My Tourniquet

Hi Folks...it's October! Time for the creatures of the night. This is the first of a batch of stories with a Halloween bent, so if you don't like those, you should probably pass this one by. I started the story out trying out another new editor...God I miss Mikothebaby...I ended up finishing it with SirCharles5150 from last week. He cot in at the last minute and did an absolutely heroic job. Here we go. SS06

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New Orleans is a city of contrasts. As soon as visitors stepped foot in the city, its character washed over them like a hurricane. Its rich cultural diversity and old world charm just seemed to fit right in alongside all of its modern conveniences. The swampy, hot, humid weather seemed to only add to its down home sophistication.

Internet bars and Starbucks franchises competed for space on the avenues. But in New Orleans they sat right beside fortune teller's shops, voodoo bookstores and hundreds of tiny yet charming mom and pop restaurants that served the most enticing blend of French, Southern and Creole fare.

Religion, be it Catholic, Voodoo, Paganism or whatever, was very in your face. And it wasn't unusual to see statues or posters of the saints, whether the religious icons or the very modern day football team in the windows of both large and small shops.

Tourists are a big part of the city. They come from every area of the country and the planet to experience Jazz, Ragtime, Blues and a thousand other types of music and entertainment that the city is famous for.

Me, I'm Theresa Gillian, I'm thirty four years old, I've lived here all of my life, and I hate it. I can't wait to get out of this cesspool. This city is so full of sin and evil that I often feel like I need to take three showers a day and go to church twice just to keep my soul clean. I've been saving all of the money I can, as quickly as I can, so I can move to Chicago to live near my cousin and her family.

That is my dream. Ever since I visited her three years ago to attend her wedding, I've wanted to go back there. I know that Chicago isn't the nicest place on the planet. They have crime and all of the other ills that every big modern city has. But the difference is that its ills and even its evils are clean, human problems. They don't reek with the touch of evil that permeates the air here.

Maybe it's the fact that because of the water table we have to bury the dead above ground. And that keeps them so close to us that you can fell the presence of the dead all around you. Maybe it's just that being an old city brings the air of past times, past crimes and past evil, closer to the city in an intimate way.

My parish priest once told me that old spirits, both good and bad liked the places that were familiar to them, so an older city has more ghosts. But whatever it is, in only a few months, I'll be free of this place.

Some of the woman that I work with, cleaning hotel rooms in the big tourist type hotels near the quarter laugh at me when I talk about it. But I know what I feel. And I know what I know.

The tourists especially the younger ones with their piercings and their tattoos, who come down here looking for God knows what, should be more careful. Some of those poor young people disappear and are never heard from again. I truly believe that some of them came face to face with what they sought.

Those poor stupid children with archaic languages and metal decorating their bodies have no idea about the forces they play with. Most of them are just looking for thrill. They want to be scared. They are no more prepared for what they find here than those stupid paranormal investigators on TV. They go into a haunted house carrying thousands of dollars worth of equipment, trying to find ghosts or evidence of the supernatural.

What always makes me laugh is how quickly those expert ghost hunters scramble and run out of the pace as soon as something goes bump in the night. Why do they run? I mean the whole intention of their visits is finding ghosts, right? So why would they run as soon as they find one?

They run because it's a human reaction to things that the mind just can't face. There are some things that people should just leave alone. And although those idiots' conscious minds tell them to go and tease the ghosts, their subconscious minds know better.

I pray for all of them though because they really don't understand what they're playing at. Tattoos and body piercings are the devil's way of marking his children. And sooner or later he comes to claim them. If you tease a demon you shouldn't be surprised when he snatches you. Here in New Orleans, magic, whether spiritual, Christian, or evil, is all real. The city is like a nexus point where all kinds of things just seem to come together.

Some places just resonate with a certain type or power. The Catholics have Rome. The witches and Pagans have Salem. The Native tribes have the Great Lakes region, but New Orleans just seems to be the place where they all interact.

