A kid from The Ural's
Как обычно бродил по DA и наткнулся на красивый рисунок, как оказалось он был сделан к не менее красивой и таинственной истории, события в которой повествуют о вампирах, действие происходит в России. История тут с ссылкой на галерею автора (где еще тонны похожих сокровищ). Если будет позволено, история будет переведена на Русский, и если Ностиэ и Менелион помогут с библиотекой, то это добавиться и туда))
читать дальшеI remembered that night. Bast Theatre, he said. It would be fun, he persuaded me to believe. I should have trusted my better instincts to remain at home, immersed in my studies, where I belonged.
Instead, once more, Tatsumi had hauled me from the annals of my crypt, the lonely apartment on 75th and Cherry West abandoned for the sake of the theatre.
As a result, it was expected that I was to do all of the following: behave myself, actually have a good time, and try not to bite my neighbors--all of which I managed with ease. I was not, after all, the type of man who enjoyed calling attention to himself, nor was I the type to deny an enjoyable evening out.
However, it was the anniversary recently past of my own misfortunate passing, and as a result, I was less inclined to traverse far from my humble abode than I would be even upon the rarest of occasions.
Merely four or so weeks past Christmas? Tatsumi should have known better. But I humored him, he was only a simple man, after all--a simple, undead man.
Bast Theatre, an old, abandoned theatre from the 70’s, was a quaintly quiet little place. Neighborhood gangsters and hoodlums often crawled in its darkened, torn wallpapered-walls, insects, building nests in the chairs and snuggling up with their own films, just to ‘chill’, as it were.
Tatsumi brought wine; and he brought schnapps for me--as well as a film reel he told me repeatedly in the car was a surprise, one I’d never seen, but would inevitably really like. He chattered and sang to the pop-rock tunes on the radio, bouncing in his little 1972 Cadillac the whole way there, to the theatre, while I sat in stony silence, thinking on what had been, and what would be, as I watched the snow sulkily settle upon the earthy ground.
…the gunshots faded into the distance as my commander’s voice screamed mutely in my ears. I was alone--left, one of the few, now. Crawling carefully through the snow, shaking hands clasped around a semi-automatic. The Tokarev SVT 38/40 had become my best friend besides the earth I hid in, cradled to my chest in camaraderie and for dear life. My eyes burned from where torn-up parts of the earth had been flung into my eyes, the enemies were closer than we could’ve ever dreamed or anticipated. The last thing I remembered was a burst of the earth rising like a tidal wave into the sky, and cascading heavily upon the rest of the taiga. Wind whistled, screaming, in my ears, the fading noises of war sighing out into flat, uneasy silence.
All quiet on the home front, and no one alive to tell the tale.
I slowly rested my forehead against the earth, sobbing, thankful to God that I had made it out alive. A six-pointed star, clutched in my gloved fingers, dug into my hand, the thin, iron chain dangling towards the earth. I rubbed against the ground, trying to worm myself a hole, to become a part of it, to be safe--just spend a few hours here, weary.
We’d been marching for hours, and now there was no one left. No one left to order me around, tell me to get up, shove me by the back with a gun and tell me to keep walking.
Keep marching. My eyelids fluttered, and I nearly fell asleep. I jerked myself awake and clung to my gun, every shadow or false movement of the taiga; an enemy.
I exhaled and watched my own breath freeze, curling far away from me. The sky tilted, and suddenly, the ground around me broke apart, spasms shaking it left and right as bullets carved their initials into the hard, cold face of the earth. I sprang up, scrambling to claw my way over the hill I was huddled against, but it was no use.
Cries of “Шпионка, Шпионка! Он живет!» belted out over the snow, and for a sickening moment, I realized that it was my own people that shot at me.
“I’m not a spy!” I screamed, standing up and waving my arms. “Look at my uniform! I’m not a spy--!”
My words were cut short as they opened fire upon me again, and hot, searing pain gagged me, my gut burning, and I crumpled to the ground, arms clasped around my waist.
Mama, I won’t be home for Hanukkah this year. I’m sorry. Papa. Chop the wood without me. Agnessa, please learn your studies well. Anechka, stop teasing the boys…Filip, take my place as…head son…Fyodor, Kiril, Oksana…everyone, don’t forget who went to war for you.
Even if he does not survive…remember me.
I don’t know how long they left me there. I took an awfully long time to die, though. Darkness came, then false darkness as my eyes began to fail me. My stomach leaked crimson trickles onto the whiteness and brownness of the earth. My only remaining stain upon the world would be my life’s blood. I kissed the Star of David in my fingers, and rested against the ground. If this was God’s will, so be it. Just let the pain end. My shaking fingers couldn’t even grasp the gun that’d been my friend, a few yards off, and frozen.
All they could hold was the symbol of my faith, a few evenings into the last month, December, 1941, when my hope died, and I died, under silently watching starry skies above.
A while later, an angel came to me. A woman. A lady in white.
She spoke to me, asking me if I was afraid of dying. Her hands were gentle on my face, her long red hair, I remembered clearly. She was indescribably beautiful, flawless in features. I remember how cold her dark blue eyes were, how pale she looked. I asked if she was, indeed, an angel. She smiled and said that if that were he case, she was the angel of death.
