Joseph Schmoe, The Reluctant Vampire (A Tale of Bloody Melancholy)

By Pierce Nahigyan

Joseph is a very old vampire, or at least old by vampire standards. He doesn't play the part of the gothic undead, he doesn't revel in his bloody damnation. He just exists, and very uncomfortably. When a hip young bloodsucker starts calling for a "Red Revolution," Joseph is happy to stay out of it. But the youth's insistence that Joseph join him carries with it a none-too-subtle threat: If Joe doesn't get with the program, his undead days are numbered.

In this tale of macabre melancholy, Joseph remembers the wicked betrayal that transformed him from a man into a beast. It's been more than a century since he was mortal, but a hundred years of lonely nights have not solved his existential crisis.

~~~ Excerpt ~~~

Joseph looked dumbly at his hands. He was dressed in a sheet, his skin was pale and his hair was plastered to his face. “Where are my clothes?” he asked.

“The clothes I gave you have been disposed of. They were old, in any case.”

Joseph smiled despite himself. His eyes peered down into his hands. He could now see the tiny granules of soot and dirt hiding between the crevices of his palms, and when he curled his fingers he did not understand the glassy resilience of his fingernails. “What happened to me?”

Bevan shifted in his chair. “You were duped,” he said.

“‘Duped?’” Joseph repeated, incredulous. “I was destroyed,” he growled, feeling the ghosts of pain flit down his back.

“More than you know,” the old man said. He leaned forward and put his hands together, fixing Joseph in his gray-eyed gaze. “Your presence here proves that you were unwilling to die when death came for you. You have no doubt felt the cold presence settling upon your head. So, whether your beliefs sustain such a statement as I am about to make or not, you must accept it, or face a second death.” Bevan swallowed, and for a moment he looked pathetically old. “You are a vampire, Joseph.” He gave a cracked, awkward smile. “You have heard the legends, no doubt.”

Joseph gazed levelly at the old man. Conjectures rose up within him, contradictions, then a cold, obstinate belief that transcended thought. Reflexively, he spun his wedding band about his finger. Without his wife, without any bearing upon the life that he had lived, how could such a thing be untrue? Nothing of Joseph’s world remained with him. Nothing to cling to or cradle. Could fate be so twisted, he thought with a bittersweet smile, that he would not only be denied Emily, but his humanity as well? He stared at Bevan, not saying a word. So be it, if it were true. Reality vanished within the cloud of bubbles that stole him from his family.

“My boys could not kill you outright, though Morgan surely intended to make you a meal,” Bevan said. “Yet I put you under my protection, Joseph, which may have been your undoing. For that, I apologize. I should have allowed the boys to murder you in the forest, but I was unwilling to let such a foul act be committed before me. Yet I did not kill you, and I did not seek to have you killed. I wanted you away from my castle, to flee back to the rest of your life.” Bevan bit down on the first knuckle of his fist. “This did not sit well with the boys, who do not remember––or perhaps never knew––what it was to be human.”

“You left me with them,” Joseph said.

“They promised me––”

“The promise of monsters?” Joseph spat. But why was he angry? The thing had been done. He sighed, and fell back against the aged chair. The chair squealed back.

“You will say I am a neglectful parent, too, then? Yes... I should not have left you alone. But. You do not know the hunger, Joseph. And you will. Dear Christ, you will. Or perish.”

Joseph frowned. “Why was this done to me?”

Bevan barked a wicked laugh. “Oh, young man, that question will never be answered to your satisfaction. But, as to why you are now a monster like me and no longer a man, when Morgan realized that he could not kill you

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pierce Nahigyan
• Release date: Mar 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310460203

Pierce Nahigyan

Pierce Nahigyan is a freelance writer, editor and cartoonist. He grew up in New England and then the South, was educated in Chicago, and sort of fell into Los Angeles. Along the way he worked as a busboy, a bartender, a Sunday school teacher, toymaker, canvasser, ship’s cook, voice actor, tour guide, freelance journalist and failed novelist. A graduate of Northwestern University, Pierce holds a B.A. in Sociology and History. He lives in southern California with his groovy wife and their dog, Nymeria.

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Joseph Schmoe, The Reluctant Vampire

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© Copyright 2016, Pierce Nahigyan, All Rights Reserved

NOTICE: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

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Chapter 1

More and more often the rain was invading the city, pounding upon its gates, frightening its children indoors—forcing them thither on reluctant feet, their tiny bodies craving to dance in the splatter but their cold noses insisting otherwise—and chilling the weeds deep to their shallow roots. The rain came.

