Tuesday, 10 June 2008

• The meeting was held in a dark basement, and the cliché was stifling as Madeline and the others arrived.  They took a roundabout way in getting there, crossing through alleys and over rooftops and even once through a tunnel bored in the wall of another basement.  Everything was damp and cool and dark, and something somewhere always, always dripping. 
  
  "Is this it?" Madeline asked aloud.  This was at the tunnel, dark and mysterious.  It was not so much a tunnel as a hole that could very possibly have been made by immense killer moles, eons ago. 
  
  "This is one of the last ways, yes," replied Cyprian.  Leif was pulling a white paper mask like that of a construction worker over his nose and mouth.  He offered another to Madeline, the only other traveler who actually needed to breathe, and she accepted.
  
  "It doesn't look very safe.  Underground passages that aren't reinforced with wooden or iron braces on the walls and ceiling are liable to collapse.  Even if you didn't need air, you might die of starvation or dehydration if no one found you after you were buried.  It's the simple physics behind a number of unplanned tragedies that could have saved lives."  Madeline was inspecting the yawning hole in the wall with great concern as she spoke.
  
  "Say what?"  Dimitri spoke from somewhere deep inside the tunnel, possibly sixty to a hundred yards before the others.  "You coming or not?" 
  
  Leif shrugged and trotted after Dimitri's disembodied voice, and Cyprian pondered her words of warning for only a moment before following suit.  Left alone in the dark basement, with the ever-present drip in the corner, Madeline sighed deeply and, gingerly touching the walls and ceiling as she went, entered the tunnel, too.  All four could see in the pitch black, and their heightened senses enabled them to keep track of the what seemed to be weak points in the walls.  They skipped lightly past these every time Madeline sucked in her breath with apprehension or shouted in panic.  The tunnel twisted and turned, became extremely narrow at parts, and eventually sloped upwards toward a hatch.  Cyprian went first, carefully unscrewing the rusted metal door and throwing it upward.  No light poured into the darkness, indicating an indoors location or else the cover of night.  Cyprian clambered up through the round doorway and stuck his hand back down after a moment's pause to gesture for his comrades to follow.  They alone seemed to have the night when they emerged.  Not a sound, not a movement broke the stillness, though the moon's pale, reflected light gave them better visibility of the narrow street they now occupied.   Though there were no streetlights, the quartet ran for cover in the shadow of a dingy town house's diminutive front porch.  This house had two cellar doors facing oblique and skyward.  They were rough wood with peeling paint of an indistinguishable color in the gloom, and when touched, Madeline had no doubt they would inflict the offending hand with many painful splinters.  Leif and Madeline held their breath, and they all stood like odd statues for what seemed like hours until Cyprian, with lightening motions and precise reflexes, reached out an arm, kneeling, and rapped the door sharply just once.  For what seemed like a fortnight, they waited, and then the hatch opened and they climbed down into the dank basement of aforementioned description. 
  
  The room had been dark, but candles began to flare all around the walls.  The basement was cavernous with walls bored out in every direction but in that of the cellar doors.  The dim, flickering light not so much illuminated, but shadowed the features of a hundred hungry, gaunt faces.  They were the overcast visages of children as young as four or five to as old as seventeen, the misery-stricken masks of want belonging to adults from eighteen to their late nineties.  Some were wolves with heaving, matted sides.  Possibly the most grim sight in the room, possibly the most heart-wrenching thing she ever saw since her previous, sheltered life at her ivy-clad university in Princeton, New Jersey, was truly terrible:  a massive she-wolf, swollen with the burden of child, breathing heavily in a corner, her eyes bloody, filmy, and scabbed as if gouged out.  She had cuts all over her mottled muzzle, and her fur was sheared in funny places, cut through by ugly scars on her back legs.  A young man in his late twenties or thirties stood by her, rubbing her powerful back and flanks, his forehead permanently creased with worry, but his jawline hardened like a man resolute against the evils that had hurt his friend.  "My God..."  Madeline tried not to stare as she breathed these words, and clutched at Cyprian's arm.  "This is terrible.  This is madness."
  
  "This is our, and your, reality, Madeline.  Take a good look."  Cyprian looked as if he might cry and averted his eyes from the struggling werewolf.
  
  "I--I thought you said slayers mistake kids for vampires and werewolves.  Only about a third of those present look passable for high school students."  Her voice shook with a mixture of rage and the desire to lay her head on the mother wolf and cry through her brown and black fur. 
  
  "They know we stop aging when we get the bite or develop the lupine traits and start transforming.  For some reason, they interpret that as meaning we all stop aging young.  The oldest here is about a century and a half in actual age, ninety seven in appearance.  There she is over there," Cyprian explained, gesturing briefly to a sage Korean woman clad in hoods and scarves and thick gloves nearby.  "As if we only bite the young and beautiful." 
  
  "Maybe they're hoping if they piss us off enough, we'll bite them and they won't have to look more like crap on a stick every day."  This was Dimitri.  He had a needle attached to a labeled tube of blood in his hand and was wearing a huge grin on his face.  "Look.  Free food."  Madeline's already dilated pupils seemed to enlarge further and she hungrily eyed the needle.  Dimitri chuckled.  "You're a junkie."  He took her by the elbow and injected the pressurized contents into her forearm.  It felt like a shot of caffeine to the head, and she felt a little less anxious.  Madeline hadn't realized she'd been tensed up and standing on her toes till now, as she stopped.  "Complements of the house.  A whole lot of hungry vampires in a room of werewolves...  You've still got blood, even if it's not quite as pure as a normal human's or an animal's.  I don't know how you'll react in the cramped space, so this is a precaution.  Don't go crazy, please.  We have an image to protect."  He found her immediate reaction to the food highly amusing. 
  
  "Crap on a stick?  What does that even mean?" asked Leif, genuinely puzzled.  Cyprian was busy rolling back his sleeve to give himself the cautionary dose of blood.
  
  "Your mom, Leif.  Your mom."  Dimitri put his hand on the small of Madeline's back and directed her to an empty space along the wall where they could crowd together.  Cyprian and Leif took their places beside them.  Madeline could clearly see now the details of the lair.  The present individuals and groups took places along the rough, earthen walls.  Cinder blocks held a crude wooden stage a little bit off the ground.  A man looking to be in his thirties or so, but with gray at the edges of his fawn-colored, poorly kempt bowl cut, stood on this podium awkwardly.  He was located at the vague head of the room, and appeared to be working up the courage to speak over the low murmurs of the gathered crowd.  The air in the room was gloomy in spirit, thick and musty in physical property.  Madeline hated feeling like a young child.  She was twenty-one, for God's sake, and about to graduate college, yet here she was, in the dark and uncertain about the proceedings of this meeting.  She analyzed the situation carefully--use that two-hundred-thousand-dollar education!--and came to the following conclusions based on her surroundings, companions, and prior knowledge: one, she thought, they will decide where I go.  I may lose my only friends and advisors and never be able to interact with my family again.  Two, there are tempers here.  Look how that group eyes this group suspiciously, and that one glares at Cyprian, Dimitri, and Leif.  The group that glowers; they are scarred from battle and hardened by their bad experiences with normal humans.  They are angry and violent.  This could possibly become very dangerous.  And three, this is an excellent place for an attack.  We're trapped in here with only one visible escape route, small and splintery.  It would be easy to spray us down with a machine gun in the space of seconds.  Oh, God.  Oh, God.  Cyprian must have felt her tense again.  Beside her, he uttered a soft hushing sound, like that a mother might use to calm a hysterical child, and put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her closer, as if he could shelter her in one, casual motion, from the plight of their people.      
  
  

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