B E G I N N I N G

There are more rooms in Hell than stars in the sky. There are all kinds of monsters. They don't only come out on Halloween and they don't always have sharp teeth and horns.

She gave me this notebook about three months ago, thick with blank pages and thin-ruled lines. She had painted some of the arcane symbols from her home country on the cover and even though I'm used to her surprises by now, this one caught me unprepared.

"What's this?" I asked.

"It's a book," she told me.

She wasn't being any more sarcastic than usual so I asked, "What's it for?"

"You should write it down before you forget."

I knew what she was talking about and that made me mad. "I'll never forget!" I said. It hurt me, too, that she could think that would happen.

She leaned forward and poked at the campfire a bit, stirring things up. Sparks whirled up and disappeared.

"Time changes everything." She stared at me while firelight danced across her face, a phoenix beauty. "You won't forget ...exactly ...but you'll remember different from how it was."

"Bullshit!" There were about a hundred other things I wanted to yell at her but I had to be satisfied with that.

I went into the Night not long after, then into town, found someone and fed.

Now that's a change. I wasn't that hungry. Any other time, I would have ignored it and waited till the Hunger was more insistent. There are a lot of reasons for waiting and not all of them noble. The rush of satisfaction is more intense, for both parties, when you wait. But I am different now. Changed. There have been too many times when I needed to feed, when need was a living-death, not the bliss of anticipation, when feeding had nothing to do with pleasure.

The Hunger is ... empty, the void that waits to be filled. It's desire ...sated and sating. It's mutual need ...the two-who-really-are-one ...giving and taking. It's the Knowing, the Understanding. The Accepting.

Hunger is power. You can walk on the edge of that black abyss and draw the void to you, bend it, tease it, shape it to your will ...an electric roller-coaster ride. You spin the bottle with a Molotov cocktail. If you survive, you find yourself alternatively basking in the after-glow and mentally bashing yourself for the crazy risk. And it is crazy. Believe me.

The Hunger is pain, death-without-dying. It's a million, tiny blisters boiling beneath your skin and rubbing against your bones, prickling and biting until you try to claw them out. It shreds your muscles into too-tight elastic. It's devils playing skip-rope and taffy-pull in your belly, jumping up and down in the rec-room of your stomach, jumping higher and higher up your throat till you think you're going to sick one up. They get smart then and lay flat, hands over their own mouths, laughing in that churning emptiness. You feel that laughter drooling up, cold and stringy, over the mouth you've chewed to pulp to keep from laughing. Or screaming. It's fire ants excavating your spine, building nests and foraging over your scalp, chowing-down on the skin around your eyes, nose and mouth. It's amateur Heavy Metal groups that bang-tango in your brain.

It's ugly. It makes you ugly. All those things you swore you'd never do, all those things you swore you'd never say....

The Hunger leaves you screaming, buried beneath sharp, hurting things ...but not dead. It never actually kills you and that's the worst of all. If you starve a human being, you will kill him (or her). Starve a vampire and all you get is a monstrously hungry vampire.

The operative word in the sentence is "monster" but you guessed that already, didn't you?

So now I do my Scarlett O'Hara thing, "As God (or whoever) is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." Be honest. When you first heard the name Scarlett O'Hara, didn't you think she had red hair?

I have red hair and green eyes. My hair is the color of sunset or oxygenated blood. For as long as I can remember, someone's always called me Red. I didn't like it then. I still don't.

I have a lot of other names now but the first name, my real name is Tony Bianco and, I've decided to write everything down before I forget.

She's right, you know. Time is memories' opiate. It shades and smooths, bleaches out the red, red pain. How could we go on ...why would we go on ...if we had to live with memory every hour, every minute, every micro-second of our lives?

But it was three months later when I pulled the book out of my pack and looked at it again. Looked at it so they could see me looking at it. (I'd already had it out dozens of times before, staring at those pristine, perfect pages. The empty lines. There are all kinds of vampires and I knew what I held in my hand was just waiting to suck me dry. I kept putting it back. The old thrill of anticipation was not a factor here unless you count the kind you feel after midnight when you hear the crunch of a footstep behind you on a dark, lonely street.)

Anyway, they looked at me and I looked at them.

"What am I supposed to do?" I asked, feeling like an idiot. "How do I start?"

