-----

I.  William

He underestimates my mind
I know he's messing with my head
My only weakness is
I can't believe the guy could be entirely dead

~Poe, "Trigger Happy Jack"

-----

~*London, 1880*~

My life begins with an ending.

Her eyes are like black pearls, like ebony sapphires, like deep pools of gleaming oh for Christ's sake William can't you stop writing poetry in your head for five minutes running?  She's got eyes, it doesn't matter what they look like, she's got eyes and all that matters is that they're looking. at. me.

((i see you))

No one's ever *looked* at me before.

"Do you want it?" she whispers, and

((oh yes))

"God, yes..."

And there's a piercing and a drowning and a chorus of screams, and for awhile there is darkness.  Silence.

William dies.

Tries to, anyway.

Death is really something of a process.

-----

Years later, while slightly drunk in a *ristorante* somewhere outside Rome, he tells me how they woke sometime that afternoon to find me laid out on the dining-room table.  A violent argument soon erupted.  Dru, classicist that she was, wanted me buried.  She herself had not been buried (she had, I believe, awakened the next morning on a pile of dead nuns) and she blamed most of her mental and emotional problems on this singular fact.  Angelus said he'd be damned (ironic, that) if she was going to bury that skinny little whelp in his rosebushes, and Darla just wanted the body off her dining-room table, NOW.  I spend the subsequent century very glad that I slept through that particular conversation.

In any case, I can't imagine being buried.  Scraping my way to the surface like

((like him))

like something out of a bad monster movie.

I may have my faults, but traditionalism certainly isn't among them.

-----

The hero surviving his own murder,
his own suicide, his own
addiction, surviving his own
disappearance from the scene-
returned in new faces, shining
through the tears of new eyes.

-Allen Ginsberg, "Kansas City to Saint Louis"

-----

Dolls are the first thing I see.

I can *feel* their eyes on me.  Peering.  Watching me.  China cheeks and black curls and.  Glass eyes.  They frighten me so badly that I hastily lay back down and shut my eyes again.

((dolls))

((darkness))

((where am i))

Curiosity, at great length, finally defeats paralyzing fear, and I peel my eyelids open slowly to see

-a ceiling.  Good one that, William.  You're just a wealth of knowledge this evening- morning?  Who knows?  It's not a particularly familiar ceiling, but that isn't telling me much.  It's nice as ceilings go but for God's sake William stop being such a pansy and sit up and look around, is that too much to ask?

Calm down.  Breathe.

Not helping.  Try not breathing?  Similarly, no effect, very worrisome; a much older and larger cousin held my head in a bucket of water for nearly three minutes once when I was eleven years old, I know what not breathing feels like and it doesn't feel *anything* like this.  Am I dead?  I can't be dead; this isn't Heaven.  It's got a nice enough ceiling, true, but it can't be Heaven, and I can't be in Hell because I've never done

((anything at all))

anything wrong.  All right, William, you can open your eyes and investigate your surroundings, or you can lay here like the cowardly ponce you are.

That's good.  Laying here, very good.

But not, after five or six minutes, very interesting.

Besides.  I'm *hungry.*

I sit up again and gasp at the sudden rush of energy that surges through my muscles.  Dolls.  Dear God, they're everywhere.  Twenty of them?  Fifty?  All frilly dresses and kid boots and wide, staring eyes.  Silk wallpaper and lace curtains.  Sharp smell of burning candlewax.  A ladies' bedroom, no wonder I'm confused and lost, I've never *been* in a ladies' bedroom, and my skin feels strange, too tight and buzzing with electricity, the normally blurred lines between objects are too sharply defined and I can hear everything, *everything,* the merest rustle of my fingertips against the bedclothes.  I'm in a woman's bed and the dolls are.  Watching me.  Where on God's green earth are my spectacles?  I haven't been able to see without them since I was seven years old.  The ends of my fingers are humming- no, they aren't.  Fingers don't hum.  I have a university diploma- well, will in three weeks, anyhow- and I know perfectly well that fingers don't hum.  Stand up, you brainless ponce.

