by Philip Roberts
Even in the depths of summer, Warren never wore short sleeves, but the prospect of the sale made him forget, and he rolled up his sleeves without thought.
Thankfully the client didn’t see a thing, too lost in paperwork and future planning to notice, but Blake, Warren’s boss, wasn’t quite as distracted, and called Warren over with a silent gesture. “You’ll have to excuse me for a second,” Warren said, rose from the desk, stepped out of his glass-fronted office that let anyone see in.
“I’m not looking for an explanation,” Blake whispered to him, the two huddled behind a cubicle, “but I’d suggest you roll your sleeves back down.”
He glanced down at his exposed right arm, and the clear, red irritated from where the needle had gone in just a few hours earlier. He quickly rolled his sleeves back down, smiling as he did, doing his best to stifle a laugh when his eyes rose to see the concern in Blake’s gaze.
“Your personal business isn’t mine, but I’d suggest you at least consider getting help.”
“Don’t worry about me, Blake. It isn’t what it looks like.”
He patted his boss on the shoulder and turned back towards his office, still chuckling to himself.
* * *
The house Warren walked into said nothing about the wealth he’d accumulated, hidden away in various bank accounts and investments. He’d never been a good enough liar to be able to explain how he’d managed to build up this massive nest egg, and the truth simply wouldn’t do, so he chose to hide it all instead.
Before he reached the basement he could feel the headache setting in, the dry, itchy quality in his skin. The feeling had first started a few years back, but time made it worse, made him increase his dosage, but that was fine, he didn’t have much longer before he could retire in style at the supposed age of thirty-two.
He didn’t hear the chains rattle when he opened the basement door, but his friend was indeed awake, hunched against the wall, glaring at Warren. The bound man looked haggard, more so than normal, the higher doses starting to get to him, Warren figured. Previously there hadn’t been a single change, the man as youthful looking as always, even after his blood was drawn from him, but now, Warren had to pause to stare into the wary eyes peering back.
The cries for freedom and reprieve had once burst out of the man each time the basement door opened. Over a hundred years had taught him silence, allowed him to accept his fate, that he would never leave the basement again. Lately he’d been even more quiet than normal, but worse than that, Warren could see the hint of a smile in the man’s cracked lips, and he didn’t like it.
“Another already?” the man asked with a raspy voice. Warren hadn’t heard him speak in over a month.
Before grabbing the syringe Warren paused before his captive. “You know something?”
The man shrugged. Warren jabbed the needle into the man’s neck with more force than normal, let the point dig around the skin, but the prisoner didn’t fidget, or grimace in pain. He accepted the pain with the same smirk.
“I suppose it’s convenient really, not having to listen to you scream,” Warren said as he rolled up his sleeve. The red blotch remained on his arm, just below the bicep. Normally it only took an hour or so for the blemish to fade, but that too had changed, and Warren considered injecting himself somewhere else for the first since he’d first shoved the needle into his arm.
The pain made his arm stiffen when the needle pierced through. “Something is changing, isn’t it?” he asked, expected the silence he received.
The worst of it he knew was that he had no means of punishing this captive. He already fed him as little as possible, and had once endued listening to hours of agonizing shouts for sustenance. Now, Warren understood if he didn’t feed this man, he might very well die, and that wouldn’t do. His prisoner had learned the limitations of his confinement, and while he could never hope to break free, he could deprive Warren of any satisfaction, or information.
In the back of the room Warren stepped into the cage and up to the sleeping pig. The animal came awake with a jerk when the needle entered it, but Warren’s arms were tight around the animal, and it didn’t struggle enough to break the needle, well accustomed already to the procedure.
His prisoner accepted the food without a word; those eyes remained locked on Warren as he ascended the stairs and closed the door behind him.
* * *
“You know, you actually look kind of tired,” Betty said to him over lunch.
Two of his fellow coworkers agreed with the statement, but Warren simply smiled, waved it away. “We all get insomnia some times,” he said. His smile ended the conversation, but felt less genuine than normal, more forced.
He’d put in five years already at the insurance company, and knew he only had a few more left before they’d start to give him strange stares, to see the lack of wrinkles, of gray hairs, or anything similar to aging. But then, maybe he wouldn’t have to worry about that, he thought, and excused himself for the bathroom.
