| ...Still I Have the Warmth of the Sun By Wwolfe |
| Disclaimer: Characters and situations related to BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER are the property of others. No copyright infringement is intended or implied. But it won't matter if you sue, because Wwolfe isn't some kid that'll fold like a house of cards, he's the legal counsel for the DarkSide, the Devil's Mouthpiece, the real lawyer from Hell. So go ahead. Do your worst. If you dare. Bwa Ha Ha! Archive- Please email request. Feedback- Absolutely. ******************* It looked like a ship hidden in a cove. The prow, curving gracefully out from the cliff wall, and the mast rising up above the sand. Or, it looked like an old-style diner, plunked down incongruously on a beach by a Southern California cousin of Dorothy's cyclone. Oz stared at it, puzzled by its placement a stone's throw across Pacific Coast Highway from the sands of Malibu. Why was this building here? Who built it, and what for? Oz didn't know. But he did know that an empty building with a roof was a good place to sleep, and with the sun setting and the early evening winds whipping off the ocean water, he switched off the van's ignition and set the emergency brake. As his shoes scrunched across the sand, he thought of the many places he'd seen during his wanderings. His departure from Sunnydale had been like the break in a game of pool: the fact of his nature, and of Willow's choice, had slammed into him and he had gone caroming wildly across the land. He had not yet found a pocket to settle in, and he had no expectations that this odd architectural non sequitur would be that place. In his mind, he pictured his van, running down the road - from Barstow, to Lone Pine, from Twenty Nine Palms to Death Valley, from Salinas to the Sierra Madres - and again he thought of the title of Robert Johnson's old blues song, "Hellhound On My Trail." Except in his case, Oz understood, the hellhound was in his van, sitting behind the wheel. Oz pitched his sleeping bag on what seemed to be a stage, located at the far end of the one large room that filled the interior of the building. There he was sheltered from the wind that whistled through the gaping spaces left where large picture windows had once been, along the ocean-side of the building. As he lay on his back with an arm crooked behind his head, he stared at the tattered shards and relics hanging on the walls: two dirty-white, ring-shaped life buoys above a shattered mirror behind a long bar that curved around most of the cliff-side of the oval-shaped room. Dusty bottles sat on shelves in front of the mirror. On the wall opposite the stage, two mold-covered surfboards were crossed like swords on the wall of a medieval castle. To their right, a faded poster dangled from one thumbtack stuck through its upper right corner. "Big Battle of the Bands!! The Challengers Vs. The Ramrods!! Be There or Be Square!!!", it announced. The children who danced to those bands were probably grandparents now, thought Oz, as he drifted off to sleep. --------------------------------------------------- Oz awoke to music that drifted off the walls and high ceilings of the room. "What good is the dawn that grows into day? The sunset at night, or living this way? Still I have the warmth of the sun Within me tonight..." Oz saw the transistor radio sitting on the bar. The sound was tinny, but the natural acoustics of the room lent an echo that made the Beach Boys sound like a band of ghosts, summoning the spirits of the young people who had danced in this room so long ago. Propped against the far end of the stage was a surfboard - a behemoth of a board, nearly ten feet in length, and made of dark brown wood. And standing next to the surfboard was a young man Oz presumed to be its owner. He wore baggy shorts and sandals, and nothing else. His skin, which still dripped water from the Pacific, had been tanned to a perfectly even shade of bronze, and his wet hair had been bleached blond by the California sun. As the young man took a step forward into the moonlight shining through the empty picture window, Oz could see that the yellow of his hair nearly matched the yellow of his eyes. ---------------------------------------------------- Oz no longer liked his life. That was an unwanted, rock-hard understanding to reach, but it was perhaps the only real accomplishment he could cite for all his time spent in ceaseless running. That, and its companion: he did not expect to ever like his life again. Recognizing those truths, however, and living with them, was different from hoping that his life would end. And the end of his life was what now stood not twenty feet from him, one tanned hand resting easily on the biggest surfboard Oz had ever laid eyes on. "Ever see one of these before?" asked the blond vampire. When Oz shook his head slightly to indicate that he had not, the vampire continued. "This is a long board," he said. "Made of redwood - not like those little Styrofoam dinks they all use today," he said derisively. Lifting the board with one hand and extending it toward Oz in one easy motion as he approached, the vampire said, "Feel how heavy that thing is - nearly 80 pounds." Oz tentatively grabbed the end of the surfboard, some part of his mind registering blankly that it was, indeed, a solid piece of wood. The vampire sat next to Oz on the edge of the stage. "Man, it was Heaven here in '59," he sighed. The vampire's gaze rested somewhere far-off, someplace only he could see, Oz suspected. "Can you imagine what it must have been like to leave some nowhere farming town in Iowa after the war and move to *this*?" the vampire sighed, as he took in everything - the room, the beach, the Pacific Ocean, the perfect sun that wouldn't rise for another several hours - with an expansive sweep of his arm. War? Which war? Oh - THE War, Oz realized. Dubya-Dubya-2, the Big One. "*I* can imagine it," said the vampire. "Because my parents did it." Oz found himself feeling oddly impressed. It wasn't every sociopath who engaged in a bout of nostalgia prior to ripping his victim's throat out. The vampire told Oz a tale. How his father had returned from his war in the Pacific, vowing to get out of the 4:30 a.m. milking the cows on a minus 20 degrees January morning farm that he'd always hated. How he'd packed up the family's belongings in their beat-up truck from 1925 - before farm prices had bottomed out in the late Twenties, before the rest of the country had caught up to the Great Depression the farm states had been stuck in for several years, before the war had