A Hallway of Numbers

They were coming for us.  The men with guns.

Until they were truly spotted just outside our window—until they encroached at every angle, with their red pants and their massive automatic rifles—I had thought our house the ultimate safe haven.  The one place they would not, could not reach—irrationally.

We had lived there and cared for cats.  I placed little cups filled with water in all the high places around the house, since I knew that cats liked to jump on those unreachable places, and that they enjoyed having sources of water that felt secret and incorruptible.

When the time came to hide, I knew of no place to even hope.

There was a decorative, tall, yellow-pine cabinet of sorts at the far end of the living room.  It seemed to engulf most of the wall.  My mother—or at least, the woman who was caring for me—threw open one of the opaque cabinet doors and motioned for me to get inside.  Inside… the tiniest space… where I knew I would have to contort my small body to fit.  Perhaps this very fact would dissuade them from even peeking inside—the improbability of fitting a person in there—but I was not convinced.  They would sniff out every crack, every unlikely corner—they would spill every cup.  No one got lucky; no one.

And what would my mother do?  She was a fully grown woman–what possible crack or niche did she hope to escape to?

Still, I crawled inside.

…The backing to the cabinet was false.

My mother reached over me and pulled it away, displaying a tight, gray tunnel in the wall beyond that curved into blinding darkness.  Go, she urged me.

There was a sense of mourning and finality as we crawled through that tunnel.  Even as a feeling of profound safety pulsed and settled over me like a gentle blanket, I knew that I was leaving an entire life behind.  The house, the cats—everything that I had known so far.  It was mysteriously, and suddenly, at and end.  But I was still there.  My mother was still there.  Life, the most sacred core of it, continued.

We arrived deep underground in a hallway of doors and numbers.

The dry, powdered stone of the hallway looked as though it may have been hacked by hand; hacked with an entire people’s passion and diligence.  Even though I felt the opening of the tunnel behind me, I knew—somehow knew, in some deep, divine instinct, as though the hand of God itself protected this place—that the men with guns would never, ever find it.  Untouchable.

We were not alone, either.  Around the rows and rows of aged concrete doors were numbers–numbers scrawled in chalk… Black numbers, sometimes blue, once or twice pink.  Just numbers.  Big and small, straight and crooked—some grouped together, some alone; some low, some high.  They seemed to blossom all around the doorways—but on the doorways themselves, there were always a select and purposefully limited set of numbers, and the long evidence of previous chalk etchings blurred out.

My mothers eyes read these hodgepodge numbers with a sting of tears in her eyes as we stepped through the silence, cutting in with joyful exclamations about how such-and-such had had a baby, or so-and-so was doing well.  I realized she was talking about family.  A vast, impossible family that stretched over all imaginable distances.

A family I had never seen, or met.

“One day, we will all be reunited,” she explained, with emotion that simply was not characteristic of her strong persona.  She wiped her tears.  “Until then, we all live safe this way.”

I understood.  Behind each numbered door, there was a family—some small, like us… some large, with several numbers grouped large and small.  They were living in some sort of temporary life, too—because it was not yet safe for us to go home.  I did not know what “home” was, exactly—but whatever it was, it meant all of us being together, again.

I understood not to mourn those temporary lives too deeply—that the promise whispering in this hallway, with these numbers, was something deep in my blood that outweighed any artificial home I might gain or lose throughout my life.

I also knew, on some instinctive level, that this hallway was very old—very old indeed.  That the people my mother’s eyes teared for might in fact be people she had never met, and that I might never meet.  The hallway might exist long after I died, and my number was only a memory scratched on the wall like some encoded gravestone.

But… someday…

We stopped at a door toward the end of the line.  There were no active markings on this one—merely the dust of old ones scratched out.  I knew that whatever lay beyond this door was now to be our new life, and that we would be safe there, for a time.  Perhaps for many good years, as I had had many good years to last my entire childhood.

All that was needed was to write our numbers on the door, and step beyond.  Then others, who might come to the hallway from time to time, would look on those numbers and wipe away a few tears themselves, and say to their loved ones, Look, they are safe.

…But I woke up, before I could learn what my number was.

A Dream of Life, a Dream of Death

I slept and I dreamt about a baby.

There were a few of us on a medium sized boat, though the only two people I remember in the clouds of wakefulness are myself and Kai. I do not know where we were going, if anywhere. Our boat was on midnight waters; the sky and the water were both so black that the only thing distinguishing them from each other was the onyx-like glint that kissed the edges of moving waves, appearing only within a short circle of our dim boat.

There were no stars, and it the night was despairingly cold.

