Ten Thousand Miles of Darkness
Infinity is not a number. It’s a process. The circle of life embraces the fractal line of infinity, the blood soul knowing nothing of time, only change, one disguise for another. A fish can become a bear and crawl back into the sea and change to a whale.
The fractal blood soul is as old as old gets. Before our planet swirled to a hot heart of magnetic magma in the cold fist of outer space, the fractal line limned the cosmic clouds. Before that it etched the lineage of elements in the stellar furnaces. It flexes in the vortex of every galaxy, coiling infinity into black holes. It calls itself life among the quick. The dead, I’m sure, cherish it as something else, something without a name. And for the undead … well, I pray you never find out.
I think I made her understand this before I told her ▬▬Get in the car. Drive back to the hospital. I will come for you when I’m done.
“Uh-huh, right.” She gave me a tolerant look. “Why would I go back to the ward? Clocks have stopped for me there.”
▬▬You can’t come with me.
“Why not?” She put a finger to her chin as if trying to remember. “Oh, yeah. I might get killed and my body wander the earth till the sun burns out.”
▬▬You don’t want that.
“You think I want to waste away vomiting?”
So, that’s how I found myself in the night forest with a dying girl and webs of moonbeams like filaments of spun glass.
The undead floated in all the darkness. So many. Their squalid songs ventured under my breastbone and plundered my forlorn heart for memories of Bernie, our sad little squabbles, the shameless sympathy we felt for each other’s weaknesses, and all the years of tenuous obligations that had quietly coalesced to a fumbling relationship of symmetrical lives, an improvised partnership, where we fulfilled our parallel yet separate dreams, business for him, yoga and food for me, carnal gratification for him, tantric union for me, the comfort of routine holding us together, though he dubbed it loyalty, and I fashioned it love.
I knew what the undead were doing, trying to undermine my will. I was one of them now. And they were right about everything they sang. But they were wrong about thinking it mattered. It’s just a dream. Illusions of samsara, the endless cycling of being and non-being.
That’s why I came back for the girl. I knew she knew about the dream in ways my Bernie could never have comprehended. Last night, I had learned a lot about what she had already figured out for herself. She was ready. She had been ready a long time for my pitiful announcement: ▬▬They are coming now.
With silken silence, spreading darkness through the moony air like billowing ink, a vampire swept down from the cathedral heights of a nocturnal yew. It snatched the girl by her shoulders, even as she glanced upward at a soft susurrus inside the vagrant wind.
Her legs scissored frantically, footless in midair. Breath knocked out of her in one shriek, she sailed mutely thrashing into a forest tunnel where moonlight stood at the far end like an ivory door.
She was gone, already arriving at where her grievings had beckoned. And the dream moved on.
The moon slid from bough to bough as I floated among pitchblende shadows accompanied only by the lunatic trill of crickets. In evergreen alcoves, I beheld the undead, ghast faces freckled with blood, squatting on reckless youths who had dared return to the gruesome site of last night’s immolation.
One yet lived and gaped at me with despondent exhortation until the vampire pressed close its fatal embrace. The dream moved on.
Creamy darkness and the demon of me brimming in the blood laid claim to my soul, and oh how I longed for power|rightness, my strength as a ghost. A creature of the undead, I let the rapport of kindred evil gorge my heart like a chest of treasure and usher me forth both reverent and afraid to the clearing where the fugitives of hell awaited me.
Arrayed in choir among great drifts of moonsmoke, vampires shadowed the pasture – but not the scorched earth. Here, my flesh had burned. Erratic mounds of dirt and tossed rocks and debris lay strewn near the charred ground none dared approach.
These impotent attempts to bury the toxic ash of a twice dead thing had created a heraldic slum of gravel, deadwood and grass clods that appeared arranged at the boundary of chaos more by bestial intelligence than exiles of humankind.
The shaman priest advanced through blue, moonlit haze. All his bones showed under his windings of human leather, face a rancid clot crusting a malevolent skull, jaw undershot, serried with incisors.
▬▬Brother, by your own umbrageous hand to the fiery gulf your flesh was given. Now why return in the flesh of another?
I didn’t bother answering. They knew my posthumous heart as I knew theirs.
