Hunger Pangs
A coin stood on its end, balanced under John Abbott's fingertip.
The shine had worn off after countless trips from trouser pockets to soiled fingers to cash drawers and back. Money was the dirtiest thing going. He crouched close to the bar and studied the grime caked on its lusterless face, imagining where rotation had taken the bit of currency. What societal ills had it touched? This occupied his mind for five or six minutes. Beyond the coin, the man tending bar was a blur. "I'll have another round," John mumbled, but he gathered that it went unheard when the man kept wiping the countertop. With sleepy eyes, the vampire straightened and tried again, wobbling on his stool. "I'll have another round, I said."
John was in a state. It looked as if he hadn't slept or fed in days, and he hadn't, thanks to all those dreams of young miss Brahms. His star pupil had been married off to a widower, a policeman whose previous wife was offed by a runaway horse carriage. Its driver, three sheets to the wind, had simply let go of the reigns and let it plow through London. So Angela was rescued from a life of spinsterhood, but not before she allowed her tutor a few gropes between lessons. John's memory was a frightful thing. He could still feel the warmth of her soft thigh on his knuckles. But gone she was, before he'd found out all her secrets, and so Angela would long weigh on his mind.
The vampire rubbed his eyes and blinked. A messy thatch of black curls obscured his forehead.
As Simon breezed into the pub, he did so with no distractions of the kind that plagued the good Mr. Abbott. He had decided, after his brief encounter with the young man whom had been paid for his services, that he had been spending all together too much time inside and alone. He needed to breathe the night air, to drink wine that hadn't been sitting in his kitchen for weeks, and to feel the pulse of London once again. Of course, not the dirty, human pulse, but rather the sort of distant and spiritual one that Simon wouldn't actually have to touch.
Leaning farther across the bar than was at all polite, Simon drummed his fingers on the wooden surface of the bar top and grinned. "A bottle of the house red, please. Or perhaps two. Well, we shall start with one and progress from there, shall we not? Pour one for yourself sir, and be quick about it, my good man!". Wine always ran quicker when shared, and that was just about all of the conversation Simon was planning on having with the common denizens of the pit of a city he was so loftily planning to submerge himself in. The wine arrived, and he poured himself a glass of it, giving a sidelong glance to the wretched creature slumped next to him. Should he move to a table? When he'd come in, they'd all appeared to be taken, but drunkards were unpredictable. What if he turned around to look for one and the man noticed his desire to leave and made an accusation? Or worse, what if he tried to touch him?
Fixing his gaze back on the far side of the bar, Simon brought his glass up to toast to the barman, then drank.
When in one of his moods, John was hard pressed to notice anything except the object of his fascination (currently a coin, though it only provided so much distraction from plain-faced Angela). He could be single-minded to a fault, which explained why he'd overlooked the necessity of blood, ever since the news broke: The handsome pay Mr. Brahms awarded him would be the last of its kind. A tutor's services were no longer needed for a married-off daughter, and wouldn't John like to join Mr. Brahms for a celebratory drink?
No. Not in the slightest.
It wasn't the smell of wine that pulled him out of his glass. It was the color of it: dark red. The lights glinted on the bottle as it passed in his peripheral view. John's eyes went along, as if drawn by a magnet. He was reminded of missed feedings and his stomach clenched. John swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, but he kept up with the movement of the new man's glass. Up in the air, down to lips.
It wouldn't taste like what he wanted. It was a poor substitute, like many things.
"Aren't you're generous," John observed. Few patrons offered a barman a portion of their wine. The man's pockets must be heavy, a rarity in this part of London.
Simon allowed his eyes to graze slightly towards the man at his side when the stranger spoke. He didn't sound as drunk as he looked, and his words brought a new concern to the front of the magician's mind. Wasn't he generous. If that wasn't a hint that someone wanted something bought for them, then Simon didn't know what was. "Aren't I just," he commented dryly, certainly not aiming for any approach upon social nicety here. If anything, his sole interest would be to deter the man from thinking that he could have a drink wheedled out of him.
For a moment, Simon hesitated, before bringing his glass up to down the remainder of his wine and move to pour himself a fresh glass.
Still, he was taking entirely the wrong approach to this. The pulse of the city should extend to its ugly drunken wastrels! If he was going to drink in the urban environment, then surely he should make an effort to... to communicate with this creature! To befriend him! He gave the bartender a drink, didn't he?
Then again, the bartender was distributor of wine and the ouster of rowdy drunks! It was important to befriend the bartender! Somehow the drunk who just happened to be sitting next to him seemed... less key to the situation. After a long, considered pause, Simon held up the bottle slightly. "Could I offer you a glass?"
