--
It called to try and dream in rest, but they only came in brief dark waves. They never bled out their colors and it made me blind and deaf.
"I kind of thought it was a weird story once."
There are grey times close to morning in some cities, when heavy clouds made it dark though the lights were turned off by the clock. Vague shapes of concrete walls slowly bending and decaying, outlined in fog. And then it becomes a maze and there's no memory of which turns you've travelled or which turns to go.
I wanted to see them all burn.
Only in circles. You should know what's been done already but if you keep losing that half-trapped awake there's nothing for it.
"God. You actually think you're serious. The crazy one, the crazy one."
I saw someone dead. I watched someone die. She was nothing but a monster. Nobody expects pity. I ran my hands over the woman's cold chalky face and closed her eyelids for her, like smoothing across a fold of cloth. I should have done that for her before, because she had lost everything. Adelaide burned screaming.
"Ellie's book. I own it."
I saw trees growing in a colonnade in the woods, but in my mind they grew out of the body of a woman. Everyone dies sometime. I can't see myself beyond a year, beyond ten months, beyond a day or two trapped in here. I never thought of growing old.
"I don't want you to be cold."
Frost crept on grass that was steel instead of grass. The harsh surface left bruises and flattened out skin. It crept up and made things glacially paralyzed and stiffened out a body lying across it.
People can be made not to wake up from sleep. People can be made very docile. It's better to sleep when something hurts if you can. I couldn't tell what was natural or unnatural and waited in the dark, which bred half-dreams on a cold floor.
Once I ran through the sights and colors of a travelling carnival to make sure I found my mother, but this time there was only dead grey bark masks shaped like faces in a long night.
A door opened sent me awake because there was blinding light.
"Humans need fresh air. We all do. Come with me."
Because it seemed better I left with Helen. Outside the windows it was dark, and because not all places in the house were lit I stumbled up behind her. She opened the front door to a risen full moon, changing from painful burning light into softer night. A gust of wind blew fresh frostlike air across us. Tall trees framed her garden and then grew very close together, and the road spooled away into the darkness like a wide grey string.
She stopped me from falling down the outside stairs, but leaning on her was nothing like a human. I regained footing easily enough.
"You don't sleep."
"We cannot," Helen replied. "...It does grant us more time to work. I have composting to do here." She led a way past the chickenwire hutch, and drowsy rabbits woke and squeaked--possibly with terror--at us. There were a lot of them, light long-eared fast-moving furred shapes in the night. She'd fed me some mystery meat, from time to time, cubed and fried and slightly sour...
She didn't fence her garden and she turned to a black heap, carrying a spade.
Take a chance. Of course you should take a chance.
Run and don't look back because that only costs time. Run where there's cover and nobody will see. Run far and fast because there is a chance--
I didn't hear her spring back and only felt the hand on my upper arm. Not painful, considering. Not nearly as painful as she could have made it. She didn't drive in the open skin below the bandages. Helen's face and hair were shadowed under a low-branched tree. I screamed into the night in case any human was there to hear. She waited.
"It's not that nobody would help you if they could hear," she said in a break. A raw throat sounded like a whimper. "But there is nobody. Our senses are sharper than yours."
...Whatever you're going to do, do it and stop this waiting...
"Let me go."
"The duty of a prisoner is to escape," Helen said--steady as if she quoted it like a rule. "I am not going to hurt you. Be calm." Her grip was unbreakable. She didn't fight back--but she was a cold sheet that couldn't be untangled away, or vines that held like steel chains.
...And you know what will happen if you give in and what it means to give in, and when running away is no longer possible-- She waited still as stone and she outlasted anything I could do. I fell down in the tree's shadow.
"Running away is sane," she told me. Another effort to make me think she was kind. "Fear not for your mind. You are not prey."
"You probably told Carl and Adelaide so." Her arm around my shoulders was no comfort, and I buried my head between my knees. Helen made no reply. I wanted control enough for her to stop it; I wanted to run and run and never have to look back; I wanted to be far from here.
