Lost Christmas

Looks like I’ve lost the Christmas Day lunch job in the Priory crypt.

Damn.

It happened like this. It was just after noon and the last of the worshippers upstairs had gone home. The homeless were all asleep or passed-out (we feed them as the Eucharist service begins at ten to keep them quiet, and so that any willing to take communion have time to eat, burp, and stagger upstairs to the communion rail.) The last of the other volunteers had wished me a merry Christmas and taken the remaining rubbish sacks out with them. I was left with the washing up which is frankly soothing after the rush and the bustle and trying to keep the crazies quiet during the service up above and the drinking sessions downstairs. I always cherish those moments of quiet as the Vicar and his curates put the communion stuff away, and it gives me time to work up the psychic oomf to waken the sleepers and urge them out of the great wooden doors and on their way to the homeless shelter across the city for the night.

Usually I put on my winter costume of ankle-length coat, wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses at that stage, potter out of the back door, and sprint around the corner to the service area of the teashop and souvenir kiosk and wait in one of the great stainless steel rubbish bins until sunset at about 3.50. This time, however, the Vicar came down with a brightly wrapped parcel as the homeless lads and lasses were shuffling up the stairs.

‘Let’s check everything is switched off properly down here, Mister Dublin,’ he said, glancing at the tramps as they mumbled and bumbled and ‘Bless you Vicared’ past. Was he staring at their recently scarved necks? Lucy always spends the period between Halloween and Longest Night knitting warm winter scarves for these folk, and their bright colours are often visible for weeks into the New Year; in doorways and on park benches about the town. Hide the alcohol-swabbed clean patches a treat, my Lucy’s scarves do, in addition to keeping the cold out for the poor lambs.

I listened to the doors closing behind the last of the tramps, and the huge iron key in its lock squeaked and clunked. There was some scraping and dragging about going on in the church, and finally the two curates came down into to the crypt, standing between us and the stairs. The curates had some communion kit with them; wafers, cup, and heavy brass cross.

Oh-oh.

‘You know, Mister Dublin,’ the vicar went on, ‘You’ve been with us exactly ten years now, doing these Christmas lunches for the homeless, and you’ve been a tireless worker. You really are very dedicated, and I’ve always admired your hard work and early morning starts every year. And do you know, in all this time you haven’t aged a bit. Not by a single day. I wonder how that is?’

Oh, bollocks. I smiled. ‘I’ve discovered a really effective moisturiser, Vicar,’ I said, hoping to ploy my way out.

‘So I have come to believe. We’ve been discussing it this past week or so, and come to the conclusion that you ought to have your service and dedication recognised, and so we bought you a little keepsake. Go on, Mister Dublin. Open it.’

What could I do? Play the farce out, and hope for a nonviolent solution of sorts, I supposed.

The box contained a shiny disc of glass framed in white metal - not silver, thank goodness - that showed me a sequence of moving pictures of the crypt’s vaulted ceiling and then of the walls as I turned it slowly in my hands and then it showed the fear-blanched faces of the clerics as I held it vertical to face them. Of course it didn’t reflect me. I put it back in its box. I said. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘Don’t say anything, said the vicar grimly. ‘Drink?’ He gestured to the younger of the curates; a shivering, pallid-faced child of thirty. He held a silver communion cup.

‘I don’t drink. Wine,’ I said. Well, it was true and absolutely the right thing to say, and could you have resisted saying it; scared to death or not?

‘Technically, it’s not wine, Mister Dublin, because we have blessed it for Holy Communion, as we have blessed these wafers. Technically it’s blood. Do you want some of it?’

‘The Reformation doesn’t seem to have stuck with you, Vicar, if you truly believe it’s blood. I thought that’s what the other lot believed. Isn’t it just still wine to you Church Of England types?’

‘“The other lot” is represented by Father Butler here,’ said the Vicar, nodding to the unfamiliar – and hard-eyed – face of a cleric I did not recognise from previous years.

