An Unattractive Vampire (21 page)

“I told you so,” said Simon later, back at the designated flee-to place.

“You didn’t fare much better, I see,” retorted Yulric.

The boy mumbled something about travel-sized holy water containers. “What we need is proper documentation,” he said.

The vampire gave it some thought. “In the TV, people forge their documents. Could such a thing work?”

“It couldn’t hurt to try,” replied Simon.

He was wrong. It did hurt. At least, it hurt Yulric, who took the full brunt of the 240-pound dock official’s tackle. The look of terror on the man’s face when the vampire exploded into a thousand spiders and crawled all over him was barely consolation.

“I think we need better documents,” said the boy as the vampire reconstituted himself back at the house.

Yulric examined the parchment documents with their impressive calligraphy and hand-drawn borders. To him, they looked more official than anything machine-made. “What do you suggest?” he asked, ripping apart two days of painstaking artistry.

“Well, once I have an adult with me, I can get a proper, legal passport,” Simon reasoned. “The problem is you. You don’t have a social security number or birth certificate.”

“Bah,” the vampire scoffed. “I can find my way on board easily enough.”

“And what happens when someone opens the cargo hold in the middle of the day?” asked the boy.

“What of the Dracula plan?” Yulric suggested.

“Shipping you in a coffin? We’d still need a grown-up to be my”—Simon rolled his eyes—“chaperone.”

“That should not be difficult to provide,” Yulric offered.

Simon glared at his counterpart. “A
willing
chaperone.”

The vampire glowered. “I thought you wanted to save your sister.”

“If we rescue her and it isn’t to her liking, she’ll take away my library card and won’t pay the cable bill.” Yulric hissed.

“Exactly,” Simon went on, “so unless you know someone with a lot of spare time on their hands, who owes you a favor, we move on.” Simon flipped a few more pages in his notebook. However, there was a decided lack of clacking from the vampire. He looked up. The vampire was smiling again. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“No,” replied Yulric, “I very much doubt you will.”

• •

Catherine Dorset was baking a cake in her mind when the ghost came back.

“I have an offer for you,” it said without preamble, causing her to jump and smash the cake into the stove before dropping it on the ground.

She wheeled on the ugly old man. “Look what you made me do!”

The ghost looked confused. “It is not real.”

“That’s not the point,” she sputtered. “It isn’t polite to just pop into someone’s mind unannounced. I could have been naked.”

The ghost raised an eyebrow. Catherine sighed. Living the life of the mind could be hard sometimes. Trying not to think of an elephant often resulted in an elephant barging through your room and treading on anything you told it not to. Saying “I could have been naked” posed similar problems.

“Turn around, please,” she told him, covering herself with her arms.

“I assure you I—” began the ghost.

“Now!” she demanded. The ghost rolled its eyes and turned around. She quickly ran upstairs where she found the clothes she had been wearing not moments ago, folded in a dresser drawer, and put them on. She would have gone back downstairs but found the ghost behind her, the same distance away, still with its back to her.

“All right then,” she said, signaling that it was okay to look. “First of all, hello again.”

“Greetings,” it said reluctantly. “I have an—”

Catherine held up a finger. “I didn’t get your name. Before you make any offer, I feel it only right that I know who keeps invading my mind.”

A look of deepest disgust crawled across the ghost’s face. Literally crawled. It slapped its own face, hard, to make it stop.

“New skin,” explained the ghost to answer the look of disgust that had much more metaphorically crawled across her face. Then, with a low and patronizingly theatrical bow, he introduced himself. “I am the vampyr Yulric Bile.”

Catherine tried to catch a snicker before it came out. She failed. Yulric Bile rose back up, angrier than before.

“So you said something about an offer. Is this about me dying again?” Catherine asked hopefully. She had made up her mind on this, or rather network TV had made up her mind for her by canceling her favorite sexy-lawyer show.

“Actually, I need you to accompany me on a trip,” said Yulric.

“Excuse me?” Catherine uttered. She was sure he must have misspoke. Or been kidding. Or . . .