Someone on-board had a baby, and somehow it went overboard. We crawled to the most dangerous edges, reaching for it. Someone dove in. I don’t remember who all was actually in the water, but we were all wet and cold when the baby was finally pushed up onto a safe surface. Kai happened to be laying there, exhausted from her efforts, wet. The baby crawled up underneath her shirt–for warmth, I suppose–and curled into a fetal position there.

End dream. Alarm clock. Several snoozes. Kissing Rowen’s neck and telling him that he has to get up and go to work, come on.

Rowen goes to work. Sleep assaults once more, like a dark bag thrust over my head.

And dark it is… so dark.

I dream about Death. She manifests very similarly to “the girl” from The Ring. She is after my friends, and some people who appear to be strangers, as well, but who I apparently feel some acquaintanceship with in the dream.

It is easy to tell when someone is marked by her. There is a long period of torment before she finally snatches them. The darkness appearing out of walls; little accidents that brush by your cheek. Slices and dices you know were meant for you, but which you evade, because you know that death is after you, and that she is cruel and dark. The people who are marked grow pale, with dark, sleepless circles under their eyes. Death, a vicious cat, preys omnipresently.

I am always rushing about, trying to save them–trying to help them dodge the thing that grips them every second of their terrified lives.

It takes Eileen. For the rest of the dream, I spot her stalking in the background, hunched over… A thin, open-mouthed avatar, consumed by the infusion of death, perpetually circled by black air that seems torn from the fabric of void.

Death finally targets someone I care deeply about. I do not remember who, except that it was a girl. I faintly remember blond hair, though I might be wrong. (For the record, Kai is not present in this dream.) Desperate to save her, I battle and bargain as I’ve never done before. I stay on her arm and follow her where-ever she goes, protectively, even though death’s fog circles in all her corners, and massive objects are prone to fall in her vicinity.

I am finally able to get some sort of power, or arrangement, from a third party. It is a system of sorts, a trade-off: only 75 attempts on her life will be made per day, however-… I do not remember the “however”.

Still, I tell her this with some sort of perverse celebration–only 75! Then it goes up to 100, then a little more, and well, it’s only a temporary stall, but anything is good…

She is blank with exhaustion and fear.

I look past her and I see that a wide spot of bricks on the wall have turned onyx black. I almost want to touch them, shaken by the mystery of the force that colored them. Death’s presence is all around. The fog creeps. I see her.

Frightened, the lot of us pile into the one room off the hallway–a gothic jewelry shop of sorts. Even though I am cold with terror, I do not allow it to show–I take on an attitude of leadership, and make certain to maneuver my friend away from any fixtures in the ceiling. I feel as though the 75 attempts are flickering by as each possibility is dodged. 75 does seem very small against the infinite turns of fate.

But she is there in the shop with us, crouching in the shadows. When I pass by her, her dead-colored hand shoots out and grasps my arm, firmly.

“You and I need to work things ooout.” She somehow coos it and growls it all at once.

I jerk free, and for the first time I get the terrible, horrible sensation that death has noticed me. That through all my efforts to protect others, I may finally have been marked. The truth is, I do not feel outright marked… merely noticed.

My jaw is hard. Angry, steady, protective. The terror is real, but so is the defiance. Death stands and steps into the room proper, leaning over a table–to light incense, to write inscriptions, I don’t remember, but it is something of the sort.

“Someone is trying to reach through,” she comments. There is a sort of mocking, cruel, sing-songety quality to her tone, whose irony is its apathy.

I remember the black bricks, which had seemed to unusual to me–a manifestation I had never observed. I realized, then, that someone must have been holding a sort of seance, and that they are attempting to communicate with death. I think that whoever they are, they are an idiot, who have no idea what they are actually reaching toward, or what is coming.

As I watch death lean over the table, I take note of her colors. The skin is a grayish, greenish brown–like decayed, but still hydrated, caucasian tissue. There are veins showing clearly through the skin, and all sorts of other imperfections, blurring into some sort of common texture. And then I see her hair. Only the hints of color left, and yet it is clear to me, as I gaze at the tiny braids that are bound through a sort of bandanna and wash all the way down her back… She is a red-head.

Suddenly, I feel the barest hints of affinity, and I address her. I do not remember the exact conversation–it was short and harsh–but through her comment to me, someone else identifies what historical society she hails from, and death confirms it.

She was human once? My thoughts race; I wonder if there is some way to reach through to her, and yet I sense with every bare inch of my intuition that this is impossible. She is what she is now.

“You must be very proud of your work,” someone says.

“Actually, I am disappointed with it,” she says, with as little regard as if she were conversing with a wall. “—”

I don’t remember the second half of her statement. I am busy wondering if Eileen will prowl the earth for centuries, too, and reap people to their ends.

