He knew that people would look at him oddly.  It was somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic ocean, somewhere around the 4000 mile mark, that he had decided to wake from the warmth of  his cheap red wine dream and look in the mirror.  He knew what the pain in his neck was.  That was from the bite.  From the moment that she sank her teeth into his neck with a force that was at once painful and euphoric.   The rawness, the realness of the moment had overcame him, and he swiftly passed out as the bleeding trickled on to the edge of the pillow.  She had told him she was going to sink her teeth into him.  Not like in the films, when it always happens by surprise. Not this time, it wasn’t going to work like that for him.

Looking in the mirror in the cramped toilet of the aeroplane, he had no idea what the state of his upper lip would be.  It felt hard, swollen, burst.   He didn’t remember being punched, and had no allergies he could think of.  It had been decades since he had last seen a doctor.  He cleaned the sleep from his eyes, and began brushing his teeth with the minute toothbrush the airline company had generously provided passengers in cattle class with.  There had been no decent films on the entertainment system, and he had taken to the wine in an attempt the inevitable jet-lag. In truth, the alcohol was blocking his memory, and he would come to understand in time.  Of course, with hindsight, he had wanted it, just as he had wanted her.  And now, to his general bewilderment, after all this time, it had come to this.  This nonsense, this ridiculous beauty.

It was four degrees below zero in Brooklyn and the previous day’s rain was rapidly turning to ice when he stepped out of the taxi onto the street front outside the hotel.  It was one of those chain hotels, usually found by roadside stations, little by way of originality.  All pretty much the same, the bland decor and the un-moveable curtains.  The entrance to the lobby had already been gritted in advance of the expected blizzards.  As he opened the door, he noticed an empty police car in the car park across the street.  The building was small, by New York standards, the pink and blue facade reached upwards above the rail tracks, upon which ran the J Line, and this brought a certain sense of character to the ambience.  New York was a noisy city.  You need the roll and the clank of the trains to bring that authentic feel.  There wasn’t much point in coming to the city and staying at a golf resort in the Hamptons, he thought.  Inside, the lobby was minuscule, the veneer of the front desk was a plexiglass plate and the receptionist spoke through a small microphone mesh in the middle. 

With a minimum of small talk, he checked himself in, and, using the equally miniature lift, he took his bag and went up to the second floor, where, turning immediately to his left, he opened the door to room 203.  He turned on the mood lighting and threw himself down on the bed.  He turned on some football game.  It was snowing.  The benches were over-reacting to the cold, but he felt glad to be out of the cold.  Cold weather was good, but without snow, it didn’t yet feel right.  He lay back on the bed.  It was a new, good quality mattress.  He wasn’t feeling sleepy, but he had turned up the heating and his mind was beginning to wander. 

It had been ten years since he saw her last.  The only photograph he had of her was of a red haired woman on a river bank, looking for something inside a carrier bag.  He remembered her eyes; brown like bark, deep like an ocean.  He remembered her hands, small and gentle, without any blemish and very few palm lines.  He recalled how she would touch him with the grace of an artist.  When he closed his eyes he could just about hear her deep, soothing voice.  He had always thought she would make a great voice over artist.  He thought back to her clothes; quirky, idiosyncratic and completely unfashionable.  All those were clear and true.  But what was missing was her face and her body.  Later he would find out he had underestimated her height.  He had forgotten her curves and the way her breasts felt when he held her.  He had forgotten how he liked to lay his palm in the small of her back.   Thoughts like these had occupied his mind for years.  Years in which he had descended into madness and climbed back out, years in which he had poisoned his soul and his mind.  There were times his dreams of her were all that kept him alive, and now was the time for him to tell her.

He drifted off in the coziness of the hotel room.  When he awoke the first flurry of snow was beginning to fall and the hotel car park was dusted in a light sprinkling of cocaine.  The football had finished and the television news was turning to the skies and praying.  The mayor of New York was giving a press conference dressed in a padded, leather policeman’s coat.  His message was an attempt at reassurance; the city’s gritters and spreaders and salt shakers would be on full alert, nobody would be left stranded in their cars so long as they didn’t make any un-necessary journeys.  And that sort of thing.  It’ll all be okay, no matter what God what throws at us.  Empty rhetoric.  Notwithstanding of course the new networks’ seemingly indefatigable desire to undermine everything with apocalyptical prophecies, newsreaders electing themselves harbingers of impending doom. 

