Thirsty Read online

  The doctor is pulling my records. That’s what he told me, at least. “Wait just a sec. Let me pull your records.” So I am sitting in a backless tunic with my bare butt on the paper of the table, swinging my legs, and I’ve read most of the April issue of Highlights for Children.

  The doctor comes in again.

  “Feeling chilly?” he says.

  “I have no pants on,” I reply.

  “That’s true,” he says. “You don’t like the tunic?”

  “I feel like I’m dressed for a science fiction film,” I say. “Maybe this is why the Star Trek team always beams up with their backs to the wall.”

  He stares at me, frowning, and sits down. He opens the file. For a long time, he looks over the file.

  The doctor looks up. “I’ve asked for your dental records to be faxed over from Dr. Shenko’s office.”

  “I had a bad accident,” I explain.

  The doctor regards me coldly.

  “I ran into a large object. And hurt myself.”

  “Chris,” he says, “you know your parents are very concerned. They say you’re not sleeping much and you’ve become very different to them.”

  I’m starting to feel uncomfortable.

  He continues, “They say you’ve seemed very tired and cranky recently.”

  “It’s just a phase,” I say. I’m hoping to fool him. “I was wondering if I could have some advice about what to do with my hormones and things. The confusing changes that are going on in my body.”

  “Chris.” He sizes me up. He is looking at me and wondering something. I don’t know what. “Chris, has anyone approached you recently and said anything strange to you? Touched you in an unusual way?”

  I stare back at him. I’ve got to move carefully. “No. Are you saying . . . ? No, I mean, I don’t think so.”

  “Do you wear any religious symbols about your person?”

  “No,” I answer. “I had a cross, but I lost it swimming.”

  “Please think. Has anyone spoken to you recently in a language that did not seem human? Made passes in the air near your body with their hands or any kind of unusual prop? Has anyone bitten you, Christopher? Not even just on the neck. These are all avenues of inquiry I’d like to explore.”

  “No. None of those.”

  “Has anything happened recently that you’d like to tell me about?” He looks almost like he’s sneering. I can’t calculate what’s going on in his head, because I can’t tell what he’s like as a person. I try wildly to picture him at a cookout. I figure, if I can just picture him at a cookout, how he would smile and wave to people on a lawn and whether he would offer to work the grill, I can figure out what makes him tick, and I can give him the right answers.

  I shrug. “No. What kinds of things?”

  He’s just looking at me. I feel very thin and naked and realize how awkward I am hunched over on the table with my ugly feet dangling and a copy of Highlights for Children on my lap, open to Goofus and Gallant.

  He rolls his chair closer. He leans in toward me. Like a threat, he says in a whisper, “If anything — anything — strange . . . If anything strange happens to you.” As he whispers low, one hand makes a sawing motion across the other. “If the slightest urge . . . If you have the slightest urge that you think might be unusual or unnatural . . . If that should happen, I want you to call me immediately. We’ll come and pick you up. Do you understand, Christopher? You won’t be hurt. It’s for your own good. For your own good.”

  I’m looking at his hands. His voice says, “Do you understand? For your own good.” But his hand is sawing, and sawing, and sawing away at his fingers.

  It is one week to the Sad Festival of Vampires.

  In the city of Worcester, which is partially serviced by our reservoir, one day the water is turned to blood. There is no water anywhere in the northern part of the city. Faucets spit blood. Blood spatters out of spigots, splashes out of hoses to stain the bushes dark; gore begrimes stacks of greasy plates and shoots out of drinking fountains to make people gag.

  Torrents of blood flow down drains and stain the gutters.

  There are screams as it happens. People sobbing hysterically and grinding their bloody hands in dishtowels. People throwing up in restaurants. Sorcerers and psychics saying that it is a sign from God, an alien invasion, the anger of the Little People. I wish I could have been in Worcester.

  It lasts for only an hour. Then sweet water flows. But by then, the damage is done.

  The blood has clotted in the pipelines. Scabs five miles long.