The conversation intensifies–death grows more threatening. The last image I have in my head of her is leaned into the crowd, toward me, over the table, hissing something important. I think talking about the death of the person I’ve been protecting. But at that point, my physical body interrupts. My bladder is screaming so badly that I literally pull out a pen and hit “pause” on my dream, holding up a finger and saying, “Hold that–I’ll be RIGHT back!”, rushing to find a bathroom in my dream.

I get up and use it in real life, but of course, the trail of the dream is lost by the time I return to my bed. I am only left with the strangeness of finding a human element in death, and wonder if it is my own mind trying to make it more tolerable–trying to give me the illusion that it is something to be negotiated with.

A House Dream

Dr. House is overcome by a suspicious feeling.  He turns away from the running water and squints at the low cabinet in the bathroom, which seems, to the average viewer, innocent and silent.

He approaches, and tears it open.

“You asshole.”

Inside crouch a husband and wife, betrayed and infuriated at their discovery.  The husband is an old colleague of House’s, from the early years when he and House were the driving force behind the advancement of a rather underfunded treatment–one aimed at a very rare and inevitably fatal disease that few others did much but inquire after priests about.  They were both the sort of stubborn, anti-establishment, arrogant youngsters who would walk into the field with far too much to prove, and only fed off each other’s attitutes.  Thankfully, they both matured, dispersed, and enjoyed successful careers after that, although they never really stayed in contact.  That would have been some sort of sentimental acknowledgement of friendship.  Instead, they chose to respect each other’s work from a distance.

“Get out of there–I want to cure you!”

Presently, this old colleage is dying.  He and his wife have both been exposed to a terrible tropical infection–the final stage of which is so wholly undignified and painful as to warrant complete seclusion.  Upon reaching the brain, the virus causes a carnival of misfirings, causing the suffering party to flail, kick, clench with an inhuman strength, while screams and terrible vulgarities escape their spasming mouths.  Once this stage is reached, nothing can be done, and death usually occurrs within ten minutes’ time.

The old colleage and his wife have come to the hospital to be restrained and sedated, and to die in dignity.

Unfortunately, House learned of their presence, and has been hunting the entire hospital for them.  Presently, the colleague shoots out of his hiding position, spreading his legs to shield his sobbing wife, and glares daggers–with a brave directness–into House’s eyes.

“Don’t interfere with this, House.  My wife and I want to die in peace–without YOUR madman meddling.”

“Aren’t you listening?  I can CURE you.”

“There is no CURE!  Don’t you dare say that in front of my wife!”

“There is no cure on the market, but there is one in the final stages of development at this hospital.  The results have been 100% positive, Dick… I can end this.”

“Even if what you’re saying is true, you wouldn’t be allowed to administer that drug on a-”

“But you know I will.  I’ll find a way.  Just come with me, please… I’m asking you to save your own life.  And your wife’s.”

The wife is sobbing heavily at this point, her wails interspersed with phrases like, “Don’t listen to him” and “Just want to die in peace…” etc.

Dick stares back at his wife, his lips tight… wavering momentarily, but then seeming to cement himself in the present conclusion.  He turns back to House sternly.  “No.”

House throws an arm up, overwhelmed by his friend’s stupidity.

“My wife and I have known that this was coming for a long time.  You cannot take this away from us now.  Just let us go through with it.”

“But you can get BETTER!”

“Goodbye, House.”

Dick takes his wife’s hand and leads her out of the room, leaving House in a state of disappointed incredulity.  He decides to take his bath, pondering the whole time how he could reverse this situation before it is too late.

He decides to introduce his old friend to the state of the research they abandoned so long ago.  As House suspected, Dick finds it irresistible to at least take a look, which infuriates and further wounds his wife, who stands by with arms crossed and eyes resentfully puffy.

“This is incredible… I had no idea we had come so far,” Dick spills, fascinated.  Dr. House is watching him with glimmering eyes, satisfied in his own cleverness.  However, Dick’s wife feels a stray spasm in her arm, and begins to shriek, “It’s happening, it’s happening, oh no no..:” and is lead away by a compassionate nurse, to have her final wishes for restraints and sedation fulfilled.  After his wife leaves the room, Dick’s renewed life and interest slowly droop and gray.

“I’m sorry, House… but I’ve been living with this inevitability too long, now.  I have to join my wife.”

“Why?  Just because you thought that’s how it had to be?  You know how this virus is transmitted… She probably cheated on you.  Why die for her?”

Wordlessly, Dick leaves, ignoring House’s insults.  House watches him go, somewhat in shock–that he could not even convince a Human being to preserve their own life, given such an obvious choice.