John tilted his head and his body contorted in a stretch, which excluded his arms. His hands held fast to the coin and glass. "You could," the vampire hedged, squinting one hazel eye. "But you needn't, as I would undoubtedly turn you down." He relaxed his shoulders and balanced the coin on its rim. A finger plucked it and he watched it spin, wobble, and finally vibrate on its side.
"Hmm." His mouth twisted into a bemused smile. "Cheers."
He lifted his whiskey to the newcomer and tossed back a few swallows. That's right, old boy. Add an addled mind to your woes. At this early hour, John already saw the writing on the wall. Later, when he was well and truly drunk, he'd stumble into the alley, his arm around a girl with too much cleavage and not enough sense. He'd make a thorough mess of biting her and she'd make a run for it, screaming her bloody head off. It'd be on John to stumble to safety before she brought any trouble down on him.
Done with the daydream, John leaned on his elbow and studied the other man. "Are you celebrating something?" he asked. "You look like you might be."
Simon found himself immediately cheered by the stranger's decline of his offer, and smiled with something which approached genuine warmth as he lifted his glass slightly, responding in kind, "Cheers."
He drank in silence as the vampire's mind drifted. More than comfortable in letting the other man be with his own thoughts for a time. In fact, if he was honest, Simon was a little surprised to hear himself addressed again at all. Lowering his glass, Simon very slowly brought his gaze back around to the stranger, like it was a great imposition upon his time to do so. Then he winced ever so slightly, remembering that he was trying to communicate with the external universe tonight, and gave a slight shrug. "Celebrating. Yes, well, I could be celebrating. I could be celebrating the passage from one universe to the next of my cat, or..." He groped for recent events. What had he done lately? Played with his cats, employed a particularly mouthy prostitute, done a little work, and run out of milk. Goodness, but he knew there had been a reason he needed to get out of his house!
Shaking his head in disgust at his own life, he replied quickly, "Celebrating the great exodus from the four walls of my house. My God, I have become boring!"
This said, he downed the next glass of wine and began pouring himself yet another. His present state had to be remedied! Turning to look briefly at the other man again, Simon added quickly, "And yourself? Is there some occasion for your present state or are you merely one who is forever spirited?"
John tipped his glass and surveyed the dwindling contents. "You wouldn't believe my constitution," he mumbled to the stranger. "I'm afraid I'm not the slightest bit drunk." No, but he was blindingly tired and feeling weaker by the hour. His reflection in the mirror looked gaunt; he was pale and there were circles under his eyes. He rubbed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
"Ah, but given time, I might get there yet." John shrugged his shoulders. Holding his glass, he pointed at the other man's wine. "Your dead cat is my lost debutante."
Feeling conversational, he leaned conspiratorially closer, though not enough to invade the man's space. A curl of his glossy hair settled on John's eyelashes. He lowered his voice to a mutter. "You know that point when the fruit's almost too ripe to bother plucking from the vine? A day or a week longer and it's wasted?" He nodded and slowly careened away, back to the confines of his bar stool. "That was her. While I contemplated picking her, someone else did it for me."
"Neither," claimed Simon loftily, in response to John's comments about drunkenness, "am I!"
This was not really true. In all actuality, Simon had drunk his last few glasses of wine far, far too quickly and was carefully waltzing down the barrier between being slightly squiffy and being genuinely drunk. Nor was he at all interested in slowing down. He mirrored the other man's shift in position, leaning in ever so slightly alongside his new companion.
Nodding along with the conversation, Simon allowed his mind to wander to actual fruit. He didn't much care for listening to people's woes in pubs, but he did like fruit. He also had a certain amount of appreciation for the fairer sex, so as he suspected the rhythm of the other man's commentary was coming towards its natural conclusion, he made an effort to tune back in. Simon nodded sympathetically. "Yes, well, pretty girls will do that to you. A wise man sticks to plainer ladies and revels in the expertise born of necessity." He stopped then, studying his glass for a moment before smiling a little wryly, caught up in thoughts of a different time. "Still... it's a fine vintage if you can time it right." He brought the glass up to his lips once again.
Here, John made a correction to the other man's assumption. His pinky extended away from his glass, emphasizing the point. "No, you see, this one wasn't pretty. But she had something, didn't she?" He rested his chin on his hand and gazed at the collection of bottles across the way. What was it about Angela that kept him awake, other than the desperation creeping up around the edges? He tried to remember when he had begun to want her. What was the physical catalyst?
