The Old

TWO

AND

THE

MORNINGS

AFTER

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many formed and changing.

-The Red Book

“DOES ANYONE KNOW?” Chris  wondered.

 “Not really,” said Lewis. “I told a few. Only my closest friends. Erika, yes. But the funny thing is it seems to have no effect, or either they don’t understand.”

 “Or don’t want to.”

 “I think in the end they just think it’s like being a teenaged Wiccan, or a pagan, or hugging trees. There isn’t really much of a way of explaining it. Unless you see it. And you can’t really show it. I’ve only brought it up once. Maybe twice, but it’s the funniest thing, and not really something to complain about,” Lewis said, almost losing his cigarette as they sat on the floor in the living room in rumpled clothes, “the longer I am what I am the more there is a difference between myself and other people, between what I’m seeing and what they see, between even what I care about and what they care about.”

 “The books and the TV shows are all wrong,” Chris said.

“You know, where the mortal sees the magic and freaks out, and then the witch or the wizard waves a wand and makes them forget. That’s not the way it works. People only want to see so much. People are nearly incapable of comprehending what they don’t want to, and their minds are dull. Magic and wonder slide off people’s brains. That’s why you can be utterly honest with your friends and everything slides away from them. If they are not, and this is sort of an awful word, magical, they won’t comprehend it. In fact, in this day and age they’ll be too stupid to understand it, or most things. It will slide off their brains like water going down a rubber ball. There is no enchantment necessary.”

 “Yes,” Lewis realized. “Yes, that’s right.”

 “She’s a nice girl, your Erika,” Chris  said. “Truly kind. Kinder than most, and in her own way more open than most. But…she’s limited. There is a gulf between what we are and what she is.”

 “What we are?”

 “Creatures of the borderworld, of the otherworld. And we both crossed into it at one point in time, and having crossed into it, can never really cross back. That’s why we understood each other. That’s why you knew what I was and, in some way, I knew what you were. But we weren’t afraid. Not really. Something told me to get up last night and go searching, and it wasn’t the blood hunger. It was a different hunger. It was… Well,” Chris  smiled a little and he caught his cigarette before the long tail of ash fell on the carpet. “It was hope, I suppose. A dark kind of hope.”

 “What I don’t understand, still,” Lewis said, “is why… Why no one sees? Sees anything.”

 “The episodes of Bewitched, the Harry Potter movies. All the silly things that make people think they know what magic is. The dulling of the senses in every direction. Those without power who speak of it all the time, and eyes turned in the wrong direction. No one pays attention to houngans and the shaman or the nuathals. They all pay attention to the dippy white chick with the black glasses and magenta hair who tells you about her coven. And so people’s minds can no longer process what you are. And believe it or not, this is part of the enchantment. I believe your people have a phrase, that the fifth point of the star is—”

 “Secrecy.”

 “Yes,” Chris  said.

 “But how do you know so much about me?” Lewis said.

 “Lewis,” Chris said, “I don’t know a thing about you. I’m just getting to know you. I mean, I know the most important things about you. That I feel tied to you. That when I try to think about last night—and I don’t mean just the sex—I can’t think straight or talk about it without getting emotional. I can’t think about us being out on the beach without—” Chris said, breaking into a smile—“breaking into a smile. And… the love. All of that… I can’t think of that without going red, which I’m sure my face is right now. And I’m not usually emotional, but you make me feel emotional, alright.”

 Lewis nodded.

 “Then I have questions for you.”

 “Ask me anything!” Chris said.

 “I don’t really know what to ask.”

Lewis was quiet a moment. “I’m not going to ask you if you kill people because I think that would be stupid. I think a vampire is a vampire and pretending you glisten in the day time and drink berry juice is foolish. I… don’t need to imagine people as something different or more pleasant than I wish they were. But… I don’t even know what you are. Like, you clearly don’t sleep in a coffin. And you clearly have a heartbeat, and I haven’t checked the whole reflection bit, but you do have a shadow so… I don’t know what’s true and what’s not.”

 “Then how did you know what I was?”

 “You were like me, but not like me, and when I asked myself what you were, it came back to me that you were human, but not human. Like me but not like me, once dead, but now alive. But not now alive as I am. I could not rightly phrase it. I couldn’t dare to phrase it. Until you asked me how long I had been a witch. Then it was as if you opened me up to ask you.”

 Chris  nodded, and his blond hair fell a little in his face, now that it was no longer gelled. He reached into his pocket, and instead of the shades pulled on brass rimmed spectacles. He didn’t look vampiric at all.

