Home » Archives » December 2003 » David Parker’s Journal: 2

12/19/2003: "David Parker’s Journal: 2"

Music: Funeral March
Mood: Danger lurking

It was already dark at 5:30 p.m. The winter solstice arrives three days from now, the shortest day of the year … and the darkest.

Following the blood, listening to its mysterious whispers, if found myself downtown. I have lived in this old river city for the past year. Do not ask me why, because I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Everybody has to be somewhere. I am here.

I turned the corner, the river now behind me. A biting wind blew down off the bluff, my face stinging from the ice crystals in the air. Across the street to the left, an old Catholic church, its walls built of fieldstone that glowed ghostly white in the darkness. On my side of the street, a block of brick buildings dating from the 1800s.

The big building on the corner was an old hotel in the midst of an ambitious renovation that had been abandoned due a lack of funds some years earlier. Inside the first floor, the walls had been knocked down and scaffolding erected to the ceiling, which was bare down to the lathe.

Next to the hotel was the former home of a newspaper, the building now a business of some indeterminate nature. An antique shop was after that. I paused and looked in through the window, leaning into the wind as I turned up my collar. Someone had left a light on in a back room, and it cast just enough illumination to outline the old, dusty relics. Old lamps, tables, tea cups, toys – who buys these things?

The clutter was vaguely ominous: an array of possessions bought new by people long since dead. We are an acquisitive race – humans and vampires alike – yet what meaning do the objects we collect to define ourselves have once we’re gone and only our possessions remain as ghostly reminders?

The next building was three stories of brick with the words “Hibernian Hall” engraved over the doorway. An Irish social club, a small corner of Erin preserved in the new world. Except that now it, too, was nothing but an artifact, a relic left behind by the dead.

I walked on, wondering what it was that kept me out on an unfriendly December night.

A house dating from the 1840s stood apart from the social hall, the space between them wide enough for a man to pass. The front door and windows were boarded with plywood. I could smell the smoke in the air. There had been a fire recently, probably earlier in the day. The sky above the building rolled and roiled so that I thought the fire had rekindled itself until realizing it wasn’t smoke but a large flock of crows turning and turning above the building, darkness animated. A number of their brothers had perched along the edge of the roof. The creatures were as aware of me as I of them; they hopped about on their perches, cocking their heads to look down on me, the black pearls they have for eyes glittering reflections from the streetlight.

What attracted the birds to the burned building? Perhaps they were drawn to disaster. If I were to fall down on the sidewalk, I thought, the bravest birds would drop down beside me for a closer look, hoping for a chance to rip a bit of flesh from my body.

The back of my neck began to tingle.

I whirled around, my defenses up, sensing something -- a person, a thing, a sense of energy in motion.

The sidewalk was empty.

A crow shrieked and in the next moment they were all at it, filling the night sky with their grating song of warning or, perhaps, mockery.

My glance settled on the door leading into Hibernian Hall. I could tell that it was unlocked, which was strange, because ordinarily I notice that sort of thing when passing. (Even best vampire is always, at some perhaps unconscious level, on the hunt.)

In the next instant I realized that the door had been locked before but was now open – an indication, an invitation, for me to come inside.

Who or what waited for me inside?

I reached out with my senses, my thoughts passing effortlessly through the icy bricks, up the darkened staircase to what awaited beyond. I found no tell-tales indicating danger. Even stranger was the fact that I sensed nothing – not even the quick heartbeats of rats living in the walls.

I moved swiftly to the door and reached for the latch.