Vampire High Sophomore Year

24



In the living room there were seven kids who looked sort of like jenti but weren’t. They were dressed in black and their skin was pale, but they were shorter than jenti, and some of them were wearing sunglasses indoors. Jenti never do that.

They were sprawling on the floor like they hadn’t figured out how to use chairs.

One of the girls, who was fat and had her hair roached up into a terrific Mohawk, got up.

“Cody Elliot, we presume?” she said.

“That’s me,” I said.

“My name is Gelnda,” the fat girl said.

“Hi, Glenda,” I said. “’S’up?”

“Gelnda,” she repeated. “We are the Daughters of the Crypt Poetry Slam Collective of New Sodom. These ladies are War, Famine, and Death. The tall guy over there is Hieronymus Bosch, and the other one is Basil IX. The one over there under the coffee table is Pestilence.”

I saw a pair of long legs sticking out one end of the long brown table by the sofa, and a lot of long, frizzy brown hair coming out from the other end.

“I’m practicing,” Pestilence said. “For being in my coffin.”

“We are here to be part of your opening,” Gelnda went on.

“Whoa,” I said. “How did you hear about it?”

“My mother is president of one of the groups you contacted,” Famine said. “I heard her talking to another president about it.”

“We think it’s a valid idea, and we want to be part of it,” Basil IX said.

“We will read our stuff,” Hieronymus Bosch said.

Pestilence wriggled out from under the table and rolled to her suitcase-sized purse.

“We’re serious writers,” she said, and held out a thick sheaf of papers.

It was a huge pile of poems, and the way she held it out to me was kind of timid and in-your-face at the same time.

“There are others,” Gelnda said. “Musicians. Artists. People like that. We all know each other. We need a place.”

“Better than the Screaming Bean,” Pestilence said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We could have used you.”

The Daughters looked like I’d just slammed the door in their faces. They were looks of real pain.

Pestilence stuffed the poems back in her purse.

“Yeah, right,” she said.

“They always do this to us,” Gelnda said. “We’re not surprised.”

What she said didn’t make a lot of sense, but I knew what she was talking about. I’d gone to Cotton Mather High, the gadje school across town, for a semester last year. Guys like these were a joke to the rest of the kids. A mean joke, from what I’d seen. It’s dangerous to be different in high school.

“No, really. You sound perfect,” I said. “Only there’s a slight problem. The jenti are getting ready to kill each other, and from what I hear, their war’s going to start at that building. It’s going to open on Halloween. But all hell’s going to break loose when it does.”

“That would explain a lot,” Basil IX said.

“The sirens. The fires,” Hieronymus Bosch added.

“War,” War said. “And I wasn’t even invited.”

“None of us were,” Famine said. “We’re just gadje.”

“They’re going to slaughter each other, and we’ll just get stepped on, same as always,” Death said.

“Trod on,” I said. “As in ‘Don’t tread on me.’”

Yeah, right. In New Sodom, everybody trod on everybody else. The gadje trod on the jenti, and the Burgundians and the Mercians trod on each other, and now they were both going to use the gadje as pavement for their street fights.

Mercy Warrener got trod on all her life. Goth kids got trod on. For that matter, I had a few footprints on my own face. Sooner or later, everybody was dirt under somebody else’s feet. It was probably inevitable.

But accepting it wasn’t. You could be a sidewalk, or you could be a rattlesnake. Or at least you could try.

These guys were not what Turk had wanted for the center. They weren’t important, they weren’t connected, and they weren’t even grown up. But they needed the center and the center needed them.

“Listen,” I said. “What if you guys went ahead and showed up? What if we just said, ‘Go ahead and start your damn war. We want this place, and we’re going to make it happen’?”

“We think that would be cool,” Gelnda said.

“Don’t say yes so fast,” I said. “I have no idea what’s going to happen if we do this. The jenti may still start their war. The town may try to do something to stop us. At the very least, we’ll be breaking about six laws. But maybe if we show up and do what Mercy—what my cousin and I—wanted to do all along, it may untie this knot New Sodom’s tied in.”

“Would we be beaten?” Famine asked with a little smile.

“Take a look at me,” I said. “And it could get worse.”

“Killed for reading poetry,” Gelnda said. “Perfect.”

“It’s no joke,” I said. “It could happen.”

“It could happen anyway,” Pestilence said. “Like you said, nobody knows what’s coming next.”

“The thing is, we need all those people you talked about,” I said. “The more people we have in that mill, the more likely this is to work. We’ve only got about eight days before Halloween, so we have to start getting the word out now.”

“We need a Web site,” Pestilence said. “I can do it if you want.”

“You’ve got the job,” I said.

“I do good work,” Pestilence said.

“You should get started,” Gelnda said. “The rest of us will leave now. Everybody go home and start networking.”

“Listen, there’s one thing I have to ask,” I said. “You guys are all Daughters of the Crypt? Even the guys?”

