City Lights
He shifted, uncomfortable in the dim lights he’d insisted on, and ran a long fingered hand through his blond hair.
“I’m not sure I’m digging this sofa thing. Sorry, but y’know…”
“It’s normal for people who haven’t been to therapy before to feel a little anxious.” The clipped young woman was scribbling on her notepad. He could hear the itching of her pen.
“I don’t like you being behind me like this. I’d rather you were where I could see you. Is that okay?”
“I’m sure that’ll be fine. Most people like to feel like they’re alone when talking about their inner selves.”
“No. I don’t want to feel alone. I want you to be here. Where I can see you.” He pulled himself up a little as she moved her chair round, a little clumsy in the darkness. She was cute, oval face, longish brown hair with bleach blond highlights pulled up in a bun. Little half moon spectacles, trimmed nails, tailored grey skirt suit with a thin scarf at her throat. Black shiny stiletto court shoes, opaque hold ups. From where he was lying, he could just catch a glimpse of the lace around the tops. She had very pale thighs.
“You’re very pretty. I mean, smart, y’know? Well dressed. You look good. I mean, I’m not, like, coming on to you or anything.”
“Thank you. Do you often say that to women?”
“Sometimes. Well, I used to. Not anymore. I… I guess I just don’t want to think about women right now.”
“You don’t want a relationship?”
“Forget relationships. I never did relationships. All that dating shit, not my style. But… um.” He blushed, his fingers twisting together. “I did used to, y’know… sleep with girls a lot. I… I don’t feel like doing that anymore. I don’t want to be close to anyone, physically, y’know? Maybe not, like, love anyone either, although I kinda always had problems with that.” He laughed, nervously. The woman nodded, scribbling. It was starting to annoy him.
“That’s perfectly fine. Is that what we’re here to talk about?”
“Well… kinda.”
“Are you comfortable? Is it dark enough for you?”
“Yeah… yeah. Have you got enough light?” He could see her squinting at her clipboard. “There’s a lamp on this little table here, with a- I mean, it might have a dimmer switch. You could just turn it up a little and sit close.”
“It does have a dimmer switch.” She moved her chair a third time, to the little table, very close to him now, turning the light on low. He could smell her perfume. The gentle glow illuminated her client a little. He looked healthy, but haggard, like a normally fit and strong man who hadn’t slept in a few days. There was a dusting of stubble on his chin. His dirty blond hair was just long enough to be snared back in a short ponytail, but this had been done a few days ago and some of it fell over his face. He wore shiny trousers, probably PVC, tucked into what looked like army boots, a black t-shirt and a dull grey shirt over the top. The shirt had had one of it’s sleeves ripped almost completely off, hanging on by a few threads on his shoulder, the fastener on his trousers had been broken and there was mud and dirt on his clothes, plus a few large, dark stains on his shirt. His boots were caked in dark, clotted earth. He looked homeless, but had calmly paid double her extortionate fee, in cash, without question.
“I’m sorry to have you out so late. I mean, you were going home when I turned up, weren’t you?”
“Just about to, yes. But that doesn’t matter, it’s important to me that everyone who comes to me is helped to the best of my ability.”
“Cheers, doc. I… sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“You can call me that if you want. Otherwise, Miss Walters is fine. Or Jessica, if you prefer. I don’t mind.”
“Jessica? That’s a nice name. I’m Lauri, by the way. Not Larry, Lauri. Law-ree. L-A-U-R-I. It’s Finnish. My mom was Finnish. Bit funny, really.”
“Lauri. Second name?”
“Not important.”
“I see. So… if you’re comfortable, we can begin.”
There was a silence.
“I don’t… I don’t really know where to begin.”
“What is it you want to talk about? Or don’t you know? It’s fine if you just feel you want to talk to someone.”
“No… no. I know what I want to talk about. It’s… it’s something that happened. Few days ago. Maybe a week… no. Less than that. Three, four days ago.”