“I will be traveling overseas and require someone to watch over a small boy,” he clarified without kidding or misspeaking.

“You’re talking about . . . in the real world, right?” she asked, feeling this point needed further clarification. She had, after all, done quite a bit of traveling in her head: Paris, London, Sheboygan.
⁴⁸
But that was very different and somewhat unsatisfying, as she had never been anywhere outside Massachusetts before and could draw from only old black-and-white movies she’d seen. In other words, everywhere she went looked like a gray California.

“The real world, yes,” he responded.

Catherine sighed. “I thought we went over this last time. I’m in a coma. I can’t wake up.”

“What if you could?” he asked.

Catherine’s metaphorical heart skipped a beat. Or was that her real heart? Whichever it was, it lodged itself in her throat. “What—what do you mean?”

“If I could give you a measure of control over your body, would you serve my needs?” he proposed.

Catherine raised the suspicious eyebrow of someone who watched too many sexy-lawyer shows. “Serve your needs how?”

“Mostly what I already said,” he explained. “Watch and care for the boy while we travel. Also, you will be required to pick up my coffin at our destinations.”

“And the, uh, sleeping arrangements?” she said, trying to put it delicately.

“You can work that out with the boy,” he replied. “I will be spending my nights out.”

She felt this point needed clarifying. “What I’m trying to get at is . . . Well, I’m gay, so even if you were thinking about—”

“You may prostitute yourself on your own time, so long as you fulfill the duties you are given,” replied Yulric with his seventeenth-century definition of the word
gay
.

“Whoa!” Catherine cried. “I am not a prostitute, okay? I—I’m trying to say that I like girls. Women. Not men.”

Yulric glared at her. “I do not see how this is relevant.”

“So . . . no kissing, right?” she said.

“No. No kissing,” he answered, as if kissing
her
was the most disgusting thought a person could have.

“Just so we’re clear,” she muttered. “So, what’s the catch?” She remembered his problem with words. “The drawback? The downside? The—”

“I will show you.” He cut her off. Yulric raised his hand and passed it through the space in her mind. A hospital room appeared around them. It was very white and very sterile, without any personal touches that might distinguish it from any other room in any other hospital. A TV hung on one wall, sadly turned off. The curtains were drawn on both the windows and the door. The room was dark, brightened only by the reds and greens of various computer displays and a book light being used by a little boy in the corner.

“Where is this?” asked Catherine, who had never seen a room like this before, except on TV. She checked the patient to see if she was a famous celebrity. She wasn’t, not by a long shot. The woman in the bed looked awful. She was bone thin, and wired up to so many machines, it looked like a plastic squid was erupting from her face. Her hair was matted and scraggly and hadn’t seen product in years. Four years, to be exact.

“Is that . . . me?” she asked.

“Yes,” Yulric answered.

Catherine flickered for a moment, her mental image switching between her full-bodied normal self to the wraith she saw lying in the bed, and back again. She’d known that she didn’t look good, but it had never been an issue because she’d never been able to look at herself. It was such a disturbing sight, she didn’t even care that a second version of the vampire was crouched on top of her, looking into her pried-open eyes.

She turned away, unable to take any more, and found herself facing the small boy. She’d have thought he would stir at the sudden and miraculous appearance of a hideous man and flickering-mind woman in the middle of the room. There he was, though, paging through a biography of Oliver Cromwell like they weren’t even there. She went up and waved her hand in front of his face. He licked his finger and turned the page.

“This isn’t real,” she said, very disappointed.

“On the contrary,” corrected the vampire. “This is very real. This is your room, as I see it.”

“Okay,” said Catherine, “I’ll give you that, but—”

She was cut off. Catherine’s hand, her
real hand
, was waving at her. Catherine gaped at herself. “How is that possible?”

“A vampyr can control the actions of the weak willed,” he boasted. “A person who lies forever in sleep is particularly weak willed.”

“Uh-huh,” she replied, trying not to take offense. “Great. You can make my weak-willed arm move. Good for you. What do you need me for?”

“Due to your condition, such control requires concentration and . . . proximity,” he explained.

