#anyway here's 'don callahan is a reverse-cryptid - the vignette'

[gcnenineteen-blog]

HE COMES HERE. HE HAS A BURNED HAND.

     She had begun seeing the graffiti about four months ago, appearing in stark crimson spray paint first on the alley wall of the deli six blocks from her office building, then on a park bench near her usual bus stop in Brooklyn. The lost pet posters she was used to; she checked them regularly out of habit, the way someone might read the classifieds with only a vague sense of what they’re looking for, but rarely made an effort to look for the people they described, largely uninterested in her civic duty toward her fellow undead. But when the can-toi stooped to such obvious warnings, you took notice, because it meant that more subtle methods hadn’t worked to eliminate the problem - it meant that the person they were after wasn’t just an inconvenience, but a danger. 

     She knew about the Burned Man, of course - what vampire in NYC didn’t? He was the latest fashionable urban legend, something thrilling and frightening to gossip about in the Dixie Pig on Saturday evenings: a figure taken straight out of Dracula, an Abraham Van Helsing for the modern age, and he allegedly did his hunting with horrifying efficiency. They said he could smell the death in you, would know you for what you were at a glance - that he had some sort of glam that hid him until it was too late. She knew there had been too many disappearances lately, too many to blame them all on vampires growing bored with New York and picking up stakes - no pun intended - but she had never credited the rumors. It was too fanciful, too storybook, tailored too perfectly to vampiric primal fears; the Burned Man was no more real than the Jersey Devil, which had after all been nothing but a mutie goat that had wandered into the Pine Barrens through a thinny and mauled no more than a handful of hikers before expiring in its own tumorous juices. She’d thought, at most, that ‘our irish setter - one wounded paw’ was a psychic, someone the can-toi wanted for the Breakers. Someone they’d have under control in a month.

     But she was standing a block from her new bus stop now, looking at the back wall of the pub across the street, reading the warning there - no whimsical chalk stars or comets, just red text that shouted at the eyes. They were dead serious. The direct servants of the Crimson King not only believed the Burned Man was real, that he was a threat - they believed that he had been in no fewer than three of the places she frequented regularly. It wasn’t just unsettling - she had bypassed unsettled days ago. It was actually frightening.

     It had been nearly fifty years since she’d genuinely been afraid of something. The disease stole compassion first, because a predator wouldn’t survive if it could empathize with the animals it was supposed to hunt, but over time all of the other emotions seemed to go too - it was like progressively going colorblind, and after awhile you almost forgot what things like yellow and orange had looked like, until they returned without warning and scorched your eyes. She was afraid, but she also needed to work if she didn’t want to depend entirely on the good graces of Richard Sayre and his cronies - and the mistake that would undo her, on this gorgeous late fall afternoon, was the simple, universal assumption that nothing truly bad can happen in the middle of the day. 

     She sat at the bus stop, back stiff, smoothing her dark brown hair with a slender, olive hand. Her nerves were rattled, yes, but she felt fine - the overblown incompetent she did secretarial work for was so prodigiously fat that she could afford to drink from him twice a week, and she had left him in his office in a daze, totally unaware that it wasn’t his cock she had sucked. She’d started to notice small sores at the corners of his mouth, and wondered how much longer it would be before she needed a new job. She wondered if he’d given what he’d caught to his wife - if the woman could even bear to be touched by him at all. She wouldn’t have blamed her if she couldn’t, not at all. 

     Fifty years ago, she might have felt some stirring of horror at her own train of thought, at how casual and flippant it was - she could even remember a time when she had felt horror over it, long ago - but she had, as they said, lived since then. Why should she care if her fat, lecherous boss died of the GRID? Why should she care if his wife, or even his wife’s mistress caught it? What should she care if the whole of the tri-boroughs caught it? If she had learned anything about people in the last half century, it was that there were always more of them, much the same as the last had been, and that only the calamity of all calamities would ever succeed in wiping them out entirely. It was none of her business.