Trousers and waistcoat rumpled, cufflink and collar missing, and the side of my neck- I don't remember getting cut last night.  In fact, I don't remember much of anything at all... a party.  A party, and people laughing at me.  Well, that could have been any night... God, but I'm hungry.  I've never been this hungry in my life.  What happened after that?

((effulgent))

It's a perfectly serviceable word.  It's a *marvelous* word, dammit.  Stupid bastard.  What happened last night?  Was I drinking?  I don't drink, do I?  What in the world have I been drinking?

"Have you lost your *mind*?"  A deep, booming voice ((irish?)) somewhere outside the closed bedroom door.

"Probably," I whisper aloud to no one in particular.  My voice sounds abnormally loud to my own ears.

This is just too much.

I walk to the doorway and put my hands against the surface.  Each individual wood grain comes alive under fingertips.  I can hear my footsteps on the soft rug and the candles seem too bright.  None of this makes any *sense.*  God.  So hungry.

I push the door open slowly, soft squeak of hinges battering my oversensitive eardrums.  I'm so overwhelmed by sensation and lightheaded with hunger that I can barely make my way down the dark, labyrinthine corridors that stretch out in front of me, and I can still hear that damned voice.

"Perhaps if she simply... takes him back where she found him?  Leaves him there?"

"No good," inserts a woman's voice, cold, haughty.  "They always follow you home.  Trust me.  I know."

I take a deep sniff with nostrils that can sense every mote of dust on the air and my stomach rumbles.  Strangely enough, every kind of food that comes to mind seems vaguely nauseating, but I'm about to keel over with hunger- and there's... something.  Nearby-

The woman's voice continues.  "Only thing to do is to stake him.  Oh, don't look like that, Drusilla.  We'll get you a puppy, all right?  Or a... kitten, or a rabbit, or something.  Just stop that dreadful whining."

((drusilla))

A third voice, a child's voice ((where have I heard it before?)), choked with tears.  "I don't *want* you to stake him, Grandmother.  He's mine.  I brought him home and I want to keep him.  I l-love h-him..."

"Oh, you do not," the man's voice says with a great deal of exasperation.  "We don't have time for this, Dru-"

"But you *told* me to-"

"Make yourself a playmate, I know.  What I didn't realize is that you have astonishingly bad taste, and I can't take care of you and your misbegotten brat both."

"*I'll* take care of him!" she responds indignantly.  "He's my baby, my shining boy, my prince, my noble white knight-"

Don't know who she's talking about.  But whatever it is I'm hungry for is close, so close, and

((there))

and I don't really remember anything after that, only a red haze that falls over my vision and faraway screaming and suddenly my hands and clothing are very, very stained.  But I'm not hungry anymore, so everything else is secondary, I suppose.  I glance in dull horror- more alarmed surprise, really, than the revolted terror I would normally have at such a sight- at the body on the floor next to me.  The girl, or what's left of her, looks fairly young, dressed in a workwoman's clothes- drenched in blood, now.  A throat clears and I look up to see an immaculately coifed woman standing above me.  Pale hair and cold blue eyes, hands folded sanctimoniously.  She tosses a dismissive glance over her shoulder.

"Drusilla," she says sharply, "this creature with whom you are so enamored has eaten my chambermaid."  A familiar face appears behind her, wide eyes and black curls, and suddenly I remember everything.  The party.  The alleyway.  The biting ((biting?))

The girl ((Drusilla her name is Drusilla)) claps her hands together in delight.  "He's made a mess, he's made a mess," she says joyfully.  "Such a pretty mess."  She turns to the dark-haired man beside her with an adorable pout.  "May I keep him, Daddy?  Please?"

He folds his arms over his chest and lets out a labored sigh.

"*Please?*"

"I suppose," he says, with all the goodwill of a long-suffering father.  The girl squeals happily and drops to the floor beside me, clutches my hand, and presses her lips against mine.

Guess I'm home.

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