Home » Archives » February 2004 » David Parker's Journal: 9

02/06/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 9"

Music: Pull The Knife Out and Stick It In Again
Mood: Indigo

There was no shortage of places to park downtown on the foggy winter night. I pulled into an angled space at the corner and shut off the motor.

Two men in ratty jackets and knit caps loitered next to the traffic light, squinting at me through cigarette smoke. I got out and shut the door, turning up my collar against the damp. The Audi’s lights blinked and its horn honked briefly, a signal to me, and anybody who happened to be paying attention, that the security system had powered on.

I nodded to the men and crossed the street.

Around the corner, on the one-way next to a lavishly ornate movie place that had been closed since the 1970s, was a tavern called Mac’s. I pushed through the door, breathing in air scented with beer, tobacco and fried food. It was a reassuring, even comforting aroma to me, a reminder of my younger days, when I played piano in a jazz band in Chicago nightspots.

Mac’s was about half-crowded, but there was plenty of room at the bar.

“A Guinness, please,” I told the bartender.

Except for the beer signs, the place looked as if it hadn’t changed since the 1930s. It was classic tavern, with a tile floor, dark wooden booths along the far wall, and an ornate, old-fashioned bar running the length of the narrow room. A lot of businesses remodel every decade or so to keep their look current, but not Mac’s. For whatever reason, the place was stuck in time. To be honest, I liked it that way. It was something the tavern and I had in common, for I was also stuck in time. I would never look older than the night, a decade before, that Tatiana gave me the dark gift.

There were a group of Irish musicians sitting around a table at the end of the long room. They began to play about the time my drink arrived. I leaned on one elbow and listened. It wasn’t the sort of music I was accustomed to as a concert pianist, but I liked what I heard. I especially liked the guitarist – he had a sublime sense of rhythm – and the fiddler, who sometimes put down his violin in favor of an old Gibson mandolin. While he didn’t have the sort of formal skills a classical player would boast, there were times when his playing bordered on brilliant. The fiddler would take off on flights of divine inspiration in the midst of a reel and only return to earth upon realizing, as he invariably did toward the end of the solo, that he remained mortal.

I drank my Guinness and was about to order a second when a woman began to sing. The lovely redhead soprano voice possessed such sweetness that it reminded me of why I had come there that night – and why I needed to be gone. I stood up and put money on the bar beside my empty glass. It was almost physically difficult for me to leave. The voice had its hold on me, drawing me toward its owner, but for me the greater the beauty, the greater the danger. The Hunger rose up sharply inside of me, a passion almost too powerful to be denied.

A few of the patrons looked up as I hit the door, suddenly in a hurry, my hand slamming against the frame. The chilly air stung my face, the Night itself reproaching me for playing blood games. I had already done what I needed to do to keep the Hunger at bay. To continue to hunt was the worst thing I could do. I was still a little intoxicated from the woman who’d fed me at Border’s. My judgment was weakened and my desire grown sharp – a deadly combination in a vampire.

The men were gone from the corner. They must have found whatever they had been waiting on when I drove up – a ride, a woman, a score.

I slid into the Audi and started it, revving the motor like a teenager in a hotrod Camero. Part of me felt like racing, not other cars but simply away, racing away from myself. The car rocked back and forth as the RPMs screamed and fell, screamed and fell. The other part of me wanted to go fast for no other reason than to as a way to express the meaningless, wordless rage brewing in my soul.

Why had Tatiana come back? Had it been to warn or entice me? And what did mysterious Masonic symbols and an antique book from the Olde Curiosity Shoppe have to do with the vampire Illuminati?

I put the car into reverse, tires squealing when I jammed on the brakes and throw the gearshift forward into drive. I jammed the accelerator to the floor, sliding around the corner on the wet pavement. I wasn’t drunk – alcohol does not effect me – but for some reason I turned the wrong direction down the one-way. Fortunately, traffic was sparse on the four-lane at that time of night. Drivers in the on-coming cars flashed lights and honked horns.

Normally, I would have done what anyone would have done – sheepishly pulled over or turned on the first street, happy to have had the good fortune to escape an accident. But there was nothing normal about my mood that night. The other drivers’ alarm amused and inflamed my inner demons. I pushed the gas pedal back to the floor, grinning as the quick little German car rocketed toward and through the oncoming traffic. My reflexes were fast and there was no real danger except that one of the other drivers would panic and swerve into me.

I drove like this for several blocks before I regained control over the impulsive madness possessing me. I jerked the wheel hard to the left. The tires broke free from the street just long enough for the car to spin around and stop against the far curb.

I sat with my foot on the brake, my hands on the wheel, my heart pounding. It took several moments for me to realize the sound coming from my right was fingernails tapping on the passenger window. The Audi was stopped in front of a tavern completely unlike the one I’d just left. That much was obvious from the small crowd of people milling outside on the sidewalk at 11 p.m., a motley collection of hustlers, pimps, dealers and hookers.

The fingernails – ridiculously long artificial fingernails, lacquered blood red, and decorated with glued-on rhinestones – tapped again. My fingers found the controls on the door to lower the glass.

“That some fancy driving.”

I didn’t know how to answer.

“What you looking for, mister?”

I chose not to say, and with good reason.

“You want to have a party?”

It was only then that I seemed to see the woman for the first time. She was young and attractive, or would have been, if she hadn’t been so garishly dressed and made up. The woman was stoned out of her mind. I smelled it instantly in her blood. Her eyes were dull, and there was a little quaver to her voice that comes from blood pounding too hard and fast through the heart.

The blood…

I closed my eyes and gripped the leather steering wheel, holding on as if life depended on it – her life, in this particular case.

“Maybe you want something with a little more pop that Lashoda has left in her tired little booty.”

A fat man with soul patch and do-rag leaned in the window. She tried to shove him away, but she have had more luck pushing over a brick building. His enormous hand enough to reveal baggies filled with white rocks. I felt a pang of want. For a moment, I forgot that coke couldn’t still do something for me. But I was a thousand miles past smoking crack. There is only one drug a vampire craves, and it is no drug at all, except to the members of my race.

“Lashonda,”I said, my voice sounding far away. “Get in.”

“Move, fool,” she said. The dealer politely stepped back away from the door so she could get into my car.

“You change your mind, my man, you know where to find me.”

But I was already driving away with the caramel-skinned woman, the window up and the door locked.