So there I was, stuck in G______________ with no ride, no friends, and the sinking suspicion that my client Turner Done was right: this town really was being taken over by blood-thirsty vampires. How else to explain the priest’s severed arm producing no blood, the uneasiness of the jaundiced police officer who insisted we meet again at night, the bloody clothes that hung like a battered pinatas from Stephanie Daniel’s clothesline.
It seemed that G_____________had all at once become a dry town, and I don’t mean they were no longer serving alcohol.
But as I tripped and slid through the high reeds of an open sewer creek, taking in the reek of raw sewage through my busted nose, I couldn’t help but consider things how a judge or jury might. After all, I had now fled the scene of an accident.
Worse yet—had sprinted way from the police cruiser as though I had done something wrong. I’ve seen people get booked for much less, especially in our not so just, justice system.
I had to table such thoughts, piker that I was, because at that moment I heard a whispering “shhh” from inside a nearby tunnel. One of those open-faced sewer tunnels, where you can imagine uncanny alligators might reside, until you remember you’re in Northeast Appalachia.
“Go on,” I said to the faceless voice from inside that dark void. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it already.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” came a tiny voice. “But if you don’t hide in here, the other’s might.”
I trundled to the crevice, and peered in. A child stood before me, his face partially subsumed by dwindling light. No more than ten or eleven from the look of it. A worn Yankees cap slicked across his greasy hair, and his eyes seemed to glow with feline intensity.
“Are you a vampire?” I asked. “Because you’re sure lurking in the shadows like one.”
“Hard to hide in the light, mister,” the voice murmured. “And who said anything about vampires?”
This made me feel a bit better. Perhaps I had misjudged the town after all, had slid right off old Occam’s razor and straight into La-La land, bleeding all the way. I didn’t exactly have gray in my beard yet, but I thought I’d been practicing long enough to no longer get wrapped up in my client’s delusions, yet here I was.
“Of course there’s no vampires,” I said, pinching at my nose, almost believing it.
“I know,” the child said. “They’re zombie witches.”
The thing about this new generation is they’re apparently misinformed when it comes to monster tropes. My parents’ generation had learned that vampires were to be feared, and my generation had learned they were to be fucked, but apparently these pandemic babies didn’t know their ass from their elbow when it came to basic vampire lore.
“They like, eat people,” the child said. By then I had learned his name was Reggie. “Which means they’re zombies. But they also chant strange, witchy things. So I think that make them zombie witches.”
“But vampires eat people too,” I said. “Or more specifically, suck their blood.”
“Whatever,” Reggie said, leaning against the sewer walls, becoming one with that true bacterial fantasia. “All I know is they bit my parents, and then my parents wanted to bite me.” He looked up at me as though I were the dumbest human on the planet, and maybe he wasn’t far off. “Zombies,” he said, definitively.
From what I gathered, Reggie and his family resided in a local trailer park, his mother worked at the diner waiting tables and his father was an angry, bitter man even before he made his little pact with the Dark Lord.
Reggie had a half-sister who had recently been taken away by child protective services, and one can assume it was all for the better. A world where vampires were real and child protective services were competent, I really had gone through the Looking Glass.
Being tiny, and resilient, if not intelligent about suddenly life-defining monster tropes, Reggie had apparently spent the past few days farting around in the sewer system. Something he apparently also did before his town, er, grew some teeth. I offered him an old banana from my briefcase and my deepest condolences.
“How do you know I’m not a zombie witch? I asked.
“Simple,” he replied. “You haven’t tried to eat me yet. And that’s how you know I ain’t one either.”
I asked Reggie if he knew Turner Done and he said he did, but everyone in school called him ‘Turdler’ Done, because he was always cleaning toilets. He said the kids hated him because he was always in a foul mood pushing his mop around, tripping children with gleeful hate in his eyes, and so on.
I asked Reggie if there were any other humans left and he said maybe there was and maybe there wasn’t, but he wasn’t much inclined to find out. He asked me if I had a plan and I said we should hide in the sewer system and wait things out. This didn’t impress Reggie much…that my plans were apparently no better than his own despite our decided age difference.
Reggie said we would have to hoof it to a nearby stream if we were going to have anything to drink and it was better to do it by light of day. Having no better options, I started to follow the fleet-footed little shit, struggling to keep up.
I never much liked children, not even when I was a child myself. But I was out of ideas and, like the vampires, increasingly thirsty. As we walked, I noticed that the child left no reflection in the water. I seemed to recall something about reflections and vampires, but then settled on that being in photographs. By then I was feeling a bit groggy from the head trauma, and the boy was too fast to get a good look so I kept following.
We eventually came upon a stream, though it wasn’t apparent that its source was any different from the sewer. I didn’t want to explain the contours o my germophobia to the child, who was already on his hands and knees scooping the water to his mouth, so I just hung back.
“Come on,” he said. “It taste’s good.” I told him that so did chocolate to dogs, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t poisonous but he kept gulping away. The banana I had given him was still in his pocket. I would have assumed he’d have scarfed it down straight away. I felt a twinge of fear shivering up my spine, and then I felt like a giant dork for fearing a ninety-pound child. If I had a significant other, I thought, they would really be embarrassed at how callow I was feeling.
I walked toward the boy, to see if I could make out a reflection, when he wheeled around on me and started slurping up the blood from my nose. I pushed him off of me, and stared in disbelief as Reggie, or what used to be Reggie, licked my blood from his fingers. I hadn’t noticed before how green he looked in the light.
