"Nothing to suck."
The voice filled the room, despite being no more than an infant's - or so it seemed. The darkness hid the true identity. In fact, he imagined he was dreaming. Maybe he dreamed he was imagining. Whatever the case, he slapped his head back into the pillow as if that were the secret of sleep.
"I can't suck straight."
This time, a mistake was impossible. He sat propped against the headboard, listening with more than half an ear. In fact, even his heart had heard - beating twenty to the dozen, as it was. Yet the lungs were quiet, daring not to disrupt any possibility of silence - for which their owner yearned - with the faux pas of breath.
If only an untimely dawn would now soak the curtains in a spillage of orange light. He might have excused this mistake in the course of nature, in order to camouflage an even greater and more frightful hitch such as the voice which spoke of sucking as well as sounding as if the words themselves were syphonned up from a sump that had sucking as its second nature.
He could have felt for the light switch as second best. But manmade illumination was far from dependable. He did not know that. There was little else, however, in the midst of night. Even if the lamp broke into that yellow incontinence which was its shade's habit of casting after the dull click of the switch, it owed him nothing and, furthermore, felt no need to have truck with a ghost. He had sensed many such facts following the arrival in his new home. In any case, the ghost (or whatever it was) might be a chameleon and only the changing hues of daylight could throw up any figment of its presence...
He had no purchase on such considerations. He dabbed at the switch in his side and recognised the dull pin-click with a sigh.
"And now my teeth are cast crooked."
There, etched against the wallpaper, were two swelling tusks of black light, snagged one upon the other.
Silence was deeper than the empty space that quickly filled with a crumpled edge of cot-blanket.
Only with a blotted moon, of course, and the least tenable permutation of nature's secondary quirks, could vampires strut and stalk - freshly born from teething babies such as him.
Published 'Roisin Dubh' 1994