"Start at the beginning. Remember what it was like before."

She should have said, "Take off all your clothes and jump into the fire." That would have been easier, an easy out. I might have actually done it, too, just to prove a point. I've done worse.

B E F O R E

I was first born in the United States, in Brooklyn, New York, smack in the middle of the 20th Century. I was a mistake. The brother closest to me, Angelo, was ten years older and Mama considered herself done with babies. That was pretty much the story of Mama's life, things always happened to her over which she had no control. She closed herself away most of the time, pretending whenever she could that what was happening wasn't. You can imagine how successfully this attitude worked for her.

We didn't see much of Dad. Mama got to him and you could tell. He was a storm, building, then roaring out, blasting everything and everyone in sight only to build up again after it was over. I learned to stay out of the way, to do what I was told. It was safer. I always used to feel like our family was playing some huge game and I was the one in the audience the Game Show Host looks down at and yells, "Come on up!" while everybody else cheers and yells. Right away I knew the reason they were all cheering was because their name hadn't been called.

My brothers and sister used to talk about how they'd never be like Mama and Dad which was weird because they were so much like our parents already. Sliding into the image of their creators, I guess. By the time I was old enough to notice, they were old enough and smart enough to suspect what they were becoming. They were like herd animals waiting for slaughter. (They know something's up, they know what's coming will be terrible. They also know they are powerless to stop it.) Can you imagine anything more hideous than to feel your soul being twisted into a replica of what it hates ...and loves ...most?

When children say the word "God" in their prayers at night what they mean is "mother" and "father," right? Who has more power over a child's life than a parent? Who teaches kids those prayers anyway? When children clasp hands before their tiny hearts and plead with some mystical, over-whelming force to "Please make me good" what they're saying is "Please don't hurt me again." It's the Mamas' and Dads' who "giveth" and "taketh away," isn't it, who reward and punish? Diabolical and divine, they know all the weak spots. They never have to lay a finger on you. They know what hurts the most.

So did my brothers and sister ...although their harm was largely unintentional. They hurt, they were confused and did more harm to themselves than anyone ever did to them. Just like Mama and Dad.

But there are all kinds of monsters and monstrous things happen every day.

I think Angelo loved me. He was youngest before I cam along. It used to be his job to scurry about trying to make things right, to guess the game-rules even while they changed around him. He kept the wrath of the gods at bay. When it became my job, he was very sympathetic.

Angelo wanted to be a musician and, as I got older, he hung out with a lot of music-loving friends. It was the late 60s then and the world was crazy with change. There was so much color, so much sound. Berto was oldest. All he could talk about was "getting away." He got away into the Army as soon as he turned eighteen. He used to send me postcards and fantastic little toys from overseas. Maria wanted to get away, too, so she got married. That was a big time for our family, Maria getting married and Berto going into the service. Everybody celebrated. There was a huge party.

Mama and Dad died right after that. I know it was a car accident but everyone thought it best to spare me the details. They thought it would upset me. Not knowing what really happened gave me nightmares for years even after I made the Change. The funeral was the last anyone ever saw of Berto. He was transferred to Vietnam right after and, some time later, disappeared ...M.I.A.

It was decided that, since Maria had her own family, Angelo would take care of me. No more music-dreams for Angelo, it was time to grow up. He was to get a job and take care of his little brother. Everyone, including Ange, seemed to think it was the best thing. I don't know. The reasons all blur together but I don't think memory is at fault here. Time doesn't always change everything. It's not easy to forget what you never understood.

Some children grow older, not up. Angelo was like that. He aged ... five years for every one we spent together. There was hunger in him, too, though not the kind I came to know. Jobs, like his music, never worked out for him.

We moved, took a room in another part of town. Later, when we couldn't make ends meet there, we found another room. We lived in old apartments, ancient lodgings that came with sad and desperate ghosts. Angry ghosts. We left some of our own behind whenever we moved out. It's true what I wrote first. There are more rooms in Hell than stars in the sky. Or salt in the sea. Yeah. Hell-holes for children aren't any better or worse than the ones they have for grown-ups. Doors open. Doors close. And no matter what anyone tells you about black clouds, silver-linings and all that crap, things can always get worse.

