alley. I never seen anything like it, sir, and I've watched a lot of pornos. And then
she's all shuddering to a climax right there in the backseat of my Malibu. And the
blood's dribbling from her lips… but it's not a scary thing… it's warming her,
lighting up her face… her cheeks were pale before, but now they're all blushing
just a bit. And then she says to me, I want you to join. Join what? I asks her, but I
already know what she means. I said, I heard there's a lotta parties, and in them
parties you all get down, if you know what I mean. Parties right in the cemetery's
what I heard. She smiled. You're coming to the very next one, she says, and it's
on Friday the Thirteenth… next weekend… but it'll probably last until Sunday
morning… when some of us, the ones that aren't in too deep, who can still stand
the vibes, why, we go to church. I'm thinking that it can't be that bad if they go to
church afterwards. So I say, Sure, I'll come. And she says, Be sure and bring your
best Mend Jody.
—Who did she mean by that?
—Jody Palmer, my best friend.
—The defendant?
—Yes sir, he sure is.
—I trust the prosecution is now satisfied as to the relevance of this witness?
—We continue to object, Your Honor. All this is fascinating in a prurient sort
of way… I can see the reporter from CBS in the back there, desperately looking
for an opening to demand the cameras back… but the fact remains that Jody
Palmer killed several people, including his mother… and that he's being tried for
murder.
—Your Honor, we must have some latitude here. The prosecution's perfectly
aware that we're trying to establish that the defendant was under such crippling
social and emotional pressure that he believed he no longer had a choice. You
must allow the witness to—
—Your Honor! The coffin lid is shaking!
—Well, hold it down, Bailiff!
—I can't! There's something inside… struggling to get out!
—Jesus Christ, I forgot daylight savings time! Sunset's an hour later!
—Cut the profanity, Counselor.
—I'm sorry, Your Honor, but—
—I'm fining you a thousand dollars for contempt. Get your checkbook out this
minute, Counselor. Bailiff! Control that coffin!
—Blast! The lid's off!
—Well, put it back on.
—It's fighting back! Someone's inside—and he—she—it's trying to sit up!
—Well, restrain him, Bailiff.
—It's a woman, Your Honor… a young woman.
—Cat!
—The witness will refrain from speaking unless it is in response to a question
from counsel, or from myself.
—Oh. Yes, Your Honor. Yes, sir. I didn't mean to—
—Counsel for the defense… you've been referring to this witness in the
masculine gender from the beginning. And now that your witness has deigned to
emerge from her… ah… conveyance, she appears to be very, very feminine
indeed. Exceptionally so, and flaunting it besides. Do you always instruct your
witnesses to appear in court in flimsy negligees? Is this a courtroom or a
Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue? For God's sake, madam, cover yourself!
Bailiff… a cloak for the witness. I won't have the jury distracted by her
endowments. In fact, I won't have the jury distracted at all; Counsel, I want an
explanation.
—Your Honor, could we have a brief sidebar? This isn't the witness we had in
mind for this portion of the testimony. There appears to have been a …
misunderstanding.
—Oh, Jeremy… you sure are a sight! You look real small and scared and
powerless up there in that witness box. But it's okay, baby. Cat's here now. Cat
will hold your hand. It's gonna be all right. You didn't do nothing wrong… and it's
not you that's on trial.
—But Cat… you're dead! I saw you die!
—Death ain't nothing, baby. Just another kind of doorway. And there's more
through, and you can let them flush the key down the toilet bowl of eternity… or
you can wrest that key out of their hand and take it with you… so they can't slam
the door in your face… so you can rive forever on the edge of life and death… I
did it, baby, just like I said I would… I did it, baby. Oh, yes, I crossed over, and I
crossed back. Just like the Duke said. And you can do it, too. Don't be afraid,
Jeremy. Oh, and Mr. Counsel… the Duke says he's sorry, but he can't be in court
tonight. Something's come up. He sent me instead. I can give all the evidence you
need.
—The Duke, as you call him, Miss… Sperling, is it?… is under subpoena.
—Subpoenas don't work too good on dead people, Mr. Judge. If the Duke
wants to come to your court, he'll come; but your laws don't really apply to him.
The undead have their own laws. There's nothing in the constitution about them.
—On the contrary, Ms. Sperling. Just because creatures you're calling the
undead are not specifically mentioned in law doesn't make them outside the law at
all. Anyone who is evidently capable of rational discourse and capable of
appearing here and making remarks, relevant or otherwise, is a prima facie
candidate for personhood, and I can damn well hold them in contempt if I so
choose!
—Your Honor, the witness is… well… she's sort of swirling, melting into
some kind of mist… and now there's a black cat running around the courtroom…
it doesn't seem very friendly, sir… in fact, it's got poor Mrs. Coates trying to
climb up one of the pillars… it could be rabid, Your Honor.
