“Henry!”
I wake up with a start not knowing for an instant where the hell I am, what night it is. I was having a vivid dream about Sara, my love Sara, dancing in front of me, her long red hair moving back and forth back and forth whipping her cheeks like flames caught by some slow-motion camera, her eyes pools of untempered devotion. Once-upon-a-time, soon after we met, we went to some cavernous techno club. In search of prey. I remember Sara dancing like that then, all eyes upon her as she shook her butt and hips in time to apocalyptic machine music.
Springes to catch woodcocks…
“Henry…”
Jill Porsino’s face comes into focus above me now, as I shake the sleep fuzz and the remnants of that wonderful dream away like morning fog. And I remember exactly where I am. We are sleeping together in her dead brother’s bed once again. It is (sadly) our very last night together.
She’s naked and straddling my body. Almost like Charles Robinson Serling did the night he tried to finish me high high atop that fiberglass and metal husk.
“Jill…?” I mutter, rubbing my bleary eyes and wondering what the fuck is up. Don’t hear any suburban dogs right now, blessedly. But the birds are twittering and blathering, laying siege to the house. Must be dawn or very close…
Does she wanna fuck? We already did that a few hours ago, if memory serves…
“What’s up?” I ask.
She stares down at me, her bony thighs squeezing my blanketed body, her black eyes boring into mine with such fearful intensity I feel that she might be able, with that gaze, to turn this vamp to ash. Like one strong dagger of sunlight might.
I am vividly aware right now of the grey strands that run through her hair. Of those two concave gullies of flesh that mar her throat. She’s still beautiful. But right now she looks about sixty years old. And tired. So tired…
“Henry…please…” she gasps, her hands now pressing down hard on my stolid chest. “I don’t…don’t wanna go. Please…turn me Henry. Turn me into a vampire.”
“Wha…?” I reply. I am fully awake now, staring up into her eyes.
“I don’t wanna die, Henry…I don’t wanna die…I don’t wanna die…” she wails. Tears materialize from those black hole eyes and start to pour down her glossy cheeks. Drip drip down into my chest hairs.
“Please…make me a vampire!”
Well…I think. As she continues to rain tears. Why the fuck not? I was so willing to do the same for Daniel Lovelace only a few short days before. Save him from stupid death.
Why not do the same for Jill?
“Jill…” I start to say, ready to show my canines and make it so. And then, my eyes break from hers for a brief second and I glance over at that oak dresser with its absurd shrine to her brother. His little funeral card, still propped up against the black belly of three-fingered Mickey his stupid eyes still going back and forth back and forth scouring ephemeral time.
No…no…NOT my place, I think. The common doom is to die,
Or is it the common joy?
I return Jill’s desperate, imploring gaze.
“I can’t Jill. I just…can’t,” I say.
She stares down at me, shaking her head. Sending more bullets of tears down.
And then she collapses, a little girl once again. Falls against my dead chest.