To pretend that on that day - the moment before it happened - that Ishmael had had any idea what was going on, would be a lie.
A dead body, that much he realised, connecting foot to hand to their unnatural stillness and bloodlessness and silence. He'd seen dead bodies before, so that was easy enough to grasp. The first corpse he'd seen, he didn't think he had grasped - not really - because back in Liverpool the slavers had been coming back with perished cargo since the earliest days of his childhood. There had been plenty more deaths by the time he'd gone to sea himself - not slaves, not on his ships - but men and boys lost to scurvy, and then the war here after that, but Ishmael had already been desensitised at sixteen, near indifferent at the sight: his father had passed some years before - eleven years old, he'd been - and that had been a nasty slow decline, symptom on symptom of sickness that still scared Ishmael more than seeing a wall of soldiers in their blue and gold stretching out across the horizon, bayonets a-brandished.
Still, he was cavalier about the war. Cavalier about this corpse here, in so much as they had been a person once - a person no longer. He didn't care who they were, who they had been, where they had come from, none of that. All, Ishmael supposed, that he was interested in was how they had wound up here, slumped in the gutter. Whether whoever was responsible had had some particular reason for it and had fled, or if they'd come back, decide to stick around to see more people off. If they had gone, all Ishmael cared about that he was not spotted here in the gloom, looming over the body like a guilty shadow. That'd be a shame indeed, to get mixed up in another man's business.
(Less a shame, maybe, if he had anything worthwhile in his pockets.)
But Ishmael didn't get a chance to crouch down and look, barely got a chance to look up before he felt the rush of movement towards him, only rustling clothes and barely-felt footsteps. He had tried to remember details, as time unwound after that, in all these years later, but all he had were guesses, gut assumptions that may have been confounded by all the disorientation of what came next. Shorter than him, he had thought. Maybe a woman. They were cloaked; it was hard to tell.
And their identity seemed a minor detail, against the horror of what they did next, the way they lunged at him. Ishmael let out a yell. He'd expected, possibly, in the blink of an eye, that they were going to knock him out, bash him over the side of the head with the wrong end of a musket. Drag him away, maybe, or leave him here - like the corpse - in the alleyway too. But, instead, he felt a wrenching pain in his neck, the force of it arching his head sideways as though he might get away. But the pain followed, a strange shooting sharpness, hooked into him and drawing blood.
The blood should have come out in spurts and streams if he'd been stabbed there, gushing out like the fountain of water from a whale. But it wasn't - it wasn't coming out like that - because whoever it was at his neck, they were still latched there like a spider to a fly, and they had needed no more weapon than their teeth.
"What -" He gasped, hissing out air as he clenched his own teeth against the pain. The notion was slow to sink in, perhaps because it was hard to concentrate on anything but the concentrated ache, the throb of his quickened pulse that seemed to be getting slower and duller, forced into some new rhythm of relaxation. He had tried to shove them off him already, forced his arms out in front of him and failed to achieve anything against an impossible strength, so instead he had shut his eyes and grunted against the pain, rooting with one hand amongst his clothes until he found what he was looking for. His fingers snapped around the handle of it, and Ishmael drew out the knife, trying to find somehow to even the score. He'd gotten out of scrapes before -
But not scrapes like this. He had ventured the knife closer to their body, ready to fight back with it, when the thought clicked in his mind. Teeth in his neck. Drinking his blood.
If he'd grown up without his mother in the world, he might have dismissed the thought. Folktales and myths, nothing more. Vampires that roamed the earth. It sounded like a story to scare children. Only Ishmael knew better. Ishmael knew about magic, and wizards, and wands and weirder shit than could come out of the imagination. Ishmael knew there were such things as monsters, and this - this creature - wasn't human. They might look it, might be holding onto him with human hands and have run at him on human feet, but he could feel their coldness beside him, their strength against him, the way they were sapping his from him, leaving him tired and faint and light-headed. What would happen if he tried to cut into them, anyway, into deadened flesh? They'd have no blood to bleed. What good was his knife to him today?
What good was thinking to him now; and what good was a simple knife or a bayonet he didn't have or the docks he couldn't reach or a shout in an empty street or struggling against a force he couldn't fight or this feeling of fear in him, rushing hot and heady in his ears, like the blood leaving his own body? Fear wouldn't stop death in its tracks if it was coming. But he didn't care about death, he told himself, a feverish lie. He didn't. He'd never cared about death before.
