Could the witness confine himself to—
—Brother Thompson was even there, and he was handcuffed to a gravestone,
and these motorcycle bitches were prodding him with cigarettes, and he was all
moaning.
—That's enough, Mr. Kindred. Counselor, instruct your witness to get to the
point.
—So, Jeremy, you, ah, made a pass at your best friend.
—Well, not exactly. It was more like this: I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls
of that blood-cocktail thing, and everything went all misty… well, okay, and I felt
like my veins were on fire… like this burning sensation, this tingling, everywhere,
especially, you know, down there… and the next thing I knew, I was on Jody's
leg, like a dog or something, rubbing myself up and down on it. But he wasn't
getting horny off that blood at all. It wasn't affecting him the same way. Even
though there was couples, threesomes, getting down every which way, in the light
of the moon, with a dark, pounding music pouring out of a ghetto blaster
somewhere… like one of them imperial orgy scenes in Caligula, you know?…
Jody wouldn't have none of it. He shook me off of him like you'd shake off, well,
a dog. "Don't," he said. "You're like all them others. To me the blood feels
different. I think maybe I ain't the same kind as you, maybe I don't belong with the
likes of you. What you're all doing seems so empty to me. Blood sings a different
music to me. When I look into the dark, I look right past all of you and all your
sleazy thrills, your wanna-be games, I see you all just flirting with the darkness…
not willing to embrace it… to become a part of it… no, you're not like me after all,
and it makes me sad because you've been a good friend to me, Jeremy, all these
years when no one would talk to me because I'm like the school outcast, the
mutant in the hallway… today I'm starting to learn who I really am."
—So the defendant had, as it were, an epiphanic moment from the drinking of
human blood?
—I don't rightly know what that means, sir.
—Doesn't matter. That evening changed him, didn't it?
—Maybe so. What he said to me, though, was he found his true self.
—And his true self was what? A vampire?
—Won't that simple, sir. But anyways, I didn't have time to listen to him
ranting on at that point, because, as I said, I was thinking with my dick. And soon
my dick found something to play with. There was this mousy girl, no one anyone
would look at twice in the daylight… her name was Constance Thorpe… and the
only time I ever spent more than five seconds in her company was when me and
her was paired off cutting up rats in biology lab one time. You know, she always
used to make me nervous. She had nerd glasses, and she had a way of pulling out
them rat intestines that made it look like she was enjoying it too much. And she
dressed like a refugee from the sixties, parents must've been hippies or something
and she forgot to rebel. Well, I saw her leaning against a tombstone, and she
wasn't the same bitch at all, lemme tell you. She'd lost the glasses and she even
had a spot of makeup on. But I didn't really give a shit, because of whatever it was
in that blood; all I cared about was that she made a beeline for me and kinda nosedived toward my crotch. Before you knew it she'd unzipped me and she was all
up on me like a noisy old vacuum cleaner. I mean, I wouldn't have been seen dead
with her normally, but you should have seen her suck, I mean, that girl could suck.
She was wild, too, licking up a storm on my balls and even thrusting down past
them, I think she'd have stuck it up my butt if my pants had come all the way
down, but the zipper was all tangled in her hair. Must've hurt, it yanking on that
hair like that, sir, but she sucked with a will, like her life depended on it. So I sorta
leaned back against a gravestone, closed my eyes, and slipped into like a kind of
trance, just letting myself go with the flow of it… then I sort of came to with a
shock because I could feel this pinprick, this sharp pain that wouldn't go away. I
looked down and she had pulled out a syringe and she'd stuck me right in the
shaft, and you know how much blood gets down there when you got a boner. I
guess I kinda panicked, even though I knew that these people have a thing about
blood, and I drew back, and well, I knocked the syringe out and I jizzed at the
same time, and there was blood and cum everywhere… well, Constance was
on her face and she'd've drunk it. Holy shit! I didn't like it. The high of the vanilla
blood was coming down now. I was all dizzy. This wasn't how I thought it would
feel. I felt all dirty inside. That's when I decided to go looking for Jody. I sorta
pushed Constance out of the way. She was on all fours, the fucking nympho
bitch, and already sniffing for a fresh piece of meat to chew on. I kept calling
Jody's name, asked a couple people where he was, and they kept shrugging or
being too involved with their own shit.
—And where did you in fact discover the defendant to be?
—Well, I'm getting to that, sir!
—Good. I see that the prosecution has become too, ah, involved in its prurient
fascination with the material to object any further…
—There's no need for the defense to snipe, Your Honor, when it is clearly
burying itself with every word this so-called witness utters.
—Be that as it may… Mr. Kindred?
—Okay. Well, there's this big old structure bang in the middle of the cemetery,
see, and it's the oldest monument there. I think it dates to long before the war.