“You do realise that I might have to inform the police…”
“You won’t. I mean, you won’t have to. It’s not like that.”
“I see. Alright then, if you would like to start… this incident.”
“D’you want me to tell you what happened?”
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
“I…” He paused, stared at his dirt-encrusted nails for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah. Beginning to end. That makes the most sense. That way… that way you see it how I saw it.”
He took a deep breath, and started.
“It was about three, four days ago, like I said. My perception of time has got a little fucked up. It wasn’t great to start with…” He chuckled, but it sounded a little desperate. “But yeah, it was a few days ago. I… Jesus, this is hard.” He rubbed his eyes, swallowed, and started talking like he wasn’t going to let himself stop. After a few moments, it almost seemed like he couldn’t stop.
“I went out one evening. Clubbing. Nothing strange about that, I go out most nights. I fix old cars and motorbikes for a living. I’m self-employed. I like it that way. Nobody breathing down my neck all the time, I can relax and really get into the job. So nobody cares if I don’t start work until midday. So I go out most nights. This night, I went to this club… its called The Cave. It’s some old underground thing. It’s about the size of a football pitch, all red brick, and the ceiling is held up by these brick pillars about every ten feet. The dance floor’s actually a pit, well, two pits, there’s two of them, one on either side of the bar. You have to jump down about two feet to get to them. The bar’s circular, right in the centre, red brick again, and the DJ-tables are bang in the middle of the dance floors, on a raised pillar. More like a chimney, really, that they sit inside so you can’t get at ‘em, but you can see their top half. Then there are alcoves and that along the walls, with chairs. They’ve got strobe lights and stuff, but huge dishes full of fire as well – it’s like the gateway to hell or something. Proper good place, though. Bit of a gothic crowd, but I don’t mind. I guess… I guess it was really the perfect place for them. For him.” He swallowed again, then started talking even faster, like he was desperate to get it all out.
“I’d gone to have a drink, listen to some music, maybe pick up a girl. Like I did every night. But I was sitting at the bar, with a JD and coke, chatting to this cute little black girl with a glittery blue afro and white lipstick and a white top that was practically see-through…” He paused, then frowned. “It’s weird. Back then, I wanted to fuck her so bad… ‘scuse the language… but now I don’t feel anything. Nothing at all. I guess he kinda changed my perceptions of things. I never thought I was like that, even though I didn’t really want him to… Jesus, I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyways… who came swanning through the doors at just that moment but… but…”
“Hell, it sticks in my throat even now. This guy’s like the devil, or Beetlejuice or something, you can’t say his name. You don’t say his name. Or at least, I can’t. The girl next to me, though, she just breathed it, Like he was a movie star or something. Like she was totally in love with him. Like she would have gouged out her eyes to lick his shoes.”
“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to.” She spoke clearly, but she was paying more attention to writing everything down. There was a moment’s silence.
“His name was Copper Lynx.
“He… he was… Jesus, okay, I can say it. He was gorgeous. I’ve never looked at a guy in that way, never touched a guy in my life and I would never want to, or at least, back then I thought I would never want to, but he was… beyond belief. Like an angel out of heaven. He had… he had long copper coloured hair, and I don’t mean ginger, I mean proper copper. It looked like fluid metal. And it was down to his waist or something, with a heavy curved edge at the bottom. It’s hard to describe, all the hairs ended up touching his back at right angles cause they curled round just a little… perfect. Not a hair out of place. Long bangs over his face, and a top hat. One of those felt, kinda floppy ones, with a long feather in it. A silver feather. And a silver pin, with a white, kinda creamy stone on the end. It had a tiny bit of silver in it. A long black coat with cut out shoulders and those little Chinese fastenings down the front, silver edging, and a train so it dragged along the floor about four or five feet behind him. No one stood on it. Nobody would have dared. Boot cut black pinstripe trousers with perfect creases. Ruler strait, all the way down. Platform ankle boots, with a silver paw print on the right toe. A cane with a silver tip and a black tassel on the top. Like a neo-Victorian gentleman.
