This Rock, That Star, the Emptiness Between
Moonlight diffused enchantment deep into the long, dragonbody of the forest. Alcoves of illuminated fog smoldered like fluorescent gas. The girl, inside her giant leather jacket, clung to my side, gaze vigilant, encompassing the wide field of running shadows, searching for predators.
I could have told her that the undead lurked nowhere nearby but paced porcelain lanes in the distant woods murmuring sorcerous imprecations, but I liked her close. Her scent had changed since the vampire virus had thrived and died in her. She smelled of inconsolable beauty, a scent that gleamed on the camphor breeze off the pines and reached what remained of my humanity.
“I died.” She tipped her head forward and looked knowingly at me. “And I heard you call me back.”
▬▬Power|rightness called you back.
“Whatever. Sounded like you.”
▬▬There is no me. I died last night with Bernie. Now I’m just a ghost in a living corpse.
“You’re alive. And you kept me alive.” She appraised me with a new look, eyes soft with sublunar light and wanton possessiveness. “You were right. I should have gone back to the hospital. This is all too weird.”
▬▬It’s not over yet. You know about twice dead things. The undead don’t want you walking out of here at sunrise with that knowledge.
She responded in a quick voice of complicit danger, “Then let’s run for it! The vampires are gone.”
▬▬No. They’re in the woods. Waiting. If we leave the circle, they’ll swarm.
“We’ll carry ashes. Cover ourselves with ashes!”
▬▬The ash is too weak. It won’t save us out there. And it probably won’t save us here either once the undead accept that some will have to die to kill us.
Her expression didn’t waver, just a quiet sigh as she admitted, “I’m not afraid anymore. I feel strong with you here.”
A laugh thumped in my belly. Me – a hero! Bernie would’ve howled with laughter. I offered a pedagogical answer, to keep from guffawing ▬▬That’s power|rightness you’re feeling. The only real strength there is.
“Some kind of yoga thing, right?”
▬▬Vedantic philosophy actually…
My brain blinked. Iciness opened fans in my blood. I sensed the lamia running through the forest’s opiate shadows, aiming its vehement body directly at us. ▬▬Stay behind… I managed to blurt, and then the ground detonated.
Cinders shot up in a sheet of ash, dirt and gravel, and hearing stuttered deaf under the lamia’s fatal cry.
We collided in a plumed ball of dust. I took the hurtling thing into myself, away from the girl, and the rampageous blow spilled us out of the burned circle into the tall grass.
Perhaps it intended to daze or distract me, as if I was still Adam’s flesh and lacked the undead’s echo-mind, sounding out the deepest underworld of the lamia’s thoughts. Perhaps it wasn’t intending anything other than rage, because, when I jumped to my feet, that’s all I perceived, sheer suicide wrath.
Sooty with the ash of a twice dead thing, the lamia’s berserk talon strikes carved space inches from my frantic body, blurring the air to a silver deathknot.
I pranced backward toward the cauterized circle, less concerned with the creature’s scything limbs, which I could read by heart, than the broken ground I couldn’t see.
Sure enough, at the circle’s edge, champed earth did foul my footing, and I went down on my back. The lamia drove its turmoil of slashing hooks at my throat. I crawled backward, ogling the chess piece moon perfectly still above the agitated pug-faced demon.
Focused by fear, I held onto the vampire’s oracular bond. I snagged its wrists, and the mad scissorings of bladed-fingers stopped abruptly, crisscrossed before the black tremor of my eyes. Its space-cold stare locked on mine, and we bridged a silence that occulted all prophecies.
The lamia braced to bodyslam me. Its oily face glossy as a placental veil exposed appalling freak fangs in triumphant anticipation of chewing my face off. As the lamia dropped violently onto me, its harpy jaws, dead agate eyes and grapnel claws splashed into fine, blue pumice and twisted away in a screaming wind.
I rolled gibbering with fright onto scorched ground and came up kneeling before the girl. No threat stirred in the many black mouths of the forest. The lamia’s death-bawl had flogged the undead down the dragon’s gullet into bramble gullies and desolate ravines of this aboriginal timberland. There, they roosted where moonlight lay like bones, razor jaws shivering with cretinous malice.
The girl squinted at the forest of windy moonlight. Distant flares of creek mist mimed ghouls rampant in the woodlands. “Are more coming?”
She looked frightened, features puzzled apart…
The lamia’s attack had set madness dragging its magnetic field across the moonwashed land. A warped headache throb squeezed her eyes as she scanned for the vampires’ adamant hunger.
Her tight stare reached me, and her face unclenched to a smile. “Breathe!” She suddenly remembered our moment of shared power|rightness in the lamia’s grip, and she hurried to my side.
A smile! In this nightmare! It left me giddy even as my fright still churned from the lamia’s attack.
You know, the soul has its own crazy spaciousness. From the Palace of Luck inside each blossom to the evanescent cleft of day and night, down that momentary green gulf of sky where quasars twinkle invisibly from the farthest heaven, the soul is at home between both extremes. But that easy smile at the sight of me – that credulous smile from a teenager with death’s stain in her blood … that joy marked an expanse of trust my soul ached to fill.
▬▬Breathe.
I mirrored her smile – I hoped. I still wasn’t sure how atrocious I actually appeared and shrank at the memory of Bernie’s robust smile corrupted by a goth grin. ▬▬You must be freezing.
I swept a raft of deadwood into the circle and put my arm around the girl to reach the butane lighter in Bernie’s jacket.
