The Wiccan Diaries (9 page)

* * *

I left with a map he drew for me, to the location of Lia’s
boyfriend’s party tonight; I promised I would try to come. It made me feel bad.
I had only been in Rome one day and already I had prior commitments.

“Be there,” he said. “It was nice meeting you.”

I told him likewise and hopped on my Vespa, speeding home. I
didn’t pass any motorcycles coming back the way I had come, but could hear them
in the corridors.

It was like they were prowling around. I was soon across the
river, with the evening to look forward to.

* * *

Dear Diary,

If that is what you
are,

Today, as I drove to
Ballard’s, I felt a strange tug; it began at the Questura, which, let us never
speak of again, but it intensified as I came around the Piazza Venezia rotary.
I drove in a circle, lost for a long period of time, trying to get my bearings
and avoid being run over. Around and around I went. Wherever I was headed, it
seemed like I should turn off, go back to where I came from. I don’t know if it
was a tug into the past, or else a protective instinct, shielding me from what
I might find.

What I didn’t tell
Ballard about St. Martley’s was more for his protection than honoring ardanes.
St. Martley’s instructs girls how
not
to
craft, but there is more to it than that. For instance, teacher slips. We have
all seen one or more of them lose their cool. I suspect foremost Mistress
Genevieve. She seems a wicked bad witch. I would hate to fight her.

I hope I made the
right choice. I left in such a hurry. Three months, but still. I have
effectively burned that bridge. There will be no prodigal Halsey, returning.

When we come of age,
we are indoctrinated into the Craft. I don’t know how I feel about that.
Particularly the whole abstinence bit. If they knew what some of us get up to...
Sometimes with each other... although, I never did....

Having an all-girls’
school is like waving a banner to every healthy hormonal boy in a hundred mile
radius. It is the enzyme in the equation. The spark that lights the blaze. I am
a furnace of heat.

But I’m getting off
track.

Mistress Genevieve
said it was a kind of test. Not the no-sex bit. The Magical abstinence, is what
I’m talking about. It’s a kind of badge. It’s supposed to teach you
resourcefulness, patience, discipline––all of the multitudinous
virtues. Instead it has us cracking up.

Her analogy was a
piece of fruit. How we were all like little plump plums or other dumplings on
the vine. Like a peach, a peach was good.

And if we got picked
too
soon...

How about not getting
picked at all? What if we just fell off the magical tree, which, in the
analogy, was St. Martley’s? What if we just fell off and nobody noticed? What
if we just lay on the ground, wormpecked and rotting? Who would eat us, then?

There were 8 Virtues,
according to Mistress Genevieve: Insight, Discretion, Virtuosity, Malleability,
Severeness, Humor, Goodwill, Grace.

Hers was clearly
Severeness. Sometimes Becks would do a rendition of Mistress Genevieve. “We
must be beautiful,
powerful
bitches,”
she would say. “Stern when we need to be.”

That had me thinking
what my Virtue was? Knowing me, I’d probably get stuck with
Malleability
, whatever that meant.
Virtuosity
sounded cool. That must be badass
witchcraft.

* * *

There was a storage compartment on the back of the Vespa
under the seat. I bought some laundry detergent, shampoo, and bars of soap, and
headed back to my apartment on Via dei Condotti.

My landlady nodded her approval. She had facilities onsite:
washers, dryers. It got me thinking of Trastevere, and how freely its occupants
aired their dirty laundry.
‘I’m too much
of a coward to be so free. Instead I have you, Diary.’

* * *

He hasn’t come yet. I
stood around down in the street, for a while, window-shopping.
Drooling
is a better term. Waiting for him to show
up. I swear I don’t drool at the thought of boys and whether or not they
remember promises ever, Diary. There are so many boy rules when it comes to
second contact. It’s coming on nine o’clock at night. The summer days are long.
I think the nights must be mercurial in response. Who knows what may happen? I
think I will change into some fresh laundry. Yes.

I want to see more of
Rome. I find all I want to do is mix, mingle, and be single. All those Six Nine
Guys can’t
all
have girlfriends.
Drool.

Chapter 8 – Lennox

Things were not going my way. It began with my wheels. The
scent of dead guy was strong with this Fast Walker. He kept bitching and
moaning.

That was a powerful trifecta of reasons not to take John
Occam’s car. Next, the wardrobe issue. I had two stops to make. The first one I
was not looking forward to. The second one I was. I did not want Halsey Rookmaaker
to think I walked around in a trench coat all the time. So I put on something
new. You could only wear leather so much in the summertime, anyway.

Unfortunately, that meant I would have to take the sewers,
otherwise I would end up burning to death in the sun. I would probably end up
getting to the morgue late and smelling really bad.

