The Doorman

Jim Krueger

Good evening to you as well.

Pardon me? You need to speak to me about something extremely important?

Well, my good man, it is a relief to know that I have nothing to fear or that you won’t tell anyone my secret, but really, you have me at quite a disadvantage. I simply do not know what you are suggesting.

A what? You think I’m a what?

Are you mad?

You…you followed me on your nights off? You saw what? From a distance? You… Oh, I see. You have pictures.

I suppose that simply confessing I am some sort of serial killer and not a vampire at all is not really going to solve my problem, is it?

Let me begin by saying that you are in no position to negotiate anything.

Look at me.

Look closely.

Closer. In my eyes.

Now hand me your phone.

Thank you. Wait. Let me turn this around. Look at the screen. Unlock it.

There.

Now let me see these pictures of yours. Ah, well, the lighting is not what it could be and I’m afraid the composition is a bit off. Not a great loss.

There. All gone. Here is your phone.

Ah, you are a writer. I should have guessed as much. I remem­ber the notebooks you once scratched your thoughts into. I remember how you looked, the disappointment, when you tore certain pages out. That was before you purchased your smart phone and it became the depository, I assume, of your thoughts and inspirations. When deleting became your preference to tearing and ripping. Though, you now see, if you did not before, how easy it is to have the invaluable lost in a moment because of this device.

I suppose I should also not be surprised that you came to the conclusions you did, even before you began to follow me. You have been a doorman here, at the Hotel Holloway, for a great many years. Almost as many as I have been a resident here. You see how guests come and go. I imagine, for someone whose sole focus is to open doors and guard the gates, so to speak, that certain cures for personal boredom would be sought out and would lead to the amplification of your observations. Maybe your paranoia as well. But, as this evening is the one it is, I suppose trying to talk you out of your summations would be ridiculous. And quite actually, when I am honest with myself, there is a freedom in being found out.

I am certain my goings and returnings, only in the nighttime hours, betrayed me, at the very least, to your imaginings and suspicions. Positioned as you are in this life of yours, I understand your hunger to allow your mind to wander through possibilities. Through the twilights and dawning of what might be. As well as the streets denied you most evenings. Streets you can only visit on those rare nights you are not working the so-called graveyard shift.

How do I choose my victims? At random most nights, though the healthier the individual, the less inebriated, is advantageous. But that has more to with taste and satisfaction than sport. More to do with the fat content of the blood. Or any viruses that might alter how quickly I will need to feed again.

Is it comforting to know that I do not choose my victims based on gender, ethnicity, orientation, or even age? For someone you say sleeps all day long, I am rather “woke.”

Let me begin by saying you, too, have nothing to fear. You need to calm yourself. Even as it is right now, your heart rate is like a beacon. A siren call. But where I have not aged, not a day, you have. And not well. If you don’t calm yourself, it will be you in fatal threat, and not because I will feed on you. But because your own body will. You are not well. I’m afraid you will be lost. And this is something I do not wish.

Actually, I think you are quite lost already. Again, I am not here to rip out your throat or to damn you to the likes of a lightless eternity.

Why am I telling you my story, now that there are no pictures? No evidence? Why did I say you were lost? Simply because you witnessed a number of murders. You took pictures. You could have gone to the authorities. Instead, you confronted me, and then tried to blackmail me in exchange for the story. Perhaps it is not fame that you desire, perhaps it is only significance. Regardless, you were prepared to let me continue in my way in exchange for a story. You would aid and abet me.

Simply put, you are not a good man. I am not saying you are a bad one, merely a weak one.

Please, I see that I have offended you. I am not a good man either. And I have no desire to be one.

Because of this, I will indeed give you your story.

It is not necessary that you swear to keep my secrets on your mother’s grave or on anyone’s graves for that matter. Graves are hardly a concern of mine as it is. It is the living, of course, which have been my source of focus for so many years.

So, yes, I am a vampire. Or, if you will, one of the Nosferatu. The people of endless night. A moonwalker. There have been many names for my kind. But again, there is no reason to fear.

Incidentally, the classic film, Nosferatu, was only titled that because rights to Bram Stoker’s book could not be secured.

As for me, I have been this for a great many years, and I merely wish to tell you of the many doors I have walked through. Incidentally, there was always a doorman of sorts as I walked through these doors. Always a witness of the walking through, though some did not live long enough to even recognize the moment or what they were witnessing. And that is why you must be here this very night. Even as it evaporates into day.

I want to be known and there is much to confess.

So, my priest, let me begin. I do apologize for the strictness of my language, but I want to be cautious with how I speak in this moment, and want to make certain, as I talk of times past and times present, that I do not speak with the slang of the moment.

Let me begin by speaking about doors. To walk through one is to be changed. And I have been changed a great many times.

