The Cemetery Diaries
We Are Bats
Moulded plastic, the colour of an oil slick. That’s what I’m handing to you. Well, go on, take them. They’ll make your midnight darker. They’ll make it last all summer long. These are brand name; they’re top quality. You can’t complain. There, now we match. They say that eyes are the windows of the soul, so you’d better blot yours out. You wouldn’t want anyone to see the permanent wells now sinking around your eye sockets, pitiless and dense as coal burned at the centre of Hell. A little bit of plastic can change a lot about a person. Consider these a prosthetic darkness for your most sensitive organs.
I have another surprise for you, too. I’ve thought of a name, something to stand you apart from the other actors in my world, the innumerable human bodies, limbs and faces that play their way through a myriad of roles like actors on a stage, all part of the same unimportant flesh. All those others, I call ‘you’ and ‘them’, but you, I’ve decided, will be my Trixie. Trixie the third, from the French ‘trois’. You would have been the third kill I documented in this diary of mine, the book I keep inside my skull, printed forever in memory. You would have been my third, but now you’re my eternal; the one I’m always killing; the one who never dies.
We are bats in the flying night, soaring down the narrow streets, brick pressed to brick as though the city is living and breathing, and these are the constricted arteries branching out of its congested heart. The blood of the city is petrol, and the fuel in my engine is blood. This motorbike is the sleek cousin of every flaming hell-cart with neon scorch marks up its sides, and it does better tricks. Close your eyes, and let us make a highway of the clouds. We zoom up, off the road, so that we seem to burn a ribbon behind us, the twisting twin of the asphalt road a hundred metres lower. We create our own path, a streak of grey, and leave it to dissipate as the wind tears it asunder.
The air is fresh, breathe it in. Feel the cool, noxious fumes curling past your lips and curdling from your nostrils, tracing the shape like a snake looping through a skull. Do you smell it? That’s the scent of magic. Taste its venom as we descend, and the motorbike shudders against the solid concrete of the sidewalk. Remember that metallic tang as I dismount, and pull you after me, towards the line of shop windows, mannequins trapped in their glass.
The unlife is a blessing inverted, but in truth so far I’ve only given you half of what I hope to give. I broke into a store after hours, brought you the sunglasses. Now, it’s time to finish the rest of this spree. You’ll need riding leathers, for when the wind is rough and rakes at even vampire skin with the tenacity of a stormborn demon. You’ll need breathable cotton, as an undergarment for when the air is humid and the moisture in it boils. You’ll need sturdy boots, and better cargo pants than the ones you came in. It feels like I’m dressing a doll taken out of her box for the first time, the way I’m forcing you to think outside the world you always knew, but never cherished.
Smash, crash, tinkle, and the glass falls wounded to the ground, cascading like a sheet of water freezing as it falls. Bits of broken halogen lights reflect in the shards that litter the ground at my feet like a corona lighting me from the wrong end. I crush a few with my boot tip, grinding them to powder. That’s how you put a light out. I stride through the star-shaped entrance to the shop, and pull you in after me. We make a short job of combing through the racks, and find something I deem appropriate. You don’t resist. The jacket fits snugly about your chest, the purple spikes like the needling armour of a sea urchin on each of your shoulders. It’s a punk look, and the boots match. I pull them on for you, because the first feast of blood has made your fingers numb and useless. You’re Cinderella’s evil twin, her worst nightmare.
Across the street, we find the rest of your items, and just like that, you’re born again. Your hair tumbles down in black showers; the devil’s veil. With your blood and the blood of an unfortunate nearly as damned, you wed shadow. Your kiss is oblivion armed with fangs, and there’s unholy Eucharist in your veins. You sit as though you’re owed some kind of a moon, but it won’t be gilt in honey. Yours is a full moon, a new moon, a blood moon. It’s time to take you to the church.
I have another surprise for you, too. I’ve thought of a name, something to stand you apart from the other actors in my world, the innumerable human bodies, limbs and faces that play their way through a myriad of roles like actors on a stage, all part of the same unimportant flesh. All those others, I call ‘you’ and ‘them’, but you, I’ve decided, will be my Trixie. Trixie the third, from the French ‘trois’. You would have been the third kill I documented in this diary of mine, the book I keep inside my skull, printed forever in memory. You would have been my third, but now you’re my eternal; the one I’m always killing; the one who never dies.
We are bats in the flying night, soaring down the narrow streets, brick pressed to brick as though the city is living and breathing, and these are the constricted arteries branching out of its congested heart. The blood of the city is petrol, and the fuel in my engine is blood. This motorbike is the sleek cousin of every flaming hell-cart with neon scorch marks up its sides, and it does better tricks. Close your eyes, and let us make a highway of the clouds. We zoom up, off the road, so that we seem to burn a ribbon behind us, the twisting twin of the asphalt road a hundred metres lower. We create our own path, a streak of grey, and leave it to dissipate as the wind tears it asunder.
The air is fresh, breathe it in. Feel the cool, noxious fumes curling past your lips and curdling from your nostrils, tracing the shape like a snake looping through a skull. Do you smell it? That’s the scent of magic. Taste its venom as we descend, and the motorbike shudders against the solid concrete of the sidewalk. Remember that metallic tang as I dismount, and pull you after me, towards the line of shop windows, mannequins trapped in their glass.
The unlife is a blessing inverted, but in truth so far I’ve only given you half of what I hope to give. I broke into a store after hours, brought you the sunglasses. Now, it’s time to finish the rest of this spree. You’ll need riding leathers, for when the wind is rough and rakes at even vampire skin with the tenacity of a stormborn demon. You’ll need breathable cotton, as an undergarment for when the air is humid and the moisture in it boils. You’ll need sturdy boots, and better cargo pants than the ones you came in. It feels like I’m dressing a doll taken out of her box for the first time, the way I’m forcing you to think outside the world you always knew, but never cherished.
Smash, crash, tinkle, and the glass falls wounded to the ground, cascading like a sheet of water freezing as it falls. Bits of broken halogen lights reflect in the shards that litter the ground at my feet like a corona lighting me from the wrong end. I crush a few with my boot tip, grinding them to powder. That’s how you put a light out. I stride through the star-shaped entrance to the shop, and pull you in after me. We make a short job of combing through the racks, and find something I deem appropriate. You don’t resist. The jacket fits snugly about your chest, the purple spikes like the needling armour of a sea urchin on each of your shoulders. It’s a punk look, and the boots match. I pull them on for you, because the first feast of blood has made your fingers numb and useless. You’re Cinderella’s evil twin, her worst nightmare.
Across the street, we find the rest of your items, and just like that, you’re born again. Your hair tumbles down in black showers; the devil’s veil. With your blood and the blood of an unfortunate nearly as damned, you wed shadow. Your kiss is oblivion armed with fangs, and there’s unholy Eucharist in your veins. You sit as though you’re owed some kind of a moon, but it won’t be gilt in honey. Yours is a full moon, a new moon, a blood moon. It’s time to take you to the church.