Sallow House

by Phil Malone

Again, Lucado hesitated.

  “Give me something, Mario,” Kolka urged him. “It might help me understand what’s going on in my guy’s head.”

  “He drank it.”

  Kolka tasted bile at the back of his throat. He swallowed. “You saw him do this?”

  “The police didn’t believe me. They said I was in shock. I probably was, but I didn’t imagine what I saw.”

  “He drank your wife’s blood. Like a vampire?”

  Lucado looked up, staring into Kolka’s eyes. With his patchy, unshaven stubble and grey hair going white at the temples, he looked even older than his years. But there was no uncertainty in his eyes. “No, detective. Not like a vampire.”

  His last statement hung in the air for a moment. Kolka finally cleared his throat, picked up the folder, and stood. “It’s an interesting theory, Mr. Lucado. But I understand why those East Haven cops had trouble believing you.”

  He went to the door and knocked. After a moment, another officer opened it from the outside. On the threshold, Kolka paused. “Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  Kolka’s partner waited for him on the other side of the glass. Lester Fitz was younger, hungrier, but already jaded.

  As soon as Kolka walked into the room, he knew he was in for it. Fitz had that smirk playing at the corners of his mouth that meant he wasn’t taking a case seriously. “Don’t tell me you bought all that,” he said.

  “I think there might be elements of truth hidden in his story.”

  Fitz rolled his eyes. “Let’s wait until we hear from Connecticut before we go jumping to any conclusions.”

  “Suits me. You get anything useful from all that shit he was saying?”

  Fitz flipped through the pages of a notebook. He’d managed to fill a bunch of them, just from Kolka’s brief conversation with Lucado. “We’ve got someone pulling the camera footage from inside the morgue, so we’ll know exactly what he did while he was in there. I’ve already run down his car’s make and model, and the license plate. We can pick that up too, run his insurance, inspect the laptop. We’ll find out if he has an income, whether or not he’s really licensed as a P.I.”

  “I tend to doubt it.”

  “Same here." Fitz slapped the notebook against the palm of his hand, repeatedly. He stared through the mirrored glass at the suspect, but kept stealing glances at Kolka from the corner of his eye.

  Kolka sighed. “Just say what you want to say, Fitz. Tell me what you think I did wrong.”

  “Why didn’t you ask about the man he saw? The one who killed his wife? Seems like the easiest way to pick his bullshit apart.”

  “He’s not gonna tell me anything he didn’t tell the investigators in East Haven, back whenever this happened. If it happened at all. Why ask him now, years later, when he’s had time to perfect the story in his imagination?”

  “You think he’s just lying?”

  “Not lying necessarily. It’s probably all in his imagination, though. If I’m wrong, the Connecticut police will set me straight." Kolka jabbed his finger towards Lucado, on the other side of the glass. “But he won’t.”

  “What if it turns out there is a connection? Something to do with the missing blood, maybe.”

  Kolka scoffed. “Even he couldn’t keep that story straight. First he says he came down here because the killer drains the victim’s blood, then he says our guy is, what, cleaner? However much blood was missing from his wife’s body probably soaked into the carpet.”

  “You never know,” Fitz grinned. “Could be the killer has improved his technique.”

  “I hate it when you play devil’s advocate, Fitz." Kolka gestured towards Lucado. “Even he concedes it’s a different killer." He checked his watch. “We still have a couple of hours before we get the video, the laptop, and whatever we hear back from Connecticut. Make sure somebody feeds him, will ya?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Fitz nodded.

  The duty officer had called Kolka about the body before five in the morning. He was running out of steam, really starting to feel it. At the moment, Kolka wanted nothing more than to return to his desk, kick back as far as the cheap office chair would let him, and rest his eyes for a couple of hours. Fitz could handle things in the meantime.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After the shock wore off, Damien Sanger still wasn’t prepared to believe he’d been turned into a vampire. He’s been born into all this money, he thought of Napoleon. He is crazy after all.

