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Twilight in the Cancer Garden
I woke in appalling quiet. Through the slats, I glimpsed a late afternoon of gray, sprawling mist that did not hurt my eyes. I needed a shower.
In the bathroom, I paused before the mirror to ponder the physics of how vampires cast no reflection. Fractal spectra radiating from vampire DNA – all the trillions of cells of the body configured in a precise antenna-array of DNA – meet key-and-lock with EMF waves rebounding from reflecting surfaces and nullify the images of the undead. More to think about! DNA as antennae broadcasting signals…
The possibility of the police arriving at any moment hurried me along. While showering, I explored Bernie’s body, already so very intimate to me from outside. Inside, it felt sturdy, massive even. What was left of his orange hair came off in my hands. Running trembling fingers over my bald pate, I tried to feel the fractal figures in the scalp, felt nothing unusual.
Fingertips explored vague eyebrows and the stubble of Bernie’s cleft chin. I wasn’t used to seeing the world from this height. Lathered up, I played with my penis. Did vampires have sex? What about other bodily functions?
Fear of discovery by police detectives interrupted my self-exploration – ‘Vampire Found Playing with Self in Shower.’ And something more. I was hungry. A rapacious blood hunger.
I dressed in the sturdiest clothes Bernie owned: black denims, hiking boots, brown corduroy shirt and the crushed Italian leather jacket I had bought for him six birthdays ago. I left the cabin with only one overnight bag stuffed with Bernie’s clothes.
Even wearing ski sunglasses, I winced. The frail rain-light hurt my eyes, and I practically had to grope to our rental car. Dizzy with hunger, I held only one destination in mind – the nearest hospital.
I drove with a fever of evil, a head full of annihilation. Every car on the road was a lunch box. My square-knuckled hands gripped the wheel like talons. I needed first feeding, needed blood with a demented appetite that made taillights look yummy.
I followed blue signs with the big white H to a large general hospital and parked out of sight of the institution on a hillside street with wide lawns where nothing stirred. As dusk fell, I blew down the street like a feather.
I cut between houses, a shadow blur through the hedges. Dogs droned.
Under a sky of amber shellac, I entered a maze garden of dwarf trees and raked gravel. The hospital towered above, every long window lit.
“You can’t get in that way.”
This voice of bruised velvet floated from out of a teenager, a girl with pale skin, a faux tattoo of abstract design inked in ballpoint along her jugular, and spiky, pixie hair – skin so white and hair so black she emitted darkness.
“There’s always a guard at the terrace door.” She sat on a stone bench, a low seat round as a mushroom.
I had smelled her before I saw her, a blood smoke tainted with medicinal ectoplasm. I had thought it an aura of the hospital and had nearly tripped over her. Chemo, I established, staring down into those raccoon eyepits.
She regarded me blandly. “You’re a vampire.”
▬▬New recruit.
My shadowy voice frightened me. ▬▬How do you know what I am?
“Take a look at yourself.”
▬▬Can’t. The mirror thing.
“You look really freaky. Those shades don’t hide anything.”
▬▬I don’t scare you. You’ve seen vampires before?
“Yeah, right.”
I blinked to make sure she wasn’t an apparition, a hallucination of my blood hunger or of my infected brain. ▬▬Young lady, vampires are evil. We kill people horribly.
“You can have my blood.” She stood, a lanky adolescent of broad face, baby cheeks, and high, perfect brow with a faint blue vein down its middle. She wasn’t wearing hospital attire but hip-slung jeans on a razor-sharp pelvis, biker boots, a vermilion halter top, and no make-up – except the ballpoint design at the side of her neck.
Something errant in her attitude, a solemn and fearsome lawlessness, empowered her from the afterlife. “Go ahead. I’m a goner anyway.”
▬▬You’re a tough cookie.
“You don’t want me?”
▬▬It’s the chemo. You don’t smell very appetizing. Besides, I don’t kill people.