We are each of us born in blood. It needs to be wiped away and washed and, in all cases, cut from us from those first moments of life.

In fact, for the months leading up to our births, we all swim in blood and water on the other side of flesh.

The first door I ever walked through was, of course, birth. A violent wailing entrance into the day. From the dark I came, like we all do.

Is it any wonder then, for one such as I, that becoming a vampire felt like a returning to those first moments of consciousness? The hunger to be held in blood was still with me, like a returning to something forgotten? That is what it means to be a vampire. To drink blood is to once again know the joy of being cradled in the blood and flesh and darkness of another.

This is not as romantic as the words suggest. It is far more primal and removed from the words of authors who can only guess what it means to be once again so connected with the very source of life. And to know that it sees you. Recognizes you. Nurtures you. Perhaps if your kind knew what it was like to be my kind, the response would not have been to hunt us down and try to kill us. There should be wonder. Appreciation. Even if you are our prey.

When I was mortal, in those early days of your country’s birth, I fought for your country’s freedom. I walked with every other man and woman through the door that was the forging of your nation. I cheered like so many others at the doors being closed on England, when, with tail in hand, and a tailwind behind her, she mounted ships and returned to the little island from which she came.

But the soon-to-be foreigners of Europe left me with their gift. With this curse. Perhaps I spoke out about them too loudly. Or I drank too much and stumbled upon them, and not they on me. Or perhaps my victories on the battlefield of Lexington were a little too bloodthirsty, and they enjoyed the irony of showing me what “bloodthirsty” really was.

I will never know.

Incidentally, your George Washington knew of the vampires that came to your shores to oppose your revolution. He kept quiet and made certain word did not get out regarding their existence. Perhaps he knew how superstitious your people were. Or perhaps he thought that the sheer magnitude of what my kind would mean to yours would indeed be an obstacle to your countrymen’s courage. I even sometimes wonder if those wooden teeth of his were a way to dispatch those, of my kind, who let their teeth show a little too brightly in those days long ago. I never knew for certain but suspected his very personal way to strike at the English was to bite back.

Before I was what I am now, I was not a good man either. And the many years since have not made me any better. I like to drink. This has always been the case. It is just the drink that changed.

It’s very possible that the reason the Europeans bit me was to curse this new world. To allow a new red plague to spread through the Americas the way it once had through Europe. Perhaps I was to be a vehicle of destruction in the same way.

Before the revolutionary war, I and many of those I fought beside would pass poisoned blankets to the indigenous people of this nation. Perhaps becoming a poison myself is a well-deserved fate.

But I did not like the idea of making more like me. I knew power. Real power. So why would I share that with those that I wanted to feed upon? More of my kind merely meant less blood for me. And this was indeed America. Spreading the wealth has never been at the core of our nation’s development and growth.

Let me also mention that blood is not all I thirsted for with this new “night life” that was bequeathed me. There was experience. Experiences. I had become a sort of immortal. And death, while once a fear, no longer was. Now it was only present around me. It was coming to meet everyone else. Not me. In fact, for those who sustained me, I merely provided an early introduction.

In the 1790s, during the rarely talked about Whiskey Rebellion, I realized that I was wrong to think that I was a bad man compared to my other countrymen. I was merely a vote. One that weighed little compared to the atrocities to come. During this rebellion, many refused to pay a tax for their whiskey to fund your new government, and though it would be years and years before your famed civil war, the tension between your federal government and the wants of its divergent regions, began to show its hand. Whether it was taxes, or state rights, or land, or wealth, or even the various races of people that found themselves often coerced to be here, there was a fight brewing. A contradiction of thirsts. A war between the hunger of individuals and a table set to feed all. It was a fight, in some cases, between the truly gifted and exceptional, and the swell of the mediocre. Am I being unfair? Or perhaps you think all should become like me? And what would we feed on then?

There is a lie at the heart of this country. It is the tension between the want for all to be equal and the truth that we are not. We never were. Some are beautiful, some are not. Some are strong, many are weak. Few are wise, but they fight to protect the rights of the foolish. Perhaps lies are more important to ensure a fragile peace than truth is. I have seen people ignore the truth over and over again. For the sake of a lie. A happy ending. A hope that is too good to be true.

I fought on both sides during your Civil War. When it appeared like I was dealt a fatal blow by the Northern Army, I waited until the smoke was too thick to gaze through, and I took the uniform of the so-called enemy and fought on their behalf, until again, that would lead to an apparent death. Blood was in ample supply. I fed well on both sides. And I found myself very much alive on that battlefield, walking through the revolving door of the North and South. I found myself singing and dancing in the mighty plantations, drinking mint juleps with a people that did not understand that the way they had always lived was now considered morally wrong. Days later, I would condemn them for their selfishness and ignorance while lifting beer with my fellow Bostonians.

