moon_custafer | I Wrote A Thing

This isn’t a Hallowe’en story but it does have a vampire in it, so close enough for October I guess.

The vampire was likely not the first monster in the neighborhood, but his story is the oldest. The street had no name yet in those days, a decade or two after the civil war; nor did he. The stories don’t even mention how he came to America, if he shipped himself across in a coffin full of earth, or if he made the journey as a living man and turned sometime after reaching shore. At any rate, he came to the street — half dirt road, half alleyway— already a creature undead. He wasn’t pale and waxy like Bella Lugosi in the movies, but livid with decay slowed to a standstill but not before it had left a purple bloom on his skin. It was just after an early winter sundown, however, and if anybody noticed his bloated face and unsteady gate, they were too polite to comment on a stranger who’d overindulged in spirits, not as long as he didn’t swing his fists at anybody.

The vampire noted each window and doorway with his shoebutton eyes that saw everything, even as darkness and smoke gathered themselves and wrapped up the wood-and-brick buildings. There were plenty of people about to choose from and too many for him to make a move. Some of the doorways were closed to him; some, the shops, welcomed visitors. Trying to look like a casual browser, he lounged towards a two-story structure whose exterior was lettered with words like IMPORTED DRIED FRUITS and BEST SPICES.

Inside, the smell of cloves briefly overpowered the vampire’s senses. Still, he thought to himself, at least he hadn’t picked a greengrocer’s or a restaurant serving dishes containing garlic.

“I know what you want,” said the woman behind the counter.

Panic-stricken, the vampire whirled to face her, but she was already opening a drawer in one of the wooden cabinets that filled the shop. She took a bit of something and held it out to him, starting a little at the chill touch of his hand:

“Crystalized ginger? You look, if I might say so sir, as if you’re feeling unwell.” Not knowing what else to do, he accepted the piece of candied root and put it in his mouth. In the dim light, his fangs might just have been bad teeth. The ginger was hot on his tongue once the sugar dissolved-- sensations he'd scarcely remembered until that moment. “That’ll put you right,” the shopkeeper said. “Now, what can I get you?”

The vampire chewed the ginger slowly, but at last he had to swallow and reply to the inquiry. He’d planned to recite her a list of items, then take her when her back was turned to search for the harder-to-find ones, but the gratis ginger had caught him off-guard and now his conscience was uneasy, though till now he’d assumed he’d lost it along with his soul.

“Two—” he hesitated— “Two pounds of raisins,” and chuckled nervously. The woman nodded.

“Is that all?” “No, I—” What in the names of all the devils in Hell was wrong with him? The ginger, perhaps, that still warmed his insides.

“Do you need me to call a doctor for you, sir?” It was too much. How could repay such kindly concern with murder? And murder it would be, though he’d often told himself the ache for blood was a question of nourishment.

The vampire made a choice that would determine his eternity:

“It’s all right,” he gasped, stumbling back towards the entrance. “Just need some fresh air.” The shopkeeper made an equally fateful choice. She came out from behind the counter and followed him, and as she drew close the warmth of the blood beneath her skin woke what he was trying to hold at bay and he turned on his heel in the doorway of the little shop. This time she saw his fangs.

“Forgive me” he croaked, but before he could lunge for her throat the shopkeeper grabbed a large wooden scoop from the nearest binand, raising it with a sharp jerk, tossed something at the vampire. He flung one arm — he did not yet, in those days, wear a cape— across his face, but no garlic, no holy water, nothing but a shower of sesame seeds rained over him as he stood on the threshold.

The vampire blinked, and looked down at his sleeve. There were fifteen seeds clinging to the moth-eaten wool crepe, and he counted each one.

Then, of course, he had to count the rest.

The shopkeeper watched through the doorway as the vampire knelt and began making a little heap of the seeds, his lips moving silently as he counted each one. As he noticed some had flown past him, he crawled on his hands and knees onto the front stoop, then the rough wooden sidewalk and began gathering them up in the palm of one hand, turning periodically to add them to the pile on the threshold. She, for her part, gathered up her courage, and approached close enough to shut the door in her customer’s face.

He was still counting when the sun rose the following morning, but he kept to the shadows of the buildings and the light only made him blink a little. The woman came down and opened her shop for the day. She seemed a little surprised to find him still outside in the street, but merely nodded at him. Sparrows landed among the seeds and began pecking at them.

“No, you’re spoiling my count!” he wailed, only to find the shopkeeper at his elbow with a tin mug of coffee.

“Why don't you could count the sparrows, then?” she suggested as she handed him the hot drink.

“Is that a vampire?” the barrel-maker next door asked her, later that morning. “I didn’t think they came out by day.”

“Perhaps there’s still some good in him?” offered his apprentice, looking up from a piece of wood he was planing.

By the time the sun stood at noon, the vampire had counted 3,754 sesame seeds, 1,225 of which he’d had to pick out from between the wooden slats of the sidewalks, and 63 sparrows who’d eaten an unknown number of seeds. He was lurking in an alley between two buildings, the only shade available at midday, when a man came by selling bagels that he carried on a long pole. They were sprinkled with sesame, and as he watched people step up to buy them he saw some of the tiny pale seeds flake off and fall to the ground. Not to mention the seeds that disappeared into the mouths of those who ate their purchases directly.

With a groan that turned a few heads, the vampire counted the people, and then the bagels, and finally, when the seller had moved on again, the new sesame seeds scattered in the street.

As time passed the vampire wondered what kept him, if not alive, then at least out of the ground; he rarely fed, and never on the street’s residents. Perhaps drinking blood was not a necessity, but a compulsion—one replaceable by another. He was such a local fixture by now that some of the local shopkeepers had taken to asking his help with their bookkeeping. When the tailor at the end of the street offered him some new clothes, the stylish if slightly old-fashioned and foreign outfit he accepted earned him the teasing nickname of “the Count.” As for the street, well, it had a name too, now.

There is a neighborhood called Sesame Street. Like many in its city, it is a street of immigrants; and like many also, some of them have had monsters follow them from the old country, or rather the old countries, so many countries. But the unusual thing about this street is that those who live there, wherever they or their forebears hail from, all have a way with them; nobody knows if it’s this that leads them to Sesame Street, or something they learn from living there a while, but all of them are capable of talking down monsters and appealing to their better natures. Even where you wouldn’t think they have them.