Unknown Vampire

5 Tartar

“Both murders may be related and the heinous Unknown Vampire killings are expected to stop and  to cease if that is so.  There is however a danger the so called Unknown Vampire is still at large Donald Quai is expected to plead guilty for though no one in the Loon ‘n’ Feather Gift Shoppe saw any of the activities or even heard the altercation as it took place due to the volume of the air conditioner and other noises in the park’s only business, there were at least eight positive identifications of Quai, one of them his wife who by state law is not required to testify against her spouse. However, anyone with any evidence about the murder that took place on the boardwalk is asked to call the Beltrami County Sheriff’s Office immediately,” the local newspaper stated in a special edition devoted to the so called “Unknown Vampire,” killings under a headline, “Vampire Arrested.”

 In the warm soapy bath, daylight waned in the northern city named after Native chieftain Shaynowishkung long since a spirit in his own right, and therefore bearer of the certain knowledge the unknown vampire had been copycatted.  Don Quai was a jackass in the real monster’s mind, a buffoon in the eyes of many when he cleverly but foolishly kept the straw in his mouth when it was well-known the real monster’s straw could not have lasted so long, needing to be removed to bite and suck and speak to Doran Johnston it’s only victim in the afternoon air under this sky in early summer in the Minnesota bog where the only supreme creature the mosquito dared compete with his bloodsucking other so some were thinking was Sasquatch gone mad.  Yes, but no sasquatch would meet the likes of Unknown and walk away without nightmare material, the monster striking fear to the very life giving muscle that pumped precious blood to the veins, arteries and capillaries known from the surgeon to the child to carry every creatures key to longevity in its substantive being.

Unknown as he became known to many was not just a man to the likes of forensic scientists and psychics alike who tried mostly in vain to see much evidence in the method of operandi to indicate the identity of any known civilized male, or female for that matter.  Unknown, the word spread fear to the inner being of learned men and woman, as well as children with too much spaghetti to have been eaten too close to bedtime.  But these were classic concerns and I digress for our creature was strictly human, if Don Quai was just human, if the rest of his victims were but human, so was he tortured, tangled and with perplexity no stranger than the odd addiction, the deviant aberration that governed his soul.  Yes, Unknown was human sort of, just as he was vampire sort of; but mostly a creature unable to truly embrace either realm in the definition of things, sometimes man, sometimes vampire he was primarily normal like most of the society he lived in shuddering at the things the monster did, but of course for an entirely different reason.  On the one hand he was secretly Unknown, and on the other he was largely Unknown as to who he was even by himself.

Therefore he rose and sat naked as the black bath water whirled down the drain until only the light skin of his feet was visible near it.  Lying next to the knife on the edge of the tub he grabbed it and laid it under the tap where the water could free the coagulants from its sharp blade as well as the mud, muck and mire that were also trapped in small amounts.  If they had found Unknown surely they would have known who and what he was, though he himself perhaps never did as he watched the process with tears in his eyes, beginning to run the bar of soap against his skin awkwardly and yet with purpose as the filthy addiction seem to disappear along with the dirt, blood, sweat and other human excrements common with great heights of human joy when a man, if he was only that, or as he might think, ‘Just that?’

 Had he been merely a man even lying naked in the mud would have been enough probably to trigger uncontrollable sexual urges, but he was not.  Had he been strictly a vampire such events would not have been needed, but he was not.  Had he been merely human the thought of being caught would have aroused fears great enough to addle his brain but he was born with a sense and in a situation that made fear irrelevant, a home difficult birth at least, and perhaps even a self-caesarean?  He was in his peculiar birth circumstance alone completely beyond the realm of ordinary human, ordinary vampire experience; he was mysterious.

He was alien to Annie Rose who would lay with him tonight if things went well.  He was unable to grasp certain concepts his Annie found profoundly acceptable to her way of thinking, a way of thinking that began with a compassion for mental deviations that were often described as illnesses, and led her to a full dose of dogma and near brainwashing into a strong adherence to the tenets of people known to be psychologically strange.  He was not able to wrap his mind around the meat of that steak sandwich like a piece of bacon did his favorite food sizzling on the grill of life, the hellish end for a completely mollified set of beasts, the bovine and the common swine or gammon carrier, domesticated. 

Unknown thought, ‘Domesticated?  How nice; if only he could be domesticated, and not defined necessarily but tamed without knowledge of his actual un-humanness and mere the goal of making him docile enough . . . well he didn’t like the direction his selection of thoughts was taking him.

 “Hun,” he said as he laid Annie Rose’s bacon wrapped sirloin on her plate and then one on his own, “Would it be a worthy goal for a woman such as you to completely domesticate a feral beast like me?”

As usual she was puzzled when he did things like that to her, and shocked to think his mind went to such places for pleasure.

Then as he sat next to her on the picnic table that was bolted to a tree to allow the couple to sit side by side and watch the waves of the lake and hear the waves of time pass in the same likeness off the large lake called Lake Bemidji, but anyway, as he sat there he smiled.

“It would, wouldn’t it?” as he started to kiss her neck suddenly fighting and urge to bite so hard as to rip open her skin and allow his teeth deeper and deeper access to the end of her life as she innocently turned her head just enough to expose her carotid to him.  He wanted to do what he should, and just allow it to pass, but it was too strong, too compelling, he had to . . . “No!” he shouted and stood for no reason causing Annie Rose to look up at him wondering what he was angry about, it was her who should have been angry in her mind’s eye.

“Domesticate someone?” she said, “Ew!  That is repulsive!”

He pretended that was it and sat down ripping open the blood red steak wrapped in bacon before him on his plate almost giggling inside as Annie Rose turned her head aside so that she did not have to see the blood in his tartar, nor the crimson drool run from the corner of his mouth to his chin; the entire reason perhaps the couple sat side by side even at their own picnic table, Unknown preoccupied as usual but this time with the pinkish way beef blood seemed to permeate a napkin as a thought began to be conceived just before he shook it out of his head.