JIMMY BOY: Michael S. Collins
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010We knew we were in trouble when we found out that Jimmy was a vampire.
Ok, fair enough, we knew we were in trouble a bit before that. What with the dead rising and our exams up coming, but Jimmy being a vampire was probably the straw that broke the camels back.
He looked in our direction, smiling, licking his lips. I missed the old Jimmy. Specifically the old, vegeterian Jimmy. He was nice and friendly, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. He wouldn’t hurt me! Instead he was, the same but somewhat changed, and continued to smile, drips of blood falling from his mouth. And he began to advance.
Now for a flashback, and hopefully not the one you get at the end of your life, to recall how things came to pass to come to this. We have to go back a while, not too far back to the point where we all had teething problems: that’s a bit too far back, and we have teething trouble of our at the moment anyway.
No, far back enough to be a fortnight back, when Jimmy and Smithy and me started practicing the Dark Arts.
Well, I say practicing the Dark Arts. I mean dabbling. And when I say Dark Arts, I mean reading Latin backwards. It seemed like fun. At the time. How were we to know that the whole thing could be manipulated by others? I mean, if we’d known our playful attempts to talk to the Devil would lead to mass Armageddon, do you think we’d have done it? Of course not. It was just a bit of a laugh. A gathering to scare off some of the less friendly older kids at school, and of course to get the attention of the girls. Because if anything, girls love Dark Arts. And we all love girls. Well, me and Smithy did.
So we would enter the broken window of the old derelict church – it wasn’t us who set on fire the other year, honest! - and use it as a place for circumstances. And it was nothing much, just a few dressups, a few phrases of pig Latin, nothing major. Just a lark, you know. Until the school found out.
The Headmaster, Mr Raculad, was very interested about the whole thing. He was an old, Romanian type, who stretched his Ws instead of Rs and had sleaked black hair. A man not short of strange precursions: for example, on taking the job, he banned Woodworks classes, in case anyone had an accident and was stabbed with one of the wooden stakes we used. He would also hide in his office during the rare day up here there was sunshine, would randomly transfer useless teachers to unheard of foreign schools (well, they’d enter his office and we’d never see them again), and banned the use of garlic in school dinners. All of this seemed fairly reasonable to us, and the man was very popular. More so than the last Headmaster, Mr Lamb, who disappeared very suddenly one weekend. Mr Raculad was a tall impossing figure, with an inticing stare and big, caped arms to throw over a needy students shoulder.
As you can see, he seemed like a completely trustworthy soul. So when he took interest in our activities, we were more than relieved that his first thoughts were not to tell our parents, or someone who could punish us. He didn’t. He didn’t even give us detention. No, he let us all go by Jimmy. As we sat outside the office, wondering what was to happen, Jimmy left the office and spoke to us.
“Everythings ok”, he said, and he smiled.
“Really?” I said. “You mean, we’re not in trouble.”
“No. Mr Raculad was just correcting my Latin grammar. He said we were missing something to make the whole thing that bit more effective.”
Sounded perfectly innocent at the time. Of course now you can guess what happened. He tricked us, did Mr Raculad. For the changed grammar was actually some old gothic curse to raise the dead as army of bloodsuckers. I know, I have no idea why Mr Raculad would want such a thing either. But it happened.
And Jimmy disappeared very supernaturally a few days later, and nobody cared. Nobody cared because of the undead. They were being rather pesky, walking the streets, loitering, getting in the way. Occassionally grabbing some unknown grandmother and biting her head off. A wee bit inconvenient, but since someone started it, then someone else could fix it. Someone else’s problem, unless you knew someone who had been bitten. Which was everyone. A bit of a flaw in our logic, I guess, but we’ve always been that kind of a town.
The last time we saw Jimmy, before now, he was going to meet Mr Raculad. And now here was he again, Jimmy that is, looking paler and happier and more saited than ever.
“Join us” he said. And further he advanced, as I shook off the flashback.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Smithy.
He never responded, he rarely did. He was a cypher of a boy.
Jimmy continued to advance.
“I dont think Mr Raculad is all he’s cracked to be, is he?” I said.
Jimmy shook his head. He was right on me. I racked my mind for something to say.
“God, Jimmy, you’re a right pain in the neck.”
But then I was dead, and no longer cared about the situation.
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© 2009 Michael S. Collins
Michael S Collins is a member of GSFWC (the Glasgow Strange-Fiction Writers Circle). His work has been published in several countries (including Literature E-zine websites, ad writing for Bob Furnell) and do book review for magazines such as The Fortean Times. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such as Aesthetica, Clockwise Cat, The Short Humour Site, MicroHorror, TBD, and was included in the DemonMinds anthology in 2008.