She tried to help me stand again, though it wasn't needed. She went back to her heap as a cloud overhead blackened the moon. Lights shone from inside as if nobody there slept. I watched her from a distance, thinking about darting back again and waiting for the vampire to give chase. I shivered in the cold, though the fresh air was better than inside. Easily past midnight; one or two in the morning and something to tell myself what time had passed. Helen never looked back, kneeling over her work in the south border, though I was sure she observed.
I picked a leaf tinted shiny black in the dark and stripped a thin branch half off a bush, separating the thin parts that stuck it together. Clenched a handful of thin needles torn off a fir. Stuck a hand in a thornbush and gained a scraped forefinger. Walked over where they had made the fire for Adelaide--the ashes were long raked over and the ground looked like any other. Ashes white and feathery as dust after the purple flame. Peeled thick scraps of falling bark to fling on the ground. Helen's wheelbarrow squeaked. The faint light from the house lightened her hair and face like a ghost.
"Do you want help?" I said.
She gave me a trowel--turned on a porch light--and set me to fill holes with compost. Old rotted leaves, muddy pellets, dirt, manure, and things that felt and looked like tiny fragments of bone. Possibly not human. I could make a mark on this place. Draw on a tree with the metal tip--scrape along part of the house--rip down more branches--hide something else in the hole. Let other people know I was here. Odd that mostly I'd hate attracting attention at all. I was here on this night running rabbit bones through my fingers and on some level it mattered--
"Jon Icarus," I said, starting simply. "Why was he called that?"
Helen turned and answered a simple question with a simple answer, her hands moving all the while to gently settle a hole she'd filled in. "We change our names from place to place. I doubt Jon had a true surname."
"Jon, short for anything? Jonathan? Jonas? Johannes? Jonah?" A stupid question.
"No."
"You people say the Moirai are powerful vampires. You think they'd kill me. If people investigated what happened," I asked. "Are they really worse than your husband?" The insult to him might have altered her, because she watched me and did not look away, though her answer was still calm.
"You should beware the Moirai. They live across the ocean, but they observe all of our kind. They would kill you--or try to turn you." Helen might have slightly shaken her head. "They feed on humans but they keep our kind secret rather than make the world a slave to bloodlust."
They talk about these Moirai. That's all. I believe in vampires with red eyes--Adelaide in the van.
"I don't want that either. You should believe that. Leave me somewhere on the east coast and I'll stay out of sight of anyone from here." It was part a lie--I'd return to the ward in Seattle no matter how long it took. You're lucky that we were the first to taste your scent, she said. Those who drink blood aren't known for their restraint-- "Don't--" The ground was rough and cold. "Don't keep me here."
It was too far and too cold and giving too much away.
"If you think your sins can't be forgiven, why don't you kill yourself in a fire?"
She nudged her compost in place, silent again. She did this work slowly and delicately for what she was, keeping herself to human's speed as if she hesitated over something very precious. She wouldn't ask the same question back.
"Winter comes," she said, brown muck spread over her gloves, "we prepare the ground for new plantings."
White mist spiraled from my mouth when I breathed. "Because you're not sure that the ghost is dead. The white dust in the air. Bodhi tried to set her on fire. She was ground to dust and still conscious. You think perhaps Adelaide's ashes are still..."
"Fire ensures we do not rise up." Helen straightened in the night, outlined in moonlight. Branches bent toward her with a whispering that went against the wind. Sheafs of black pine needles flew across lonely beams of light by her. "But only those with souls can sleep. That is why."
--
Bodhi set the ash ghost free.
Which wasn't true: Helen hoped that set them free. She did not and could not know. Whether ashes lingered covered by grass, sleeping or waiting--but never dying.
Humans don't do that; humans die and are buried and atoms change into other shapes. Lose a human mind and you have lost everything... The times come when no matter what you want you slip away into a dream, work weighting arms and legs with heated fatigue. Probably death is like that, peace if nothing else guaranteed after all the pain of being ripped apart and burned.
