Sweetblood (9781439108741) Page 3

  “Worse.”

  “AIDS?”

  “Much worse.”

  He has to think hard now. “I know. Leprosy!”

  “Do I look like a leper?”

  “Well, I can’t see all of you.” He grins. I spend a couple seconds trying to decide whether his remark constitutes sexual harassment. I decide to let it pass.

  “You don’t want to know what I have,” I say.

  “Really?” Now he is trying to figure out if I am serious.

  I’m trying to figure that one out myself. I feel as though I’m teetering on the edge of a cliff. Do I want to expose this blue-eyed Guy to all my unadulterated weirdness in the first five minutes of our acquaintance? Do I want to sit alone with my brown-bagged haute cuisine for the rest of the school year?

  I suck my cranberry juice-in-a-box dry.

  “Fact is, Guy,” I say in my most serious whisper, “I’m a vampire.”

  6

  The Sad Truth About Bloodsucking Demons

  by Lucy Szabo

  Creative Writing, 4th Period

  There are many tales about vampires, but almost none of them are true. So why are there so many books about vampires? Why do so many different cultures have their own vampire stories?

  The truth is, vampire legends are based upon actual fact. Vampires were (and are) real, as I shall prove in the following paper.

  Most of the modern ideas about vampires come from a book by Bram Stoker titled Dracula. Count Dracula (according to the book) was a vampire who lived in a castle in Transylvania and drank blood to stay alive. He could turn into a bat, and he was hundreds of years old. He was superfast and superstrong and 100% evil. Bram Stoker got many of his ideas from Romanian folk legends, and from reading about a real historical person named Vlad Dracula, also known as Vlad the Impaler. Impalement is an interesting punishment that was quite popular in the Middle Ages. The way you do it is you insert a sharpened pole into a person’s rear end and then stand the pole upright so that he squirms on top of it like a living shish kebab. This was Vlad Dracula’s favorite way to punish his enemies. It was said to be very painful.

  But the real Vlad Dracula was not a real vampire (as far as we know). He was just a sadistic sicko, much like Elizabeth Bathory, who liked to bathe in blood collected by murdering local maidens. She also liked to bite them and torture them.

  Basically, Bram Stoker was just a writer who cobbled together a few folktales and some twisted history into a kind of ghost story. But ever since, the vampire legend has grown to become a huge force in modern literature. The true story, however, was lost in the mists of time—until now.

  Most myths and legends are based on real events. For instance, the story of Noah’s Ark might have been inspired by a real flood, and the Abominable Snowman is probably a rare species of bear.

  This is also true of vampires.

  First, you have to realize that when the vampire stories got started there was very little knowledge about diseases and medicine. People treated cancer with leeches and rubbed dirt into cuts to make them heal. Ignorance was even greater then than it is today.

  Even thousand of years ago there was some knowledge of diabetes. Not that they could do anything about it, but the ancient Greeks knew that diabetics had too much sugar in them and that no matter how much they ate, they would soon waste away to nothing. But that was all they knew.

  As an insulin-dependent diabetic myself, I have read a great deal about the disease. Today, we diabetics take insulin and test our blood glucose (sugar), and most of us do okay. We worry about blindness and kidney disease and heart disease and neuropathy (terminal numbness), but that’s only after many years of having the disease. But before insulin was discovered, things didn’t go so good for diabetics. Without insulin to turn glucose into energy, the body’s cells literally starved to death. The untreated diabetic would get hungry and thirsty, but the more they ate, the sicker they got. The sugars would build up in their blood until they were so sweet that their body would start burning up fat and muscle and eventually there would be nothing left. But it wouldn’t happen right away. An untreated diabetic might take weeks or months to die, and her body might go through some very peculiar changes on its journey from life to death.

  Untreated insulin-dependent diabetes is pretty much extinct today. When a person starts getting thirsty and ravenous and feeling sick and peeing all the time, they go to a doctor. The doctor gives them some insulin and a syringe and modern medicine triumphs again. So it’s hard for us to imagine what it was like before, when diabetes was as incurable and fatal as the electric chair. So I have made a list of some of the symptoms of advanced, untreated diabetes. This is what might have happened to a diabetic teenage girl in the Middle Ages.