She snuggled closer, and we built a wobbling fire under the wind. The lighter was there for the spliff also in that pocket, memento of the amorous intentions that had inspired Bernie and me to wander into the Adirondack wilderness last night.
My mind fuddled to think of the eerie events that had since transpired. What infernal intelligence had hoisted us out of our lives and discarded my lover before tossing me back into his body to huddle at a rickety fire with this stranger in my embrace, in Bernie’s arms? By what wicked design were we both facing a purgatorial heath of contorted shadows heeling beneath giant trees black as damnation and breaching to greater perdition beyond? What but hell itself?
And where else is the vertex of supernatural evil and human light but in the heart of nature? Look out at the inexorable day. What is it? This rock, that star, the emptiness between. Does the confidence of our dreams lie in this? Then, we are all deceived.
Evil comes to us as reverence and truth shining through our deceptions. Embrace it. Even as I embraced that girl with no name in arms of flesh not my own upon a night with no day ahead – for, I tell you this in all sincerity from a heart gallant with desperate suffering, strife and love are the workings of one design whose absence itself is its worldly presence.
At the zenith, the moon finally shone down upon the dark face of the limestone bluff. Girl and vampire clinging silently, we watched the chalk cliff brighten.
“Look!” A lone figure came and went at forest’s edge among parcels of light thrown down by wind thrashing in the treetops. “It’s one of them!”
The conspicuous iniquity of the shaman priest had already infested my heart, but I had said nothing to the girl. I had wanted the moonlight on the haunted bluff to last a little longer, meager redemption for my lost moment with Bernie.
I stood. The girl quickly retreated to the center of the singed circle and tossed ash over herself like a fanatic penitent.
▬▬O ruined brother!
That elemental voice crooned with the wind while the slayer trod slowly out of the woods and into the grass and sliding fog a long way off. ▬▬The dream moves on. Illusions cycling endlessly ‘twixt being and oblivion. That is your faith, aye?
I made no reply. What was there to say? That thing was coming to kill the girl after dismantling me. Plaintive fear chanted up from my heart, wondering what terrible sorcery possessed the vampire to dare approach me alone. It heard my fear.
▬▬Behold where eyeless rage has delivered you. Madding fear breeds in absquatulated flesh, vile corrupter. You gain nothing with your pernicious rage. Though you slay slayers you will not out-scorn the sun. We are gentlemen of blood.
Deeply inhaling my fear, I stared across misty reaches of grass and rock to the forthcoming figure, that creature gaunt as a stick-man to veer away crows. Moonlight reflecting off the limestone precipice filled its translucent flesh, and bone-shadows of spine and clavicle hovered like a crucifix. The incongruity startled me, a cardiac shiver. My body’s vampire animality swelled with fear. Breathe!
The priest of the slayers closed in slowly and spoke my own words in its pneumatic voice: ▬▬Spirit kisses the vampire with acid. Why should this be so?
With jolting clarity, the priest answered himself: ▬▬Spirit is a shoreless sea. Its distances rive mind and flesh. The art of our hunger is fouled before such magnitude.
I understood what it meant. The infinite fractal line of the blood soul disappears in the transcendent among greater infinities.
That would have meant nothing much to me, except Bernie’s brain had learned that infinities come in different sizes and there is no biggest one. The infinity of whole numbers, 1,2,3,4,5…∞, known as aleph-0, is smaller than the infinity of real numbers, whole numbers and all the fractions between them, which is aleph-1.
The transcendent participates in the process of infinity, what mathematicians call the aleph sequence, an infinite succession of infinities aleph-0 times aleph-1 – including the infinity of multiplying together every infinity between the infinities, all the way to infinity.
But here’s the wild part. The great god Uncertainty owns infinity. Last century, mathematicians proved not that we don’t know but that we can never know if any aleph is the next biggest infinity after aleph-0. So, when we raise a big infinity to an infinite power, say aleph-0(aleph-1), uncertainty makes sure we’re never sure if that new infinity is merely a fraction, the number of numbers between 0 and 1, or a truly vast number.
The same with the fractal blood soul of vampires. The transcendent, the process of infinity, is something humans experience as an awareness of reality beyond what we can understand: examples include faith, the secret intentions of the unconscious, or the finger-pointing-at-the-moon physics of string theory that identifies higher dimensions in which our universe floats like a mirage in still hot air.
That cognizance of incognizance blurs the fractal blood soul. Better than garlic when it comes to warding off the undead is a head full of transcendence.
▬▬Transcendence. You make content with so scant a word?
The nearing vampire raised knobbed arms to a sky glittering like black snakeskin. ▬▬Houseless heavens! Uttermost incomprehension! Coffin of all conclusions! Transcendence, you say? I say Hypnosis of Forever in Unborn Stillness! You see a word. I see Nothing. You understand God, and God cannot be understood. This does not unseat your mind? Ontological Anarchy!
Under pulse beating stars, the undead shaman rattled its fingerbone necklace. Something nameless glowed inside me. The legendary shores of sleep tilted horizons.
“Hey!” With both fists gripping my shirt, the girl yanked until the buttons popped. “You! Wake up!”
I jarred alert, and there was the vampire, hell-ice mouth over her shoulder, eyes eyeless black in their sockets, watching me indifferent as camera lenses. My arms pulled the girl hard to me, and I spun about.
The slayer’s mass pressed against my back, flared jawbone grazing my nape with quivering bane. Words sparked wetly in my left ear yet remote, surpassing deep in the conjectural hollows of my head ▬▬The dream moves on, anatman.
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