     She wrinkled her nose at a sudden waft of unpleasant odor - the tang of whiskey, overlaying a smell that reminded her vaguely of a fish market. Her back stiffened a little further when a tall, lanky man dropped down on the far end of the bench from her: he was obviously homeless, bundled in a ratty coat and jeans faded to the color of dishwater, leather shoes whose expensive brand she could only excuse by their battered condition - he had pulled them from a dumpster, probably, and worn the tread threadbare since. There was no debating the source of that stench, and she felt a ping of irritation and contempt, avoiding the man’s haggard face with the reflexive ease most Haves experience when confronted with a Have Not. Don’t make eye contact, the maxim went, and she wouldn’t, because he might ask for change, or take her attention as an invitation to begin some delusional panegyric. Christ, but he stank. 

     The homeless man sat blessedly silent and unobtrusive beside her, hands jammed into his pockets and face buried in the collar of his coat, but she still felt a flood of relief when she saw the bus approaching, and shot to her feet with a haste that bordered on rudeness. She didn’t care - the homeless were, in her own opinion and that of many of her friends, useful only as a very last resort. If one had to stoop to feeding from vagrants, one was either incompetent or desperately ill - or possessing unaccountable poor taste.

     She boarded, paid her fare, and chose a seat halfway down the length of the bus, preparing to settle in with the half-finished book in her purse. Another wave of that stench stopped her before she had even opened the cover. The homeless man had boarded the bus behind her, slotting coins slowly into the farebox, and she firmly glanced away the moment he turned down the aisle, holding her breath as he passed. He took a seat near the back of the bus - probably planned to sleep there until he was kicked out at the end of the circuit - and the driver pulled away into the thoroughfare, leaving her in a steel box with that horrible stink.

     After suffering it for five minutes, she glanced cautiously to the left and ahead of her, gauging the reaction of the other passengers - really, it smelled so bad she thought someone else must have noticed it, but none of the other commuters seemed bothered. The old woman sitting across the aisle from her had glanced toward the back of the bus once with an expression of sadness, or maybe pity, but that was all. Humans had weaker senses as a rule, but she didn’t know how they could miss it - that horrible, pervasive scent of raw fish. 

     And...and something else, she thought. The overlaying smell of alcohol made it hard to pick out, but there was something beneath it, too - a sort of musky, polecat odor that made her think of roadkill. She curled her lip at the thought, then frowned at a tickling of familiarity the smell tried to bring her. It was a vague thing, and she couldn’t quite seem to get it, fleeing further away the harder she tried to focus on it. Shaking her head like a dog trying to clear its ears of water, she determinedly opened her book and tried to read.

     She managed twenty minutes of the hour-long drive across town before she finally gave into the urge to actually turn around in her seat and look at the man, whose presence she didn’t seem able to completely shut out. She had been prepared to look away immediately if she thought he might catch her, but she found that she needn’t have worried: the homeless man did indeed appear to have fallen asleep, his forehead pressed to the grimy bus window, mouth a little ajar, breathing slow and even. He was older, long, steel gray hair shot through with strands of shock white, but just looking at his pale, bearded face, she couldn’t have said if he was fifty or seventy. She got the sense that he might have been remarkably handsome, once - in the strong cleft of his chin, the shape of his jaw, the evenly spaced eyes - but she couldn’t bring herself to find any beauty in the dirty ruin of a thing he was now. She felt another surge of contempt for him, stronger this time.

     He had stuffed one hand into his coat as if to hold in the warmth, and his other hand rested lax on his lap, tough, pitted fingers curled between the V of his bowed knees. He looked dead to the world, and she thought the odds that he would get off before her stop extremely slim. She thought of mentioning the man to the driver and asking to have him removed, but she had seen him pay his fare, and no one else seemed the least bit bothered by him, or even aware of him.

     She tried to read again, actually angry now, but after little more than a page or so found her mind wandering, snagging again and again on that lingering sense of familiarity that was trying to become memory somewhere in the back of her mind. It niggled at her, like something important that she knew she had forgotten, and she smoothed her hair again, didn’t see the single silver disc of an iris gleaming at her from under coal gray eyelashes. The elusive memory began to infuriate her even more than the smell, and she was glaring intently out the window when the bus passed Tom & Jerry’s Artistic Deli, and the muscles in her lower belly tightened into a stone.