In the final scene, the couple is seen from a distant height–each bound, strangely, to a pillar.  From such a distance, their tiny, spasming motions are almost invisible, and the gagged silence is deafening.  After several long moments, there is an eerie sense of stillness that transcends even this, and one wonders if they are both dead, or merely the wife, who was slightly further along.  There is some strange hope that Dick will step free, having fulfilled his wife’s final wishes, and take the cure himself.  But no… there is silence.  Silence…

There is a painting hung on the wall just past the two.  A shapeless collection of indigos on a black canvas.  If one looks closer, closer… it almost seems to move, seems to shift, in some chilling approximation of a face.  And it is singing.

The painting is singing a slow and mournful tune, as though- ensouled.  And in a wild moment of childish delight, one begins to think that everything is alright–that Dick’s soul is now locked in this painting, and that he is therefore still existent, still THERE, still salvageable somehow.  But no… That foolish notion is quickly overridden by the realization that this paining is merely the abstraction of Dick’s death, singing its own dirge.

Skin

Aw, fuck.

White

As I stormed through flip-doored hallways, I found them becoming whiter, white, until they resembled a 3D architectural model—all shape, no pigment layer.

Geometry flowed and flickered around me as I sprinted through this monotone world, until, like an omen, color appeared… in the form of two loitering individuals, who appeared to be waiting for me.  One familiar, one strange.  One male, one female.  Both smiling soft, knowing smiles at each other–both turning their eyes to me, one after the other, as I approached and slowed.

The familiar one–the man–twinkled with an intoxicated warmth that I would have called smug if it were not so innocent.  The woman, the stranger, took her time in casting her vibrant eyes toward me, and when she did, my first impression was one of sly cruelty—which, after my initial prejudice, evolved into an impression of secure knowing… of supreme self-confidence, of feet planted with impossible firmness, and of a sort of condescension that rang like the laugh of silver bells: not malicious, but a casually fond and curious.

Her hands were grasping onto his arms, and she stood as though she had just been leaning up to whisper him the secrets of the universe.  Though he stood still, he seemed to sway in her grip, light-headed and dreamy.  Still, as I passed by  him, he seemed a man fully conscious of the substances he imbibed—and it was obvious to me that she, too, had no investment of manipulative control… merely a mutually enjoyed drunkenness that revolved around her sharp-clawed talents, and his own luminous reactions.

The woman lead me through the next set of double-doors, leaving our mutual acquaintance behind, smiling calm and kind after us.  The was a set of wooden grid benches in this room, deep and oaken against the never-ending white, and upon one of these she took her seat, magnificently at ease and—in an unnerving fashion—underlyingly amused.  She gave a sharp “Heh!” as she reached into an inner pocket to procure a shining silver cigarette case, drawing one for her purple-painted lips.  Her hair was a mild shade of pink, cropped close till the middle of the ear-line, above which it shook in a perfect glossy mass, just tangled enough for a vague impression of punk.  She patted herself for a lighter.

“So you like him,” she said.  She seemed to think it was funny that she was having this conversation with me at all, and finally looked up at me proper when she found her lighter, nabbing the fag from her mouth while she scanned me up and down.  I remained standing, feeling strangely diminished to childlikenss by those eyes, yet all the more protective and certain of my integrity.  “Huh.”  The cigarette was lit with the flip of a chromebox lighter, which was put away before I could decipher the design on its side panel.

I stood silently, not sure how to answer… because I did not know in what capacity she asked, or who she was, or why I had been pulled aside.

“The thing you have to remember about him is that he’s sensitive,” she explained, in a voice that in any other context would have belonged to a sneer, but which was filled with far too much affection to be any such thing.  “And he’s clever, too.  He’s got a complex heart.”

“I’m sorry,” I said finally, “Why-”

“You’ve got to be aware of his quirks, you see… Have to understand him, know him.  If he is to be used correctly.”

A dreamy pattern of thick, white smoke passed through her lips and obscured her face as she said this, leaving me only with the itchy vibration that had been placed on the word “use“.  I no longer remembered how to speak, even if I had anything to say.  I stood in a silence, caught by this woman, and the eerie self-certainty she exuded… the faint parental amusement…

I almost wished she would antagonise me so that I did not have to stand there and feel so… lesser.  And I was still confused.

“—”

She spoke again, but I do not remember her words.  It was a bored, amused, slightly warning, slightly warm lecture.  The smoke of her cigarette was so thick, so white—white like the walls.  Soon, it dissolved the entire scene.

Stranded

Stranded. On a deserted island.

There is a very limited area to which I can keep myself, deep within the jagged sandy beach, just on the rim of the looming jungle. It grows dark so fast in that harsh, tangled copse of trees and greens. Just a few feet into that oppressive overgrowth, and I might never find my way back. Wild things prowl inside, and poisonous things, too.

