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ELEVEN

"Dream!" I said to Vincent before he could say anything else to me. We were on the road headed away from the train yard. There were no streetlamps. "I need to have a dream- like, right now. Things always happen when I have dreams. They're like bookends. It'll tell us what to do."

We had carried Garth into the library. The librarian was cordial, told us he'd set up a camp bed for Garth, and would tell him where we had gone when he woke up. Even polite men have their limits, and I wondered privately if the librarian was not a bit sick of all the trouble we had caused him tonight. Still, when I thanked him, he waved a hand airily, as if to say not to mention it, and disappeared into the recesses of the carriage.

Vincent tilted his head toward me. He wasn't looking at me directly, so I continued: "He got to me through dreams. Did you know he could do that? And he got to Garth. And he got to Bertha. If you want this over with, then we need to get ahead of him."

"My camera?" Vincent whispered.

"I kept it," I told him, and passed it from my pocket into his waiting hands. He looked, for a second, complete again.

"What are we gonna do?"

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I want to know why no one has done anything about him, if he's such a big problem. He's banned from a video store- ok, great, that's a start. But he just hit Garth with a car. He wants you dead. Why haven't you-"

"Killed him?" Vincent asked. The night was still and calm. There probably wasn't another person for miles. There would be no chance that we'd hitchhike our way out of this one. Plenty of distance left and plenty of questions to ask him, on the lonely road at the end of the world. And Vincent's voice made me feel like it was the end of the world. "I'm not a killer."

"We killed Auggie Mire." I had been preparing myself for this debate. "If you knew he was going to die, and didn't act to stop it, that's no better than murder. You realise that, don't you? Or do you just not care?" I couldn't stop the bitterness from creeping into my voice.

"I can't stop death. I can't intervene. It's not my place," Vincent said slowly. "I know you have questions. You're gonna tell me you don't understand. That's ok. It's not your place either. You should go home."

I believed him, because of course I did. But then again: "I'm not going home. We have to find Newmaker."

"What will that do?"

"It'll stop him from doing anything else. Christ, I was actually starting to like Garth. The least we can do is-"

"Get revenge? Sound the trumpets? 'And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea?'"

I thought about my dream- Newmaker gripping Auggie by the head and making him gone. Sending him into thin air. "He means me harm, too. Do you really think he'll just let me kill myself and move on?"

Vincent paused. "No."

"Then we should... I don't know. Find him? Talk to him?"

"Like you talked to the dentists, Prince Charming?"

"How did you-"

"Word travels fast. Not many of us, like. Not much to talk about."

I regained composure. "Well, sure, if you'd like. I could talk to him."

"It won't work."

"Have you ever tried?"

Vincent kept his eyes fixed on the road. "I can't move directly against him, same way he can't come for me."

"Do biblical grudges exist in your world, then?"

Vincent grinned. "Hm. Sorry that you're caught in the middle of one."

I shook my head. "No. It's fine. This I understand. It's like a book."

"Like a movie," Vincent agreed.

I went quiet for a moment then. "Tell me what to do, and I'll do it. I just want this over with." I said after a while.

"There's a service station in two miles," was all Vincent said in reply.

Lonely lamplit souls on the dead highway. I imagined hitchhiking ghosts drifting past us, waiting for cars that would never come. I imagined a carriage, helmed by a headless horseman, trundling to a stop beside us. Vincent would know him. They would shake hands and we would climb aboard. That was probably just wishful thinking on my part- we had a lot of walking left in us. It seemed to me that we would walk and walk and it would be nighttime forever. I was tired, and yet righteous. I was thinking about Moorside, and the tenants that stood up for that girl when her boyfriend returned. I was wondering if I had one last negotiation, one last niceness, in me before I went home to sleep in the bath with my wrists wide open. To be honest, the very idea of Newmaker scared me, because I knew he scared Vincent. It was like the patterns and signs I had been seeing for years. Everything in the trees, and the snow-covered ground, the desolation of the walk, gave me the gut-feeling that I wouldn't be able to rest until the Newmaker problem was resolved. Maybe it was set in stone from the moment Vincent tried to show me 'First Visit', and realised he couldn't.

"I met Dime, by the way. They seemed really upset about the tape that they sold. They were scared of you."

"They only know me by reputation, then."

"What is your reputation?"

"Camera ghoul. Mad director, I guess. People who don't know me think I'm violent 'cos of the films I make."

"I thought vampires were violent until I found out they only eat horror movies."

"Not all of 'em necessarily want to know where their food's coming from, though."

"They took us on a school trip to a meat-processing plant once, in high school. Half of the class went vegetarian after that."

"Hm."

I stared at him as we walked, still, willing him to look at me. "Auggie Mire came to visit me, afterwards."

"Hm."

"Does that happen every time?"

"People don't want to think about where their food's coming from. People don't want to think that they're dead."

"And you help them move on?"

"I told you this."

"Why? Who gave you that job?"

Vincent sighed quietly. The only reason I could tell that he had done it was because his breath streamed out in a puff of visible air against the cold. "If I shot it in a film, I would be able to tell you, I think. Maybe you'd be able to write it."

