The Night Market

The vampire moved through the night market, unseen amid the crowd and the splendid distraction of its many wares. In the light from torches and oil lamps, the scent of humans and the smell of spices mingled. They tangled with his other senses. Men and women moved like stutter and song stewed together. Reds and yellows loved the light. Blues and purples teased the shadows. Black smoke danced above the flames. He moved through a staccato of words he could not decipher. And of course, the vampire sensed the roar of blood racing through veins. Somewhere between his ears and skin, it moved all around him like the wash of waves beneath the surf. He could filter it. He could allow that sound, that hunger to recede.

Although he had lived for many years beyond the mortal measure, he had never been so far from home, so completely alone. The moon watched over the Silk Road as well as the sun, and he knew that his kind lived in this land. However, he did not know them here. He had not sought them out. The vampire kept his cloak tight about him but found more comfort in the jostling crowd than he cared to admit. After all, to admit his kinship with the crowd was to admit his sin, and he fled from the thought.

The heavy smell of ripe fruit told of its long day prior in the sun. The vampire passed skewers of meat, fragrant with smoke and dripping fat onto the fire. He could not eat them. Food no longer enticed him. However, he still relished the hiss of juices as they found the coals. He saw pots of shellfish, greenish and odd in their proportions, still alive and awaiting their fate. He saw a butcher block, a golden chicken slaughtered there, blood smeared across the wood. He would never bring that blood to his lips. He had learned the Eight Precepts, the essential law of his kind, and the Third forbid the taking of animal blood. “Never the blood of beasts,” he recited. He could only talk to himself. Nobody heeded his words, even strange as they were.

Men sat at rough benches, drinking from small dark cups, the smell of fermentation all around them. They laughed together, pausing only a troubled moment as he passed. His pallor marked his difference here, but the crowd blunted the chill of his presence. He had not come to eat, had not come to hunt. Not tonight, not in this city. He angled away from the food stalls and the worst of the crowds. Here, closer to the margins, were merchants who sold all manner of worked metal. He eyed a display of knives, admiring the blades but not the handles. Wood carvers also sold their wares here, deep brown wood fashioned into broth bowls and idols, the unfamiliar gods of an unfamiliar land, or so he assumed.

He finally came to stalls devoted to clothing and sandals. He would not adopt the customs of this place. He was only passing through. However, they sold leather here too, and that was his purpose. The vampire could renew his flesh but not his garments. Nights of exile had taken their toll. He needed to patch his ragged pants or replace them, and soon. He wished to sew new ones, following the pattern of the prior pair. One of the merchants, a small and sleepy man, his brown skin deeply wrinkled and loose on his frame, did not flinch as the others did. The vampire approached.

He pinched some folded leather, cut from the hide of a cow, and found it perfectly tanned, pliable even. “How much?” he asked.

The man replied in his native tongue, his voice sleepy too. But he also held up three fingers and shook them slightly, stained fingernails facing his customer.

The vampire nodded, untying a small bag from his belt. He fished out five rough coins, simply stamped, the kind his victims carried in this land. He dropped them into the open palm of the sleepy man. “Keep the change.” He pulled the leather from the table and folded it under his arm. It was more than he needed. He would sew the remainder inside his cloak to use in future repairs.

As the vampire turned back toward the throbbing heart of the market, he heard the man offer a hoarse whisper. “Thank you. Peaceful night to you,” he said, not well but in the vampire tongue.

The vampire stopped and looked over his shoulder. The sounds of the words jolted him, the first such words in many nights. This man had clearly dealt with his brethren in the past, more than once. The vampire wanted to return to the stall and talk in broken sentences. The promise of connection tugged inside him, the weight of his exile suddenly felt. The vampire pushed down the sensation. He only dipped his head, an understated bow of respect. “And a peaceful night to you,” he replied. He hurried back into the market, its sights and sounds, the light of torches, the promise of distraction.

***

Jim Hohenbary lives and in Manhattan, KS and works at Kansas State University as the Associate Director of its honors program. He has published pieces in several different genres over the years, most notably his 2019 novel, Before the Ruins (from Blueberry Lane Books), which also features a vampire (the very same one that appears in this work of flash fiction actually).