Outsider (28 page)

"Haven't you read Anne Rice?" She was trying
to rekindle their literary conversations of old. Why did she need
the reassurance?

"Well," Sid made a big facial show of
thinking, before continuing: "something to do with …….dead blood
basically not very good for a vampire's health. But," the joke now
gone out of her voice. "You don't necessarily want to leave a trail
of corpses in your wake."

"Exactly. I know, it can be fun!" She
remembered it well. "But, nowadays, human beings are more
scientifically clued-up than they used to be. Safety is
paramount."

"You mean: secrecy." The human Sid had never
been that argumentative.

"Whatever." Had she created a rebel? But
weren't vampires, each and every one of them, rebel of some
kind?

Sid licked the neck of her victim one last
time and let her drop in the out-of-sight doorway. Her eyes found
Joy's wondering face; they both could easily pass for humans of the
living kind after feeding. She could almost see the blood pumping
under the skin of her maker. And this blood had been so much
tastier than the one unwillingly offered by the young woman still
in her teens. Joy's eyes looked around.

"We've got to go, Sid. Can you feel the sun?
It is getting ready to break out."

The older vampire wove an arm around the
waist of the younger one, getting hold of her securely, and flew
off above the street, fast and powerful.

Sid woke up from her first day of vampiric
slumber with many questions chasing each other around her restless
mind. Was she able to fly? What about this recent mutation Joy had
once upon a time mentioned, daywalking, was she capable of it? What
about hypnosis? How strong was she? How fast was she? And what
about mindreading? The awareness of the older vampire staring at
her flooded her mind and she opened her eyes. They had taken refuge
in Sid's flat as she had not changed the black PVC curtains, or the
cosy vast quilt, after Joy's disappearance. Sid's bedroom was still
a safe haven for vampires.

Joy had risen back to consciousness earlier
than Sid. She was older, more sensitive to the movements of the
sun. Hopefully wiser. Sid's teasing fingers started trailing gently
across Joy's naked belly, sending shivers across the skin, starting
a fire in the elder’s senses. Sid hungry for sex, suggesting sex?
What kind of vampire had Joy created on impulse…….

* * * * * * *

And every night would start the same way. Sid
would feed her hunger for sex -
or would lust be a more
appropriate word
, Joy wondered- before feeding her thirst for
blood.

Soon, Sid was calling the shots, choosing the
hunting grounds and selecting the victims. Like Joy, Sid would
ensnare the victims with sexual advances. Each victim was female,
sometimes goth, sometimes punk, always willing. Threesomes,
foursomes. Sid also liked watching. And Sid liked dealing pain. Joy
was just about able to stir her onto the fetish scene, just about
able to keep her within limits of safety for their toys. This was
what the young vampire was doing: toying with the victims.

The morning Sid laughed at Joy and stood in
the first rays of the sun in front of the older vampire's eyes,
just outside their day shelter, and laughed even louder when her
skin didn't sizzle with the heat, Joy started to curse her
impulsiveness, wondering about the cruelty she had exercised
throughout the 20th century. Irony: Sid, the human Sid, had taught
her how to feel again, and now Joy had given Sid the gift of
cruelty. She watched the young immortal glide effortlessly a few
feet above the ground. The laughter resonating, vibrating in the
still quiet streets of South London. A dog barked somewhere at the
back, and a cat responded.

* * * * * * *

Somewhere else, in an unspecified location,
probably in another dimension, certainly a different realm, two
major players were contemplating the disaster on their monitors,
while the Envoys of Death and Life's Helpers were milling about
their multiple missions. Sadness was painting shadows under Death's
eyes and paleness on Life's usually sunny features.

"So much for my holidays!" Death joked.

"You know what this means?" Life eventually
smiled, amused.

"I've been at it too long?"

Silence greeted Death's musing. They both
knew the truth. That a human was made into a vampire was supposed
to be irrelevant to them, even at the worst of time.

"She is not really a threat to the order of
things."

"So far……."

"But,……." Life prodded.