About three years later, Angelo and I were living in another new but very old room, the worst of the lot so far. I should have been used to it by then although every time we moved, I expected things to get better. I always expected it to get better. Children do.

My bedroom was a curtained-off corner. Not much by most standards but mine and as private as it got. I was home from school because Angelo was sick. Angelo was almost always sick so I was almost always home. No one ever asked questions. No one wanted to know. Anyway, somebody had to take care of Angelo and there was only me to do it. It's no brag, just the way it was.

The sun was going down when I heard Angelo get up and start pacing around. We all keep treasures and mine was on the floor around me, a bunch of toy cars Berto sent me from Germany. (I'd lost his postcards early on and felt bad about it. The toys I managed to hang onto.) One of the cars was neat, a Corgi Rolls Royce Silver Ghost with diamond headlights. Okay ...so they weren't real diamonds. They were only rhinestones but they looked great and the light from the window made them sparkle. The wheels had realistic-looking tire-tread with a spare you could remove from the roof.

I heard Angelo bang into something. It wobbled and fell and crashed so Angelo said, "Shit!" I waited and, pretty soon, Angelo yelled, like I knew he would, "Red! Red ...get out here!"

I didn't want to go because I could guess what kind of mood he was going to be in. I knew all of Angelo's moods. But I got up and went out there anyway.

Angelo looked worse than I'd ever seen him, even in the half-dark. He was gray and sweaty even though it was cold. He smoked cigarettes like they were something to eat which I always thought was strange. The smoke made the air bad like always. Still, Angelo seemed to prefer them to food. Ange and food never got along too well either. His skin hung on his bones like an old man's clothes.

It was just like Angelo to call me into the room and not say anything, to forget why he called me. Quiet like that made me nervous so I asked, "Don't you feel any better?"

Angelo shook his head. He sat down on the end of the couch (which was also his bed) and lit a cigarette. His hands shook a lot.

"What do you think?" Angelo said. "No. I don't feel better. I feel rotten."

I started chewing on my thumb nail again. It was a lousy habit. I wanted to stop, it was such a kid-thing to do, but I couldn't. My hands looked like shit, all chewed up and bloody ...mongrel-ized.

Finally, I tried again, "You look real bad. You look real sick. Maybe you should go to the clinic."

"I told you I can't do that." Angelo was mad. "I can't go there. You want to get rid of me? Is that what you want?"

"No."

"I told you what would happen if I go over there, didn't I? I told you they'd put me away. And they'll put you away, too. You won't see me again ...or Berto or Maria. Nobody."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you mad."

"Maybe it would be better if you did go. You'd be better off some place else."

"Don't send me away, Ange. Please. I want to stay with you."

"Aaah ... don't give me that shit," he snarled. "You're such a pain in the ass. Why should I stick my neck out for you anyway?"

Contempt stings like an open fist. It was a righteous question and one I'd heard before but I still didn't know the answer. Thinking about it now, the scary part was that I did want to stay with Angelo, I was desperate to stay. All I could think of was, if life was this bad with Angelo, what would it be like without him? No matter what, Angelo took care of me. I knew Angelo loved me even when he hit me, even when he really hurt me. He always stopped when I cried even though I hated myself for that. Then Angelo would get upset. He would hold me and tell me how sorry he was, how he didn't mean to hurt me, wouldn't have hurt me if only I wasn't such a bad kid. We would talk then and I would promise to be better, never knowing what "better" was supposed to be but I would try and, for a while, it would be better.

Until the next time. Angelo's sickness made next-times happen more and more often. That night I just sat down and waited for what would come next. Like always.

But what came next was, Angelo started to cry. That shocked me more than anything he had ever done. Angelo never cried, not like this.

"The thing is," Angelo said, "the thing is ... I can't take care of you any more. I can't do it."

Angelo cried and cried. He was crazy with tears, rocking back on forth on the edge of the couch, holding onto himself like he was going to bust into a million pieces. Tears and snot streaked his face. He was so ugly. He was so scary. I hated him and I was ashamed I felt like that. I thought I should go to him. I wanted to run away. But I just sat there, locked in place, like someone had turned a key on all my joints.

Angelo moaned, again and again, "I don't want to do this," and I took it up, kind of. All I could say was, "Don't." Over and over.

"I can't take care of you any more," Angelo said, coming back a little. "I'm too sick."

