Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [11]
“I don’t have to listen to this,” I say. “This is all the completest bullshit. I bet you’re not a celestial being at all.”
“I am too a celestial being. Christopher, I can help you. If you help the Forces of Light and act as a secret spy in the ranks of the damned, then we guarantee that we will cure you one hundred percent of the fatal scourge of vampirism.”
He waits. “And if you don’t,” he adds with quiet simplicity, “in five months you’ll be dead. This is not a threat; it is the truth. Either you will not have killed, in which case you’ll die of starvation, or you will have killed and been caught and lynched. Holy water to sear and blind you. A stake in your chest to finish you off.”
“What if I’m not turning into a vampire?”
“You are turning into a vampire. Don’t doubt it.”
We remain there for a moment. I am standing, with mud drying on my shoe. He is sitting, with the grass blowing around him. I feel like I cannot hear my own thoughts. Inside my head it is silent. The sky is getting darker.
“You have heard of Tch’muchgar?” he asks me suddenly.
“The Vampire Lord?”
“Yes. That’s the very one.”
“It’s not a common name,” I say, shrugging.
“No,” he agrees. “I can tell it is going to be a pleasure to work with you. Now consider Tch’muchgar: blasted from this world in man’s prehistory by the Forces of Light, snared in the most potent of enchantments for his grotesque misdeeds, and imprisoned in a foreign world that happens to have one of its points of entrance underneath this fine municipal reservoir. This is all true as you’ve heard it. Also very real are the spells that yearly must be cast here and in the White Hen Pantry off Route 62.
“This summer, Tch’muchgar will try to escape. He is locked in a parallel world — unable to move even a fraction, unable to see, seething with hatred. You see, we in the Forces of Light do not kill. It is a rule of ours: No death by our hands. Sometimes the greater punishment is to let something live.
“Though Tch’muchgar technically has no power in this world, he has managed to stain certain impressions on the minds of his vampiric servants. Vampires are loners, but he’s convinced them to work together. The plan is that this summer, during your Sad Festival of Vampires, they will interrupt the spells of binding that your townspeople cast yearly to hold Tch’muchgar; they will interrupt the spells just when those bonds are being reforged and are at their most delicate. Then the Vampire Lord will return, burst back into the world, and chaos will ensue.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’ve been very clear so far, Christopher. Tch’muchgar the Vampire Lord will return and probably conquer most if not all of North America. Then he will most likely start to use mankind as cattle. Keep a few around as studs to corral and breed. Cripple their children. Lock each one in its dark little cubbyhole for easy storage until it starts to mature. Keep the race fed on a protein-rich diet. Then kill them, one by one, and drink their blood.”
I shuffle from one leg to the other.
“Okay,” I say. “And me?”
“And you what?”
“What do you want me to do?”
The celestial being draws his fingers ticklingly along the bottom side of his jaw. Then he drops his hand to his lap again and nods. “As I’ve said, you are useful to us in the Forces of Light. You can walk among vampires without being suspected. Yet you are so young and your spirit still so transparent that you would be hard to trace with spells and wizardry if something should go wrong.
“We need you to enter the dwelling place of vampires. We need you to take within an object that I will find for you at great cost and deliver to you. You will take this object, enter the vampires’ enclave, and find the small gate they have opened to Tch’muchgar’s prison world. You will take the object through the gate, activate the object, and leave it there. Once