Throat (9 page)

Then the clock went away, and the comfortable feeling was all there was, and I was basically staring at a place in the center of the
dark. I could see perfectly that there was nothing there but the wall and my bedroom closet. But then something different happened: instead of becoming a blip of lost time in my life, I was completely aware of what was going on.

It started like this: the feeling of something physical pushing itself into my head … a solid, invisible finger digging straight into the comfortable feeling of my absence seizure. I kept staring at the wall; I suddenly became aware that someone was standing there. A tall man with long legs and a coat that came to his knees …

“Good evening,
Mädchen,
” he said.

If the bottom of the sea could make a sound, that’s what his voice sounded like.

He was with me, right there in my bedroom. The vampire. I should have screamed, should have jumped up, run for the door, anything. But I was somehow still locked inside the seizure, experiencing that feeling of endless, openmouthed comfort. So I only stared. That’s all I could do.

The vampire was not seven feet away. I could see his black, creased pants. His dirty white shirt with the cork buttons. Eyes with no color. There was a lavender glow about his entire body. Not blue, like with everyone else. Lavender with an edge, as though the blue of his original color had been mixed with blood.

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. As if there wasn’t room for anything else inside my mind.
Only room for him
. I wasn’t even sure I was breathing.

“So this is your … room,” the vampire said. He spoke the words slowly, the hint of a bottoming-out snarl in his throat. “How nice to have found you home in bed.”

He watched me and I watched him and we waited.

Wirtz
.

I heard the word like a sound inside my head, not a voice, but more like the ping of a small bell. The vampire’s lips hadn’t moved. He hadn’t spoken it, but somehow I knew that was his name.
Wirtz
.

The vampire stared at me without any particular expression. My mouth was wet at the corners and my face felt as if it were immersed in cotton.

The vampire, Wirtz, turned his face away slightly. I could see the pinkish flap of torn scalp on top of his head. He was looking at something else. So I looked there too.

A pair of tiny sneakers was on the floor next to my dresser. The sneakers had yellow and blue flowers and pink laces.

Manda
.

Wirtz looked at her shoes and licked his lips. His tongue was unnaturally long and slightly squared at the tip rather than pointed.

“
Delikatesse,
” the vampire said, nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply. As though he was tasting something on the air.
Tasting her
. “A delicacy, you know,” the dark man went on, looking at me again. “Very new blood. So warm as it slides down your throat, it almost burns. But that is not the best part. New blood is also very energetic. As I drink from someone so young, I can taste the lack of age. The lightness of the years. But drinking young blood is also something like eating new fruit. So … 
scharf
 … tart.” He extended a long finger, pointing at Manda’s shoes. “You will watch as I drink from her,
Mädchen
. You will see it in my face, the tartness of her sweet young blood.”

I was still trapped in the middle of the seizure, but now I started to feel a trembling sensation in the cottony thickness wrapped around my face. A rippling from deep inside, trying to bring me up to the surface.

“Come to me,” Wirtz said. “You must answer my Call. It would
be so much better for her if you would come on your own, as you should. It is unnatural that you have resisted, stayed away from me for so long.”

I couldn’t remember resisting anything. This sure didn’t feel like resisting. It felt like … 
surrender
.

I started to push back on the inside. Wirtz turned his head the other way now, looking around the room as if trying to remember everything there. My soccer posters. Bookshelves. Nightstand, laptop, the quilt on my bed.

He looked at me again. “I will find you, you know. I will never stop looking. Come to me now and I will let her live.”

I was still locked inside my mind but could feel the tumblers beginning to fall. I was coming up from someplace that was very heavy and deep and far away. But I was surfacing. The more he stared at Manda’s shoes, the faster I rose to the surface.

“I am your father,” the vampire rumbled. “I created you. You are one of my children. How did this happen? How did you make your escape? Help me to remember. The last thing I know, I saw … 
Lichter
 … lights. After, nothingness. You did this?
Unbegreiflich
. Inconceivable. You have hidden secrets from your father. Come to me so I may learn them too. These secrets will not buy your life.” He glanced at the shoes. “But they will buy hers.”

Snap out of it, Emma
, a voice said. It was my own voice, coming up from far below.
Now. Now. Now
.

“If you do not come to me,” Wirtz said, “let me tell you what I will do. I will find you, and through you I will find your family.” He smiled. “I will have her. I will hold her in the air and break her spine across my leg. With luck, she will still be alive. Alive enough to know she has been paralyzed. But do not worry. Her condition will not last long. I will rip her throat open and suck her dry until she is
shriveled and gone almost completely, but not quite. I will save some spark of life, some
Funke
, until the very end. And then I will tear her head from her shoulders.”

The voice in my head was screaming now.
Come up, Emma, come up!

“Very well,” the vampire said. “Your silence is your answer.” He gestured at the sneakers. “This is your decision. I will find you. Her blood will be on your hands.”

He stooped beside Manda’s shoes, reaching as if to stroke them with his dirty fingernails.

“All I need is something that will tell me … where … you … are.…
Ah.
”

The fingers stopped just short of caressing the shoes.… The vampire had spotted something else. A scrap of paper.
My school lunch menu
. The menu was upside down. If Wirtz turned it over, he would see the name of my school in bold print across the top.

He reached for the paper, then his face twisted with something that almost looked like pain. The vampire drew back his hand and stood, looking at me. Mouth like a wound. He sighed.

“No matter. It is only a question of time. And I have so very much of it. Run if you prefer,
Mädchen
. I will still come. I will never stop coming until I find you. Never.
Das schwöre ich
. This I vow.”