I told her I was scared. She told me not to worry. She took my hands in hers, and squeezed them.
“Do not be afraid, darling. I’m here.”
Her ruby lips caressed my neck, and somehow, between the blurring howl of blackened death and the blood in which I lay, she changed me, ‘turned’ me--and I became trapped, soul bound to body.
And like snow, she was gone.
I sat up, bloodless, as she had made me, alone. I touched my neck and felt two, tiny holes from where she had ‘kissed’ me--and I glanced down to find, eerily enough, the blood I’d been laying in had…dried, somehow, and flaked off of the earth like rose petals, trickling in the wind. I felt sick, and weary, but I was alive--
And then I realized I was without a heartbeat.
Вампир, as she had made me.
Вампир, as I was meant to be…
“Wake up, fancy pants,” cackled Tatsumi, jarring me out of my memories as we pulled up to the theatre. “We’re here!”
“And so are others, apparently,” I drawled faintly, watching my breath mist against the glass of the Cadillac’s window. Tatsumi opened his door, after killing his engine, and calmly offered the cigarette a pink-haired woman, in all leather and velvet, offered to him.
“Hey baby,” she chirped, snuggling against Tatsumi as I climbed out of his car. “What’s happen--” She spied me, and her pierced, deadened face fell, her black lips drooping slowly downwards in disgust. I offered a polite incline of my head, and she turned away almost immediately, to drape her arms around Tatsumi’s neck and complain. “I thought you said you weren’t bringing company.”
“Plans change, hot stuff,” Tatsumi jeered, calmly lowering his hand to sneak a grab to her rear. I turned my nose upwards slightly, quite a feat, as Tatsumi liked telling me, and examined the faded signs on the face of the theatre. “This is Nik. Nikolas, this is Babette Paisley.”
“Call me Paige,” The woman said awkwardly, thrusting a pudgy, ringed hand out at me. I glanced down at it, tilting my head, and did not offer my hand--I could see cigarette stains, among other marks, on her fingers, and kept my own hands folded behind my back. Tatsumi’s eyes gleamed, but I did not comply--I had offered my greeting, a nod, and she had returned it with rudeness.
Her smile faded again, and she dropped her hand back down to paw at Tatsumi’s side, clawing at him lightly.
“Come on baby,” she whined. “Let’s get the fuck inside and get this over with. I’m cold.”
“A moment. Nikolas, may I speak to you?”
“You are speaking to me,” I countered, tightening my fingers around each other behind my back. Tatsumi’s brown eyes narrowed.
“A moment alone?”
“We are alone.” Paige threw her hands up in the air in disgust at my obvious ignorance to her presence. I smiled tightly. “I will behave myself, Tatsumi. You may count on that.”
He snorted in derision, and without a word, rounded on Paige, lunged forwards, and dragged her into the theatre, tugging her onwards by the hand, into the dingy hallways, and through the double-doors. I followed in pursuit, strides long and loose, and quietly pursued, undoing the top of the bottle I held.
The schnapps tasted fiery on my cold tongue, and I enjoyed their peppermint flavor, as I passed by broken mirrors. I adjusted my hair in one of the reflections of the walls, slicking it back, as I liked it.
Contrary to Hollywood’s smothering beliefs, vampires could see their reflections, and it wasn’t a matter of whether or not they were visible, but how they let themselves be seen. Every time I looked in a mirror, I could see a young soldier, rotting away, bullet holes in his stomach--so usually, I kept a stubborn look at my face alone, and nothing more.
As I followed Tatsumi and the girl down the hallway, I became entranced with the architecture of the place. Pillar upon cracked Egyptian-styled pillar rose to frame the massive walls, between the reflective surfaces and empty popcorn-stands. Abandoned mannequins for children to play with, while waiting for the show to start, glittered eerily as their eyes swept past me. It was a circus tent within an Egyptian palace, and I felt small as I walked past a replica of the Sphinx, whose wood was peeling its gold lame`.
“Hurry up, Nikolas.” I rested a hand against the Sphinx’s flank a moment, then hurried on, a shadow in the shadows.
We reached the third theatre on the left, the only theatre with a remaining projector that still worked, and a screen to match. Tatsumi, throwing open the doors, mockingly bowed to the seats that lay, moldering in the semidarkness, and calmly kicked the body of a dead rat aside.
“That can’t be sanitary!” Squealed Paige, abruptly clutching onto the lapels of Tatsumi’s shirt and burying her face against his shoulder. I strode past both of them, absently.
“Any excuse to snuggle, I suppose,” I said dryly, mostly to myself, as we entered into the empty, skeletal chamber of the once-grand theatre, past the wounded organ and the flickering lights. Up above us, the projector creaked to life, spitting out timed light and flashing, weak, crackling sound, that Tatsumi adjusted with a well-placed kick to a particularly obnoxious set of speakers.
“Have a seat, have a seat…” Other people trickled in, mostly punks, with green Mohawks or pierced lips and half-shirts. I settled myself awkwardly into the seat nearest to the back, in the center of two other seats, while Tatsumi and his date settled into the seat in front of me. Again, as I had on Christmas but a few weeks prior, I envied his human façade and wondered how he did it so damned well.
