1. The Playroom

"Ever notice the neat way that bones are stuffed with flesh? It doesn't simply hang there; every crevice and joint and hole, filled with pus. And you know, after this fellow decays" -- (he kicked the splintered rag-ball on the floor) -- "there'll be others just waiting to take his place."

I'd heard tangents like this before. "I'm tired, shut up, go back to your tombs, or whatever. I'm going to bed."

"But you always say you want to hear about what I've been doing lately. I've been killing."

"Shut up."

His expression turned ugly. Scary. "Lisssssen, my time with you won't always be, ugh, wine and roses." A sudden move. I backed up. "So then tell me about your day, your brief tenuous blot on the earth, a wage-slave, a bone-slave, and see it it isn't me that's disgusted, Food-For-Worms."

I couldn't help it, nervous giggles choked me; it'd been my favorite rhyme as a kid. "The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, da-da-da-diddily-da-da, da-da..."

It broke his temper, his features relaxed. But maybe it wasn't really funny. In the light of a bare bulb there was a dead thing on the floor at his feet. I felt ill and leaned against the cold cellar wall. "Uh, time to go."
---
I slept upstairs in his house that night and dreamt of his leftovers rotting one floor beneath me. Up until the show-and-tell in the basement the evening had been swell, all talk and tease. I might have gotten drunk. I woke up with small puncture wounds on one little finger, and didn't give it a second thought.

After all, my life is covered with bandages.

3. Playtime's Over

Then there was the time I listened to him rave in an emergency room while his dinner died ecstatic upon a stretcher, to the dismay of internists and nurses up and down the hall. I was driving that night and had watched it happen (visible yes in the rear-view mirror.) Later he had studied his meal, a broken man bleeding across his lap all the way to the hospital.

"The promise of evil is this:" -- his voice absorbed and flattened by the waiting room linoleum -- "Give up everyone but yourself and I will show you Wonderful Things, answers to mysteries. Like Faust you will strive alone in the world til unholy love controls you. Care about none but yourself and you'll know at last the secret of death -- the foremost being that death is universally private. Believe only in your ability to experience death in your own way, and you'll never fear it again. My gift."

-----
Weeks later he said that he had also whispered those same words to the dying man, and that was why the mortal left life with a smile.

What crap.

5. Redemption

"I need a confessor, I need a confessor!" -- he was shouting wildly and I had to know why. "Because oh because because (giggle) I need a confessor because I've discovered the secret of inner peace for immortals..."

"Yes?"

His grip relaxed upon my arms so suddenly that I might have been standing before another, new creature; hysteria had passed his face. "It's simple physics: unburden yourself of your sins -- feed them to another -- hire a whore, betray a friend -- it doesn't matter. When the energy of your everyday murders enters another, you become free, free --

...free to go out and do it again."

This was while he was still frothing pink after some feast, probably upon one of his... confessors.

I said "honey, there are generations-old religions based on stuff like that. Don't validate them. Keep and swallow your sins, with each bite of mortal man."
---
So I only had myself to blame. Later I should have closed my eyes but I love to see the moonlight shining on sharp teeth.

Moonlight didn't make bleeding any more, uh, romantic, however...

Rain City continues...