Part 3 (2/2)

The celestial being laughs and claps once. ”That's wonderful. You've made the right decision.”

”I hope I have.”

”You have. That's just great.” He shakes his head. ”This sure is a load off my mind. Now I can go and retrieve the Arm of Moriator for the next step.”

”When will that be, again?”

”In about three weeks. I'll be in touch.”

”Okay,” I say. ”What is your name?”

He looks surprised. ”My name is nonverbal,” he says. ”It is a pattern of thought.”

”You don't have a name?” I ask, somewhat incredulously.

”Okay, a name,” he says, shrugging. ”I don't know. Name . . . ? Chet.”

”Chet?”

”That will do.”

”Your name is Chet? Chet the Celestial Being?”

”Look,” he says. ”I don't need this.”

”Do you really think I'm becoming a vampire?”

”You are becoming a vampire. Within a few months, you'll be a killer.” He moves to rise. ”d.a.m.n,” says Chet the Celestial Being. ”I am unused to physical existence and my leg has fallen asleep.”

I part ways with Chet. He shakes my hand and says he knows I'll be perfect for the job. He says wait a few weeks and I'll start to see his point of view.

”Otherwise, Tch'muchgar and the Forces of Darkness will devour us all.”

Then he limps away, doing the hokeypokey with his sleepy left leg.

I run toward my friends through the long, dead gra.s.s. I want so badly to be with them and to talk about stupid, normal things like B movies and truck scenes. The gra.s.s is all around my waist, exhaling in the wind. I am running, and my friends are now faceless bodies far, far off along the sh.o.r.e.

Jerk, Tom, and I are walking back toward the dam, silently. Tom will not forgive me. He will not even talk to me. The afternoon is getting chilly. There are more clouds now than sun. Some people who were picnicking on the banks are standing up and shaking the gra.s.s out of their blankets.

None of us says anything. It is better that way. I am picturing a scene in the future when Tom will drop by my garret to visit, when he is bored and married and has an itsy-bitsy little life. He will come by my garret and find me amidst clutter, listening to vibraphone music and papier-macheing pictures of apes and cosmetic supplies to my girlfriend's nude body. I will have told her, ”Once I was a vampire and saved the world.”

We pa.s.s between two small brick sheds. One says ”Grady '74.” We do not speak. Tom is walking ahead of us. He chooses which path to follow back to the dam.

We walk down beside the cataract. The water splatters on boulders and struts.

Jerk asks me, ”In The Hitcher, The Hitcher, did you see that scene where the guy finds the finger in his french fries?” did you see that scene where the guy finds the finger in his french fries?”

”No, Jerk,” I answer. ”In the version I saw, they cut out just that scene.”

My hunger grows. At dinner, I ask for my steak rare, and my brother calls me a bloodsucker. I try to change the subject. He keeps calling me a bloodsucker. My father is silent throughout the whole meal, except once, and that is because he likes a lot of b.u.t.ter on his potatoes.

I dream that night of killing Tom.

I dream we are in a fight. He says that something is not blue, and I say that it is green. So we fight, and I kill him and drink his warm blood; and as I do, I go from strength to strength. Then I realize that I am going to dream about Rebecca and am horrified. I will not let that happen. I wake up.

My sheets are twisted like a winding-sheet. It is black in my room, but I can see.

I do not feel like going to sleep. I am frightened. I am thirsty.

I pad down to the bathroom. I drink water and more water out of the faucet.

I turn it on warm. I want to drink the water warm. I gulp and gulp, but am not satisfied. It runs down my face and soaks the flannel collar of my pajamas.

I straighten up. I look in the mirror, and I see what I saw in the water earlier when I tackled Tom.

I have no reflection.

I pace in my room.

I am thirsty.

In the next few weeks there is spring rain. It rains all the time, rain like little spit pellets of dirty newsprint, tapping and gumming on windows and roofs. Out in the gray rain, there are sludgy buds hanging on the trees like chrysalises.

On the few days when the sun comes out, there's a dog-dung smell clogging the streets of town. For the people who live near cow fields, there's a cow-dung smell. In fact, our town is a kind of dung-smell smorgasbord.

People talk about the beauty of the spring, but I can't see it. The trees are brown and bare, slimy with rain. Some are crawling with new purple hairs. And the buds are bulging like tumorous acne, and I can tell that something wet, and soft, and cold, and misshapen is about to be born.

And I am turning into a vampire.

I receive the first vampire letter about four days after my discussion with Chet the Celestial Being.

It is on a cream card bordered in black. It says:

On the back, in fountain pen, someone has written, ”Christopher! We'd love to see you! We'll provide transport - just R.S.V.P. and we'll set up a car pool! Hope you can make it.”

I have read it through three times when the writing fades and the paper withers to fine onionskin.

So they have found me. I ball up the letter to throw it away. This I mean to be a big gesture, showing that I will have none of them, but unfortunately the paper is so spiderweb thin and spongy by this time that I don't get that sense of rattle and crinkle that makes balling something up and throwing it away a really a big event.

I am anxious because I don't know what to do. Obviously Chet the Celestial Being wants me to act with these inhumans as if I were happy to become one of them. Otherwise, I won't be able to slip in with Chet's magic Arm. But there is no way that I am going to visit vampires alone. There is no way that I am going to pencil in on my social calendar a gruesome kegger of death. So I don't know what to do, and I wish he'd come back and tell me.

I wonder how he expects me to just figure things out with nothing to go on. I've never fought with the Forces of Darkness before. That was a Cub Scout badge I seem to have missed.

In the nights, I cannot sleep. I lie in my bed, and I hear the rain drumming and drumming until the roof must be numb.

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