Among the vampires, I spotted the girl, small in Bernie’s jacket, still alive, eyes swiveling, reassessing her devotion to darkness.
A lamia, a female abhorrence of savage, iridescent muscularity, knelt on the girl’s back, hank of its victim’s hair in a bioluminescent fist, yanking her head back, exposing taut throat and ticking veins.
It stared straight at me through tresses of colored tinsel. Black eyeholes aimed like gun bores, targeted my humanity. The lamia made certain I had an unobstructed view of its kill. Magenta lips sneered back from barbed teeth, jaw blades flaring blue as acetylene.
The priest continued in its desert wind voice ▬▬O perfidious spirit, join us. Redeem yourself among the slayers. You alone may approach this baleful soil and not die. Bury this twice dead thing t’was your former sorry frame. And feed on this sickly lamb. Salve injury inflicted by your killing grief with this sanguine proof of fealty. Forsake vengeance for timeless life. Brother, feed!
The shaman priest edged away, without shadow in moonlight veering through mist.
The lamia raised its dragonskin hand, beckoning me, exposing armpit feathers black and plastered with sweat. The lobes of the creature’s brow, glazed with lunar light, pulsated branching veins, eager to feed yet restrained by a nastier will yet, offering me the kill.
I won’t lie. I felt whole as a rose, my fractal blood soul a livid blossom in the presence of the slayers. I was of them in flesh if not spirit. I belonged. Like no other time in my former life, I belonged.
Each one of the undead was so magnetically bound to my carnal pith, I actually experienced my hunger eating their hearts. The shaman priest’s snakehead grin opened.
Glowing with the moon’s radiation, the lamia waved me into the field where fog sloshed close to the earth, simulacra of the departed crawling out from their humus beds.
I left the speared light among the shaggy trees and stepped into the glade, where the limestone bluff, a monument to the moon recumbent against the stars, parted darkness.
Chest constricted with unholy desire, I strode among litter of heaved rocks and bramble and passed the slayers. Their eyes’ cadaver mascara all trained on me, their souls pure mirror, reflecting archaic mystery, nightfall before the dawn of life when earth was still disaster, a geological blaze cooling to volcanic glass and starshine.
For such venerable lineage, old as the somnambulism of rocks, organic existence is a mutilation. The vampire virus originally thrived on gravel. In these ogre bodies of human flesh, germinated out of fish-slime and worm-mucus, vampires yet remain faithful to the first iron, the world’s ordinal blood, bleeding numb rust in the radioactive glare of a primordial planet rapt by fire.
The lamia’s nacreous body seethed light. It was a spiritual moment of communion. To us both, the girl smelled of cancer and poison.
The quicksilver radiance of the moon, mistress of illusion, veiled the girl’s frailty – ivory skin, pulsing throat, her fevered stare – in bridal vestment. One more moment, then with a ripping swipe of my dangerous mouth, I marry her to death.
Her eyes searched the terror that was my face, trying to reach past the ravening stare, beseeching a mercy detestable to her only minutes earlier. What had changed? I will tell you. She had met the inhuman. Not the prehuman, the man-killing tiger with mask of black and orange lightning. Not twisted life either, the vicious evil of malignant tumors, treason of the known – terrifying enough – familiar death darkening in the body.
The vampire is something other, a macabre rending of everything accepted as real. The fractal blood soul unfurls to infinity. The vampire virus hijacks every cell. Snowflake fractals braid dendrites, honeycombing the brain, and the electric hum that generates consciousness alters.
Individual awareness severs from the body, and ‘I’ is instantly ‘not-me,’ shoved out into sunyata nothingness by a new entity, living carrion that continues with sick fury. The girl saw it coming.
Her voice strained in her stretched throat, reaching for some final human reckoning, “I’m going to die.”
▬▬You think?
I winked a quick supernatural smile into her terror and met the abyssal eyes of the lamia.
Its emphatic jaws widened with outrage. I didn’t hesitate – and I didn’t know Bernie’s strength. My fist smashed the thing so hard, its ganglia hair whipped and repulsive mouth clacked shut under a stunned grimace. It flopped backward, taking the girl with it – and snapping for her throat.
