An Unattractive Vampire (9 page)

This new visitor, however, didn’t make a sound. No talking, no humming. She couldn’t even hear the person breathing. If it weren’t for the clattering noise of her chart being picked up, she’d have sworn she was imagining the whole thing. Even so, as her mystery guest was obviously not going to give her any stimulus, she decided to put her knitting away and indulge in some Regency-era romance.
²¹

“How are you not dead?” said a voice.

It shocked Catherine to hear it, partially because she hadn’t expected it, partially because it sounded so gravelly and sick, but mostly because it was coming from behind her. Since in her real room, she was lying on her back in a bed, it meant that either someone was under her bed or . . .

Catherine turned around to find a tall, hideous stranger in her mind. His head was mostly bald with wispy white hairs coming off in irregular patches. His skin was gray, wrinkled, and peeling. Veins bulged and joints protruded. His eyes were clouded like that of a corpse, except in the center, where they were unbelievably black. It was a personage that Catherine would never imagine on her own. She didn’t like those kinds of movies.

He stood there, where he couldn’t possibly stand, and took in his surroundings as if unsure what he was seeing. He reached a curious hand toward the teddy bear Catherine had possessed since she was four.

“Can—can I help you?” she blurted out just in time to stop him actually touching Mr. Boysenbeary with his . . . Well, it wasn’t often you could use the word
talon
with a human being, but in this case, the term nearly applied.

The man’s head jolted back as if he’d just remembered she was there. “How are you not dead?” he repeated quite bluntly.

Catherine was surprised. His accent was clearly English, and yet he did not hem or haw or politely ramble, everything an unexciting lifetime of movies and television had led her to believe about British men. The very least he could have done was introduce himself.

Though, perhaps, he didn’t need an introduction. Perhaps she should know exactly who this robed, skeletal figure was.

“Are—are you . . . Death?” she asked. It only seemed right to get confirmation. I mean, if you had to card people for cigarettes and alcohol, one should probably check Death’s ID, too.

“Why would you say that?” he asked, crossing his arms defensively. The question seemed to annoy him.

“Robed figure, creepy and skeletal, meeting me on another plane of existence,” she explained, now doubting that this could be Death.

“Ah,” he said. The answer seemed to mollify him, and he regained a bit of his composure. “I am not he. Not the one who ushers souls on to that which comes after. No, I am the death that man fears most: the death of blood and body, filled with pain and darkness, with no hope of anything after. I am that death. I am . . . a vampyr.”

Catherine burst out laughing.

“Stop. Stop that,” said a very annoyed mystery man.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said, trying to regain herself. “It was a very good speech. That ending though . . .”

She started laughing again. It was a bit before she composed herself again. When she did, Catherine noticed that the man looked angry. And taller. And . . . closer. She made a note to herself that it was probably not wise to laugh at shady characters who invaded your thoughts.

“Enough,” he said, approaching her quickly.

Catherine tried not to be intimidated. She tried to remember that he could not possibly hurt her in her own head. That didn’t stop her from backing against her imaginary cabinet, though.

“Tell me, why are you not dead?”

“I’m—I’m in a coma,” she said, working her way behind the dresser. Maybe, if she had some time to think, she could—

“A coma?” he questioned, passing through the cabinet as if it were not there. Ghostlike behavior, if ever she’d seen it. Which meant that he couldn’t possibly hurt her, right?

She tried to muster some gusto to throw back at him. “Listen, mister,” she began, prodding him in the chest. It made her pause. Ghost or not, if she could touch him, then . . . The same thought seemed to be going through her visitor’s mind, as well, so to placate him and back up a bit farther off, she said, “I’m asleep. I had an accident, and I can’t wake up.”

“Obviously,” he snorted, insulted. “
Koma
, from the Greek. But how do you still live?”

“My family,” she said. “They must hope that I’ll come out of this. Or they’ve forgotten about me. One or the other.”

“The sheet of paper says ‘four years,’” he stated incredulously. “You long since should have perished.” Strangely, his intent didn’t appear malicious. He seemed . . . puzzled, that was all.

