Kev the Vampire

by Phillip Donnelly

Chapter 6 : Revelation

Kev the Vampire synopsis

‘The blood is the life! The blood is the life!’ That is all the mysterious Patient K would say at first. Dr. Mac Pherson gradually pieces together the story of K’s life: his gruesome school days at the Holy Bleeding Pelican; his drug- and alcohol-induced visions; his wars with Social Welfare zombies, and his attempts to use his meagre housing allowance to rent a castle. Dr. Mac Pherson learns of K’s romantic misadventures as a dishwasher in Bavaria and how comically difficult life can be for the quixotic would-be vampire in the 21st century.

(K.’s Drug Diary)

Launch: Major Kev to Mind Control. Major Kev to Mind Control. Took my protein pill and now this diary’s on. Placed tincture under tongue, bit into it, felt burning sensation in mouth. Nothing else to report. Kev O’Donghaile is still blue and wonders what the tincture will do.

Launch + 10: Though Salvia’s passed into my blood, I’m feeling pretty still. And I hope my blood knows which way to go. Tell my veins I love them very much — they know.

Launch + 11: This is Major Kev to Ground Control. I’m stepping through the door, and my body feels very different today. Stomach floating in a most peculiar way.

Kicked a couple of times. The kick inside. Must be what it’s like to be pregnant. Kicked from the inside out. What if baby was a thug and kicked you to death? Psycho-killer foetus. You could get your own back and eat it post mortem. Feed us on foetus, o minister of wormly grace, o maggot moghul. The shrieking of nothing is killing.

And here womb I sitting in my bedroom, far above the world.

Launch + 15: Major Kev to Birth Control. I’m pregnant! Salvia Salvinorum has put one in my oven. Alert CIA to militant feminist conspiracy to impregnate males. Foetus is floating in salvia placenta, housed in a salvinorum womb.

Get a message to the Action Man: Salvia saliva. Saliva semen.

And yet... I’m happy and I hope my baby is happy too.

Launch + 20: Room starting to look very strange now.

Black the new white it flicks in synthesis, and... so many shades of noir nothingness... And colours are rivers that run from white wishfulness...

I am the room and the room is me. I am in camera, in situ. We are one, disassociating and dissolving into ourselves.

And the pen, and the pen. Is this a dagger I see before me, the nib toward the paper? Scratching, scratching; scratching its way into a semi-colon universe.

Colon: the universe emerged from God’s colon; and the semi-colon; the semi-colon is mankind; and the comma, the comma is life. But God is dead. Dead as a full stop.

Or is life the colon and death the end of the defecatory process? Hell is a toilet bowl and heaven a turd flying skyward. Life is nothing more than a seventy-year journey through a colon. Eureka Turd! Giggle gestalt. Zany zeitgeist for Zippy.

Launch + 40: Major Kev to Ground Control. Alert all astronauts to the danger of mirrors and duplicitous nature of sheets. Should not have taken sheet off mirror but it kept asking to lie on the bed and go to sleep. Sheet said it missed its home.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the freakiest of them all?

Mirror man has placed an aura around my head. How can I get haircut now? Face is all out of shape: eyes too big; nose too long and starting to attract invisible mucoid ether flies; twisted mouth and rotten teeth are threatening to eat my own face.

Launch + 50: Major Kev to Ground Control. I want an axe to break the mirror. I wanna come down right now.

Paint is running down walls and the lakes of anti-black will soon breach the dam of the floor.

Went downstairs but TV is melting. How am I going to explain this to my mother?

‘Sorry, mum. I melted the TV. And sorry about the floor, too; it’s not flat anymore. A floor of hillocks from a king of shreds and patches. Welcome to Teletubby Land, the Gothic Quarter.

‘And yes, all the chairs are bendy now, and they’re developing the power of speech. I spoke to one and he felt oppressed. He said people keep sitting on him. He feels used and much sat-upon.’

Launch + 60: Major Kev to Ground Control. It’s time to leave the capsule. I must go to the place where there is only silence and RIPing peace. Rip this experience to the hard disc of death. Glasnevin Cemetry: it’s so good no-one ever wants to leave, celebrity corpses included. Oh gloomy Glasnevin: grant me asylum from this mutating furniture!

Launch + infinity I’ve lost all sense of time rather careless of me or maybe time lost me me time me time time me time me who knows where am I and how did I get here and why and why and why are these words dancing across the page like something out of riverdance dancing l legs and dotted i heads perhaps I could dance here here and now Irish dancing in an Irish cemetery for Irish ghouls and the ghost of Parnell is shagging Kitty O’Shea and the earth moves in a dead country dead and gone dead and gone and the moon is full full of angels gloating in androgynous harmony angels have got no funny bits and thats why they never laugh

whats that flying above me

a bat abat abattabat abattabattaboomboom asingasanga sungsung abat a bat and the mist is rising and theres something in the mist a foggy fellows in the trees hes coming hes coming hes going

stay wounded spirit ill follow thee eye will follow D.

[illegible entry]

the blood is the life the blood is the life i am the heir i am the son the son of the sunshy i am dracula the last of the dracule the last of an ancient race a thirsty race the suckers of blood not semen jugular piercers are we life stealers from the dawn of time

not dead but gone before here no more here no more but from the ashes to ashes we will to rise again phoenix phalangists we fly to life once more

every bird needs two wings to be airborne and born in air and and a mission a mission in the mist unfolded unto me i have a vision of the future chum a quest to find an unholy grail for two wings must beat two hearts

elizabetha i must find my dark lord’s dark lady of seditious sonnets elizabetha immortal beloved in thy still heart shall I beat life and in this act make my powers manifest and manifest my destiny till then i am but a spirit that steers a puny mortal body

but when we are joined no priest nor man may put our union asunder and then to rule the world in endless night in endless night follow sweet delight some are born to and some must die for the blood is the life the blood is the life

salvia salvation

(End of Drug Diary)

* * *

The diary entry stops here, but there are also several drawings of fangs, bats and vampires; and the name ‘Elizabetha’ is written over and over in the shape resembling a Orthodox crucifix, crossing on the ‘i’.

Apart from this diary record, what transpired that night is still unknown. Following the ‘revelation’, K.’s mind was consumed by the vampire fantasy, and he no longer had any appreciation of an external reality independent of these delusions and hallucinations.

For example, he actually recalls travelling home in the form of a bat, his black wings flapping above the housing estate, his flight made difficult by his heavy cargo, with one claw clutching the diary and the other the pen. He remembers entering his home through an open window; and in his mind, he hung in bat form from the lampshade in his bedroom all through the following day, plotting silently.

His first task was to secure independent accommodation, since he felt that his parents, who were due to return from a month-long holiday at the end of the week, might object to sharing their abode with a creature of the night, and he feared they might also object to his recent redecoration of his bedroom. Kev the Vampire and the Dracule within him needed to spread their bat wings.

To be continued...