—You mean the Civil War.
—Yes, sir.
—I think most of the jury are familiar with the monument you're referring to.
It's the Forbin-St. Cloud Memorial, right? Built by a prominent French family, in
the days when our little city was booming. Which times, since the banning of
hemp cultivation, are long past. A bizarrely incongruous Gothic monstrosity,
surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with strange-looking gargoyles on top,
rumored to have underground passageways, under whose sheltering eaves the
homeless of this town often rest, as the local police force rarely bothers to kick
them out, rarely even patrols this area because of the mysterious death of Police
Sergeant McKinley, found garroted and disemboweled and spread-eagled over
the—
—Why is the defense now regaling us with a history lesson, Your Honor?
Objection!
—I'll stop, Your Honor. I just thought the local color would be helpful. The
Forbin-St. Cloud monument has… vibes. I want the jury to understand that. Since
all of them heard the ghost stories when they were kids, and few were brave
enough to go there. I know the prosecution is anxious to get back to the dirty bits.
So how about it, Mr. Kindred? Let's have 'em. The dirty bits.
—Like I said, sir, I thought I saw the back of Jody's head, and he was
squeezing through the iron bars into the Fo-for-… well, we don't call it that, sir.
—What do you call it?
—We call it the Hellhouse.
—Why?
—Well, sir, on account of… it's bi
g enough to be a house, what with all the
underground passages it's supposed to have… and it's got this entranceway…
well, a fake entranceway… that looks like the mouth of hell… a big old demon's
jaw in stone with a stone door that can't be opened. Well… I didn't think it could
be opened. But then… I saw Jody sort of standing there… at the stone mouth…
you could see the sculpted flames of hell there… and he was just standing there.
Just staring. Like he'd seen something… supernatural. Well, I kind of snuck up
behind him. I guess I startled him because when he felt me breathing down his
neck he screamed up a storm. I mean he had like a panic attack, and I hadn't never
seen him lose his cool before. I got him calmed down. I kept saying, It ain't so
bad, Jody, nothing bad's happened yet, maybe we just lost a bit of blood is all.
Maybe we're a bit weak from that, you know, dizzy, seeing things. When you lose
blood you see things. We learned that in school. But he was all, I saw what I saw.
I said, What did you see? and he said, Nothing. Fucking nothing, and don't ask
me again. I ain't crazy. I said, Nobody said you was. Just tell me what you seen
there.
—And did the defendant respond?
—Yeah.
—What did he say?
—He more than said, sir. Well, at first he just murmured, They went through
the doorway, they just up and walked right on through there like it was air, I can
feel them inside there, feel the heat of their souls inside the dead, empty space…
but pretty soon he was a-banging on that stone with his fists, like he should have
been able to melt right through it. Well, what do you know? The wall started to
give.
—He shattered a mausoleum wall with his fists?
—Not hardly, sir. I mean the wall and him seemed to kind of meld together,
and he was sort of sinking into it.
—What did you do, Jeremy?
—I thought he was going to die. I mean, getting sucked into a Jell-o kind of a
wall, it was one of them Poltergeist-style special effects, like you see in movies.
So I guess I grabbed on to him, and that's how I ended up getting pulled inside,
too. The stone felt mushy. Oily, you know. It made my flesh crawl. But the wall
closed right up again as soon as we got through, and it was dark as shit in there,
and won't no way to get back out. I almost shat my pants, I don't mind telling you,
sir, it was that scary. The air was all moist and stale-smelling. I don't know how
dead people are supposed to smell, but I could feel death there. Well, after a time,
you could start to see a bit of light. Water was dripping. Where we were was a
kind of corridor leading downward. And we heard voices. From down below. I
was shaking, sir. And then Jody said the strangest thing. He said, Jer, we been
buddies for a long time, but there's places you weren't meant to go… places I
have to go alone. You weren't meant to pass through to this place, but you held on
to me, and maybe that's good, because if anything ever happens to me, you can
bear witness one day, you can speak the truth about me, shout it out, even if
nobody ever believes you, or even understands what you say. I ain't long for this
world, Jer, but I'm meant to go out like a comet, not like a lil' old candle. You
know that, don't you? I've always been different… like everyone's born facing the
same way, their butts to the past, their faces to the future, but not me, I go
sideways, past and future are a sidestream to me, a path I can never tread.
—Quite a speech for a teenager, don't you think?
—Objection! Calls for speculation.
—Ah, I see that the Madame Prosecutor has awakened. Sustained.
—That's all right, Your Honor, I was only being rhetorical.
Mr. Kindred… Jeremy… I'll say it a different way. Did your friend, the
defendant, often make long speeches like that?
