With fangs bared and a wild look in his blood red eyes, Archie Greenway propelled himself from his favorite recliner with as much force as he could muster.
Traveling all of two feet, he landed face down on the floor. His nose bloodied, his upper fangs driven into his lower lip, he had fallen and could not get up.
“My God, Archie!” his caregiver, Augusta, shrieked. “Are you all right?”
Her first instinct was to run to his aid, but the old man’s insane babbling caused her to remain motionless.
Slowly, painfully, he separated fang from lip, then managed to shout in a dry, thin voice, “Come here, woman! Your overlord of the underworld commands it! Kneel before me! Worship me! Hey, come on, let me suck your blood! Oh, Augusta! I think I broke a hip.”
Augusta remained standing in the kitchen doorway. “Overlord of the underworld? What are you talking about? Archie, you look like you’re bleeding.”
“Oh, I must have bit my lip. Goddamn fangs. Five hundred years a vampire, but I just can’t get used to them.”
“Fangs? You don’t have fangs.” Augusta came closer to Archie, leaning over to get a better look at his mouth. “Huh. Your teeth do seem to look different. The ones up front are kind of pointy, but I wouldn’t call them fangs. Too small. I think fangs are supposed to be bigger.”
“I never had any complaints about my fang size before.” He looked up at her with tired, watery eyes.“You have great boobs. Let me touch them before I die.”
She straightened up. “You’re not touching anything. And you’re not going to die. At least, I don’t think you are. I suppose we need to get you up off the floor.”
“Just let me nuzzle my head in between them, then I can pass on to the next life a happy man.”
“Oh, brother, you really are a drama queen. A horny drama queen.” She looked him up and down. “Does anything hurt? Do you honestly think your hip is broken?”
“No, there’s nothing broken but my pride. My ancient, vampire pride.”
She peered with pity at the bag of old bones in her charge. “Yeah, you have to wonder what Dracula would say about you taking a belly flop on the living room floor.”
“Dracula. What a load of hooey. Never existed, at least not like that Hungarian hambone who played him in the movies.”
“I always thought Bela Lugosi made a good Dracula.”
“He was no better than a common junkie.” As quickly as it arrived, his temper disappeared. He asked meekly, “Could you maybe help me up?”
Augusta pondered for a moment. “I guess. Can’t just leave you there in a heap. Well, I could, but that would be against my employer’s rules. Might be against the law, too. Then again...”
“Would you just help me up please?”
“Oh, all right, you big baby.” Within a minute she had Archie on his feet. Facing each other, he swayed until his body was resting against Augusta’s, his arms lightly wrapping around hers, his hands settling on the small of her back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked him.
“I’m overpowering you,” he replied.
“Feels more like you’re collapsing,” she said as she gave him a gentle shove. Slowly moving through the air, he plopped down on his recliner.
“There, feels better to sit down, doesn’t it?”
“No. I felt much better with my arms around you.” Looking and feeling weak, he slumped in his seat. “It’s hell to get old, even for an immortal. Or a semi-immortal.”
Ignoring him, Augusta took a chair from the dining room table and sat in front of Archie. She looked him over with great curiosity. “Your teeth really did get sharper. How did you manage that?”
“I told you, I’m a vampire. In the old days, in my prime, I would have swept you into my arms, thrown you down on the bed, had my way with you. Then I would have sunk my teeth into your neck and we both would have eternal life.”
“Yeah, eternal life drinking other people’s blood.”
“Well, you can’t drink your own blood. That’s like drinking your own urine. It’s no good for you. Make you sick.”
“That’s not what I meant. Drinking blood sounds icky. It would be like going through life having to eat food you don’t enjoy, like liver and onions.”
“Oh, I used to love liver and onions. Can’t find it at restaurants anymore. Some world we’re living in.”
“Hold on. If you’re a vampire, why do you need to eat normal human food? I thought you just drank blood and that was it.”