But he didn't want to die.
post count: 1000 words
A dead body, that much he realised, connecting foot to hand to their unnatural stillness and bloodlessness and silence. He'd seen dead bodies before, so that was easy enough to grasp. The first corpse he'd seen, he didn't think he had grasped - not really - because back in Liverpool the slavers had been coming back with perished cargo since the earliest days of his childhood. There had been plenty more deaths by the time he'd gone to sea himself - not slaves, not on his ships - but men and boys lost to scurvy, and then the war here after that, but Ishmael had already been desensitised at sixteen, near indifferent at the sight: his father had passed some years before - eleven years old, he'd been - and that had been a nasty slow decline, symptom on symptom of sickness that still scared Ishmael more than seeing a wall of soldiers in their blue and gold stretching out across the horizon, bayonets a-brandished.
Still, he was cavalier about the war. Cavalier about this corpse here, in so much as they had been a person once - a person no longer. He didn't care who they were, who they had been, where they had come from, none of that. All, Ishmael supposed, that he was interested in was how they had wound up here, slumped in the gutter. Whether whoever was responsible had had some particular reason for it and had fled, or if they'd come back, decide to stick around to see more people off. If they had gone, all Ishmael cared about that he was not spotted here in the gloom, looming over the body like a guilty shadow. That'd be a shame indeed, to get mixed up in another man's business.
(Less a shame, maybe, if he had anything worthwhile in his pockets.)
But Ishmael didn't get a chance to crouch down and look, barely got a chance to look up before he felt the rush of movement towards him, only rustling clothes and barely-felt footsteps. He had tried to remember details, as time unwound after that, in all these years later, but all he had were guesses, gut assumptions that may have been confounded by all the disorientation of what came next. Shorter than him, he had thought. Maybe a woman. They were cloaked; it was hard to tell.
And their identity seemed a minor detail, against the horror of what they did next, the way they lunged at him. Ishmael let out a yell. He'd expected, possibly, in the blink of an eye, that they were going to knock him out, bash him over the side of the head with the wrong end of a musket. Drag him away, maybe, or leave him here - like the corpse - in the alleyway too. But, instead, he felt a wrenching pain in his neck, the force of it arching his head sideways as though he might get away. But the pain followed, a strange shooting sharpness, hooked into him and drawing blood.
The blood should have come out in spurts and streams if he'd been stabbed there, gushing out like the fountain of water from a whale. But it wasn't - it wasn't coming out like that - because whoever it was at his neck, they were still latched there like a spider to a fly, and they had needed no more weapon than their teeth.
"What -" He gasped, hissing out air as he clenched his own teeth against the pain. The notion was slow to sink in, perhaps because it was hard to concentrate on anything but the concentrated ache, the throb of his quickened pulse that seemed to be getting slower and duller, forced into some new rhythm of relaxation. He had tried to shove them off him already, forced his arms out in front of him and failed to achieve anything against an impossible strength, so instead he had shut his eyes and grunted against the pain, rooting with one hand amongst his clothes until he found what he was looking for. His fingers snapped around the handle of it, and Ishmael drew out the knife, trying to find somehow to even the score. He'd gotten out of scrapes before -
But not scrapes like this. He had ventured the knife closer to their body, ready to fight back with it, when the thought clicked in his mind. Teeth in his neck. Drinking his blood.
If he'd grown up without his mother in the world, he might have dismissed the thought. Folktales and myths, nothing more. Vampires that roamed the earth. It sounded like a story to scare children. Only Ishmael knew better. Ishmael knew about magic, and wizards, and wands and weirder shit than could come out of the imagination. Ishmael knew there were such things as monsters, and this - this creature - wasn't human. They might look it, might be holding onto him with human hands and have run at him on human feet, but he could feel their coldness beside him, their strength against him, the way they were sapping his from him, leaving him tired and faint and light-headed. What would happen if he tried to cut into them, anyway, into deadened flesh? They'd have no blood to bleed. What good was his knife to him today?
What good was thinking to him now; and what good was a simple knife or a bayonet he didn't have or the docks he couldn't reach or a shout in an empty street or struggling against a force he couldn't fight or this feeling of fear in him, rushing hot and heady in his ears, like the blood leaving his own body? Fear wouldn't stop death in its tracks if it was coming. But he didn't care about death, he told himself, a feverish lie. He didn't. He'd never cared about death before.
But he didn't want to die.
