By Mana
Vampirism
An exploration of human intimacy based on memories of bad hospital stays and supernatural happenings.
If you stared at the mold-splattered ceilings long enough, you’d start to see all kinds of patterns, depending on how you looked at them and when you looked at them. They always morphed and changed in the light — or otherwise absence of light — but at the end of the day, they were still the same. Always shifting, never changing.
That one right there looked like a giraffe at 9 a.m., and it shifted into a willow tree at 5 p.m., and at 2 a.m., it became the wailing face of an old man. A very old man with streaks and wrinkles and dust and soot caked within the ridges and valleys of his wrinkles.
I could’ve stared at the ceiling all day. That was enough to entertain me. I became used to the air-conditioners’ familiar chill against my face, the ones the women in the white dresses and funny hats said not to turn off or else mold would sprawl all over the walls. And when it got too cold, I’d seek refuge under my blanket that was so thin and small. I’d either have to cover myself head to toe in that paper-thin sheet and freeze like a popsicle underneath anyway, or I’d fold it in two and have it laid over my legs, where my legs would be very warm and sweaty. But then the hairs of my arms would stand on end, and a thin layer of ice would form on my arms where sweat had once been.
Normally, when people my age kick the bucket, people will falsely lament, rehearsing all the same tired old cliches and theatrics. ‘Oh, he was so young’, they’d say. Or they’d say, ‘He had his whole life ahead of him’. But believe me, if those people knew who I really was, they’d probably do away with all the theatrics and start unplugging all the cold machines hooked up to me. Maybe even smother me with my pillow, reducing me to a struggling, spasming, dying mess. And underneath the pillow, caked with spit and blood, I’d be smiling.
It wasn’t so bad, rotting away in a cold and clinical bed. I was quite acquainted with my predicament. When death comes knocking on my door, I’d swing the door open, grab him by the hand, and take him inside and make him a cup of coffee for an evening chat and a game of chess. Don’t get the wrong idea — you won’t see me outside knocking on every house, asking for one Mr. Death. I’d just stay inside and do whatever, swinging my legs and waiting for the doorbell to ring.
Then they wheeled her into my ward.
I was trying to sleep that night. I couldn’t. So I sneaked outside the ward and wandered down the air-conditioned hallways. There’s a sort of library in the hospital — though I wouldn’t like to call it a library, it was more of an eclectic collection of books stacked on 4 shelves in a small dusty room. The area that was the least dusty was the magazine rack, kept up to date at least by 2 or 3 months.
Snatching a random book off the shelf without even looking, I carried it under my arm and fled back to my ward. When I made it back though, she was already there. She slept on her bed, situated right across from mine.
I tiptoed through the darkness and placed the book under my pillow. My eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The young lady across from me looked to be sleeping very deeply, maybe dreaming wonderful dreams, maybe dreaming about nothing at all. But it was the kind of sleep that wasn’t so easy to wake up from. Not even if this whole hospital sprouted legs and skipped down the hill, bouncing us around in its belly.
She looked small in the middle of her bed — nothing more than a skeleton wrapped in skin. The mummified black hair sprawled across her pillow only made the sharp bony features of her face more noticeable. Her ears were hooked up to auditory wires connected to some sort of black device, no bigger than an office pen, that whispered sounds and music through her skull. I didn’t think much of it and made it for my bed. Next thing I knew the device fell to the floor with a tinny clang and it bounced under her bed, the black wires knotted all over the floor. Pick those up for me will you, she said to me. I picked them up, but not before putting one of those wires up to my ear to hear what it was she was listening to. Her eyes shot wide open. They floated in their sockets.
The blue waves lapped at the edges of the beach, bubbling and fizzing to a sandy froth, and when the waves came in, the wind quickly followed and cooled the thin layer of sweat on my forehead, which I wiped away with my forearm.
I slowly walked along the edge of the shore. The sand white hot against the soles of my feet, but not hot enough to warrant jumping around on your toes. In the distance, a big red thing came into view, and when I squinted, it was an umbrella — a comically large umbrella big enough to fit a dozen people, stabbed into the sand to make some sort of shade against the sun.
Underneath the shadow of the mega-umbrella, the sleepy girl sat on the sand, with her knees propped up and her arms wrapped around her legs. Bare-footed, in a sundress the colour that children use when colouring in the sun in drawing books. Her raven black hair fluttered behind her when the wind blew. She was full of colour and so animated and alive even when sitting still, looking out across the sand, her eyes fixed at a distant point beyond the straight line between the sky and the cerulean sea.
I set one foot in front of the other and began walking towards her, but no matter how much and how far I walked, I never got any closer, even when I quickened the pace — the distance between us remained static.
“That’s as far as you go,” she said.
I slowed down to a stop. Under the rays of sun, I sat on the sand, stretching my legs in front of me, and joined her in staring out at the sea. The blue water was oddly still.
