Sunshine

I waited till full night dark, and then I settled on the floor inside the open balcony door. I lit the candles and the herbs, and stubbed the herbs out again. I waited for the smoke to mingle. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant smell, but it was interesting, and intense. A…drawing sort of smell. It drew me into it.

I closed my eyes. Con, damn you, where are you? I’m sure you’re in trouble. Call me to come to you, you stubborn bastard.

I was back in the vampire space, but the smoke had come with me, wrapped round and round me like an enormously long scarf, streaming behind me into the human world, streaming before me into the vampire beyond-dark. I lay, suspended, in between, but this time I felt neither lost nor sick.

Sunshine, pay attention. I felt neither lost nor sick. It wasn’t the same space. It was some other weird Other void where no human had any business. The big difference was that this one wasn’t trying to kill me. At least not at once. Was this the back way, the little country lane way, after the speed and roar of the superhighway had been too much for me earlier? I still couldn’t read the map.

Pity you couldn’t just take a bus.

I wriggled a little where I lay—there was still the uncanny pressure of alien-space, the difficulty breathing, the blindness, the awkwardness, as if a human body was the wrong vehicle if you wanted to travel here; but it lacked the malevolence of the nowhere I’d been in that afternoon in Aimil’s living room, and the smoke-scarf gave me a little protection, as if against a bitter wind. If I were a car, then I’d rolled my windows up. Okay. Here I was. I practiced breathing. A little time went by, if time went by here. Till the strangeness, this nonmalevolent strangeness, began to feel like…merely the medium I had to work with.

I was a painter who had been handed a dripping glob of clay, a singer who had been handed a clarinet…a baker of bread and cookies who had been handed a vampire.

I bent and turned, seeking the alignment I wanted. There…no. Almost.

There.

And then I heard his voice.

Sunshine.

Once. Only once. My name. There.

The shock of when I hit the exact bearing felt like putting my whole body in an electric socket. Wow. But then I was blazing along that line like an arrow from a burning bow. The smoke was stripped away by the speed of my going, my hair seemed to be peeling off my scalp, and the pressure was increasing…and increasing…I was being stretched—rolled like a ball of dough between palms to make breadsticks, a fluff of sheep’s wool twisted and squeezed to wind round a spindle—thinner and thinner and thinner, a bit of blunt thread crushed between huge fingers, poked painfully through the eye of a needle…

Wham.

I dropped out of the darkness, the void, the Other-space, back into something like somewhere. Back into my body, if I had been out of it.

I fell a little distance, smack, onto something. Something rather chilly, and slightly yielding, but not very, and also curiously…lumpy. I would have slid right off it again.

Except that it wrapped its arms around me, rolled me over so that it was on top of me, pinning me securely with its weight, and buried its fangs in my neck.

I froze. Well, what are you going to do? And all this was happening flickflickflick like the frames of a movie, too fast to react to.

It was dark, black dark, as dark as the void I had so recently traveled, and while I could see in the dark, I didn’t have much practice in this kind of darkness, and also…well there was this other stuff going on, you know? My chief awareness was centered on the feeling of teeth against my neck.

The teeth hadn’t broken the skin. His teeth hadn’t. His hair was in my face. I’d had his hair in my face once before, but he’d been bleeding on me that time. Maybe it was my chance to return the favor? He had said he wouldn’t turn me—that he couldn’t turn me. He’d also said that I could be killed, like any other human. Standard deaths of humans included being dry-guyed.

Maybe vampires didn’t like drop-in visitors. Well, I’d tried to call ahead. Ha ha.

His teeth were still against my neck. Other than that he was motionless. I mean that. Motionless. Like being lain on by a stone. A stone with fangs, of course.

His hair smelled musty, damp. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell—if it reminded me of anything it reminded me of spring water, wet earth and moss on the rocks around it—but it wasn’t his usual vampire smell. Don’t ask me how I knew it was him but I did. Besides the fact that I guess if it had been any other vampire he wouldn’t have hesitated midway through the fang-burying action.

He was cold. Motionless and cold. Cold all the way down the length of him…