Vampire Fiction – As Promised

The Vampire Suicides
Part One
By Peter Hodges 

I have intentionally laden several layers of cliché into the text. See if you can pick them out.

It’s not easy to kill yourself.

The moon and stars were obscured by angry clouds, lit softly from underneath by the mercury glow of street lamps. I lay on my back in an alley, clutching one of the splintered remains of a wooden pallet in my left hand. In my other hand, I held a hammer that had once belonged to a nameless handyman who was still drinking his nightly dose of forgetfulness in the bar behind me.

The center of my back was over a small pothole–combined with the length of the wood, it should seal my fate nicely. The dirty storm water had soaked through my black wool peacoat. The feel of it was clammy against my back, but somehow different than what I had remembered before. I felt the form without substance, as though I weren’t really cold. Perhaps my nerve endings were crying out with the memory of sensations that could no longer be mine.

I tried to shiver. I tried to feel remorse. I tried to feel anything but grim resignation to end it all with a few well-placed blows from a hammer. When I felt nothing but hollowness, I placed the sharp end of the pallet splinter just to the left of my sternum. My knuckles whitened on the grip of the hammer. Awkwardly, I rapped the end of the wood, biting back a cry as the impromptu stake pierced my flesh. The first strike had not been adequate to pierce the dense cartilage of my rib cage.

I raised the hammer to strike again, willing myself continue. I summoned the strength that was both my boon and my curse. Lightning flashed directly overhead, followed by a clap of thunder, startling me as I drove the hammer downward. I felt the sharp edge of the wood scrape across my ribcage and penetrate my lung to the left my heart. I gasped and choked on a fluid that was no longer blood. I had missed my heart.

Worse, I had driven the stake deep into the soft gravel and dirt of the pothole, effectively pinning myself to the ground. I screamed a cry of defiance, but my enhanced strength had seen to it that I was firmly pinned. It would take an acrobat or a fellow denizen of the night to remove me from my predicament.

I felt my body rally against the injury, repairing it with a speed and efficiency that no surgeon could hope to match. What good would it do to repair damage when the source of that damage remained in place? I had no control over the processes that animated my body, so I could only writhe in repeated agony as my sinew tried to knit itself closed over the horrible wound in my chest.

The steel door behind me opened with a clang, rebounding off of the dingy brick wall behind it. I craned my head to see Johnny Jangles, the leader of my order, silhouetted against the harsh, fluorescent light of the kitchen behind him. He moved with the precision of a dancer, his wrists jingling with the sound of the brass charms he wore. His chosen monicker was at odds with both his features and his voice. We all thought that he was trying to pick an American name that made him sound like a gangster.

“Tommy,” Johnny said sadly in a thick Eastern European accent. “Always you try this, and always you fail.” He gripped the wood piercing my chest and turned it cruelly, tearing my flesh anew. “When will you learn to accept the gift I’ve given you?”

I spat blood in his face. “It’s not a gift,” I replied angrily. “It’s a curse. I’m trying to end it.”

Johnny stopped his idle torture. “If it would not please you so, I would release you from this curse,” he said. He yanked the stake out of the ground and brandished the bloody end of it in my face.

“Do it,” I grated, laying perfectly still.

I held a tense breath as Johnny held it over me. “I think not,” Johnny said, laughing. He tossed the piece of wood into an open garbage bin with a jingle from his bracelets. He offered a hand to me. “Get up,” he said. “You look look like you could use a drink.”

I took his hand with an inward sigh. Muck from the alley coated my fashionable jeans, the back of my peacoat, and the trendy button-down shirt. A ragged, bloody hole was just off center on my chest where the stake had pierced me. I could already feel my skin closing over the wound; my breathing became easier the longer I stood still.

“I should go home,” I said.

Johnny shook his head. “Tonight,” he said eagerly, “we feed.”