“So,” I said. “Was that Weird Fishes?”
“…What?”
“Weird Fishes. What you were listening to on that player.”
There was a pause, and she said: “So what if it was?”
“Nothing, just curious.”
Her face fell to her hands. “You know, don’t you? And now as a final insult you’re trying to guilt me and make me feel even worse, is that it? That’s why you’re pointing out this shared interest in pretentious British alternative rock to humanise yourself and make yourself more relatable? And make this even harder for me and for you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Forget about it.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Just cut it, okay? Don’t torture me with fake concerns. Honestly, I’m quite surprised you’re still talking to me. I’d have expected you to start seeing red and break out into a sprint, ready to just snap my neck. Guess not. Oh well. This interaction has been fruitful. Enjoy the view while you can.”
I had no idea what she was talking about — I certainly can’t explain it in words, but I felt like I understood, but the memories have been scraped off of my skull, and all I’m left with are ghosts.
I stared out at the sea, as did her. The wind blew again.
When I woke up, I thought the men and women in white strapped me to my bed in my sleep as some sort of punishment for my nightly wanderings. I couldn’t get up. I looked down and only saw my body, the same as it has ever been: no leather straps, just the usual pyjamas.
The morning sun splattered its obnoxiously orange warmth right across my face. My bed and the window beside it were positioned in such a way that I would lie on my back with my feet as compass needles that would always point exactly south. And as the wall mounted clock dragged itself to point at 7am, somewhere, over the far-off shadows of hills, golden rays would beam across the sky, painting the clouds in its colour, chasing away the night, and my window would then act as some sort of magnifying glass, with my sleeping figure in the middle as an insignificant ant, to which the sun would materialise as some ghostly (but still very obnoxious) cheery figure that would shake me awake and tell me to stop rotting in bed all day.
I surrendered to the sun’s persistence, as I had always done. But this time was different. My joints creaked and grinded against themselves as I got off the bed. I managed to put my two feet on the floor with some effort. Has my condition really worsened that much?
The bathroom light had a hard time getting itself alight. It kicked itself, flashing alternately at half second intervals. It bathed the whole humid room in its orange incandescent glow at one split-second, and in the next the darkness consumed the empty space.
Under the diseased flickering light, I looked into the mirror. A corpse looked back into me. It wore my skin and had my eyes.
The light came back on. In the mirror the corpse was gone. It was just me now. I had lost my colour.
Even disregarding the lack of colour in myself, the uninformed could say that I was still very much alive. But the twin gaping wounds in my neck betrayed that notion. I was standing; a dead man. On the side of my neck, pus and tar coagulated and hardened around the wounds, as if an iron gauntlet had jammed its two fingers into my neck and left two holes filled with rust and disease. I tried feeling my neck to inspect the wound, but my fingers found bare, perfectly healthy skin. The wounds remained in the reflection. Either the mirror was lying, or the rot had progressed so utterly that I no longer felt any pain.
For the rest of the day, I sat on the chair next to the mummified girl and read aloud the book I had smuggled the night before. Even in her Egyptian slumber, she’d still be listening to seashell-like devices in her ear. I figured it’d be less of a bore if I had read out something new instead of her just listening to the same prerecorded audio day in day out.
When I read Poe, she found it mildly amusing. It had something to do with the quality of the writing itself that seemed carefully made so as to effortlessly roll off the tongue, preferably in a hoarse voice. She told me that she never really got into Poe’s stories when they were first published some odd 165 years ago, and she confided in me that she wished she gave him a good chance sooner.
When night came, I found her in a wheelchair. You’ll be my guide. Show me the sights and smells of this rotten corner of the world.
So I did. The world had changed a lot more than she had expected. There were all kinds of these odd small machines around. Some of them beeped, some of them hooked up to other patients, and some of them captured the spirits of humans, trapping them in time behind glass. She had a passing interest in such things, but couldn’t understand the first thing of how they worked.
Before it got too late, we went back to our beds.
The ocean wind whispered at me.
“So, you’re still alive,” she said. This time, she was wearing a sun hat made out of straw.
“It would seem.”
“I wasn’t expecting that from you. I guess you have a lot more blood in you.” She traced circles in the sand. “But back then, why didn’t you just kill me? You barely escaped with your life, so I’d think that you’d be furious, enraged. Plenty of stairwells to throw me down. Open windows on the 5th or 7th floors. Plenty of sharp things to stab with. Or you could just do it quick and simple and wrap your hands around my neck and give it a squeeze.”
“So,” she continued. “Why?”
There was a brief pause. “Because I didn’t want to?”
“Ugh. Can’t you see what I’m doing to you? I’m draining you. That’s why your neck is rotting off. If I took a few more bites out of you, I’d be up and running straight out of this place. But you won’t be coming with me. Because they’d already be zipping you up and wheeling you to the fridge downstairs with all the other bodies.”
