Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (52 page)

That’s when I decide it’s time to track down the woman who turned me. It’s harder than I think. I don’t really know where to start. Because she found me outside a concert at the Civic Centre, I spend most of December and January going to the clubs and concerts, thinking it’s my best chance. Zaphod Beeblebrox 2 closes down at the end of November, but Barrymore’s is still just up the street from where I live, so I drop in there almost every night, sliding past the doorman like I’m not even there. I can almost be invisible if I don’t want to be noticed—don’t ask me how that works. That’s probably why I can’t find the woman, but I don’t give up trying.

I frequent the Market area, checking out the Rainbow and the Mercury Lounge, the original Zaphod’s and places like that. Cool places where I think she might hang out. I go to the National Arts Centre for classical recitals and the Anti-Land Mines concert in early December. To Centrepoint Theatre in Nepean. Farther west to the Corel Centre. I even catch a ride up to Wakefield, to the Black Sheep Inn, for a few concerts.

This calls for more serious cash than I can get from my salary at the coffee shop and the meager tips we share there, so I take to lifting the wallets of my victims, leaving them with less cash as well as less blood. My self-esteem’s taking a nosedive, what with already being depressed, making no headway on finding the woman, and having become this petty criminal as well as the occasional murderer—I ended up having to kill another guy when I discovered he was raping his little sister and I got so mad, I just drained him.

It’s weird. I exude confidence—I know I do from other people’s reactions to me, and it’s not like I’m unaware of how well I can take care of myself. But my internal life’s such a mess that sometimes I can’t figure out how I make it through the day with my mind still in one piece. I feel like such a loser.

I have this to look forward to forever?

Cassie’s the only one who picks up on it.

“What’s the matter?” she asks when I stop by for a visit during her Christmas holidays.

“Nothing,” I tell her.

“Right. That’s why you’re so mopey whenever I see you.” She doesn’t look at me for a moment. When she does look back, she has this little wrinkle between her eyes. “It’s because of me, isn’t it? Because I didn’t want to become a…to be like…”

“Me,” I say, filling in for her. “A monster.”

“You’re not a monster.”

“So what am I? Nothing anybody else’d ever choose to be.”

“You didn’t choose to be it either,” she says.

“No kidding. And I don’t blame you. Who’d ever
want
to be like this?”

She doesn’t have an answer and neither do I.

* * *

Then one frosty January evening I’m walking home from the coffee shop and I see her sitting at a window table of the Royal Oak. I stop and look at her through the glass, struck again by how gorgeous she is, how no one else seems to be aware of it, of her. I go inside when she beckons to me. Today she’s casual chic: jeans, a black cotton sweater, cowboy boots. Like me, she probably doesn’t feel the cold anymore, but she has a winter coat draped over the back of her chair. There’s a pint glass in front of her, half full of amber beer.

“Have a seat,” she says, indicating the empty chair across from her.

I do. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I don’t know where to look. I want to stare at her. I want to pretend I’m cool, that this is no big deal. But it is.

“I’ve been looking for you,” I finally say.

“Have you now.”

I nod. Ignoring the hint of amusement in her eyes, I start to ask, “I need to know—”

“No, don’t tell me,” she says, interrupting. “Let me guess. First you tried to turn…oh, your best friend, or maybe a brother or a sister, and they turned you down and made you feel like a monster even though you only feed on the wicked. But somehow, even that doesn’t feel right anymore. So now you want to end it all. Or at least get an explanation as to why I turned you.” I find myself nodding.

“We all go through this,” she says. “But sooner or later—if we survive—we learn to leave all the old ties behind: friends, family, ideas of right and wrong. We become what we are meant to be. Predators.”

I think of how I wanted to turn Cassie and start to feel a little sick. Up until this moment, her refusing to be turned had seemed such a personal blow. Now I’m just grateful that of the two of us, she, at least, had some common sense. Bad enough that one of us is a monster.

“What if I don’t want to be a predator?” I ask.

The woman shrugs. “Then you die.”

“I thought we couldn’t die.”

