Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (63 page)

I ended the call, then went into the café and bought a cup of coffee. I drank it standing outside in the windy parking lot. It tasted of nothing.

“S
ometimes I feel as if I’m completely alone. As if I’m the only one of my kind. Do you feel that way?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I know what you mean.”

During the hundred and twenty miles or so we had covered, she hadn’t once taken out her cell phone to check or send a message, make a call, or just generally mess around with it the way most people do these days. I assumed she didn’t have one, but it no longer mattered. I was on a different track now, but I had to proceed with caution.

“Did you start to feel this way at . . . any particular time?” I asked in a further attempt to sound out the terrain.

We were just passing Gnarp, and as on so many occasions in the past, it felt like a knife thrusting into my warped, infected heart when I saw the lights shining in the windows of the houses, the flickering glow of TV screens, and the silhouettes of people living their ordinary, cozy lives together. I usually sleep in the cab these days. Sleep during the day. Drive during the night.

“Something happened to me,” the woman said. “At first I didn’t understand what it was. I had no one to ask.”

I had to make a real effort to prevent my voice from trembling when I asked: “Did it feel as if you had been given . . . a task to fulfill?”

“Yes,” she replied. “You could put it like that.”

T
hat’s what I can’t understand. Since I accepted what has happened to me, what I have become, I have been unable to escape the sense of a kind of
purpose
running through all the repulsiveness, as if this is what I
have
to do.

My first one after Gunnar was just under a year later. A hooker at a rest stop outside Aachen. A transaction that was concluded in a mixture of English and German, after which she led me into the forest, where I slit her throat with a Japanese chef’s knife specially acquired for the occasion; it was as sharp as a razor blade. As she was dying, as I drank her, as I dragged her farther into the forest and buried her, it all felt just as natural as loading up my truck, driving, and unloading at exactly the agreed time. Doing the right thing.

The remorse and anguish came later, the fear of being found out, but every time while it was actually happening it felt as if I was simply fulfilling the task I had been given. As if the slaking of my thirst was part of a bigger picture, and I was doing my bit.

That feeling has not grown weaker—quite the reverse. My latest victim was a young guy, a hitchhiker I picked up outside Ljungby. After a few miles, I said the suspension was making a funny noise and asked him to help me check it out. As we squatted down and peered under the trailer, I did
that
for the first time. Used my mind to make my teeth sharper, turn my nails into claws. Then I grabbed hold of him, pierced the skin over the carotid artery.

It was euphoric, a sensation of being in total contact with the universe as my hands grasped his head, covering his mouth while I sank my teeth deeper and deeper into his flesh so that the blood poured into my own mouth. I was a wolf hunting down its prey, a squirrel leaping through the air, I was a creature doing exactly what it should be doing. Then I dragged him away and buried him, all with the same deep feeling of meaningfulness.

And so it grows, it is consolidated. It is a road I am destined to
travel, I will travel along it for all eternity, and I am not allowed to deviate in any way. It is appalling.

I
flicked on the right-turn signal, slowed down, and pulled into a rest stop just outside Hudiksvall. A couple of toilets, a few picnic tables. No people. This was where I had vaguely planned to drink the woman if the signs were favorable. I switched off the engine; it fell silent with a weary sigh from the hydraulics, then I simply sat there, my hands folded in my lap.

“What are you doing?” the woman asked. “Why have you stopped?” There was no fear in her voice, only neutral curiosity.

“I feel as if we have a great deal in common,” I said.

Perhaps that wasn’t the best thing to say. Some women might take it as the prelude to an approach, maybe even rape. But I didn’t think she would do that, because we understood each other on a different level. At least I hoped we did, and her next words confirmed it. “I feel the same way.”

“I’m going to ask you straight out,” I said. “This task you’ve been given. Does it have something to do with . . . blood?”

For the first time since she climbed into the cab, there was genuine emotion in the woman’s voice as she replied in a trembling exhalation: “Yes . . .”

I turned my head and looked her straight in the eye as I whispered: “Are you the same as me?”

For a long time we sat there with our eyes locked together, not even blinking as something indescribable flowed back and forth between us. Then she said: “Close your eyes . . .”

I leaned back and did as she said, trying to make sense of this unexpected development. What did it mean? What was going to happen next? What were we going to do? Was I at long last going to get some of the answers I had yearned for? Out of the darkness behind my eyelids, I heard the woman say:

“It was just after New Year’s in 2009. That’s when it happened. I was in the laundry, I was just putting some sheets into the washing machine when I had an . . . attack. My head was filled with images. A port somewhere, a truck. A woman with black hair and a bloodstained dressing on her neck. It was so powerful that my nose started to bleed. It dripped all over the sheets.”

As the woman was speaking, I heard the rustle of nylon fabric as she took something out of her rucksack. What she was saying was not at all what I had expected, and I wanted to open my eyes, but suddenly my eyelids felt so heavy, my body so uncooperative that I remained sitting exactly as I was while she went on:

“It took me a long time to realize that it was a calling. Several years. I thought I was going crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe we’re both crazy. But a year ago, I set out. Out on the road. Because that was all I knew. That the person I was looking for was out on the road somewhere.”

When I felt the pressure over my heart, I finally opened my eyes. In her left hand, the woman was holding what looked like a billiard cue that had been broken off and sharpened to a point, which was pressing against my chest. In her right hand was a small hammer, ready to strike.

“Because it
is
you, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded and her face contorted in what might have been pain as she raised the hammer another inch or two.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “But I’m just doing what I have to do, exactly like you. Isn’t that right?”

I pushed my infected heart harder against the sharp point, closed my eyes, and said: “What kept you so long?”

T
hey bathed her and perfumed her body, perfecting her for the god.

Then she could hear it, the sound of a drum.