     All at once, it recurred to her: she remembered this smell from the first time she had seen the graffiti, on the alley wall of that very deli. She had had to pass through the alley to get to the subway station from the Italian restaurant across the street, where she had stayed late with a date she had ultimately decided she could do better than. She had noted the graffiti then, passed it by, and then had given herself quite a scare along the following blocks toward the subway. It had been that smell - not the booze, but the fishy stink, and that underlying, musky odor that tickled something in her lizard brain. She had fancied she heard footsteps behind her, been absolutely convinced at one point that she was being stalked, and had made the trip down the last block at a clipped walk with her keys clenched between her fingers, thinking Burned Man, Burned Man, Burned Man. 

     But she had reached the station safely, mingling among the night shift commuters unharmed. She had looked up the street before descending the stairs underground, and all she had seen had been-

     Had been a homeless man, staggering across the street toward the bar on the far side. 

     She sucked in a breath between her teeth, first resisting the urge to turn and look again, and then giving into it, turning her head very slowly over her right shoulder so she could see him, across the aisle and three rows back. He was still asleep; his face had slid a little down the pane of the bus window, pulling up the top lid of his eye to reveal a crescent of cornea, and his breathing was still slow - and in his lap sat an unblemished hand. She was about to turn around again and scold herself for being stupid when her eye fixed on his right arm stuffed into his coat - hiding the hand.

     They’re whispering his name through this disappearing land, but hidden in his coat is a red right hand.

     Who wrote that? It didn’t matter. A flicker of real fear had begun to take the place of paranoia, and she desperately tried to place his face, to determine if she had ever seen it before. It was hopeless; she hadn’t seen the face of the hobo that night by the subway, and who in New York paid attention to the faces of the homeless anyway?

     God, but what if that was it? They said the Burned Man had a glam, something that kept him safe from notice until he was right behind you, but why would he need a glam when every New Yorker worked so hard not to see vagrants by choice that it eventually became second nature? A homeless man was the only type of person in the city who never looked out of place, and as a result never drew any especial attention. 

     Her heart hadn’t beat in over half a century, but she felt as if it had lodged itself in her throat, and when the old woman across the aisle gave her a curious look, she turned stiffly to face the front of the bus again, fear crawling on her back like a skittering insect. She was safe - she had to be. Who could look less like a vampire than she did? Middle-aged, middle-class, pretty but not beautiful, modestly dressed, second-generation immigrant from Italy - there were tens of thousands of women just like her in this city, and to think that she might be suspected of anything so far-fetched was ludicrous. The homeless man was human - foul-smelling, but undoubtedly human. She had nothing to fear.

     The homeless man snorted, then belched, face sliding a little further down the pane. If he was pretending, he was very good, and she tried again to convince herself that she was being silly, shutting her eyes tight, and trying to clear her mind. She wasn’t such of a much as far as power went, had never been all that potent even among her own class of vampires, but her senses were still keen, and with concentration she could call upon them - call upon them to hear the quiet rasp of his steady breathing. And the steady thrum of his heart, thud-thud, thud-thud.

     Too fast. The man’s heart wasn’t just clipping along, it was racing, and all at once she was in a paroxysm of terror, absolutely certain of his identity. Certain that she was trapped in a bus with the Burned Man, and that there was nothing she could do. Cry out? Make a scene? No, she would look like the aggressor, with him feigning sleep so artfully back there, and even if she didn’t simply provoke him into pouncing on her immediately, she could be detained, and he could just wait in some alley for her to leave. Ask to be let off the bus, go somewhere crowded? She’d give away that she knew, then, and he might simply follow her. No matter where she went, it would close eventually, and she would have to leave - he’d just have to lie in wait. 

     Home. She would have to go home, exactly as she had intended - she had a gun in her closet, and once she was inside she could call in at the Dixie Pig. If she said the Burned Man was outside of her house, the can-toi would be at her door in minutes, and he would either be caught or driven away. If the latter happened, she would just appeal to Sayre to relocate her. It would cost her a few more years’ debt, but she could cope with that for peace of mind. Yes, there - that was a solid plan.