At first it had been cold and bitter, snapping at fingers, tumbling out of the high eastern hills that loomed black against the gray horizon, sifting into old women’s hair and melting unfurled newspapers. But now, now the rain was warm and subtle with its descent. It would not stop falling, save for a precious few hours of the afternoon, hours which the schmoe had not dallied in for years. Even if he could, the humidity would have been no more or less tolerable. The city had always been more or less tolerable.

The schmoe’s name was Joseph, and his mother had read the Bible. She had died. When he was a baby, Joseph had curled against the frail woman, ignorant of the world and her illness, for he knew no more than she told him.

Before bed, every night, his mother would read him her favorite stories from the old book, recounting each tale with her soft willow’s voice. But she did not merely regale the boy with the Psalms, or those parables firmly buttressed by moral fortitude. She read to him about King David fornicating with the wife of another soldier, of Adam and Eve severing God’s trust for all time. Even Samson, with his strong arms and his abundance of women, was buried beneath a tide of sin. Yet at the end, Samson’s faith had redeemed him. As did King David’s, though he was made to repent and repent and repent.

But Adam and Eve, Joseph knew, never got their happy ending. Adam lived for a very long time, nearly a millennium, and he’d had to live with his guilt for the duration of his time on Earth. Outcast from paradise, ignorant of how long his natural span would be, the first man rose every morning to the newborn son and wanted to crawl back into sleep again, or just die and be rid of himself. But God decreed murder a sin.

Joseph had always harbored such a fear: to live for so long with a memory so terrible. His family shamed him for how queerly he behaved when forced to see his grandfather in the hospital, impaled by the very machines that kept him alive––unnaturally alive. His grandfather was one-hundred and two and had served in two wars, first on the battlefield, and then sending others to it. Joseph couldn’t imagine the nightmares he must have had.

But his grandfather had no nightmares, Joseph’s mother told him. His grandfather did not dwell in the past. He lived alone in his bed and slept the past away. That was what his mother told him. And it all came back to his mother. She read him the Bible because she liked the Bible. Her son often thought that even if she hadn’t believed in God that she would still love the Bible. His mother loved to read.

The rain was picking up speed now, and pelting the rusted lids of rusted trash cans with tinny tat-tats, dribbling from above down a busted drainpipe. Everything was busted. Joseph was sitting in an alleyway, the slanted roof of some old shanty shielding him from a deluge of scat water.

The sun had set one half-hour ago. As far as he knew, he was the only one awake at this hour. He could have been out here sooner; the sun could not be seen through the thick sweater of clouds that fit over its head––it would have had to poke its shiny fingers through and pry the seams of the sky apart. A smile brushed Joseph’s face at the thought of a large, balding man with shiny glasses, sweating, trying with all his might to separate a cloud. He laughed aloud into the crooked alley, startling a pigeon that had been resting below him, managing the invisible until sound drove it to slam flying into a wall of rain. It hit the cataract and plowed through it, but Joseph was both sad and amused to see it falter and crash into the rubbish on the other side.

He thought to help dig it out, but it was over now, the calm that preceded the storm. There was a scent of incipient lightning in the alley as Joseph prepared himself.

The old woman. Her hair was still a frizzy blonde though her age was not under eighty. She wore orange sunglasses over her crinkled eyes despite the clouds and the cascades that narrowed her path. Her grocery bags bounced against her old hips but her squat footsteps did not falter. She was a tough old woman. Had Joseph not been hungry, she might have made it past without even noticing him. Except she did notice him, the young man with a whisker or two protruding from his chin, sitting cross-legged atop a garbage can. She stopped in the old alley, her yellow umbrella stem tilting back, diverting the rain behind her. The old woman stared at Joseph, and he regarded her with heavy eyes.

Hello, she said to him.

Hello, he said back.

No more words. Maybe in the absence of light her eyes were hidden from the street. But Joseph saw them. The regret that welled within him washed down his back in a current of fortified indifference. He could not help himself; a statement truer as time progressed. The apathy before sating was reflexive. Hunger was growing in him, neither the lust that preceded a kill nor the gnawing that demanded nourishment but the empty feeling of neglected fulfillment––made more painful by the foreknowledge that he would receive none. This was simply the surcease to a temporary urge, just like a jogger eased himself by urinating after a marathon. Joseph’s lip quivered.

The old woman set down her bag on the damp street and