‘Were you responsible for those terrible deaths at the Catholic Cathedral, Mister Dublin?’ the stranger asked; his voice hoarse with anger. ‘I saw you come in from the churchyard when it all started.’

‘No. I was as surprised as you were. I just carried a few lame ones out of the broken window. I saved their lives, Father Butler.’

‘And drank their blood!’

‘The blood of the dead people which something nasty that a human being had conjured up spilled. It couldn’t be used for transfusions and all I did was clean up for a few moments whilst I picked through the ruins and pulled fallen beams and suchlike off the injured. I saved a good few lives that night, Father Butler, and all the rest of them when I tracked the perpetrator down and took the book from him.’

‘Produce him, then. Let us hear him complain about you. Perhaps we’ll believe him, and think you innocent.’ This from the quivering curate.

‘I can’t. He attacked me. I didn’t have time to be gentle.’

‘Produce the body, then, and his summoning gear.’

‘I can’t do either. The body was destroyed. I burned it on the moors. He was a mad bastard when tepid. He’d be a real disaster if I made him tepes. As for the book; well, Father Butler’s people have a third, and some bald chaps I met on the station platform have taken their part to India, and the last portion will literally require Armageddon to prize it out of its nice deep bunker, built at wholesale prices. Or at least some seriously stupid foreign policy from the American and British governments which, on recent form, I must say seems rather likely. Oops. So; there’s no end-of-the-world nutcase to prove I’m not the bad guy, but this is still England (just about) and I don’t have to prove myself innocent just to stay alive. Sorry to disappoint you, and all that, but I’ll just be on my way now, gentlemen. Pity. I enjoyed helping the old winos out each year.’ I made to move toward the staircase.

‘What will happen to the bitten ones?’ asked the Vicar, raising the heavy cross to block my way.

‘Short term, they’ll be a little less prone to bacterial infections for a week or two, but slightly more vulnerable to viruses for the same time. They won’t feel the cold much. Dogs will avoid them, and the local thugs will think twice before beating them up. They’ve got a temporary dark aura. Good insurance; like Redibrek with attitude.’

‘And when they finally die?’ pressed the Vicar.

‘That’s for you to answer; not me. They aren’t drained and they only drank hock and port today. There’s no chance of them turning.’

The Vicar wasn’t buying it, and stood foursquare between me and the steps. Father Butler looked a little less firm; thinking, perhaps, of why a vampire would hand a deadly grimoire over to the Vatican. The third man was quaking even harder now, the poor sod.

Time to attack. ‘Is this really your thing, Father Butler? Luring a vampire to his death? Can you really wield the cricket stumps or pool queue or whatever it is you’ve got under your vestments? Slam it through my chest and hear me scream as the blood flies all over you? Or are you just pleased to see me?’

That got a smile; he was no brainless fanatic. ‘A colleague of mine did okay in New Mexico a few years back,’ he said, ‘and I think as a rugby man I’m better than a mere soccer player any day.’ Tough bastard.

More pressure, Adonais, or you’ll have to really hurt one of them. ‘Do you know what the important point about your internal organs is?’ I asked. Butler looked blankly back at me. ‘I mean, the really essential, the vital, the sine qua non of your internal organs. What is it, do you think?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he shot back, anger growing.

‘I’ll tell you then Father. It’s “internal.” That’s what you need to keep in mind about them, and just the way you ought to keep them, Father.’ But I wasn’t talking to him or the stony-faced vicar. The curate thought about the alternative to internal, dropped his box of Hosts, and ran up the stairs whilst the vicar and Butler turned to look at him. A thing to bear in mind about vampires is that ‘up’ and ‘down’ aren’t as absolute for us as they are for the tepid. I was able to scuttle up the walls and across the ceiling in a blink and I actually overtook the fleeing curate. Nice man; lousy leg muscles.