     But the last fifteen minutes of the drive felt like an eternity, constantly aware of his slow breathing and dark polecat odor somewhere behind her, and it took all of her willpower not to run off the bus the moment the door was opened. She walked slowly, forcing herself to look absent, natural, and preoccupied, and when she reached the curb she even took a moment to glance at her watch - in reality, glancing over it at the bus window, where the homeless man was apparently still sleeping, his breath visibly fogging the window. He stayed there, unmoving, even as the bus door closed and it began to pull away with a shriek of gears and exhaust. She watched, nonplussed, as it chugged on down the street and turned onto the adjoining avenue, and out of sight. 

     And just like that, he was gone. Swept out of her life, and after another minute of standing she had to make herself turn in the other direction and begin to walk. For the average person - and, for all that she had died sixty years ago, in mindset at least she was an average person - six blocks of walking is more than enough to begin doubting the memory of an irrational fear. What feels so visceral and absolutely true in the heat of the moment becomes vague, uncertain, because the mind is eager to discard the confounding, and will look without thinking for reasons to do so. 

     By the time she stepped into her brownstone and considered actually contacting Sayre, she didn’t just feel silly - she felt ridiculous. Was she really going to give Richard Sayre and his bookies a foot through the door of her privacy because she had gotten spooked by a sleeping homeless man on the bus? It was two in the afternoon, for Christ’s sake - broad daylight! The idea that that haggard man on the bus might have planned their meeting and deliberately stalked her now, when the world was alive with light, was stupid and absurd, and even if he had gotten off at the next stop, he would have had no way of knowing where she’d gone from there. She was not going to call Sayre.

     She did take the revolver out of the closet and load it, but she placed it on the coffee table when she sat down in her loungewear to read and listen to a record, and after an hour she had nearly forgotten about it. By four, she had forgotten about it, and got up to make herself a late lunch, leaving the gun in the living room. When she discovered that the trash was full beyond her ability to jam it back down into the can and, grumbling, slipped on shoes to take it out, she did not take the gun with her. 

     The sunlight had taken on a darker hue as early afternoon became late, but it was still a gorgeous day out, and she took a moment to breathe it in before padding down the front steps and heading around to the dumpster between her building and the next. It didn’t smell half so pleasant in the alley - it didn’t matter how much money you paid per month, alleyways in New York always smelled like wet garbage - and she held her nose as she flipped the dumpster’s lid up and dropped her bag inside. She held it, and did not smell that musky polecat odor when it mingled with the rest of the alley stink. If the shriek and crash of a car accident close by hadn’t startled her into turning, she would have died immediately. 

     A heavy carpenter’s hammer cut through the air inches from her head with a sharp whoomp, and she uttered a breathless scream, turning to see the man from the bus, his shock-white hair windblown, chapped lips drawn back over his teeth - shock and fury mingling in a pair of wide, wild, red-rimmed eyes. She tried to scream again, but could manage nothing, because it wasn’t the hand holding the hammer that had arrested her attention, but the other one, clutching what she realized had been her book, forgotten on the bus - her book, with her name and mailing address written inside the back cover. And the hand that held it was hideous, mottled - and a dark, livid red. 

     “No, no, no, please,” she hissed, backing away from him, further into the alley. He advanced on her, and in the avidity of those pale eyes she thought she read not just rage, but fear. Was he scared? Afraid now that his ambush had been foiled and the element of surprise was lost? She was afraid, oh yes, but she was also a predator, and even a fearful predator is crafty - perhaps especially then. Always looking for the way out.

     “Please, I don’t understand - I haven’t done anything to you!” Her voice cracked and quailed, and as she made her body small and held up her tiny hands in a warding off gesture, she was sure this time that she saw him hesitate, saw him swallow, saw those pale eyes flicker. The thing inside of her with its low cunning scented the air, smelling vulnerability. “I don’t have any money - it’s all inside! Bu-but...but you can have my jewelry!” She started to frantically remove her sapphire earrings, then went for her emerald ring as well when she saw an expression of horror dawn on his face. “Here, take them!” She shoved her palms out at him, and he actually took a step backward, holding up the disgusting ruin of a hand that held her book as if to say ‘oh cripes, I’m so sorry, my mistake’, mouth working soundlessly.