  Napoleon brought Sanger before a huge mirror in one upstairs room of his house. Vampires don’t cast reflections, or so the stories go, but Sanger found this wasn’t true at all. He saw his own reflection, but the Sanger in the mirror appeared far more monstrous than he ever remembered looking. Skin so pale it looked blue, veins like reddish birthmarks crisscrossing every inch. His hair looked thinner, his cheeks so hollow that they revealed the shape of his skull. His eyes peered out from deep within dark sockets, where the irises glowed so pale they looked almost fluorescent.

  Sanger turned away in horror. Napoleon placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I promise you, congressman, to the naked eye we appear nothing like that. You look much the same, only perhaps a little pale. Are you still hungry? Follow me.”

  They came to another room. This one had no carpet, no furniture, and nothing on the walls. Instead, there were three cages, three large dog kennels. Only one was occupied, and not by a dog.

  The woman inside the cage was naked, huddled with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her shins. Sanger’s mouth fell open in surprise, but his first instinct wasn’t to rush to her rescue. Instead, he felt his mouth water.

  Dried bloodstains dirtied her knees, elbows, collarbones. “I have already sampled her,” Napoleon apologized, “but please, do help me drain her the rest of the way.”

  Sanger shook his head and backed away a couple of steps. “This is wrong.”

  He never even saw Napoleon move. A hand shot out, grabbed him by the arm, pulled him further into the room. Sanger stumbled, almost fell, and barely managed to regain his balance at the last moment.

  Napoleon opened the woman’s cage and yanked her shrieking out into the open. No matter how far back she shrank from his grasp, she couldn’t escape his reach. “Watch,” he said, staring at Sanger.

  Goosebumps rose along her neck as Napoleon’s breath whispered against her flesh. Sanger saw each one so distinctly that he could have counted them. He could hear her rapid heartbeat, and though she whimpered, a glance from Napoleon was all it took to render her slack and compliant.

  Napoleon held her from behind, hugging her to his chest. Her head sagged to one side, exposing her neck more fully, allowing Napoleon to brush her hair out of the way. His mouth opened, lips almost kissing the vein that pulsed along her throat.

  The canines in his upper jaw protruded as his lips pulled back. Unseen muscles inside his mouth bared their full length, like the sudden appearance of a cat’s claws. His grip tightened around the woman’s head as he pulled it aside even further.

  Spellbound, Sanger watched as Napoleon’s fangs pierced the woman’s flesh. A weal of blood bubbled to the surface, but only a trickle escaped before Napoleon’s lips clamped down on the wound. Already paralyzed, the woman merely went limp, and stared glassy eyed at Sanger. He found himself unable to look away.

  Sanger ran his tongue over his own teeth. The fangs were there, buried in his upper jaw, knife-edged points pretending to be the canines he used to have. He wondered how they got so sharp so fast.

  After a few moments of feasting, Napoleon broke off. He licked a stray smear of blood from his lips and urged the woman forward. She took a few uncertain, shuffling steps. When they were close enough, Napoleon grasped Sanger’s hand and placed it over the woman’s warm, fluttering heart.

  “Drink,” he said, “but tap the vein on the other side of her neck. Make your own bite.”

  Sanger stared at him. He could smell the woma
n’s blood and beneath that, the lingering scents of soap, shampoo, perfume. He wanted to pull away before the urge to throw up overcame him. More than that, though, he wanted to tear her head off and drink from the fountain of her neck. Instead, he just stood there, paralyzed.

  Napoleon shrugged. “Let your instincts take over. Drink from her, or try to rescue her if you want. You will soon starve, if you do.”

  For half a moment, he tried to fight it. But the woman in his arms felt warm, and the unbroken vein in her neck pulsed like a beacon. Sanger bent closer. He only meant to breathe in her scent. The fangs in his mouth pressed against the inside of his lip, so he opened wide to let them out.