“No, no. More myths. We can eat anything we want. Pancakes smothered in butter, juicy burgers, goulash. Does anyone make goulash anymore?”
Augusta was becoming intrigued. “So I could still eat things like kielbasa and enjoy it?”
“Oh, honey, I’ve got a kielbasa for you.”
“You’re a disgusting old man, you know that?”
“I’m not sure my kielbasa works anymore, anyway,” he said resignedly. “Of course, if you handle my sausage properly, you never know what might happen.”
“What might happen is that I’m going to throw you back down on the floor and leave you there.”
“All right, okay, I’ll behave myself. Seriously, Augusta, the things I’ve seen. I was in Florida when Apollo 13 took off. I was driving along, people were pulled off to the side of the road, standing by their cars, looking up at the sky. There it was. It had just launched, I could see the flames, the exhaust. It was beautiful. I always thought I had brought it bad luck though. You know, they were the ones that had the problem.”
“Yeah, I saw the movie.”
“Uh-huh. I was in Jersey when the Hindenburg crashed. I had never seen one of those zeppelins land, so when I read in the paper it was going to land at Lakehurst, I had a friend take me over and we watched it come. Scared the crap out of us when it caught fire. Ran for our lives.”
“Sounds to me like you’re bad luck.”
“Hmm, does seem like it, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have stayed home more.”
Augusta looked closely at his mouth. “Looks like your fangs have gone away.”
“Yes, they only appear when it’s feasting time.”
“Is that what you call it, ‘feasting time’? Nice.”
“We have to call it something. When a vampire transforms a normal - that’s what we call you non-vampires - we refer to it as feasting. Because that’s what it is. We’re replenishing our strength, nourishing our bodies, our souls, our minds.”
“You have a soul, Archie?”
“Very funny. Of course I do. Every living thing has a soul. And when a vampire puts the bite on a person, we absorb some of their soul, and vice-versa. The new vampire gets a little bit of the old. Same thing with the mind. The old gets an infusion of the new vampire’s knowledge, and the new gets some of the old vampire’s intelligence. Not all of it. In some cases, such as with a centuries old creature like myself, all the accumulated knowledge would be overwhelming. The newly transformed humans head would explode, or something like that.”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got this all pretty well figured out.”
“Well, I have been around a while, my dear.”
She leaned back in her chair. “So let’s say I’m a vampire and I’m living the life eternal. How do I take care of myself? I still have bills to pay. I don’t want to work as a caregiver forever.”
He looked at her incredulously. “Have you taken a look in the mirror? You’re a hot mama. You get yourself one of those parents, a sweetened father...”
“You mean a sugar daddy?”
“Yeah, whatever. Get one of those things, let him take care of you, and when he kicks the bucket from old age, you find yourself another one. Vampires age at a fraction of the rate normals do. You just have to keep finding someone to feast on once in a while, to stay youthful and refreshed. It doesn’t even have to be a person. Some of us go for animals instead, leaving humans out of the equation entirely. Of course, the animals simply die after being bitten, rather than turn into vampires. I’m not sure PETA would approve, but what do they know? Damn hippies.”
“Animals? You mean, like squirrels? I hate squirrels.”
“So do I! God’s most useless creature, other than used car salesmen. Bought a used Chevy Impala once. After a week, I couldn’t get the car to go in reverse. Went and found that sales guy, got my money back. They never did find his body.” Archie winked at her.
What Archie was telling her gave Augusta pause. She reflected on her life. Born in Chicago, she was raised in a tiny apartment above a dive bar on Damen Avenue. In fact, her father wanted to call her Damen. Her mother informed him that Damen was a masculine name, so they both agreed that nearby Augusta Boulevard would be her namesake. Only the influence of the priest performing the baptism kept her middle name from being Boulevard. There were no childhood beatings, nor any alcohol or drug abuse in the family, just a grinding poverty brought on by having a stay at home mom minding seven children and a nearly illiterate father slaving away as a grammar school janitor. Augusta had worked hard since dropping out of high school, helped support the family, but with dead parents and siblings scattered to the four corners of the globe, she had no one but herself to worry about now. A never ending series of lifetimes being cared for by rich men had a certain appeal for her. Augusta didn’t fully place her faith in Archie’s tales of vampires, but she didn’t entirely disbelieve him either. She was willing to take a chance.
