Chronicler's Guide

1985 Emilio gnawed at his fingernail, the same damn finger, the left ring finger that no longer carried a wedding ring. Every night, he bit it. Sometimes he worried at it, gnawing until the white edge came off in a strip, peeling back to the cuticle and needing to be chomped, leaving a tiny flap that would catch on loose threads and draw his thumb to fidget. Or he could peel it and then pull, hard, painfully tearing it out where the nerves were. Or if he was disciplined he would file that excess length down, or trim it with clippers. It didn’t matter. Every night, when Emilio awoke, that half-broken length of left ring-fingernail would be back, the same, restored like his hair and his immortal flesh. Some nights, he even managed to leave it alone. Not very often though. Emilio was restless. He was not the type to let things go. “No, not ‘Brainchildren,’ ‘Rain Children’. As in, water that falls from the sky. Yes. Thank you.” He was sitting on a hotel room bed, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. To Emilio’s eyes, plenty of light was seeping through the curtains, crawling under the crack of the door, urine- yellow streetlight glow was plenty for him to dial by. He was in Portland and he didn’t like it, but he’d tracked the book to the coast and now, maybe, to this library… “You have? Splendid, that’s… now, this next question is a little, erm, queer. Odd, I mean. Is it Monastic House Press? I see, good. Can you tell if it’s first edition or second edition, is that…? Well, the author made some changes, some fairly significant changes, between them. Hm? Oh, I’ll wait. I’m happy to.” Emilio had read three versions of Rain Children, he’d done it even before he died, but he could never have guessed how important it would become to him. It wasn’t a terribly popular book. The style was peculiar, inasmuch as the author, Harriet Becker, had recorded strangers on pay phones and busses and in restaurants, she had assembled the dialogue out of transcribed phrases. It read oddly on the page: Living people don’t talk like fictional ones. That was only the beginning of the oddness that was Rain Children. “Both editions? Really, that’s… mm hm? Well, which one’s on the…?” Emilio bit his lip, and then bit his finger. “Checked out. Well, I’ll… yeah, thanks. Thanks anyway.” He hung up, and sat for just a moment in the darkness that to him, was not dark. He was steeling himself for a trip to the stacks. ††††† The computers baffled Emilio. He’d gone to the shelf in hopes that perhaps the first edition was there, that there’d been a mistake, but of course there was no mistake, of course it was gone. He’d then positioned himself with a magazine and a chair, watching the front desk. He’d expected a card system, files of patrons, like he’d known in childhood but instead there were these bulky white boxes with typewriters attached, making blinking green letters on TV screens. He narrowed his eyes. To Emilio, the moderate fluorescents in the drop ceiling were bright as a summer noon. Every edge of every page in every book stacked half a room away was visible, a line as thin as a thread. Every speck of lint on every sleeve, every fleck of dandruff on every shoulder was, to him, as obvious as a boulder. He looked for something reflective behind the librarians, a book with a plastic dustcover… no, too cloudy. There was no window behind them, but a framed picture… yes, he could see the screen reflected there and read the strange strings of meaningless letters they typed to make authors appear, titles, call codes… Ciphers and gibberish. He folded his magazine and approached. As he did, he listened. It was essential to talk to someone different, someone who wasn’t answering the phone… yes, he hadn’t spoken to either of these ladies. It must have been someone in Reference. He waited politely and introduced himself and, when she drew back and looked uncertain, he tried not to lean in and focus on the pulsing vein in her neck, full and ripe, beating like a drum, as if he could hear it, the throb of life within her rich and… He didn’t. He was here for something else. He asked about the book, politely, and as she looked it up he stared into her glasses, stared without seeming to stare, reading the name, the address, the person who had the first edition of Rain Children checked out and overdue by several months. Emilio didn’t say thank you or even end the conversation. Too few hours in the night. He just turned and left once he had what he wanted. ††††† Monastic House had printed only five hundred copies of the first edition of Rain Children, the hardback. The paperback second edition, which had (among other changes) deleted a scene in the fifth chapter in which the heroine was raped, an event that was never referred to in the rest of the book, that edition had been a print run of two thousand. When Rebel Rouser Press had bought the rights, their paperback, which had the rape scene back in but other material changed to reflect it, was printed in a 10,000 copy run. It sold poorly. Emilio was looking for one of the Monastic hardbacks. As he’d suspected, the library patron was a dealer who’d stolen it to sell. He got into the bookstore, and read her records. The buyer had ordered it through the mail and had it delivered to Tempe, Arizona. Emilio didn’t dare kill the bookseller after making a scene in the library, so he killed a man who lived two doors down. It took him a year to get to Arizona, and that’s where he discovered that the purchaser was, like him, a vampire. 1996 Emilio – now known as “Leo Taylor,” a shy and minor part of the Tempe Kindred scene, woke up and thought, Tonight’s the night. He grinned, and got up out of his box in the pet-store basement. He said a few kind words to the rattler that slept out its days on his cold chest, gave it a little kiss, then stood and stretched. He looked at his left ring finger for a moment, and wondered where his wedding ring was now. “Until death do us part.” His grin became a smirk. “Sure.” He bit the nail clean across, in a single practiced movement. The pet store was two blocks from 2200 Flatbrush Avenue, the home of Byron Bass, the vampire who had, eleven years previous, bought that first edition Monastic copy of Rain Children. Leo happened to know it was signed by the author, too. He’d done plenty of research, years of it, and he could tell you more than anyone living about the fate of each of those five hundred hardback books. (Eighty-seven: Destroyed. Three hundred and thirty: In private collections or European libraries. Eighty-two: Unaccounted for, but sold in the United States. One: On the bookshelves of Byron Bass.) Tonight was the night Leo would steal it, using abilities that he had been scrupulously careful, for the eight years he’d been in Tempe, to conceal. He went up the steps into the stink and chatter of the closed store, puttering about as kittens mewled and dogs woke up to bark, monkeys and lizards and even the fish moving to the corners of cages and aquariums to get away from him until he turned those undead eyes on them, muttered soothing nonsense, calmed them. Then he flared his eyes and moved his blood and began. He emerged from the store’s back and immediately jumped up to the top of the garbage dumpster, springing across a short alley to another building’s wall, clinging with the effortless ease of a squirrel. He scrambled to the top in moments and scampered across the roof, his muscles twitching and bouncing with unaccustomed freedom and vitality, the urge to move to spring and grasp and climb and fly nearly overwhelming but matched by his more personal drive to get the book. Rooftops blurred beneath him as he made his way and he was midair, a twenty-foot leap in the dark when he heard… “What the…? Didja see that?” “What?” “Something up there!” “The streetlight?” He felt a lurch of fear, wondering if two dense yokels were going to spoil everything but he couldn’t allow himself to stop, not even to slow, not even to worry about it, he was going, he was moving, he was getting the book. A leap from roof to tree, easily clotheslining the palm trunk and sliding down, a quick scuttle through the dry grass to Bass’s fence. It was wrought iron and pointed on top, but he got between the bars with ease. Then a bolt to the house, and up it. Byron Bass, known as ‘Judex Bass’ to his colleagues, had a fairly secure home. There were decorative (but heavy) iron frameworks over the windows. Not too many cameras or motion detectors – they were unreliable against Kindred. His protections ran more towards tripwired flame-throwers. Not real napalm or anything, just a sudden flare of ignited propane at chest height. They wouldn’t catch a house on fire (at least, not this house, not in the hallways designed to be trapped) but more than enough to scare the fight out of most vampires.

Load more