Violins trickled out of the speakers, and, startled, I glanced up, in time to glimpse a sunset scene, and a man standing on a rooftop, playing a fiddle.
“A fiddler on the roof? Some say it’s crazy…”
I leant forwards in my seat, suddenly entranced. I forgot about envy, forgot about woes, and the punks who sang and laughed along down below. This man on screen was a Jew--a…a singing Jew--and Russian, too, no less. The place he lived in, that village Anatevka, looked like my own village. My chest felt tight, and the music--the music was sweet, loud, booming.
And so I did in fact relax, for a moment, to enjoy myself. The women were lovely, the songs were lively, and the alcohol I held eased the pain each time a bad memory tried to surface. I was here to enjoy myself, and lose myself in the theatre, as it was meant to be, and do, in the days of old.
By the time the first half of the movie was done, however, I had finished three bottles of schnapps and was feeling rather sick. Tipsiness made me warm, as I settled back into my seat, and enjoyed the sensation of the velvet against my skin, despite its moldy smell. Tatsumi and his date tore at each other’s lips with every chance, each time, with more fervency than before. I looked upon them, slowly, with more and more fondness, and kept my thoughts to myself, chuckling, as they rolled about on the cushions they sat on.
Then the bad parts came. The war. The evictions of the Jews. Gunfire. I was startled out of my seat by the violence and nearly scrambled over my seat in surprise. I stared, horrified, at the screen, as Tatsumi let out a drunken laugh, and I lost my balance, my feet slipping woozily, and crashed to the floor--I think weight made the camera jump, for everyone turned to glance at me. I slowly rose, tugging my shirt and jacket into place, and swept back my hair, feeling faint.
“I’ve had enough,” I announced, to no one in particular, as Tatsumi, his shirt half-off, turned to glare at me. “G-good evening.” I frantically dug in my pocket, trying to find something, anything, a comfort foot--I got a small peach and clung to it, rushing out of the theatre.
The taste of blood was in my mouth again, my blood, the blood I had choked on, during the war, as my feet raced across the creaking, wooden floorboards. I burst out of the theatre, chewing madly on the fruit to erase the taste of blood from my mouth. I never fed on human blood for the selfsame reason--I knew its taste, and its price of pain. No amount of silly, drunken Russian Jews could erase that.
“Nikolas, wait up,” Came an arrogant laugh from behind me. I spun, the peach half-ensnared by my incisors, as Tatsumi came into view, holding onto his charge with one arm, and his wine bottle with the other.
“No, Tatsumi.” I said, sharply as I could. “You’ve had your fun, poking fun at my culture, now leave.” I gestured with a flick of my wrist, clutching the peach, and splattering the frozen ground with pips. “And take your meat sack with you.”
“Meat sack?” Paige’s nose crinkled in piggish amusement as she turned to squint up at Tatsumi’s face; which had gone slack, and uncharacteristically solemn. “What’s he talking about? That’s a funny nickname for a girlfriend…”
Tatsumi gripped Paige’s head abruptly, and she went still, as his fingers dug into her pink-streaked blonde hair. Laughter died on her lips, and she glanced from Tatsumi to me, confused.
“Honey?”
He turned his fingers in her hair, and I felt my eyes widen, despite all my efforts to remain stoic.
“Tatsumi, do not.”
Too late, I had realized my mistake. Despite his easy-going qualities, Tatsumi was a trained killer. We had met through the mafia, and we had left in the same fashion. But while you can take a man from the Costello, you can’t quite take the Costello from the man. I saw his brown-eyed gaze grow flat, and he stared at me over her head--before clenching his fingers so tightly into her hair that she screamed.
“Tatsumi, don’t,” I pleaded quietly, fingers clenched around the peach in my fingers. He smiled slightly.
“Nikolas, when was the last time you fed?”
“Guys, this isn’t funny anymore!”
“Wouldn’t you like to? Feed, I mean? It’s in your nature. What keeps holding you back? You’re a coward, Nikolas. You’re a treacherous coward who goes against his own nature. You won’t die if you don’t feed, but you will suffer, as I know suffering, you will starve. You will wither and decay into what you were meant to be--a corpse, but still alive. You will become a living, yet unliving dust upon the wind.”
“More poetic than I’ve ever heard you speak,” I spat faintly, watching him. “Let the girl go. She’s no part of this--you’re drunk,” I added, staggering backwards slightly. “You’re drunk and c…crazy.”
“You’re the drunk one,” Tatsumi said softly, tilting his girlfriend’s head to one side idly. “And the insane one. What kind of vampire doesn’t feed?” Paige gasped, and squirmed, as Tatsumi’s fingernails dug deeply into her scalp. The tang of blood rippled in the air, and something in my stomach churned. “You try to stifle your cravings with fruit of all things, Nikolas. Fruit! What kind of idiotic vampire does that? Soon your body will learn to reject human food altogether--”
As if on cue, my stomach heaved, and I thrust out a hand drunkenly to keep from slamming into the pavement, catching the sharper edge of a brick building, and regurgitated the peach I had devoured, along with what felt like all the alcohol Russia could hold. My stomach burned and my throat ached, and slowly, I slithered to the ground, shivering.