“All right, let’s do this,” she told him emphatically.
“You mean sex?”
“Not by any stretch of the imagination do I mean sex. The vampire thing. Let’s change me.”
Archie was surprised. This was the first time in decades he had successfully persuaded a woman to do something he asked of her. “Are you sure? There’s no turning back, you know. Once you’re in the club, you’re in for life. Like being in the Mafia, but with a better retirement plan. You know, I knew Lucky Luciano. He was one of us.”
“Yeah, okay, let’s focus on me here.”
“Sorry.”
“So how do we do this?”
He looked around the house. “Well, let’s see. I’ll need to be on top of you.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“It’ll be easier on both of us that way. Standing would take too much out of me. It’s a lot of stress on the body of both vampire and normal when someone gets transformed. I promise to be a total gentleman.”
Augusta rolled her eyes. “That’ll be the day.”
“I helped write that song.”
“You did not! Come on, let’s get this thing over with.” Augusta grabbed the old fellow by his hands, pulled him out of his chair, and led him into the bedroom. She threw the covers onto the floor and lay down on her back. She lowered the collar of her shirt a to provide easy access to her jugular. “Do you think you can get on top of me without breaking any bones? Or hurting me for that matter?”
“Don’t you worry, little missy, this is going to be great.”
Slowly, with much grunting and creaking of joints, Archie managed to get into bed. Gingerly, he placed his body over Augusta’s. There was a faint smell of stale coffee about him.
“Give me a second, I need to get in the mood, if you’ll pardon the expression,” he told her.
“Couldn’t you have gotten in the mood before you got on top of me?”
“Quiet!” He pictured in his mind some of the women in his life. There had been Southern belles, mistresses of their plantations with pale skin that never saw sunlight and light blue veins that ran along the sides of their necks. Of course, the mistresses had slaves, dark skin covered in sweat from daylong toils, strong of body, full of fight until the end. There were European queens and princesses and ladies in waiting, small town schoolmarms and big city whores, young girls lusting for their first thrill and old women longing for a final fling.
Finally, Archie felt his blood begin to boil. His teeth sharpened. “It will only hurt at first, then there won’t be any pain,” he whispered to her. Like a master craftsman, he punctured her skin in exactly the right spot. “I’ve still got it,” he mumbled, as it was difficult to suck blood and speak coherently at the same time.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothum,” he replied.
Her blood flowed into his mouth. He was right, she thought, the pain was brief, then the area he was biting went numb. She had the strange sensation of being under his control.
The transformation was taking longer than she had anticipated. At some point she noticed he was no longer drinking. The punctures at her neck felt as if they were clotting. He had been breathing heavily, but it had eased, then seemed to stop altogether.
She whispered in his ear. “Archie?” No response. She got a hand between their two bodies, placed it in the middle of his chest. There was no heartbeat.
“Shit!” she said loudly. Archie had died on her, literally.
She needed to get his body off of hers. First, though, she needed to remove his teeth from her neck. She placed a hand on either side of his head and decided to pry it off quickly, thinking that would be less painful, like swiftly ripping off a bandage. His teeth didn’t want to come out. She wiggled his head a little, gave it a good pull, and out they glided. Once that was done, she pushed his body off, then laid him out on the bed, making him appear as natural as possible, as if he had been taking a nap. Picking the covers from the floor, she flung them over him, then called an ambulance. She would tell them he had been napping, and that she had dialed 911 when he wouldn’t get up and was unresponsive. By the time the paramedics arrived, Augusta was wearing a fashionable scarf around her neck and a look of mourning on her face.