“I assume that’s why you’re on top of me?” she added. She made a quick glance to make sure his hands weren’t anywhere they shouldn’t be.

“Indeed,” he said, choosing to ignore her lack of trust in him, “it would be more beneficial if you could move yourself.”

“Believe me, I’d love to,” she said.

“I can show you,” he told her.

Four words. Four lovely words. Yulric held out his hand. Catherine, shaking with nervous excitement, took it. His other hand reached out and touched the projection of her comatose body. It shuddered, sending the machines into apoplexy. The boy ran over and silenced them.

“Please, lie down into your body,” Yulric instructed.

“Um, can you move?” she asked him, referring to his real form, still crouched on the bed. He glowered, obviously having no intention of changing his position. Swallowing the discomfort of his hovering body near her spectral head, Catherine sat on the bed, letting her feet line up with her feet and her legs line up with her legs, or at least where they appeared to be under the blanket. It was weird, as her mental legs took up far more room than her real legs. It felt like trying to squeeze into jeans that were now too small for her, a sensation she was all too familiar with. Once her bottom half was in position, she lay down, slowly at first, then more quickly as her mind abdominals grew tired. She passed through the real Yulric’s body—a cold and endless void filled with screaming maggots and burning flesh—and finally settled her head down into place.

“Close your eyes,” instructed the Yulric standing beside the Yulric crouched on top of her. Catherine wasn’t sure which she preferred. She did close her eyes, though.

“Now open them.”

She did.

“Now scratch your nose.”

“Not funny,” she said. At least, she tried to, but she couldn’t. Something was in her throat, gagging her. With a panicked thought to the monsters surrounding her, she scrabbled at whatever it was with her hands . . . and stopped. These were not the hands she was used to. They were paler, more veiny. They had longer nails and rougher skin. An IV stuck out of one of them. They were skeletal and weak and utterly goddamned beautiful.

These were Catherine’s
real
hands.

She laughed, or tried to. The sound was once more strangled by the tubes in her mouth. With her two real hands, she pulled them out, gagging as she did so and probably scraping her trachea or esophagus or both, but she didn’t care. She was finally going to get out of this bed, just as soon as the vampire got off her.

“Excuse me,” she said to the Yulric in her mind. Her voice was dry and scratchy, but it was real and she could hear it with her ears.

Mind Yulric just stood there, staring at her, as unmoving as his real body.

“Fine,” she said, and with a swat of her arm, she knocked the vampire’s body onto the floor.

Everything went black.

Catherine looked around in a panic. The room was gone. The boy was gone. Both Yulrics were gone. She looked down at her hands. They were back to normal. Normal for her mind. Tears welled up in her eyes. Not really, though, since the tears were just imaginary. And with that thought, she started to cry.

“That would be the problem.”

Catherine looked up. Mind Yulric was standing over her once more, mocking her with a little wink.

“Bastard!”
she screamed, running and flinging herself at him.
“Goddamned bastard!”

She hit him, but without the will to do much else, she just sort of melted down his front in a pile of sobs. He knelt down beside her.

“You can only control your body by inhabiting its image in your mind, but you can only maintain that image through my sight,” he explained. Catherine looked through tear-filled eyes up into Yulric’s face. It was cold and hard but free of malice. What she had taken as a wink was clearly something more. The vampire’s left eye remained closed.

“So”—Catherine cried—“what does that m-mean?”

“Sacrifice,” said the vampire, his voice echoing through the blackness of her mind. “On both our parts.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” she asked.

“The very oldest,” he told her, lowering his gaze. Hers followed suit and fell upon his balled-up left hand, which unfurled to reveal its contents—a clouded eyeball with a pinprick black pupil.

“An eye for an eye,” he said.

Catherine understood. This was the price of feeling, of moving, of being alive, truly alive. One measly eye.

“Yes,” she agreed.

The vampire picked her back up off the floor of her mind.

“It shall be quick. You will not feel it,” he said as he faded back into the real world.

“Be seeing you,” she called after him. That single eye rolled in its socket. Catherine smiled and closed her own. Then, she opened them and got up.