“And your hunger will consume you. Why, you don’t even have a second form yet! Poor Nikolas--trapped, unable to change, unable to feed. Is it truly fear that holds you back, or your conscience? What vampire, Nikolas, HAS a conscience--” I heard a brutal shriek, and whipped my head up, dizzily, searing with pain, to see Tatsumi clench his fingers tightly into Paige’s hair. “When you can live forever; guiltless?”
With a sickening crunch, Paige’s head flopped to one side in Tatsumi’s grip, his hands curled around her head as he snapped her head around like a toy, breaking her neck and letting her drop to the ground. He smiled shallowly at me, brown eyes narrow and scornful.
“Here, Nikolas. Since you don’t know what’s good for you, I took the liberty of getting you a meal.” He gestured sourly to poor Paige, a broken doll on the ground. “I know how to take care of myself, Nikolas. When the earthquake of Kanto came, in 1923, I survived a fall from a ten-story building--do you know why? I had made love, sweet, death-defying love to a vampire the night before.”
I knelt beside Paige, shaking the girl’s shoulder, biting my lower lip to keep from screaming.
“And she gave me her kiss, her one, fatal kiss, Nikolas--because she said it would save my life, and that I was important.” His hand snapped downwards and gripped me by the hair--I flinched, yanked partially upright, as far as Tatsumi’s meager height would allow. “Do you know why I’m so important, Nikolas? Do you know why I survived?”
“Because--unh--you’re a tenacious bastard!” I spat, and spit acidic peach-bits into his face. Shuddering, he cast me aside and kicked Paige’s corpse towards me, his fists upraised.
“Nikolas, I am looking out for your benefit!” He roared. “The Costello didn’t notice, but I did--you’re dying, again, and doing it to yourself in the process! They’re just simple cattle, Nik,” he added in a wheedling tone. “Just cattle, we’re just the wolves. Please, believe me. You’re weak. You need strength to traverse with me. To London. Paris. Rome! We’ll leave America behind us, and all these nasty memories will fade. The Costello has offered us quarters in Berlin, if you so choose to accept this and come with me!”
“I left that behind!” I bellowed, hauling Paige over and away from myself--my fingers trembled. I felt lightheaded. “I want to be a good man, Tatsumi--I don’t need blood, the way you need blood. I will find a way, Tatsumi--I will be a good man, a journalist, a reporter, before the war, as--as I was then, I--” hiccupping faintly, I cut myself off, staring at Paige’s muddled corpse. “…I…”
Saliva twisted itself around my teeth. A pulse that wasn’t there heeded no desire but its own in my dried and withered veins. Paige’s neck lay exposed, bare, blueish in the light. Tatsumi smiled, out of the corner of my eyes, a fatal, white smile.
“That’s it, Nikolas.”
I whirled on him and grasped him by the collar. He was laughing, even as I slammed him back against the wall, even as debris fell in showers around his silky, brunet locks.
“You can’t kill me, Nikolas!” He jeered furiously, shoving me back. “I made you what you are today!”
“You’re not my sire,” I said sullenly, in the same way a child would denounce a father.
“I am your benefactor,” he hissed, and swung a kick out at my midsection, which once more drove me back. “I wonder, Nikolas--” and his hand slid under his coat as I stumbled for balance. There was a click, and a glint of metal, as a small handgun glittered in my face, the muzzle sweetly gaping in mock-surprise at my own ill-tempered shock. “If it has to be the same make and model of gun that killed you, or if it has to be on a war ground, or if, oh, hell, any old gun will do…?” He clicked off the safety, and held the gun to my chest.
“Or if I can kill you right here, right now,” he breathed. I stared from him to the gun, and then slowly smiled. The smile turned into a chuckle, and the chuckle into a sickened guffaw. Tatsumi’s smile vanished. “What’s so funny?”
“The fact that,” I paused to catch a breath I didn’t need, and leveled my face into a deadpan expression. “You just gave yourself away.”
His face darkened, ever so slightly.
“What do you mean?”
I stepped forwards, smiling as I felt the gun press deeply against my chest. He tried to nudge me back, suddenly wary.
“How did you die, Tatsumi? Was it from falling debris, or a stray car?” I settled my arms around his shoulders. “Or maybe you…snapped your neck.”
His eyes widened, and the gun went off, but I was airborne--I jumped, leaping into the air, to claw at the sky momentarily. Go, change, I willed my body. A second shape, ANY shape, permitted it could fly…
I felt a shift within myself, a slithering of skin, and saw Tatsumi’s eyes widen in wonder, as a look of bemused horror settled over his handsome, youthful features. His mouth formed a word--“Fruit--?” before I descended, human again--no, vampire again, and, gripping him by the head, snapped his neck, in the blackness, in the night, in the alleyway beside the theatre.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
And when I walked away, from there, carrying him, and his faithful whore, to the harbor, I realized vampires were no more human than humans were--they were all animals, and it was all a matter of survival. Mama, I'm sorry. Papa, I'm sorry. The violins screeched a sour note--I was no longer who I was, who I was meant to be. I was something new, something old, something dead and yet unburied. I was something...different.
