Doris walked over to him, looking at the pamphlet all the while. “The Haversmiths. Spiritualists of the Good Faith,” it read. “Purveyors of the real in myth and legend.”
She tapped the man on the shoulder and held the pamphlet out toward him.
The man nearly winced, then he looked her over and with a nervous laugh said, “Oh, no. You can keep that … ”
Doris smiled.
“For your master,” the man added.
Her smile gone, Doris stared at him with wide eyes. “I have no master.”
“Well, for yourself, then.”
“Myself?” Doris said. “Surely, not before the whims of some other possible master?”
The man nodded cheerfully and somewhat emptily, as if his mind was elsewhere. He glanced back at the businessman’s house, from which there came a chorus of laughter that sounded very agreed upon.
Doris looked back at the pamphlet. “The people you work for,” she said in a humble tone favored by emissaries of something supposedly great, “are they familiar with all sorts of myths and legends? In the Christian sense, of course.”
“Yes,” the man said. “They’ve got plenty of books on those very subjects. And I do believe they’ve read them all.”
“Would they know anything about the earth having a heartbeat?”
The man stood up. With the bend, he was the same height Doris was. Looking her up and down, he wrestled the pamphlets into a neat stack. “I can’t say I rightly know, but sounds a bit fiendish to me.”
“To me as well,” Doris said. “If the ground beneath our feet had a heart, it’s obviously not using it, much like that man who knocked down your papers.”
Was the man about to smile? Doris couldn’t tell. The door of the nearby house opened up, jingling a tiny bell with it; and the pamphlets nearly fell to the ground again.
With the door held open by the black man who worked for the businessman, the Haversmiths walked outside with a speedy confidence. The Reverend Cote and his wife appeared in the doorway, and the Haversmiths turned nimbly on their heels.
“We really should meet up more casually, reverend,” Mr. Haversmith said as he shook the hand of Cote, who did so matter-of-factly, and with glances all around him. “We’ve finally settled in, and we’re only a few miles away.”
“Fellowship between good Christians is central to our world,” Cote said. His wife and Miss Haversmith smiled awkwardly at each other, and then Cote walked down the steps as his wife clenched his arm.
If Doris and the man with white hair didn’t step aside, the Cotes would have walked right into them.
“Argall!” Miss Haversmith yelled belatedly. “Get out of the reverend’s way.”
Doris watched the man with the white hair, Argall, move even further aside.
The businessman, Mr. Rhodes, stepped outside with his arms folded behind his back. “The reverend doesn’t seem to think it can be done,” he said.
Mr. Haversmith nodded sadly. “And 'tis a pity. Because I assure you that a world where one can speak to your dearly departed wife is not only just as Godly as the good reverend’s, it’s quite possible.”
Mrs. Haversmith turned toward her husband. “But of course … awakening someone from the slumber in which they await heaven is not without its hiccups.”
Mr. Rhodes took a step forward. “How big are these hiccups?”
“Minor,” Mr. Haversmith said. “Merely the signs that the extraordinary exists.”
The businessman nodded. “I suppose we shall embark on this journey together, then,” he said, extending his hand. “You will let me know when you’ve made arrangements at your house. And then I will come whenever I please.”
Mr. Haversmith shook the businessman’s hand profusely. “Of course.”
They went their separate ways, with Argall nodding at Doris and following in tow. When she looked back at the businessman’s door, the black man who worked there was closing it. Doris waved to him, but with a sad kind of haughtiness, he ignored her.
Would it be possible for someone else to see all of her again? she wondered. With the weight of her new fangs and all.
Doris went around to the shed where doves were kept. She’d been taking one every other week or so, and as soon as she got close, the creatures fluttered about in their cages. Doris was sad to need the blood of one at all, but she went straight in there and unhinged the nearest cage. She snatched a dove and held the creature in one hand, even as she fell to her knees.
Its feathers reminded her of the man with the white hair.
If those spiritualists were right, maybe it would be possible to scream into some visage of Henry’s face: “Why did you leave me alone?”
She thought it likely the specter would fly off in the other direction toward its beloved sunlight.
Doris heard someone coming, could smell the rusty scent of his musket. Would a chest full of buckshot have been a fair trade for anyone trying to ward off starvation? No, she thought, but she ran off in the other direction, anyway.
5
Shaky Ground; What Else Is There?
Present ^
The day after Doris had come into his great uncle’s house, Roger told his great uncle that he was going to put a cross up on the roof. Then he climbed up there and nailed the two wooden boards over the footprint that had gone through it, in a decidedly cross-shaped fashion.
Some corporate hip-hop blasted from a car somewhere nearby, alternating with other beats that all seemed like part of the same playlist: “What else is there except me and mine?”
Roger tried to avoid looking anywhere nearby in particular because everything was too close and he was too near-sighted to not have to squint. He looked upward, where some of the bigger corporate buildings loomed on the horizon. Closer still, there were a few apartment buildings, and he thought that the roofs, with their old, useless antennas, looked like they held a bit more quiet.