The main door was blocked to me by a large standard crucifix that had been dragged in front of it. The vestry door was covered in dotted communion wafers, and in any case looked to be soaking wet. I guessed the font would be empty. I never saw the fleeing curate again that day, and I think he must have been cowering amongst the pews. I ran back towards the rear of the church and through the back to the souvenir shop door. It too was barred; this time by widely splashed holy water and a couple of smaller old crosses. How rood. However, there was a stained-glass window between the arch above that door and the Lady Chapel on the left hand side of the nave, and a four-seater oaken pew smashed it open beautifully. It has not been my month to respect church architecture and fittings, I’m afraid, but needs must when the slayers drive. I leaped through and ran into the night.

‘And with a single bound, he was free,’ right?

Remember the time of day it was? Emphasis on day?

I’m thinking of lying low for a few weeks, or maybe months or decades. At least until the scars heal and my ears and fingers regenerate. I’m going to have to be extra polite to Lucy, (who is typing this with her slender, deft digits of unsurpassed loveliness and grace), if I want to continue my blog.

So there you have it, vampire fans. A handful of amateurs led by the one solitary witness of my unthanked heroism at the Cathedral almost had me staked. I’m suffering massive burns and lots of acute things, and Lucy and I will have to avoid public appearances into the New Year. A good deed never goes unpunished, they say.

Perhaps we’ll stay with Benny the Zebra in Manchester. He’s an understanding chap, and he owes me a favour for once, instead of the other way around.

A Happy New Year to you all, dead readers, and see you in it.

("")

Adonais and Lucy.

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A Merry Christmas To All Our Bleeders

A Merry Christmas to all our readers and friends from Adonais and Lucy.

We’re not at home today and a friend is posting this for us from our home - slayers please note! - as we’re doing our usual Christmas Day good deeds. We like to spend this day each year in the company of people who are less fortunate and slower-moving than we are.

The Priory church in town has a very large crypt which the Vicar uses as a dining-hall, kitchen, and dormitory over Christmas Eve and until Christmas Day evening when other charities take over. I join him and, as there is no direct sunlight down there, I can stay all day long in complete safety. There are other helpers, usually, but none who sticks as close to the kitchen as eagerly as I do, or who take no breaks. I like to keep the festive fare traditionally English for this meal, and no fancy foreign muck spoils the roast geese I bring, nor the potatoes, vegetables, Yorkshire puddings, or stuffing. Plum pudding as per Dickens and the local supermarket managers and lots of unlicensed booze. None of your garlicky French rubbish.

It’s a really enjoyable day out as we get a few homeless coming down for a feed and a step out of the weather. There’s a great feeling of bonhomie and companionship and, if I can’t join the services in the church above (the Vicar’s bit over-generous with the cross-waving) I can surely echo his seasonal sentiments from the shady place below. And shadow part of the ritual. Besides, the homeless have a tendency to pass out by about noon anyway. Turkey, goose, and potatoes roast in goose fat and a big portion of Christmas pudding on top of something from the case or two given by the local Freemasons tend to relax the old boys and girls something wonderful. There’s this magical combination of vitamins, protein, trace elements, fats and carbohydrates in the English Christmas lunch; along, no doubt, with the clouds of alcohol fumes and warm fellow-feeling of the day itself that strengthens and enriches the blood of those unfortunates. Keeps them alive over the winter’s deepest cold, it does, and so nourishes more than one life. Vodka is never nicer than when it has been quadruple-filtered: three times at the distillery and once through a wino.

Then they can totter safely (or be carried) to the shelter at the other end of town to sleep Christmas night in warm and security. Nobody attacks my town’s tramps over Christmas; it’s as if they have a guardian angel keeping watch over them. In fact, they attain a dark and foreboding aura for a day or two which the local toughs shy away from.

Lucy spends the day in the hospital. She’s an illustrator for children’s books and so gets a free pass to the pediatric ward to read them stories and generally be all cheerful and Mary Poppins for them, poor scraps. It’s right next to Haematology, so she never has to leave the second storey for refreshments, either, though there’s usually a tipsy nurse or a porter or two to be tapped, and consultants tend to alcoholic excess at the best of times.

