Free Outsider by W. Freedreamer Tinkanesh Page A

her daughter and cried with her.
Tears of blood in vague candlelight.
     
    * * * * * * *
     
    She waded namelessly through the next decade,
loneliness, anger and resentment, her faithful companions. Wearing
black by day and night to enhance her cruelty, to avoid the sight
of blood stains on her clothes, the reminders of constant killing.
Killing to forget that even so powerful, she was powerless at
retrieving her past life.
    In the thirties she became Judith and enjoyed
preying on the bourgeoisie. It was a time of discovery. In the
forties, she emigrated to the United States of America, land of
promise and opulence. She mingled with the Italian and Irish
communities, feeding on their eagerness and fiery tempers. In the
sixties, as Jade, she got her predatory share of the sexual
revolution and welcomed the first mini-skirts. Then she started to
miss the narrowness of Europe and the old families. She traveled
back to London in time to witness the rise and fall of Punk. Early
eighties, she felt at home with the New Romantics. They were gothic
enough to “play vampire” with her. She changed her long hair for
the more attractive mane of black and white strands.
    But life as a vampire had grown stale, making
her yawn from dusk to dawn. Her daily slumbers had shrunken. She
had taken on rising earlier than the mythical Lestat de Lioncourt
and getting out of her dark retreat before dusk, skimming
Chinatown, high heels laden with natal soil. But she wouldn’t
withdraw into the ground. She had read about this onset of
depression in Anne Rice’s strangely well-documented chronicles. It
was not her time yet. But she felt bored, utterly bored. After only
a century as an undead. She felt so chillingly lonely.
    She had renamed herself Joy and started
haunting new scenes. The musical underworld crawling with drugs and
misery.
    She acquired new tastes and started to favour
indie rock. There was this one band she couldn’t help coming back
to. Two women with incredible charisma. Their name was Second Look.
She would have left after a few feedings. The band wasn’t as
underground as her usual territories, the trail of bloodless
corpses she so enjoyed leaving behind had attracted New Scotland
Yard’s attention and their D. I. Madison’s incompetent skills. She
would have left if, if only, some weirdo weirder than the usual
brand, hadn’t danced into her visual field. A lone writer with a
green mohican and Native American tattoos spilling down her
shirtsleeves and her trousers legs. An average-size and lean woman
competing for the band’s attention.
    While Sid’s shortsightedness was an added
reason for obnoxious paparazzi habits, it was an unexpected
impediment for Joy’s hypnotic stare. The creature of the night had
grown to expect human beings to be boringly predictable and wear
spectacles or contact lenses when shortsighted or longsighted.
Blind people were mistakenly safe from her predatory activities.
Ah. The writer suddenly stood out in the crowd, unbelievably tall
and attractive. An obsessive beacon. An exciting prey. Sparkling
life and adding contrast of shades and lights to Joy’s decidedly
routine existence.
    Bitter and cruel, angry and resentful, the
vampire wanted the writer’s blood more than anyone else’s. There
she was, a worthy prey. One who was not after Joy’s attention, one
who was not into buying her drinks or lighting her cigarettes. A
prey who seemed immune to her hypnotic stare…….
     
     
    INTERLUDE (By courtesy of the
author Sid Wasgo)
    CONTROL
     
    It was an accident. I swear: I never intended
to kill Sweet Jane.
     
    She was always so quiet. With such sweetness
in her eyes. When her blonde hair was not covering them, that is.
She would have made my heart melt with just one of her smiles. I
guess that’s why I picked up my camera again: to collect her
smiles, some of the greatest smiles on Earth. Yeah, ok, I’d do
anything for a woman’s smile; it’s my greatest weakness.
    With Red Reb, it was a