(The following short horror piece originally appeared in the first issue of Yellow Mama web magazine.) Night Nurse by David Tallerman It was a surprise to see a nurse so late in the evening - they’d turned the strip lights off an hour before, leaving tinted lamps to illuminate the ward a sickly shade of green.  The staff had been ignoring me since my operation that morning, leaving me with gloomy thoughts and a pile of ancient National Geographic’s.  It wasn’t as if they were that busy; I had the small ward to myself.  My first reaction when I saw him was to say something suitably scathing.  But he got there first, and what he said was just as surprising as his belated visit: "you writers - you’re so fanciful."  He was small, middle-aged, bespectacled and with a straggly, greying comb-over.  He was gazing half at my chart and half at me.  "That’s quite a nasty break you’ve got for yourself.  What was the last one called?  Night’s something?" "Night’s Sestina," I replied, in the neutral tone that I employ when I’m not sure whether people actually like my work or not. "Yes.  Not very realistic, if you don’t mind my saying." I laughed, a little awkwardly.  I felt impatient more than anything else.  The painkillers stopped my leg hurting, but they didn’t make the ache go away, and the ache was driving me crazy.  "It was fiction," I pointed out, perhaps a little brusquely.  "Fiction about an imaginary subject.  I never thought realism was much of an issue." "No?  I would have thought verisimilitude is always an issue."  He stared at my cast distractedly.  "It must get to a point, I suppose, where people don’t know what to believe from you ... when you have such an innately dishonest profession." I thought about saying: 'one thing that’s definitely true about my profession is that you can’t avoid the nuts.  You’re not my first, and you won’t be my last.  You nod and smile at them, you try to by polite, and eventually they always get bored and go away'.  But instead, I nodded and smiled and, trying to be polite, said, "Yeah ... if I tell my wife it’s a sunny day she automatically assumes it’s raining." "Hmm." He bent over and began to roll the leg of my pyjama bottoms, up past the top of the cast.  I thought about yelling out, but I didn’t.  To be fair to him, he had a very good bedside manner - for all that he’d just insulted me, I felt completely safe in his hands.  "I suppose I can’t blame you for writing trash when people are willing to read it," he went on conversationally, "but what bothers me - us, I should say - is the idea that we all live in graveyards, that we stalk around at night like hungry dogs.  It’s this suggestion that we can’t hold down a proper job!"  When he opened his mouth wide I could see that he had unusually long, sharp incisors - not what you’d call fangs exactly, just very long, sharp teeth.  "Now, isn’t it more likely that we’d choose a profession where victims--as you would call them - were readily available, and not about to argue or resist?  A job where we could go home at the end of the night with money in our pockets, perhaps to a comfortable bed in a nice, well-curtained apartment?  Don’t you think that’s a little more - well - realistic?"  Strangely, it didn’t hurt when he bit into my thigh; whether it was the painkillers or something he did I don’t know.  I certainly felt it, I felt the blood being sucked out, but it was more like being nipped by a playful terrier that anything else. Still, when he looked up, there was a fair bit of my blood smeared over his lips.  He licked it away and carried on talking just as calmly as before: "we don’t harm anybody, not really.  A little here, a little there, people in comas, or on sleeping pills, or tranquillisers.  Normally we try to keep it a secret, as you can imagine, but I really was quite upset by your last book you know.  I just couldn’t resist this opportunity to have a little talk with you ... to set the record straight, so to speak.  And as I said - nobody would believe you, would they?" He took out a hand mirror, checked himself, wiped a last smear of red away with a handkerchief.  Watching him, my mind cast back to those old Christopher Lee flicks, and I wondered vaguely what he'd seen in that small pane of glass; his own reflection, or just a red smudge hovering in thin air?  But strangely, I didn't feel the need to ask, or to say anything at all.  Looking back there are quite a few things that I’d like to have said, so perhaps it was some kind of hypnosis, autosuggestion, something like that ... there’s nothing so strange about it, you can learn it in books.  Then again, I was fairly taken aback by the whole thing - it’s not what you expect when you pay the extra for private care.  Looking at him then though, he was just a middle-aged doctor again, harmless as anything.  He said, "we’ll send you home in a couple of days, and if you keep off the leg then we should be able to remove the cast in three weeks or so.  I hope you’ll be more careful in future.  And ... as for the other thing ... it might sting a bit in the morning, but don’t worry yourself about it becoming infected - we’re very hygiene conscious.  Now, you should try and get some sleep."  And he wandered off, whistling tunelessly to himself. # So anyway, he was right, of course, writers are fanciful, in our own way we’re a pack of liars, and nobody ever believes a damn thing we say.  Not much point telling the police - "officer, a nurse drank my blood" - I don’t imagine it would have gone down too well.  But, one other thing about my profession of choice that he neglected to mention is this: A story is a story, true or not, and only the biggest fool would pass up on free material.

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