But those probably belong to the pigeons, he thought. It was good they had something.
The closest of the serene-appearing roofs – about two blocks away – had someone on it, and though Roger’s vision that far away was quite blurry, it seemed like the person was facing the direction of his house. Roger waved, and getting nothing in return, squinted. The figure with its long hair could have been the woman from the other night, the one that seemed to have been waiting on Doris with her bare, metal-crushing feet. Roger closed his eyes, opened them, and the figure was still there, under the light of the sun.
He went down the ladder, knocked on the door, and waited impatiently as his uncle unlatched all the locks.
“Good thinking on the cross up there,” Simon said.
“Yeah,” Roger said weakly, “but what will it do for the property values?”
Simon laughed, and Roger almost laughed himself. But he had the doors to lock. Afterward, he walked with his uncle to the living room, where he hunkered down and resumed watching TV. Roger stood there, with his hands in pockets while people lived on screen. He wished he live in a world where his great uncle had ever had a chance to be a doctor, like he’d wanted once upon a time. If there were vampires that could stand the sunlight, then, well … Roger wasn’t sure if the world was that much different.
He went upstairs.
“You okay?” Simon called after him
“I’m fine,” he called back.
In the attic, Roger slipped down along the wall and sat there. At some point he grabbed the book of haiku he’d been reading, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to get through any of them.
The next few days passed similarly, except that Roger got something in the mail about a job opening in the bibliographical section of a business on the other side of town. A card was enclosed in the envelope that said “show me” in handwriting that looked like an old printing press’ font.
There had to be easier ways to get blood, Roger thought.
He looked at a map. The company’s location was near this stand where a woman he knew sold
books. He thought it’d be nice to have an excuse to head around there without feeling like a bum. In the kitchen, he found himself listening on the phone while Desmond, out there by the company’s actual location, performed a mirror test.
A few dogs were yelping in the background.
“So … okay,” Desmond said. “I’m holding my mom’s compact mirror up to my face...”
“Because you’re the best of us modern men,” Roger said.
“And all the people going and coming out of this place have reflections.”
Roger was less relieved to hear this then he thought he would be. “Okay,” he said. “Of course they do.” In the background, the dogs had suddenly stopped yelping. “Wait, is there anyone else around now?”
“What?” said Desmond. “I’m sorry. The dogs are pulling me away.”
“From what?” Roger said.
“Nothing,” said Desmond. “Well, no, I guess they are a little freaked out. But they get that way every other hour even when nothing’s around.”
Roger had walked enough dogs to know this was true. “Right. Well, thanks, Des.”
Suddenly the house started shaking. No, Roger thought. It was much bigger than that. Everything seemed to be shaking. Glass was breaking or cracking like ice. Things around the house were falling. From the phone’s speaker, he could hear the dogs yelping again.
“Holy shit,” Desmond said. “Is the ground shaking there, too?”
“Yeah,” Roger said as he moved into the doorway.
From the living room, Simon screamed like he was waking up from a nightmare. Outside, car alarms went off together and in tandem.
“Gotta go,” Roger said. “Be safe.” With the floor continuing to shake, he dropped the phone and stumbled into the living room. Simon clenched the armrests of his chair. He was pushing his head back into the headrest, and his eyes were darting around the room. Roger tripped over one of the crosses, then crawled toward the chair and pulled himself up from behind it. He held on to the back of the headrest with one arm and put a hand on Simon’s shoulder.
“It’s an earthquake,” Roger told him. “It’s not whatever you think … ”
The shaking stopped entirely, just like that, but Simon continued screaming. The fear inside of him was just too big to stop. He kept up the screaming for a few minutes, and all Roger could say was, “It’s not that vampire,” until Simon tired himself out.
Roger felt entirely alone, except that all the fear was still there in the room with him. Nearby, someone fired up their stereo system. Roger hit his forehead against the wall a few times.
He decided he’d take that job – as long as they let him out when there was still some sign of the sun in the sky, and that much was only for Simon’s sake. Roger went and threw a quilt over the old man, then he hopped over a fallen shelf and got some garlic that he stuffed in the foot-shaped impression above his bed – to put in some soup later. After that, he went around the house and picked up everything that had fallen apart, which included the crosses.
The earthquakes were the result of emptiness, according to the voice in the ad – there was a hollowness beneath some of the city, and the earthquakes were merely the ground beneath a few substantially empty paces finally sinking to become the support for something else. Something better, they added; casualties would be minimal, and such would all boil down to luck. The ad showed people walking in the sunlight with their tiny dogs in neighborhoods that, alternately, had been refurbished or were entirely new. All of the people seemed to glow a bit.
In order to go to his new job, Roger had to untangle the ten locks as Simon stood by, squinting at the barest hint of sunlight even as the blinds were fully closed.
“Are you sure you have enough garlic?” Simon asked him.
No, Roger thought. But surely eating two bulbs meant that he was now half-garlic, so he nodded.
“And you’ll keep your phone on, in case there’s another earthquake or something else?”
“Yes,” Roger said, and he mostly meant it. “What about you? You feeling all right?”