“He came right up to the bar, and people just moved around him… normally I probably would have laughed at someone dressed like that, but you couldn’t laugh at him… you couldn’t. He had a black and silver rosary around his neck. The Our Father beads, those are the little ones on their own, right? They were little silver spheres. The Hail Mary’s were perfectly smooth pill-shapes, some black stone that seemed to catch the light like a star inside it. His fingernails were black with silver tips, like those French thingies, you know, only not. He had long fingers, and you could just see the bones through the skin on the back of his hands. His skin was so pale, I couldn’t believe it was real, but he wasn’t wearing any makeup. A tattoo on his left hand, just on the point of the little triangle of flesh between his thumb and his first finger. It was a paw print. Not a cartoon one, it looked real realistic. It was smaller than a penny. I could have covered it with the tip of my finger, maybe. I wanted to try. I don’t know why I wanted… to reach over and touch him like that. It wasn’t even, like… it wasn’t… it wasn’t sexual. It was just a fascination. Like how I remember all the little details, how his hair fell, the way the Hail Mary’s blazed like dying stars in the strobe lights, the way he eased himself up onto a bar stool, on one foot, one hand on the bar, the hand holding his cane sweeping up the train of his coat.
“And then he looked at me.
“He just scanned around, his face kinda hidden under his bangs, and right at the end of the sweep, he saw me. And he looked me right in the eye. He hadn’t done that to anyone else, but he looked me right in the eye. And I couldn’t look away. His eyes… his eyes were green, acid green, with darker green round the edges, and flecks of pure gold. His hair, his eyes, they were such a contrast to the silver… Jesus… Jesus he was so beautiful. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I could only stare into his eyes… he had such long lashes… until suddenly he blinked and I could look away.
“I almost fell off my stool. It was such a shock, for him to have held me like that and then just let me go, without ever touching me. And then… he reached out, with his left hand, the one with the tattoo, and touched me on the chin. Just one finger, barely contact, but I could feel the prick of his fingernail. He lifted my head back up, but I didn’t want to make eye contact again. His face was right in front of me, I couldn’t look at anything else, but I couldn’t look in his eyes. I couldn’t. I thought I would die if I looked in his eyes. I thought he would never let me go.
“Instead… instead I looked at his face. He was so beautiful. Beautiful like I didn’t think a human being could be. He had to be an angel. I was totally fascinated by… by the line where his eyebrow flowed into the bridge of his nose, by the slight hollow under his cheekbones, by the smudges of eyeliner on the inside of his lower eyelid, by that little curve on the inner corner of his eye. By the slight dent in the centre of his lower lip. He moved his hand just a little, up just a little without moving the finger under my chin, and ran the point of his thumbnail from the right corner of my mouth along the line where my bottom lip turned to regular skin. Smooth as silk. The skin bunched together, moved with the nail until it couldn’t anymore, then fell back. His nails were so sharp, they were more like claws, and all of a sudden I realised he’d drawn blood. There was a drop of blood on my bottom lip, a little towards the right where the flat bit at the bottom starts to curve upwards.” Lauri’s finger lingered on the spot, his eyes unfocused and wide. “And… and he licked his lips. Ever so slightly, just the tip of his tongue running around the very edge, but suddenly…
“Suddenly it was sexual. Suddenly I could almost hear his heartbeat, like I could hear mine. Suddenly my clothes were hot and heavy. Suddenly I was so aware of the fact that we weren’t touching apart from that one finger under my chin. My eyes were almost closed. I think my mouth was a little open. I was breathing heavily, like… like I was almost begging him to… to… kiss me.