I walked away from that scene that night, with the harbor behind me, and the bodies behind me, and my world, my past, behind me-- feeling a victory sorely gained was more or less a tragedy, and a tragic defeat indeed.
http://yourpleasantdarkness.deviantart.com/art/In-My-Head-Memories-74234316#
А это уже не относится к делу, но на досуге я должен попробовать: http://www.diary.ru/~foryou/p64159626.htm?from=last&discuss
Instead, once more, Tatsumi had hauled me from the annals of my crypt, the lonely apartment on 75th and Cherry West abandoned for the sake of the theatre.
As a result, it was expected that I was to do all of the following: behave myself, actually have a good time, and try not to bite my neighbors--all of which I managed with ease. I was not, after all, the type of man who enjoyed calling attention to himself, nor was I the type to deny an enjoyable evening out.
However, it was the anniversary recently past of my own misfortunate passing, and as a result, I was less inclined to traverse far from my humble abode than I would be even upon the rarest of occasions.
Merely four or so weeks past Christmas? Tatsumi should have known better. But I humored him, he was only a simple man, after all--a simple, undead man.
Bast Theatre, an old, abandoned theatre from the 70’s, was a quaintly quiet little place. Neighborhood gangsters and hoodlums often crawled in its darkened, torn wallpapered-walls, insects, building nests in the chairs and snuggling up with their own films, just to ‘chill’, as it were.
Tatsumi brought wine; and he brought schnapps for me--as well as a film reel he told me repeatedly in the car was a surprise, one I’d never seen, but would inevitably really like. He chattered and sang to the pop-rock tunes on the radio, bouncing in his little 1972 Cadillac the whole way there, to the theatre, while I sat in stony silence, thinking on what had been, and what would be, as I watched the snow sulkily settle upon the earthy ground.
…the gunshots faded into the distance as my commander’s voice screamed mutely in my ears. I was alone--left, one of the few, now. Crawling carefully through the snow, shaking hands clasped around a semi-automatic. The Tokarev SVT 38/40 had become my best friend besides the earth I hid in, cradled to my chest in camaraderie and for dear life. My eyes burned from where torn-up parts of the earth had been flung into my eyes, the enemies were closer than we could’ve ever dreamed or anticipated. The last thing I remembered was a burst of the earth rising like a tidal wave into the sky, and cascading heavily upon the rest of the taiga. Wind whistled, screaming, in my ears, the fading noises of war sighing out into flat, uneasy silence.
All quiet on the home front, and no one alive to tell the tale.
I slowly rested my forehead against the earth, sobbing, thankful to God that I had made it out alive. A six-pointed star, clutched in my gloved fingers, dug into my hand, the thin, iron chain dangling towards the earth. I rubbed against the ground, trying to worm myself a hole, to become a part of it, to be safe--just spend a few hours here, weary.
We’d been marching for hours, and now there was no one left. No one left to order me around, tell me to get up, shove me by the back with a gun and tell me to keep walking.
Keep marching. My eyelids fluttered, and I nearly fell asleep. I jerked myself awake and clung to my gun, every shadow or false movement of the taiga; an enemy.
I exhaled and watched my own breath freeze, curling far away from me. The sky tilted, and suddenly, the ground around me broke apart, spasms shaking it left and right as bullets carved their initials into the hard, cold face of the earth. I sprang up, scrambling to claw my way over the hill I was huddled against, but it was no use.
Cries of “Шпионка, Шпионка! Он живет!» belted out over the snow, and for a sickening moment, I realized that it was my own people that shot at me.
“I’m not a spy!” I screamed, standing up and waving my arms. “Look at my uniform! I’m not a spy--!”
My words were cut short as they opened fire upon me again, and hot, searing pain gagged me, my gut burning, and I crumpled to the ground, arms clasped around my waist.
Mama, I won’t be home for Hanukkah this year. I’m sorry. Papa. Chop the wood without me. Agnessa, please learn your studies well. Anechka, stop teasing the boys…Filip, take my place as…head son…Fyodor, Kiril, Oksana…everyone, don’t forget who went to war for you.
Even if he does not survive…remember me.
I don’t know how long they left me there. I took an awfully long time to die, though. Darkness came, then false darkness as my eyes began to fail me. My stomach leaked crimson trickles onto the whiteness and brownness of the earth. My only remaining stain upon the world would be my life’s blood. I kissed the Star of David in my fingers, and rested against the ground. If this was God’s will, so be it. Just let the pain end. My shaking fingers couldn’t even grasp the gun that’d been my friend, a few yards off, and frozen.
All they could hold was the symbol of my faith, a few evenings into the last month, December, 1941, when my hope died, and I died, under silently watching starry skies above.
A while later, an angel came to me. A woman. A lady in white.
She spoke to me, asking me if I was afraid of dying. Her hands were gentle on my face, her long red hair, I remembered clearly. She was indescribably beautiful, flawless in features. I remember how cold her dark blue eyes were, how pale she looked. I asked if she was, indeed, an angel. She smiled and said that if that were he case, she was the angel of death.
I told her I was scared. She told me not to worry. She took my hands in hers, and squeezed them.
“Do not be afraid, darling. I’m here.”
Her ruby lips caressed my neck, and somehow, between the blurring howl of blackened death and the blood in which I lay, she changed me, ‘turned’ me--and I became trapped, soul bound to body.
And like snow, she was gone.