Death laughed. There was a hint of bitterness
in the sound. The plan for Sid had been for her to die and join
Death; it had been such all along; they had never expected Joy's
sudden impulse. Maybe Life was right, Death had been at it too
long. So many millennia. She decided to state out loud a reality
they both were aware of and never had trouble with.

"Vampires are not under our dominion."

"Not per se."

"The only reason we were able to take Toni
and Dee-Dee out was because they were threatening the balance."

"A technicality."

"
They
don't care.
They're
too
busy playing cards. Or whatever
They've
been doing since
They
relinquish
Their
responsibilities to us."

"We're supposed to be wise enough."

"There has never been the shadow of an
instance needing
Their
express return."

"The possibility of this occurrence is rated
at less than 0.000000000001%."

"Close enough to nil."

Life and Death looked at each other,
seriousness in both pairs of amazing eyes. Each knew where this was
taking them. Life skipped a step and voiced her personal
position:

"If you were to retire, I don't think I could
work with another Death. We've been at it together too long for me
to change my habits."

"What about Them?"

"Oh, we just have to find a loophole."

"Ha, ha! A loophole! Life! Your sense of
humour alone is worth the millennia on this job!"

This definitely reminded Joy of the years of
insomnia before her encounter with Sid. The restless days waking up
before sundown, roaming the streets of Soho just before darkness
falls. She was older than Sid, she was likely to rise earlier than
the new vampire. Really? The fledgling was more powerful than any
she had ever met, even more powerful than she had been, or the
cruelly alluring Toni probably. How was that possible?

She had to take the risk, she needed to know:
whatever happened to Sid Wasgo? Was it a feeling of abandonment at
Joy’s disappearance? But Sid had seemed so strong, behind her
shyness, her quietness, her lack of understanding of the world. She
used to have a calculated strength fuelled by her natural,
intellectual curiosity. The very same curiosity that had made Joy
secretly glad that Death had prevented her from feasting on the
writer’s neck. With her need for constant analysis, Sid must have
kept a diary. Joy silently opened a desk drawer, her ears attentive
to the non-existent pulse, to the imminent first flutter of the
retinas. In the obscurity, she saw the hardback notebook resting
tantalizingly. After a motionless second, her hand swiftly grabbed
it and she almost glided out of the bedroom, carefully replacing
the PVC curtain behind her. Sid was still brain-dead under the
carefully spread quilt.

Speed-reading had never been a problem for
Joy, but the diary was unwilling to yield the secrets she was
after. It was not even written in code, the answer she was
searching for almost desperately, was simply not there. Yes, Sid
had certainly written about Joy never coming back and missing Joy
painfully. A physical craving, an unbearable need, the screaming
inside her head. The vampire looked at the chronological scattering
of feelings. The dates seemed to be running further and further
apart from one page to the next. And there, the writer was
mentioning, in a quick, almost unimportant note, working on a brand
new novel. About vampires…… She looked up at the bookshelves and
saw the thick volume staring at her, daring her to slide it out of
its comfy niche. “
The Private Life of A Vampire
”……. Joy
smiled at the achievement.

Refocusing her attention on the diary, she
noticed the increasing sobriety and dryness of the daily style.
Like life leaking out, something inside the chronicler slowly and
irreversibly dying. Then, in capital fonts, the name of a woman, a
thick arrow linking the name to the words “music” and “piano”. Joy
recognized the name. She had seen the movie and enjoyed the music.
She had even felt secret pride when reading Sid’s name in the
credits.

But the diary was still not unlocking the
secret of Sid’s cruelty. This did not make sense to Joy. She would
have expected to see mentions of Sid’s friends, critical notes on
books and movies, appreciative rants on music gigs. She would have
expected Sid to entrust her pain and emotional devastation to her
private diary, to write about daily activities and experiments.
Except that maybe, there was a secret paranoia at the very core of
Sid’s being, so secret that Joy would have never noticed, because
after all, Joy had been mostly interested in Sid’s menstrual blood
and in sex with Sid, or so she had wanted to believe. Thus Joy
wouldn’t have known it even if she had read it. It would have been
like poetry, too subtle and too deep.