—Shoot the critter! I won't have any more disruptions!
—Sir, the cat appears to have leapt out of the window.
—That's four stories, Bailiff! Surely even a cat can't leap four stories and
survive… now what? It's flying into the night? You see great leathern wings against
the face of the full moon, Bailiff? Is this Batman or is it a court of law? Put that
camera away, Mr. Prinze, or I'm kicking CNN out completely. And I'm hereby
instructing the jury to ignore all of this—the woman climbing out of the coffin, the
soap-opera dialogue between Ms. Sperling and the witness, the bizarre
metamorphosis from female to feline, and Mrs. Coates's screams. None of this
ever happened, do you hear? None of it!
—Your Honor…
—What is it now, Counselor? My patience is wearing pretty thin.
—In view of the fact that we have let the wrong… ah, cat out of the bag, and in
view of the fact that the witness currently on the stand hasn't yet completed his
testimony…
—Quite, quite, Counselor. I think there's been quite enough claptrap for one
day. Court will reconvene tomorrow at nine o'clock sharp, corpses and all.
—The corpse… and I will try to make sure we have the right one on hand
tomorrow, Your Honor… will not actually be able to say anything until
sundown… might an allowance be made? Please don't consider it contempt;
consider it rather to be a medical condition that prevents the witness from
testifying during daylight hours.
—All right. I'm going to give you a lot of leeway, Couns
elor. But any cats,
bats, or talking corpses are going to have to abide by my rules. Court will
reconvene at three P.M., then—we will allow the current witness to finish his
touching story—by which time sundown will have arrived and we will be able to
continue with your key witness—assuming him, or her, to have completed his, or
her beauty sleep at that time.
—So, Jeremy… having had your blood sipped by the sexiest girl at Kramer
High in what can only be described as a somewhat erotic experience… did you
then accept Ms. Sperling's invitation to an event which you believed would be
some kind of wild, gothic orgy?
—Yes, sir.
—And did you bring the defendant with you on that occasion?
—Uh, yes, sir.
—And did you and the defendant drink blood at that event?
—Yes, sir. Vanilla.
—Vanilla?
—When the new ones drink blood for the first time… they mix it with vanilla
syrup. Kinda kills the taste. Gets you used to it. It's like, uh, you wouldn't give
your kid brother a straight shot of JD the first time, not without mixing it with a
Coke or something. He'll get just as drunk, but it won't burn his throat as bad.
—What did you tell the defendant to get him to come to this event?
—Oh, that was easy. Jody's a big vampire fan. He watches vampire movies all
the time, and he plays role-playing games, live-action ones, too. Last year, we
hitchhiked down to some sci-fi convention in Chattanooga, and he got into a liveaction vampire thing that lasted the whole weekend, 24/7. He didn't even try to
pick up no bitches or get fucked up, he was so caught up in the game. See, when
it came to Cat Sperling's big event, orgy, whatever you wanted to call it, I was just
looking to get laid, but Jody wanted something deeper. When I told him that she'd
asked me to bring him, asked for him by name even, he got all glassy-eyed and
weird, and he was all, "Finally. This is it. The call. The embrace of ultimate
darkness." Which sounds like the script of a video game, but he said it all like it
was for real. Jody has these deep eyes, that cornflower blue color, you know, that
the bitches like so much; he could have had bitches, except he wouldn't play any
of the games they wanted him to play. So when he starts talking about ultimate
darkness, and he puts on this weird, toneless kind of voice, like he's, I don't
know, possessed or something, it gets creepy. That's why the kid had no friends.
He scared people. Even so, I wouldn't exactly call him guilty of murder.
—Objection! The witness is speculating wildly about the defendant's guilt…
even without counsel calling for such speculation. He's not here to speak to these
issues.
—Yes, yes. The jury will disregard that, of course; the defendant's guilt is for
the jury to decide, not this benighted young man. Please confine your testimony to
the facts, Mr. Kindred… if any.
—All right, Jeremy. You do understand what the judge is saying, right? Just tell
us what happened. No opinions, just facts.
—Yes sir.
—You passed Cat Sperling's invitation on to the defendant.
—Yes.
—How did you convince the defendant to attend?
—I told him it was the wildest live-action role-playing game of all time.
—You didn't mention the… erotic element?
—Oh, yes, sir. I told him there would be an orgy.
—And how did he react to that?
—He said, you can have the sex, Jeremy, long as I can have the violence.
—So is it fair to say that the defendant had a tendency towards violence?
