The Society of S (25 page)

It took me more than an hour to get my next ride, which brought me only fifteen miles down I-95. I spent that whole day making slow incremental progress, and I began to realize how lucky the first ride had been. I told myself that every mile might bring me closer to my mother, but the romance of hitchhiking began to fade.

I remembered what the woman had said, and every time I saw a police car I ran into the trees near the road’s shoulder. None of them stopped.

Most of the people who stopped for me drove old-model cars; the SUVs passed me by, as did the trucks. One man driving a tank-like SUV nearly ran me over.

The sky grew dark again, and I waited at an entrance ramp in the middle of nowhere, wondering where I could spend the night. Then a shiny red car (little silver letters on its side read
Corvette
) stopped for me. When I opened the passenger door, the driver said, “Ain’t you a little young to be out here by yourself?”

He was probably in his early thirties, I thought. He was small and muscular, with a square-jawed face and greasy-looking black hair. He wore aviator sunglasses. I wondered why he wore them at night.

“I’m old enough,” I said. But I hesitated. A voice inside me said,
You can choose not to get in
.

“You coming or what?” he said.

It was late. I was tired. Though I didn’t like his looks, I got in.

He said he was headed for Asheville. “That work for you?”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure if he’d said Nashville or Asheville. Either destination sounded sufficiently Southern.

He gunned the engine and barreled the car up the ramp onto the highway. He turned up the radio, which played rap music. The word
bitch
was in every other line. I focused on rubbing my hands. They felt stiff and cold despite my gloves, but I kept them on, for the illusion of warmth.

How long was it before I knew something was wrong? Not very. The route signs said I-26, not I-95, and we were headed west, not south. I’d have to double back to get to Savannah, I realized. At least I wasn’t standing outside in the cold.

The driver held the steering wheel steady with his left hand and rubbed it repeatedly with his right. His fingernails were long and stained. The masseter muscle in his right cheek clenched and unclenched, clenched and unclenched. Once in a while he looked over at me, and I turned my head away, toward the passenger-side window. In the gathering darkness, I couldn’t see much outside. The road stretched ahead, flat and pale, lit only by headlights. Then, gradually at first, it began to climb. My ears popped, and I swallowed hard.

Two hours later, the car swerved and headed down a ramp so fast that I never saw the exit sign.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

He said, “We need to get a bite to eat. I bet you’re hungry, ain’t ya.”

But he turned the car away from the lights of the service station and fast food restaurant, and a mile or so later he turned sharply down a country road.

“Relax,” he said, not looking at me. “I know just the place.”

He did seem to know exactly where he was going, taking three more turns before driving onto a dirt road that twisted up a hillside. I saw no houses, only trees. When he stopped the car, I felt my stomach sink.

He used both arms to grab me, and he was strong. “Relax, relax,” he kept saying. And he laughed, as if he found my struggling funny. When I pretended to relax, he used one hand to unbutton my pants, and that’s when I lunged and bit him.

I didn’t plan it in any conscious way. Only when I saw his neck, exposed and bent before me, did it happen. I can still hear the sound of his scream. It sounded surprised, then angry, agonized, plead-ing — in the space of seconds. Then all I heard was my heart beating loud, and the sound of my sucking and swallowing.

What did it taste like? Like music. Like electricity. Like moonlight shining on rushing water. I drank my fill, and when I stopped, my own blood sang in my ears.

I spent the next hours walking through woods. I didn’t feel the cold, and I felt strong enough to walk for miles. The moon overhead was nearly full, and it stared down with blank indifference.

Gradually, my energy began to fade. My stomach churned, and I thought I would be sick. I stopped walking and sat on a tree stump.

I tried not to think about what I’d done, but I thought about it anyway. Was the man alive or dead? I hoped he was dead, and part of me was appalled at myself. What had I become?

I gagged, but I didn’t vomit. Instead I tilted my head back and watched the moon, visible between two tall trees. I breathed slowly. The nausea passed, and I felt ready to walk again.

The hill inclined steeply. Walking wasn’t easy, but without the moonlight, it would have been impossible. The trees grew close together. They were tall and bristly — some sort of pine, I supposed.

Father, I’m lost
, I thought.
I don’t even know the names of the trees. Mother, where are you?

I came to a crest and followed another path that gradually declined. Through the leafless brush, lights glimmered from below — indistinct at first, then brighter.
Back to civilization
, I thought, and the phrase cheered me.

When I heard voices, I stopped walking. They came from a clearing ahead.

I stayed among the trees and moved quietly around the perimeter of the open space.

There must have been five or six of them. Some wore capes, others pointed hats.

“I am vanquished!” someone shouted, and a boy wearing a cape waved a plastic sword at him.