She cocked her head to one side, incredulous. “A vegetarian vampire?”
▬▬Actually…
“No way!”
▬▬Way. Well, half way. I need blood. First feeding. I’m going to pass out soon if I don’t get it. But I don’t want to kill for it.
Comprehension brightened in her woebegone eyes. “So that’s why you’re here.”
▬▬I came for the transfusion bags. Can you help me?
“If you help me.” She stepped closer and placed her hand on my chest. Her warmth made it hard for me to stand still. I was ravenous for her blood, even if it did stink like paint thinner. Her voice narrowed to a whisper, “I want to go with you.”
▬▬I don’t know where I’m going.
“Do I look like I care?”
The girl knew her way around the wards. She went in the terrace door past the security guard and opened a service access entry in the broad driveway on the far side of the garden wall.
Security cameras posed no threat. Blood scent, after a near calamitous detour to an operating theater, eventually led to the refrigeration units. While the girl distracted the on-duty staff, I packed two coolers with 350 ml bags of red blood cells.
A soft whistle announced the all clear, and we skipped back the way we’d come. I felt sadness at this criminal act and relief my urgency hadn’t driven me to murder anyone – yet.
In the capacious, empty driveway with a cooler of life in each hand and an alley of sky above blowsy with stars, I took my opportunity to lose the girl. I didn’t need her anymore. And there was the question of her parents, her family. She couldn’t simply disappear with a vampire.
Small clouds drifted blue as souls. I removed my sunglasses and bolted into the star-spun night.
A small cry from the girl eked after me like a bat. I entered the wind, weightless as tissue paper. Perhaps I would see her again in the bardo between lives. She’d be there soon enough, separated by ecstasy from parents and family, with no connection with anything except mystery, sunyata emptiness, the anatman at the secret core of us all…
The wind curled, and I boomeranged into the broad driveway where the girl had already turned her back.
▬▬You coming or not?
She was dead anyway. What did it matter?
“I thought you skipped.”
▬▬Don’t know my own speed yet. Sorry. This is new to me.
I shrugged. ▬▬Want to get your things? I’ll wait in the garden.
She dashed to my side, eyes glorious, and hooked her arm through mine. “Let’s go!”
Drinking refrigerated blood for a vampire is a lot like sipping a young wine, something fresh and nervous from Côtes du Luberon, perhaps a chilled Cuvée le Châtaignier with its dark lavender spices.
Hospital blood banks store their supplies in a special refrigerator with the temperature constantly kept between two and eight degrees Celsius. Very refreshing. In the rental car, I drank two bags full, almost three fourths of a liter, with the girl watching avidly.
I found out then why vampires take their blood from live victims. My heart skidded. Sinews twisted all through my body. Too many memories of too many living people to digest, a complex math of souls, grievances and joys. The living lived. Extrasensory linkages nearly tore me apart.
“You okay?”
▬▬Can you drive?
While the girl drove following my directions, I lay on the backseat ripping apart the snaggle of second-sight that confused me with the thoughts of other people: a young woman’s tax questions, two brothers arguing about their senile mother, a man burdened with fear and gambling debts.
By the time I sorted out these paranormal voices and a radiance of strength and clarity breathed in me, we had arrived back at the dirt road in the forest near the resort.
We got out, and I took off my jacket and put it around her shoulders. ▬▬I couldn’t have made it without you.
Cold, she slipped her arms into the oversize sleeves. “What are we doing here?”
I told her the story of Bernie and me, of our 17th anniversary, and our romantic stroll through conifer woods to watch moonrise over a haunted bluff. When I was done, she understood. “You came back for your ashes.”
▬▬The ones that did this to me and Bernie, I’m coming back to make them pay.
“You can’t go in there again.” The moon frosted the treetops of the black forest, and we stood in its path. “They’ll be waiting.”
▬▬Like I don’t know?
Click to read pt. 6:
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on the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
FICTION
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