I swooped on top of them, one arm around the girl, the other trying to prize the biting jaws from her neck. The lamia had already drawn blood as I dropped the full brunt of Bernie’s weight into a bodyslam.
Just before contact, our holes-in-the-head eyes met inches apart, sharing common darkness. Blood spice cut with venom made both our mouths ache. The acrid taint of chemotherapy drugs slowed the hemorrhaging bite long enough for me to channel the lamia.
That’s right. Like some kind of telephone tarot reader, I connected through the lamia with its victim. “Breathe!” The girl heard me! Wait. That was her voice – exhorting me!
▬▬Breathe! I echoed.
The vampire virus reverberated power|rightness between us. Under the basilisk scowl of the lamia, the girl and I shared breath|force.
This happened in one pivotal instant, a fraction of a second where the lamia partook of clarity|insight with its prey, startled, not sure what was happening. That loosened its meshed jaws, staggered its hungering furor. That – and Bernie’s pounding bodyslam. The wallop stamped the lamia into the loam and broke its clamping bite.
I hugged the blood-smeared girl to my chest with one arm and with the other pushed off the lamia.
We were eleven heartbeats from the fire circle. Thirty-eight vampires stood within striking distance and pulled closer. I knew precisely how many, because I sensed the thoughts behind the atrocities of their faces. Moving in counterpoint to their intentions, I ducked blows, sidestepped pounces, grunting with each effort.
Motion smudges blurred the moonlight, and shouts exploded from me like hysterical barking.
The girl writhing in my arms, succumbing to the vampire virus, messed with my center of gravity. My boot jammed in a divot, and I plowed headlong into a lunging vampire. Our collision tossed us like thrown dice, and I caromed tumultuously among the slayers, tripping others on the cleft earth.
Boldly, with the girl clutched tightly against my body, I stepped up on proffered backs and leaped – into a blind tackle by one of the undead that knocked us madly right into the firepit!
The slayer in the pit reared upright powdered in ash, a shocked butoh dancer, locked in a manikin vogue of fright.
Vampires froze and watched from skullholes of unblinking darkness, staring intently as at a stick of sparkling dynamite.
Nothing happened. The cringing undead unhooked their fright and slinked closer. Perhaps the ash was weak, rendered harmless by a windy day of mist and boreal showers. Perhaps there was no hurry in killing us…
Fangs unsheathed in the moony air, ardent as stropped razors.
The wind swerved, and the wretched slayer in the ash pit dissolved. Its lilac dust whirred into moonshadows, poising briefly. Like so much exhaled smoke, the vampire draped emptiness with an elongated caricature of its former shape, before withering away.
Emitting a collective shrill, the keening of the undead screeched like wrenched metal, lamentation from the iron floor of the soul. Recognition exploded. The melismatic scream of the undead flung me back to that mantic moment of the previous night when I first touched this twice dead thing – my own cremated flesh.
Its doomful warrant beggared hope for all the undead. In my arms, the girl trembled and chittered, the vampire virus inside her melting. I crouched over her, swinging aggressive stares left and right.
Encircling slayers postured like Nijinsky’s queer faun, peering sidewise through time, gauging the peril and promise of destroying me. The ash didn’t kill instantly. If they rushed me, I would die.
I tossed a handful their way, and they danced into mist and churning shadows. The final dark in their malefic eyes speckled the tarnished air. So many. All with one attention and red rage in their hearts.
They eddied closer among derelict mists, until I swiped my hand angrily and drove the whole flock back into the breathing shadows of the forest. From afar, their many fangs rimed the nocturnal woods with glints and gossamer shine.
Night had only just begun. Before it ended, I would be dead – or morning would combust me. The girl would survive. The ash of a twice dead thing was eliminating the vampire virus and restoring her destiny with cancer and a higher calling.
Not me. The undead had seized my future and crucified that great god Uncertainty to the sky with silver nails of stars.
Bernie’s brain clicked numbers, the slow planetary rotation toward midnight’s return, hours under the remorseless wheel of the star gods, so many frightful heartbeats for the girl racing far ahead into the empire of night and its ten thousand miles of darkness.
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on the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
FICTION
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