I sat up, bloodless, as she had made me, alone. I touched my neck and felt two, tiny holes from where she had ‘kissed’ me--and I glanced down to find, eerily enough, the blood I’d been laying in had…dried, somehow, and flaked off of the earth like rose petals, trickling in the wind. I felt sick, and weary, but I was alive--
And then I realized I was without a heartbeat.
Вампир, as she had made me.
Вампир, as I was meant to be…
“Wake up, fancy pants,” cackled Tatsumi, jarring me out of my memories as we pulled up to the theatre. “We’re here!”
“And so are others, apparently,” I drawled faintly, watching my breath mist against the glass of the Cadillac’s window. Tatsumi opened his door, after killing his engine, and calmly offered the cigarette a pink-haired woman, in all leather and velvet, offered to him.
“Hey baby,” she chirped, snuggling against Tatsumi as I climbed out of his car. “What’s happen--” She spied me, and her pierced, deadened face fell, her black lips drooping slowly downwards in disgust. I offered a polite incline of my head, and she turned away almost immediately, to drape her arms around Tatsumi’s neck and complain. “I thought you said you weren’t bringing company.”
“Plans change, hot stuff,” Tatsumi jeered, calmly lowering his hand to sneak a grab to her rear. I turned my nose upwards slightly, quite a feat, as Tatsumi liked telling me, and examined the faded signs on the face of the theatre. “This is Nik. Nikolas, this is Babette Paisley.”
“Call me Paige,” The woman said awkwardly, thrusting a pudgy, ringed hand out at me. I glanced down at it, tilting my head, and did not offer my hand--I could see cigarette stains, among other marks, on her fingers, and kept my own hands folded behind my back. Tatsumi’s eyes gleamed, but I did not comply--I had offered my greeting, a nod, and she had returned it with rudeness.
Her smile faded again, and she dropped her hand back down to paw at Tatsumi’s side, clawing at him lightly.
“Come on baby,” she whined. “Let’s get the fuck inside and get this over with. I’m cold.”
“A moment. Nikolas, may I speak to you?”
“You are speaking to me,” I countered, tightening my fingers around each other behind my back. Tatsumi’s brown eyes narrowed.
“A moment alone?”
“We are alone.” Paige threw her hands up in the air in disgust at my obvious ignorance to her presence. I smiled tightly. “I will behave myself, Tatsumi. You may count on that.”
He snorted in derision, and without a word, rounded on Paige, lunged forwards, and dragged her into the theatre, tugging her onwards by the hand, into the dingy hallways, and through the double-doors. I followed in pursuit, strides long and loose, and quietly pursued, undoing the top of the bottle I held.
The schnapps tasted fiery on my cold tongue, and I enjoyed their peppermint flavor, as I passed by broken mirrors. I adjusted my hair in one of the reflections of the walls, slicking it back, as I liked it.
Contrary to Hollywood’s smothering beliefs, vampires could see their reflections, and it wasn’t a matter of whether or not they were visible, but how they let themselves be seen. Every time I looked in a mirror, I could see a young soldier, rotting away, bullet holes in his stomach--so usually, I kept a stubborn look at my face alone, and nothing more.
As I followed Tatsumi and the girl down the hallway, I became entranced with the architecture of the place. Pillar upon cracked Egyptian-styled pillar rose to frame the massive walls, between the reflective surfaces and empty popcorn-stands. Abandoned mannequins for children to play with, while waiting for the show to start, glittered eerily as their eyes swept past me. It was a circus tent within an Egyptian palace, and I felt small as I walked past a replica of the Sphinx, whose wood was peeling its gold lame`.
“Hurry up, Nikolas.” I rested a hand against the Sphinx’s flank a moment, then hurried on, a shadow in the shadows.
We reached the third theatre on the left, the only theatre with a remaining projector that still worked, and a screen to match. Tatsumi, throwing open the doors, mockingly bowed to the seats that lay, moldering in the semidarkness, and calmly kicked the body of a dead rat aside.
“That can’t be sanitary!” Squealed Paige, abruptly clutching onto the lapels of Tatsumi’s shirt and burying her face against his shoulder. I strode past both of them, absently.
“Any excuse to snuggle, I suppose,” I said dryly, mostly to myself, as we entered into the empty, skeletal chamber of the once-grand theatre, past the wounded organ and the flickering lights. Up above us, the projector creaked to life, spitting out timed light and flashing, weak, crackling sound, that Tatsumi adjusted with a well-placed kick to a particularly obnoxious set of speakers.
“Have a seat, have a seat…” Other people trickled in, mostly punks, with green Mohawks or pierced lips and half-shirts. I settled myself awkwardly into the seat nearest to the back, in the center of two other seats, while Tatsumi and his date settled into the seat in front of me. Again, as I had on Christmas but a few weeks prior, I envied his human façade and wondered how he did it so damned well.
Violins trickled out of the speakers, and, startled, I glanced up, in time to glimpse a sunset scene, and a man standing on a rooftop, playing a fiddle.
“A fiddler on the roof? Some say it’s crazy…”
I leant forwards in my seat, suddenly entranced. I forgot about envy, forgot about woes, and the punks who sang and laughed along down below. This man on screen was a Jew--a…a singing Jew--and Russian, too, no less. The place he lived in, that village Anatevka, looked like my own village. My chest felt tight, and the music--the music was sweet, loud, booming.