“I can’t bite,” Reggie said. “My big teeth haven’t grown in yet. I can only drink the blood of lamb.”
“So I suppose that makes you a zombie witch?” I asked.
“No,” Reggie said. “You were right all along: I’m a vampire.” He started screaming: “He’s here! He’s here!” My heart racing with fear, I flung little Reggie into the stream and cut my way up and away from the water, darting through old-growth forest and wishing I’d kept up with my law school cardio routine.
“He’s getting away!” stupid fucking Reggie screamed behind me.
By then I was, inexplicably back in Stephanie Daniel’s backyard, unless there happened to be another Victorian with bloodstained clotheslines, and in this town I couldn’t exactly rule that out. I climbed in through a basement window and slinked my way into a crawl space.
There, I tried my phone again but it still had no reception, and was also running distressingly low on battery. I used the flashlight app and saw that the basement looked like a kid’s playroom had just exploded.
Stuffies and dollhouses and even a tiny, porcelain white crib. There was also a coffin-shaped pine box that I dared not open, one too large for a child of normal proportions. Everything else seemed right out of a nursery.
That’s right, I suddenly remembered. Stephanie Daniels had wanted to join the vampy cult so she could be with her dead daughter. Turner had said the vampy crew had been meeting at her daughter’s gravesite. The police report indicated the child had died a couple years earlier from severe pneumonia. I tell you: there’s evil in this world down to the microscopic level.
These thoughts were interrupted by a creaking sound upstairs, that of a chair rocking. I tiptoed my way to the top of the stairs and found the basement door cracked ajar, just an inch. Outside in the living room, I could make out Stephanie Daniels—I recognized her from the case-file photos—rocking a pale toddler. In her hand was a clear baby bottle, with which she was feeding to the child.
The baby bottle was filled not with milk, or formula, but with a black-red blood. The child sucked on the nub of the bottle greedily, hissing and writhing in delight. She was all but a skeleton; I’m not sure what type of curse gave her human form at all. By any normal biology the child should have been nothing more than a skeleton sporting a creepy tuft of hair.
Stephanie was humming some mesmeric-sounding nursery song. I didn’t recognize the tune; perhaps the vampies have their own music catalogue. “La-fa-la-do-la,” Stephanie cooed, a cursed chant to my ears. Across her neck was a long, blistering, fresh scar. Turner was right, she had been stabbed. How had the County Sheriff missed that? The report indicated Stephanie had no signs of lesions or trauma of any kind.
It must have been my weariness, I’m not sure what else could have done it, as I’m really not one for a death wish, but at that moment I swayed ever so gently and bumped my still bleeding nose against the basement door. Immediately, Stephanie’s eyes darted to the door jamb, and my stupid face.
“I didn’t know we had a visitor,” she said to the child. She spoke with the soothing yet creepy voice of a dental hygienist about to dig into an inflamed gum. “May I please ask what you’re doing in our house,” she said.
I pushed open the basement door, more out of curiosity than any latent bravery.
“For Christ’s sakes,” I said, pointing to the bottle. “You’ve…made an abomination of your daughter.”
“For Satan’s sakes,” she said, “You’ve made an abomination of your self.” Stephanie Daniels, or what had become of her, strapped on one of those icky baby carriers that go around one’s shoulder to keep the hands free. She took her time in doing so. Meanwhile, skele-baby slurped at the bottle, which she now held tightly in her own desecrated little claws.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Stephanie said. “And even if we did, I doubt you’d recognize me now. It’s been a busy few days, hasn’t it little Aurora?” she said to her daughter. She stared up at me and winked, a soulless facial twitch from her gaunt face.
“I’m a lawyer,” I said, as though I owed her an explanation. And I felt in a way that I did, having broken into her house. She giggled. “A lawyer?” she repeated. “Then come join us. Clearly you’re meant to play for our side.” She moved toward me, and I flashed my cell phone at her, flashlight app blazing.
“Ahh,” she said, turning away at my steal attack, but laughing too, as though at the ridiculous of it all. That’s when my fucking cell phone died. She lunged at me, and this time I tripped over my own shoes and fell down the flight of hard, gray, basement steps.
She laughed at the top of the stairs as though this was mere theater. A Saturday Night Live cast member throwing themselves over a cardboard sofa. Despite the fall, I wasn’t in very much pain. I had sort of caught myself against the railing a few times on the tumble, and one strength I’ve always had is I’m quite hard-headed.
I laid in a messy heap at the bottom of the stairs. Then I gathered myself together and slipped out the window I had entered back into the purifying light of a now descending sun. Rosy red, glimmering. There’s hope in the sun, even if it’s capable of burning our eyes out. As I ran away, I could Stephanie and little Aurora screaming into the basement, and tearing their way through the dead nursery. I didn’t wait for them to see I’d escaped.
But I write these words while lightly sedated at a local hospital. I’m gathering my strength to tell my story in full, considering one last attempt to prove that neither Turner Done nor I suffer from any form of hysteria.
“You’d been in a car accident,” the Sheriff said. “You fell down a flight of stairs, of course your ability to discern reality is somewhat…impeded….”
I so want to continue with what happened. But as before, the telling makes me weary, as the various meds act and counteract in my system and the nurses come and go, checking my vital signs and working to ensure I don’t try another jailbreak. Before, I could go on and on typing. A laptop is any good lawyer’s weapon of choice.
But I fear this is where my fingers must stop their typing…
For now….