This one evening, I watched Gilbert staring at Antonia as she sat on her stool and choked out a ballad. She wore a long canvas skirt, and her feet were crossed on the stool’s dowel. He looked at her tragic ankles – so slender, with tendons that flexed like heartstrings – and his big brown eyes moistened.
And then Sebastian arrived, flanked by two other weirdly gorgeous, unnaturally spry men with expressive eyes. Every time you would think their eyebrows couldn’t get any more expressive, or their gazes more smouldering, they’d kick it up another notch. Their eyebrows had the dramatic range of a thousand Kenneth Branaghs – maybe a thousand Branaghs per eyebrow, even. The other two smiled wan, ironic smiles at each other, while Sebastian kept his gaze fixed on the tiny trembling lips and giant mournful eyes of Antonia.
A few weeks – and a few thou worth of high-end liquor – later, both Sebastian and Gilbert began to speak to Antonia of their passion.
“A heart so grievously wounded as yours requires careful tending, my lady,” Gilbert rumbled in his deep voice. “I have strong hands, but a gentle touch, to keep you safe.” His sideburns were perfect rectangles, framing his perfectly chiseled cheekbones.
“I fear...” Antonia turned to put her guitar in its case, so the anguish on her face was hidden from view for a moment. “I fear the only thing for a condition such as mine is solitude, laced with good fellowship here at Rachel’s. But I shall cherish your friendship, Gilbert.”
Soon after, Sebastian approached Antonia, without his cronies. “My dear,” he said. “Your loveliness outshines every one of those neon beer signs. But it is your singing, your sweet sad tune, which stirs me in a way that nothing else has for decades. You must consent to be mine, or I shall have no choice but to become ever more mysterious, until I mystify even myself. Did I say that out loud? I meant, I’ll waste away. Look at my eyebrows, and you’ll see how serious I am.”
“Oh, Sebastian.” Antonia laughed, then sighed. “Had I even a sliver of a heart to give, I might well give it to you. But you speak to a hollow woman.”
Blah blah blah. This went on and on, and I had to re-order several of the single malt whiskeys, not to mention all the mid-range cognacs, and Southern Comfort.
Who can say how long this would have gone on for, if both Sebastian and Gilbert hadn’t turned up on an evening when Antonia wasn’t there? (You guessed it: The Full Moon.) The two of them started arguing about which of them deserved Antonia. Gilbert rumbled that Sebastian just wanted to use Antonia, while Sebastian said Gilbert was too much of a big ugly lug for her. Gilbert took a swing at Sebastian and missed, and that’s when I told them to take it outside.
Soon afterwards, we all tromped outside to watch. Sebastian was dancing around like Prince on a hot griddle, while Gilbert kept lashing out with his massive fists and missing. Until finally, Gilbert’s forearm caught Sebastian in the shoulder, and he went flying onto his ass. And then things got entertaining: Sebastian’s face got all tough and leathery, and fangs sprouted from his mouth. He did a somersault in mid-air, aiming a no-shadow kick at Gilbert – who raised his boulder-sized fist, so it collided with Sebastian’s face.
After that, the fight consisted of Gilbert punching Sebastian, a lot. “Stupid vampire,” Gilbert grunted. “You’re not the first bloodsucker I’ve swatted.”
By this point, Sebastian’s jaw was looking dislocated. Those expressive eyebrows were twisted with pain. “I’m not... your average... vampire,” he hissed. Gilbert brought his sledgehammer fist down onto Sebastian’s skull.
Sebastian fell to the ground, in an ungainly pile of bones. And he smiled. “The more beat up I get... the harder to kill... I get,” he rasped. And then he stood on jerky legs, his flesh peeling away.
Sebastian’s smile turned slack and distended. Instead of his usual witticisms, he said but one word: “Braiiiiiinnsss...”
Gilbert kept punching at Sebastian, but it did no good. Nothing even slowed him down. Sebastian thrashed back at Gilbert with a hideous force, and finally he hit a weak point, where Gilbert’s head met his neck – and Gilbert’s head fell, rolling to land at my feet.
Gilbert’s severed head looked up at me. “Tell Antonia... my love for her was true.” And then the head turned to stone. And so did the rest of his body, which fell into several pieces in the middle of the dark walkway.
Sebastian looked at me, and the couple other regulars who were watching. He snarled, with what remained of his mouth, “Braaaaaaaiiiiiinnsss!”
The nearest patron was Jerry Dorfenglock, who’d been coming to Rachel’s for 20 years. He had a really nice, smooth bald head, which he’d experimented with combing over and then with shaving all the way, Kojak-style, before deciding to just let it be what it was: two wings of fluffy gray hair flanking a serene dome. That noble scalp, Sebastian tore open, along with the skull beneath. Sebastian reached with both hands to scoop out poor Jerry’s gray matter, then stopped at the last moment. Instead, he leaned further down and sunk his top teeth into Jerry’s neck, draining all the blood from his body in one gulp.
A moment later, Sebastian looked away from the husk of Jerry’s body, looking more like his normal self already. “If I—” He paused to wipe his mouth. “If I eat the brains, I become more irrevocably the zombie. But if I drink the blood, I return to my magnificent vampiric self. It’s always hard to remind myself. Think of it as the blood-brain barrier between handsome rogue... and shambling fiend.” The other patron who’d been watching the fight, Lou, tried to make a break for it, but Sebastian was too fast.
I looked at the bloodless husks of my two best customers, plus the chalky pieces of poor Gilbert, then back at Sebastian – who now looked as though nothing had ever happened, except for the stains on his natty suit. I decided being casual was my best hope of coming out of this alive.
“So you’re a half-vampire, half-zombie,” I said as if I was discussing a Seinfeld rerun. “That’s something you don’t see every day, I guess.”
“It is an amusing story,” Sebastian said. “When I was a mortal, I loved a mysterious dark beauty, who grew more mysterious with every passing hour. My heart felt close to bursting for the love of her. At last, she revealed she was an ancient vampire, and offered me the chance to be her consort. She fed me her blood, and told me that if I died within twelve hours, I would become a vampire and I could join her. If I did not die, I could return to my mortal life. She left me to decide for myself. I went out to my favorite spot on the edge of Stoneflower Lake, to ponder my decision and savor my last day on Earth – for I already knew what choice I would make. But just then, a zombie climbed out of the lake bottom, where it had been terrorizing the bass, and bit me in the face. I died then and there, but as the vampire blood began to transform me into an eternal swain of darkness, so too did the zombie bite work its own magic. Now, I remain a vampire, only as long as I have a steady diet of restoring blood.”
“That’s quite a story,” I said. I was already trying to figure out what I would do with Lou and Jerry’s bodies, since I had a feeling Sebastian would regard corpse cleanup as woman’s work. “You should sell the TV movie rights.”