Eyes, hands, ears, mouth, legs, ears, warmth, a human arm around your shoulders, sleep. A cloud of white dust in the air--fine enough to shred anything. Alone. You'd go mad if you weren't already.
I want to live, the estrie said in the night. So I will drink the life of my friend from her.
Vampires are a metaphor for aristocrats who feed on the poor. Those who might as well be dead already.
A human soul is supposed to exist following the death of the body: a spirit that is formed of insubstantial substance and waits for a day of judgment. There is no proof of any of this.
Prayer, gods or death cannot cure.
"Perdita," I found myself saying aloud to the four close walls, not knowing from where it came. "Her name is Perdita."
--
Alora pushed herself in the room while I was awake. High and cheerful as if she was putting it on. Her pink pigtails stiff with dye jutted out from her head as usual and she wore a light purple patchwork shirt over rolled-up short jeans. "You look very well today. I can't smell you bleeding any more. Actually, apart from that--" She looked down, because I was sitting against the wall. "You look awful. Like a sad clown. But it's mean to say so. Would you like to come with me?"
She left the door open. Jon's house was wide and bare and white for the most part in the hallways, sterile as a hospital. No trace of leaf or dirt from the trailing ivy was allowed beyond its boundaries; none of the windows seemed to open to the outside at all. Outside the light was a blue morning, the sun rising up.
"Would you let me go somewhere else?"
"Oh. That's funny." The girl turned back, tilting her head up to speak to me, yellow eyes wide in her face. She walked quickly. "No, Jon wouldn't like that one bit. He does a lot of work at the hospital. And if people knew about us then all his experiments would be ruined...and he wouldn't like that one bit," the girl repeated, shaking her head. "Big brother Jon always knows what he wants."
"He's not really your brother. Your...sire? Guardian?" A touch of a shoe left a scuffmark on the pristine walls. Perhaps they made Antony or Helen clean.
"Big brother," Alora repeated--surprisingly firmly, a few strong lines joining in her face like folds in clean paper. "We tell humans that Bodhi's my sort-of auntie Bodhi, but really we ought to be sisters. That's much nicer. Come in so I can keep my promise from before. Rainbows are pretty." She opened a door--hung by a pink nameplate with a straw doll smiling mindlessly above it.
Entire families could live in a space as large as Alora's. She'd filled it easily: two large closets that seemed filled to overflowing, a sewing machine set up on a small table with pieces of ribbons and offcuts and paper patterns by it, three white dummies draped in clothing by a stepladder, soft-looking thick plush chairs in fringed red, colorful stuffed toys covering a shelf, a frilled bed that didn't look slept in at all, and hanging from the ceiling a lot of crystal ornaments that shed lights on her walls. She had a large east-facing glass window and made herself a room full of rainbows. One of her walls was painted with a giant cartoon drawing of a grinning, waving sun in bright yellow.
She'd hung back, making me go in first as if it was some way to pretend to be polite; I saw her smile where she stood by the door and reach out to the reflection of a prism by her, a brilliant blue-green. Red danced across my hand then yellow, and as I walked the colors in all the crystals bled into other parts of the spectrum. I brushed a low-hanging faceted crystal ball out of the way, and stepped over to stare out the window. Between the trees the sun shed light on the glass ornaments Alora fastened to her window--some of them gold-surrounded to make animal shapes, two crystal swans and a bear cub and a smiling lion--and beyond there was nothing to see but the forest. Eastwards was the sea and Monty's reservation. And if anyone could see, anyone at all--someone with more-than-human eyesight who could turn into a giant wolf, a birdwatcher in the woods turning the binoculars somewhere they thought was human--I waited in the window and tried to hope to draw attention. Smash it open with a hand--and bleed. And then--
The pink curtains closed. Alora pulled back on a string. "Come on, Xavier. That's enough rainbow-gazing, then. I'll let someone else show you the other nice thing that happens to us with sunlight--it makes Jon look like an angel. Ellie's nice too, and she let me find clothes for you because I like making people look pretty. Antony's hand-me-downs wouldn't suit you even if you were shorter and as big as him. You're a Spring."