—Not often. But more than any other kid I knew. If he got going, he could talk
up a storm. Almost like a preacher, except it would be all about violence and death
and dark things.
—Are you aware that the defendant hasn't said a word since he was taken into
custody?
—I've heard that, sir.
—So he's definitely changed.
—Yes, sir. He ain't human no more.
—Literally?
—Well, sir, I was getting to that.
—Proceed.
—Well, like I said, there was voices. And the corridor leading downward. And
the light, you see, the light came from down below. A flickering, red light, kind of
like the flames of hell, I guess. And even though Jody told me, No, you stay up
here, this is for me alone… well, I guess I couldn't help following him down there.
I was curious, sure. But it was also creepy as shit, and I didn't want to be alone.
—Did the defendant know you were following him?
—Sort of. But you see, he was like in his own world. He really didn't pay me
no mind at all. I was like a puppy dog or something… no, a shadow more like, a
nothing.
—To whom did the voices belong?
—Well okay, we kept going down deeper and deeper, because the corridor
ended in steps, and the steps led us deeper and deeper underground. Maybe we
were going into the hillside, I don't know; I lost my sense of direction. Because
now there were steps going up, and passageways leading sideways. It was like that
story we learned in Mrs. Seymour's class one time, the one with the maze and the
bullheaded man and the hero with his ball of yarn. The walls glowed. It was a cold
light, millions of dots of light, you know, like you get in caves sometimes,
phosphorescence I think it's called. I followed. After what seemed like a long time,
it widened into a cave. I think it was part natural, this cave, but there was also a
bunch of marble columns and statues of weeping angels and other cool gothic
shit. The light came from flaming torches on the walls. Some parts of the walls
had paintings, Egyptian stuff, guys with dogs' heads, other parts had been painted
over. It was all coated with soot, and when the torches flickered, it looked like
them pictures was moving. And at the far end, there were niches in the wall, and in
the niches were dead people. I mean some were long dead, like skeletons, but
some were fresh… and some of them I recognized. I mean, they went to my
school. I mean, they weren't supposed to be dead at all. I mean, I would have
heard of it if they'd died, I was in some of the same classes. Well, I wasn't that
sure. Like I said, I was dizzy. And the sex thing hadn't totally worn off. I hid
behind a big statue. An angel. The Archangel Michael, I think, with a flaming
sword. The sword was metal and sort of attached to his hand with a leather thong.
And a bronze cross around his neck. His wings were wide enough that I could
crouch down and peep through a little chink where his elbow lifted up against his
robe. Apart from the sword and the cross he was all marble, and cold. And, well,
I wasn't dressed for the cold, so I was shivering as I huddled there, trying not to
breathe too much.
—What did the defendant do at that point?
—He stood there, in a semicircle of light, facing all of them dead fol
ks, and I
saw there was three coffins laying there, fine old coffins made of carved wood
with all gold on them. The coffins are just laying there, and the middle one, the
grandest one of them all, is closed, but the other two have their lids on the ground
next to them, and they're empty, you see. And there's people here. They're hard to
see at first, because they're all blended with the shadows, and it takes me a while
to make them out. They ain't the same kind of people as the ones in the orgy up
there in the cemetery grounds. They're, well, pale-looking. What was that word for
the way the walls was all glowing? Phosphorescent. Yeah. That was in their faces,
too. When you looked at one of them a long time you could see the cold light
clinging to their faces. They all wore black. I don't mean all Dracula capes and
stuff. I mean, some of them had capes, but there were clothes from olden times,
and clothes you could see down at the Goth coffeehouse over in the next town.
There was leather and fishnet stockings. There was black lipstick. Sunken eyes.
Some had sweeping robes, you know, the kind that rustle when you walk. And,
well, standing next to one of the empty coffins was Cat Sperling, and she was
totally naked. And by the other coffin was
… shit man, it's weird to think of it now, but it was Constance Thorpe, the little
geek that done went down on me next to that gravestone up above. She was
naked, too. She looked better than I thought she would. I couldn't believe it. The
only two bitches I'd ever really messed around with, and they were standing
around bare-ass naked in front of a bunch of ghouls in black. I gotta admit, it was
making me, you know, all hot down there all over again. I watched my friend Jody.
They didn't seem to notice him at first, them two girls, because they were busy
staring into each other's eyes. I mean, I thought I was trapped inside of a lesbo
porno. I mean, this was fucking wild. I never dreamed them two would have a
thing for each other, I mean, the sexiest girl at Kramer High and some gap-toothed
nerd with a thing for cutting up mice and frogs… secretly wanting to dyke it out?
… I could see it in their eyes. Cat went without saying, but Constance looked
different. A glow in her flesh. Gleaming. Maybe it was sweat. She had hard little