She turned swiftly, heart pounding. A young man sat there. The lamplight outlined him against the dark bushes behind like a ring of frost around the moon. He smiled at her as a cat smiles, with secret humor. “You scared me,” she whispered fiercely. Who was this person invading her bench?
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he didn’t look it.
She recognized him then, from last night. As if he saw this he said, “We’re even now. You scared me.”
“Why should you be scared?” she demanded. “It’s you creeping up on people.”
“Why should you be?” he asked.
Zoë bristled defensively. “I don’t like evasive conversation.”
“Do you like any conversation?”
“No. I want to be alone.”
“I think you are alone.” He reached for her hand. She snatched it away and stood up. How dare he be right, then take advantage of it? He seemed surprised for a second, but then his smile deepened, and a dreamy look was on his face. “Please stay,” he said in tones soft as a lullaby. His eyes were huge, dark, and gentle. She hesitated for a moment. He seemed so understanding. Surely she could talk to him. Then her anger surfaced again. The manipulative jerk, she thought.
“I don’t know what you’re after,” she said, “but you can look for it somewhere else.” She turned and walked firmly away.
“It strikes me,” he called after her in a voice now with an edge to it, “that girls who sit alone in parks at night are the ones after something.”
She was so furious, she could have screamed. She almost turned, but no, she thought, that’s what he wants. She walked on. Her anger carried her home before she knew it. Strangely, it had made her hungry. She ate better than she had in weeks.
She hesitated once between mouthfuls with a feeling of dread. Was he weird? Would he have hurt her? No. He looked like an angel in a Renaissance painting. Could beauty hurt?
4
Simon
Simon watched the girl walk away, a cloud of anger around her. He was bemused. She had not responded correctly. He had started to moon-weave, and she had broken it. She had snapped it with anger. He was interested. He followed her.
He slipped gradually into a half state, nearer mist than form. It was easy—like dreaming, really—just let go of body and drift. His consciousness held molecules together with tendrils of thought. He blended with the shadows and became the air. She would never see. He flowed beneath trees, slid along walls, cut corners through dying autumn flowers. He always kept her in sight. She walked fast, shimmering the crisp air with her breath.
They usually came to him when his eyes softened with the moon, when he crushed his voice like velvet. They let him caress them. They tipped their heads back and drowned in the stars, while he stroked exposed throat and wallowed in conquest. Sometimes he let them go and allowed them to think it a dream. He left before they broke the spell of his eyes, to sit blinking and head-shaking in cold predawn wind. Sometimes the dark hunger awoke too strong to hold. He clenched them tight, sank fangs deep into yielding neck, and fed on the thick, hot soup of their life. He was lost in the throbbing ecstasy song of blood pumping, life spurting, until blood, horror, and life ebbed, and he abandoned the limp remnants to seek dark sleep.
He stood at the wooden gate, watching the girl enter a forest-green door with diamond windows. He trembled with desire. Lights came on in the house. He circled it, peering in windows—a peeping Tom, ecstasy denied. He inhaled details from the golden warmth he could never have: an Oriental carpet, an antique armoire, cream kitchen tiles, and a painting of bright, crazed, laughing girls. His eyes narrowed. The girls in the painting looked right at him. Just a painting, he chided, but he felt mocked, and an anger rumbled deep in his throat. The lights downstairs dimmed. A light came on above. She goes to sleep, he thought, and begrudged her rest when he had none.
He paced her garden with slinking gait, examining basement windows and garage doors. He could not enter unless invited, but he liked to know the ways in, and out, if needed. The animal was close to the surface tonight. It reminded him of when he first changed, when he roamed the woods like a beast for what seemed an eternity, mindless from shock. Threads of memory clung to him, though most was a blur. Images sparked bright at times; pictures frozen in the muted green light of the forest—savaged corpses of animals, or a gamekeeper crumpled and drained amid the fallen leaves, his head barely attached to his neck. Simon could not ever control it then, and his attack was fierce, made vicious by his own fear. It took a long time to regain the capacity to think. It took longer to leave the forest. But the forest had never left him. Tonight it echoed in him like owl cries, and pine needles rustling.
He marked his territory like a wolf, and urinated on the back-door steps. It helped a little. I know where you live, he thought.
He walked then. He walked long and far, beating the anger beneath his feet. The quiet, dream-laden suburbs gave way to the street life of the urban fringe. Here the streets pulsed with light from corner bars and pizza palaces, late-night video-game arcades, and record stores that seemed to never close. The hot boys stood on street corners, whispering promises of romance to girls in leather skirts who knew that they were lies. Groups of lonely people huddled together against the dark. He felt a kinship here. He was as separate as they amid the crowd. No one saw him. He was too much like the undernourished, ill-clad street waifs of this jangling street to catch an eye. A group of boys ran laughing down the sidewalk, one waving a shirt above his head, bare-chest drunk. Girls paraded bargain-store fashions, their bleached hair and bedroom eyes hiding the fear that they weren’t good enough. Soon the cold would force them inside, so they clutched at lost summer.
Simon drifted off the main road to the darker streets. He hummed pitch perfect a song he had gathered along the way. It was one of the angry songs he enjoyed. He beat out its driving rhythm on his thigh as he walked. Occasionally he’d sing a phrase, when he remembered the words.
He paced the uneven pavement in front of row houses with peeling paint but well-scrubbed steps. Through one uncurtained window at a corner house he saw a woman on a man’s lap in a shabby chair. They were laughing at a game show on TV. He could have stood there unnoticed for an hour. Suddenly he wanted to smash the window and scream, “Look at me!” He wanted to be noticed. He wanted people to see him. It was dangerous, this want. It was mad. But sometimes he was afraid that he didn’t exist. Now and again someone recognized what he was. They had to die. If they didn’t, well … It was foolish not to think of protecting himself. There was no one who knew him, no one to say his name.
He turned a corner and startled a dog. They cringed and growled at each other. The dog’s hackles spiked, then it whimpered and ran. Simon walked on and found a weed-choked vacant lot. Its only inhabitant was an abandoned car. He sat on a ruined wall and gazed at the moon.
“Hey, boy!” A call from the high brick wall next door. A leg was flung over, and then a scruffy youth of about sixteen pulled himself astride it.
Boy, Simon thought sarcastically. He smiled in anticipation.
“Yeah, you!” came a deeper voice. Another youth, perhaps a touch older, stepped out from behind the car. He was a big
lout in jeans and a flannel shirt like a lumberjack.
A sneering boy in a leather jacket followed him. “This is our lot,” he hissed. He carried a half-empty liquor bottle and swayed slightly. His right hand flashed silver. Simon saw he carried a knife. Simon didn’t like long pointy things. They made him nervous. He didn’t like being nervous.