  Now I am sure. Chet is not coming. Tch’muchgar is coming. He is feeling his way into this world, preparing himself for the leap.

  There is not much time left.

  Darkness.

  Down the street I walk. The streetlights are buzzing.

  It is a hot night. People are cooped up in their houses. They are asleep, and I wonder if, even in sleep, they can tell they’re cooped up, like zoo animals roused when they roll over against the bars.

  I have to talk. I have to.

  Rebecca Schwartz. Three o’clock is probably too late to drop by and shoot the breeze. But it is a warm night, and the thick leaves are restive and suggest to me that all the night is alive and I should be reveling in it.

  If Rebecca were a vampire, if she were damned, we could be together. This is not a serious thought, but I think it anyway, how it would be for us to be together. We live in a high dark house in the woods; our walls hung with incomprehensible pieces of modern art by the friends we have and must leave when they notice that age does not wither us. At night, we stalk the grounds and lie together by the ebony fountain clogged with amber leaves. Sometimes we cry whole ages of darkness together because of our common sin, but there is no one else to whom we can turn, and so we understand each other completely. We know each strange motion that the other makes and what it means. As the eons pass, we come to be very genteel, and I am more suited to her and not so awkward all the time, and after a few centuries my athlete’s foot clears up.

  That all seems to make so much sense that I want to go speak to her now, and it takes me a moment to remember that I hardly even know her. That she would stare at me, aghast; that if she knew, she’d hate me and run inside and lock the door. That she is not my chilly queen of the night. That she wears jeans and loses her hair clips.

  Tom I think about only briefly. I can’t trust him.

  So I head to Jerk’s. Jerk may be Jerk, but he is the one person who is always loyal. He will always be loyal to me. I need to tell him and have him say that there’s something we can do.

  After a while, I reach his house. The lights are all off. There are bleached sand toys scattered around the front lawn. There’s a wading pool with the hose dangling in it. I start to cross the lawn.

  There’s a low growl.

  I look around, breathing the air in deeply. I see shrubs and a tree and the aluminum siding. Jerk’s room is on the ground floor, but the window is around the back. The snarl comes again.

  A dog is slinking toward me, growling like a crazy jackal.

  “Bongo,” I hiss. “Bongo.”

  He stops and shivers.

  I look into his eyes.

  I am so thirsty and so tired of all this. I’m tired of all this sneaking around and endless complaining. I want the damn dog to get out of the way.

  Carefully, I step toward it with my hands stretched out.

  I find it cannot move. “Bongo,” I repeat, quietly but coldly, almost like a warning. “Bongo. Bongo.”

  I take another step forward.

  My hand shoots out and fastens on its head.

  My thumb and pinkie slip down either side of its neck. I can feel the dog’s pulse. I can feel the warmth of its blood. Its eyes are going wacko, shooting around looking for an escape. But its body can’t move. My eyes are fixed on it. I know that if, for one second, I stop staring at it, it will start barking.

  My saliva is running fast and thick. I can barely keep
it in my mouth. I can feel this dog like a drink. Carefully, I rotate the head up. It tries to stop me, but my strength, I find, is great. I rotate the snout up by eighty degrees, until the dog is looking almost straight up. It is gulping with fear. I can see its throat flexing. I move my other hand, almost lovingly, to the soft down below its neck.

  Pushing the head up a few more degrees, I encounter the resistance of bone. The head will twist only a few more degrees before things start to pop and snap.

  I lower my head, drooling.

  Good-bye, Bongo, I think sardonically.

  My heart beats faster.

  I nuzzle the soft fur with my lips. Open my jaws.

  I am ready to kill him.

  But then I think of that name . . .

  Bongo. Bongo the dog.

  Jerk must have named him, years ago, when he was little. When Jerk was just a little Jerk, his parents’ hope and joy and all, saying, “Lesss call him Bongo. The puppy. Bongo.”

  And I think about Jerk finding the corpse, drained and twisted. And I must remain human. I can’t believe what I want to do.