It’s handy for the mortuary, too, which is good because Lucy likes plans that save life in more than one way. Christmas Day is about three days after the Longest Night.
Amongst out kind, this is a big celebration, of course; the triumph of the darkness over the light and so on. Some idiot always has too much to drink and takes no precautions at all. So three days later there’s often some weeping assistant pathologist describing what’s scared him to policemen who tactfully cease to take notes after the first couple of sentences, or who begin to wonder whether to breathalyze him or check him for narcotics. Then some bright spark in the local fortean club gets to post online about another Christmas Day case of spontaneous human combustion and Lucy weeps until New Year’s Eve when we provide first aid and clean up after drunk-drivers.

So Lucy always checks up on the pathologist and his cooling charges in case there’s a happy event, and she can bring the newborn home to ours in the shade.

Otherwise we meet up again after our shifts, and then we do our annual prison visit.

The castle in town has been converted to a prison where the convicts spend the last few months and years of their all-too-short sentences. Murderers, rapists, armed robbers and gangsters all; they used to believe that they and their crimes were forgotten by all but the victims’ and their grieving relatives.

Lucy and I are able to put them right on this matter each Christmas, and it is easy as the prison can hardly be described as a home, barred by the protective aura of property and familiarity, and the skylights on the roof are poorly secured. I think those old felons really look forward to our visit every year. I’ve heard the Vicar saying that all the Christmas services are packed out in the prison chaplaincy: morning, noon and night, and no-one ever wants to return to their cells, bless them.

I truly think we’re making a difference there.

And so to those who, as Lucy and I do, make your livings by earning and buying or persuading others to give you the wherewithal of survival, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all. Whatever your species or faith, your race or station in life or your vital signs, we hope you enjoy the festive season, and that next year we can find even more ways to get along without actually killing each other.

Blessings from Adonais and Lucy.

PS. To the predators and the humourless slayers that they inspire and motivate to come a-calling, see you in 2008.

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Wide A Wake

Next day.

Typical.
There’s always some idiot who’s prepared to spoil everything, isn’t there?
It was all going so well; grand baroque music and charming flickering candles in the cathedral; I had a pew not too close to any crucifixes; lovely new roof and an impressive new green and gilt rood-screen.
Come half-time and the mulled wine is going down a treat and young Deidre and I had just popped out behind the Social Centre for a quick nip when some total bastard decides to open up a temporary interdimensional rift. For ten or fifteen tentacled seconds of claw-slashing, crimson-spattered chitinous horror, the cathedral became a chthudral.
The authorities will probably put it down to a gas explosion, now that terrorism is no longer a safe excuse to explain away supernatural slaughter. After all, who would ever slaughter a churchful of worshippers and their friends whose only offence was to listen to some Christian music? Who could possibly be offended by such innocuous behaviour? It just never happens. Anywhere. Too much trouble asking such questions.
Nope, a gas explosion is what it’ll be, and the job’s finished. Dignified services for the dozen or so dead, a news blackout about the strange lights in the sky, and a quick, misleading, and above all accurate account in the weirdoes’ news magazines. No-one but a few witnesses will remember a black-clad figure leaping like a flea through the shattered east window and hopping out again with the wheelchair-bound and Zimmer-framed survivors. Government-appointed ‘Stress Councillors’ will treat and discredit with any such false memories.
Not that I want the attention. There was a lot of claret about last night whose owners no longer needed it, and ‘waste not, want not’ is a Lancashire saying.
But now I learn that there’s an eschatological nutcase hanging around my hometown. That should add to the fun over Christmas; finding him/her/it/them, and dealing. As if I didn’t have enough to do this month already, what with staff parties and the Homeless Shelter work on Christmas day itself…Busy, busy, busy.
It’s two-thirty GMT and it really is time I got some sleep. Got people coming round tonight for my wake, and I still haven’t sorted out the catering.

Sainsbury’s deliver food right to your door now, they say.

Sleep well, friends.

AB-

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Who Knows Where The Thyme Goes

Today is the eve of the anniversary of my mortal body’s birth.