  The first thing is, she starts getting very hungry and thirsty. She can’t get enough water. She devours bowl after bowl of gruel (whatever that is). At first, her parents are angry at her because they are poor and gruel is not free. But she can’t stop herself from eating everything in sight. Soon, she starts losing weight. She is eating like a pig, but the food is going right through her. Her parents are afraid she might be possessed. They hide her from the neighbors because if word gets out, their daughter could be burned at the stake.

  Weeks go by. The girl has lost a quarter of her body weight. She is pale and she smells sweet, like honey. She sleeps most of the day, but it is a restless sleep, tossing and turning and whimpering. When she awakens she is hungry and thirsty.

  She wets the bed repeatedly, and after a week of that her mother stops bringing her fresh straw and simply lets the girl lie in her own filth. The girl doesn’t seem to care. She talks to herself in her sleep, crazy garbled conversations with imaginary people. Her skin becomes pale and beaded with sweat, her lips are ruby red, and she has a peculiar, acrid odor.

  One day the mother brings the girl a chicken leg. The girl sits up on her soiled straw pallet and snatches the chicken leg and tears into it with the ferocity of a starved wolf. The mother recoils from what she sees—the girl’s teeth have grown longer, and her mouth is bloody. She gobbles down the chicken leg, crunching the bone between her long, bloody teeth. Her breath reeks like a stew of rotten fruit and fetid meat; her eyes are so dilated that they look like black holes in reality. The mother, terrified, flees.

  The next day, the girl staggers out of the cottage, looking for food. As the midday sun strikes her she screams and covers her eyes and crumples to the ground. Her parents are shocked to see her this way, in full sunlight. Her skin is white as a fish’s belly, her hair has fallen out in patches, her limbs are thin as broom handles. The father carries his wasted daughter back to her pallet and lays her down.

  The next morning the girl is still and unresponsive. Her forehead is icy cold. There is no sign of life. The mother tells the father that the girl is dead. They cover her with a sheet. They tell the neighbors that their daughter has died. Tomorrow they will bury her in the graveyard by the village church.

  But that night a strange thing happens. The girl awakens. She throws aside the sheet and climbs to her feet. She does not know where she is, but she is ravenous. She staggers through the cottage, confused and terrified. The mother sees her and screams in horror. The girl claps her hands to her ears. Too loud! The terrified father grabs a knife and waves it at her. She runs from the cottage, runs from the screaming and the flashing blade. She sees a flickering light in the distance. She hears voices. She smells cooking! She heads for the light, bursts into her neighbors’ cottage, grabs a chunk of pork from their stewpot and crams it whole into her mouth. The neighbors run away and the girl gobbles their supper. She wanders off into the countryside. The next day some village boys find her lying motionless in a beet field. The village elders are called. The local tooth-puller pronounces her dead; the priest says that she is possessed. They decide to burn her quickly. A pyre is erected on a hilltop. The girl’s body is placed atop the enormous pile of dry logs and branches. The priest throws a torch onto the pyre
and within a few seconds the flames are roaring and the villagers’ faces are orange with reflected firelight. Then something inside the tower of flame moves, and they see the shape of the girl. She erupts screaming from the pyre into their midst, her entire body on fire. She twists and turns and leaps in a dance of death as the villagers run shrieking. Then she dies—for real, this time.

  That is what might have happened to a diabetic a few hundred years ago. Imagine the stories the peasants would tell! All of the symptoms I described are possible symptoms of untreated diabetes. The sweet smell of too much glucose in the blood, the strange, acrid reek of advanced ketoacidosis, the rotten smell of bacterial infection. Madness, ravenous hunger, extreme sensitivity to sunlight and sound, bleeding, receding gums (that make her teeth look longer), cold, clammy skin, and deathlike coma—all resulting from untreated diabetes. Even the spontaneous, repeated revival from a deathlike coma is possible.