"Oh... Right, I remember," he said. He used his knuckle to rub at a spot. "She had this lock of hair that fell out of her pins and settled just here, along her neck." She had been reading aloud a passage, stumbling over every fourth word, when his attention drifted and he saw the curl, which led his eyes in a beeline to her pulse bumping in her throat. It was as if she wasn't born until that moment; She was just a woman-shaped sack of bones in the chair next to his.
The sooner John got over this, the better, or some night would find him throwing pebbles at a bedroom window, hoping in vain that he didn't wake the policeman husband.
On to the next of many.
When Angela left his mind, the coin seemed to, also. John tucked it into his pocket and straightened his posture. His stomach growled and he felt his fangs strain in his gums, wanting to extend. He balled a fist against his stomach and kept the hunger at bay. Reflecting on an earlier moment in the conversation, he asked, "What keeps you trapped within four walls?"
"Huh." Simon sounded out the slight exhalation, his own hand moving towards his neck as the other man described the feature that had somehow made his debutante intoxicating to him. A lock of hair resting against her throat, tracing the line of her neck. He had to admit now that the image was implanted, the idea of it was certainly appealing. Simon allowed himself a brief sojourn into a personal vision of what was most likely a completely different girl, imagining a curl of strawberry blonde hair against flushed skin. He visualized the slightly blurred edges of somebody radiant, standing under a ray of sunlight, under brilliant green leaves. The women he would never met were always the most brilliant.
"What keeps me within--" Simon's slightly drunken mind was still drifting around the edges of his imaginary woman (because of course once requisitioned by the magician's own lechery, she had become his) as the man whose company he shared moved on to a topic which was usually more interesting to him than any other. Shaking himself back into the conversation, Simon let his fingers graze down and away from the vein in his neck, where he'd been mirroring John's own gestures. "Yes, within four walls. Excuse me. Nothing but my own torpor, I'm afraid. A little too much dedication to my work, and not enough of anything else. I have the worst habit of allowing myself to become entrenched within the details of a thing, I'm afraid, at the expense of a broader understanding."
Finishing his wine, Simon drained the remainder of the bottle into his glass, not stopping in his explanation as he gestured to the barkeep for a second. "Something catches my interest, my attention, and so I pursuit it. Then the pursuit takes me to connecting issues, and to the details of the thing, and then to the details of those details until I am sat alone in my room endeavoring to pick apart the molecules of something which was not even to my interest in the first place. As I do this? I forget to do other things. Like leave my house."
With hunger gnawing at his insides, John could relate. Only rather than intellectual pursuits, the vampire's litany of temporary but all-consuming obsessions included random people, places, and objects. At times, he felt more like a bottomless pit than a person. The pangs had only increased with immortality.
"What line of work are you in?" he asked. Briefly, he scanned the rest of the patrons and people who worked in The Dragon's Arms, looking for a potential victim to lure outside and drink. It ought to be someone less cautious than the fellow on the neighboring stool. Even pliant with wine, there was a note of the peculiar and distant about him, an air that kept John from wanting to try it. He had the impression it would be more trouble than it was worth. He was too exhausted for trouble, and a flimsy excuse for a vampire at present.
John finished his whiskey and placed the proper currency next to it.
The theory that Simon was more trouble than he was worth was more widely ascribed to than just about any other theory about him. With a slight snort of amusement, he tilted his glass away from him. Simon didn't work! Simon didn't need to work, and thank god for that. He didn't think much of his chances when it came to holding down any kind of gainful employment. "I am... perhaps what you would call a creature of leisure. A self financed scholar."
Actually, that was kind of a lie as well. He was more "Family financed" than anything else, but who cared to know that? Simon brought his wine up again and drank again, before swaying to the side slightly and gesturing with his glass to the company now being kept. "You know, there is a pyramid in a graveyard on the east side of the city? A small one, mind, but a pyramid none the less. They say the man in it made a pact with the devil, that when he folded his last hand of cards and stepped away from the table, his soul would be condemned to hell. So what did he do? Hah. He had them bury him at his table, with a hand of cards propped in his dead fingers."
Simon ran a hand over his face, looking most thoroughly unimpressed. "It's nonsense of course. The pyramid is there because Egypt was in fashion when the man was buried. The man, might I add, was a puritanical nobody with no mind to be consorting with devils. He's not even sitting up in there, just lain like all other corpses in the appropriate position. Still, the lie persists."
