The Cemetery Diaries
Bottoms Up
Night crawling is one thing, but the sunlight is another. It’s not like people say in storybooks. Vampires can come out in the natural light. We just have to take steps to preserve ourselves, as the heat of day can as easily slough flesh from bone as the hot edge of a sword. Our revelry is all the more dangerous when done by the sun’s burning glory, but that’s just part of the Invictus clan’s image. We welcome danger.
The summer day begins to dawn, and it’s a rain of sweat. The motorbike sits steaming in the churchyard parking lot, not far from the entrance to our crypt, black and shiny as a shed cicada skin. Its temperature is blistering, and the air around it shimmers with something thicker than magic; the blanketing, oppressive heat. It rumbles at my touch, a stroke of thunder bellowing in each stroke as the engine revs up. Climb onto the back, and I’ll show you where our kind goes in the summertime. It’s not a beach, and it’s not a cold cellar. It’s probably exactly what you expect. We go to a cemetery, about an hour’s ride from here.
Out on the open road, beneath the open sky, our wheels burn rubber. You cling to my back with tenacious hands, your tank top rucked up above your waist. Your skin is perfectly white marble, glistening with crystalline sparkles in place of perspiration. I know that, with the rays of the sun bearing down on you, you will be baking. I remind you to sip blood and water from the canister periodically, lest you dry out. Your sunglasses are on, as they should always be by morning and after sunset, and they cover half your face. That’s good. Maybe with them, you’ll be safe. We roar around highways bent gently with the curvature of the earth, past scores of gumtrees raking the clouds with their barren claws. Crows cry, letting brittle branches rattle where they depart, like pockets of leftover night. They are the only black things in the landscape, apart from us. Hug your leathers tighter, dearest. You’ll need them.
The mad droning of insects pipes up as we enter the bushland, creating a dreadful choir that pools in the valleys and echoes off the tallest walls of the thickets. It is an insane noise that drowns us at its crescendo, masking all the smaller menaces of slithering, hissing, and hunting. In the oven the devil has made of this country, every eucalypt is a scented candle melting, white and waxy, peeling in strips. The soil lifts easily in clouds of red dust. Just a little bit further.
You’re clinging to me like a bat to a perch, as you’ve learned to cling, like all your seconds are speeding underneath us on that black ribbon of tarmac, and you could join them at any minute. Your heels find the steel pegs in the bike’s side and dig in hard. Since your transformation, they are feet with talons that know how to latch on hard, just like your razor-sharp fingernails. The bike cruises to a standstill where a dirt road diverges from the now empty highway, and as the wind ceases to rip the sounds of the wilderness away, the cicada din rears up louder and more monstrous than ever. A rusting gate, wide enough to permit two cars abreast, sags on tired hinges. I swing my legs off the bike and stride towards it, making short work of the chain latch. I reach back behind me for your hand, and feel your fingers slip into mine, your willowy step falling into in line in my footsteps. I’m proud to show you off, and everybody sees.
Mohawks and pierced and tattooed faces with identical pearly points in their mouths turn to study you. Rings hang from their ears, and rat tails trail from the bases of their skulls. Their heads come in every shade of bleached bone, lurid green, shocking red, satin sable and violent purple. The jingle jangle of chains and spikes follows as, gracefully, each leather-clad, studded male swags or staggers towards you, as though you are the centre of a drawing vortex. Pairs of eyes follow suit, none blinking, all transfixed, and every cheek flushed white.
This is Trixie, I tell them guardedly. She’s mine. I lift my glasses, and my eyes ache with an instant, stabbing pain that bores all the way back into my brain, as though I’m seeing bright light through my eyelids. The flash of crimson is enough, however. Everyone sees that I’ve fed recently, that I’m strong. They won’t interfere with you. Come along, my little Trixie, to where the graves are old and overgrown, unmarked beds of sleeping stone. This is a pioneer graveyard, burials from the eighteenth century now long forgotten. Hidden out in the rolling hills of used-to-be sheep stations, it’s not on any maps. Some of the more ornate graves have dry branches adorned with empty beer cans stuck into the ground like stakes. Others have shovels impaled at their heads, striking the mounds they created. More beer and Guinness cans litter these sites, too. Most of the rubbish is ours.