They cut her toenails with copper shears and pierced her ears with gold.

And in the distance, the sound of a drum.

Slaves painted her skin, dark bands across eyes and mouth, blue everywhere else.

Coming closer, the sound of a drum.

Blue for water, blue for Chaac. Blue for sacrifice.

And before her, the sound of a drum.

They placed the peaked headdress atop her lacquered hair.

And now, beside her, the sound of a drum.

They walked her across the dry stone, the withered grass, holding her hands.

Behind her now, the sound of a drum.

To the edge of the cenote, its waters shrunken by the drought.

And faster now, the sound of a drum.

Prayers were uttered, prayers for rain. Prayers for mercy.

Thundering in her ears, the sound of a drum.

Her head swam with visions and the hopes of her people.

And now the drumming stopped—

And they cast her in.

B
lue for sacrifice. The water below was blue. Her fall seemed to take forever, as if some god were playing a trick on her, stretching out the day like thread between a weaver’s hands. She put her arms out to her sides as the wind rose up around her.

The cenote was a natural well, round as the moon, fifty arms across and twenty deep. Ferns and long vines hung down over the abrupt lip of the well. Sheer walls fell away to perfect blue water at the bottom. The same blue they’d painted her skin. Over the years, so many sacrifices had made it that way.

She braced herself for the cool of the water, the way it would feel between her toes. She promised herself that when she sliced through the blue depth she would not struggle, would not try to swim. She would let herself sink. Down into Chaac’s domain, where she would be put upon a smooth, carved bench and be brought the food of the water realm. Where servants would plait her hair and sing her underwater songs.

She would not try to swim. This was paramount: if she resisted, if she fought the water and tried to keep it out of her mouth, Chaac would know the sacrifice was made with only half her heart, and he would not bring back the rain. She must open herself to the blue, let it fill her. Let it consume her.

One life, her little life, for the rain. The rain that would bring back the corn. One little life to save so many others. She was a hero, like the great twins. She would be remembered forever, and given a place of honor in the underwater hall.

She would not struggle. The wind around her face made tears fill up her eyes, and she could not see. She would not resist.

She would not.

Please
, she begged,
let me not resist
.

Time had not slowed down, not truly. That was all the time for thinking she had. Before she could even get her knees up, she was at the bottom of the cenote.

But the gods did play cruel tricks. As her foot split the blue water, instead of the depths of the cenote, instead of the cool blue water of Chaac, her toes found hard stone. A ledge, hidden just below the surface.

Underneath her, the bones of one leg bent like a bow strung by a strong warrior. Bent, and then snapped. Shattered.

The pain was brighter than the sun.

S
he knew she screamed.

She remembered very little else.

There had been no sleep, no darkness inside her head. The sunlight that bounced off the sheer walls of the cenote burned behind her eyes, still, as it had without break, without interruption.

Yet she was sure that time had passed, time she had not reckoned.

The pain had been so large, so hard to compass, that it had stripped away thoughts and passions and even language from her brain. Slowly things came back to her. Her name. The faces of her family. Why she was here.

The knowledge, certain and deadly, that she had failed.

She had screamed when her leg snapped. And that was inexcusable. By crying out, she had likely ruined everything. Chaac would be offended because she did not offer herself willingly—her scream had prolonged the drought. She had ensured more of her people would die of hunger and want.

That hurt nearly as much as the pain in her leg.

For a long while, she could do nothing but weep. She was barely aware of where she was, only that she had wasted her death. She
could do nothing but stare through her tears, stare at unfocused sunlight, stare and take great jagged breaths that hurt her chest and made her shake on her watery ledge.

Eventually though, she wiped at her eyes, smearing the band of dark paint there. She looked up, thinking to see her people staring down at her in shame.

But up at the lip of the cenote, so far above her head, there was no one. Ferns and flowers swayed their heads in the breeze. Long lianas fell straight down toward her, spills of green against the gray stone walls of the cenote. Above, only blue sky. A paler blue than the water below. This was a sacred place. No one would come here until they were ready to perform another sacrifice. That could be many days from now. As far as her people knew, she was dead—they would not come to look for her.

H
aving wasted her death, she now began to think about life, and how it could be preserved.

The cenote was almost perfectly round, and the water was still, so it looked like a king’s mirror. Its walls were sheer and smooth. No one could climb down to bring her out, even if she dared to hope someone might try.

The liana vines hung down straight and sturdy like natural ropes. She was a strong girl and she knew how to climb. If she could have reached one of them, jumped up and grabbed its curling end, maybe she could have gotten out on her own. There was one on the far side of the cenote that maybe she could have reached, if she could jump for it. But her leg was never going to let her jump again.

The ledge she was on was a finger’s depth below the water, invisible from above, but under her hands she could feel its rough surface, find its limits. It was about twice as long as her body but very narrow. If she was not careful she might roll off, into the much
deeper water. She would drown there—something she had wished for so recently but now seemed a terrible death.

She knew why the water was so blue. Every sacrifice ever made in the cenote had worn the same paint that covered her skin from her forehead to the soles of her feet. It was good paint, very durable—permanent, even, which was why it was saved for rituals of the gods. The water in the cenote had been clear once but now it was the color of all the people who had been thrown into its depths.

Blue.

If she fell into the water now and drowned, the water that filled her belly would be stained by human skin and rotting flesh. The pain in her leg had already made her nauseous. The idea of dying like that certainly didn’t help.

But what was her option? To die of hunger on the ledge? She could try to take her own life, but how? She had no knife with her, no weapon of any kind. Even her peaked headdress had fallen off when she struck the ledge and was presumably at the bottom of the cenote. She wore nothing but a thin shift. She could tear it into strips, make a rope with which to hang herself. But what would she attach it to?