  It seems clear to me that diabetes in the Middle Ages led to the folktales that led to Bram Stoker’s book that led to Anne Rice’s novels and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all the other vampire stuff. Diabetics were the original, the real vampires. They weren’t evil or superpowerful or immortal. They were just sick. Like me. I’m actually a proto-vampire. When I take an insulin shot now, I think of it as vampire vaccine. If I quit taking insulin altogether I would become that starving vampire girl from the Middle Ages. I might come crashing into your house and eat your pork stew.

  Or whatever.

  You never know what a vampire might do to you.

  1655 words (including these)

  7

  Draco

  I get a sick feeling as soon as I turn in my paper to Mrs. Graham. Like maybe I should have left out the part about impalement, or the part where I threaten to break into her house. Oh well, I just wrote what I was thinking. She’ll have to deal with it, just like I have to deal with her. I don’t know why all my teachers are so hard on me. It’s not like there aren’t a lot of other kids doing worse in school. Buttface, the school counselor, says they’re hard on me because I’ve got so much potential. Like because I got straight As for a couple years, all of a sudden it’s not okay for me to be average. What’s so terrible about slacking off for a year or two? Don’t I ever get to relax?

  Buttface says it’ll matter when I try to get into college. Just to piss her off, I once told her I was planning to go to beautician school to learn to do manicures. Buttface sat back and stroked her glass-bead necklace. She always goes for that necklace when she gets upset. When I’m in her office she’s usually pawing at it within seconds.

  Buttface’s real name is Ms. Butkus. She is married to a man named Steele but kept her maiden name. This reveals something about her, but I don’t know what. She’s not actually stupid.

  After creative writing, I materialize in the doorway to her office. She is sitting behind her desk doing nothing, as if she has been waiting for me.

  “Hi,” I say. “It’s me.” Like she can’t figure that out herself.

  “Lucy.” She smiles sleepily. Buttface’s style is to stay calm under all circumstances. I think she takes tranquilizers. With her round face and heavy eyelids she looks like a little kid ready for her nappy. “How are you doing today?” Her standard question.

  I shrug—my standard answer. She nods as if I have said something, so I do. “This is a preemptive visit,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You know—like for a problem that isn’t a problem yet, but you might be hearing something about it.”

  “Something you haven’t done yet?”

  “Not exactly. More like something I already did, but it hasn’t hit the fan yet.”

  “Oh.” She’s still smiling, but she looks a little sad.

  “I wrote this paper for Mrs. Graham. We were supposed to write an essay? It was supposed to be about our future, you know? Like, what I think my life will be like when I become a lawyer, or president, or something. Except I wrote something different.”

  She holds her sad smile, waiting for more.

  “Anyway, in case Graham blows a blood vessel or something, I just wanted you to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That I was just messing around. I’m not crazy.”

  “Nobody thinks you’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  That night at midnight I log on and drop into Transylvania. 2Tooth and Fangs are arguing about how much blood a full-blown vampire needs to stay healthy.

  Fangs666: it’s the essence that s important. Vamps eat reglar food 2. They just need a little bit of blood everyday

  2Tooth: REEL vampires need LOTS of blood

  Fangs666: depends on what U call LOTS. Maybe 1 rat worth

  2Tooth: More like a pig worth

  Fangs666: U know how much blood in pig?

  2Tooth: DEpens on how big the pig.

  Sblood: HEY. I keep telling you morons that REAL vampires died out in the 20th century.

  Fangs666: blood, U don’t knw crap

  Sblood: at least I know how to type. you morons know less than that.

  Draco: Children, behave yourselves!

  Nobody writes anything for almost a minute. We haven’t heard from Draco in weeks. There is something about his “voice” that scares me.

  Draco: To answer your questions, young ones, a 30 kilo Vietnamese potbellied pig holds 2 liters of ruby nectar. This is enough to sustain an adult Overman for 2 weeks, more or less, depending upon his level of activity. That is about 150 milliliters per day. Of course, we eat other things as well, such as the rest of the pig.