So walking around here with a pentagram or an upside down cross tattooed over your hoo-hah is only going to get you in trouble.

Wednesday night, I was walking home after my shift, with one of the girls who lives near me. As we passed by the old convent near the French Quarter, she looked upwards suddenly and let out a gasp. I looked to see what had startled her and noticed that a man was climbing out of one of the windows on the upper floor. It had to be about forty feet up.

He looked around and then just jumped. We were frozen on the spot. Caroline and I both thought that he had jumped to his death. But when he landed, his legs buckled and then he stood up and walked away as easily as if I had just jumped down from a truck with a lift kit.

Caroline gasped and crossed herself, because we both knew that nothing human should have been able to do that. Suddenly he turned towards us. We ducked behind the building we were passing and went back the other way. I learned at an early age to never let the Devil know that you've seen him.

By the time I got home I was still shaking about what I had seen. The very next morning I told my priest about it when I went to church to pray. He of course proved to be useless. He asked me several times whether I was sure of what I'd seen and if was I was taking any kind of drugs or medication. For a man of the cloth who is supposed to do battle in God's name, against the forces of evil, he seemed to be just as scared as I was.

He even told me not to tell anyone about what I saw. He told me it was probably just a trick of the light or some sort of fatigue making me think I saw something that I didn't actually see.

I went to work today with the intention of having Caroline go to the church with me, so she could tell Father Scaredy pants that she saw it too. Both of us couldn't have been fooled by a trick of the light. Both of us weren't suffering from the same fatigue.

The problem was that Caroline didn't show up for work today. This is the first time I remember her missing work. When I called her, I got no answer. I'm pretty sure that she ran off with that man she's been dating. She's always telling me how she's tired of being alone. So maybe she took him up on one of his offers. He's a truck driver and always asks her to go out on the road with him. I figured that he's married otherwise he'd have asked her to marry him by now. Being out on the road in a truck would be just like playing house. And that's a sin.

I've decided that tonight, I'm going to either walk home the long way and avoid the old convent or maybe just walk over to the taxi stand that's right down the street from hotel. Even though it isn't a convent anymore, I'm not walking past that place again. I still get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.

It's a warm night but I feel cold for some reason. I pull my sweater closer around my shoulders to keep the chill out. It just seems funny that on a night when it's eighty degrees out, I'm still cold.

I sit down on the bench to wait for a taxi. A shrunken dark skinned man smoking one of those foul foreign cigars nodded his head at me.

"Ah'll be back in just a shake ma'am," he says. "I just gotta' get my log book and take a leak. There's my cab right there, if you wanna wait inside of it."

It sounded like a good idea to me. There were people just across the street in the sidewalk cafes. There were a couple of Zydeco musician down the block playing for tourists. But there was something wrong with the night itself. It just seemed like the darkness was palpable. If you looked only two feet away from the street lights it was dark again. It almost seemed like the light couldn't chase away the darkness. Waiting inside of the cab sounded like the best idea I heard, so I got up to walk the twenty feet over to the cab.

I never made it. He stepped out of one of the puddles of darkness, as if the dark itself was a cloak to cover him. For some strange reason it seemed as if I was the only one who could see him.

It was as if he had hypnotized me. I couldn't look away from his eyes. He had one of those corny old hats that they used to wear forty or fifty years ago and a ratty old coat. He even had a walking stick. Who the hell carries a walking stick nowadays?

He spoke in a Cajun accent so thick that I could barely understand what he was saying. "Ya saw me th' other night huh Chere?" he asked.

Recognition fired in dormant brain cells along with fear. I tried to run but my body refused to cooperate. My heart started to beat faster and louder and I wanted to scream but for some reason I couldn't. He turned again towards the darkness and I followed him without even being asked.

The strangest thing was that we were only a few yards away from the tourists who were smiling and dancing to the happy sounds of the Zydeco. He bit deeply into my neck and took half of my blood with the first draught.

"Are you going to make me a vampire like you?" I asked.