I’m stranded with a few useful items… amongst them my lap top and router. My fancy sidekick cellphone. A few other electronics and wires of lesser note.

Somehow, I make myself believe that I get the router to work. That I have access to the internet. I think that my phone has a signal. I write email after email and text message after text message… begging for someone to come and rescue me.

At first, I feel safe.

After all, what stranded situation could possibly have gone better? I have a fully functional laptop that survived the wreck. I have internet access. Everything is fine. Not only is it simple as pie to reach out to my rescuers—I have a tool against the boredom while I wait.

I spend more and more time on the island, and nobody comes. Nobody replies to my emails.

I continuously glance over at the twisted wires of my router and other equipment, rooted in the grainy, dark sand… always just a little moist from the humid weather. I start to journal my paranoia that something will happen to it. I imagine what utter disaster might befall me if ever the slightest thing were to shift—a wave break too far ashore, and short circuit everything. I would truly be stranded, then.

Once, I saw the shadow of a large, predatory cat moving in the darkness of the jungle.

I ventured into it—often. Just those few feet that I dared. I kept myself to the first row of trees, climbing them, searching for food—collecting dry branches.

It was never proper day. There was only a gray, maroon darkness upon the troubled beach, or an even more oppressive void waiting to swallow me in the jungle thicket. Periodically, this gray maroon would sink into a black so absolute that I could not see a single foot in front of myself. This was night. There were no stars. It grew so cold at night that each one was simply a prayer to survive. I would desperately gather my laptop in my arms and stumble to my other equipment, and lay there with my arms over it, protecting it with my body while I slept, trying to draw warmth from its electronic hum.

The days were always too short. Always. And still nobody came to the rescue. Nobody replied…

Without the faintest realization that it was happening, I began to go mad.

Perhaps I was already mad… but I went off the deep end when I uncovered a human skeleton buried shallowly near the trees. It looked to have been male. I felt an instant bond with his dark, rotted remains—the last bits of flesh long since disintegrated from his fragile frame. It was only bone, dark bone, and I felt it drum an answering vibration in the core of my own flesh: grinning skeletal death.

I began to build a shrine.

Death was the name of my efforts, and Death was the name of my mind and soul. I smiled while I did it—a content, knowing smile. I used the branches I had gathered and some of his long bones to create the structure… nonsensical, thin, wavering. An architectural hiccup with no other use than to represent my dying. That was alright. I did not intend to use it as a shelter; I did not intend to live anymore.

It was an odd place to be—beyond my own life… I walked and breathed still, hungry, worn… but I had lost all investment in living. All connection to it. It was so utterly clear that no one was coming, and it had been so long, enduring those pitch black nights and those mercilessly short, oppressive days. The laptop sat abandoned a distance away, glowing onto the sand. Eventually, as I sweat my blood over the ritualistic structure, I forgot it existed.

At long last, I positioned his grimy skeletal head on the wobbly shrine. I was talking to it. What I said, I don’t remember… and I’m not sure I would ever want it played back to me if I could. I’m not sure it would have made sense. Perhaps I was enjoying some strange Lovecraftian devolution of tongues.

I started into his dark, empty eyesockets… I smiled blankly… sinking further and further into that gaze…

And then a riveting internal shudder struck me, rumbling up from my core and shaking my entire being. Fear. Blessed, human fear. And panic.

I ran to my laptop and pulled up my email again, writing another one to my mother—the first in too terribly long. “SAVE ME! FOR GOD’S SAKE, COME RESCUE ME!” Typing out that message was the most intense, silent scream for my own survival. I unleashed it into the universe with bitter hope that it would be received; that strange trust, when you send something into the internet, that it will arrive and connect with another human being… and at the same time, the strange, eerie paranoia that there is nothing but the machine. Grinning at you.

Perhaps they had all abandoned me.  Perhaps they were sitting there, on the other end, reading all of my emails, but shaking their heads sadly, unable to or unwilling to ever come and rescue me.  Cutting themselves off and not sending a single note; my loved ones leaving me to die, grieving for me already… or perhaps not grieving at all.

I heard a very different kind of rumble.

Looking up, I saw the stratus that had masterfully confined the sun for so long take on a thicker, more ominous shape. I saw it belch and turn in on itself, blackening with anger, growling with pure natural rage. It was going to storm. A destructive, all-consuming, tropical storm. I typed in a quick follow-up email to my mother, warning her that this might be the last time I could ever communicate.

Oh god. My equipment.