“To all intents and purposes,” she says. “But we’re not invincible. Yes, we heal fast, but it’s genetic healing. We can deal with illnesses and broken bones, torn tissues and birth defects. But if a car hits us, if we take a bullet or a stake in the heart or head, if we’re hurt in such a way that our accelerated healing faculties don’t have the chance to help us, we can still die. We don’t need Van Helsings or chipper cheerleaders in short skirts to do us in. Crossing the street at the wrong time can be just as effective.”

“Why did you turn me?”

“Why not?”

All I can do is stare at her.

“Oh, don’t take it so dramatically,” she says. “I know you’d like a better reason than that—how I saw something special in you, how you have some destiny. But the truth is, it was for my own amusement.”

“So it was just a…whim.”

“You need to stop being so serious about everything,” she tells me. “We’re a different species. The old rules don’t apply to us.”

“So you just do whatever you want?”

She smiles, a predatory smile. “If I can get away with it.”

“I’m not going to be like that.”

“Of course you won’t,” she says. “You’re different. You’re special.”

I shake my head. “No, I’m just stronger. I’m going to hold on to my ideals.”

“Tell me that again in a hundred years,” she says. “Tell me how strong you feel when anything you ever cared about, when everybody you love is long dead and gone.”

I get up to leave, to walk out on her, but she beats me to it. She stands over me, and touches my hair with her long cool fingers. For a moment I imagine I see a kind of tenderness in her eyes, but then the mockery is back.

“You’ll see,” she says.

I stay at the table and watch her step outside. Watch her back as she walks on up Bank Street. Watch until she’s long gone and there are only strangers passing by the windows of the Royal Oak.

The thing that scares me the most is that maybe she’s right.

I realize leaving home wasn’t the answer. I’m still too close to the people I love. I have to go a lot farther than I have so far. I have to keep moving and not make friends. Forget I have family. If I don’t have to watch the people I love age and die, then maybe I won’t become as cynical and bitter as the woman who made me what I am.

But the more I think of it, the more I feel that I’d be a lot better off just dying for real.

Four: Cassandra

In the end, I did it for Apples, though she doesn’t know that. I don’t think I can ever tell her that. She thinks I did it to be able to run and breathe and be as normal as an undead person can be. But I could see how being what she is and all alone was tearing her apart and I started to think, who do I love the best in the world? Who’s always been there for me? Who stayed in with her weak kid sister when she could have been out having fun? Who never complained about taking me anywhere? Who always,
genuinely
enjoyed the time she spent with me?

She never said anything to me about what she was going through, but I could see the loneliness tearing at her and I couldn’t let her be on her own anymore. I started to get scared that she might take off for good, or do something to herself, and how could I live with that?

Besides, maybe this
is
my destiny. Maybe with our enhanced abilities we can be some kind of dynamic duo superhero team, out rescuing the world, or at least little human pieces of the world.

The funny thing is, when I told her I wanted her to turn me, she was the one who argued against it. But I wouldn’t take no and she finally gave in. And it’s not so bad. Even the blood-sucking’s not so bad, though I do miss eating and drinking. I guess the worst part was those three days I was dead.

You’re aware, but not aware, floating in some kind of goopy muck that feels like it’s made up of all the bad things people have ever done or thought.

But you get over it.

What’s my fear? Fuzzy animal slippers. I used to adore them, back when I was alive. Even at sixteen years old, I was still wearing them around the house. Now I break into a cold sweat just thinking about them.

Pretty lame, huh? But I guess it’s a better weakness than some you can have. Because, really. How often do you unexpectedly run into someone wearing fuzzy animal slippers?

I still have this idea that we should turn Mom and Dad, too, but I’m going to wait awhile before I bring it up again. I think I understand Apples’s nervousness better after she told me what she learned the last time she saw the woman who turned her. I don’t think it’s that she doesn’t love our parents. She’s just nervous that they won’t make the transition well. That they’ll be more like the woman than us.

“Let’s give it a year or two,” she said, “till we see how we do ourselves.”

