"Sit down."

I've got a card table from a junk shop. It's covered with a black cotton tablecloth an old lady sewed me for a dream I read. There are a couple of chairsaaa green plastic lawn chair that she sits in. I found that in an alley that growled at me when I took it. There was also a wooden chair that I'm already sitting in.

The wooden chair came with the rent.

"Are you right handed or left handed?"

"Does it make a difference?"

"In the old days the palmist read your left hand. Closest to the heart tells truth, so they figured. But that's nothing but bulls.h.i.t. The heart is the biggest liar you ever met. I read the hand you think with, the one you work with. The hand you don't use, that's what you were born with," I tell her. "The hand you use, that's what you made of it."

"What if I'm ambidextrous?"

It was late and my patience was never long lived.

"Then you ought to make up your mind," I said, trying to make my irritability into a joke.

She just stared.

"So, are you?"

"Am I what?"

"Are you ambidextrous?"

"No," she said. "I'm right handed."

So I get her to hold out her right hand.

"You're receptive," I say. "Like a radar dish to life, you take in what it sends you. You lap it up, like a cat licks cream."

The shape of her palm, her splayed out fingers, they tell me this, that, and a pretty good guess. Her grin tells me I guessed right.

I hold her hand, and test it for flexibility. A stiff hand means an inflexible personaasomeone who doesn't change easily, a control freak, unreceptive to new ideas. Her hand is cold, but it's almost night and there's probably a chill in the air. I could tell her that she had a warm heart, but I don't believe in that old saying: cold hands, warm heart.

Next I always turn the hand over and look at the life line. That's the line that fish hooks from between your thumb and index and down towards your wrist. If it's long and strong it means a good healthy life. If it bends away from your thumb, like a linebacker heading out for a lateral pa.s.s, it shows a wild spirit, a black sheep, someone who has disappointed their father early on. If there is a second line inside it, it means a strong inner life.

Only this line wasn't like any of those others. This line was like some kind of crazy spiral dance. This line looked like a long skinny worm wrapped around and around her thumb. It just kept running on, wrapping around her thumb and back again, like a string that she'd tied on so as not to forget something.

The line looked like one of those spinning hypnotic discs you used to be able to buy in the back of comic books. You know, the ones right next to the garlic chewing gum, the X - Ray gla.s.ses, and the genuine shrunken heads. Do you remember those X-Ray gla.s.ses? They were supposed to allow you to hypnotize women into letting you have your way with them.

Believe me, they didn't work.

"What do you see?" she asked.

What do I see? Christ, I don't want to see what I'm seeing.

I try to swallow, but my tongue has swollen to the size of an overstuffed couch.

"What do you see?" she repeated.

This means a lot to her. She really needs to know.

Call me Galahad, but there's something about a woman in need I can't resist.

I swallow the couch and find my voice.

"I see a long life. A very, very long life."

I'm not kidding. A life line like this you would expect to see on something like a G.o.d. Something that's going to be around for a very long time.

"What else do you see?" she asked impatiently.

What could I tell her? It was like her life line had swallowed everythingaaheart, head, fateaaall gone in a single gulp.

"I see hunger," I say. "A life of endless hunger."

She clears her throat, as if she's tasting something she doesn't like.

"What about happiness? What about children? What about marriage?" she asks.

There is a fistful of unshed tears trembling in her voice, but I can sense that she isn't the kind of woman who cries a lot.

In fact, she isn't any kind of woman at all.

I remember something granny told me about a life line that ran like this; something I had brushed off as old superst.i.tion. I was putting pieces togetheraaVerdelak. Nosferatu. Vampire, Count Yorga, Barnabas Collins, Christopher Lee in all those old Hammer movies ... only worse.

This was real.

She was real.

She kept asking me questions.

"What about love?" she asked.

"What about it? You might as well ask me which way the wind will blow, three hundred years from tomorrow. It's late. Go home, and come see me in the morning."

"I don't see anyone before sundown," she said.

It figures.

"What about my future?"

"Future is all you got. Future, past, and hunger. Lots of lonely hunger."

Now she's looking at me like I might look at a good tavern steak.

I figured it was time for a little creative self-defense. So I stood up quickly. I kicked over the wooden chair and brought my boot down on it as it hit the ground.

The rungs shattered.

She watched me like a patient diner, waiting for their favorite midnight snack.

I grabbed the broken chair rung and pointed it at her like a knife.

"Get back vampire. There's no future for you today."