Each year I commemorate this event by visiting my grave and pruning the rose and hawthorn bushes that my widow planted on the site. A thorough woman, that. Lives in a garlic farm on a river island. Remarried too; to a crossbow manufacturer. Very thorough. Makes child contact a bit difficult occasionally, that does.

Still, I have few regrets having come into this life. The strength and the longevity are fine things to have, of course, and if the diet is unvaried it is at least low on cholesterol except for when I meet gluttons.

It’s difficult to remember after twenty years what daylight felt like, but my Lucy makes the night a warm and bright enough place for me.

It’s only the damned predators and the remorseless slayers that they inspire that keep life being from being pretty damned perfect.

It just isn’t necessary to kill humans for us to live. A sip here, a good long slug there, and we can be on our way to the next party or a midnight conference call with our offshore portfolio managers, or just go for a stalk or hang around in a favourite graveyard. All this taking over the world nonsense is pointless, dangerous, and expensive. If they’d only lay off the humans for a generation or two, hit the bottle all the while, and let the chick lit and films do their work, and we could come out of the casket and be acknowledged as yet another interesting tribe of mankind. We’d be able get a lot of work as historians and mine rescue workers and detectives, and the priests and the pubescents could go back to their parishes and pimples and leave the rest of us in peace.

As it is, since Sumerian times and even before, some of – well, almost all of – our kind have decided upon a manifest destiny to rule and dine on the rest of humanity. The bastards. The total, utter bastards. Do they know how easy life can be in an industrial civilization with sterile needles and refrigeration and 24/7 online shopping and banking? But, no! They have to rule the cringing mortals / own the Power Of The Night / hunt through eternity to satisfy their Endless Thirst. It buggers it up for the rest of us who’d like to live as peaceful citizens of good standing, and we could truly rest in peace. It’s inevitable really. Though paying taxes does not look at all appealing we’ve got the death part beaten into a cocked hat.

Well, it’s fully dark here, and they’re doing mince pies and mulled wine at the Cathedral, so I’d better run so as not to miss the rush. Amazing what a spoonful of cinnamon and ginger in a drop of heated vin ordinaire will do to even the nicest catholic girl’s inhibitions.

I won’t even be able to see my widow’s dancing shoe heel marks on the turf, either.

Cheers,

AB-.

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Chick flecks.

Dear ‘Vlad’,

It’s all your fault.
Your ‘Eternity Without Cruelty’ lark is sending me mad.
Mad, I tell you.

In the old life, the Bride and I could spend our evenings hunting and stalking and bleeding our prey. All good, clean, vampiric fun. Now that we have joined the IV League and mealtimes are rapid and joyless occasions, and therefore the remainder of the nighttime needs to be filled with some activity or other. Our wealth is copious and diversely invested, and using the internet has made attending to them an easy and quick thing, and so it is no longer a diverting challenge.

Well, we’re both keen readers, and my Marjorie has been so ever since Mister Caxton made books cheap enough for commoners such as we. There are some splendid books available, and many of them to my taste, as I see they are to yours. Reading is, at best now that we are all literate, a solitary vice. We need such amusements as can be enjoyed together, as a couple. And so we have turned to the cinema and television, as I see you have, as a suitable pastime.

There are many splendid vampire films available, as you know, but can Marjorie and I choose films which we both enjoy equally?

Can we hell! I like light, romantic comedies with happy endings, such as Daughters of Darkness and The Hunger, or musicals wherein all the would-be vampire killers end up variously anxious, heartbroken, or ashamed. My Marjorie, however, prefers dreary weepies where the vampires suffer pain - both emotional and physical - and even defeat, such as Van Helsing or Blade.

Why, oh why, is it that women always seem to enjoy cruel and violent tales, while we menfolk prefer cheerful and edifying stories after which we can sleep soundly all day long, unafraid that the mortals will destroy us?

Could we but hunt and kill once more, Mister Blackburn, Marjorie and I need never squabble over the choice of DVDs again.

Dining non-lethally was your Mistress Bountilaire’s quirkish gift to my marriage, and I insist that she, or you, provide a solution.

Regards,
Bernard Hatton, (deceased.)

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