It was ridiculous. She kept talking about her class with Mrs Fox at the school; that once she went to Paris and studied clothes there and loved touring the museum at Versailles...
"--They had a Hall of Mirrors and that was very pretty, a lot prettier than it looks in pictures, but in the end I can make many more rainbows myself. I hope you're nearly finished..."
At least she had a screen to change behind. What would be the point of thanking her for it?
"I'm happy." Alora looked up and down and smiled widely, her mouth light pink and no blood in her cheeks. She always looked as if she ought to flush a healthy bright apple-red; she did not and that was inhuman, blue-tinted death in her face clear at certain angles. "Very happy. You look better. Nice and comfy? Good. --You wouldn't like to dye your hair some nice color to go with it, would you? Oh, all right, then. Sit in one of the comfy chairs if you like. I do want to show you something."
Red, thick plush and new stuffing, facing away from the door. I sank in while she searched through her shoulder bag, trying not to feel as if it was eating me. The new shirt had stiff, slightly itchy cuffs. Glancing up I saw her ceiling: festooned with dangling crystals, but above that it had been painted to look like a close photograph of loose-woven cloth--she likely painted it. The threads of it were a pale yellow, and above it dead-black spots were drawn over the pattern as if something consumed holes in it. It felt oddly unsettling to watch for any length of time, and I looked away.
"I see the future," Alora said carefully, blinking her eyes as if she did so with as much purpose as a reptile slipping underwater. "In parts. Sometimes my visions don't come true and sometimes I don't get them in time. And these are only my cards made by a human."
She showed off the pack--the dancers in bright ruffles and dresses she'd used for solitaire. "Wands, Coins, Cups, and Candy Canes. See?" She held out a picture of a black-haired woman in pink, dancing around a red-and-white striped cane. "Some versions use sharp things, but candy canes are nicer. Don't worry! I didn't eat the artist." She shuffled them quickly, like a card trick, too fast to follow-- "Here."
I drew a card.
It was a cloaked figure who carried a golden sack filled with sand, and in the depths of the dark purple cloak he had red, complacent cheeks. He rode a white horse with a braided mane.
"It's the Sandman in my deck," Alora said, before she'd looked at anything more than the back of it. "In other decks it's not so nice a card but in mine he only makes humans go to sleep. With a magic sack."
By hitting them on the heads with it, probably.
And you miss that yourself? I nearly asked her--the girl older than she looked. "Good. I like sleep," I said, shallowly as she was trying to make it.
"My visions are almost dreams," Alora said. "Sometimes I think I see other people's dreams. That's why it's good to be around humans sometimes--there's a girl at the school, I'm not sure which one she is, who always dreams of flying. She gives herself wings, long feathery white wings arcing out of her hollow-boned back and taking her up high in the sky, rising through the sunrise and looking over the beach and the woods." Alora's voice softened at the image, gently up-and-down in sing-song tones. "She gives her friends wings too, and the people she thinks she loves. Who aren't you.
"And I think once she did dream about you. In the bottom of an old brick swimming pool with moss rotting out of the walls and thin bad water below. You didn't have wings. Just a network of old moulding heavy purple bones growing out of our back, breaking your skin and weighting you down too much for you to stand.
"And there's a boy who dreams in music instead of pictures, the sound of guitar strings playing songs that sound like the sea or like the mermaid songs in stories, and one of Bodhi's girlfriends, the mean one, doesn't want to tell anyone that she dreams in mathematics..." Alora said. "Draw another card."
"There's a human trick for knowing what's about to be drawn," I said, and kept my hand covering its back.
"When it's close it's easy. Ten of Wands. Three of Cups," Alora said.
"Queen of Swords," Bodhi added, before I'd even uncovered the last one for myself, and forced her way inside.
Alora smiled as if she'd expected that.
