Deficiency

SIX

He returned to the chair facing the pond and sat quietly, relaxed. The sky was clearing. A westerly wind was pushing the low out. Tomorrow would be another spectacular day. He felt reinvigorated. He always did after a good feed. Early tomorrow, right around the rising of the sun, he would be out jogging again, filling his lungs with fresh air, feeling his blood being pumped into every extremity, restoring cells, replenishing.

These country roads were wonderful for a morning run. He had noted that as soon as he had driven into the area. As always, his senses would be heightened the morning after. He would be able to smell every plant, every wildflower and hear insects crawling as well as the flapping of bird wings. The anticipation was so great, he almost felt like doing it now.

Lately, however, the wonderful after-effects of a good feed were not lasting as long as they used to last. He found his needs developing faster and his hunger growing more and more intense. He was far more impatient during the process than he remembered and barely went through any foreplay anymore. It was almost going right for the kill with no delicious preparations. The sexual aspects were nearly eliminated.

All this was evidenced by his choosing a victim too soon after the previous one and too close in actual proximity. He knew this was not intelligent, but there were forces at work in him now that were overpowering. He would admit it to no one, not that there was anyone to whom he could confide, but he was a little frightened of himself these days, frightened of his loss of control. Control over everything was what gave him a sense of himself, an identity. It provided him with his radiating self-confidence, what he thought was his attractive arrogance, the magnetism that drew women to him, often despite themselves. Few that he could recall put up much resistance, and even those that had, capitulated soon enough. Suddenly he recalled a woman back in New York City, a magazine editor who almost got away. She called his romancing condescending. She distrusted compliments and began with the assumption every man was a predator. Well, of course he was. How to disguise it well or make it look insignificant was his problem to solve. In the end he pretended to agree, to confess, and to throw himself upon her mercy. She liked that, and she remained within his reach.

So many of them had been so similar in their composition. It was often like paint by numbers, but occasionally, there was a real challenge, someone like the editor who for one reason or another had the potential to escape. None had up until now. He took pride in that and it didn't seem to matter that he had no one with whom to share it. Companionship, friendship, society itself was a vague concept, a shadow that hovered out there somewhere along with all the other shadows, none so dark and distant as the one that surrounded his birth. Once again he wondered. Did he have a birth? Did he have parents? Siblings?

Was there someone else out there who was like him? Who even knew about him?

Often when his instincts were as sharp as they were after a feed, he sensed that he was being pursued, but by what or by whom he did not know. Asleep, he would waken suddenly with a jolt and lift his head from the pillow to listen. He was like a dog, disturbed by sounds no ordinary human could hear or like a wild creature alarmed by that evasive sixth sense, that mysterious animal power mankind had lost through civilization and evolution. If it was still within them, the women especially would know to run from him. Fortunately for him, it was not, or it was too dormant to ever be awoken.

Some, however, were trying to rediscover or restore it or something akin to it. He had read about and even met people who talked about positive and negative energy forces around them. It wasn't something tangible, but they claimed they could sense it. They were right of course, but they had no idea how right they were. One woman (he could no longer remember her name or even her face) told him she deliberately avoided people who were full of negativity. They were a threat to her own happiness and well-being, she said.

For a while he thought she would sense the danger to her that was in him, but she didn't have that much ability, none of them had. They were on the right track, but they had a long way to go and in his opinion, they would never reacquire what had been lost. It was too late for them. The truth was they were becoming less and less of what they were created to be. Their technologies, their artificiality, their virtual reality, all of it was quickly turning them into just another part of the machinery they were creating. Pure beings like himself would be so rare, one could search the globe and produce only a handful, he concluded with that delicious arrogance he so enjoyed.

From what well he drew all this wisdom, he did not know, and although that didn't bother him, he was becoming increasingly concerned about the loss of some memory. He used to be able to recall events that had occurred a year or so ago, and then it became less than a year, months, until now, he was having trouble bringing up vivid recollections of events that had occurred less than six months ago. It was only after a good feed, like the one tonight, that he was able to remember what he had done in the immediate past.

He gazed over the pond into the moonlit darkness that wrapped shadows about the naked trees and wondered if he was not becoming a shadow himself. Was that his final destiny, to disappear into the night and be unable to touch, to feel, to smell, taste, or hear anything? He could almost see himself looking back at himself in this chair, looking back with a deep longing, an ache that turned into a primeval howl heard only by the wildest, yet untouched creatures that roamed the rim of civilization.

Who am I? he wondered and it occurred to him that he had not wondered or cared about that very much until just recently. Who could he ask? Who would know? The answer hung out there. He sensed it.

He turned quickly and looked back to the road that led up to the tourist house, a narrow, pitted, and cracked rope of macadam that snaked through the woods, up from this hamlet of Loch Sheldrake, another little community that went into hibernation after Labor Day with most of the shop owners drawing the curtains on their front windows and the ones who remained looking like cemetery caretakers gazing vacantly at the highway of the dead.

There was a lake, of course, one with an amusing history if he was to believe some of the old timers he had met at a local bar. They told him bodies were still being discovered under the water, bodies deposited years and years ago by ruthless gangsters who had an organization notoriously known as Murder Incorporated.

What a funny idea, he thought. Did it enjoy the benefits of a corporation? He asked one of the nearly toothless balding men if it was an S-corp or a C-corp. They looked at him as if he was crazy, and then he laughed.

"Laugh all you want," one of them said angrily, "but this is a place with history."

Okay, he thought. I'll add to your history.

He continued to stare at the road that ran by the tourist house. Someone or something was coming, he thought. It was as vague a thought as usual at first, but it grew stronger, more insistent. He took a deep breath. He wouldn't be able to remain here much longer. He would have to move on to new territory. That angered him. He didn't like feeling he was the prey, he was being pursued. He didn't like running from anything. His pride was too grand for such a concept. Everything and anything should be running from him.

Yet, the instinct to survive would not be silenced and was far more muscular than his pride. Like it or not, he would eventually obey and he would move on. Defiantly, he vowed he would stay as long as he could.

He gazed back over the pond where now the moonlight turned the surface into a yellowish white layer that looked like ice. He thought that was wonderful, but then a thin, slithering gauzelike cloud slipped between the moon and the earth and cut a shadow over the jeweled water. He wanted to shake his fist at it and scare it off. He felt that powerful, but it moved on at its own pace and left him like some ingrate raging at the world he had been given.

All this was interrupted by the real sound of an automobile crunching the gravel drive that led up to the tourist house. The police car did not have its bubble light on, but it looked ominous enough to cause him to rise and move quickly into the darkness. Was this the danger he had sensed?

He watched two patrolmen and a third man in a sports jacket and tie emerge and walk to the front entrance of the tourist house. He knew the old lady was already asleep and would not be answering the door so quickly.

He watched them knock, wait, and then try the door. It was open so they entered. He drew closer to the house, close enough to look through a side window and see the lights go on in the sitting room. The old lady wearing a dull brown robe turned to the three men and listened. Then she brought her hands to her face and the one in the sports jacket put his arm around her shoulders and guided her to the sofa.

What was going on? he wondered.