shut down production of anything but war materials for the duration - and driven away from the one crossroad town with its clapboard houses, across the rolling fields of corn and wheat, over the Rockies, over the desert, and onward west to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. There they'd camped on the beach the first few weeks, until he'd secured a job at the Hughes Aircraft Plant in Playa del Vista. From that reliable source of income, he snagged the loan that got them their house in Mar Vista, on a quiet street with two trees planted in every house's tree lawn, and an orange tree in every back yard. That was 1949. It was while they were camping on the beach that the vampire - then a seven-year-old warm-blooded boy - had seen his first surfer. He had awoken one morning and looked out the flap of his tent to see a lone man standing on a wave, white foam at his feet, the dawn's light glinting off the blue ocean water. The boy knew then what he wanted to be: that man, on that wave, at that moment, forever. Beginning in the summer of his twelfth year, he began spending all of his time at the beach in Malibu, at first only watching the small crew of devotees who knew of this isolated spot as they rode the waves that curled in perfect arc after perfect arc, then being adopted as a sort of mascot by the group, then being taught how to handle the long, heavy redwood boards that were the only game in town in those days, and finally joining as an equal among a clearly elevated band whose simple goal was to remain young, golden, and perfect as long as the waves rolled, the sun shone, and the palm trees waved in the ocean breeze. The boy - now a twenty-year-old man - had reached his goal in 1962. By then Malibu was no longer isolated. The crowds had grown with each passing year - so big, in fact, that the very building in which Oz now awaited his fate was built to host the dances that drew crowds of young surfers and their girls to hear the surf bands that roamed the beach towns, as numerous as grains of sand. The Balboas. The Marketts. The Chantays. The Frogmen, the Pyramids, the Rumblers. And on many a wild night, the King of the Surf Guitar, Dick Dale himself, with the Del-Tones. At the mention of that name, Oz's attention picked up. "'Pulp Fiction'," he said, approvingly. The vampire gave him a puzzled look. "Movie. After your time, I'm guessing," Oz said. The vampire shrugged. "You know how he got the idea for that surf guitar sound?" the vampire asked. "He was shooting the curl - " the vampire paused, asking Oz, "You ever surf?" Oz considered for a moment and then said, "Me and the wave-catching -- not such a good combo." The vampire nodded and continued. "Dale was right in the pipeline, right in the middle of the arc of the wave, going about 50 miles an hour, when he stuck his finger in the water as it rushed by," explained the vampire. "It sounded like a machine gun firing, and he came back and figured out how to make his guitar sound like that." Oz was pleased by the vampire's description. "Folk art in Malibu," he said. "Strangely impressive." It was while Dick Dale and the Del-Tones were playing "Miser-Lou" that the twenty-year-old surfer had wandered out back with a young blonde woman in a red bikini. When he asked her where she was from, she had simply said, "Around." He liked that, so when she leaned in for what he thought would be a kiss, he was more than willing. He was stunned by the searing pain in his neck, and as his knees buckled, he fell forward against her. She held him up with surprising ease, and as he looked up into her yellow eyes, he heard her ask, "Wouldn't you like to be young and beautiful forever?" Yes, he thought - let me be just like I am now, young and strong, now and always, here by my beloved ocean. ------------------------------------------------------------- And so he was. Young - although he was now 58. Strong - although a sunbeam could kill him. Now and always. "I have counted every reflection on the surface of the ocean. I have stared at that water every day for 38 years, from here, by the ocean. I can tell you that the water looks like a blanket made of a million shards of glass, flung out in the sun. I can tell you the make and model of every car that was parked on the roadside last Saturday. I can tell you what the fashions in women's hair were in 1975. But I can't tell you what it was like to walk across the sand in the sun at any time in the last 38 years. Because I've been here, in this room, watching the ocean from 200 yards away. In the shade." The vampire sat in silence for a moment, staring at his hands. He held them up so Oz could see the wrinkles caused by the ocean water in which he had recently surfed. "I'm 58 - my hands should be wrinkled, don't you think?" he asked the young man. "The only difference is, mine go away." Oz asked what had become of the young blonde woman who had turned him. "Oh, she wanted me to head up north to some little town - she said there was this Big Kahuna vampire she wanted me to meet," the vampire said. "But...I couldn't be away from the ocean." He snorted in self-disgust. "At least not more than 200 yards away," he said. The moments crept by, and then Oz spoke. "I realize I may be violating the club's policy on booking talent, but, uh...where do I fit into this evening's entertainment?" The vampire looked at him. "I mean - if you'd wanted dinner, this could have been over a long time ago." The vampire looked at Oz. "I haven't eaten a human in nearly 20 years," he said. He explained how he hunted in the canyons for coyotes, deer, and the occasional bear. "Call it what you want - Surfer Zen, whatever," he said. "But I think what it comes down to is the pull of the ocean is stronger than the pull of one demon." He stood and walked to the empty window frame, where he could see the moonlight glisten on the face of the water. "I made the wrong wish, man," he said, looking at the water. --------------------------------------------------- Oz swept up the ashes with a whisk broom kept in the back of his van. He stood on a pylon of rocks that jutted out into the water and scattered the ashes across the waves and foam as the sunrise reflected off the water. Then he tossed the blade from the surfboard with which he had dusted the vampire onto the floor on the passenger's side of the van and pulled back out onto the highway. He didn't know where he was headed, but he knew that his time was measured in days and years. And he knew that even a demon might find some form of peace. Main Menu ~ Return to "Other Worlds" Menu |