You see, viewpoints and opinions and convictions are doors as well. But for most, they are walked through slowly, over years, beginning in the circumstances of birth and family through the experiences they have and the tiny part of the world they are introduced to. But in those days when your country was divided—not that it is not today—I walked both ways. I eventually stopped caring for the better or more logical argument. Or who said what with greater passion or enunciation. And merely enjoyed being in both worlds and allowing myself to feed upon the melting pot of voices. It was a stew. Perhaps that is all it ever was.

Your first World War was interesting because now the war left your contradictory country and I found myself in Europe. Another door. I was there in the trenches, and when one of our men was killed, I made certain that their blood was not spilled in vain. I, of course, fed on the enemy as well.

I had never been to Europe before. One night, when the smoke was thick and the moans of the men on both sides of the trenches had reached a crescendo of sorts, I stole into the night. It had dawned on me—not that dawn is anything more than an obscure abstraction at this point in my life—that it might be good to check in on those who had given me this gift. I had over the years made certain that I collected information on those that had done this to me. Did I desire revenge? I do not believe so. As I said before, issues of justice and vengeance were not passions or character traits important to me anymore. Perhaps it was just conversation that I wanted. A chance to face them and let them see that I had not become the curse on my country that they intended. Or maybe, as the days behind me seemed nothing like the days before, I wanted a glimpse at my future. It was not to see them as much as it was to see me. What I would become.

Unlike the war for independence, the vampire that took my life and then gave me another, did not fight in World War One. He was still in England. Getting to London was not a problem for me. But I need to admit I was surprised that he did not go to where the blood was flowing. That he did not come to the killing fields for the amusement of not having to hide in the shadows when taking life after life.

Had he perished somehow? My death had not been a concept I had even considered for a long time. The fear of it was so distant, I could no longer recall its gravity on my life.

I remember being struck by another door that perhaps awaited me, one that would have been too terrible to walk through. What if he was somehow paralyzed in some way? What if some harm had crippled him? The idea of being a prisoner of my own body for all of eternity was a maddening and sobering irritation.

When I found him, he was sitting in a great chair in what I assume had been his home, a monster of a castle or manor of some sort. His dwellings were unkempt. Tapestries that looked as dusty as the giant area’s rugs below them hung from the walls like shrouds covering the bones of the old architecture, and also covering the great windows, of course. Webs filled the arches of doorways that hadn’t been walked through in years. And there was a smell. A rotted smell. I’m not certain if it was the summation of those that had died there, had been fed upon there, or if, instead, it was the stench of my host and benefactor, Lord Winsick himself. Lord Winsick did not pretend not to recognize me. But he also did not seem to show any surprise that I was there.

I wanted him to see me. I wanted him to realize that he had not loosed a plague upon my country. The truth is that there was nothing I did or said that seemed to provoke him in the slightest. He spoke little. My questions, all of them, went unanswered, save one.

I asked him why I should not kill him right there. Some say a vampire cannot kill another vampire, which is very untrue. Every animal, alive, dead, or undead, is capable of terrible violence toward its own kind. Our world, our countries, nature itself, is proof enough of this.

In answer to my question, he merely said it was because I was not a merciful man. That he had seen that in me those many years before. I asked him what he meant by that. He said nothing. I stood before him for maybe another hour, trying to get him to speak. But it was akin to speaking to the walls. Nothing.

I returned to the trenches. I returned to the fighting and the blood and drank my fill.

The America that greeted me upon my return was very different than the one I had left. One war had ended only to give rise to another one, a new kind of civil war. Between the elite and those that had even less than they had before. This was your Great Depression. Most lived in such terrible poverty and shame, little understanding what had happened. Others gambled and made their sad, bitter love in the jazz dens, dancing their way through their losses, still seeking ways to get from those who no longer even had anything left to be gotten.

Even the blood of the poor lacked the taste it once did. The blood did not flow like it had before. I am not speaking about the battlefield. I am speaking of the veins. Sadness can travel in veins in the same way a virus does. It actually damages the body quicker, perhaps because it opens a door for viruses as well.

Also, my intended meals did not run from me as they did before. Their heartbeats did not quicken those few moments when they recognized that their lives were coming to an end. Some knew the lore of my kind, and those that did, all of them, begged me not to change them because they did not want to have to think of more days like the ones they were living.

So, I fed upon the rich. I struck at them in their hardly-a-secret Gatsbian parties just out of reach of the hungry. Do not think for a moment that this was somehow an act of conscience. Simply put, the rich simply tasted better. Their blood satisfied me for longer periods of time.

This great depression led to the outlawing of alcohol and drink­ing, which hardly affected me since there was no actual law against drinking blood. Though I am certain that if your lawmakers knew of my existence, they certainly would have written such litigation.