  Fangs666: what if you can’t get it?

  Draco: not get blood? What a curious concept. This planet is swimming in hemoglobin. But let us say that I were marooned on a raft in the middle of the ocean and could not so much as catch a fish. Like any other creature, I would starve. Of course, the real problem would be the sunburn. My skin is quite sensitive.

  I try to imagine Draco sitting at his computer. At first I see a tall, dark-haired, handsome man in his thirties. He has cold eyes and a cruel mouth. Like Pierce Brosnan only younger and paler. He is sipping red fluid from a wineglass. I shake my head to clear it. Now I see a pimply twenty-something computer nerd guzzling Yoo-Hoo and scratching himself and pouring a lot of misplaced energy into the net. Some jerk without a life.

  Sblood: maybe you should see a doctor, Draco

  Draco: How amusing. I did visit a physician recently for a blood workup. I was concerned that I might have become HIV positive. Many of us have contracted AIDS, you see. The sad fact is that the consumption of human nectar, while sublime, is not without risk. This is why I have been raising potbellied pigs

  Sblood: did they check your blood glucose? Maybe you’ve got diabetes.

  Draco: Ah, Sweetblood, still promoting your diabetic vampire theory I see. In fact, my blood appeared to be normal in most respects, although the physician seemed a bit concerned about my cholesterol levels

  Sblood: too much pork in your diet

  Draco: perhaps

  2Tooth: How old wre U when U started?

  Draco: you mean when I passed? Chaos, upheaval, revelation. I was fifteen.

  Sblood: how old are you now?

  Draco: That is a very rude question! But I’ll provide you with an answer of sorts. When I first felt the Hunger there was no internet, no cell phones, no CDs.

  Sblood: were there cars?

  Draco: Yes, dear, there were cars.

  Here is what I think: I think these cybervamps are playing games. If any one of them, including Draco, were to gulp a goblet of pig’s blood, I bet he’d puke it right back up again.

  I’ve been all over the Web. Several so-called vampires and vampire groups have sites where they talk about things vampiric. There are psychic vampires and energy vampires and vampire-lifestylers and immortal vampires and a few who just claim to enjoy an occasional taste of blood. Some of them believe in the classic supernatural vampire: creatures that can tu
rn into bats and show no reflection and so forth. Others maintain that vampires are a subspecies of Homo sapiens. There are also those who claim that vampires are victims of a retrovirus that requires them to drink blood to survive. And a few see vampirism as a religion or a form of meditation. But most of them, I think, are just posers. They just like to dress up and look cool and act weird.

  I mean, maybe a few of the really warped ones drink a little blood now and then, but that doesn’t make them real vampires. I could tell them about real vampires, but they wouldn’t like it any more than Mrs. Graham will when she reads my essay.

  I wonder if she’s reading it right now.

  I really wish I’d left out the impalement stuff.

  8

  Femmes Fatale

  “I have a present for you, Vampire Lady.”

  Guy is standing in front of me in the hallway. We have just survived another French class. He has a tattoo on his wrist: a red heart pierced by a black sword. I wonder why I didn’t notice it before. A small white cardboard box rests in the palm of his hand.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “Open it.”

  I take the box and lift the lid. Inside, resting on a pillow of cotton, is a pale green object about an inch and a quarter long. It is smooth and semi-translucent, as if carved from jade. Its shape that of an imperfect cylinder. One end is bullet-shaped with a tiny black stem in the center; the other end is asymmetrical, like the point of a used green lipstick. A row of tiny metallic gold dots circle one end, looking as if they had been applied by a steady hand with the smallest imaginable paintbrush. I touch it gently with the tip of my finger. It is firm, but not hard like stone. It is neither warm nor cool. I think of plastic, but with a softer, more organic feel.

  “What is it?”

  “A chrysalis.”

  For a second I don’t get it, but then something from biology class comes back to me.