“It was wrong. It was so fucking wrong; I felt it all at once. I tried to push myself away, I tried to… to fight him, but we weren’t at the bar anymore, we were in one of those alcoves, on a bench, and there was no one else around. I was almost lying on the bench, knees up, feet apart, and he was kneeling about level with my ankles, hands holding himself up either side of my waist, his face inches from mine when my head hit the wall and I couldn’t pull back anymore. I don’t know how we got there. We still weren’t touching… I could feel it so strong, that we weren’t touching, and I think I was whimpering, like a wounded dog, because he… in just a second, he was going to force me down and rape me, I just knew it, and I couldn’t live with myself if he did that…
“And he came closer… and… and our faces were nearly touching, and… he put out his tongue, just a little, and touched it against that little drop of blood on my lip. Just a touch. I barely felt it.
“And then his lips were forced on mine and his tongue was in my mouth and his body was pressed against mine and even though I was screaming inside I couldn’t stop him. I couldn’t stop him.
“He… he held me down for a long time. It felt like a real long time. He didn’t… even though he was on top of me, he didn’t try and… y’know… touch me. He just kissed me. For a real long time. And I couldn’t stop him.”
There was a brief silence. For a few moments, the psychiatrist had forgotten to write.
“B-, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with feeling a little insecure about your sexuality…”
“I’m not gay!” He sat up sharply, and she leaned back a little as his eyes glimmered dangerously in the light. “You don’t understand! This is the point. I don’t like men. I’ve never wanted a man, and I still don’t. There’s only him. And he… he was controlling me.”
“I see…” She made a note, regaining her composure. “And why did he stop?”
“I bit his tongue.” He replied, sounding almost embarrassed.
“I see…and what did he do?”
“He jerked his head back. I dunno how I’d managed to do it. I’d felt like I couldn’t move at all… but I bit him, and he seemed almost, I dunno, pleased. Then he hit me.”
“Hit you?”
“Backhand across the face. It shouldn’t have hurt. At least, it shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. But it felt like he’d broken my cheekbone and I went sprawling on the floor. Then he grabbed my collar, and there was a jerk, and we were somewhere else. Outside. The alley behind the above ground portion of the Cave. And he flung me against the wall, so hard I cracked my head and saw stars, and he was pinning me again, with his whole body, and his head right next to mine, his cheek against mine, and I was… I was completely dazed and I couldn’t move and… and I thought, ‘this is it’.
“He didn’t… he didn’t, though. His hand went to my throat and I think he had a knife or something and he… cut me. And pressed his face against my neck. He was… he was drinking my blood. Licking it off my neck where it trickled down. I was whimpering again, but somehow he wasn’t holding me like he had before. I mean, he was only holding me with his body, not… he wasn’t in my head. Like he had been before. Maybe he wasn’t trying anymore. Maybe he couldn’t. But I couldn’t believe that, after everything he had done…”
“Mr… Lauri.” The psychiatrist rubbed her eyes. “I think this has gone far enough-”
“No! Please, no… please! I have to finish. You don’t understand yet! You… you don’t know what he did to me!” He burst out, sitting up again after he’d only just relaxed. She sighed.
“I see…” Flicking through her notes so far, she added a new one. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that this ‘Copper Lynx’ was a vampire.”
There was a silence.
“It sounds stupid when you say it.” He replied, in a small voice. “But it’s true. You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never met one; you’ve never met him… you don’t know what he’s like. You don’t know…”
“You said he bit you?”
“No. No… not at first. He cut me, and licked the wound. I dunno if he had a knife or just used his claws. But… he… he wasn’t finished.
“When he was done lapping up my blood he lifted his head and looked me in the eye. And then he laughed at me. I was so… disgusted… horrified with what he’d done… he’d drank my blood! It was weird and sick and… wrong… but how could I have stopped him? He was so strong… too strong… inhumanely strong. Up until now I didn’t know what to think of him, but now…” Lauri paused, blinking. “I never was a sharp one. You got it faster than I did. And now that I realised… that I accepted… that, that Copper Lynx wasn’t human…
“Jesus, it was worse. I didn’t think it could be worse than it was, but I guess some part of my brain had been hoping that he wouldn’t… go all the way… but a vampire! Maybe I would have been able to deal with it if he’d… he’d…” He swallowed, closing his eyes. “If he’d just forced himself on me. I’d have got myself a girlfriend. I’d have worked through it. Maybe I wouldn’t have been the same person ever again, but I’d still be alive!