“We took a vote on the name,” Gelnda said. “They lost.”

“The vote was along gender lines,” Hieronymus Bosch said. “It wasn’t really fair.”

The Daughters of the Crypt, except for Pestilence, took off.

I couldn’t believe how calm these kids were. And I didn’t think it was because they were clueless about the danger. Maybe there’s something about being everybody’s in-house loser that helps to make you strong. Anyway, I was glad to have them on my side.

Pestilence and I went up to my room. She sat down at my computer and went straight to work. It was like her brain was hooked up to the screen, and her ideas made a detour through her fingers to get there.

DANGER! ART!

Was the first thing we put up, in dark red letters that emerged one at a time from a field of black. An image of Crossfield before the mills came next, and the words “On a dark and blood-soaked field …”

Then an image of the mill.

“… a new peril to the people of New Sodom has arisen.” Then a picture of one of Turk’s art pieces, pulled off the Web.

“It is the threat of art.”

We were working so well together it was like we were all one thing—me, Pestilence, the computer, the work we were doing. I felt like I was flying.

And when my mom knocked on the door and asked if my friend was staying for dinner, I automatically said, “Sure.”

Then I said, “Can you?”

And Pestilence said, “Thanks, yeah. I think I should. We still have to do your podcast.”

I was sure Mom and Dad would figure Pestilence was a little weird. After all, she was a little weird. But there was only one truly weird thing that night: Pestilence and Mom hit it off right away.

“I want to hear all about your poetry,” Mom said. “I wrote a lot when I was in college.”

My mother wrote poetry? How come she never told me?

“Why did you stop?” Pestilence wanted to know.

“My inspiration was Sylvia Plath. Like a lot of young women then. I’m afraid I wasn’t very original. And when I got married and had Cody—my life just seemed so pleasant, I felt like a fraud writing all that dark stuff.”

“Sylvia Plath had a husband and children,” Pestilence said. “She stayed dark. Very dark.”

“That’s true,” Mom said, and leaned forward with her chin on her hand. “Who inspires you?”

“I feel, like, a spiritual affinity for the Anglo-Saxon poets,” Pestilence said. “But I wouldn’t say they inspire me. It’s just that they understood fate.”

Dad turned his wineglass in his hand and said, “Give us something.”

Pestilence stood up and shouted:

Still life.

That’s what they call it.

Slice of life.

An old Dutch painting.

Tulips dead four hundred years.

A vase that broke when a bomb blew up the museum it was in

Back in World War II.

And crawling across the rotted table a bug that didn’t live through winter.

Slice of life?

Slice of death.

“Not bad,” Dad said.

“I can see why you like the Anglo-Saxons,” Mom said.

“It’s like having our own gleeman,” Dad said. “Or glee-woman, I guess.”

“What’s a gleeman?” I said.

“A poet hired to entertain the dinner guests in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall,” Dad said.

I looked at Dad in surprise. I wasn’t used to him knowing things except law stuff.

“I married her.” Dad shrugged and cocked his head toward Mom. “It’s been educational.”

“Just a minute, please.” Mom smiled and ducked her head. “I’ll be right back.”

She got up and almost ran up the stairs.

“Have you read the Burton Raffel translation of Beowulf?” Pestilence asked Dad. “He was also a lawyer, I think, before he switched to poetry.”

Pestilence and Dad launched into this whole thing about Beowulf, and whether the dragon is Beowulf’s own unacknowledged fear and whether the Anglo-Saxon warriors are the modern intellect, and a whole lot of other stuff I must have been absent for the day they taught it in school.

“Those Saxons are just like lawyers,” Dad said, sounding excited. “Greedy, conscienceless, out for loot. Beowulf and Elliot, attorneys at law.”

“You probably know the word attorney is literally ‘attorney’—at tournament,” Pestilence said. “It goes back to the times when you hired a mercenary to fight for you in trial by combat.”

“Hasn’t changed,” Dad said. “When I go into the courtroom—”

They stopped when Mom walked in.

She was carrying some worn black notebooks, and she had a shy smile on her face.

“Some of my old things,” she said.

“Read us something,” Pestilence said.

Mom flipped open one of the notebooks and said, “Oh, this is really bad. But I was so proud of it when I wrote it.”

The lonely trees are still and stark.

The death-cloak snow lies on the ground.

The pallid sun goes down to dark

And silence is the only sound.

My heart has wandered from this home

And found no better sky or earth,

So I return to it alone,

Contented with my share of dearth.

“‘Death-cloak snow,’” Pestilence said. “I wish I’d thought of that.”

I wished I’d never heard it. It was embarrassing, like walking in on Mom and Dad kissing. I was hoping we’d change the subject, but Mom and Pestilence were on a roll. First Pestilence recited a poem, then Mom did one of hers. Then they’d say something like “That broken window is a good image,” or “I really like the assonance in that last line.”

They went on like that for an hour, with Dad paying attention to every word, and me hoping they’d run out of them.