And so I did in fact relax, for a moment, to enjoy myself. The women were lovely, the songs were lively, and the alcohol I held eased the pain each time a bad memory tried to surface. I was here to enjoy myself, and lose myself in the theatre, as it was meant to be, and do, in the days of old.
By the time the first half of the movie was done, however, I had finished three bottles of schnapps and was feeling rather sick. Tipsiness made me warm, as I settled back into my seat, and enjoyed the sensation of the velvet against my skin, despite its moldy smell. Tatsumi and his date tore at each other’s lips with every chance, each time, with more fervency than before. I looked upon them, slowly, with more and more fondness, and kept my thoughts to myself, chuckling, as they rolled about on the cushions they sat on.
Then the bad parts came. The war. The evictions of the Jews. Gunfire. I was startled out of my seat by the violence and nearly scrambled over my seat in surprise. I stared, horrified, at the screen, as Tatsumi let out a drunken laugh, and I lost my balance, my feet slipping woozily, and crashed to the floor--I think weight made the camera jump, for everyone turned to glance at me. I slowly rose, tugging my shirt and jacket into place, and swept back my hair, feeling faint.
“I’ve had enough,” I announced, to no one in particular, as Tatsumi, his shirt half-off, turned to glare at me. “G-good evening.” I frantically dug in my pocket, trying to find something, anything, a comfort foot--I got a small peach and clung to it, rushing out of the theatre.
The taste of blood was in my mouth again, my blood, the blood I had choked on, during the war, as my feet raced across the creaking, wooden floorboards. I burst out of the theatre, chewing madly on the fruit to erase the taste of blood from my mouth. I never fed on human blood for the selfsame reason--I knew its taste, and its price of pain. No amount of silly, drunken Russian Jews could erase that.
“Nikolas, wait up,” Came an arrogant laugh from behind me. I spun, the peach half-ensnared by my incisors, as Tatsumi came into view, holding onto his charge with one arm, and his wine bottle with the other.
“No, Tatsumi.” I said, sharply as I could. “You’ve had your fun, poking fun at my culture, now leave.” I gestured with a flick of my wrist, clutching the peach, and splattering the frozen ground with pips. “And take your meat sack with you.”
“Meat sack?” Paige’s nose crinkled in piggish amusement as she turned to squint up at Tatsumi’s face; which had gone slack, and uncharacteristically solemn. “What’s he talking about? That’s a funny nickname for a girlfriend…”
Tatsumi gripped Paige’s head abruptly, and she went still, as his fingers dug into her pink-streaked blonde hair. Laughter died on her lips, and she glanced from Tatsumi to me, confused.
“Honey?”
He turned his fingers in her hair, and I felt my eyes widen, despite all my efforts to remain stoic.
“Tatsumi, do not.”
Too late, I had realized my mistake. Despite his easy-going qualities, Tatsumi was a trained killer. We had met through the mafia, and we had left in the same fashion. But while you can take a man from the Costello, you can’t quite take the Costello from the man. I saw his brown-eyed gaze grow flat, and he stared at me over her head--before clenching his fingers so tightly into her hair that she screamed.
“Tatsumi, don’t,” I pleaded quietly, fingers clenched around the peach in my fingers. He smiled slightly.
“Nikolas, when was the last time you fed?”
“Guys, this isn’t funny anymore!”
“Wouldn’t you like to? Feed, I mean? It’s in your nature. What keeps holding you back? You’re a coward, Nikolas. You’re a treacherous coward who goes against his own nature. You won’t die if you don’t feed, but you will suffer, as I know suffering, you will starve. You will wither and decay into what you were meant to be--a corpse, but still alive. You will become a living, yet unliving dust upon the wind.”
“More poetic than I’ve ever heard you speak,” I spat faintly, watching him. “Let the girl go. She’s no part of this--you’re drunk,” I added, staggering backwards slightly. “You’re drunk and c…crazy.”
“You’re the drunk one,” Tatsumi said softly, tilting his girlfriend’s head to one side idly. “And the insane one. What kind of vampire doesn’t feed?” Paige gasped, and squirmed, as Tatsumi’s fingernails dug deeply into her scalp. The tang of blood rippled in the air, and something in my stomach churned. “You try to stifle your cravings with fruit of all things, Nikolas. Fruit! What kind of idiotic vampire does that? Soon your body will learn to reject human food altogether--”
As if on cue, my stomach heaved, and I thrust out a hand drunkenly to keep from slamming into the pavement, catching the sharper edge of a brick building, and regurgitated the peach I had devoured, along with what felt like all the alcohol Russia could hold. My stomach burned and my throat ached, and slowly, I slithered to the ground, shivering.
“And your hunger will consume you. Why, you don’t even have a second form yet! Poor Nikolas--trapped, unable to change, unable to feed. Is it truly fear that holds you back, or your conscience? What vampire, Nikolas, HAS a conscience--” I heard a brutal shriek, and whipped my head up, dizzily, searing with pain, to see Tatsumi clench his fingers tightly into Paige’s hair. “When you can live forever; guiltless?”