Her speed-reading took her to the last lines,
written three months ago, and the following spread of blankness.
Three months without writing, without jotting down her daily
thoughts? Was she missing something? Was something missing in the
diary? She scanned in between pages, but they seem to be each
there, no leftover of a leaf torn out……. Intriguing. She sensed the
rapid decline of the sun behind the high blocks towering over Sid’s
building. As swiftly as previously, she rejoined the bedroom and
deposited the notebook back into the desk drawer. Just in time for
the first flutter of Sid’s retinas, the first stirring of Sid’s
lust…….

* * * * * * *

It was an odd angle and Joy didn’t know what
to think. Her face showing no expression, she stared at the younger
vampire who was busy licking blood off her own lips, looking like
the cat with the proverbial cream. It was an odd angle and Joy
didn’t need to look at it. It had been clean, neat, swift. Sid was
good, very good, at killing. The half-naked body of the young
fetish aficionada was smeared with blood, fear spilling out of her
still open eyes. Her girlfriend didn’t look better. Joy had to kill
her to shut her up, with Sid’s cold laughter ringing in her ears.
She had half eaten the girlfriend’s throat within one precise bite.
The blood was still flowing out of the wide wound. An odd angle of
the neck, too. The girlfriend who liked pain, who got a kick out of
being chained to a wall. Her naked body was now starting to wear a
red and viscous blood that Joy was not feeling hungry enough to
drink. She stared at Sid, the monster she had made……. The monster
was now entertaining herself with clawing at the dead, lean body,
breaking bones with a smile and cupping flesh with her hands to
suck the nutritious blood out of it. The light spread around by
torches gave an eerie medieval look to the scene. They were in a
dungeon. One of these toy-rooms, playgrounds, where people would
pay to go to, to enjoy humiliating or enjoy being humiliated, to
enjoy giving pain or enjoy receiving pain. Joy’s existence suddenly
felt senseless. She was a vampire, an old vampire, she had killed
countless times, countless preys, more concerned about spilling
blood on her neat clothes than for the lives she was destroying.
What was happening to her?

True, the living Sid had never expressed real
concern about Joy’s feeding habits. Sure, she had made sure that
the vampire would never feed on the writer’s friends. Had she been
lacking some sort of moral fibre without Joy noticing it? After
all, Joy wouldn’t have cared less, back then……. So, since when did
she care?

“Problem, Darling?”

The irony in Sid’s tone didn’t escape Joy.
She heard the provocation, the challenge, and tried not to rise to
the bait. She soberly enquired:

“How do you clean up?”

“But, Joy, you’re my teacher. You’re supposed
to show me……. You haven’t touched the other one. Something wrong
with her blood?”

Sid was toying, and Joy hated being toyed
with. Did Sid want a fight? Would she give Sid a fight…….

“I think I got a bit carried away…….” Sid
mused, her eyes wandering over the mangled body of her food.

Joy looked away, too undead to sigh.

“Time is of the essence”, Death declared, and
Life smiled. This was a meaningless quote and a call for action
altogether. It was time for Death to reclaim Sid’s soul and heart,
and for Life to consider Joy’s…….

* * * * * * *

Joy was standing in the darkening front room,
reading “
The Private Life of A Vampire
”, secure in her
powers, safe in the dying day. She was actually quite fascinated by
Sid’s protein theory and her detailed study of the various
blood-drinking animals.

She froze in her reading when she suddenly
felt fingers drifting through her long hair. As fast as lightning,
she swivelled around, ready to strike. Only to find her right arm
stopped by the steely hand of ……. Sid……. Sid? There was cruel
amusement shining in the fledgling’s brown eyes. Sid……. How in hell
was it possible? She had not felt the writer’s consciousness stir,
she had not heard a sound, not even sensed the air move around
her……. She remembered that the writer, when a living being, didn’t
know fear. Maybe, just maybe, it was time to run away from this
monster she had created, who was so incredibly powerful for a
fledgling. But Joy felt responsible.