CHAPTER 12
In order to avoid the daylight remaining before he could switch to the night shift, Reginald called in sick on Wednesday, and planned to do the same on Thursday and Friday. He called early, before Berger’s secretary was in, and left a message on Berger’s voicemail. Then he turned his phone off for the rest of the day.
Maurice came over on Tuesday night before heading to work. It was Reginald’s first full night as a vampire. He had some questions about his new life, and he had a story to relate.
“Yeah,” said Maurice when Reginald told him about the day’s events. “Daylight’s a bitch.”
They were sitting in Reginald’s house. Reginald was on the couch, semi-supine, and Maurice was in a La-Z-Boy with the foot support up, a cigarette burning in his hand. He said he’d picked up the habit back in France, well after becoming a vampire. No, it didn’t make sense, he said, but vampires liked to be chic, and smoking in Paris cafes was the height of chic at the time.
“It isn’t just daylight,” said Reginald. “A lot’s a bitch so far. I’ve got to be honest. I’m not seeing the upside.”
“Well, you’ll never die unless you burn in the sun or someone stakes you,” said Maurice. “You’ll never get old. And you’re stronger.”
“Yeah,” said Reginald. “Watch this.” He picked up an empty can of Mountain Dew, flourished it for Maurice, and crushed it.
“Stronger than you were, I mean,” said Maurice.
Reginald rolled his eyes and opened a new can of Mountain Dew. It turned out that vampires could eat and drink human foods if they wanted to, and Reginald, always a comfort eater, still very much wanted to. He’d already eaten two buckets of fried chicken since dinner, and the remnants were still on his face. There was a Sara Lee coffee cake warming in the oven and the corpses of three Twinkies at his feet. At the rate depression was setting in, he’d bankrupt himself on Cheetos and Yoo-Hoo within a month.
“It’ll get better,” said Maurice. “Like I told you, we get stronger and faster as we get older.”
“How quickly does that happen?”
“Pretty quick,” said Maurice. “You’ll notice a significant difference in a century or two.”
“That’s not fast,” said Reginald.
“Measurable improvement even in a decade, then,” said Maurice with the air of someone conferring a great favor.
Reginald sighed.
“Are you hungry?” asked Maurice.
“Starving. That’s why I ordered the pizza.”
“You understand that human food doesn’t nourish you anymore, right?” said Maurice.
“It nourishes my soul.”
Maurice sat up. “What I was asking was, are you hungry for blood? Because by tomorrow or Friday, you’re going to need something other than carbs and grease.”
“I’m hungry a lot. How can I tell the difference?”
“Well,” said Maurice, “if you feel like you will die — and I mean literally die — if you don’t get some sustenance soon, that’s blood hunger.”
“I feel that way now,” said Reginald.
“No you don’t. That’s just old habits.”
Reginald waved his arm dismissively, indicating that Maurice was of no use to him.
After a few minutes of silence, Maurice hopped up buoyantly, like an aerobics instructor. “C’mon,” he said. “Stand up. I want to try something. Have you tried anything physical since last night? Maybe your wind is getting better.”
Reginald shrugged.
“Do some jumping jacks,” said Maurice.
Reginald did. After twenty, he was starting to pant and sweat.
“I did twenty!” he said, jubilant.
Maurice shook his head.
“I’m not improving? Am I hopeless?”
Maurice didn’t answer. Instead, he propped his elbow on a stack of TV Guide magazines like he wanted to arm wrestle. “Let me see your guns,” he said. Then, noticing the look on Reginald’s face, he added, “I’ll go very light. I just want to see where you’re at.”
Reginald hunkered down and put his palm in Maurice’s palm, which made Maurice’s hand look like that of a child mannequin by comparison. He set his elbow on the TV Guides and looked up.
“Ready?”
“I guess,” said Reginald.
“Push.”
“I am pushing.”
“I mean, push as hard as you can.”
“I am pushing as hard as I can,” said Reginald.
Maurice sighed. “Okay, then try to resist me. I’m going to push really, really light. Okay?”
“Okay.”
There was a loud snap and Reginald’s wrist exploded in a mess of tendons and veins. It was as if someone had thrown spaghetti into the air. Blood sloshed down his arm, and a tiny gusher from the severed artery began squirting Maurice in the face.
Maurice tilted Reginald’s hand, which was still attached by a flap, back up and into place. It healed instantly. He grabbed a greasy KFC napkin that Reginald had tossed onto the floor and began mopping his face with it.
“Sorry,” he said. Then silence hung in the air.
After a few minutes in which Reginald thought Maurice might be deciding to kill him after all, Maurice looked up with something like hope.