Traveling all of two feet, he landed face down on the floor. His nose bloodied, his upper fangs driven into his lower lip, he had fallen and could not get up.
“My God, Archie!” his caregiver, Augusta, shrieked. “Are you all right?”
Her first instinct was to run to his aid, but the old man’s insane babbling caused her to remain motionless.
Slowly, painfully, he separated fang from lip, then managed to shout in a dry, thin voice, “Come here, woman! Your overlord of the underworld commands it! Kneel before me! Worship me! Hey, come on, let me suck your blood! Oh, Augusta! I think I broke a hip.”
Augusta remained standing in the kitchen doorway. “Overlord of the underworld? What are you talking about? Archie, you look like you’re bleeding.”
“Oh, I must have bit my lip. Goddamn fangs. Five hundred years a vampire, but I just can’t get used to them.”
“Fangs? You don’t have fangs.” Augusta came closer to Archie, leaning over to get a better look at his mouth. “Huh. Your teeth do seem to look different. The ones up front are kind of pointy, but I wouldn’t call them fangs. Too small. I think fangs are supposed to be bigger.”
“I never had any complaints about my fang size before.” He looked up at her with tired, watery eyes.“You have great boobs. Let me touch them before I die.”
She straightened up. “You’re not touching anything. And you’re not going to die. At least, I don’t think you are. I suppose we need to get you up off the floor.”
“Just let me nuzzle my head in between them, then I can pass on to the next life a happy man.”
“Oh, brother, you really are a drama queen. A horny drama queen.” She looked him up and down. “Does anything hurt? Do you honestly think your hip is broken?”
“No, there’s nothing broken but my pride. My ancient, vampire pride.”
She peered with pity at the bag of old bones in her charge. “Yeah, you have to wonder what Dracula would say about you taking a belly flop on the living room floor.”
“Dracula. What a load of hooey. Never existed, at least not like that Hungarian hambone who played him in the movies.”
“I always thought Bela Lugosi made a good Dracula.”
“He was no better than a common junkie.” As quickly as it arrived, his temper disappeared. He asked meekly, “Could you maybe help me up?”
Augusta pondered for a moment. “I guess. Can’t just leave you there in a heap. Well, I could, but that would be against my employer’s rules. Might be against the law, too. Then again...”
“Would you just help me up please?”
“Oh, all right, you big baby.” Within a minute she had Archie on his feet. Facing each other, he swayed until his body was resting against Augusta’s, his arms lightly wrapping around hers, his hands settling on the small of her back.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked him.
“I’m overpowering you,” he replied.
“Feels more like you’re collapsing,” she said as she gave him a gentle shove. Slowly moving through the air, he plopped down on his recliner.
“There, feels better to sit down, doesn’t it?”
“No. I felt much better with my arms around you.” Looking and feeling weak, he slumped in his seat. “It’s hell to get old, even for an immortal. Or a semi-immortal.”
Ignoring him, Augusta took a chair from the dining room table and sat in front of Archie. She looked him over with great curiosity. “Your teeth really did get sharper. How did you manage that?”
“I told you, I’m a vampire. In the old days, in my prime, I would have swept you into my arms, thrown you down on the bed, had my way with you. Then I would have sunk my teeth into your neck and we both would have eternal life.”
“Yeah, eternal life drinking other people’s blood.”
“Well, you can’t drink your own blood. That’s like drinking your own urine. It’s no good for you. Make you sick.”
“That’s not what I meant. Drinking blood sounds icky. It would be like going through life having to eat food you don’t enjoy, like liver and onions.”
“Oh, I used to love liver and onions. Can’t find it at restaurants anymore. Some world we’re living in.”
“Hold on. If you’re a vampire, why do you need to eat normal human food? I thought you just drank blood and that was it.”
“No, no. More myths. We can eat anything we want. Pancakes smothered in butter, juicy burgers, goulash. Does anyone make goulash anymore?”
