5 - Ryet
They’re Josep’s problem now.
It’s hard for meto watch Syrsee go. There is a weird feeling inside me, an urge to go after her and bring her back. It’s almost painful. It starts out as hollowness in my stomach and then progresses to a pressure in my chest as I watch the truck disappear back down the driveway.
I don’t take anything about myself for granted right now. I don’t know if this urge and these feelings are just emotional because we just made a major decision about our relationship—one I’m not necessarily happy with—or if it’s some kind of reaction to my food source being too far away.
Food source. It’s crude, but it’s accurate.
Of course, Syrsee is much more than food to me. And IthoughtI was much more than an emergent vampire to her, but maybe not.
I don’t know. But here is what I do know—making big decisions about anything right now would be a mistake. There’stoo much going on. There are too many new things to decipher. There are too many confusing feelings. So I’m trying to let it all slide down my back. Trying not to get caught up in the sense of loss, which isn’t even real. I haven’t lost her yet.
Yet.
That word sticks in my mind for far too many seconds.
Is it inevitable? That she will hate me one day? Is it inevitable that she will become just another feeder in a bedroom being fed on by me?
I wish I had people to ask. In human lore like movies and TV shows, vampires come in groups. There is always a leader, a bunch of minions, and an older, wiser father or mother vampire who knows all the secrets and doles them out, little by little, on a need-to-know basis.
And even though all that shit is fiction, I’m starting to feel a little cheated. Because I have no one and nothing to guide me through this. I’m a blind man crawling around on my knees in the dark.
I turn and find myself looking at the door to the basement that leads to the root cellar. And before I know what I’m doing, I’m heading towards it. I pull open the door and stare down into the darkness, my new, better eyes adjusting automatically, focusing on the hidden shapes in the black. Steps. That’s all they are.
Then the smells are all back. I can smell everything in the cabin individually. The floorboards, the curtains, the gas in the lines feeding the stove. They are separate and distinct.
But then I smell what’s in the basement. And it is not separate and distinct. It is a bouquet of scents that all mix together perfectly. Dirt, and insects, and water, and rust, and iron, and tree roots.
It is the scent of earth and the moment I get to the bottom of the stairs and my feet touch the ground, a wave of relieffloods through me. The pressure in my chest eases and the hollowed-out feeling in my stomach evens out. I sit down on the bottom step, take off my boots, and then stand back up, my toes wriggling in the wet dirt.
A breath comes out. I relax.
This relaxation is so immediate, I take off my jacket, then my shirt, and a minute later I’ve stripped naked and the scents all around me are something new now. They are a mist of lavender and it coats my body like rain.
I forget what my problem was.
I forget why I’m here.
I almost forget everything as I pull open a door and walk forward into the tunnel that leads to the root cellar. The mud squishing under my feet—even that feels good.
Syrsee wouldn’t like this. I would not want her to find me like this. I would not want her to know that I am a thing that lives underground. That I am a thing that needs it. Because only gross things live underground. Only gross things don’t need the light can survive in the darkness. And I can already feel it inside me. The idea that I don’t just live here, Ibelonghere.
The door to the root cellar appears and I open it and step inside, looking around with my new, vampire eyes. The shelves are not empty, but everything on them has rotted into a petrified version of its former self or just deteriorated away into bits and pieces. There are about a dozen glass jars on one shelf, the size of baby food jars, and next to those are vials.
Vials? I blink a few times, wondering when the hell I would’ve put vials in here.
Never, that’s when.
Come to think of it, when did I ever can up baby food?
Again, it never happened.
So where did these jars and vials come from?
I walk over to the shelf and pick up the first jar. It’s covered in a thick layer of dust and I have to wipe this all off for several seconds before I can see the label. It’s faded and old, obviously, but it’s also fancy. Vintage might be the right word. I read it out loud. “Thirst.” Which tells me nothing. So I pick up the next one, perform the same actions, and read it out loud as well. “Hunger.” I repeat this for all the jars. “Gasping. Purging. Chills. Sweats. Fatigue.”
I think about these words for a moment and realize that they are symptoms. Not of diseases, but the lack of basic requirements. I set the last jar back down and start picking up the vials, cleaning them off, and setting them on the shelf in a neat line. Then I read the labels. “Despair. Loneliness. Regret. Contempt. Estrangement. Fear. Shame. Guilt.”
