by Lawrence R. Dagstine

Balancing the bag of refillable glass bottles against one hip, Geraldine Hintz fit the key into the lock with her free hand. As the door opened, the tight, still air of the darkened Park Avenue South apartment rose up and met her like a wall. She set down her paper bag on the foyer table and walked quickly into the living room toward the spectacular bar, the nerves in her stomach shaking so badly with her need that when she reached it, and poured some into a large jigger, she poured too much and too fast and some of it slopped over.

With her head snapping back in a practiced motion, she downed the drink in one gulp and then stood still, her eyes closed, waiting. Ahhh, now that was good. She could feel the warm blood, which had come straight off the bar’s special heater, tunneling down inside her like a hot poker, spreading out in warm tendrils through her chest.

She opened her eyes, veins coursing. Like a vampire, she thought. I drank that like a real vampire, a fully made one.

Most women, dead or alive, would have choked or gagged but she hadn’t; the stuff had rolled down her throat smooth and easy as you please, like oil down a pipeline, and this gave her a feeling of shame. A drinking problem. Only alcohol wasn’t the cause of her addiction, and there was no Bloodletter’s Anonymous which she could pick up and run to; a mechanical, silly laugh leapt out of her throat just at the thought of it. But she had enrolled herself into the care of an Upper East Side psychologist.

Her therapist had often asked her, “Do you think you have a drinking problem, Geraldine? You can tell me.” Her face looked so kind and grave, always leaning forward in concern.

“Good God, no, Beatrice!” Geraldine would laugh. “Why, I only drink when I’m in the mood. Sometimes I don’t have a drink for a week. It just makes me feel good, that’s all. It relaxes me.”

Now she looked down at the empty jigger in her hand. No ice, no mixer, no lemon peel; not even an olive. All that could come with an alcoholic beverage. This was fresh blood, most of it cleaned and sterilized through a dialyzer. She would sip this next one like a lady, and the one she poured after that. But this one she needed at once, its quick jolt of power working like adrenaline on her unbeating heart. And her thirst.

She was still shuddering. Actually, the thing in her system was more like a tic, like the uncontrollable fluttering of an eyelid that came sometimes when you were too tired. It was like this with most early stage vampires, half-mades, and it took a while to stop. Standing there, she could not control the inward shaking. It was the way drug addicts must feel, she thought, when they were going through withdrawal periods, each tortured nerve crying out for something just beyond its reach, like an electric wire, straining to touch another for contact and not meeting that contact, left raw and quivering in the air.

Her maker, Paul, a Goth club owner from New Jersey, had once told her that after a mass feeding, lying there in the cellar of some Garden State dungeon long after the younger fanged crowds had gone home, the muscles in his thighs had gone right on jumping; he could actually look down and see the flesh contracting in muscular spasms, as if somebody had forgotten to shut the electricity off. Though he had felt stronger, replenished in the end.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he’d always say. “This is what happens every time you drink or feed. You’ll grow into it.”

“Will I really?” she often wondered. “They say that Elizabeth Bathory bathed in blood in order to retain her youth.” And because her body could not contain itself in her prone position, she went on shaking. Her mouth became dry as paper, and she went on begging for more.

It was the way she felt now. It was also the way she felt at the end of every working week among the day-walking mortals, her mind a blur, her face pale, her legs like two stumps of dead wood, her nerve-endings frayed and raw from too much friction. If she turned on the light and looked in the mirror now, there would be nothing there for her to see. But if she had been able to see her reflection, her face would have had the sharp, torn look she sometimes caught sight of in the office as she rounded the corner of that glass-enclosed corridor.

She had worked for a modeling agency in Midtown, preparing photo layouts before they were delivered to all the major fashion magazines. There was a new mirror there and whenever she would see a model approaching?slender, chic blonde-frosted hairdo, with an anorexic face in which all the features seemed to have been sucked dry of fat and tightened with a screwdriver?she would think: who is she? Is she new around here? Is she really that much prettier than me? Or am I just getting old? When she considered the difference in age, the realization would finally come that it had once been her own reflection she saw coming toward her, and she would feel a sudden terror.

“I should look like that…again,” she would think. “I’m not over the hill yet. I’m only forty. I’m still young. So why can’t I look like that? It must be her expression; she must do something about her expression. Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if a woman could be immortal? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live forever, always look and feel young?”

And in that moment she would dig into her own purse for her makeup and quickly try to rearrange her features into softer lines?relaxing the old stiff shape of her mouth, gentling her gaze and smoothing out the wrinkles, trying to summon up sweetness from some inner repository that, in reality, held none for her. But, of course, at the next small crisis?and there were a hundred a day in this high-profile agency in which she worked?the sharp, tight look would suddenly be clamped on her face again with absolutely no way to control it. And it would stay there, even on the subway coming home; all the crises would be with her, her mind a mixed bag of melancholic feelings.

“But if I became a vampire and drank blood,” she told herself, “lots of it, then I certainly wouldn’t look or feel this way.”

Little did she care to understand that eternal beauty came with a price.

It was only at this moment of the day though, after this first drink, did all of it begin faintly to recede. Soon, with her second and third, it would ease and give way like hard crust being softened, sponged away. After all, blood was to the overworked and distraught vampire what marijuana was to the pothead or what the pipe was to the crack head in Central Park.

Lifting her head, as she stood half-drowned in shadow, there was only an outline of herself in the mirror beyond. Had there been more than that, there would have been an attractiveness to go with it, one that did not say forty years old like the mirror once did. She had almost a teenager’s figure, disciplined by her vampiric diet; her belly was now as flat as a college-aged girl’s, her legs quite lovely. She could buy size two dresses without having to worry?how she adored being able to wear young designer clothes!?especially the ones with advertising captions like SWEET THING or SEXY STUFF. It made her feel buoyant and yeasty to wear them; she was always eager for any new craze that came along?the fashionable belts, the wildly patterned pantyhose, the cartoonlike earrings and other accessories. And if all of it fought silently against the blunt statement of a forty-year-old face, she didn’t care. Being half-vampire now had its advantages. A part of her was, defiantly, still age twenty.