The face the mirror offered him looked wrong, different from what he was used to, and given that his face hadn’t changed in a lifetime, the small abnormalities stood out, made his stomach clench. Something had changed. In truth Warren had seen it start nearly ten years before when the doses began to get larger. His body began to resist.
Anger grabbed him quickly. His fist sent a crack through the mirror, flared pain through his hand. The pain wouldn’t subside, his fist held against his chest as it kept throbbing. Just moving his arm made him feel the growing bruise from the injection that morning.
“You never expected to keep this up forever,” he whispered. Maybe he had. Some part of him had grown frightened about the idea of death. He didn’t like having what had felt like immortality ripped away, aware that whatever was happening to him wouldn’t stop, and it was getting faster.
When he returned to his coworkers he smiled casually, kept up small talk, both to maintain appearance, and to try to distract himself from his own thoughts.
* * *
He pulled up a chair and took a seat in front of his prisoner. A single light bulb hanging from a string in the ceiling let him see the man’s growing smile. “You know what’s happening to me, don’t you?” Warren asked.
The man leaned back as best he could, his hands bound to his ankles, position unchanged in the entire span of his imprisonment. Had the muscles turned to mush, Warren wondered. Would the man be able to move about if set free? He supposed it didn’t matter. He had no intentions of letting this creature go.
“I know,” he rasped, smiling larger. “Didn’t at first. Never dealt with it before, least not personally, but I heard, and now I know.”
“Why aren’t I one of you?” He didn’t expect an answer, because the man had never given one before. Warren had done everything he could in those first few years to become whatever this man was. He rarely used the name vampire consciously, feeling foolish for saying it, but understood all the same how much this man fit the description, but every method Warren had attempted to convert himself led to failure. He’d even sedated the man and forced those fangs to cut through his neck, hoping something in them would start the changes, but every time he came away human. Only the blood seemed to have any affect, and even then it merely stopped his aging, or had.
Now the man forced himself forward against the chains, let his face get as close to Warren as possible. “I tell you this for a number of reason, and I suspect you can imagine none of them are good for you. Want to know why you can’t change? I have to will it. I have to want you to. You can’t force it. All you’ve done is force my blood into yourself, received a bit of beneficial side affects, and your body? As we speak it’s trying to reject the presence of my blood, but it can’t completely, because it’s part of your flesh now, changed you.”
He laughed as he collapsed back. “What’s going to happen to me?” Warren asked.
“You’ll see.”
“I’ll just take more. I’ll drain every drop of blood from your body if I have to,” Warren shouted, red faced, unable to conjure any form of fear in his prisoner’s eyes.
“You try it,” the man said. “Only regret would be I wouldn’t be alive anymore to see it and enjoy the show.”
Warren’s knuckle cut across the man’s cheek. His only reward was pain, the skin bruised, while the man showed no reaction, head barely moving, his physical dominance over Warren as pronounced as ever, and a power the blood injections had never given.
Surprise and a needle full of sedatives had allowed him to capture the man before, all of it a fluke and good timing on Warren’s part. A gift from God, he’d once considered it, sometimes musing that he was doing good by keeping such an evil creature prisoner.
He didn’t bother with justifications anymore. He grabbed the needle and shoved it into the man’s neck. “Go on,” the man whispered, “take all you want. Won’t do anything for you soon.”
For the first time Warren injected the blood into his left arm. Before, when the blood first flowed through him, he had felt his body flare with life, muscles almost on fire, but not with pain. The last few times, the feeling had diminished, but they always remained, until now. He felt nothing when he pulled the needle free—nothing but a deep, unshakable weariness in his body.
The man smiled in front of him. “Your life is over, my friend,” he said.
Warren’s lips pulled back into a snarl, fingers wrapping around the handle of a hammer on a worktable along the wall. The dull metal snapped the man’s head to the side, but he only laughed at the blow, smiled wider as the hammer nearly dislocated his jaw.
When the fury left him Warren had to hunch over to catch his breath, stare at the battered face in front of him, still smiling, eyes visible through the bloody tatters of flesh that remained on the man’s face. “Used to be afraid of death,” the man wheezed. “Thinking about the fate you have ahead, death doesn’t seem so awful anymore.”
“You can starve to death down here,” Warren growled. He threw the hammer into the wall before marching up the stairs, locking the door behind him.