How I raced against that vicious water, clawing my electronics from the sand—running and tripping with wires and steel bundled up in my arms, spilling over. I had to find someplace safe to put it—I had to… If the internet was taken away, then there would be no more hope. No more hope… I would be so desperately cut off, so helpless, so alone and stranded… I would die there on that beach. I would rot. No more reaching out for help; no one would know my misery. No one would hear my cries.

I would die, alone. Whispering to the wind.

…I wasn’t even sure the internet existed anymore. But still, I had to save it.

The storm was making it so dark—too dark, too fast. There were never stars on this island; those damn clouds. What I wouldn’t have given for a single star to guide my step…

But instead I watched the twigs and jabbing rocks ahead of my feet fade into blackness as though they did not exist, the storm becoming a purely sensory experience, visible only with the occasional flash of lightning that left me more blinded than anything.

Finally, I found a safe, enclosed space that was big enough for my electronics. Just barely. I shoved it all inside and hoped for the best. And then I threw myself down at the entrance, hoping for the best, too.

The Exterminator

I must have nodded off while waiting for the exterminator… because when he finally knocked on the door, the fellow I let into my apartment was-

…No… That’s impossible.

As he set up his spray-kit, I tilted my head to the side, observing his tell-tale features… That mischievous brow; the scintillating eyes; that boyish little smile. Although I had only seen him in pictures and in full make-up on the stage, I could tell. It was unmistakable.

“Is your name… Jason?” I prod hesitantly, not sure how receptive he is to being recognized. Why on this green globe Jason Mills would be working as an exterminator during his daytime hours is beyond me to begin with.

“-Mills, yes,” he finishes for me, flashing one of those warm smiles that causes the corners of his eyes to pinch up.

“…oh. I- tried to send you a letter…”

“I know! I read it.” He places a hand over his heart. “I was deeply touched by your words.”

My eyebrows raise as I feel a warm flush reach my cheeks. “Oh…” I say again, dumbly, before sighing shakily. His beaming eyes remain on me for another long moment, before-

“Well!” He animates suddenly. “I’d better get to exterminating!”

“Yes…” I say meekly, wrapping my robe around a little tighter as I follow him into the bathroom. Oh crap… I had been trying to figure out a way to tell my landlord that my bathroom ceiling is caving in. “Oh. Oh no, my bathroom ceiling,” I feign, pretending it was the first time I had seen the mess.

“Oh, that’s no problem! I’ll fix it for you,” Jason offers congenially, hopping up on a chair and beginning the repairs. His hands seem to magically seal every crack.

“Oh… Oh that’s so nice of you,” I manage wispily, before drifting back into the main room, lounging back on my bed. Jason Mills is in my bathroom, fixing my bathroom ceiling… This is really happening…

While I lay there, dumbfounded, I hear Jason begin to sing from the other room–some cheerful, slightly corny Broadway tune from the good old days of Hello, Dolly! and My Fair Lady. Nevertheless, I am completely puddled by the sound of that majestic, resonant, charismatic voice, making music of every air molecule in my apartment. Wow. Damn.

“Here,” I hear him say, suddenly, and look up to see him standing over me with a smile, a plate held firmly in his strong hand. “I made you some tacos.” He places the plate of steaming hot tacos in my lap, and I stare down at them for a long moment… before letting out a resounding,

“Aw, crap.”

Jason Mills is bringing me tacos in bed? I’m obviously dreaming.

Sure enough, the realization causes me to open my eyes, and I realize that the real exterminator is knocking loudly on my door. He tips his cap at me and smiles shyly beneath a frizzy mustache before he proceeds to spray my apartment, telling me kindly in his African American dialect that “those spiders sure do love them boiler rooms. I once wen’ in a hallway an’ had three-hundred spiders waitin’ for me!”

Dementia

It must have been a yule-tide celebration, because the bitter night was decked in snow, but every generation from tod to crone was gathered inside of the cramped, wooden house. The house was as one might have seen when wandering outdoor museums: crafted from logs, with splintered ladders leading up to ceiling platforms, and beds forced into the most unlikely of spaces. Yet here, this night, the house was a home: it contained none of the stale darkness that ruins do, but all the love and light and warmth of a place maintained from the heart.

There were craftfully woven tablecloths, tucked together to cover the long, unpolished table with its makeshift bench–nothing more than a long, half-stripped trunk–that had been hauled into the tiny living room for this evening’s celebration. Uncles, nieces, cousins and kidlens, all weaved in and out of the smothering little kitchen beyond, bringing jams and dried pork and all manner of goodies. A little boy, humming, sat stripping a yellowed bone in the corner, so that he could knife out its deep gray marrow. The moaning grandmother and Elder of the family, whose mind age had sadly stolen, was taken from her eternal chair–whose cushions bore her imprint–and bundled in blankets to sit at the edge of the bench.