"Sorry Chere," he laughed. "You're just as plain as swamp grass. You wouldn't be a good vampire." A few seconds later, his red rimmed mouth descended on me again and I felt my soul drawn out of me. As I melted away into nothingness I wondered about the futility of it all. What about heaven? What about hell? Did any of it mean anything?

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Mason

Hunger is a funny thing. It affects us all differently. Some people get really testy when they're hungry and others get tired. Some of us respond to hunger like there's a dinner bell ringing behind them, and other look at it like it's merely a suggestion. Some of us are vegetarians, who wouldn't touch meat to save their lives. Others think that no meal is complete without a large portion of charred dead animal flesh on their plates.

I see us all, with all of our different appetites as being the same. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. We all have our woes and our crosses to bear. I know a nurse who's a diabetic. Living around the big easy and not being able to partake of most of the sweets and cakes and pies that come from this region is probably one of the most insidious versions of hell. When I think about her, my particular dietary conundrum becomes less damning.

I call myself a Fluitarian. That means I subsist totally on fluids and I'm kind of particular about which fluids I take in. Other than that and a fatal disability to process sunlight, I'm your average, every day swamp rat.

I've been told that I have a certain roguish charm and I see the results from time to time, like tonight. I work in Grace Hospital as a transporter. My job is to move the patients from one area in the hospital to another. I'm supposed to be charming and compassionate, while maintaining an air of professionalism. At least that was the way they explained it during my orientation.

I'm sitting here in the administrative office considering my options, while a forty year old woman with stars in her eyes tries to convince me to better my life.

"Mason, I think you can do better for yourself," she says. "In fact, I'd be willing to help you to do just that." As she speaks she leans over the desk between us much more than is necessary. She leans over so far that the cleavage between her dangling breasts shows me that she isn't wearing a bra. She looks into my eyes to make sure that I'm paying attention to her and smiles as she notices that I've noticed her breasts.

"Mason, we can talk about other things, some other time. Right now we should talk about your future. What do you think about you becoming a nurse or maybe even a doctor?" she asks.

"Well ma'am..." I begin.

"Hallie," she corrects. "Just think of Halle Berry but without the creamy brown skin."

I nod at her. "I'm a transporter, that's it. I don't think I have what it takes to become a doctor or a nurse. That's a lot of school. And I have to work to support myself."

"We can work all of that out and..." she begins.

"Hallie, I'm not interested," I tell her point blank. I was always told to always leave your opponent with a sense of hope, so I throw in. "At least not in the schooling. I like to keep my life in the low pressure zone." I smile and obviously leer at her breasts.

She smiles and leans back in her chair, pulling her shoulders back to make her breasts stand out more. "Can we maybe talk about those other things later tonight?" I ask.

"We sure can," she smiles. "I'll come and find you."

Now all I had to do was avoid her for the rest of the shift. It wasn't hard. With the constant flow of patients to all of the areas of the hospital, I was often too busy to even chat with the patients for more than a few seconds. But those few seconds often made the difference in the lives of the sick.

Sometimes just a few kind words at the right time made all of the difference. I also saw some of the cheesiest things in the world happen. There were times, especially around the first of the month, where the adult children of senior citizens would send mom or pop to the hospital while they spent their parent's social security check. I saw it all too often. Mr. Smith or Mrs. Jones had no idea why their son or daughter had brought them into the hospital. "I coughed a couple of times and she sent me here," was a typical response. And in this day of litigation for any and every reason, the hospital had no choice but to schedule Mr. Smith for a Chest x-ray while his son skipped off to the casino.

With the transporters working overlapping shifts to ensure that there were always some of us on duty, I got off at 4 a.m. Lucky for me, my amorous HR fan was long since asleep. I left the hospital under the cover of darkness and smelled the warm, humid air. My belly was full of the cold, yet still life giving fluid that I had taken in. Years of experience in the hospital setting had taught me how to get around the security methods in the blood bank.