Nobody has brought a victim along to this particular gathering, although I’m not the only one with a new girl. What they have brought is an Esky, full of chilled blood and other potent liquids. Here, take a bottle, and join me in the shade. There’s music thumping, giving the cicadas a run for their money. In scant patches of shade, vampires are dancing. Bottoms up, my love. There’s nothing our kind like more than getting high.
The summer day begins to dawn, and it’s a rain of sweat. The motorbike sits steaming in the churchyard parking lot, not far from the entrance to our crypt, black and shiny as a shed cicada skin. Its temperature is blistering, and the air around it shimmers with something thicker than magic; the blanketing, oppressive heat. It rumbles at my touch, a stroke of thunder bellowing in each stroke as the engine revs up. Climb onto the back, and I’ll show you where our kind goes in the summertime. It’s not a beach, and it’s not a cold cellar. It’s probably exactly what you expect. We go to a cemetery, about an hour’s ride from here.
Out on the open road, beneath the open sky, our wheels burn rubber. You cling to my back with tenacious hands, your tank top rucked up above your waist. Your skin is perfectly white marble, glistening with crystalline sparkles in place of perspiration. I know that, with the rays of the sun bearing down on you, you will be baking. I remind you to sip blood and water from the canister periodically, lest you dry out. Your sunglasses are on, as they should always be by morning and after sunset, and they cover half your face. That’s good. Maybe with them, you’ll be safe. We roar around highways bent gently with the curvature of the earth, past scores of gumtrees raking the clouds with their barren claws. Crows cry, letting brittle branches rattle where they depart, like pockets of leftover night. They are the only black things in the landscape, apart from us. Hug your leathers tighter, dearest. You’ll need them.
The mad droning of insects pipes up as we enter the bushland, creating a dreadful choir that pools in the valleys and echoes off the tallest walls of the thickets. It is an insane noise that drowns us at its crescendo, masking all the smaller menaces of slithering, hissing, and hunting. In the oven the devil has made of this country, every eucalypt is a scented candle melting, white and waxy, peeling in strips. The soil lifts easily in clouds of red dust. Just a little bit further.
You’re clinging to me like a bat to a perch, as you’ve learned to cling, like all your seconds are speeding underneath us on that black ribbon of tarmac, and you could join them at any minute. Your heels find the steel pegs in the bike’s side and dig in hard. Since your transformation, they are feet with talons that know how to latch on hard, just like your razor-sharp fingernails. The bike cruises to a standstill where a dirt road diverges from the now empty highway, and as the wind ceases to rip the sounds of the wilderness away, the cicada din rears up louder and more monstrous than ever. A rusting gate, wide enough to permit two cars abreast, sags on tired hinges. I swing my legs off the bike and stride towards it, making short work of the chain latch. I reach back behind me for your hand, and feel your fingers slip into mine, your willowy step falling into in line in my footsteps. I’m proud to show you off, and everybody sees.
Mohawks and pierced and tattooed faces with identical pearly points in their mouths turn to study you. Rings hang from their ears, and rat tails trail from the bases of their skulls. Their heads come in every shade of bleached bone, lurid green, shocking red, satin sable and violent purple. The jingle jangle of chains and spikes follows as, gracefully, each leather-clad, studded male swags or staggers towards you, as though you are the centre of a drawing vortex. Pairs of eyes follow suit, none blinking, all transfixed, and every cheek flushed white.
This is Trixie, I tell them guardedly. She’s mine. I lift my glasses, and my eyes ache with an instant, stabbing pain that bores all the way back into my brain, as though I’m seeing bright light through my eyelids. The flash of crimson is enough, however. Everyone sees that I’ve fed recently, that I’m strong. They won’t interfere with you. Come along, my little Trixie, to where the graves are old and overgrown, unmarked beds of sleeping stone. This is a pioneer graveyard, burials from the eighteenth century now long forgotten. Hidden out in the rolling hills of used-to-be sheep stations, it’s not on any maps. Some of the more ornate graves have dry branches adorned with empty beer cans stuck into the ground like stakes. Others have shovels impaled at their heads, striking the mounds they created. More beer and Guinness cans litter these sites, too. Most of the rubbish is ours.
Nobody has brought a victim along to this particular gathering, although I’m not the only one with a new girl. What they have brought is an Esky, full of chilled blood and other potent liquids. Here, take a bottle, and join me in the shade. There’s music thumping, giving the cicadas a run for their money. In scant patches of shade, vampires are dancing. Bottoms up, my love. There’s nothing our kind like more than getting high.