“But now I knew he was going to… he was going to… he was going to kill me.
“The hold on my mind came back, so fierce that I almost blacked out. I was only just aware of what was happening… he fished the keys to my car out of my pocket, picked me up… slung across his arms like those girls in long white dresses in the vampire movies. Just like in the vampire movies. Hell, what did I know? Maybe he was the vampire movies.
“I could only see shadows, shapes, I caught little bits and pieces that were so clear, but sometimes it was like I was under water and it was pitch black… I was so confused, but he shoved me in the car… on the back seat… pinned me down…” Lauri swallowed, closing his eyes with a sound almost like a sob. “I knew what he was going to do. I knew. I had hardly any control over my body left but what little I had… I was sobbing, begging him not to… he held my face, cupped it in his hands as he knelt over me… kissed me. So gently. No tongues or anything. I turned my face away. And… and that made him mad. He hit me again. Broke a tooth. There was blood in my mouth and he forced my head back so he could suck it out. One hand was holding my head still, by my hair. I tried to pull away and he ended up tearing out almost a handful. The other hand… went everywhere… and I mean everywhere… my hands were free and I was lashing out, trying to hit him, trying to push him away, trying to open the door, trying anything to get free, but it was no good… no good… he… forced… broke the button on… turned me over…. And… and… he…” Lauri broke off with an almost silent sob, burying his face in his hands. For a few long moments, he shook noiselessly.
“I can’t.” He whispered, finally, his face streaked with damp lines of slightly cleaner skin. “I can’t say it. You understand, don’t you? You… you know what he did to me.” There was another long silence, as he stared into nothing, and finally Lauri whispered again.
“I can never forgive him for that. For everything else… yes. He’s been good to me. He’s done what was best. But for that…
“He was… afterwards… he held me. Cradled me against his chest like a baby. I was still crying… crying more than I had been before… before he… y’know… and he held me and stroked my hair and… he sang. He… he sang me a lullaby. Like I was a baby. He… he’d just…” Lauri’s face became contorted with tears again. “He’d just fucking raped me and he was singing me a lullaby! The bastard! I hated him so much, but in the whole world, he was the only thing I could cling to right then. The bastard.” He repeated, closing his eyes, then adding wistfully. “He had such a beautiful voice.
“He took off his coat… he was wearing a sort of sleeveless top, what’s it… like one of those that ties at the back of a girl’s neck, but on a guy… and wrapped it round me. He’d left his hat and his cane on the parcel shelf. He really was beautiful. And he slithered into the front seat and started the car… drove away from where we had been parked… and just looked up into the rear view mirror, and smiled at me.
“I didn’t know where we were going. I was scared and confused and hurting, all at once, and I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to say anything, but I didn’t want to go to wherever he was taking me either.
There was another long silence. Lauri drew his knees up, hugging them like a child.
“It was a graveyard. I knew the moment he opened the car door that it was a graveyard. It’s… a smell… something, I don’t know. But he picked me up… carried me through the gates… wrought iron gates, I don’t know how he got them open, he never touched them… and through a door, a stone door, and down a set of stone steps, a narrow corridor, down into the belly of the earth… swallowing us whole…”
“Mr. Lauri, really, I-”
“No! Please, you’ve got to listen, you’ve got to hear it all…”
“I must be frank, Mr. Lauri,” Removing her glasses and rubbing her eyes, she made to get to her feet. “It’s late and I see no point in listening to the delusions and hallucinations of a-”
“It wasn’t a hallucination!” His voice was suddenly so strong, his eyes almost flashing with anger, that she flung herself back in her seat.