For the first time, Catherine began to note certain aspects of the stranger. His manner of speech was familiar, not because she heard it in her everyday life but because she watched so many movies with people speaking that way. His clothes were, too—his long, flowing ebony robe seemed like something one would see at a Renaissance fair, except less comfortable, less colorful, and less well-made. These things combined with his extreme age and his questions as to her survival, and her mind finally slid the last gears into place.

This was a very old ghost.

She took pity on this sad apparition, and in a voice people usually reserve for the dying and her, said, “The machines around my head. The devices?” And then, in case he still didn’t get it, “The metal things? They keep my body alive. They feed me and give me medicine and monitor my pulse—my heart—to make sure it continues to pump . . . to beat.”

“Your body cannot do these things on its own?” he challenged.

“Well, some of them,” she corrected him.

“But without their aid, you would die?”

“Yes,” she said. She knew this conversation should annoy her or make her sad, but the truth was, it had been so long since she had been heard by anyone that she was actually enjoying herself, regardless of subject matter.

“Then, your body is dead,” he said, working out a problem in his head.

“Some people would say so,” she replied.

“But you are here, in the darkness.” He added, “Asleep, but aware. Consciously dreaming. Technically alive but apparently dead.”

“One might even say, undead,” she chimed in, seeing his train of thought to its logical conclusion.

“No,” he corrected her. “The opposite. Unalive.”

Again, it was not an insult. It wasn’t even that mean. For the first time, the old man seemed almost kind. Frankly, it made Catherine more uncomfortable. She had to turn away from him.

“Would you like to die?”

The question echoed around the walls of her mind. She turned back to that sallow face, those sunken eyes suddenly free from malice and filled instead with an earnest seriousness. His gaze no longer searched or prodded. Instead, he waited, simply waited, for an answer.

Would you like to die?
When you are stuck in a coma, it’s a question you ask yourself at least once a day, and since she had no idea how long her days were, it was probably far more often than that. She often thought about death. She often wished for death. In that first year of being unable to talk or move or even wake, she would scream at the top of her metaphorical lungs for someone, anyone, to please, please kill her. Even now, four years on, after she’d found a kind of rhythm and routine to her eternal daydream, even now, there were bad days when she tried to will herself away. It never worked, though, and after eating some chocolates that she imagined and having a good cry, she would pick herself up and find some mental cobweb to sweep.

This was different. This was someone else asking. Not even asking, really. It was an offer. One that, ghost or not, Death or not, she felt certain this strange man had the power to fulfill—continue to live this half-life, unable to affect anything real or tangible, almost a ghost herself, or shuffle off this mortal coil into (a) heaven or (b) oblivion. There was, of course, that third option, but she was fairly certain she wasn’t going there. A priest came by pretty frequently to give last rites, and it was difficult to masturbate without the aid of her arms.

It was time to make a decision, one way or the other.

She was weighing her fear of death against utter boredom when the door to her room opened in the distance. It wasn’t all that loud and hardly noticeable, except that it was quickly followed by a maddened scream.

“What do you think you are doing?”

The man spun around, staring up into the darkness and out of her head. He appeared to be a bit scared, or at least alarmed. Catherine recalled the look she had worn in high school when her parents had caught her doing . . . something . . . she ought not to have been doing.
²²

As quickly as it had come, the panic faded, and when the man turned back to her, it was with the dignity of a duke and the face of the duke’s long-dead grandfather who had fallen victim to some terribly disfiguring plague.

“If you will excuse me?” he said. With that, he faded into the darkness and Catherine was again alone, unable to do anything but cozy up on an imaginary couch with a bucket of popcorn that did not exist and listen to the argument unfold. Death would have been good, but at least she was entertained.

• •

To say Amanda was surprised was an understatement and did not convey the correct level of anger she felt. Even the word
anger
did not convey the correct level of anger. You had to go to old-school words like
rage
and
wrath
and
smote
. She had merely been going about her business changing a coma-patient’s saline bag, when she’d opened a door and found her unwanted houseguest crouched over the woman, staring into her forcibly opened eyes.