"It's a plot hole that's giving me a bit of grief at the moment, to be honest."

"Do you know why you were born?" he asked.

I couldn't find an answer.

Further and further into the night and still, not a soul had passed. I realised that it was Christmas Eve, and that didn't bother me too much. I had never been a big fan of Christmas. I had a great sense, then, of the absolute hopelessness of the world, and the man-made totems that protruded from it, war, pestilence, and famine, like radio towers, crackling with a dark energy. And then there was Vincent, mounted to the totem of death, the only pure totem. And the more I looked at him the more I realised he was like me- not a monster or a creature, but someone carried by the pulse of a world with its own unshakeable ideas. An overworked temp agent. The reaper's apprentice on work experience, taking consolation phone calls. He was just a young man with a sharp, hollow face. Bad acne. His eyes were glassy, not white. He had a bad haircut- parted into curtains. He looked tired. He looked like someone I might have run into at the library after hours while studying and wondered what course he was on. His too big clothes and stained hands and taped together boots. I realised that, like me, he would never marry, would never exert himself outside the realms of what he thought was his own private hell. He would never be remembered in a way that mattered, and that probably, I was the first quote unquote person that he had spoken with in a long time. And none of this was his fault.

Suppose we had met at university: he would be studying film. At the university's library, most of the books I took out, fiction writing and less than popular genre novels, were only a few shelves away from those on screenwriting, directors and filmic genre. We would have run into each other, or caught each other's eyes through the shelf. He would have been working nights at the volunteer-run theatre opposite the restaurant where I was waiting tables. We would have talked about normal things. Despite how much I willed this to be true, it was a sad fiction, one which was just for me, would never be published or known. In a way, we had both been dealt a sickness.

"There's a version of me," I told him, "In every short story I tried to write. I never thought it was narcissistic. I imagined them like my brothers or sisters. When I would write, I would just be checking in on them, or giving them reason. Giving them parts of the life I thought I wanted, y'know, as like... gifts."

"I stopped filming myself," Vincent told me, "when I became what I am now. Vincent Vulture. At the time, I was making little tape versions of me as way-markers."

"But do you think they're real? Do you think there's other you's and other me's."

"Without a doubt."

"Do you like being this version?"

"... I would've been studying film at uni. I would've worked at a theatre. Not a chain one- smaller one. I'd probably have been happy enough. But I like what I am now."

"Because there's no other choice?"

"No. Because it makes sense, narratively-speaking. I can't see the bigger picture, but I'm fine enough playing a small part in it. There's a reason for all of this."

I looked at him sadly: "I can't see one. I'm still going to die- my life's a complete waste. I've been terrified for years, rotting away, and now I have to kill myself just to stop it all. And I've done all this: found out about zombies and places with more than one entrance and ghosts, and I've liaised on behalf of vampires and aided camera ghouls and no one will ever know because all of that will die with me. I'm mad- it would have made a good book, y'know? But no one will ever find out."

"Half of the best stories in the world have never been written," Vincent said.

We approached the service station. Vincent bought us both sandwiches from the kiosk. I was ravenous and couldn't find it in me to care whether I would be sick later, so bolted down the food. While I was eating, Vincent went back to the kiosk and returned with a packet of sleeping pills.

"You're going to have a dream..." he began. "You might have noticed, but people like us tend to keep records of things that never happened. Bertha stocks tapes that never made it to their final cut. I don't know much about the library, but I'd imagine it's the same. Unpublished stuff. My films are for memory- yes, this happened, and someone cared enough to watch it. Ghosts everywhere. Witches and vampires recycle trash, what people call trash anyway. They can get meaning from it- they eat or make power. Newmaker has no patience for ghosts. He would like it better if these things never happened. If there was no record. If they never existed in the first place. He doesn't catalogue. He only destroys. Smashing tapes and burning books. Even dentists and doom-heads keep trinkets, but Newmaker leaves black holes. He knows you now, so when you die, he'll take you too. I'm not sure how he does it. No one is- that's why we're so scared of him. But if he had it his way, he'd take your tape and get rid of it. Not just an unpublished story, but an unwritten one. Do you understand. He erases. He wants to forget."

I nodded. "Vincent," I said quietly, thinking of the best way to put it. "After Auggie... I deleted all the footage you had of me. It's gone."

"I know. I backed it up. There's a copy somewhere," he scrunched his face up and began to rustle about in his satchel, but I stopped him.

"I believe you."

"But do you understand? This can't go on. There's a reason for ghosts. He leaves empty spaces. He can't go on."

Vincent uncapped the first sleeping pill. I took it dry. The second one, he fed me. He gave me a grateful look. I thought of crop-circles and haunted houses: evidence for spectacular things that had once happened and now were no more, leaving only absence and decay. For a moment, I thought that maybe, once upon a time, an angel had possessed Vincent, and then died inside of him, making him what he was. That he was nothing but empty- a tombstone, a scorch-mark. But I recognised that these weren't my thoughts. They were in my head, yes, but they weren't mine. I was falling fast asleep, out there on the stoop, in the cold beside the service station, and Newmaker was close by. My head was resting on Vincent's shoulder.

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