“Mr. Lauri! Really! I-”
“Shut up!” There were tears in his eyes. Eyes that were a mottled, icy blue, like frozen sea foam, shot with threads of midnight and silver. Beautiful, captivating eyes. He pointed one finger at her, his voice on the verge of breakdown. “Shut up and sit there and listen to me!”
Breathless, the psychiatrist held totally still for several seconds before she realised that she actually couldn’t bring her body under her own control. Lauri buried his face in his hands, pushing his hair back out of his eyes.
“I didn’t want to do that.” His voice was mournful, choked with emotion. “Please, I don’t like doing that… I just want you to listen… Please, just listen…”
Feeling the invisible hold on her body relax, the young woman let her breath hiss through her teeth, tightening her hands around the armrests. She made no move to rise, and Lauri seemed almost oblivious to her presence once more.
“It… It was a crypt. He’d taken me down to a crypt. He… put me down on a stone slab… a tomb…” running one hand through his hair, Lauri squeezed his eyes shut, hunched over his drawn up knees and almost shaking. “I could smell the graveyard earth… all dark and loamy and damp and clotted… the dust of centuries… the thin, empty musk of bones rotting away… the memory of funeral flowers, lilies and poppies and anemones and dried blood… the cobwebs brushed against my face like ghost’s fingers… ever second of it, I still remember, I’m always going to remember, him bending over me and… a pain in my neck… a kiss that tasted like blood…”
“He turned you.” She breathed, not moving, barely speaking. But Lauri was somewhere else entirely, lost inside his thoughts. And as he spoke, it seemed to her than another voice took up his words and took over, filling in the gaps where he faltered. A voice that was all honey and milk and rusted iron knives.
“Here in the darkness… …the eternal darkness…among the bones of my ancestors, the bones of… …the fools who could not… could not see the, the… …perfection… perfection of, of… of… of death… immortality… murder… sanctity… damnation… here in the night which is so old amidst the trappings of funerals that need never have happened at all promise me promise me you’ll never leave me…”
“That is quite enough, I think.”
The voice was suddenly so clear, so close, all classical musk and cream and dried roses, that the psychiatrist would have jumped if she could. But something was holding her again, holding her stiff in her chair, and she was unable to stop the hand, with it’s long fingers and talon-like nails, that trailed down her cheek and lifted her chin. She could see a mark, between the thumb and forefinger, which could almost be…
“Lauri…”
“… no…”
“You promised. Be good now.”
“… no…”
“For me.”
“…n-” his voice caught, unable to finish the word, shaking with noiseless sobs and the tears that wouldn’t come.
“Lauri… please.”
Wordlessly, he slipped off the black leather psychiatrist’s sofa, kneeling between her feet. She had a moment to panic before, bracing his hands against the back of her chair, Lauri pushed her jacket back off her shoulder, pressed his face against the side of her throat bared by the claw-like hand’s touch.
“’M sorry, Jessica…”
“…Jessica? That’s a pretty name…”
And then it all swam away in a haze of the old, old night. She never even felt any pain.
An eternity in a second later, she became aware of the fact that her eyes were open.
She hadn’t moved but had slumped sideways, her cheek on the armrest of her chair, and although the muscles along the bared side of her neck and shoulder were an ocean of pain, if she kept her mind away from that abyss of unconsciousness she could see a little. The world flickered and spun, her hands and feet itched as though they’d been impaled with a thousand pins. The scarf around her neck was somewhat tighter than it had been, like a noose or… or a bandage…
Lauri was pressed against his chest like a child, long black sleeves wrapped around him, engulfing him like the darkness, protecting him. He was still shaking. But the other… copper that never tarnished and darkness that flowed from every corner and whispers and nursery rhymes and dried funeral bouquets and the soft touch of an ambiguous warmth. No shape, no definition, just a candle’s shadow in the night.
“B-But… I didn’t…”
“I know.”
“I promised you…”
“I know.”
“Y-You said…”
“I know. Shh now.” A kiss like a falling snowflake, more felt than heard. “I’ll take you home.”
And then they were gone.