“What about your mind?” he said. “Have you ever been tested?”
Reginald had been a mediocre student. High school had been miserable and he’d wanted only to survive it, to make it to the next day and the next day until it was over.
“I was average. I got mainly B’s in school.”
Maurice shook his head. “Not the same thing. Have you ever displayed high creative aptitude? Are you good with math? Music? Memory? Problem solving?”
Reginald shrugged, unsure.
“Think about it,” said Maurice, “because vampirism enhances our true mental natures just as it enhances our physical natures. The only hitch is, the things that get enhanced in your head aren’t always the things you were good at as a human. It’s like vampirism reads your innate skills right off of your DNA — the potential you were born with. Many new vampires are surprised by what they find they can do. I have a friend who’d never played an instrument before, but learned to play drums as good as any human alive in an hour. He discovered it quite by accident, by playing Rock Band and then deciding to try the real thing.” Maurice nodded at Reginald’s video game console and his Rock Band guitar and drum set.
“Are you asking if I’m good at Rock Band?”
“Just looking under the hood. Have you played since last night?”
“No.”
“Want to?”
Reginald wanted only to drink his Mountain Dew and wait for his pizza, and maybe spend some time hoping to die. Everything else felt pointless and futile.
“Nah.”
“You might be surprised, Reginald. Seriously. I was thinking about this last night. Typically, vampires are very good either above the neck or below, but seldom both. It’s as if there’s only so much improvement to go around. Most vampires end up being strong and fast, but not much more mentally adept than humans. The most mentally gifted vampires I’ve ever known were those who aren’t perfect physically. It’s like vampirism goes to your brain when there’s not much else for it to work with.”
Reginald barely heard the point about mental adeptness. He’d heard something else.
“You’ve known vampires like me?”
Maurice rocked his head back and forth a little, unsure. Then he said, “Not like you, no.”
“But you’ve known vampires who weren’t physically perfect.”
“In the past. Yes.”
“In the past?”
“Times change. Things change, even for us.”
“Do you still know them? Can I meet them?”
Maurice bit his lip. “No. There aren’t many around nowadays.”
“But the old ones. What happened to them?” He was rising from his chair, finally feeling excited, but Maurice didn’t seem to share his excitement.
Instead of answering, Maurice changed the subject. “Do you know about glamouring?” he said. “Skill at glamouring usually goes with better mental adeptness.”
“Glamour. You mean like putting on makeup?”
“I mean like making humans do what you want. It’s like hypnosis. I thought everyone knew about that.”
Reginald raised his eyebrows, intrigued. The idea of making people do his bidding was promising. He could make Walker come to work without pants. He could get Berger to give him a huge raise. He might be able to get hot women to have sex with him, or at least get them to undress in front of him.
“Can I try it on you?” he asked.
“Vampires can’t be glamoured,” said Maurice. “Try it next time you’re around a human. Just one human to start. Just look them in the eyes and start talking, never breaking eye contact. Ask them to do something small, like snap their fingers, to see what effect you have. You’re either going to have a gift for it or not, and if you do, you’ll figure it out with practice.”
Reginald nodded, encouraged.
Maurice looked Reginald over, from top to bottom and down again. Then he leaned back against Reginald’s breakfast counter and crossed his arms.
“Okay,” he said. “Reginald, you are easily the most out-of-shape vampire ever created. Which means…”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Let me finish. Which means that if lack of physical gifts really does correlate with increased mental gifts, you might have some value to the Vampire Nation after all. As a culture, we’ve gotten dumber since my time. I can see it happening. It might be coincidence, or it might not be. Stand up.”
Reginald stood.
“I’m above average by today’s standards, but among vampires as a whole I’m not particularly mentally gifted,” said Maurice. He grabbed a book at random from Reginald’s ramshackle bookshelf and looked at it. Then he showed it to Reginald. It was Stephen King’s The Shining.
“I’ve never read this,” said Maurice. He opened the book, looked down at it, and then there was a blur and the riffle of pages, like shuffling a deck of cards, as the stack of pages moved from Maurice’s right hand to his left. “Now I have. People say this guy doesn’t end books well, but I didn’t see that boiler explosion coming.”
He tossed the book to Reginald, who caught it with both hands. “Now you do it,” he said.
Maurice had read the book in under fifteen seconds. Reginald looked at the thing in his hand as if he’d never seen it before.
“That’s what ‘not particularly gifted’ looks like?” he said.
“I’m just fast,” he said, pulling out a new cigarette and lighting it. “‘Fast’ is muscular. Humor me and try it yourself.”