Which meant she was going to be wondering where I was, when
I didn’t show up to her place on time. Stalker Boy didn’t miss a beat.
Can’t tell her. Can’t stay away from her.
Problems, problems.

That was something else that was bothering me. I usually had
someone to talk to about my problems. Occam was incommunicado, doing god knows
what. I could hear him now.

Girl? What does a girl
have to do with the Zombie Apocalypse? Throw her off a really high cliff,
preferably into a pit of stakes. If she lives, she is evil.

Stalker Boy was a little more adept.

If you turn her
,
he reasoned,
she may enjoy that you have
fangs. She can’t ever be anything serious.

He proceeded to relate it to coffee.

She is like a shot of
espresso. She makes this teeny-tiny little cup. But you want to make a bigger
deal of her than she already is. So you make her into a caffè latte. This is a
tall glass of coffee. A rich, full-flavored experience. It is to be savored
that much longer. But what you fail to realize is that she is still that same
hit of espresso. Like a drug. All you have succeeded at is watering her down.
Drink her and be done.

It would be easier if I did.

I had her locket around my neck for safekeeping. It tingled
where it touched my skin. What was I doing, getting mixed up with someone like
her? Already, I knew that it could end only one way.

I came up from the sewer like a hopeful monster, and checked
the parking lot.

Just the security guard at the front desk, and a few
orderlies cleaning up. The medical examiner liked to go home early.

I had Occam’s litmus kit he developed; any infected blood
would turn the paper black. The only thing left to do was go to the place where
they kept the dead bodies. At least, I hoped they were dead.

I had cultivated a persona.
Doctor L.

Doctor L was a forensic fellow who had spent time at the
Sorbonne and Cambridge, and had traveled extensively, lecturing at Harvard and
La Jolla. He came and went at odd hours. Someone or other had seen fit to allow
him to wander the pathology labs at will.

“He is interested in all forms of death,” they said. The
interns gossiped that he must be a ghost. But a few had seen Doctor L,
sometimes, wandering the halls. He was very pale. His eyes were dark, almost
black, and he looked hungry, like he would eat you, if you disturbed him. He
never talked to anybody. That was another thing, Doctor L was completely
antisocial, but
very
brilliant.
“Don’t ever bother him,” they said.

Doctor L entered through the front doors, strolling, for all
to see, without a care in the world, in a grey V-neck casual T-shirt and jeans,
wearing a pair of sneakers.

He looked like he had just made a million bucks selling oil
futures or something. He was
way
too
young to be a doctor.

He smiled at the desk clerk and signed in. The orderlies,
and everyone, had never seen him so relaxed. Usually he had a look so serious
upon his face that it froze any would-be conversationalists. This guy was
just––there was something about him... They couldn’t quite put
their fingers on it.

You realize
, said
Stalker Boy,
that soon you won’t just
have opportunities like this. That this period of your life is finite. That you
are growing up. Or else––well...

I signed in and went down the hall to the elevators to go
get a look at the stiffs. No one bothered me. It was the smart move on their
parts.

Moretti had supplied me with the autopsy reports of the
previous victims, all of whom were being tentatively attributed to the nasty
serial killer Rome had roaming its streets.
Peter
Panico.

I had to make sure
these
bodies didn’t have any infectious diseases the pathology lab was unprepared
for. That meant taking blood samples and testing them against the litmus Occam
had prepared.

There were six cadavers in all, wrapped in white sheets. The
medical examiner was probably waiting for the morning before he processed them.

I went to corpse number one, removed the cap on the syringe,
and stuck it in. Blood stopped moving when someone died––the heart no
longer beat.

This blood had already begun to degrade.

The autolytic effects were such that the erythrocytes were
on self-destruct. The blood because of the hemolysis was see-through. I made a
note of it.

The same for the next one. Both cadavers tested negative for
the Suck.

Same with the third. I was halfway through them, discarding
needles in biological waste containers. None of the bodies had any of the
telltale marks of being bitten by vampires.

Now for number four. I paused with the needle.

“I’ll be,” I said.

The blood had given me an idea. If the virus was spreading
to red blood cells, taking them over, destroying them–– No, it was
converting them. It wasn’t necrosis. And it wasn’t decomposition.
It has to be changing the
blood––reconstituting it.

We had never done a postmortem on one of the infected rats.
Never thought to study it. Occam and I had been too busy destroying the
carriers.

We incinerated the rats.

I bet their hearts
pump. I bet when the Suck attacks the nervous system, it does something to the
circulatory system. If these contagion carriers, these revenants, have pumping
hearts... One, it means they’re ‘alive’––and anything alive can be
killed,
I told myself
. But also....

