Dead Man's Song

When he opens his eyelids Mike Sweeney does not look out through those blue eyes, and indeed those eyes are not quite blue. Not pure blue. They are blue flecked with red and the irises are rimmed with gold. Mike Sweeney does not see the water, or the steam, or the shower walls through those eyes. They are not his eyes. Mike Sweeney, as he has been, is almost completely gone now.

It is the dhampyr who sees through those eyes.

(4)

Terry bellowed in rage and lifted the golf club like an ax, standing with legs braced wide, his naked body bathed in sweat, his muscles rigid with tension as the club reached the apex of its lift, and then with a ferocious convulsion that carved definition into every muscular inch of his body he smashed the club down on the largest remaining piece. Splinters leapt up around him, adding to the dozen small cuts that bled sluggishly on his calves and feet and thighs. The glass settled quickly into stillness on the carpet, not only adding to the litter but substantially increasing the number of mocking glass surfaces. He raised the wedge again, not even remotely aware that Sarah was standing in the doorway, her face white with shock. All he saw were the thousands of splinters of that picture glass spread out in a fan-pattern on the thick blue bedroom carpet, each polished surface dispassionately reflecting his face and body. Each little sliver was a fun-house mirror, distorting blue eyes and red hair and strong limbs into feral yellow eyes, stiff reddish-brown fur, and the twisted, hulking musculature of something impossible. When his mouth opened to yell in protest, the muzzles of the myriad mirror-image mouths wrinkled to show dripping fangs. If his hand wiped angrily at the tears on his face, the reflected mockery swiped at its bestial face with a furred paw that ended in black talons. A thousand tacit accusations glared at him from the glittering debris.

“Terry! For God’s sake!”

He spun, the club still raised, glaring at her with mad eyes. “Get out!” he roared.

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” she pleaded. “Look at you. You’re bleeding!”

“Get out! Get away from me!”

She took a tentative step into the bedroom; her movements slowed by fear for him and fear of him. Until now Sarah never would have believed Terry would ever hurt her, but the closer she got to him the more she doubted. At that moment there was nothing in him that was not polluted by torment—and she did not trust that he really knew who she was. “Terry, come on now,” she soothed, holding her hands out in a gesture of nonhostility, empty palms turned toward him, half to calm, half to plead, the way you would calm a dog.

He stumbled a step back, his big feet crunching on the glass. There were smears of blood on the carpet. He pointed the club at her. “You stay away! You don’t understand!”

“I’m trying to understand, Terry! Let me help, Terry.” She kept deliberately using his name, calmly, soothingly, hoping that it would in some way anchor him, bring him back to himself.

He jabbed the head of the club at her. It was less a threatening gesture than it was a barrier for him to hide behind. Then he spun and pointed at an old armoire across the room. “It’s all her goddamned fault! She won’t leave me alone. She’s been driving me out of my goddamn mind for a month. Every day…every goddamned day!”

Sarah turned to look. The japanned armoire stood silent and alone between the twin doors to their clothes closets. Slowly, she turned back to Terry. “Who, Terry? Who is she?” She knew he was talking about Mandy, but did not know how to approach that concept.

“Her!” he snapped. “She’s blamed me all these years…all these years. But—damn it to hell, I did what I could. I was just a kid! What else could I do have done? It all happened so…fast! What could I do?” He glared with anger and hurt at the wall. “Why can’t you get that through your head?” He paused, as if listening and then picked up the conversation as if he was replying to a statement. “Well, if you don’t blame me for what happened, then why are you doing this to me? Why do you keep making me see that!” He pointed the club at the broken picture glass.

There was a looking pause and then, “Bullshit!” he snarled, but there was an ocean of doubt in his trembling voice. “He’s as dead as you are!”

Terry stood there and listened just as naturally as if someone were really speaking. Sarah watched in awed fascination, seeing his expression undergo a series of slow changes: at first his face held a challenging look, then his features went slowly blank as if he was hearing new information that was taking some thought to digest; then it was indignant disbelief that curled his lips to tight thinness; then a slowly dawning look of profound horror; and finally a sad despair that made his fall into sickness. “No,” he said, and his voice was a hoarse whisper.

“T-Terry?” Sarah ventured.

“But I’m nothing like that!” he cried, arguing with empty space. “I’m nothing like that.” Tears fell coursed down his cheeks. “I can’t be like that….”

“Terry, talk to me!” She might as well have been a million miles away.

“It’s not fair,” he mumbled. “Not fair, not fair, not fair…” Each time he repeated it his voice diminished, sounding further and further away as if somehow inside his own head Terry was moving farther away from Sarah, from the room, and from himself. It was utterly chilling to watch.

There was the faint cry of a siren in the distance.

“Not fair, not fair, not—” Abruptly he lifted his bowed head and looked again at the empty wall by the armoire. “What can I do?” A pause. “I don’t want to do that. I can keep control of it. I never gave in, you know that. I’m a good person! I’ll never be like him. I can stop it!”

Sarah took a small step forward, close enough to touch him if she dared, but she did not. Part of her mind was suddenly screaming at her to run, to get away from Terry before…Before…what? She had no idea what her instincts were trying to tell her, so she slammed the lid down on them. She watched as he reached down and picked up the largest remaining piece of glass from the Warhol lithograph, a triangular spike four inches wide at one end and tapering along eleven inches to a dagger-sharp point. Sarah’s heart seemed to freeze midbeat, but Terry held it between his fingers gingerly, not like a weapon but truly like a mirror, angling it to increase the reflective surface. Just for this moment all he seemed interested in was his reflection—the twisted reflection he apparently saw and she did not. His face was filled with a dreadful fascination, as if he no longer doubted that what he saw was completely real to him and could now, in at least a marginal way, bear to examine it, as if he now understood some of the awful answers.

A chill, like a brief icy breeze, brushed along Sarah’s side, and she turned to look, but the room was still empty, still desolate. Terry turned, too, looking in the same direction as if he, too, had felt the chill; then Sarah felt her stomach turn to ice as he addressed that spot of air from which the coldness seemed to radiate. He no longer addressed the wall by the armoire. “Is it real, then?” he asked with such crippling hurt in his voice that the sound of it broke Sarah’s heart. “Is it true?”

“Oh my God…,” she whispered, and for the first time wondered if what he was seeing was really in the room with them.

“God…no,” he pleaded, letting the glass fall from his hand. “Don’t let it be. Please God, don’t let it be like this!” More tears fell from his blueberry-colored eyes.

Sarah was weeping now, too. She reached out to touch him, but he saw her hand and jerked away from her as if she had come at him with a knife.

“Don’t touch me!” he hissed, falling over onto his hip, scrabbling and crawling desperately away from her. Red blood blossomed from several long gashes that opened as he scrambled away through the jagged litter. “Don’t touch me! Can’t you see?”

His rejection of her stabbed into her with terrible force, producing not more despair but an anger that leapt up from her broken heart and escaped through her mouth.

“Goddamn it, Terry! There’s nothing to see!”

“Yes! Look! For Christ’s sake—are you blind?” He held up another piece of glass, turning it to show her.

“No!” she snapped. “No more of that!” She stepped forward and slapped the glass out of his hand, but her angle was bad and immediately she felt a burn across her palm and looked down to see blood flood outward from her palm. She stared at it and then held her hand out angrily to Terry. “Now see, damn it! Do you want to keep this up until we cut ourselves to piece…” Her voice died abruptly in her throat, choked to silence by the look that had