  I will remain human at any cost. I drop the dog.

  The second I let go, Bongo is barking like mad. I run, but he’s chasing me, and barking, and now I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

  The road is slapping under my feet, and I’m heading down under the streetlamps.

  He stands barking, barking, barking at me under a stop sign, as if that were the speech balloon translation.

  But I run on, through the suburbs. I run past the funeral home and its lawns, under the sagging power lines, past the darkened windows of the twenty-two-hour convenience store. I run under the railroad bridge.

  I am going to search the woods for a raccoon or something. I am not cold, and I do not mind the company of twisted trees and haunted bracken. I am doing the haunting now.

  I have to keep spitting because my saliva is so thick and choking. I really want to kill, and I think how people like Tom would be surprised because they don’t think of me as very wild or savage or strong.

  I envision the raccoon’s death: I see my shirt torn from the little claws; I rip it off, yanking my way down the row of buttons. I see myself sucking on the carcass, on the thick sweet blood, and it runs down my wrists to my bare chest and drips on my belly, mingling with my own blood, and I smear the skin over my own skin.

  And in my vision, I stand in the dawn in the devil’s orchard by the water tower, watching the sun rise over the reservoir, full of life, the blood caking warmly on my pale skin as the three radio towers blink and blurt out their silent soft rock like gagged victims bleating for help. The sun throws sludgy scarlet smudges over the morning clouds. The trees are full of life; and in the dawn, they are ruby like gore.

  That is my vision.

  But I find no raccoons.

  I look for hours. Nothing. Trees.

  I walk for the rest of the night. A light drizzle falls as morning approaches. All the while, I am thinking that I will never be the same again — that’s the terrifying thing — that Chet will not come, and that I will never be the same again, and that I will be condemned to endless wandering, wandering through tiny towns and lying down in alleys in big cities, lying drunk or in wait of victims, forgetting that I grew up at all, forgetting this life of green avenues and my brother’s dumb swears and my mother’s voice and my father’s quiet love of golf.

  Chet will not come, and I will have to flee. They will chase me. The crowd will want to kill me.

  I think of Tom — untrustworthy, eyes narrow — and of my father — mute and nervous — and my mother — “It wasn’t even human” — about the changeling child on TV — “It wasn’t even human” —

  And a voice says to me again and again this one chilling fact I know is true: that I came into this world from a warm place within someone else; but that I will leave it completely alone.

  I walk through the woods until I come again to the road. I start home. My shirt is intact.

  I am a failure, even as a vampire.

  When I reach my house, it is dawn. My mother is waiting for me in the kitchen. She’s dressed in a pink bathrobe, but it looks gray in the dawn. Everything in the kitchen looks gray: the table looks gray, and the dishwasher, and the sink, and my mother, too, who is in a chair.

  “Where have you been?” she barks at once, suspiciously. “Where the hell have you been? Where?” She hits the table. “Where the hell have you been?”

  I have to make up an excuse, but the sun is coming up and I’m suddenly very, very tired. I’ve been out almost all night, since midnight. “I just went out, just now, to, um,” I explain groggily, “check the tree.”

  It is admittedly not the best or most coherent lie I have ever made up.

  I shuffle past her toward the front hallway.

  “Christopher! Stop, Christopher,” she says, but this time softer, as if she’s scared to know the answer. “You’ve been at a party, haven’t you? Have you been out at a party?”

  I know she doesn’t want to hear. I can tell she’s afraid.

  So I don’t answer and go upstairs.

  I sit down on my chair. I lay my head down on my desk like it’s a broken appliance and I’m dropping it off for repairs.

  Briefly, I sleep. I dream of wielding great gouts of fire that wallop the vampires, as they cast their wicked spells. I dream of being cured by a kind touch from Chet. I dream that Rebecca Schwartz loves me and I talk to her like I would talk to no one else. I picture her careful, clever face, and I picture kissing it and her smooth white neck. I kiss her right where the pulse is, and I can feel how hot her blood is. I can feel it moving through her like quick fire; I can sense it caressing her breasts from the inside, circling like electrons around her secret womb.