 “Firstly, I have a heartbeat because, as you said, I’m not dead. I have died, but I’m not dead. We could say undead, and that’s kind of cute, but it’s stupid. If you’re a person walking around you need blood circulating in your system so…” Chris shrugged, “heartbeat.

 “You’re right. I do kill. I don’t kill every night or even most nights. As we get older we get stronger, more like regular humans except immortal which doesn’t make us regular at all. I can eat and drink, like to do it in fact, go to the bathroom, all that good stuff. But the blood is necessary and… We can get into that later.  Every... vampire belongs to a clan. Well, most belong to clans, and clans have rules. My clan has the rule that you can only kill those who are about to endanger others, who are about to kill. Which sounds nice, but as you can see there is grey area in it. I’m not going to lie. Other clans have other rules, rules that are too grey for my tastes. But we all seem to keep each other in check.

 “Oh… and I have only slept in a coffin a few times and in three hundred years you may need to sleep in the occasional coffin, but for me it’s usually a bed.”

 And then Chris said, “But you knew what I was. All last night you knew what I was. When we were on the pier and I was saying that nonsense about throwing you off the pier, when we were going back to your place on the El… When you let me into your home, into your bed. When were… together. You knew what I was.”

 “Yes,” Lewis said. “I suppose I did.”

 “And you trusted me. Though, I could have killed you.”

 “I think any time you let a man into your house he could kill you. But you have to trust, don’t you? And then, when you choose to love someone, even if it’s only for the night, you’re trusting them, and I just trusted you. I trusted you enough to put my life in your hands.”

 Lewis shook his head. “It wasn’t really about what you were or who you were. I wanted to give myself to you. I… I wanted us to give ourselves to each other. I know that sounds like something out of a novel, but… That’s what I wanted. That’s what I think we had.”

 “Me too,” Chris  said. And then he said, “ What else do you want to know?”

 “Oh,” Lewis held out his hands. “Everything, I suppose. But… there is something you aren’t telling me. Something you’re being polite about and not telling me. And you should.”

 “We don’t call ourselves vampires.”

 “Of course not. Even when I said it I thought… it’s like when polite people call me African American and I’m just dying to scream out, I’m Black. It’s like… what is the right name?”

 Chris had chuckled over that, but he said, his hands now playing with his long feet, “Sometimes we are called the Aímatos Pótis, and sometimes the Permalum Bibit Sanguinem or in the north the Blut-Trinker, but it all means the same.”

 “Blood Drinker.”

 Chris  nodded.

 “Vertically challenged people are short. Intellectually impaired people are retarded, African Americans are Black and Caucasians are white and vampires are blood drinkers.”

 “Yes,” Chris  said, “simplicity is always the best thing.”  

The sun was high in the sky when Lewis woke up again. He was holding Chris whose breathing rose and fell gently. Lewis moved from the heat of the bed and began to dress himself, then went into the kitchen to get the last of the coffee, almost burned now. The light in the apartment was grey because the windows faced east into the courtyard and the sun was past them by now. On the floor before the table which Chris had rightly assessed was an altar, Lewis sat with a cup of coffee and lit one candle. He closed his eyes and breathed, giving himself to the moment, to the altar, to the gods, hearing Chris snore faintly.

 His phone was with him, he looked at it. Vampires—blood-drinkers—were naturally nocturnal. Chris had confirmed that. It was about noon which would make this past midnight for him. Assumedly, the same way that Lewis tended to keep late hours, a vampire might stay up till three in the afternoon, maybe four or even five. Go to bed, get up at eleven or twelve, even not be nocturnal at all. He would see. Right now all that passed from Lewis’s mind, and he was just comforted by someone else here, by the gentle breathing of the man in the next room who would sleep through the day and leave him his solitude. He was here now and not going to go away,  and there would be all sorts of things to work out between the two of them, but the main thing had been worked out.

 As Lewis put down the coffee and began to clean off the altar, and then to consecrate the water, and next the salt, and now the fire, his mind briefly left the opening prayers, and he remembered lying in Chris’s arms after the second time they’d made love, and Chris saying, because he thought Lewis was asleep and couldn’t hear, “I’m so glad you’re back.”

 He hadn’t said anything then, and right now, as he took the slender wand from beside the brass candlesticks, and began to trace the first of the five pointed stars, he put that out of his mind and continued with the ritual which was after all, a witch’s true business.