Hurry hurry hurry!

I was close now, so close; the part of me that the seizure had buried was moving fast, about to break through the top.

The vampire smiled. “
Sie werden wie ein Schwein sterben.
”

You will die like a pig
.

The clock read 12:04.

An animal sound gushed from my throat. The seizure was over; I was free of the paralysis. I flung myself off my bed and leapt across the room at Wirtz.
Kill him. Kill him
.

I flew straight through the vampire and smashed into my closet door instead. The door groaned as it was knocked off its track; I lashed out furiously, splitting the wood in half and throwing shards of it up in the air. Sheetrock rubble from the ceiling fell on my head. I looked wildly around the room. Wirtz had disappeared.

I shouted Manda’s name at least five times before my mother came in and grabbed my arm from behind. I flung her away, not realizing she wasn’t the vampire. She slammed against the bedroom door, shutting it with her back, looking at me with crazy eyes. Manda’s voice came crying through the crack.

“Emma, Emma, Emma!”

My mother put her arms out toward me, eyes wide as she took in the destruction of my room. “Emma, what’s wrong! What’s happening?” She was almost screaming the words.

I felt all the air leave my body.
Oh my God. What am I doing?
“I have to … I have to go, Mom,” I said. “I have to go now.…”

She put her hands out again. “What … what are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

Manda banged on the door, but my mother was still leaning against it.

“Emma! Emma!”

My sister’s voice sounded alarm bells in my head. I took a step backward and looked around in a panic. I could still feel the vampire in the room. His cold, heavy emptiness filling the space.

Manda was still screaming. Mom was struggling to keep the door shut so my sister wouldn’t see this.
See what I’ve become
.

I had to do something. Seconds counted.
It’s me he wants
, I thought. Wirtz was looking for me; I was leading him straight to them. If I stayed any longer … the vampire would be back … holding Manda in his hands. His mouth on her throat. As her life ebbed, when he was drunk on her blood, when he had gorged on my sister’s blood, he would throw her away like a broken doll.
And it would all be my fault
.

I’m the monster
.

I had to draw him away.
Now
. I turned and grabbed the first thing I saw—my sunglasses off the nightstand. I shoved them in my pocket, rushed across the room, and threw my shoulder at the window, hitting it full force. I could feel it as I blasted through the glass and wood, and the window exploded outward with the force of my body.

I was nearly twenty feet off the ground. I fell in a shower of shards and debris and landed in the grass. I shook the glass out of my hair. I didn’t have a plan but to run, just run. Run as far and as fast as I could, before Wirtz could close in on them.
Draw the vampire away
.

I ran down our little side road, then streaked across four lanes of traffic without waiting for the cars to pass.

I was barefoot and wearing pajamas. I kept going until I broke through a band of trees. I was in a field, then another band of trees and then another field and a farm road. I put on more speed.
Power
station. Gravel. Pavement, leaves, woods
. I was flying past hills, rocks, fences, walls. I chewed up miles of countryside until I had no idea where I was or how far I had gone.

I burst through a wood and came to a wide river. I could see a barge moving through the water that looked as if it wasn’t really moving at all. I took a tremendous leap and hit the water hard and then was stroking for the barge, kicking up a wake behind me.

I grasped the edge of the barge’s nasty saturated wood and threw myself over, sailing past the heads of two men smoking on deck. The smell of their cigarettes filled my nostrils and I could hear a tiny piece of their conversation as I zoomed over—“That’s how you pick up girls”—then I fell into the water on the other side and was swimming again.

I came up the far bank, battling through river trash and vegetation, streaking through the woods and leaving a trail of drops in the air behind me. I crossed another field and came to a fence. The fence was twice as high as my head and strung with razor wire at the top. It had a large white sign that said:

I took two steps and bounded over, hit the ground running on the far side. I ran through one big field after another, then nothing but thick woods. I came to a hillside with a farm road running along its edge and a broad drainage wash that emptied into a big concrete pipe.

I ran into the wash and threw my body into the pipe. Lay there
listening to the sounds of the nighttime around me. They were loud. Insects chirruping and creaking and buzzing. Wind in the trees. Twigs crackling as something moved over them.

I curled up and made myself smaller, holding my head in my hands and drawing my knees up to my chest.

Had I gone far enough? I could imagine the vampire out there in the dark. Tracking me. Licking his lips, biting them. If he found me here …

I waited, certain any moment I was going to see Wirtz’s terrible face peer over the edge of the pipe.

Finally my heart began to slow. I couldn’t believe what I had just done. I lay on the rough cement listening and watching. My pajamas were still wet from swimming the river. My hair dripped into my eyes and down my back. I was used to a bed, a home, protection, warmth.…

I shivered miserably and wept.

As the hours crawled by, my vampire ears had me jumping at everything that moved. I had never felt so far away from the things I knew. Everything was alien. The sounds, distant lights across the fields, the smell of wildness …

I think I slept.

Where was I?

I blinked and opened my eyes, starting violently. Directly over my face was the grodiest-looking spider I had ever seen. I raked my fingernails on the inside walls of the pipe, scrambling to get out. Flopped on the moist ground, then almost started bawling all over again.

Sunshine
.

The unimaginably bright ball of the sun was rising over the hill.
So intense, it nearly made my eyes bleed. I dug my sunglasses out of the pocket of my pj’s and put them on, then lay there a long time letting the orange glow wash the night out of my skin.