  I can feel it in my mouth, running down my throat. I feel strong again; I feel alive; I feel the spark of her life twitching in my heart as she drains into me, from under me, as I feel her spasms beneath me and her death.

  My alarm rings. A half hour has passed. It is time for school. I lift my head slowly, like a moss-covered prehistoric sea turtle might if it were woken up by B movie radiation leakage.

  Even the early morning sun is painful. I stand up.

  I am not a morning person.

  I am not an afternoon person either.

  I guess that I am not a person at all.

  It is the Sad Festival of Vampires.

  At midnight, the runes and spells of warding will have been read, the White Hen shut, and the fate of the world decided.

  And if Tch’muchgar is to come from his prison world and thunder through the forests he will have come; and there will be screaming in the lonely houses by the lake and burning in the towns.

  And I do not know what to do.

  Every city has its rituals to stave off evil and to satisfy the Forces of Light. At least in Clayton, we don’t sacrifice people anymore. In Boston it is bad because every year virgins must be offered to the spirits there.

  There it is done democratically, through a lottery. The night before the lottery, the city holds a great celebration, like Mardi gras. Originally, it was a night when families could be together for maybe the last time before the name was drawn, the name of a virgin daughter or son. Now it is a difficult night for parents; they must decide whether to enjoy that last night together, sitting sadly in party frocks around their dining room table while outside the horns razz and glass breaks, or whether to push their sons and daughters out of the house, out into the parties and sweat, and tell them to go and lose their virginity in the crowds.

  Needless to say, the night before the lottery is held each year, many seniors from our school take the Worcester-Boston bus, whooping and pounding on the windows. The next morning they come back out in the dismal light with stories of what they did behind dumpsters or in hotels.

  Nobody knows what happens to the sacrifices after they’re left in a vault beneath the city. Usually they’re just gone in the
morning and are never heard from again. Once, a mangled and tattered body was seen cawing and flapping its way crowlike out to sea.

  In any case, in Clayton our rituals are not so dramatic.

  From the Clayton Crier:

  I’ve heard spring’s over and summer’s here — a little bird told me! School’s almost out and the nights are getting hot. And that means only one thing: time for the Wompanoag Valley Sad Festival of Vampires!

  Yes, step right up, step right up for the best weekend of singing and dancing and carnival rides you’ll ever sink your teeth into! The fair is coming to Barley’s Field! That means fun, hayrides, clowns, games, carbonation, whipped cream, sacrificial goats in the petting zoo, etc., etc.! And while you’re there at the fair on Saturday night, from nine to midnight catch the loudspeaker broadcast of our quaint and ancient ritual of binding the Vampire Lord! So come: Listen, eat, drink, and be merry!

  Sad Festival? It should be called the Happy Festival!

  — by Cheryl Paluski

  It has begun.

  This is the night of tears; the time of fear; sorrow abiding at the eventide.

  Paul and his friend Mark and I are driving to McDonald’s. They have a special there in which you can buy two Big Macs for two dollars.

  My mother sent me out with Paul. He’s going to the big party Tony and Kathy Rigozzi have every year. Tony is Paul’s age. I think Kathy is in college by now. They live right next to Barley’s Field, where the carnival is, and my mother wants me to go to the carnival. She says my friends will be there. She says that I don’t see my friends much anymore. She’s worried about me. I don’t have the heart to tell her I don’t have friends anymore.

  “I’ve heard this party is great,” says Mark, sliding his hand up and down the shoulder strap. “I mean, I’ve heard that sometimes girls dance with no top on . . .”

  “No way,” says Paul.

  “Yeah way.”

  “No goddamn way.”

  “Yeah way.”

  “No way, you meat-brained monkey-licker.”

  “What?!?” asks Mark, laughing. “What’s that, like, supposed to mean?”