There was a black-haired woman in delicate-drawn silver armor like Joan of Arc on the next card, wielding a red-and-white striped pole like a barber's sign, where the red might have passed for blood. Bodhi strode across without the sword.
"--This is how futuretelling and reading minds work together," Alora said, "I told you that my sister and me can do fun tricks with each other..."
"Thought you were going to stay away longer," I forced out. Bodhi crossed the room like an icy winter wind, cold and swift and always restless.
"Carl helped them rob me of my strength for a short while. I had to avenge that. Here."
She flung something at me. I screamed--she'd think that weakness and of course it was. A long curling thing coming out of a lump of something--things that shouldn't exist. A vine from some kind of plant but impossibly hard and almost metallic, curling like a moist living thing--and what it was rooted in was a lump of light-colored flesh that was also hard and cold, a frozen piece of something that looked far too close to human.
The next reaction was a piece of curiosity, something that no human had dissected before, not so different from a piece of kidney or a frog's dead leg twitching or a deer...
"Take it back. Burn it. He--" Bodhi scooped the thing up again. I had not faced him but the vines growing out of the dead body were enough. And the knowledge that being broken did not kill them.
"Oh, I will. After I guilt the cow some more about it." She twined it between her fingers. "She should have finished him herself in the beginning. After she and Jon were done planting trees inside the nearest vampire they could find, back then in the good old days..."
"Before me," Alora piped up. "Ellie is nice."
"Fucking cow," Bodhi summed up again, and I thought she looked at me. She wore nothing on her face and her eyes were the color of old blood.
I could imagine it, whether falsely or not: Jon's cold hands holding the man down on a table and Helen reaching into his open stomach with her seeds, changing them into cold harsh impossible plants rooted deep inside. And because they healed quickly--as Antony, as Bodhi's seeing eyes--they would have to slice open again and again to complete the experiment. Helen spoke of it as sin and torment.
"Your brother likes to experiment, doesn't he?" I tried to speak lightly around it. Kill me rather than end up with another Adelaide, Bodhi, because her mind was gone-- "Tell me all about how you know him--Alora, when were you found?" I asked her instead of her sister.
She stepped forward and back, like a small bird. "Oh, that's another silly question to ask--just another way of asking a lady her age. I was in a bad place and Jon came and rescued me," Alora said.
"--Your accent's southern, a touch old-fashioned, Tennesee or Mississippi or Louisiana or that region..." It annoyed me that Jon and Bodhi spoke in such a patternless way; I knew what plenty of accents should sound like across the states.
"Yes. It was one of those places. We forget lots of what we used to be when we change, you know," Alora said. "I remember people are mean to mad people or people they think are mad and back then they were very mean--back in older times they were meaner. At least they didn't drown me in a ducking pond or invite tourists to poke us with sticks like in Old Bedlam--" She gave a quick glance to Bodhi. "Jon took it over, because he's always been a doctor. Then everything was okay. I wish I remembered being nice to all the friends I must have had in the old days..."
"Oh, you were very nice to them, after--" Bodhi interjected.
"Bodhi, stop it, that's being mean." She turned back. "You and me both have school to get to, anyway, so come back with me, Xavier..." Too fast to follow, she'd taken my hand and pulled me up, but so fast that I fell on her floor. She was as strong as the rest of them. I picked myself up. "Sorry! I didn't mean to do that. Let's go back. You shouldn't be going to school anway, not after you've been hurt. And you never liked it much, did you?"
"But you like it better than being here," Bodhi said, coming too close--although she didn't taunt that I should not have ignored her to begin with. Her breath still carried a strange sweet decay, and it was tinged with something like the copper of old spilled blood. "Don't pretend you're not thinking of escaping. Or of what you'd like to do to us if you had the power--"
Better her sharpness than lying. "I distracted the ash vampire from you because I thought I'd be next. Or Monty," I said. "In case you wanted to know."
--
(Recommended source of bogglement & pointing at silly people on the internet: 