Augusta was becoming intrigued. “So I could still eat things like kielbasa and enjoy it?”
“Oh, honey, I’ve got a kielbasa for you.”
“You’re a disgusting old man, you know that?”
“I’m not sure my kielbasa works anymore, anyway,” he said resignedly. “Of course, if you handle my sausage properly, you never know what might happen.”
“What might happen is that I’m going to throw you back down on the floor and leave you there.”
“All right, okay, I’ll behave myself. Seriously, Augusta, the things I’ve seen. I was in Florida when Apollo 13 took off. I was driving along, people were pulled off to the side of the road, standing by their cars, looking up at the sky. There it was. It had just launched, I could see the flames, the exhaust. It was beautiful. I always thought I had brought it bad luck though. You know, they were the ones that had the problem.”
“Yeah, I saw the movie.”
“Uh-huh. I was in Jersey when the Hindenburg crashed. I had never seen one of those zeppelins land, so when I read in the paper it was going to land at Lakehurst, I had a friend take me over and we watched it come. Scared the crap out of us when it caught fire. Ran for our lives.”
“Sounds to me like you’re bad luck.”
“Hmm, does seem like it, doesn’t it? Maybe I should have stayed home more.”
Augusta looked closely at his mouth. “Looks like your fangs have gone away.”
“Yes, they only appear when it’s feasting time.”
“Is that what you call it, ‘feasting time’? Nice.”
“We have to call it something. When a vampire transforms a normal - that’s what we call you non-vampires - we refer to it as feasting. Because that’s what it is. We’re replenishing our strength, nourishing our bodies, our souls, our minds.”
“You have a soul, Archie?”
“Very funny. Of course I do. Every living thing has a soul. And when a vampire puts the bite on a person, we absorb some of their soul, and vice-versa. The new vampire gets a little bit of the old. Same thing with the mind. The old gets an infusion of the new vampire’s knowledge, and the new gets some of the old vampire’s intelligence. Not all of it. In some cases, such as with a centuries old creature like myself, all the accumulated knowledge would be overwhelming. The newly transformed humans head would explode, or something like that.”
“Uh-huh. You’ve got this all pretty well figured out.”
“Well, I have been around a while, my dear.”
She leaned back in her chair. “So let’s say I’m a vampire and I’m living the life eternal. How do I take care of myself? I still have bills to pay. I don’t want to work as a caregiver forever.”
He looked at her incredulously. “Have you taken a look in the mirror? You’re a hot mama. You get yourself one of those parents, a sweetened father...”
“You mean a sugar daddy?”
“Yeah, whatever. Get one of those things, let him take care of you, and when he kicks the bucket from old age, you find yourself another one. Vampires age at a fraction of the rate normals do. You just have to keep finding someone to feast on once in a while, to stay youthful and refreshed. It doesn’t even have to be a person. Some of us go for animals instead, leaving humans out of the equation entirely. Of course, the animals simply die after being bitten, rather than turn into vampires. I’m not sure PETA would approve, but what do they know? Damn hippies.”
“Animals? You mean, like squirrels? I hate squirrels.”
“So do I! God’s most useless creature, other than used car salesmen. Bought a used Chevy Impala once. After a week, I couldn’t get the car to go in reverse. Went and found that sales guy, got my money back. They never did find his body.” Archie winked at her.
What Archie was telling her gave Augusta pause. She reflected on her life. Born in Chicago, she was raised in a tiny apartment above a dive bar on Damen Avenue. In fact, her father wanted to call her Damen. Her mother informed him that Damen was a masculine name, so they both agreed that nearby Augusta Boulevard would be her namesake. Only the influence of the priest performing the baptism kept her middle name from being Boulevard. There were no childhood beatings, nor any alcohol or drug abuse in the family, just a grinding poverty brought on by having a stay at home mom minding seven children and a nearly illiterate father slaving away as a grammar school janitor. Augusta had worked hard since dropping out of high school, helped support the family, but with dead parents and siblings scattered to the four corners of the globe, she had no one but herself to worry about now. A never ending series of lifetimes being cared for by rich men had a certain appeal for her. Augusta didn’t fully place her faith in Archie’s tales of vampires, but she didn’t entirely disbelieve him either. She was willing to take a chance.