The traveller opened a beer.  “Fuck,” he said to himself, “There’s a “Weather Watch Xtreme” special on the television and I may not make it out of here alive.  Jesus, I only have a half bottle of Johnny Walker Black and two packets of trail mix.  Death is surely upon me.  Oh well.  Here’s to the memory, right?”  Beer and trail mix.  Mid-evening snack of champions.

The snow kept falling.  The wind picked up, and eventually the metallic screech of the J Line became less and less regular until, at around ten o’clock, it stopped altogether.  By this time, of course, all the taxis had stopped, and the municipal bus service cut.  The man in hotel room 203 drew the curtains as far as he could and ingested a few coffee grains.  She would be here soon, and he wanted to be awake when she did.  In spite of this, around about midnight he contemplated going to sleep. the man even went as far as writing out a note for her, telling her there was a bag of trail mix, bottle of whisky and a snuggle waiting for her and that she should wake him up if she wanted.  He put the note and a towel on the pillow on her side of the bed. He had consumed half the whisky, and was feeling a little overly euphoric.  Then his phone made a daft little noise and he saw that she had sent him a text.  She was stuck behind a flatbed truck and a broken down bus.  It could be some time.  So he got up and, with the television still predicting the approach of armageddon, he took a long, cold shower.  

At about one o’clock, she arrived, shivering.  He opened the door.  Her thin, fashionable lime-green glasses had steamed over and she was fumbling around, squinting to read the door numbers.  The man took her hand and lead her over to the heater.  She took off her coat and hung it in the half-sized cupboard.  Then they put their arms around each other and embraced in every sense of the word.  Her grip was strong and hearty, her hug a manifestation of ten years of separation.  There was a presence in the room now, a force so tangible the man very nearly stumbled.  He was struck by the way the colour of their eyes matched as they parted.  Maybe he was a little bit nervous too.  Ten minutes passed.  They didn’t say a word.  Didn’t have to.   They just looked and smelled and lingered.  She ran her hand between his fingers in a silent signal of support and trust and affection.  When they kissed it brought back feelings so strong they hurt.  He had flown five thousand miles and he would have walked every one of them for this moment.  Her eyes, those eyes, her eyes.

And then she spoke in a deep, calming voice.  It was all right now, the snow was outside, forgotten.  They were together.

“ I brought you christmas dinner, you dope.  Let me fix you a plate.”

And then he found himself sitting on the edge of the bed watching her tall, slim figure tearing up rocket leaves and placing them on plastic plates.  When she had emptied the tupperware boxes of their contents, he toddled off in his bare feet, down the stairs to the microwave in the lobby to heat up the two American sized portions.    He had never had lobster before.  But he didn’t say anything, he was overcome by the nostalgia and the beauty of her gesture.

Gestures.  That was what they were all about.  In his younger and more fanciful days, and having realised that there was a certain attraction between them both, he had managed to acquire a Japanese, wooden doll.  He sent it to her in an elaborately decorated shoe box.  She kept it on a shelf next to a one-eyed rag doll.  Flying to New York in the middle of winter was also a gesture.  Taking him Christmas dinner through a snowstorm was her own kind of gesture.    The tenderness with which she rubbed cream into his weather beaten hands another.  They had found a good place, a warm place, a unified sense of comfort in a world that rarely expressed anything other than mild disinterest to either of their efforts.