  His lips and tongue probed the woman’s neck. The tribal beat of blood rushing through her veins mesmerized him. A hypnotic lure, thrumming against his mouth. The fangs descended, pressed against her skin. He bit down hard, clamping his jaws on her neck, until his teeth finally punctured the pliable flesh.

  Bitter, tangy blood spurted against Sanger’s tongue. The woman’s limp body collapsed against his chest. He sucked at the wound, swallowing mouthfuls of thick, rich blood. It flowed like a river past his tongue until, long moments later, the flow slowed and gradually dried up. From the moment he bit her until the moment she died, Sanger lost track of time. He might have stood there with her for a minute, or an hour.

  When he let go, the woman toppled to the floor. Her eyes were still open, but they no longer saw anything. Sanger stepped back, gazing at her in horror. His fingertips brushed along his lips and came away wet. Without even realizing it, he licked them clean.

  Napoleon knelt over the body. “Not only your first real feed,” he said, “but your first kill as well. This pleases me.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “Do not think of her as a person." Napoleon stood and shoved the body aside with his foot so he could step closer to Sanger. “Think of them as food. Do you feel sorry for the hog when you eat pork? Or empathize with the cabbage or the mushroom? We are designed to eat them. Killing them is natural.”

  “I have a wife. Children.”

  “What of it? Keep them, for now. It would look strange to the outside world if they all suddenly died, or disappeared. I understand if you have a certain fondness for them. Eventually, though, even if you refrain from killing them, you will have to leave them. You will not age the way they do. At some point, the differences become inescapable.”

  “Can’t you make them like us?”

  “There are rules against doing this too often. I chose you for a reason, congressman." Napoleon led Sanger back out into the hallway. “You might as well know why.”

  A hurried tour back downstairs and through Napoleon’s sprawling mansion led them to another room, a cavernous dining hall with an immense mahogany table in the center. Twelve chairs surrounded it. On the walls behind them, twelve huge oil paintings hung, portraits of different individuals. One of them portrayed Napoleon himself. The rest were strangers to Sanger.

  “As I said, there are rules,” Napoleon told him as they entered the room. “We have a council that makes these rules. This is how things are done in this country. Vampires in different regions choose a representative, and we all meet here, in and around the nation’s capital.”

  “You meet in a house in McLean?”

  “We take turns hosting." Napoleon gestured towards his own portrait. “I am a member of the council, as you can see. The newest member, in fact." His arm swept the room in a circle. “These are the rest. Some of them have held their seats for decades, some for centuries.”

  Sanger could think of more than a few of his fellow congressmen who would gladly hang on to their seats for as long, or longer, if they could.

  “I have spent more than two centuries as a private individual,” Napoleon said. “But I have long been burdened with a vision. I envisage a society unlike any ever before seen in history. And now, at last, I have the opportunity to give that vision a voice.”

  This was something Sanger heard expressed by every new arrival in Washington. They all had aspirations, but the machinery of government never moved fast enough for them, and any compromise watered down the results they were hoping for. They came to Washington as wide-eyed optimists and stayed on even after becoming bitter and cynical, blaming everyone else for the failure of their plans. Reelection was their drug of choice, the only thing that could still assuage their wounded egos.

  But maybe things worked differently for the vampires. Sanger didn’t know.

  Napoleon stared at another portrait on the wall, belonging to an older man with short white hair shaved close to the scalp, and chiseled lines around his eyes and mouth. The ears looked almost pointed, and the eyes, humorless. “The council is a collection of strong personalities. You know how to engage with such people. I need your help to win them to my cause.”

  “Is it like a shadow government or something?”

  “More a parallel government. We are two societies living side by side. The humans know nothing of our existence.”

  Sanger thought about vampires in the popular culture, going all the way back to Dracula. He had never taken notice of it before, but much of it naturally filtered through the bulwark of his disinterest. “I’m not entirely sure about that,” he said.

