Sunday, 01 June 2008

• "I won't go back on what I said," said she, hesitantly. 
  
  "Good."  The young man's marble face crinkled into a crooked, charming smile that displayed like a toothpaste advert his healthy, pink gums and radiant teeth.  She hated that smile, so sincere, but so deadly.  He took her arm in what seemed to be a gentle touch, and then yanked her down the alley with a suddenness that took her footing for a moment.   After a few such treatments, she became used to the action and quickly changed her stride to match his.  Normally, thought she, one does not follow strange men down dark alleys under cover of night.  This, her thoughts continued, was an occupation contradictory to her upbringing, and yet still she changed her footing over a bit of uneven pavement and followed him through a dark and shabby-looking door into a yawning black abyss that she would later know as her home...
  
  She was Madeline Phelps, undergraduate at Princeton University, excellent student.  Promising, she was called.  The year had been simple.  She was acing her classes, spending her free time on enriching extra-curricular activities.  Her family was solidly middle class and educated, and she nearing graduation with her graduate program applications all filled out.  Money, health, consistency, stability: these were all hers...  So as she sat in the damp darkness of the room in a what seemed to be a hard and unstable chair, she allowed herself to think of where she went wrong. 
  
  The young man who had led her there was or seemed to be about the age a boy in her year would be.  In the past couple of weeks, poor Madeline had developed what she decided had to be a proneness to fainting.  Occasionally, she would startle out of what had seemed to be a split second, only to find an hour or so had passed.  She had seen a doctor, who had put her on medication that had lessened the frequency of her black-outs, but lengthened the elapsed time that she seemed to have missed when they did come.  She had let well-enough alone and had begun popping the pills like candy to try to eliminate them.  Recently, she had "awoken" from one of these forgotten periods to find herself battered, bruised, and badly bleeding.  Disoriented from a loss of blood, she had stumbled out into the night to find a friend who could take her to the hospital.  Instead, she had met this pale youth, who had brought her back to her dorm.  Staying only for ten minutes or so, he had informed her that she had awoken "earlier than the usual," as if he knew what she was going through.  She seemed to get her bearings and observed that she was not so badly injured anymore.  She ruled out the possibility that she had been healing so quickly.  That was inconceivable, so she had believed.  Perhaps she was never so badly hurt as she had thought...  The youth had informed her that he would check up on her.  "Do you trust me, then?" 
  
  "Good grief, man!  I don't know your name, you brought me in off the street, told me I woke up too early, and then you ask me if I trust you?!"
  
  "Stop being indignant.  It's too early for that, too."  (Ominous, she thought.)  "If I were to tell you that you would be all right and if this happened again, you shouldn't call the hospital, would you believe me?"
  
  Ever reasonable, she had answered, "No."
  
  "Fair enough.  If I told you I could help you instead?"  Madeline remembered well this moment.  Here was a mysterious boy, pale and--one couldn't help but guiltily notice--attractive, asking her to trust him.  Here was she, almost totally restored to full health after being faint of blood-loss and excruciating pain but moments before, with no clue of what to do.  I'm sure, she remembered thinking, that he had something to do with it.  And good stories never begin with common sense, do they? 
  
  "I do believe that," had been her answer.
  
  "Then, would you promise to follow me if I came for you?" 
  
  "I would.  And I will." 
  
  Ah.  That was it.  The Madeline who was at present in the dark both literally and figuratively in that wet, suspicious chamber identified this as the moment at which she had really screwed things over.  She had not gone back on what she said either.  This was the second stupid error.  "Madeline?"  About time, she thought.  This was a new voice, clearer and less certain than that of the porcelain  youth who had come to fetch her after her most recent black-out.  This last had left her scarred all over her body again, and, more notably, scarred mentally.  This was the first of many times to come that she would remember the dark periods.  It had frightened her.  She remembered snippets here and there and a powerful bloodlust, a more intense sensation than anything she had ever had before.  She recalled sharp teeth, dripping red liquid, easily identifiable, and the strangely incongruous scent of a wet dog and thick, matted fur.  "Madeline, do you remember what happened?"  Strange of it to ask as she was just dredging up the most painfully grotesque scenes. 
  
  "I shan't play innocent.  I remember killing something.  Possibly running over it with a car.  There was blood and fur.  Was it a deer?  Oh, god.  I suppose I'll have to call animal control."
  
  "Oh you killed it all right.  Haha!  It was quite a sight.  You're unstoppable in that state, girl!"  This new voice was laid back.  While casual and friendly, almost complementary, it frightened her how it spoke of such terrible things as killing so lightly.  "I think you skinned that thing alive before you actually got to its jugular!"
  