“What do you think you are doing?”
she yelled. With lightning speed and fury, she jumped forward and knocked the creature’s hand away from the woman’s eyes, allowing them to close. When that was done, she looked up to find the blinking vampire returning to his upright and locked position.

“Back!” she ordered, taking the gold cross from around her neck and thrusting it toward Yulric. He recoiled as if he had been burned, moving toward the safety of the window, hissing as he went. Amanda didn’t care. She wanted him to hurt. If he escaped, well, she knew where he lived.

He didn’t escape. He merely continued backing up, and when he reached the wall, he backed up that and onto the ceiling. Once out of reach, he folded his arms and waited for Amanda to calm down. Amanda, heaving with fury,
²³
flung her cross at him. Yulric swatted it away, taking in a pained breath as it singed his hand. Then, for good measure, she pitched the saline bag at him. This harmlessly bounced off and fell to the floor.

“Are you quite done?” he asked as the bag wobbled to a halt. Amanda was not done, but she had run out of weapons within easy reach.

“You have to come down sometime,” she said, searching for another weapon. “Eventually the sun comes up.”

“So I have until morning,” he reasoned. “How long before someone comes to check on you?”

Logic, Amanda found, was far more annoying when it got in the way of being massively pissed off. A few more huffs and a murderous glare later, she was ready for a reasonable discussion.

“What do you think you are doing?” she asked again in a slightly more controlled tone.

Yulric took a moment to unfurl himself so he could now stand at his full height on the wall in a dramatic fashion, right above her head. “Helping,” he said.

“Helping?” she repeated, trying to remain calm. “Helping? How is standing over one of my patients and staring helpful?”

“That was not helping. That was curiosity.”

“Curious about what?” she asked skeptically.

He pointed at Catherine’s body. “I have seen crippled Viking kings wade into battle and heard decapitated saints speak, but at no time, in all my many centuries, could anyone sleep for years and still live.”

“Rip Van Winkle?” Amanda suggested.

“Who?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Look, we don’t use leeches anymore. We can keep people alive now.”

“And yet you cannot wake them up,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“In this case, no,” she conceded.

“Quite cruel. I approve.”

Amanda mumbled under her breath. “Yeah, well, I’m glad. And what does your approval have to do with your creeptastic looming?”

“I wanted to see what was in her mind. To see what she saw and felt.” Yulric paused. The two stared awkwardly at each other from different planes, like some horribly dull M.C. Escher drawing.

“And?” Amanda asked after seconds of silent anticipation.

“I believe she would like to die.” Again, he said this as fact, very plainly, without malice, which for him was odd.

“Well, that’s not my call to make,” Amanda explained lamely. She glanced over at the patient. If she was listening, Amanda hoped she understood.

“Is it not her decision?” Yulric asked.

“Yes. I’ll just go before a judge and explain that I learned the patient’s true desires through vampire telepathy,” she said, throwing her arms up in exasperation. “They throw me in jail or an asylum, Simon goes into foster care, and you . . . You never get your stupid answers. Congratulations, you’ve been a big help.”

“This was not helping,” Yulric said.

“Right, it was
curiosity
. Well, do me a favor? Go home and be less curious.”

She started to leave. Then, a thought hit her. A sickening, awful thought.

“How were you going to help me, exactly?” she asked.

The vampire smiled. “By lessening your workload.”

Amanda’s eyes went wide, and suddenly, she was sprinting down the halls of the hospital, hoping against all hope.

It didn’t take long for her hope to die. Alarms were going off. Heart monitors were flatlining. Shouts of “clear!” came from a half dozen rooms. A line of carts waited for the elevator so they could get down to the OR. Everywhere there was panic and fear and death.

Except in rooms that had a crucifix. Those patients were fine.

Amanda turned to find the creature standing on the threshold of the coma-patient’s room, a broad, malicious grin across his face as he admired his handiwork. He gave a curt little nod to her and closed the door.