“So what? I’m fine with that. There’s no hope for someone like me to live a normal life outside. But if I could give you my blood and let you live your life, then I’d be glad.”
“…Are you really sure about that?”
“I am.”
Lines formed between her eyebrows. “Ugh. Don’t you value your life? Trust me, you’re making a huge mistake laying down your life for an inhuman thing like me. My existence has been one of such great selfishness. Having to sap away at the ones close to me until they’re gone just so I can chase away death for just a few more decades. And when I ran out of friends, family, and started preying on nameless nobodies, the extensions shortened from years, to months, to days. Those were people. But it was easier for me to see them as such. Only now have their faces started flashing before me like a film reel.”
“And what about me? How many months would I extend?”
“Don’t suggest that.” She sighed like she was trying to release the growing lump in her throat. “I’m tired of living like this. Even if I had my fill with you, what next? I’ll have to find someone else. And if that happens, my clock would rewind and start ticking down on my life again. I’ll laugh, cry, and die, just like everyone else.”
She continued, “Even if we go with that, what would happen next? How would two patients, one bedridden, sneak through a hospital? And even if they get out, whose car are they going to steal? Can you drive?”
“Not really… No.”
“Figured as much.”
“But let’s say we do manage to get out, and we do manage to steal a car, with myself just driving very very carefully. Where would we go?”
“Hm.” There was a silence, slowly occupied by the gentle lap of ocean waves, beautiful yet unnaturally blue. “This beach. I’ve never been here before.”
“What about the sunlight? Should we try to find that comically large umbrella you’re sitting under?”
She laughed. “Don’t even try. We’ll go at night. But that’s even if we succeed, hypothetically.”
“I’ll think of something tomorrow.”
The car hummed along the highway. The good thing about automatics is that you don’t need to worry about accidentally shifting into the wrong gear and stalling as a barrelling semi with faulty brakes flattens you from behind.
Beside me, in the passenger seat, the girl slept with her head leaning on the window, mummified and encased in layers of blankets to shield her from the sunlight when the sun rises. But at the present moment, it was Mr. Moon’s shift. To my front, on the opposite side of the road, periodically a set of blaring white lights would flash by — bright eyes in the dark. The trees flanking my left and right rolled on like wallpaper.
She said that I was doing surprisingly quite well for someone who never even touched a steering wheel. Why’s that? I don’t really recall ever getting a licence. But perhaps I did get a licence before I started going to college, and I just forgot the fact? Things like that happen all the time. It could happen to you. You went to college? I guess I did. Something like that. It was related to the sciences I think, but I dropped out in the first semester. No, wait, I postponed my studies on account of my being sick. The girl asked me why I didn’t get discharged after all this time when I looked and felt quite healthy (disregarding the loss of blood and the two necrotic holes on the side of my neck). I didn’t know. It had something to do with the fact that I had to hide or disguise myself around the staff.
I took a glance at her, and saw that she was still fast asleep, before quickly refocusing on the road. It’d be a shame if we had gotten ourselves in a mangled steel wreck after all we’ve been through. I thought about her and tried to recollect all the things I knew about her. I guess she liked the same music I think I liked listening to? I knew she needed blood to continue her extended life. But did I even know this person sitting next to me? Is it right to give up my insignificant ant life to this someone so she can live for another 24 hours?
I slammed on the brakes. From behind a semi flattened us.
That morning I woke up and found that she was already gone. An empty bed lay in front of me, the blankets neatly folded, not a single crease on the sheets. In the middle a music player was placed, with the wires wrapped around it.
I didn’t try to find her.
I grabbed the thing and led myself outside, to the front door where glass doors slid open when you walked in front of it.
The sun was very bright outside. I plugged the seashells in my ears and pressed play.
Red wine and sleeping pills
help me get back to your arms.
Cheap sex and sad films
help me get where I belong.
On the day our first semester ended, I got into my car and drove around. Taking turns into this junction or making a U-turn there, I didn’t exactly know where I was going, having never gone down these roads. But somehow I felt like I’ve gone down them again and again a lifetime ago.
I parked the car under a tree and walked. I could almost taste the salt of the sea winds on my tongue. Above me, the coconut trees stood tall and swayed beneath the wind. If I wasn’t careful they might just fall on my head.
I walked along the shore, the sand white hot against my soles.
In the distance, a young lady in a bright sundress sat on the sand, basking underneath the ocean sky, taking in the sunlight through her skin. Her sun hat made from straw shielded her eyes from the sun.
She sensed my presence and turned her head to look. When our eyes met, she smiled. I’ve never seen her smile so genuinely before.
This article was brought to you by Mana of Sundry Scribes, a Malaysian writing collective. Interested? Our Discord is open to writers and readers alike.