She sputtered and whimpered half-statements as her granddaughter, fair and lithe, leaned close to her to place a bowl of nuts upon the table. The youth, whose gentle and unseeing heart was written upon her tender face, smiled and kissed her elder’s forehead. Those green eyes, blessed upon her features, reflected the shade in the crone’s own… but it bore none of the weight, or the sorrow, or madness–it was a color as fresh as spring grass, looking hopefully upon the world, with a vision as endless as love never broken.

An unheeded hand reached tearfully for that pixie’s form as it danced through the crowds into the kitchen. Her adolescent body was small, so very small… A finely crafted little skeleton that God must have strained his eyes in the making of, so complete and beautiful were her miniature features. Each finger upon her delicate hands were as miraculous to behold as a newborn babe’s, for one could marvel at the /completeness/ of her shape–so feminine, so delicate and womanly–despite the way it disappeared inside one’s palm.

Her carrot-colored curls were swallowed in a fog of other faces, laughing, grinning, exchanging jests and licking their lips–restrained from nibbling by the honor of prayer. Still, a child or two’s cheeks bulged secretly.

The door ripped open momentarily, bringing the howling of winds and rippling of snow, which dashed through and threatened every lady’s skirt. The man in the doorway looked distressed, bearing a knot of alarm upon otherwise fatherly lines.

“Vampyr!” he shouted. “There is vampyr here!”

The immediate commotion that gripped the cabin was such that no useful orders could be shouted, each woman and man fretting in their own panic, gathering and counting their children, grasping and honoring their crosses.

It was but moments before the door ripped free again, tilting it in its slot. This time, swallowing the whole of the entranceway with his shadowy height, was the figure of a vampire. He loomed, a great black demon at their door, letting the wind tug past his long frock and extinguish their candles, lighting their fragile inner flames of prayer. His face was a long one, weighed down by a thick and thinking brow, and slashed across with a long and elegant mouth, whose thin lips hinted some sensuality as he spoke, “Am I so unwelcome?”

Gasping, some of the more fretful mothers ushered their children to climb onto the ceiling partition, where they were to lay flat and keep quiet. The vampire took no interest in what the women did with their children, for his eyes were fixed upon one woman in particular, who had the misfortune of standing at the front line of the frightened pack, which seemed to inch ever tighter underneath the vampyr’s gaze.

She stood paralyzed as his eyes turned to her, unprepared for the eye-contact, which stripped him of his objectification as a frightening thing and forced the consideration of elements much more dangerous to admit–emotion, desire… thought. His orbs were deep onyx stones set upon a glossy, flawless white, and her own felt much too naked, much too telling, in their pale human greens… which gave away every clamping tension of her pupils; every throbbing pinkness of veins that crept upon the white. Her breast was made of living stone as he beheld her. Much too forceful, and heavier than she had ever known it, the sculpture of her inner life raged against its cage, making music with the desperate throes of its entrapment. She felt its cries must ring so clear, so obvious to every ear in the room, that her cheeks flushed rose… but all that emerged from her was a barely audible breath, which none but the guilty party could know as enrapturement.

The silence between them was near-absolute, save for the never-ending whimpers and rockings of the brain-rotted grandmother, whose unintelligible sobbing had elevated in the confusion. It was such a pitiable sound, to cut across such passion.

To the vampire, this young soul was the closest he had seen to the sun in two hundred years… Indeed her radiance brought some faint illusion of warmth upon his skin, glowing there as she did in her virgin white dress and her screeching orange hair, gathered in a sloppy crown of curls upon her head. He felt… familiarity.

Sadly, he would not touch her that night, nor any night soon thereafter… for as he made his advance upon the crowd, and crossed beneath the partition’s edge above, a small tub of icy water–placed there to gather the snow dripping through the cracks–rushed down upon him… and /burned/ his skin. Burned him cruel and hard.

The children above chippered and cheered, clapping their hands together as he writhed in the dark material of his frock, wailing, melting, before dashing out the door into the blizzard oblivion beyond. They were attentive children, see, and had amongst them blessed the water, praying with the purity that only children can to invite the Holy Ghost into its pool. The adults were calling out and sighing in relief below, embracing one another, while mothers scolded with smiling faces.

None, however, felt safe. The family convened in a dread meeting of scarce candlelight after that, discussing what they ought to do next. Clearly, the vampire would heal, and then return in his strongest state to consume their children. The uncles and nieces and cousins who had traveled so far now refused to stay, citing with the greatest urgency that they must take their children home and never let them return. It was agreed, in the end, that two of the men would stay behind and look after the elder woman and her granddaughter, who called this cabin their home. They would prepare for the vampire’s eventual return.