John's cheek smashed against his open palm as he stared lazily at the stranger. The back of the vampire's fingers tap-tapped on the empty glass. He was scrutinizing the man a little closer now, his attention having been caught by the rapid shift in topic from self-financed scholar to people's unusual burial habits. He wondered if the man's studies were in local history or some topic that even John, a walking corpse, found morbid. But then, five years into the condition, he had yet to fully identify with his new species. How many vampires kept up the pretense of a day job as a tutor, or paid bills on low-rent housing?
But what else was he going to do with immortality? His mind couldn't even rest when he slept.
"How do you know it's nonsense?" he asked. "Have you looked for yourself? Seen him..." John gestured broadly. "Lain out like all other corpses?" Sir, I'm afraid you're mistaken on that count. Some of us put ourselves in entirely inappropriate positions. I have a few favorites.
"Well, I--" Simon paused, focusing on his drink, then turning his head to examine his compatriot. After a long minute, he decided not to brag about his dedication to discovering the truth, and finished simply, "I asked the undertaker. Of course."
Besides, breaking into a pyramid only to find that there was absolutely nothing of interest there wasn't really anything worth building up into a story. If the man had been sitting with a hand of cards and wronged demons coiling furiously at his feet? Now there would be a story, but Simon had risked arrest, shaming, and been more thorough than was absolutely necessary searching a tomb with absolutely no positive returns. Simon sighed, turning back to his wine gloomily, "If that poor wretch had a deal with the devil? Then the devil has him now." He swirled the wine around the glass a few times more, before leaning back and emptying it once again. He refilled it, then glanced across to the stranger once more, then finally offered him his hand,
"Simon Alexander."
Coming out of his trance, the vampire improved his posture, enough so that he wouldn't tip over if he offered a cool handshake. His grip on Simon was perfunctory, not one of those bone-crushing greetings that other supernaturals doled out, as if they were out to bend an iron rod. "John Abbott." He withdrew and settled his elbows on the bar. "I don't think the devil has as much clout as we've been led to believe," he postulated.
There were demons, yes. Supposedly, he was one. However, John had no memory of visiting the depths of hell during his brief period between death and awakening, and he felt no infernal connection to other hellish beasts, even when he fed off a living body. He, just like any other person, had heard legends and even rumors of their existence, but dying hadn't given him any particular insights. Perhaps he was dreadfully out of the loop.
"This is a devil," he mused, holding up his empty glass. Dim light shined through it and showed that not a drop was left. He didn't want another whiskey anyway. No matter how much of it he drank, his thirst wouldn't ease. Another moment of hunger twisted his insides and it was impossible not to wince. "I think it's time I took my leave, old friend." Whether he addressed the glass or his human companion wasn't abundantly clear.
Simon gave John's hand a slight squeeze, perhaps more to simply register his presence than for any other reason. Although as his companion gave his own view on the devil, Simon felt for the first time that evening like perhaps there was something of interest about this man which should have been obvious to him. Something which had passed him by in his self involved daydreams and practiced disinterest.
John Abbott, of all the improbable things, appeared to be interesting.
"Hmm. Well... I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the one most commonly feared to speak for the merits of Devils. So until further notice you'll excuse me if I maintain a certain caution, when it comes to what I barter with." He followed John's mannerisms, watching him lift the glass in front of his eyes. Simon shifted, leaning back in his seat and reaching for his own unfinished bottle of wine, "You won't stay for one more drink?"
"My staying for one more drink is another thing you shouldn't barter with," John suggested. On occasion, he was downright reckless with the things he said about himself. Though the comment was vague enough to hint at several behaviors which could be perceived as unsavory, none of them was likely to earn John a chummy pat on the back.
He was hungry and John worried he might dive at the nearest throat and take a bite. To do so in public would be foolish. Even if most people didn't know how to vanquish a vampire, attacks by panicked mobs were both painful and inconvenient. In addition to that, biting this Simon fellow was beginning to seem like a better idea. A loner who spent most of his time indoors? A self-funded scholar? There might be no one to notice him missing, or come looking for his last known companion.
"I get irritable," he excused.
"I live irritable." Simon said loftily, reaching across to fill up John's whiskey glass with wine. He could just picture his father wincing to see the receptacle being misused, but that was a different man's concern. Right now, Simon was more worried about what on earth he'd do with the rest of his evening if he was left here, with half a bottle of wine and the chances of anyone else of any interest turning up being slim to nothing. He put down the bottle and propped himself up on one hand, "Come now, you said yourself you're not yet drunk, and the night is long and theoretically boring if spent alone."