     “Please, I don’t want to die.” She played up the pathos as much as she could, hearkening back to decades-old memories of what it had been like to feel, and he staggered back another step, arms dropping to his sides, bamboozled by doubt. When his fingers went lax around the handle of the hammer, she knew she had him, and lunged.

     There were vampires more powerful than she - most of them, in fact. She walked by day in exchange for her weakness, but even she could dominate this human given an opening - her strength would surely match his, even if it didn’t exceed it. Serpentine fangs slitted through her gums with shocking abruptness as she pounced on him, wrapped her arms around his neck and locked her legs around his waist like a lover - but when she sealed her lips to his neck, she both felt and intended nothing but ruin. 

     Her teeth did not so much as graze his skin. The second her mouth made contact with his flesh, she was overwhelmed with that stench, that dark animal musk that had been lingering under the smell of raw fish like a dirty secret - it hit her like an open-palmed slap to the face, and she immediately began to heave, driven away from that primeval pheromone by instinct that was now wired in her blood. Not for you, that smell said. He is not for you. You are not allowed. Unclean. Unclean. 

     She staggered away from him, gagging, and in the moments before her death - her final death - she looked up and saw a horror. There was a sickly, bruised blue aura hanging around the old man’s head like a miasma, slicked over his cheeks and his chin and down his neck like glowing paint, staining his tongue, his teeth. All at once she knew that roadkill stench for what it was - the mark of the Unclean, who had drank of the Old Blood but not changed. Not dead, not undead, but never again truly living, cast out from the natural order into a no man’s land where neither side would greet them as kin. She had heard of it as a form of punishment, but never of a time in recent history when it had actually been done.

     “Unclean-” She moaned, gut still wrenching, and for a moment the man looked absolutely thunderstruck with what some dim, forgotten part of her recognized as anguish. He looked gutted, wretched - and then furious, and when he swung the hammer back over his head, she screamed. And because this was New York City, even her neighbors that were home on a weekday afternoon did not look out their windows. 

     The homeless man stood in the alley in the aftermath of what he had done. He looked down at the crumpled pile of untenanted loungewear, the shock of brown hair, the little pile of teeth. Old-fashioned fillings - couldn’t have been done any later than the forties. After a moment he listlessly scuffed the teeth down a storm drain, and kicked the hair into a pile of garbage, where it looked like a discarded wig. He knelt down and reached for the clothes, then stopped. For a long moment he simply knelt there in the alley - then, very slowly, even fearfully, he traced the sign of the cross in the air in front of himself, and spoke with the voice of a man expecting to be struck.

     “May the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and of all the saints, whatever good you have done or suffering you have endured, heal your sins and reward you with eternal life. Amen.” Silence reigned again, half-expectant, but no thunderbolt descended from the cloudless sky to smite him. Perhaps even the Unclean were permitted to dispense sacraments when the cause was just - because the woman who had left her copy of The Collected Works of Robert Browning on a bus in Queens two and a half hours ago was not undeserving of prayer.

     Because she, like a Saint Bernard that once lived in Castle Rock, Maine, had always tried to be a good person, and had never wanted to hurt anybody. And like that poor dog, she had stuck her head into a cave and been bitten by a bat, and all of the misery that had followed, both for her and those around her, came down to no more than a virus. The disease had stolen her humanity, rather than her reason, and if the woman she had been today had willfully contributed to the spread of the AIDs crisis, the woman she had been once could not be blamed for it. For that woman, who had been dead indeed for nearly sixty years, it had never been a matter of choice. 

     The man in the alley picked up the clothing and jewelry, and dropped them into the dumpster, then pulled a few bags of trash over them. Even if they were discovered when the woman’s disappearance was noticed, he wasn’t concerned - what evidence was there of murder? The teeth had already been washed away in the greywater, and the hair might be perplexing, but would lead nowhere. He left the alley the way he had come, and wandered back down to the bus stop. 

     When the 4:30 bus arrived, he boarded it, and when he saw the bar he had had in mind out the window, spotted the graffiti on the bench in front of it, he decided to stay on a few more stops - and the city swallowed him, because it was hungry. The city was always hungry, and not all of those it devoured were unwilling.