Many years passed without a trace of the vampyr’s shadow. The old crone’s condition deteriorated even further, but she did not die, no… She merely shriveled up more and more, until she hunched like a raisin in her dusty old chair, tucking her chin into shambling half-fists while she mumbled her nonsensical pleas.

“Dirty… dirty! Her room, always dirty!” she whimpered, and her granddaughter took the time to smile at her, occupied as she stood in the same room. She and three others were standing over the old tub, which as filled with what looked like shiny white eggs, floating in a variety of sizes. They were all holding long spoons–spoons as long as brooms, with wide, rounded ends, which they used to form and coax the water. With the right rolling sweep, they could force the liquid to take to hard matter and shape another egg.

“I’ve got another one,” the young woman informed, smiling as it took shape. “We will need lots of children if we are to protect ourselves when the vampyr returns.” Of course, she was not so /very/ young anymore… Repeated summer tans had roughened her skin and speckled it with freckles. The dry creases of smiles past hovered on either side of her lips. Her body, once so elfish, had grown close to normalcy, and its adolescent proportions had filled out into the less flattering, but ever beautiful, form of a grown woman. Covered in cloth, it was ambiguous whether she had borne children, but the increased strength of her arms and the wear in her ever-loving eyes suggested yes. The red curls on her head were dusty, and thicker than before, splintered with the wear of the seasons and the decline of vanity.

Still, a sort of glow emanated from her, like the hidden spark in a doomed ember, winking to those who stare.

The vampire came.

With a creak at the door, he entered their sanctuary once again–this time with the chilled early winds of spring behind him. The small family looked up from their egg-making, and the grandmother cried louder, louder, until she howled hoarsely in her seat.

But between the vampyr and his sun, there was only silence.

Once more, he stepped out across the distance to reach for her, and once more, water came tumbling over his head from above. He cringed, momentarily, feeling the deathly liquid soak his clothing… but then he righted himself with suspicious wonder, examining his hands. “That was not even blessed,” he observed, and tilted his head back to see the mischievous children who had done the deed. Their faces flashed before him before they scrambled back from the ledge in a cloud of giggles, and then fell silent. No hands and knees on the blanks–only moonlight peeping through their cracks. Finding himself still dry, the vampyr looked about the room… Empty. Somehow, it had transformed into day, and though the low, setting sun pierced through the window with its fatal rays, the vampyr felt nothing. There was no harm to come to him here, in this shifting place, where only the old crone’s sobs remained consistent.

“You!” he accused, grasping the old woman by her arms and shaking her fragile form. “You are the only real thing here, aren’t you? ANSWER ME!”

In her fear, she gasped repeatedly, nearly suffocating on her own panicked lungs, but somehow wheezing out a response: “Dirty… Her bedroom is always dirty.”

“Whose?” he demanded fiercely, desperate to unravel the cruel mystery that played his thoughts like harpstrings.

“No, no, no!”

“You do not understand!” He shook her again. “I do not come here to harm /anyone/! I have waited patiently to return because I love her–I must love her…”

Just then, the door creaked once more, and the young woman stepped calmly inside, her arms loaded with fresh-cut wood for the fire, depositing her load inside the door. The vampyr wasted no time, grasping the young woman’s arm and whirling her around to face him.

“Or is it YOU?” he demanded, with more certainty now–certainty rooted in hope. “YOU are the master of this illusion!”

“NO!” the old crone cried behind him, with such ferocious volume that he was forced to take a second look at her–to draw near to her trembling body as it reached a withered hand for his. With a cautious thoughtfulness etched deep into his pondersome brow, he knelt beside her and studied the acrid tears that weaved through her leathery labyrinth of lines, and followed her pained gaze to the young woman. Together, they watched as the little beauty dusted off her hands, seemingly oblivious to all other presences in the room… Walking with a privacy in her manner that belongs to those who wander unseen in their own thoughts, not merely confident of but too-long accustomed to solitude.

They watched as she walked to the window, locking eyes with the setting sun… and as she approached that light, it seemed that each step robbed age from her frame, until she stood in untainted adolescence again, as the vampyr remembered her, staring out into the sunset. Its rays saturated her lineless face until she truly was a glowing entity of light, her eyes pierced like crystals to reveal every three-dimensional detail. On her delicate form clung the unstained white of her virgin gown.

“She is you…” the vampyr whispered, turning his comprehending gaze back upon the old crone. He looked at her with the somberness of one who has uncovered the sorrow in too many mysteries, and the miracle in too few. “She /was/ you.”

“She does not exist…” the wrinkled woman sobbed, peering with half-aware longing at mirages too dark for her dying, emerald eyes.

“She does…” the vampyr sighed regretfully. “Inside your demented mind.”