Thirsty - M. T. Anderson [22]
The strange thing is that the man (for at first I assume it’s a man) is not subtle at all. I have read about a billion spy novels, and when you are following someone, you hide behind newspapers, or pretend to paint the house next door, or hide a camera inside a spacious poodle.
You don’t just walk calmly after your prey and stand across the street from him, right on the sidewalk, staring.
He is wearing a cheap baggy suit and a blue polyester tie with raised paisleys. His face is wide and stern. His hair is in one piece, all pulled back and oiled into waves. That is how I first know that he is not of this earth. No human would willingly have that hair.
His eyes do not blink or move. He does not look like he is comfortable in his body.
He follows me to school. He waits on the circle at the base of the American flag, and every class I’m in he turns like the shadow on a sundial to face the windows.
He follows me home. I am petrified. In my house, I cling to rooms where people are sitting. My family starts looking at me strangely. I can see him through windows, standing across the street, staring.
He stands there through the afternoon. No one else has noticed him.
He stands there as night falls.
During dinner, he treads right up to the window, peering. I scream and back away from the table. His face is inches from the glass. His eyes are dead. He is staring at me.
Everyone else looks around the kitchen and asks me what’s wrong.
When I look out, he is back across the street, staring at us.
I ask Paul if I can sleep in his room. He says not until I fix my little bed-wetting problem, ha ha ha.
It must be some kind of supernatural servant of Tch’muchgar. That is all I can think. It must be a spirit like Chet, but working for evil instead of good. It is watching to see whether I will respond to the vampires’ letters, or whether I will just be a danger to them. It wants to see whether I go out at night, and range through the town, and find my gory prey. It stands there, just biding its time.
That night, when I can’t sleep, I can feel the Thing with the One-Piece Hair staring in at me. I can feel its line of sight shooting through the window, ricocheting off the lamp, and striking me.
I get up at about three and peek out the window.
There are a few streetlights. It is standing near one of them. Its arms are at its sides.
Its dead eyes stare at me still.
They are staring, and it waits.
Paul and I are watching the double funeral for the two teenage lovers killed in Northborough by vampires.
The national tabloids have made the story into a big morality issue as a warning to teens and hysterical parents. Their headlines are things like “NO NECKING!” WARNS NORTHBOROUGH’S NAPE-NIBBLING NOSFERATU. The funeral is on the Catholic channel during prime time.
Paul says, “I can’t believe these media buttscoops. You know, who are the real vampires here?”
I am crouched down to watch the show because the Thing with the One-Piece Hair is standing with its face pressed to the window. Its nose leaves no grease on the pane.
I am terrified, curled up into a ball so it can’t see me behind the plaid sofa. But I know it is still standing there. My parents are out, and I don’t want to be in a room without my brother.
“Are you okay?” Paul asks.
“I have a stomachache,” I say.
“You’ve been sick a lot lately,” he says.
After the commercial break, the show moves on to the psalms.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this close camera work on these people. The mother and sisters are, like, bawling their eyes out and the camera’s loving it,” says Paul.
On the screen, the father of the girl, voice cracking like a kid’s, is intoning one of the Bible readings. “In the mountains, there is a voice of mourning, crying, and wailing; it is Rachel, who weeps for her children, and will not be comforted, for they are no more.”
His voice floats through the dark forests, past the blinking radio towers on lonely hills; it floats past the empty squares and pizza joints with buzzing signs, and into the neat white