That night they were visited by the spectre of an obese Victorian countryman, dressed from head to toe in tweed.  He lay between them on the bed, his gargantuan frame creating a wall between them and they did not speak, nor even gaze.  The man was edgy, uncomfortable and scared.  He felt alone in a bed made for two, occupied by three.  He was the outsider, and his discomfort was tangible to her.  It pervaded her soul .  By the morning the apparition had departed and the two moved closer spiritually and physically.  They switched on the television and she laid her head on his chest.  She put his arm around her waste and placed his hand upon her breast.  He kissed her forehead with an odd mixture of tender affection and helplessness.  He lay next to her soft body, his heart and soul and mind on fire in some kind of tangible emotional furnace. The time was getting near, he felt.

They spent that day in the snowfalls of Brooklyn.  They threw snowballs at strangers, and jumped over piles of snow.  They bought lunch at a cheese shop, and bought each other new woollen hats, mis-sized and over-priced.  They imbibed brandy from a small silver hip flask she had thoughtfully placed in her handbag.  The snow was falling, bringing a lull to New York City.  The constant aggression was gone, placidity fell over tension and a communal spirit took over.  He put his arm tightly on her shoulder, she put her hand in his back pocket and squeezed.  They wandered up and down Brooklyn’s grid, passing shops, looking at the displays and passing acerbic commentary on the customers.  They kept walking up Smith Street.  They stopped outside the blue facade of a gallery, closed for the day on account of the snow.  In the window stood a stump of an oak tree, surrounded by felt leaves of gold and brown and luminous turquoise.  The leaves were scattered around seemingly at random.  In the centre of the tree trunk was a large, real ruby, and from the ruby were strung a series of concentric chains of gold and silver.  Each chain was attached to a tome of ancient, perfect leather.  Each of the books had latin or Arabic or Japanese titles in golden font.   Except one.  The book, off to the left of the display, almost that you could miss it, had a title in red.  “Phantasmagoria”.

She pulled him close and whispered in his ear.  Her brown eyes were sparkling like Tokyo in the rain.

“That one was written in blood.”

And then, without closing her eyes, she pulled him close.  She gave the traveller an Eskimo kiss. 

“Tonight’s the night.”

Walking back to the hotel, his heart slowed to the beat of a dirge and his mind was overcome by a sense of melancholic calm.  His dormant sense of self was waking, and he was fine with that.  His nubuck shoes were soaked through with the snow, and the wind was cutting in his face.  There may have been bits of snow in his beard.  That would have been cool.  The traveller had suddenly become very aware of the moment.   He had arrived in a time and place he had been searching for since the day of his birth.  A spark of electricity running through the heavens had drawn him this far, right then, a snow covered New York.  It had drawn him out of the light and into a world in which nothing else mattered.  There was no drug, no drink, no pill that could pull him away from the here and now.  Contentment, certainly.  But more.  There was a deep and rich and spiritual truth happening between this man and this woman.  Her beauty would, in conventional circles, have put her substantially out of his league.  But her soul opened her up.  A natural coming together of empathetic lovers.

Ten years ago they had first met, in an all night cafe in the west end of Glasgow. At the time the man was teaching history at a local private school.  She was  studying at the art school.  She was doing sculpture at the college, but she had taken her two dimensional art portfolio to work on.  Sketching at two in the morning.   He had been slightly drunk on whisky he had drunk in the library.  He had taken out Camus’ L’Estranger in the original French, and had stopped off in the cafe to pose.  Even though his three years of barely observed French lessons in high school were failing him badly.  He had tried the same trick with Catcher in the Rye, but put his failings down to the homicidal leanings of other readers of that particular book.  He remembered her asking about Camus, he recalled bullshitting an answer, retracting it and owning up to not understanding a word of it.  He found it odd, and worth recalling, that he immediately felt honest in her company.  Honest in the sense of not pretending to understand the book, but also in the sense of actually being able to communicate with this strange, goth American loner. 

She had been a goth back then, and the traveller - or resident as he was then - had been taken by the fact that she had chosen, wilfully, to hide her brown, brown eyes.  He also liked the idea that he couldn’t even begin to guess her age.  Across the room three nightclubbers started loutishly reading the menu.  She rolled her eyes and looked at the man with the book.  He looked up and caught her eyes, and fell headlong into ten years of intense, trans-continental introspection.

