The Donor House: John Good Road: Twilight Memories

[k_a_webb]

Written by Elizabeth Barrette.

As soon as the doors opened for the evening, John fled outside. The air was cold and crisp. A light blanket of snow lay on the ground. More snowflakes drifted down from a partly cloudy sky. The sun had just set, leaving a murk of orange and crimson light along the horizon. Where the ruddy light touched shadows on the snow, it made them look like bloodstains.

John remembered blood on the snow. He remembered hunts, and battles, and worse things yet. The wind blew his long black hair away from his face. His thin shirt fluttered against his skin. John didn’t care about the cold, scarcely even feeling it.

He wondered, as he had wondered many times through the years, whether Pádriac had told the truth or not. Had all of John’s family really died at Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála? History called it the Battle of Wounded Knee, but John knew better. He had seen the photographs of twisted bodies frozen where they fell, warriors and women and infants all jumbled together. It hadn’t been a battle. It had been a massacre.

None of that mattered now, of course. Whether murdered or dead of old age, the people he had known were all gone by now. It had been over a century since Pádriac turned John into a vampire. He was the one and only Lakota vampire, as far as anyone knew. Pádriac had wanted to know how John would taste, had considered him to pretty to leave for dead. A stranger’s warped desire had led to this. Even if John could go back to the same place, he could never go back to his own time, his own people. His whole world was gone.

The last embers of the sun guttered and went out. The lurid shadows faded with it. The sky turned to soft blues and purples. Snow sifted down from the sky. It gathered on John’s shoulders and the folds of his clothes, where it clung, unmelting. The cold was soothing in a way. It left him just a little numb to everything.

Sometimes John wished, bitterly, that Pádriac had never found him. It would have been better to live and die alongside his family. The world had gone strange over the decades, all bright speed and babbling nonsense. It was full of wonders, but also horrors. John felt delighted and baffled and depressed by turns. The plants and animals here in Britain were so different from his home. Even the air smelled different, wetter, with a hint of mould that never quite went away.

The moon rose while John stood in the snow watching the western light slowly dim. To the east, the sky was the color of soot and charcoal with straggling clouds like clots of wool. The moon moved in and out through the clouds. Sometimes it showed only haze. Sometimes it cast stark black shadows across the glittering white snow.

John remembered the snow and the moon, remembered going hungry so that his younger relatives could have something to eat. The reservation had been a barren place compared to the richness of the open plains and the skeins of forest that followed the twisting rivers. Britain held nothing like any of it.

He held only memories of his former life. Pádriac had burned his clothes, his feathers, all his possessions. The canny old vampire had given John new things instead, just one more way to control him. But John’s spirit was as stubborn as a buffalo. He had not lain down meekly for the cavalry. He would not lay down meekly for Pádriac either, nor anyone else. If all he had were memories, still he would hold onto those until even his vampire body wore out and returned to dust.

Twilight turned to night at last, the westerly blues and purples deepening to black. Snow glimmered in the moonlight. The world was soft and dreamlike. The wind blew John’s hair across his face, then pulled it away again. He refused to cut his hair, even though it made people stare at him. Let them stare. His copper skin and strong cheekbones already set him aside from the pale, slender Brits who watched him so suspiciously. In the shadows, though, John could lose himself a little.

But not forever.

Footsteps came toward him, squeaking on the clean snow. “John?” That was Morgan. “You’ve been out here a while. Are you all right?”

He said nothing. He did not really feel like talking.

Morgan walked right up to him anyway. Living in the Donor House had worn away her early wariness of vampires. She wore a short fluffy coat that came down just to her hips, meant more for fashion than for real warmth. She shivered in her coat and jeans; John could hear her teeth chattering.

When she put her hand on his arm, it felt hot. “Jesus, John, you’re freezing,” Morgan exclaimed. She kneaded his arm. John shrugged, the motion feeling stiff under her grasp. “I mean that literally. You could freeze solid out here, standing in the snow with no coat on!”

“The cold cannot kill me,” John said.

“You know what? I don’t know that. I’m not convinced you know that either,” she said. “I’m pretty sure that cold isn’t very good for vampires any more than it is for humans, even if you couldn’t actually die from it. Or whatever.”

At almost any time in the past century, John could have wandered off and frozen himself or drowned himself or lain down in the sunlight. He hadn’t, because he was stubborn. He could not do those things so easily now.

Morgan was so warm and bright and earnest. John liked her. She didn’t treat him differently just because he was different in certain ways. She fed him willingly when he called on her once every week or two.

Morgan was smart, too. As she talked, she shuffled her feet, gradually shifting to stand upwind of him. The brisk winter breeze blew her scent in his face. She smelled of blackberries to him, so strongly that John had only to close his eyes to recall the fat black fruit swelling under a hot summer sun.

“John … come inside,” she coaxed. “It’s not good for you to be alone, especially tonight. People worry.”

What? John’s thoughts stumbled out of their accustomed track. Why would anyone worry about him? Here he was just one not-very-well-adapted vampire among many. He had no family left, no tribe, merely a handful of people he liked who perhaps liked him in return.

John turned to gaze back at the large dark shape of the Donor House, flecked with windows glowing golden from the lights inside. It was not home, but it was the closest thing he had to a home. He realized, startled, that there were faces pressed against some of those windows on the first floor.

“People do worry,” Morgan said, following his gaze. “Nick and Alice and Lacey and — well, I got to the door first, is all.” Her small hands dusted the gathered snow off of John’s clothes, leaving damp spots where her body heat melted the fragile flakes.

A tawny owl called, its mellow tu-whit, tu-whoo carrying over the whisper of wind and snow. John smiled, turning his head toward the sound. He liked owls, even if the ones here sounded different from those of his homeland. They represented wisdom. They reminded him that …

“Mitakuye oyasin,” John said softly in his native Lakota.

“What?” Morgan asked.

“We are all related,” John translated for her benefit.

Everyone and everything. Grandmother Moon and Mother Earth. Owls and the other winged ones. Human beings, the red and the white and all the rest.

He’d gotten so caught up in his memories that he’d forgotten some of the most important things. It happened to old men sometimes, and he’d lived long enough to encounter some of an elder’s challenges, even if his body was the same as when Pádriac had stolen him off the plains.

John looked at the Donor House again. He might not have a tribe anymore, or the family he grew up with — but he did have people. They cared if he wandered out in the snow. Someone would come after him.

Mitakuye oyasin. They may not know the words, but they understood the idea. They were his relatives not just within the world at large, but by choice.

“I am sorry for worrying people,” John said. “I will come in now.”

Morgan walked with him, warm and alive and smelling of blackberries.

* * *

Wounded Knee Massacre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre

The Wounded Knee Massacre occurred on December 29, 1890,^[4] near Wounded Knee Creek (Lakota: Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála) on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

Comments

[natalief.livejournal.com]

Pádriac had wanted to know how John would taste, had considered him to pretty to leave for dead.

"too".