I moved into the clearing and let them see me. “May I play?” I said. “I know the rules.”

For an hour we played on the hillside in the cold moonlight. This game differed from the one I’d watched at Ryan’s house; here, no one consulted spell-books, and everyone ad-libbed their parts. No one mentioned banks, either.

The game focused on a quest: to find and steal the werewolves’ treasure, which someone had hidden in the forest. The werewolves were the other “team,” playing somewhere nearby, and they’d given my team (the wizards) a set of written clues. “Keep thy eyes far from the sky / What you seek is closer by” was an early one.

“Who are you?” one of the boys had asked me, when I entered the game. “Wizard? Gnome?”

“Vampire,” I said.

“Vampire Griselda joins the Lounge Wizards,” he announced.

The clues seemed too easy to me. Wizard Lemur, the one who’d announced me, also read the clues; he was the group’s leader. Each time he read one, I moved instinctively as it directed. “Where the tallest tree doth grow / To its right side you must go.” That sort of thing. After a few minutes, I felt they were all watching me.

The treasure turned out to be a six-pack of beer hidden in a pile of dead branches. As I lifted the beer, the others cheered. “Vampire Griselda secures the treasure,” Lemur said. “Which we hope she’ll share.”

I handed him the six-pack. “I never drink,” I said, “beer.”

The wizards took me home with them.

I rode with Lemur (whose real name was Paul) and his girlfriend, Beatrice (real name Jane) in Jane’s beat-up old Volvo. They looked like brother and sister: multicolored hair cut in layers, skinny bodies, even the same frayed jeans. Jane was a college student. Paul had dropped out of school. I told them I’d run away from home. They said it was cool if I “crashed” at their place — an old house in downtown Asheville. They said I could have Tom’s room, since he was on tour with his band.

And crash is what I did, almost falling into the bed I’d been assigned. My body felt weary and excited at the same time, tingling from my head to my toes, and all I wanted to do was to lie still and take stock. I remembered my father describing his change of state, how he’d felt weak and sick, and I wondered why I didn’t feel weak. Maybe because I’d been born half vampire?

Would I need to bite more humans? Would my senses become more acute? I had a hundred questions, and the only one who could answer them was miles and miles away.

The days passed in an odd blur. At times I was intensely aware of every detail of the place and people around me; at others, I could focus only on one small thing, such as the blood pulsing under my skin; I could see the blood move through my veins with each beat of my heart. I stayed still for long periods of time. At some point I noticed that my talisman — the little bag of lavender — no longer hung from my neck. The loss didn’t matter much to me; one more familiar thing was gone.

The house was poorly heated and sparsely furnished with battered furniture. Paint was spattered on the walls, especially in the living room, where someone had begun to paint a mural of a dragon breathing fire, and quit before the dragon’s tail and feet were finished. Others had penciled in telephone numbers where the rest of the dragon should have been.

Jane and Paul accepted me without questions. I told them my name was Ann. They tended to sleep late, until one or two in the afternoon, and stay up until four or five a.m., usually smoking marijuana. Sometimes they dyed their hair, using Kool-Aid; Jane’s current color, lime green, made her look like a dryad.

Jane’s school was “out on winter break,” she told me, and she meant to “play hard” until classes resumed. Paul apparently lived this way all the time. Some days I barely saw them; others we spent “hanging out,” which meant eating, or watching movies on DVD, or walking around Asheville — a pretty town, ringed by mountains.

We spent my second night in the house gathered around a small television with the other Lounge Wizards, watching a movie so predictable that I didn’t pay attention to it. When it ended, the news came on — a signal for everyone to talk — but Jane nudged Paul and said, “Hey, check it out.”

The newscaster said police had no leads in the case of Robert Reedy, the thirty-five-year-old man found murdered in his car the day before. The video showed police officers standing near the red Corvette, then a pan of the woods nearby.

“That’s near where we were on Sunday,” Jane said.

Paul said, “Blame it on the werewolves.”

But Jane didn’t let it go. “Annie, did you see anything weird?”

“Only you all,” I said.

They laughed. “Kid’s been in the South like three days and she’s
y’alling
already,” Paul said. “Go, Annie.”

So his name was Robert Reedy
, I thought.
And I killed him
.

They passed around a pipe, and when it came to me, I decided to try it to see if I could lighten my mood. But marijuana didn’t work for me.

The others engaged in long, rambling conversations. One began with Paul’s inability to find his car keys, the others chiming in suggestions for finding them, and ended with Jane repeating, again and again: “Everything is somewhere.”

Instead of talking, I spent the rest of the night staring at the pattern of the threadbare carpet on the floor, sure that the design must contain an important message.

On subsequent evenings, I always declined the pipe.

Paul said, “Annie doesn’t need to smoke. She’s naturally stoned.”