Reginald raised a finger and prepared to open the cover, but just as he did, Maurice jumped as if he’d sat on something. “Oh, I just thought of something.” He set the cigarette in an ashtray and pulled his cell phone from his pocket and held it up.
“You’re going to take a picture of me reading?” said Reginald.
“A movie,” said Maurice, a slight smile on his face. “Go ahead; I’m rolling.”
Reginald looked back down at the book. “But I’ve read it before,” he said.
“Not like this, you haven’t,” said Maurice. “Go.”
Reginald opened the cover and thumbed to the first page of the first chapter. He read about Jack Torrence’s impression of Stuart Ullman as an officious little prick.
He looked up. Maurice nodded.
Reginald read the first page, then the second. Maurice was probably getting bored, but out of the corner of his eye, Reginald could see him smirking behind his phone. He read more. Then more. After ten pages and probably twice as many minutes, he finally looked up and stared at Maurice. “Okay, this is ridiculous. How long do you really want to stand there while I plod through this?”
Maurice wordlessly held up the cigarette he’d lit before turning on the camera. Reginald could still see the square end in the ash from when the cigarette was new, meaning that it was burning very, very slowly.
Then Maurice gestured at the clock on Reginald’s wall to show him that it had stopped at some point while Reginald had been immersed in operations at the Overlook Hotel.
Reginald shrugged, but something was strange. Maurice was smiling.
“What?”
“This is good,” said Maurice.
“What’s good?”
“How did that feel?”
“I don’t know. Normal?”
“How long were you reading just now?”
Reginald shrugged. “Ten minutes?”
Then Maurice walked to where Reginald was standing and pressed a few buttons on his phone. Reginald saw himself on the small screen, staring down at the book.
The tiny Reginald on the phone said, “But I’ve read it before.”
And offscreen, a closer, deeper voice said, “Not like this. Go.”
The picture jarred slightly as, Reginald remembered, Maurice had nodded back at him. Onscreen Reginald looked back down, and there was a blur of white at his fingertips. Then onscreen Reginald looked up and said, “Okay, this is ridiculous. How long do you really want to stand there while I plod through this?”
Reginald looked up, his mouth hanging open. Maurice was grinning.
“You know how they say that time flies when you’re having fun? It’s vastly magnified for vampires. When you’re doing something you’re good at, you fall into it and you lose track of time… if you choose to perceive it that way. Apparently you can be fast at a few things after all. Faster than me, even. Like I said, this is good.”
Maurice pressed his lips together, smiling an appraising half-smile from half of his mouth. He seemed to be truly enjoying himself. He pocketed the phone, set the cigarette back in the ashtray without disturbing the squared-off end of the ash, and crossed his arms.
“Finish it,” he told Reginald, pointing at the book still in his hand.
This time, now aware that he could apparently speed-read, the experience was different. It didn’t precisely feel like it took him hours to read the book, but he did feel, somehow, as if he’d sat down with the story and the characters for a day, a week, maybe a month. It was as if the entire experience was suddenly sucked into his mind within the span of a few seconds, but then it dilated in his memory to a much longer period of time. He wasn’t sure if he’d spent a long time reading, or a little.
Reginald looked up. The cigarette was still burning where Reginald had set it, still with the square end of ash stubbornly in place.
“How long did that take?” he said.
“Less time than I’ve ever seen,” said Maurice. “Maybe I did a good thing, turning you.”
Reginald didn’t know what to say, so he bobbed his head in agreement.
“Now,” said Maurice, taking the book from Reginald and opening the cover, “I have a question. What’s the first word of the book?”
That was easy. He’d read it before. “Jack,” he said.
Maurice nodded, then flipped to the back. “And the last word?”
“Sun.”
“Okay,” said Maurice, flipping to the middle, “time to take off the training wheels. What’s the title of the 32nd section?”
Reginald didn’t know how Maurice expected him to know something so obscure. The book was written in short chapters, and in the edition Reginald owned, the pages didn’t even break between chapters. The chapter headings were like subheads, and there were a ton of them sewn right into the narrative of the story, and there was no way he
“‘The Bedroom,’” he found himself saying.
His face must have registered surprise because Maurice chuckled and said, “This is like using a muscle on a limb you never knew you had,” he said. “It’s going to take some getting used to. Just trust yourself.”
“But I didn’t know it!” Reginald blurted.
“And yet,” said Maurice with a Vanna White wave of his hand, “you did.”