She looked at the chair rung. One eyebrow rose up like a black sunrise.

"Not sharp enough. If you're going to stick me, it's got to be sharper than that."

Ha.

Some joke.

If she smiled I was going to scream.

I wished I had time to unsnap my jackknife and whittle a point, but wishing, like my stake, was pointless.

She held up her palm like an Indian in a bad cowboy movie about to say, "How."

Suddenly she was Mandrake, Svengali, and Mesmer rolled into one. I didn't want to look, but I had to. I had to look at her palm only it was like staring at a whirlpool in the ocean and I was falling in to it and it was spinning about me, rising up to entangle me.

It felt a little like falling headfirst into a canyon full of maggots.

I felt the line, her life line, wrapping about me. I felt like Tarzan wrestling a giant snake, only this snake was colder than any mere reptile. This snake was cold and unbelievably dead and absolutely hungry. I felt it sucking at me, drawing me inwards. She was amoebic, like one of those creeping vines that strangle sunflowers.

Forget about movies. Vampires, the real ones, they never bite. Vampires suck. Sure, that sounds like the punchline to a bad pun, but I'm not joking here. I'm talking about death by osmosis. A little visceral empathy, if you please.

I've got one hope.

I reached down below me, down through the clinging lines that wrapped about me like I was a virgin in a lounge room, undead pick up artists slinging line after unholy line, to feel the broken wreckage of my wooden chair. I rose up amidst the gut storm of this evil thing's life line, clinging to two chair rungs like a drowning sailor clinging to a couple of match sticks.

I crossed them, and held them outward. I tried my best to think of Van Helsing. I tried to think about the pope. I thought about Mother Theresa and Billy Graham and Evil Knievel.

It's been years since my mother took me to church, but I remembered some of it.

I recited the one prayer from the rosary I remembered.

"I believe in G.o.d, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth; I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was crucified, died, and was buried."

I'm getting some of the lines wrong, but I must be doing something right because the life line about me loosened and I began to feel a kind of hope being born. Like a ninety-year-old deathbed repentant who hasn't seen the inside of a church since his grandmother took him to be baptized, I kept on praying.

"He descended into h.e.l.l and on the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of G.o.d."

I can't remember the last of it, something about communion and resurrection and maybe it wasn't so good a thing to be praying for in the face of what I was facing. Then I remembered a prayer my uncle taught me, the time the neighborhood bully kicked my a.s.s.

"Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our day of battle; protect us against the deceit and wickedness of the devil. May G.o.d rebuke him, we humbly pray."

St. Michael did the trick. I was free, and I was back in my room, behind the refuge of my overturned card table that had somehow been kicked over in the heat of our struggle, brandishing my make shift crucifix in the face of this hungry she-devil.

What could I do? I kept on praying, falling back on the ever-reliable Lord's Prayer.

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

She swatted the card table out of the way. It slammed against the far wall and one of its chrome legs snapped off.

The part of my mind closest to my wallet mourned the loss of a perfectly good card table and my favorite wooden chair.

The sensible part kept on praying.

"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done ... "

She laughed at this, the kind of laugh that crows laugh over the bones of dead men.

I felt a little less than confident, but I kept on praying.

" ... as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread."

She swatted the Tim Allen cross from my hands, and I felt my daily bread grow cold and moldy. So I crossed my fingers and began to chant, "the power of Christ compels you, the power of Christ compels you," but I guess she hadn't seen that movie.

She caught me by my throat, and held me close enough to smell the stink of the graveyard dirt she'd slept in.

"My people are older than your people," she said in a voice that sounded like a toad that had somehow learned to speak. "My people are older than His people."

I was scared. I tried not to show it. I figure I did pretty well, seeing how I managed not to soil my pants.

I kept trying to pray.

"Our father, our father ..."

But I guess he wasn't listening as her grip choked the words from me. She knew it was all an act. I hadn't been to church since Jesus was a Jew.

"Little G.o.d-boy, you mouth your prayers, yet you have not been to confession in more years than you will admit," she said. "Your words are wind; smoke that slips from the chimney that I will make of your open throat."

"Holy Mary, mother of ... "

She shook me like a dog shakes a dead rat, and then threw me to the floor.

"I spit on you, your father and your mother." she said.

That did it.

That, more than anything else did it.

No one insults my mother.

I was laying face first on the floor, staring at a tarot card that had fallen when she'd knocked over the card table. It was the card they call the hanged man.