Parallel World

Chapter 23

"I've meant to ask you for a long time... What's it like to look at food knowing you'll never eat it again?" Chase asked. We were meeting in a cafe today.

"I feel nothing. I don't see it as food."

"How do you see it then?"

"As something of no interest to me. What food don't you like?"

"Fish fingers," he fired back.

"Right, imagine you have fish fingers in front of you instead of those fries. You wouldn't touch them, would you?"

"Well, not normally, no. However, if I were starving and there wouldn't be anything else available I'd probably eat them."

I chuckled and rested my chin in my hand.

"OK, a different example then. Imagine you have pebbles on your plate. Would you eat them?"

Now it was his turn to chuckle.

"Is that how you see food? Pebbles?"

"No, as I said earlier I see human food as something of no interest to me. I don't miss anything. When I was still a human I loved plum pudding. After my transformation I started to perceive it as a thing. It looks nice but I've never been tempted to try and feel its taste again."

Chase tried to imagine that but couldn't and continued to tuck into his French fries.

"By the way, when is the person we're supposed to meet going to turn up?" he asked.

"She should be here any minute," I said and looked at the door. Sure enough, I saw Meghan coming.

She slid into one of the seats and seemed totally relaxed. I doubted Meghan was going to apologise for being late.

"Are you ready?" she asked. Her eyes lit up in excitement.

                                                                                            xxx

"Welcome to my humble abode," Meghan said as she opened the front door.

Humble, yeah, sure. The two-storey house was massive and so was the garden. It looked smaller from the outside, though. This is where Meghan had grown up and, until fairly recently, she lived here with her parents and brothers. Her parents were now retired and lived in Vermont. As for her five brothers, one by one Meghan had persuaded them to move out. She totally enjoyed having all this space for herself.

Meghan showed us her office. The room was split-level and the walls were covered in bookshelves, floor to ceiling. Most of the books were old and were either ancestor diaries or works of other vampire hunters. I had been here many times but the sight of the many books still took my breath away. What tremendous labour had gone into gathering all this information!

Megan walked up to one of the desks and took her foil. She lifted it up in the air, pretending to face an invisible enemy, and waved it a few times.

"My brothers work day and night so that I can focus on what I love most. Isn't that great?"

The truth was a bit more complex than that. Yes, there was an unwritten law in Meghan's family requiring that other family members subsidise the vampire hunter so that they could devote all their time and energy to the job. However, it didn't mean that Meghan's brothers had to work crazy hours in any job that was available. Hard working and keen to take risks, they had done pretty well for themselves. By the way, at the moment it looked like Meghan might be the last of the vampire hunters as there was no next generation. Meghan's parents couldn't understand how come they had six children but no grandchildren. Meghan usually said she's too busy to have kids and advised them to speak to her brothers who, in turn, came up with all sorts of excuses.