  "Dimitri!  What a terrible thing to say.  She's in no fit state to--" 
  
  "Will you turn the goddamned lights on?  Jesus, we're not the mob!"  Startlingly bright fluorescents came on in rows at the edges of the ceiling at Madeline looked for the first time upon the room's occupants. 
  
  "Ah, the light!  Hsss!"  A young man with honey-brown hair that fell over his deep-set eyes sat at a cheap formica table with a delicate castle of playing cards under his construction.  He looked at her through the shaggy curtain and said "I'm kidding, I'm kidding."  The boy who had brought her there stood beside her, greedily studying her with his dark eyes beneath a furrowed brow. 
  
  "You're fast," he said.  "I don't even see scabs."  Indeed, her cuts had  dissapeared and her bruises faded into her umber complexion.  Only a trickle of cool blood running down the side of her face remained as evidence of her injury.  And even she wasn't sure it was hers.  A third boy with a corona of white-gold, platinum, flaxen, very, very blond hair peered furtively out of the peep-hole in the grimy door, to the best of his ability.  When he turned, Madeline observed his long and shapely nose, and with a tired sort of humor, laughed inwardly at the dark smut on the end of it from where he had pressed it against the offensive door.   The room itself was nothing.  The three young  gentlemen far outshined the grungy linoleum, flaking plastered walls, and mini-fridge in interesting qualities.   "Would you like to see a mirror, or will it be less shocking to start with the rest of you?"  Madeline's eyes turned, widening as they went, to herself.  Her feet were bare, but not scarred, which was curious.  She had thought she had been wearing shoes.  Ah, there they were.  Across the floor laid a pair of tattered red chuck taylors, her own.  The toes were entirely missing, and the rest looked as if someone had pulled the pin on a grenade and allowed it to sit there.  They were entirely exploded.  Her pants were tattered, too, and she noticed with shame how not only the seams on the sides were popped, but the ones about her hips and the zipper.  They hung about her like a tattered bag.  Her shirt seemed to be in a similar state, and the back was all ripped apart. 
  
  "Oh, yeah.  We found your clothes for you.  Or what was left of them after the transformation went down.  Haha!  Anyway, don't mean to offend you or anything, but while going about it wolf form without anything on is socially acceptable what with the fur and all, we felt it better we give you back a little human modesty when you changed back.  And it was hard, too!  Ever try dressing a corpse?  It's like dressing a mannequin, but ten times heavier!  No need to thank us or anything."  This was the boy with the cards who spoke.  He had the smile of one with a severely twisted sense of humor, mixed up with a desensitivity, of sorts, about, as he said, "human modesty".  Suddenly, Madeline felt self-conscious. 
  
  "Pay no attention to Dimitri.  He has no tact.  Would you like the mirror now, love?"  The boy nearest her handed her a plastic-handled hand mirror, which she took with hands that, to her surprise, were shaking violently.  He took it back for fear of it dropping to the floor and held it before her face.  Her soft features seemed to have hardened slightly, everything about her slightly elongated.  While she understood that Dimitri and his compatriots' words had probably put ideas in her head, she interpreted the change as definitely lupine.  In addition to this, she <almost> involuntarily opened her mouth to inspect her teeth.  Funny, she thought.  She had expected larger canines or something equally ridiculous.  But... Oh, no.  It was much worse.  Her canines were pointed and translucent at the tips.  From the tip of one hung a perfectly rounded drop of blood, poppy red against the bright white.  "You have to understand, we didn't really think of the consequences of crossing breeds when we bit you.  Terribly sorry, really.  You have no idea."  Her wolfen features had not half so startled her as the red teeth marks she bore on her neck. 
  
  "Oh, my god."  In films and movies, vampire bites had always been like those of spiders': two, perfect circles on the jugular.  This looked as if an animal like a bear or a tiger had tried to maul her to death, like a rottweiler had grabbed on and not let go.  It was a raw, red ring of teeth marks, yellow to purple at the edges. 
  
  "I'm so sorry, Madeline," said the blond boy, coming over to her and taking her shaking hands in his.  The youth who had brought her there continued to hold the mirror with one hand as he touched her shoulder with the other.  They both seemed concerned and genuinely full of remorse.
  
  "Think of it this way."  Dimitri had left his house of cards and was pulling what looked like an IV bag full of red liquid--chilled blood--from the mini-fridge.  As he pierced the thin plastic with his unusually sharp canines, he said, "Now, you're this uber-cool werewolf/vampire hybrid deal.  You can fight ninjas and stuff and they'll make a movie about you."  Madeline looked at her neck, as deep brown as ever, but marred by the bite mark, sucked in her breath, and blacked out. 
  
  Copyright 2008 C. B. Sanders
  
  

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