But when it was over, I’d never seen my mom so happy. No, that wasn’t it. I’d never seen her happy in the way she was happy then. And it was beautiful. And Pestilence looked just the same way.

They might have gone on like that all night, but Pestilence said, “You know, Cody, we ought to get back to work on that project,” and stood up.

“Right,” I said. “Homework.”

“Homework?” Dad said. “How can you two have homework together? I thought Pestilence went to Cotton Mather.”

“That’s right,” Pestilence said. “Cody studied something last year that we’re only getting to this year in one of my AP classes. He’s helping me with it.”

Pestilence was smooth, very smooth.

Anyway, we did the podcast, with Pestilence being the interviewer, and asking me everything about the center. I thought it was pretty dull, actually, but when we played it back, I sounded like I really knew what I was talking about. It was awesome.

“It still needs some more work,” Pestilence said. “But I can do a lot of it at home. We’ll be up by day after tomorrow at the latest. Then we’ll see who responds.”

“Pestilence,” I said, “this was great. It would have taken me a week to do this, and parts of it I couldn’t have done at all. Thanks.”

“This has been a really good night for me,” Pestilence said. “I hardly ever—well, never—get this kind of interest at home.”

But that wasn’t the end of the evening. Not quite. Mom caught Pestilence on her way out the door and invited her to come back and bring her poetry and her friends.

“Do you mean for a slam?” Pestilence asked.

“Maybe a slam, maybe a salon. We’ll see how it goes,” Mom said. “I’ve never been to a slam.”

“I’ve never been to a salon,” Pestilence said. “But, whatever it is, I’ll pass your invitation along. Anyway, Cody and I will be seeing more of each other.”

Oh, good. More chances to be embarrassed. But I needed her. More than that, I liked her.

“Right,” I said. “Pestilence needs lots of help.”

“Let me give you a ride home,” Dad said. “It’s not a good night to be out alone.”

But Pestilence turned him down.

“I don’t live that far,” she said. “And the night’s got my back.”

I walked her to the door, and out onto the porch. It was cold, and the wind blew Pestilence’s hair across her face.

“Hey, your old guys are really cool,” she said.

“They are?” I said. I mean, I loved my parents. They were my parents. But they were not cool.

“Your mom is like this dark lake of poetry and words,” she said. “And it goes real deep. And your dad—he’s a dragon-killer.”

“My dad?” A nuisance, often. Funny, frequently. A get-down lawyer, sure. But a dragon-killer?

“Sure,” Pestilence said. “You saw how excited he got talking about Beowulf. He put down his wineglass and put his hand on his belt.”

“So?” I said.

“So he was reaching for his sword,” Pestilence said. “He thinks he’s in lawyering for the gold, but that’s not it, really. He likes going up against something bigger than he is and killing it. Then he takes the gold to show that he did it.”

Pestilence looked me up and down.

“And then there’s you,” she said. “I haven’t got you figured out yet.”

The way she looked at me made me kind of nervous.

“Maybe there isn’t that much to figure out,” I said.

“Yeah,” Pestilence said. “That’s what I’d say, except there’s this whole thing with the center. I think you might be kind of an ignorant Diaghilev.”

“Okay, I am ignorant,” I said. “What’s a dog leaf?”

“Diaghilev was the impresario who established the Ballets Russes back—I don’t know, about 1905, I think,” Pestilence said. “He hired Stravinsky to write music, Bakst to do sets and costumes, then he got the greatest dancers in the world to work for him. They turned ballet into something it had never been before. He couldn’t dance, he couldn’t compose, he couldn’t even sew. But he made it all happen. Ballets Russes, man. You should know about that. Diaghilev and Nijinsky.”

“What? Who’s Nijinsky?” I said, scoring another point on the ignorance meter.

“Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev’s greatest dancer. Greatest male dancer ever. They were lovers.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I guess I’m not that much of a Diaghilev. No lover named Vaslav.”

“No,” Pestilence said.

Then all of a sudden she was wrapping her arms around me and giving me a long kiss.

I kissed her back, and it was like holding a snake in my arms. A very warm and friendly snake.

“G’night,” she said, and sort of skipped down the steps and out to the sidewalk.

I stood there tingling and confused, listening to her steps fade.

Finally, I got ready for bed.

Lying there, I realized something. Tonight was the first night I’d been happy in a long time. All of a sudden, I wasn’t carrying the center all by myself. And there was that kiss. Oh, yeah. There was that kiss. I didn’t know what to make of it yet, but I was still tingling from it, almost half an hour later.

And there was something else that had come out of tonight. The look on my mother’s face. Dad’s good talk. It hadn’t mattered that Pestilence was a stranger, and even stranger than most. Art, poetry, had cut right through everything to make us all friends and make us happy to be together.

And if Mom and Dad could get into a night with Pestilence, who knew what real people might do?

“Hey, Mercy,” I said to the night. “We’re gonna do it. Don’t be late.”