, and then stuff them in a dark mental prison somewhere when their essence fuses with our own. In the mindscape we can go in and interrogate prisoners for info when we have to, but the door stays locked, and we don’t negotiate or put things to votes or go to them for advice because if they retain any will at all they will will us dead. So when Apollyon set his key to my forehead what was supposed to have happened, according to the middle-management types expecting the judgement as a final barrier, was effective lobotomy: every consumed soul free and taking its revenge at once, a spell guaranteed to incapacitate practically any vampire – but not the vagabond vampire who didn’t know to imprison his devoured souls.
“You guys thought … I was just running around eating unwilling people?” I marveled. And I cackled at their misfortune.
Clumsy enemies were the only ones I could ever beat – but that’s all I ever had! Jean-Claude, fumbling with his blondes and brunettes with the water cure; Nocome, smoked out of her hole in the summer; and now the angel Apollyon (or rather, those who would call on him), who sounded like a pretty big fucking deal even among angels to everyone in the inner army who knew the name.
Even if the stars fell from the sky and the oceans turned to blood and the four horsemen road in all fearsome and thundering, I had a chance, incel atheist vampire and everything!
Chapter 60: Numerological Distraction
Image credits: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, H.C. Selous & M. Paolo Priolo (1850), unknown British artist (1150)