Thirsty (7 page)

And she’d laugh, and I’d see something in her eyes.

That is not what happened.

Instead I was sleepy and said shaving wound.

The shaving wound was not as good a story.

For instance, there’s no part about romance and a shaving wound in all of
The Three Musketeers
or
The Count of Monte Cristo.

There are more vampiric murders in the news that week. The most brutal is in Northborough. Two victims are found together. They are a boy and a girl, caught fooling around in the woods. It is established that the vampire drank the boy first, in front of the girl. She evidently tried to run away, but her pants were around her ankles, so she could only waddle about fifteen feet before the vampire walked up behind her.

They are found in the morning. The vampire is not found at all.

The way they eat disgusts me.

We are in our family dining room, which is part of the kitchen and separated by a counter. My parents had track lighting installed in the kitchen, so we can turn off the light near the refrigerator and stove and have only lights from above shine on the table. In spite of the fact that we have nothing to say to one another, my parents insist that we should eat together because we are a family. We each think things alone, and occasionally say things that might be of interest to one another.

e.g., “These peas are a bit overcooked.”

And, “Stop complaining. Your father and I worked hard to put this dinner on the table.”

And, “I wasn’t complaining. I was just developing my critical faculties.”

And, “Do you want to develop your critical faculties with a TV tray in the garage?”

But the main thing is the chewing. That I see now.

I cannot believe how loud human ingestion is. I sit there, unable to eat, astonished. I am staring at my plate with eyes as big as plates. I can’t believe my ears, hearing the factoryful of noises, the squelching and popping, crunching and scratching. The rattle of forks against ceramic. The slurp of liquids. The clanging of glasses against teeth.

It’s like cannon fire. It’s like hydraulic tubes and stormy surf against bleak rocky islands.

They sit there, unaware of how grotesque their feeding is. They’re hunched below the clean strip lights like praying mantises — and I sit horrified as they cut burned legs and chests apart, and feed them into their greedy mandibles, and smile like nothing’s wrong.

“Eat, Chris,” says my mother. “You don’t think I cook for my own good, do you?”

My father looks at me over his glasses. He chews three times with a sound like the Swamp Thing learning how to use crutches. What he says is “Come on, Chris. You need to put a little flesh onto those bones.”

At 11:53 p.m., about two weeks after I speak to Chet the Celestial Being, an evil mouth appears on TV. At that time all television reception in Clayton and Bradley and all the surrounding towns suddenly fails. There is nothing but static for a second. I am upstairs lying in bed already, but I hear my father swear downstairs.

The next day, it’s on the local news. They play tapes of what came on.

The static, a gray sludge spanking again and again across the screen, spits and jabs out a messy outline — a huge maw — crooked teeth like mountains gagging and croaking — and a voice, growling and gutteral, howls through the raging storm of static:

. . . out . . .

. . . trapped and . . .

. . . you maggots little maggots . . .

Release — ! . . . this torment! Torment! Our hatred —

Soon! . . . Now! Trapped!

Your blood, damn you, all you . . .

. . . out of this place . . .

Then there is a wailing that is so ferocious and yet so melancholy that it blasts the regularly scheduled programs back on TV.

Nobody knows where the transmission came from. The rest of the night on television is as placid as a cold mountain pool that nobody has found or stirred.

There is not a hint of what dark god must struggle somewhere, writhing back and forth to escape.

The second vampire letter I get is from a girl, the morning after there was a mouth on TV. Paul can tell the letter is from a girl because of the handwriting and he steals it and runs around the room with it singing, “Chris has got a girl! Chris has got a girl!”

“Give it back,” I demand. “Give me back my letter!”

He makes a wimp face and mewls, “Give me back my wedder! Give me back my wedder!”

“Give it!”

“Give it, pwease, big bwudder! Give it back to me, pwease, my widdle wedder!”

“Don’t ever change, Paul. I hope you always keep this boyish charm.”

“Paul,” says my mother sharply. “Give him the letter. It’s his. Okay?”

So he gives it back.

I read it alone in my room. It is written on ruled notebook paper in purple felt tip pen. Some words, the special ones, are in all different colors. It is from a girl named Lolli Chasuble.

It says:

That is my letter from Lolli Chasuble.

I fold it up and plan to keep it. Then I realize Paul might search my room for it, so instead I tear it up into a thousand pieces and throw them away. I chew on some of them first so he won’t try to put it back together.

I don’t know what Chet would want me to do. I have heard nothing from him. He is due in another week.

The next day I see a scene that convinces me that it makes real sense for me to have a crush on Rebecca Schwartz. I go into the library to sit hidden in the back aisles, furtively flipping through a book entitled
The Undead: Famous Real-Life Vampires.
As it happens, Rebecca is sitting at a table nearby. She is drawing idle dandelions on a notepad, reading books entitled things like
The Cabala: Ancient Route to Power and The Lost Spells and Incantations of Hermes Trismagistus.

Through the wide sixties windows a gray light falls. The panes are smeared with the dull newsprint rain, and down on the street I can see cars stopping monotonously at the stoplight and waiting to go. Inside, the gray light shows up small dirty details of people’s faces, like the grease in the creases of chins, and the mangy stubble on upper lips, and the limp hair, hanging like dead weeds on their heads. The stains and wrinkles on their clothes.

All but Rebecca Schwartz. The light sets her face in the matte perfection of porcelain, and she seems, even more, to be poised in the midst of monsters.

“Hi,” I say.

She says, “Hi,” and slips her eyes back down to the book.

“Too bad about the rain,” I say.

She looks up for a moment. “It’s good for the flowers,” she says.

I nod. She looks down. So I turn my back to her and crouch against the bookshelf and start flipping through the vampire book for parts I haven’t read yet.

We both read for a while. I am reading a detailed account of the life of Vlad the Impaler and she is reading
The White Arts: An Introduction
when Kristen Mosley walks over to Rebecca’s table. Rebecca notices her coming. I’m interested to see Rebecca smoothly shuffle some school papers over her books, those strange books of power.