Reginald didn’t know what to make of this odd new ability. Even now, he had no knowledge of the individual chapter headings. In any normal sense, he did not — even now — know the chapter title that Maurice had asked for. But then, he also kind of did. He could see a strange afterimage in his head, as if he were staring at the page. He closed his eyes, and without the conflicting sensory input, he almost could see the page. Right there: 32, in italics. Below it, further to the right, none of it centered, THE BEDROOM, all in caps. The previous section ended with the word now. The first word of Chapter 32 was Late.
Maurice said, “What message does Halloran receive from Danny at the bottom of page 314?”
Reginald closed his eyes and it was as if he’d turned a page in his mind. He read the sentence at the bottom, all in caps, italicized, framed by parentheses.
“COME DICK PLEASE COME DICK PLEASE.” Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he added, “That’s what she said.”
“Which word is hyphenated at the end of the first line on page 215?”
Reginald closed his eyes and…
“Keep your eyes open,” said Maurice. “It’s not actually visual, so don’t reinforce that idea for yourself. You want to be able to use this while being fully present wherever you are.”
This time, the knowledge just arrived at his lips. It seemed to bypass both the visual image and his conscious awareness. “Canvas.”
“The last word of chapter 33?”
“Danny.”
“The eighth line from the bottom on the sixth complete page of the first section?”
“Was he a college graduate.”
“You say that like a statement,” said Maurice.
“The question mark is missing. It’s a typo.” Then, surprising himself, he added, “It was fixed by the 1992 mass-market paperback edition.”
Where had that come from? One time, sitting uncomfortably in a tiny faux leather chair in a Barnes & Noble bookstore to kill time while his mother got her nails done at a salon in the mall, Reginald had picked up a copy of the book and had begun reading. That had to be ten years ago.
“Interesting,” said Maurice. “Apparently it’s not just new information. You have no idea how rare that is, to pull that kind of recall from the archives of your prior, unenhanced human brain.”
Reginald nodded, surprised but pleased. “I’ve never been particularly smart,” he said. “Competent. Organized. But I never took any honors classes or anything like that.”
Maurice closed the book and set it on the counter. “Tell me: What’s the square root of sixty-five thousand, eight hundred and ninety-four?”
“Two hundred fifty-six point six-nine-eight… you get the drift.”
Maurice picked up his cigarette and drew on it. “I’ll have to take your word for that,” he said, “that not being one of my abilities. You are going to be an exceptionally gifted glamourer. It all goes together. You’ll be good at music, too, if you care to be. Music and math are very closely related.”
“It feels like parlor tricks,” said Reginald.
Maurice shook his head. “It’s not. This isn’t just recall. It’s function.” He locked eyes with Reginald, becoming serious. “And when, over the next weeks, you feel like you’re not a very impressive vampire, I want you to remember something: At this, you are exceptional.”
“Exceptional?”
“Like nothing I’ve seen before. You’ve got a bit of a secret weapon.”
With this, Maurice stabbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and rose to his full height, which wasn’t much. He was still wearing the sword on his belt, which Reginald thought ruined the otherwise suave image he’d displayed tonight. But the sword had its purposes, he guessed.
“Wait,” said Reginald. “You’re leaving?”
“I need to get to work.”
“But…” Reginald whined, loathe to be alone with his odd new ability, “… you haven’t taught me anything about how to be a vampire!”
“Stay out of the sun. Avoid wood stakes. Keep a low profile. Feed, but that comes later. And I’ll be back tomorrow night, so don’t worry.”
“What about sleeping?”
“Do it. During the day.”
“Do I need a coffin?”
“Only if you’re morose.”
“What about silver?”
“Silver is bad. It’ll burn your skin and make you weak.”
“What about…?” He couldn’t think of anything else.
“Relax, Reginald. There’s simply not that much to it, and there’s no real training to be had. You’re kind of like an animal now, and you’ll find that your instincts have become much, much louder. The things you need to know will come to you naturally. Any details about any of it that you need, just ask.”
Maurice pulled on his coat, and the doorbell rang. The pizza man.
“The pizza this guy brought you is just oral masturbation now,” said Maurice, inclining his head toward the door. “But see if you can glamour him into giving it to you for free.”
“How?”
“Look into his eyes. The rest is like what you did with the book. It’ll come. Trust me.”
The doorbell rang again. Maurice took a step toward the door.
“You’re going to go out the same door he’s coming in?”
“I’m fast. He won’t see me.”
“Wait!”
Maurice stopped, his hand on the knob.
“Um… how old are you, Maurice?”
Maurice shrugged. “Old enough. Let’s just say that I knew Caesar.”
Reginald, thinking of his pizza, said, “As in, ‘Little’?” But the door was already open, the pizza man was pulling a box from the insulated bag he was carrying, and Maurice was gone.