She told him later that she wanted to take him there and then, in the middle of the cafe, but that she had pulled back. It was unfair to take a man without first telling him of her intentions.  Instead, they went back together to her bedsit on Byre’s Road where they fucked prodigiously on an unwashed bed to the unmitigated sounds of The Cure. 

She had been open about her vampirism from the start. 

“I’ve been attracted to human blood since I was fifteen.  I was on a train going to San Diego, a cosplay convention.  There was this Japanese guy sitting opposite me.  He was beautiful.  He kept looking at me with this intensity.  It was like he was looking at me, and I was the end of the world, or the start of it, or something.  He was wearing a Japanese schoolboy’s uniform, but he was much older. Twenty-one, twenty-two maybe.  You need to know, I’ve kind of been around the block.  Anyway, he spoke this cute, broken English and he had this intensity about him... like you.  I wanted to know straight away where his mind was, where his thoughts were going.”

“So it was basically a shag on a train?  Classy.”

“Yeah.  But much more than that as well. That was a worthy and beautiful part of it, but we were talking too.  About spirits.  Reincarnation.  Our past lives. I kind of felt we knew each other before.  Before we met, I mean.  Does this sound like bullshit to you?”

“No,” he replied, honestly.  “But I’m not sure I understand.  I’m not taking the piss, it’s just, well, you’ll need to explain.  I’m open to these things, you know.  Definitely.”

She looked at him.  She believed him and she said so, but the traveller wasn’t convinced. 

“Definitely,” he said again.

“Well, he was kind and gentle.  One hell of a lover.  He was confident... but all of these things are not what you are asking about.  It’s difficult to explain”

The traveller listened wholeheartedly as his companion told him of her conversion to the afterlife.  She talked long and fervently of the moment when this strange, fiery Japanese man had sunk his teeth into her neck.  She described the moment when his dark eyes erupted with venomous beauty, and the sound of trumpets and the voices of the apostates she heard in that split second where she lost consciousness and slumped upon the toilet floor.  She spoke with a halting sadness of how that Japanese man, whose name she never learned, disappeared into the ethereal and never got off the train.

This pattern - meeting on a Friday night and spending the weekend in a barely controlled fog of love making, discussing gothic metaphysics and the existence of a cruel and earthly hearafter,  mixed up with avoiding contagious illness -  continued for all of two months before the end of term and her return to San Francisco to her quarterback boyfriend and to finish her degree.  They had parted on good terms, an acknowledgement of what had been and an agreement to see what would pass.  In the intervening decade she lost weight, dropped the mascara and make up altogether, dyed her hair blonde and became a California Girl for a while.  Her relationship with the college star ended when he wrecked his knee whilst high on cocaine and tumbled into an alcohol fuelled depression.  He moved to Mexico to become a rum runner and they lost touch, she said. Fed up of the lurid haze of the Golden State, she took a job working in a recording studio in Queens, where she worked as a receptionist, desperately spending most of her time attempting to convince patrons that she was in fact a fully fledged artist.

He, on the other hand, quietly continued coagulating the various histories of the Diggers, the Jacobites and the Weimar Republic to pubescent Catholic kids who responded with a convivial mix of  ambivalence and wonderment.  He and she wrote to each other constantly.  Occasionally she included a sketch of a headless horse or nefariously dressed pixie which he would put up in his office and take down whenever his students came to speak to him.  In the summer, she wrote of claustrophobia, frustration and hellish heat.  In the autumn she spoke of music, of central park and of the death of her pet dog, Travis.  Then, just before December, she wrote a simple note on black notepaper;

“I really miss you.”

And so, three days later, there they were, wrapped in each other, walking towards to the hotel, along Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, as a satanic blizzard fell from the heavens.  And it was in that hotel that, at 3.31 in the morning, with gales rattling the window, a blood-red incense candle burning and Leonard Cohen playing on the radio,  that she made the greatest gesture the final act of her life and the first act of his by plunging her perfect teeth deep into the protruding veins of his neck.  As his face was gripped in exalted exhaustion and pleasure, she felt tears falling on her cheeks, and she turned her back and faded into the splendid ever after.