Simon lifted his own glass slightly, turning in his chair now to give John his full attention, "Besides, I've made more foolish deals and managed to get by on them." Of course, usually when Simon made an unwise deal with someone or something, he was fully aware of what he was getting into, in this situation, it hadn't even occurred to him that he could be talking to anything more than his usual preference of degenerate.
That wine, so close in color to what John needed to healthily sustain himself, was a sore temptation. He breathed out through his nostrils and rubbed his nape. Had it been a matter of simple addiction, he would've poured the drink down his gullet and hoped to stave off the serious pangs for later. But for a vampire, thirst was a great deal more predatory. If he didn't feed over the next few days, John would become increasingly blind to and uncaring of ideal circumstances. Rats, stray cats, even a horse might temporarily sate him; They were sources of nutritional nourishment. It was the bloodlust that complicated things. Put simply, the overwhelming urge to rip a person's throat out.
His gums tingled as his sharpened teeth protruded. John only opened his mouth to take a drink, downing half the contents in a single go. "See there?" He wiped his fingers over his lips. "You're a generous chap after all." He ignored the thump-thump of a pulse, which he thought he could hear over the conversational den, only to realize it was his own. Once the fangs descended, it was difficult to keep them hidden from view, so he had to talk with his mouth mostly closed. It felt like impersonating a person who'd had a stroke.
"Not at all." Simon gestured lightly with his own glass. "I'm just trading alcohol for your time." He noticed something change in John. Although he couldn't have put his finger on the fact that it was the way the man was speaking, he could recognise that there was something changed. He frowned, leaning forward slightly and peering, with no concern for subtlety at all, at John's face.
"Hm. So, the good Mr. John Abbott. Strong in constitution and strange in tastes of the flesh, what exactly is it that you do?" He asked, leaning back again. He wanted to work something out about this man, so far not even certain what it was. Simon just had the vaguest of ideas that there was something there which was still evading him.
John flinched backward at the sudden intrusion and the mention of tasting flesh. He was wary and so he held still, the glass of spirits stationary in his hand, while he wondered if Mr. Alexander had figured him out. The play on words would lead one to believe he had, but no man in his right mind leaned that close to a fiend. It was akin to slicing one's leg open in shark-infested water. Within such proximity, the vampire's heightened senses detected a variety of scents, blood amongst them. Often, people nicked themselves on shaving razors or jutting pieces of furniture or abrasive surfaces, without realizing it.
"I once held a post as a literature professor," he said, aiming his words at the far side of the bar. No miscreant was this one, despite Simon's guess. In life, John Abbott had been a respectable and educated man, if mildly emotionally unbalanced. "Now I'm just a tutor." He nursed the wine, careful not to clip the fragile container with his fangs. "I grew tired of the daily routine." It was both lie and truth, an obfuscation of the facts. "Besides, certain appetites run counter to that lifestyle, especially when you work where you sleep."
"Hmm." Simon leaned back again, steepling his fingers and resting them back against his lips, staring at John in silence for a little while. For a time, he added nothing. His mind sieving through the strange, small puzzle he'd decided this man to be. After a few minutes he shook his head, letting out a slight breath. "You must forgive me. I suppose if I have no puzzle on my mind then I simply try to create my own."
Untangling his fingers, Simon brought both hands down to drum them across the bar lightly, but his eyes stayed fixed on John. Part of him was distantly aware that he was just playing mind games with himself, and that this was likely why he had no friends. Still, there was definitely something about John. Some indeterminate quality that just bothered him in its elusiveness.
That said, John wasn't sure whether he had puzzled the man or not. Regardless, it wasn't good to be under such scrutiny, not when he chose to play out his existence amongst the regular folk, instead of bunking in a crypt. As far as his former society was concerned, John Abbott was still alive, though deteriorated in social connections after his step down from an esteemed educational institution, and looking a bit worse for wear. Most assumed his detachment was to do with his sister's death.
They weren't far off.
"And in that quest for intrigue, you've found yourself a teacher." John smirked and swallowed the rest of his wine. "I hope you'll forgive me for being less than an enigma," he said. Though he could've carried on conversation for a while yet, his sense of self-preservation urged him to cut it short. He got off his stool and picked up a hat, which he brushed off before setting it atop his black hair. "I appreciate the drink, Mr. Alexander. If we run into one another again, you must let me return the favor. Good night."
A premature exit, to be sure. One that might make Mr. Abbott seem more guilty of hiding something, but it couldn't be helped. Necessity compelled him to make sure he left Mr. Alexander sifting through the pieces of that puzzle.