It was simple to trance an overworked doctor into going in and bringing me what I needed and then sending him on his way. Most people in a hospital would never consider questioning a doctor, especially about something as innocuous as a bag of blood.

So flush with blood and the perfume of the night I walked towards my bike. I knew there was a problem before I got to it. I saw them there, but curiosity alone made me go anyway. There was also the fact that I hadn't been seriously challenged by anyone in a long time. My kind, only seem to get stronger with age. In terms of immortality, at 60 years old, I'm nowhere near immortal. But I was turned when I was 27, so I've been a vampire for 33 years. A lot of us don't survive that long these days. It's too simple to succumb to the three S's. Suspicion, Sunlight and Stupidity tend to take their toll on us.

All of the fables and fairy tales about us are mostly wrong about some of the details. Yep, I have the potential to live forever. But potential without motivation ain't squat. Half of us are still subject to all of the insecurities and problems that most humans have. There comes a time when you just get tired of living. It's especially hard when everyone you know has gotten older or died. Life itself also changes with the generations until you no longer relate to anything around you. I was born in the late fifties. Who saw computers and cellphones coming?

Anyway, the shit about being killed by a stake through the chest is true, but come on, that would kill anything. The thing about sunlight bothers the shit out of me and I keep testing it. Every five years as I get stronger, I test it, and every God damned time it hurts like hell. I can't fly, or change into anything unless you're talking about a different outfit.

I am far stronger than any human and much, much faster though. I can trance most humans and even some animals but that's the extent of my supernatural abilities. We don't seem to have any telepathic abilities or no links between vampires unless they share a bloodline. We are very territorial, but it's mostly just suspiciousness of the motivation of others of our kind.

I have only met a truly old vampire, twice during my life. And both times it was a terrifying experience. The first of course was the woman who turned me. She was scary but only because of what she did to me. On retrospect, she was actually very kind to me. I was out of my head at the time. She didn't stick around to see what happened to me. The stories of vampires training their fledglings, is only more fiction. I often wonder what has happened to her. I heard more about her during my second encounter with an older vampire.

His name was Antoine de la Cravalle, obviously French and crazy as a bed bug. He was curious about me. He kept calling me his grandson. I finally figured out that he didn't mean genetically. He was the creature who had turned the woman who turned me. My vampire blood came from him, through her. She is almost four hundred years old and he's older still. He is extremely terrified of her, now. She has powers that defy even vampiric age. We didn't talk much, what with him being a total fucking lunatic. But from what I gathered, she has somehow gained the ability to switch back and forth between being a vamp and a human at will. And she can walk in the sun when she's human. He's scared shitless that she'll track him down and murder him while he sleeps so he's constantly on the move. I got the impression that he turned her by force over two hundred years ago and she's been tracking him around the globe to get her revenge until recently when something else took over her interest.

Anyway, I didn't think I'd have much of a problem with them at first glance. I guess, since I could hear their heartbeats, which marked them as human, and the fact that they were women I didn't really take them seriously. There was also the fact that three women, dressed from head to toe in leather piqued my curiosity. Each one of them wore a different color of leather. Each of them also wore a hooded leather cloak in the same color as their leathers. One wore head to toe white leather. Another was clothed in green leather and the last, wore yellow leather.

As I said I sensed a problem as I approached, but I didn't think it was a serious one. In the back of my mind, I had the idea that they were just another group of Goth kids. I thought the main danger might've been that they had discovered or suspected what I was. I might have to move out of my apartment or change jobs, but I viewed them as more of an annoyance than a legitimate threat. I was wrong.

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Piety

I hate being the new kid. To most of the people we interact with there isn't much difference between us. After they've been around us for a few hours or in some cases a few days, they look for differences. We're never in any place for longer than a few days though, so most never get the chance to discover that even the surface differences between us aren't really a good way to tell. Once you get past the appearance and personality quirks we're even more the same. We're all devoted to our lord and his service first and foremost.