I paused in the act of going towards the car and turned back to him.
'She goes back to Streep's,' Joe said. 'Just like I told you. And you pick up Stacey and George and Priscilla and whoever else is around if you want. But you fucking leave her off. Because I'll know if you don't.'
I wanted to say his name but I still couldn't make a sound.
Hey, Joe. What the hell.
If you have to ask, babe, you don't really want to know.
'All right, Joe,' the woman said amiably. 'I told you I'd do it your way.'
His lower lids rose up and stayed shut. Good-bye, Joe .
'Too bad you never got to drink your cognac,' the woman said to me as she put on her coat. She nodded at the snifter where it still stood on the bar. 'It's VSOP, you know.'
Night was already falling as she took me back across the river. She put on the Quicksilver Messenger Service tape for me. Have another hit. Neither of us said anything until she pulled up in front of Streep's.
'Run in and tell them I'm waiting, will you?' she asked cheerfully.
I looked over at her. 'What should I say?'
'Tell them Joe and I are having a party. They'll like that.'
'You and Joe, huh? Think you'll be able to handle such an embarrassment of riches, just the two of you?'
'Oh, there'll be a few others by the time I get back. You don't think we need all that space for just the two of us, do you?'
I shrugged. 'What do I know?'
'You know enough.' We stared at each other in the faint light from the dashboard. 'Sure you don't want to ride back? Priscilla's friend will undoubtedly have arrived by the time we get there.'
I took a deep breath. 'I don't know what she told him about me, but it wasn't even close.'
'Are you sure about that?'
'Real sure.'
She stared at me a moment longer, as though she were measuring me for something. 'Then I'll see you later, China.'
I got out of the car and went into Streep's.
After that I went home just long enough to pack my bag again while my father bellowed at me and my mother watched. I phoned Marlene from the bus station. She was out but her grandmother sounded happy to hear from me and told me to come ahead, she'd send Marlene out with the car.
So that was all. I went home even less after that, so I never saw Joe again. But I saw them. Not her, not Joe's blonde or the cop or the guy from Priscilla's apartment, but others. Apparently once you'd seen them, you couldn't not see them. They were around. Sometimes they would dive me a nod, like they knew me. I kept on trucking, got my degree, got a job, got a life, and saw them some more.
I don't see them any more frequently but no less, either. They're around. If I don't see them, I see where they've been. A lot of the same places I've been. Sometimes I don't think about them and it's like a small intermission of freedom, but it doesn't last, of course. I see them and they see me and some day they'll find the time to come for me. So far, I've survived relevance and hedonism and I'm not a yuppie. Nor my brother's keeper.
But I'm something. I was always going to be something some day. And eventually, they're going to find out what it is.
So Runs the World Away
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Caitlin R. Kiernan's short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder and Candles for Elizabeth, as well as the forthcoming From Weird and Distant Shores., and has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her multiple award-winning first novel , Silk, was published in 1998 and it was followed recently by Trilobite.
' Some time in 1995,' she reveals, 'I publicly vowed to stop writing stories about vampires for at least six years and also encouraged other writers to do the same. Though I am a great admirer of good vampire fiction, a commodity almost as scarce as hens' teeth, and although I'd written and sold a vampire novel of my own (the wisely 'suppressed', or fortunately stillborn , The Five of Cups,), I could see very little sense in fantasy writers continuing to grind out mediocre tales of bloodsucking fiends when the shelves were already haemorrhaging with the things .
' So I did stop. I wrote no new vampire stories for five years (that's almost six, I tell myself). And then I got an idea, which actually had a lot more to do with ghouls, originally; but, somehow, vampires ended up worming their way in and taking over. I suppose that's what vampires do .
Anyway, that's how I came to write 'So Runs the World Away'.
' Now, if I can only make it another five years '
A falling star for your thoughts,' she says and Gable, the girl with foil-silver eyes and teeth like the last day of winter, points at the night sky draped high above Providence and the wide Seekonk River. Night-secret New England sky, and a few miles further north you have to call it the Pawtucket River, but down here, where it laps fishy against Swan Point and the steep cemetery slopes, down here it's still the Seekonk and way over there are the orange industrial lights of Phillips-dale; Dead Girl blinks once or twice to get the taste out of her mouth, and then she follows Gable's grimy finger all the way up to heaven and there's the briefest streak of white light drawn quick across the eastern sky.