"That's okay, I said. "I'll take care of you. Please, Ange. It'll be all right."

"It's not all right!"

He was screaming so I started, too. "What do you want me to do?"

He looked at me for a long while. Then he said, "I want us to stay together, too, you know. It's not because I don't want you around. You're my brother. I promised Dad I'd take care of you but I ...I can't do it any more. We don't have any bread. We've got to get some bread ...we've got to!"

"Let me help. I can work. I can make money."

"What can you do? Hell, you're just a kid. You don't even look as old as you are." Angelo lit another cigarette. When he looked at me again, his hands were rock steady and I could see he had some plan, some new idea. "I used to know this guy, though. Allen Frank. Do you know him?"

"No."

"Do you really want to help? Do you really want us to stay together? 'Cause if you do, you're going to have to start pulling your own weight. Understand?"

"Sure. I'll do anything you say, Ange. But you got to tell me what to do. I don't know what you want."

Angelo took a scrap of paper with an address on it out of his pocket and shoved it out at me. "Here," he said. "Frank's a friend. He can help us."

"This is uptown."

"Right. That's where the bucks are and Frank's got 'em. He's a good guy, too. He'll treat you right if you do what he says. He's an important man, Red. Don't screw this up."

"I won't screw up," I promised. Angelo's hand dropped down on my shoulder. I think he only meant to give me a friendly squeeze but it felt like his fingers were boring in through the bone.

"I mean it," Angelo said. "Listen to Mr. Frank. Do what he tells you ...no back-talk. I'm trusting you. I don't want to hear you gave him a bad time."

I twisted away, grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. "It'll be okay," I said.

I was almost out when Angelo yelled, "Hey!"

I stopped and looked back. Angelo had this weird expression on his face. It took me a minute to guess he was smiling. Trying to smile.

"You know I love you, don't you?" Angelo said. "You know I wouldn't let anything bad happen to you?"

Well ... honestly, I wasn't sure of that. I never thought Angelo would do anything to deliberately hurt me but, like Mama, accidents happened around Ange. Still, he couldn't help that. How could anyone help that?

So I shrugged a little and nodded at him. It was nice but embarrassing having your brother tell you he loved you, me standing in the hall like that, where everyone could hear. People were more used to hearing arguments and fights than words of love in that building. It was like magic, those words, and I knew everything was going to be all right, that I could make anything happen.

We just looked at each other, not really smiling but....

"Yeah. Sure," I said. "I love you, too."

"Okay then. Okay. Get out of here," he said and I did.

It was cold out on the streets, summer steam turning into autumn's killer chill. New York was one of the first Meccas for the homeless in the States and the most lethal, especially in winter. In the park, leaves spiraled to the ground like broken dreams. They didn't even turn gold or red before they dived. They just dried-up brown and crapped out.

Finding Allen Frank's apartment building was easy. I was already familiar with the streets; they were my playground when Angelo turned me loose long enough to play. Cities have never scared me. Deciphering those scrawled directions was simple, like following a trail of neon breadcrumbs through a forest of concrete, brick and glass. The magic persisted even after I reached Frank's apartment. Once inside, I stepped into a world out of normal TV-life, like Bachelor Father or Donna Reed. The rooms looked nice, they looked clean. It had been a long time since I'd been any place like that and it was awesome. Seriously.

I told the guy who answered the door that I was there for Allen Frank. I must have swallowed my words a little because I had to tell him twice before he understood me. When he did understand, he was nice. There was a party going on and he let me in like I was expected and gave me something to drink (a rum and coke with a wedge of lemon! I knew what it was because Mama used to use "seasoning" in the egg nog on Holidays. They were treating me like one of them, right from the start). I took my drink and wandered over to the couch, sat down and concentrated on not screwing up.

I wondered what kind of job Allen Frank would have for me. Sal, who lived downstairs, ran the numbers money for his Dad because they said the cops wouldn't pick up a kid. Well, that was the way it was back then. Sal wasn't much older than me. There were a lot of things a kid could do and I began to plan what Angelo and I would do with the money I would make.

But right in the middle of my dreams, I fell asleep. I don't know how long. The next thing that happened was someone sat down beside me ...jarring ...and touched my face.

