The Cemetery Diaries
Lost Boys
It’s not true that vampires can’t see themselves in the mirror. We can. It’s only that other people can’t see us, because we’re so good at evading detection by human eyes, because we’re something that the human mind insists cannot exist. I watch myself in the grimy mirror now, and I am ugly. I guess it’s what I always wanted. My cheeks are pinched and sallow, my eyes sit in deep craters and my lips are thin and white. I put my hand to my bare chest, and it is icy. I carry my coffin inside me, it seems. In the bedroom, I unpack my few changes of clothes, mostly stolen, and slip on a plain t-shirt and jeans. It’s comfortable and airy in summertime, if somewhat mundane. I can’t be a horror show every day, and now that I’m mostly bunkered down, I don’t suppose it matters much what I look like. I’m not a villain in my time off.
I am, however, still an addict. The depleted mattress sags underneath me as I sit on the bed. It’s mostly gone to mould and will have to be replaced, but for the time being, I don’t mind rancid things. I slip a band from my sack of belongings around my upper arm, and slide the needle into the crook of my elbow. The pain is sharp, smarting but the flood that follows it is sweet release. I’ll have to get used to living this way. Quietly, I wonder how I’m going to order replacement syringes and extra tubes of oily solution. There’s bound to be no internet out here. I’ll have to make some calls and order a satellite. Thankfully, there is a network of people just like me spread thin all over Australia. We come to one another’s aid for essential things, and trade in the profits of immortality’s spoils. Some hunters even kill for money rather than for food. From time to time, we socialise for our amusement, existing in gangs, or occasionally packs.
I’ve left my gang now, I realise. It never even occurred to me to say goodbye. That’s just not how my species works. We don’t really form attachments, even to the ones we create. We are all nomads at heart, belonging nowhere in particular. We are all lost boys. I pad out into the cottage’s single living room, where the armchair is still heaped. I’ll get rid of it, I promise myself, as I cross to the mantle and begin to leaf through the ancient, flaking books. Their covers are coming apart at the seams, their pages yellow and prone to crumbling, but they’ll be worth at least some money. More importantly, they’ll be company when I have this place furnished to better suit my needs. Life is not like a book, to be pored through avidly or turned at a leisurely, contemplative pace. Life is a story you write for yourself, but books can give you guidance.
I leave the contents of the shelf aside, and drift out into the garden, where bees are playing in an overgrown tangle of wisteria vines. The climber has grown thick trunks out of its fused coils, snapping the wooden pylons that hole up the veranda, and grown into the shape of a shelter with the support of the beams it has bowed. The effect is a tentacled mess, but it is pleasant; a cool, green cave dripping with grape-like bunches of purple flowers. I sit myself on one of the rotting steps that lead down to the weed infested garden, and think. I could be happy here, I convince myself. I’ll find a new you, but most importantly, maybe trouble will stop chasing me like the shadow I don’t have. I stare into the blue ceramic sky, and try to focus on the lazy buzz of cicadas and the dry, rattling breath of the almost-still breeze. I wonder how much the countryside has changed in a century and more. Is this what I would have seen, had I made it alive to the shore, all those years ago?
My reverie is punctured by two short, sharp beeps from my hip pocket. Yes, vampires carry phones, just like we go to nightclubs. Nobody is completely immune to the modern era. I pull the device out of my jeans and flick the screen on. An image flashes, a picture message as gory as any image of Dante’s Hell. I recognise some of the bodies by scraps of leather and long, torn strips of white shroud. My old rival gang, their dark, bile-like blood mopped up by the bandages they were buried in. So many children of the night, worse than vanquished. My first thought is shock, my second is to question. What could have caused such carnage? What has the power to take out an entire vampire coven? I can’t see the bodies of my own clansmen there, nothing to indicate a war. This was not a gang fight, I conclude, it was a massacre. Worst of all are the words under the photographs, words that imply something impossible, something monstrous.
‘You caused this,’ they say.
I am, however, still an addict. The depleted mattress sags underneath me as I sit on the bed. It’s mostly gone to mould and will have to be replaced, but for the time being, I don’t mind rancid things. I slip a band from my sack of belongings around my upper arm, and slide the needle into the crook of my elbow. The pain is sharp, smarting but the flood that follows it is sweet release. I’ll have to get used to living this way. Quietly, I wonder how I’m going to order replacement syringes and extra tubes of oily solution. There’s bound to be no internet out here. I’ll have to make some calls and order a satellite. Thankfully, there is a network of people just like me spread thin all over Australia. We come to one another’s aid for essential things, and trade in the profits of immortality’s spoils. Some hunters even kill for money rather than for food. From time to time, we socialise for our amusement, existing in gangs, or occasionally packs.
I’ve left my gang now, I realise. It never even occurred to me to say goodbye. That’s just not how my species works. We don’t really form attachments, even to the ones we create. We are all nomads at heart, belonging nowhere in particular. We are all lost boys. I pad out into the cottage’s single living room, where the armchair is still heaped. I’ll get rid of it, I promise myself, as I cross to the mantle and begin to leaf through the ancient, flaking books. Their covers are coming apart at the seams, their pages yellow and prone to crumbling, but they’ll be worth at least some money. More importantly, they’ll be company when I have this place furnished to better suit my needs. Life is not like a book, to be pored through avidly or turned at a leisurely, contemplative pace. Life is a story you write for yourself, but books can give you guidance.
I leave the contents of the shelf aside, and drift out into the garden, where bees are playing in an overgrown tangle of wisteria vines. The climber has grown thick trunks out of its fused coils, snapping the wooden pylons that hole up the veranda, and grown into the shape of a shelter with the support of the beams it has bowed. The effect is a tentacled mess, but it is pleasant; a cool, green cave dripping with grape-like bunches of purple flowers. I sit myself on one of the rotting steps that lead down to the weed infested garden, and think. I could be happy here, I convince myself. I’ll find a new you, but most importantly, maybe trouble will stop chasing me like the shadow I don’t have. I stare into the blue ceramic sky, and try to focus on the lazy buzz of cicadas and the dry, rattling breath of the almost-still breeze. I wonder how much the countryside has changed in a century and more. Is this what I would have seen, had I made it alive to the shore, all those years ago?
My reverie is punctured by two short, sharp beeps from my hip pocket. Yes, vampires carry phones, just like we go to nightclubs. Nobody is completely immune to the modern era. I pull the device out of my jeans and flick the screen on. An image flashes, a picture message as gory as any image of Dante’s Hell. I recognise some of the bodies by scraps of leather and long, torn strips of white shroud. My old rival gang, their dark, bile-like blood mopped up by the bandages they were buried in. So many children of the night, worse than vanquished. My first thought is shock, my second is to question. What could have caused such carnage? What has the power to take out an entire vampire coven? I can’t see the bodies of my own clansmen there, nothing to indicate a war. This was not a gang fight, I conclude, it was a massacre. Worst of all are the words under the photographs, words that imply something impossible, something monstrous.
‘You caused this,’ they say.