Why does the inspiration for artistic endeavor and human invention increase in the midst of suffering? I have a theory. I have come to believe that art is the true prayer of your people. It is a form of worship, almost. An ordering and beautifying of chaos and sadness to support the imagined hope that things will become better. And this moment has a lesson for them that will justify their pain.

In the midst of all of the depression, your film industry made all things possible for me. Another door. This one to a flickering light that at least allowed me to see a sunrise again. I became quite the cinema fan. And not just of the genre called “horror”. Though I did dabble in some acting and even starred in something of an autobiography.

Fortunately, your Second World War led to the reinvigoration of your people. There were jobs, and therefore wealth. And nothing tastes quite so good as the blood that is pumped through a body filled with patriotic and righteous conviction.

I found myself in Europe again. There was so much blood. So much nationalistic fervor on all sides of the equation. If it were possible for someone like me to gain weight, I certainly would have. But please do not think the so-called “death camps” were a lure of any kind. I had already drunk my fill of sadness. There were so many other places to feed.

Before returning to America, I did visit my old benefactor once again, now hoping that perhaps time had somehow reminded him how to speak. There was little left of the manor, largely due to neglect. There was also what I assumed to have been a struggle of some sort. The tapestry that had hung in the giant window had been torn down. And the chair that once housed the mute vampire that gave birth to me was no longer present. Perhaps he had been caught unawares by one of those so-called vampire slayers. I assumed at the time, though, that he had moved on, to another place, perhaps one with a better selection of blood. But I was quite wrong.

This was not a haunted house. But it did haunt me on my way back to America on the ocean liner, the Queen Mary. There were a number of soldiers, broken and still bleeding from the war, that made such a journey for me possible. There were many who knew they would never reach America. In many cases, I ended their suffering. But please do not consider this mercy. I am not merciful, remember this as you write. When I killed them it was more of a utilitarian choice. They were receiving blood transfusions as it was, and it all struck me as a terrible waste.

The America I once again returned to was now a place of such overwhelming hope and promise. People talked about the American dream of owning a home. Of having a family. They spoke of the great defeat of the monster, Hitler, and of their own virtue in a way that made me feed far more often than I needed to. Rock and roll replaced the elitist rhythms of the jazz and secret rendezvous of the Great Depression. One and all feasted on this era. The American Dream was never so delicious.

This, of course, was why it could not and would not last. Dreams change. Even the collective ones. The hope that made the blood of this era so exquisite began to tarnish upon its golden promises. New wars began without patriotic convictions. Those wounded in these wars, upon returning home, were not given the ticker-tape welcome that met those who fought in World War II. Mistrust began to spread, often the result of your elected officials. This led Americans to suspect the worst in each other where once they had hoped for the best. No one was aware of the diseases that were beginning to spread through a movement known as free love. “Free” had become the desire where “freedom” had held on for so long. Even the staunchest protectors and fighters for the concept of freedom were either imprisoned or murdered.

Perhaps the fear that spread across the country was not merely because of this, but was aided and amplified by the invention of the television.

The movies I loved I could now watch in the privacy of my room.

But so too could I view the assassinations, the diseases, the crimes, the mounting distrust. Television was a window, or a doorway, into all that was wrong with this world.

There were eras of greed late in the last century that made the taste of this country more pleasant. But those eras merely manifested into perhaps the worst of your social diseases.

Comparison.

Keeping up with the Joneses. Needing to have what someone else had. Perhaps even needing to have more. In this mentality, your people, as they are no longer mine, chose inequality over potential possibilities and equalities.

I know what you are thinking. I sound like an old man.

I wonder sometimes if Lord Winsick really did move on to redder pastures as I once surmised.

Perhaps this is not actually, as I said, immortality. Maybe it only pretends to be when it is actually the long death. A perpetual and slow bleed out from the wounds that made me what I am. There is no true healing, only a perpetual filling of a wound, like those on the Queen Mary that I fed upon, that will never fully heal.

What if, no matter how much blood I take, no matter how many times I try to fill this dripping bucket of mine, it still leaks? And has been leaking for so long?

I fear that I now understand the final fate of Lord Winsick. It wasn’t greener or redder pastures. He did not move on. He was not attacked in his home by some slayer who knew how to expose him and pulled down the tapestry that kept the sun from him. He merely pulled it down himself. And he let the sun have its way with him.

He died of boredom. Well, he killed himself out of boredom.

I am an immortal. My body is young. I did not expect old age in any way, but I feel old. My thoughts are old. As are my words.

Time and history, I suppose, catches up to all of us.

Perhaps I have walked through too many doors.

But there is one last door.

One last door to walk through.

This one.

There will be a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Mostly dust. But I know that sweeping the front entrance is part of your job.

I hope you have time to finish your book. Thank you for listening to an old man rant.

I have grown weary of saying “Good evening.”

It is time once again to say… “Good Morning.”