I woke up, almost. There was a girl sitting next to me, beautiful in a sharp way, like a magazine cover. She had long, yellow hair, the color of lemon drops. It parted in the middle and fell down over her shoulders, all sleek and shiny. She smelled good - but nothing like lemons. Looking at her, I could actually feel my eyes go big. She smiled and reached over to brush the hair out of my face.

"Is this the one?" she asked, talking to the man standing behind her. He was big enough to block the view of the room over her shoulder but I didn't even look up. "What a little angel," she said and I thought, She's talking about me!

"I picked him out just for you, Tiffany," the man said.

"I know who you picked him out for, Allen. What a load of shit."

I laughed. Rough words startled coming from her mouth. Funny. She looked at me again, which was great. I wanted her to look at me.

"But really," she went on, "he's such a baby. Where did you get him?"

"I'm not a baby," I said. Who wouldn't?

"Red, here, has a sick brother," Allen Frank began. "We've made an arrangement. Red's going to do some work for me and I'm going to make sure Angelo gets his medicine."

Tiffany looked up at Allen Frank then and I was aware that they were exchanging a "look" about something they knew that I wasn't supposed to because the "baby" wasn't supposed to know. I got angry but not about that, not about their treating me like a child. Hell, I was a child. I knew that. I was eleven years old, not stupid.

I felt guilty. I stopped looking at Tiffany and looked at the carpet instead, watched the pattern in the rug shift and change and throb. It wasn't right. This was a nice place, these were nice people. I didn't want to lie to them. I couldn't lie to them!

"What's the matter, honey?" Tiffany asked. She was so good to me and I was so undeserving of that. Shame and sorrow blistered the back of my neck.

"Angelo's not sick," I said. "Angelo's a junkie."

It was the first time I'd ever said that out-loud. The first time I'd ever admitted it, even to myself. Carpet colors began to blur. My eyes started filling up ...just like a kid, just like a baby! ...and I started rubbing at them with my ugly-looking hands. I felt ugly and mean and stupid and hopeless. I wanted the tears to go away because I knew if I let them get started, I'd never be able to stop. I was so ashamed of the tears, ashamed of everything.

"It's not his fault!" I yelled out, trying to sound mad. Mad was better. "Angelo wasn't like that before. It's not his fault!"

"That's all right, Red," Allen soothed. "Don't get upset. Listen ... if you do what I tell you, Angelo can get better. We can work together to make Angelo well. It can be just like it was before he got sick."

"No. It can't. Ange said...."

"It can. I promise."

I looked up, suspicious but intrigued. "How?"

Then Tiffany said, "Do you want to have some fun, Red? Do you like to play games? Pretend games?"

I could feel my mouth fall open at that and I wondered if we were all involved in the same conversation. Before I could answer, Allen Frank reached down and picked me up, just swung me up into his arms and started to walk away.

This was crazy. This was suddenly scary. I pushed at Allen's shoulders and kicked out but it was like I was made out of mush or something. My arms and legs ...nothing was working right. Allen said something in a gentle voice, like, "You don't have to be scared. Be a good boy, Red," all jolly and I looked at him ...really looked at him.

He was brown and round like a big, apple dumpling, freckled with cinnamon and nutmeg. His hair was brown with some gray streaked through it. His cheeks were dimpled and jowly. His mouth was thin and dark, like a slash in raw dough and twisted up to look like a smile. His appearance ...how to describe it? Gazing at all that good-natured roundness, anyone might have thought Santa had a younger brother, except they'd be wrong.

His eyes ... I don't like to remember his eyes, the way I looked into them. The way they looked back at me. Color doesn't matter but they were brown, too. They were bad eyes, mean and smart. It would be a relief to say they were crazy, that Allen was nuts, but that would be a lie.

I know the lies. Like the one when people say they're not going to hurt you and they go and do that. It's not the worst lie but it's in the top five. The worst lie is "I love you."

(Forever and ever. Amen.)

My fingers dug into Allen's shoulders, twisting the material of his coat (yes, it was brown like a fresh-baked crust). He just kept walking, like a moving-mountain that somehow had hold of me. Magic was still working but it was going all wrong.

I looked back at Tiffany who followed close behind. She smiled at me, with her bright, magazine-princess face, sixteen-going-on-sixty, and said, "Don't worry, honey. It's going to be all right."

A door opened.

And then it closed.

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