* * *
He woke up shortly before four in the mourning. Moving at all had become difficult, brought with it a fear deeper than any emotion he’d been privileged to before. He staggered slowly towards the bathroom, had to bring up his eyes to block out the piercing light, but eventually his hand lowered to show him his reflection in the mirror.
In a way he looked older, he thought, but the changes ran deeper than just age. His skin looked leathery, the tinting odd, flesh shriveling up. Even his eyes looked oddly dry, and they itched along with the rest of him, a feeling that existed beneath the flesh, beyond his reach.
He pulled up his shirt to see his thin ribs showing through, stomach pulled back into his body, almost as if his very organs were rotting to mush inside of him.
Pain arched through his legs when he turned from the mirror, attempted to step out of the bathroom, but instead he fell, cracking his face on the hardwood flooring in his bedroom. Warm blood dribbled down his upper lip as he attempted to pull himself up, crawl into the dark bedroom, away from the bright light of the bathroom and the mirror showing him his future.
Moving at all had become nearly impossible, clawed fingers trying in vain to pull him across the floor, though to where he couldn’t say. A fit of laughter started to shake his body, dissolved quickly into painful coughs.
Over a hundred years he’d spent, always in the insurance industry, always doing his best to slowly build up his money. He’d never been much for investments, so he’d done it the old fashion way, living a frugal life while seeing his steady salary feed his nest egg for a retirement he’d never have. He’d been allowed close to a hundred and twenty years of life, and he’d done nothing but worked through all of it.
His body wouldn’t let him laugh anymore. He felt the darkness coming over him, forcing his eyelids closed, and he was curious what they would think when they broke into his home and found only a withered corpse in the bedroom, along with such a creature, perhaps dead, chained in the basement. Guess I’ll never know, he thought right before he drifted away.
* * *
Consciousness came in a way unlike anything he’d felt before. His eyes were already open, thoughts returning from a dreamless haze to see a ceiling up above him, but the image was out of focus, blurred, along with the sounds of people moving close by. The sounds lacked clarity.
He couldn’t move, could only feel in his body a deep, horrible itchiness, begging for him to scratch it, but his arms wouldn’t respond to his orders.
Suddenly the lights grew brighter, the blurry shapes of people moving through the room, around him, until a face came into view directly above his. The doctor shined a light in his eyes, and though Warren tried to squint against the glare, his body didn’t respond. He could hear them talking to each other, but the words were too distant to understand, until finally the light clicked back off, left him in partial darkness, fully awake.
Hours passed him that way. He tried repeatedly to drift away into whatever sleep he’d managed before, but without the pain he’d felt after falling in his bedroom, he couldn’t make himself ignore the light from the hallway, or the horrible irritation in his skin.
Then the sound caught his attention from the corner, and a familiar face appeared in front of him, a large smile spread across it. The man leaned down next to Warren’s ear.
“You can hear me, can’t you,” the man said, the light pressure of the man’s fingers clear on Warren’s neck. “I can feel your heartbeat picking up. They thought I was dead, took me to the morgue, nearly was dead, thanks to you.”
Warren did his best to speak, urged his body to make a sound, and maybe a gurgle of some kind made it through, because the man leaned in again, stared directly into Warren’s face just briefly, before his mouth hovered once more next to Warren’s ear.
“Enjoy the life ahead of you. Your flesh is imbued with an immortality of sorts. Not a healthy kind, of course, but you aren’t going to die any time soon, even if someone tries to kill you, your body will do its best to keep you going. Enjoy your prison. I suffered through a hundred years in mine.”
Warren didn’t hear the man depart, couldn’t turn his head to see anything, and wondered for the first time since he’d stumbled across his once prisoner what the man’s name was. He’d never thought to ask, perhaps to avoid adding too much personality to him.
He struggled as hard as he could to get his eyes to close, but the skin still refused to obey. How long would they keep him here, this bizarre man who never died, stuck comatose but always alive? Maybe they’d located his savings and even now used it to pay for all the care he received. If he could’ve laughed anymore he might’ve right then at the thought.
About the Author
Philip Roberts lives in Nashua, New Hampshire and holds a degree in Creative Writing with a minor in Film from the University of Kansas. As a beginner in the publishing world, he’s a member of the Horror Writer’s Association, and has had numerous short stories published in a variety of publications, such as the Beneath the Surface anthology, Byzarium webzine, and The Tabard Inn. More information on his works can be found at www.philipmroberts.com.
©2010 Philip Roberts