Mom and Dad sure weren’t happy about me moving out and into Apples’s apartment. I wish I could at least tell them that I’m not sick anymore, but I’m kind of stuck having a secret identity whenever we go back home for a visit. I have to carry around my puffer and pretend to use it. I have to put the leg brace on again, though we had to adjust it since my leg’s all healed.

What’s going to happen to us? I don’t know. I just know that we’ll be together. Always. And I guess, for now, that’s enough.

Pal o’ Mine

1

Gina always believed there was magic in the world. “But it doesn’t work the way it does in fairy tales,” she told me. “It doesn’t save us. We have to save ourselves.”

2

One of the things I keep coming back to when I think of Gina is walking down Yoors Street on a cold, snowy Christmas Eve during our last year of high school. We were out Christmas shopping. I’d been finished and had my presents all wrapped during the first week of December, but Gina had waited for the last minute as usual, which was why we were out braving the storm that afternoon.

I was wrapped in as many layers of clothes as I could fit under my overcoat and looked about twice my size, but Gina was just scuffling along beside me in her usual cowboy boots and jeans, a floppy felt hat pressing down her dark curls and her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her pea jacket. She simply didn’t pay any attention to the cold. Gina was good at that: ignoring inconveniences, or things she wasn’t particularly interested in dealing with, much the way—I was eventually forced to admit—that I’d taught myself to ignore the dark current that was always present, running just under the surface of her exuberantly good moods.

“You know what I like best about the city?” she asked as we waited for the light to change where Yoors crosses Bunnett.

I shook my head.

“Looking up. There’s a whole other world living up there.”

I followed her gaze and at first I didn’t know what she was going on about. I looked through breaks in the gusts of snow that billowed around us, but couldn’t detect anything out of the ordinary. I saw only rooftops and chimneys, multi-coloured Christmas decorations and the black strands of cable that ran in sagging geometric lines from the power poles to the buildings.

“What’re you talking about?” I asked.

“The ’goyles,” Gina said.

I gave her a blank look, no closer to understanding what she was talking about than I’d been before.

“The gargoyles, Sue,” she repeated patiently. “Almost every building in this part of the city has got them, perched up there by the rooflines, looking down on us.”

Once she’d pointed them out to me, I found it hard to believe that I’d never noticed them before. On that corner alone there were at least a half-dozen grotesque examples. I saw one in the archway keystone of the Annaheim Building directly across the street—a leering monstrous face, part lion, part bat, part man. Higher up, and all around, other nightmare faces peered down at us, from the corners of buildings, hidden in the frieze and cornice designs, cunningly nestled in corner brackets and the stone roof cresting. Every building had them.
Every
building.

Their presence shocked me. It’s not that I was unaware of their existence—after all, I was planning on architecture as a major in college; it’s just that if someone had mentioned gargoyles to me before that day, I would have automatically thought of the cathedrals and castles of Europe—not ordinary office buildings in Newford.

“I can’t believe I never noticed them before,” I told her.

“There are people who live their whole lives here and never see them,” Gina said.

“How’s that possible?”

Gina smiled. “It’s because of where they are—looking down at us from just above our normal sightline. People in the city hardly ever look up.”

“But still…”

“I know. It’s something, isn’t it? It really is a whole different world. Imagine being able to live your entire life in the middle of the city and never be noticed by anybody.”

“Like a baglady,” I said.

Gina nodded. “Sort of. Except people wouldn’t ignore you because you’re some pathetic street person that they want to avoid. They’d ignore you because they simply couldn’t
see
you.”

That thought gave me a creepy feeling and I couldn’t suppress a shiver, but I could tell that Gina was intrigued with the idea. She was staring at that one gargoyle, above the entrance to the Annaheim Building.

“You really like those things, don’t you?” I said.

Gina turned to look at me, an expression I couldn’t read sitting in the back of her eyes.

“I wish I lived in their world,” she told me.

She held my gaze with that strange look in her eyes for a long heartbeat. Then the light changed and she laughed, breaking the mood. Slipping her arm in mine, she started us off across the street to finish her Christmas shopping.