“Sure,” Simon said.
Roger then weaved his way around five blocks, all of them having some portion of concrete that was cracked or, well, more cracked than it already had been. He would tap the sidewalk sometimes with his foot as he walked along. Then he would hop on a crowded bus where anyone not staring at the screen of their phone was an anomaly. Some people might momentarily raise their head to look up at the damage from the earthquake, like a red, two-story house that had crumbled down to a one-story heap. But generally there was still the scrolling and occasionally the loudness: some longtime resident jostling for a sense that the space he or she was taking was indeed his or hers – and not someone’s who could belong in the new somewhat upwardly-mobile world that had been thrown on top of them.
At first, Roger spent the ride scanning the rooftops, but he never saw anything out of the ordinary among them. Eventually he just took to rereading “Limbo Should Be Less Bright,” the book of haiku by Josephine Drearden.
The company headquarters was twenty stories tall, modest by the business district’s standards. It had a stone quality that made it less sleek than any of its neighbors. His first time there was for a joint-interview with a blond man and a brunette who looked like they were about Roger’s age, mid-twenties, in a room with three glass walls on the first floor. Natural light, when it wasn’t cloudy, beamed in from the building’s lobby.
The blond man had pointed at Roger a few times. “You used to hang out with that lady who sells books at that table a few blocks over. I bought a couple.”
“Yeah?” Roger said. “Well, that’s great. I hope you enjoyed them.”
The blond guy shrugged. “They’re interesting. I just like supporting local artists. She’s smiley. Doesn’t really talk much, though.”
The rest of the interview had not gone particularly well, either, with Roger mostly unable to say he knew anything about coding, finance, or the local great places to get a drink. At a certain point, he’d tuned out, and just pushed the card over on their desk.
The blond man, having finally shut up, blinked at him.
The brunette smiled politely in a way reinforced with obligation, like the standard smile of the people at a bank. She told him to go off to a door on the side that opened to a corridor with a downward slope leading to an elevator.
“And then take that elevator to the bibliographical department,” she said.
The corridor was littered with doors – so many that Roger wanted to go back to get his bearings, but he couldn’t quite figure out which direction he had come in. The strips of florescent lighting overhead branched off into other corridors, so that if he followed one it seemed as familiar as any other.
He was about to open a door when, in the corner of his eye, he noticed another man standing nearby. He was older, in a custodian uniform, and there was a garbage can on wheels next to him. Standing at one of corridors’ intersections, the man shook his head.
Roger pointed at the door, shaking his own head quizzically for confirmation.
The man pointed left.
Relieved to see another soul, Roger walked past the man and nodded at him as he went down the corridor he was pointing to.
There, he found himself walking in the direction of a black-haired woman who looked like she belonged upstairs. Standing still in front of the elevator door, she was wearing a red dress and a blazer with a hoodie under it. Her fingers fiddled the strap of a messenger bag over her shoulder.
“Hi,” Roger called out. “Do you know where the bibliographical department is?”
Her eyes squinted, and she smiled in a halfhearted kind of way. She took a breath, then walked over to him with one of her legs seeming to drag a little. Roger recognized the same pacing in friends he’d had who had cerebral palsy.
“Technically, it’s down there,” the woman said, nodding back at the elevator door. “But also, it’s just kind of ... us. And we have to
go upstairs.”
“Oh,” Roger said. “Okay. Lead the way”
He followed her as they walked back through the corridor.
“I’m Lorraine,” she said. “You’re Roger, right?”
Roger nodded.
“Doris was hoping you’d take the job.”
“Yeah?” said Roger. “Doris … Is she our boss?”
“Yes,” said Lorraine. “Are you familiar with…? Well, they’re people of a sort. But they drink ...”
“Um …” Feeling lightheaded, Roger took a deep breath. “You’re probably not talking about alcoholics.”
Lorraine shook her head.
“Well, about them, I guess, besides … her, I’m most familiar with one just by its handiwork. It really messed up my uncle.”
Lorraine held her hand on the door that led back to the lobby. “I’m sorry to hear that … The floor we’re about to go to is a place where we might get hurt, too – or worse. We’d be looking for the typographical source of the earthquakes, but even if we don’t go up there, things might still sort of be okay for everybody – except one very lonely being. She wanted you to know that.”
The bones in Roger’s chest felt a tad bit like they were caving in.
“It took six vampires,” said Lorraine, “but Doris has already been thrown off that floor.”
Roger folded his arms high over his chest. “So how would you and I leave there with our necks in tact?”
Lorraine shook the strap of her messenger bag. “We can talk more in the other elevator. Just not at first.”
They walked out into the lobby, across to the waiting area for a twin set of elevators – where they joined a small crowd. As they waited, Roger noticed a coffee kiosk across from the glass room by the reception desk. His interviewers had moved on, chummily, to a tall, somewhat tan man in a well-tailored suit. Looming largely in the corner by a potted palm tree, there was a poster for a blood drive. “The business of giving life,” it read.
Late Night Partners Page 4