“All right, let’s do this,” she told him emphatically.
“You mean sex?”
“Not by any stretch of the imagination do I mean sex. The vampire thing. Let’s change me.”
Archie was surprised. This was the first time in decades he had successfully persuaded a woman to do something he asked of her. “Are you sure? There’s no turning back, you know. Once you’re in the club, you’re in for life. Like being in the Mafia, but with a better retirement plan. You know, I knew Lucky Luciano. He was one of us.”
“Yeah, okay, let’s focus on me here.”
“Sorry.”
“So how do we do this?”
He looked around the house. “Well, let’s see. I’ll need to be on top of you.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“It’ll be easier on both of us that way. Standing would take too much out of me. It’s a lot of stress on the body of both vampire and normal when someone gets transformed. I promise to be a total gentleman.”
Augusta rolled her eyes. “That’ll be the day.”
“I helped write that song.”
“You did not! Come on, let’s get this thing over with.” Augusta grabbed the old fellow by his hands, pulled him out of his chair, and led him into the bedroom. She threw the covers onto the floor and lay down on her back. She lowered the collar of her shirt a to provide easy access to her jugular. “Do you think you can get on top of me without breaking any bones? Or hurting me for that matter?”
“Don’t you worry, little missy, this is going to be great.”
Slowly, with much grunting and creaking of joints, Archie managed to get into bed. Gingerly, he placed his body over Augusta’s. There was a faint smell of stale coffee about him.
“Give me a second, I need to get in the mood, if you’ll pardon the expression,” he told her.
“Couldn’t you have gotten in the mood before you got on top of me?”
“Quiet!” He pictured in his mind some of the women in his life. There had been Southern belles, mistresses of their plantations with pale skin that never saw sunlight and light blue veins that ran along the sides of their necks. Of course, the mistresses had slaves, dark skin covered in sweat from daylong toils, strong of body, full of fight until the end. There were European queens and princesses and ladies in waiting, small town schoolmarms and big city whores, young girls lusting for their first thrill and old women longing for a final fling.
Finally, Archie felt his blood begin to boil. His teeth sharpened. “It will only hurt at first, then there won’t be any pain,” he whispered to her. Like a master craftsman, he punctured her skin in exactly the right spot. “I’ve still got it,” he mumbled, as it was difficult to suck blood and speak coherently at the same time.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothum,” he replied.
Her blood flowed into his mouth. He was right, she thought, the pain was brief, then the area he was biting went numb. She had the strange sensation of being under his control.
The transformation was taking longer than she had anticipated. At some point she noticed he was no longer drinking. The punctures at her neck felt as if they were clotting. He had been breathing heavily, but it had eased, then seemed to stop altogether.
She whispered in his ear. “Archie?” No response. She got a hand between their two bodies, placed it in the middle of his chest. There was no heartbeat.
“Shit!” she said loudly. Archie had died on her, literally.
She needed to get his body off of hers. First, though, she needed to remove his teeth from her neck. She placed a hand on either side of his head and decided to pry it off quickly, thinking that would be less painful, like swiftly ripping off a bandage. His teeth didn’t want to come out. She wiggled his head a little, gave it a good pull, and out they glided. Once that was done, she pushed his body off, then laid him out on the bed, making him appear as natural as possible, as if he had been taking a nap. Picking the covers from the floor, she flung them over him, then called an ambulance. She would tell them he had been napping, and that she had dialed 911 when he wouldn’t get up and was unresponsive. By the time the paramedics arrived, Augusta was wearing a fashionable scarf around her neck and a look of mourning on her face.
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