—He was just kidding, sir! I never knew Jody to harm a flea, except in some
fantasy or game, and then, of course, he'd go crazy… ripping off heads or
wrapping himself in entrails… you know, movie-special-effects kind of shit. But in
real life, no sir, Jody was gentle. I've seen him walk sideways so he wouldn't step
on a bug. Most guys kinda enjoy stepping on bugs… taking a life, you know, even
if it's just a bug's life. Jody wasn't like that. Loner, though. At lunch, he'd always
be by himself, because even though I'm his best friend, you didn't want to be seen
hanging around with a loser; he understood that; we only hung together after
school, or at the mall. But even sitting by himself, munching on them Power Bars
which was all he ever had packed for his lunch, he had an audience… there was
always bitches eyeing him from a distance, wanting him. I guess it was the eyes.
That's why he was on the cover of Newsweek, wasn't it? The eyes. I assumed
that's why Cat wanted me to bring him. And I know he's been getting a lot of mail
from bitches all around the country, since that magazine cover; he told me that one
time when they let me visit him in jail. I thought he'd be more, you know, fucked
up by jail, what with all them big dudes named Bubba, but he says ain't none of
them touched him; they're all scared of him. It's been put out that he has powers,
you know, going through keyholes, transforming into bats, and all that vampiremovie shit; but what I wanna know is, if that's true, why hasn't he escaped from
jail? Well okay, I guess I'm getting off the subject again. You wanna know about
the party in the cemetery, the Friday-the-Thirteenth thing… and how my friend
Jody come to be accused of wiping out his family and a passel of his friends.
—Yes, Jeremy. Take your time. I know some of this is painful. But the jury
needs to get the whole picture.
—Where was I?
—Perhaps you could go back to the vanilla blood.
—Yeah. It was like a cocktail almost. They served it in tall cone -shaped
glasses, flutes they called them; champagne comes the same way, I heard tell.
When me and Jody got there, it was close to midnight. That's because Jody took
some convincing, even though he loved vampires; these weren't his kind of
people. Leastways, we assumed that it would be mostly the school Goth crowd,
the Nine Inch Nails types, the Anne Rice readers; actually it was kinda surprising
who was there. It wasn't even confined to kids from Kramer High. I mean, Miss
Higginbotham, the social studies teacher, was there… and she was bare-ass
nekkid, and lying on top of a big old gravestone with her hippo-sized haunches in
the air… and moaning. And this… well, this black dude was all on her shit, and he
won't wearing nothing but a pair of black leather Pampers, and a nose ring the size
of a golf ball, which must have tickled old Higginbotham's clit something fierce…
well, she was moaning every time his head bobbed up and down, and her titties
were flapping around like a couple of beached flounders. Shit, she was a sight, all
moaning and wet in the moonlight like that. And there were other people scamming
against grave markers; some guy was even trying to pork the stone angel that
guards the cemetery gate. And there was this girl I'd never seen before, passing
around the glasses, I mean flutes, filled with vanilla blood, and that was the only
food they had at the whole party, if you can call it food. Well, just about everyone
seemed occupied with someone else, and no one paid much mind to me and Jody,
and the only one who said anything to us was the girl with the tray of blood;
she
stopped to ask us if we were new, and when we said yes, she told us drink up, it's
real important for the new ones to drink up, can't really be part of the action until
you've taken the first step; so we did.
—What sensation did you associate with drinking this, ah, "vanilla blood?"
—Hey, I don't rightly know if I should tell you what it was really like —this
being a court of law and all.
—You're under oath, Jeremy. And also, you have immunity.
—So you can't use nothing I say against me? Nothing at all?
_ Well—no.
—Objection! The witness only has use immunity.
—I'll sustain that, but I want to hear the witness's answer.
—Jeremy, the judge isn't going to do anything to you for what you say. He just
wants to hear your answer.
—Well, sir, did you ever try E?
—Are you saying that the effects of this "vanilla blood" were somewhat akin to
the drug E—Ecstasy—a drug popular among the "rave" segment of the student
population?
—Well, if I answered that, I'd have to say that I'd used E before, and the judge
just sustained that mean-looking bitch's objection. So I'll just say it gave me a
boner the size of a baseball bat, and I wanted to screw the first thing I saw.
—Which was?
—Objection! Irrelevant.
—Actually, Your Honor, this answer speaks directly to the defendant's
motivation.
—All right, I'll allow the question, but you'd better proceed very quickly to
something important. Or the gentleman from CNN is liable to wet his pants.
—Jeremy, and what was the first thing you saw that you wanted to, as you so
delicately put it, screw?
—Well, this is kinda embarrassing, sir. I mean, I wouldn't want you to think
I'm gay or nothing, but I was so horny I wanted to do Jody… well, okay, there
was something about him, the eyes, or whatever, anyway, on Brother Thompson's
Christian summer camp last year, we all learned about circle jerks from the brother
himself, so it wasn't like…
—Order in the court!
—And I mean, people were going crazy in that graveyard. I swear, I saw Mr.
Smith, the football coach, getting boned up the butt by Mr. Oliver, who's like a
police sergeant down at—
—Order in the goddamn court!
—Your Honor, we're not here to discuss the sexual antics of half the town.