It was too new an idea. I concentrated on the fourth body.
It failed to trigger Occam’s litmus.

So it’s not you.

Five, now.

My mind was still working on the idea.

There were certain cells that were ‘programmed’ to die. This
was a scientific fact. They were programmed to click off, like binary. Yes, no.
Yes––

The fifth body, a Jane Doe, had holes in her neck. There
wasn’t much time. Some of these had died almost forty-eight hours ago.
Sometimes it took a while before authorities found them. That’s why I came each
night. I didn’t want any of them ‘waking up,’ getting anybody. It was like
waiting for a vampire to crawl out of the grave.

The Jane Doe tested negative for the Suck. However, she did
have holes at her neck. Whoever this vampire was, he had nearly drained her
dry. I managed to get a few drops.

The litmus remained neutral. It did not turn black.

I dropped the used syringe into the waste container, and
then looked at her. The cops had bagged her hands. She looked...
messy
. She also looked young. Early
twenties,
at most
, I thought.

I noticed the large gashing fang wounds.

The medical examiner would notice them. No doubt he had
witnessed several similar wounds, in the past.

That made the vampire who was doing the killing dangerous.
He was thumbing his nose at the Lenoir. At
me
.
He was not existing silently. I replaced the shroud and turned to number six.
Only it wasn’t there anymore.

It was staring me in the face.

“Oh... crap...”

I was flying backward through the air, crashing into one of
the gurneys, the contents of which fell on top of me.

I got to my feet, my V-neck torn, and looked at the Fast
Walker. It had to get through me before it could get outside.

It came at me. I didn’t have any of my weapons. We crashed
through the swinging set of double doors, into the hallway. It landed on top of
me. Saliva dripped from its fangs. I rolled over on top of it, both hands on
its shoulders. It was still caught in the white bed sheet coroners sometimes
used to transport dead bodies.

There were no vampire bites on its neck. That meant whoever
had killed it had not contracted the disease. It had been merely resurrected by
the boker. I could see the victim’s black gums, silver-like teeth; its diseased
tongue lolled in its mouth.
It snapped.

As far as strength went––the zombie had it.

I was stronger.

Nobody could see us; the hallway was empty. The elevator was
right there. I got an idea. Before I could act upon it, however, the zombie
twisted abruptly, and I was thrown off balance.

It happened. When the revenant had twisted, it caught me
unawares. The energy in my body was still directed downwards.

My body dipped. I could see its eyes roll back like a
shark’s. In that moment, it was interested in one thing only, ripping my flesh
off. It nearly succeeded in biting me. Instead it howled in agony. A
high-pitched keening sound that was sure to have traveled throughout the
morgue.

The locket I had around my neck that belonged to Halsey
Rookmaaker had fallen out of my torn T-shirt and stuck to its forehead.

I got hold of the white bed sheet the zombie was tangled in,
and cinched it quickly about the zombie’s throat, then hit it hard with one of
my elbows––there was a huge burn mark where the locket had touched
its skin, which was smoking.

Getting to my feet, I pulled the zombie up with me and
proceeded to walk it to the elevator. For a Fast Walker, it did what I told it
to. We were almost there, when an orderly appeared.

He was coming out of a closet marked
rifornimenti di pulizia
, pulling a large cart laden with cleaning
supplies. I saw earbuds poking from his ears. The janitor was listening to
music on high volume.

I pushed the button for the basement, praying the elevator
was empty and the janitor had not seen us. He bumped right past and didn’t
notice a thing.

The elevator arrived. The zombie kept trying to twist around
so he could get to me. It was then that I noticed how filthy he was. He had a
long, matted beard. Life had taken a toll on his body. I cinched the sheet
tighter, securing him, as we stepped into the elevator.

He stunk.

No one was inside the elevator. The doors closed and we headed
down to the basement.

Suddenly, the Fast Walker ran up the side of the elevator on
me. His feet flashed. I had his head tight in my grasp––the bed
sheet twisted like rope around his throat. But his body just ran up the metal
interior of the elevator, until it was halfway across the ceiling.

I heard its neck snap. The body fell with a thud. I stood
there, dazed, letting the sheet fall, draping the zombie’s body. Ligature marks
stood out on its neck. The kind of bruising that could only happen with a pumping
heart.

I stepped off the elevator, dragging the revenant with me,
and laid it out on the sheet. He was absolutely the filthiest human being I had
ever seen before in my undead life, all covered in thick grime.

Satisfied that we were alone, I opened the door to the
incinerator, and tossed him in. Life wasn’t supposed to be this messy.