With a sickening crunch, Paige’s head flopped to one side in Tatsumi’s grip, his hands curled around her head as he snapped her head around like a toy, breaking her neck and letting her drop to the ground. He smiled shallowly at me, brown eyes narrow and scornful.
“Here, Nikolas. Since you don’t know what’s good for you, I took the liberty of getting you a meal.” He gestured sourly to poor Paige, a broken doll on the ground. “I know how to take care of myself, Nikolas. When the earthquake of Kanto came, in 1923, I survived a fall from a ten-story building--do you know why? I had made love, sweet, death-defying love to a vampire the night before.”
I knelt beside Paige, shaking the girl’s shoulder, biting my lower lip to keep from screaming.
“And she gave me her kiss, her one, fatal kiss, Nikolas--because she said it would save my life, and that I was important.” His hand snapped downwards and gripped me by the hair--I flinched, yanked partially upright, as far as Tatsumi’s meager height would allow. “Do you know why I’m so important, Nikolas? Do you know why I survived?”
“Because--unh--you’re a tenacious bastard!” I spat, and spit acidic peach-bits into his face. Shuddering, he cast me aside and kicked Paige’s corpse towards me, his fists upraised.
“Nikolas, I am looking out for your benefit!” He roared. “The Costello didn’t notice, but I did--you’re dying, again, and doing it to yourself in the process! They’re just simple cattle, Nik,” he added in a wheedling tone. “Just cattle, we’re just the wolves. Please, believe me. You’re weak. You need strength to traverse with me. To London. Paris. Rome! We’ll leave America behind us, and all these nasty memories will fade. The Costello has offered us quarters in Berlin, if you so choose to accept this and come with me!”
“I left that behind!” I bellowed, hauling Paige over and away from myself--my fingers trembled. I felt lightheaded. “I want to be a good man, Tatsumi--I don’t need blood, the way you need blood. I will find a way, Tatsumi--I will be a good man, a journalist, a reporter, before the war, as--as I was then, I--” hiccupping faintly, I cut myself off, staring at Paige’s muddled corpse. “…I…”
Saliva twisted itself around my teeth. A pulse that wasn’t there heeded no desire but its own in my dried and withered veins. Paige’s neck lay exposed, bare, blueish in the light. Tatsumi smiled, out of the corner of my eyes, a fatal, white smile.
“That’s it, Nikolas.”
I whirled on him and grasped him by the collar. He was laughing, even as I slammed him back against the wall, even as debris fell in showers around his silky, brunet locks.
“You can’t kill me, Nikolas!” He jeered furiously, shoving me back. “I made you what you are today!”
“You’re not my sire,” I said sullenly, in the same way a child would denounce a father.
“I am your benefactor,” he hissed, and swung a kick out at my midsection, which once more drove me back. “I wonder, Nikolas--” and his hand slid under his coat as I stumbled for balance. There was a click, and a glint of metal, as a small handgun glittered in my face, the muzzle sweetly gaping in mock-surprise at my own ill-tempered shock. “If it has to be the same make and model of gun that killed you, or if it has to be on a war ground, or if, oh, hell, any old gun will do…?” He clicked off the safety, and held the gun to my chest.
“Or if I can kill you right here, right now,” he breathed. I stared from him to the gun, and then slowly smiled. The smile turned into a chuckle, and the chuckle into a sickened guffaw. Tatsumi’s smile vanished. “What’s so funny?”
“The fact that,” I paused to catch a breath I didn’t need, and leveled my face into a deadpan expression. “You just gave yourself away.”
His face darkened, ever so slightly.
“What do you mean?”
I stepped forwards, smiling as I felt the gun press deeply against my chest. He tried to nudge me back, suddenly wary.
“How did you die, Tatsumi? Was it from falling debris, or a stray car?” I settled my arms around his shoulders. “Or maybe you…snapped your neck.”
His eyes widened, and the gun went off, but I was airborne--I jumped, leaping into the air, to claw at the sky momentarily. Go, change, I willed my body. A second shape, ANY shape, permitted it could fly…
I felt a shift within myself, a slithering of skin, and saw Tatsumi’s eyes widen in wonder, as a look of bemused horror settled over his handsome, youthful features. His mouth formed a word--“Fruit--?” before I descended, human again--no, vampire again, and, gripping him by the head, snapped his neck, in the blackness, in the night, in the alleyway beside the theatre.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
And when I walked away, from there, carrying him, and his faithful whore, to the harbor, I realized vampires were no more human than humans were--they were all animals, and it was all a matter of survival. Mama, I'm sorry. Papa, I'm sorry. The violins screeched a sour note--I was no longer who I was, who I was meant to be. I was something new, something old, something dead and yet unburied. I was something...different.
I walked away from that scene that night, with the harbor behind me, and the bodies behind me, and my world, my past, behind me-- feeling a victory sorely gained was more or less a tragedy, and a tragic defeat indeed.
http://yourpleasantdarkness.deviantart.com/art/In-My-Head-Memories-74234316#
А это уже не относится к делу, но на досуге я должен попробовать: http://www.diary.ru/~foryou/p64159626.htm?from=last&discuss
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19.03.2009 в 20:22P.S. Это Лина Инверс из Гвирагона