  “True, they contrive stories about vampires, more and more in recent decades. They are frequently wrong in the details, and diluted to the point of incoherence with their flights of fancy. We are either psychopaths or romantic leads, in their portrayals. The council suffers these fictions, though they would prefer it if humans were entirely oblivious to our presence. In their view, the love stories people invent about us are better than the brutal truth.”

  “Are vampires incapable of love?" Sanger thought of his wife, curiously devoid of feeling for her.

  “Let me ask you this." Napoleon turned to him. “That naked woman in the cage upstairs. Did you want to fornicate with her, or devour her?”

  Just the memory of the woman’s blood caused a flush to warm Sanger’s cheeks. He relished the feeling. “I think I got more gratification from drinking her blood,” he admitted.

  “Of course you did." Napoleon strode from the room, heading towards a grand entrance hall. Sanger felt compelled to follow. “Return here each night, or as often as necessary. I will have fresh food brought in. Since you are a public figure, it would not do to have you observed stalking victims of your own.”

  “And in exchange?”

  “You will help me codify my grand ambitions. We shall create of them a code of laws, the groundwork for a new society. Help me sway the council, and see my vision implemented.”

  “I still don’t know what your grand ideas are." He followed Napoleon through the hall, past the double staircase that swept towards the rooms upstairs, and through a pair of French doors. They emerged into a library, its walls lined with shelves of yellowing, hardbound books.

  “Consider something for me, Congressman,” Napoleon was saying. “You are a grown man, a father. Would you allow your children to decide what they should eat, whether or not they should attend school? Should they make such choices for you, determining your career path, managing your family’s finances, deciding if you should have another child?”

  “No, of course not." Sanger strolled past the bookshelves, his fingertips brushing along the spines of volumes he suspected of being first editions from the nineteenth century. “They’re just kids, they don’t know that stuff.”

  “Why do they not understand it?”

  “Because. They’re too young, they don’t have the life experience.”

  “Precisely so." Napoleon approached a desk at one end of the room. He moved a brass candlestick holder that overflowed with dried and broken tendrils of wax. Beneath it, he retrieved a few stray papers and shook the dried crumbs of wax from them.

  “Over the years,” he went on, “I have observed grown men and women squander their lives in various fleeting pursuits. They are all children. Teachers,
managers, generals, captains of industry, heads of state. You will feel the same after a century or two.”

  He sat at the desk, fitted a fresh candle into the candlestick, and lighted it with a gas wand lighter. The flame flickered and caught, too bright to stare at.

  “It grows more difficult with each passing decade to remain in the shadows and do nothing to help." Napoleon steepled his fingers and gazed at Sanger. Shadows from the candlelight danced across his pale face. “There is so much war, deprivation, and hatred abroad in the world. Vampires could help put an end to it.”

  “I don’t know." Sanger browsed from one bookshelf to the next, reading the names of authors on each faded volume. James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Joseph Conrad. He wasn’t surprised to see a thorough collection of Edgar Allan Poe. “So much of that is just human nature.”

  “It is. But it is not our nature. We have more patience and fewer lusts. It would be a simple matter to declare ourselves and rule as tyrants, if we wished. I do not want that. Let the humans keep their institutions, I say. We can merely provide guidance, like a father’s steady hand on his son’s first bicycle ride. We could keep them from going astray, from falling and harming themselves.”

  “They’re still our food, though. They’re not going to want any help from us. They would fear us, maybe even try to kill us.”

  “That is the very fallacy that governs our lives and keeps us hidden from the humans. It makes no difference that we feed on them. When you were human, did you hate the chicken that laid eggs you used to break your fast?”

  “No, but the chicken might have hated me if it had any self awareness.”

  “Why?” Napoleon asked. “The chicken was safe, well fed, and happy. It went about its life, doing what it does naturally. It benefits the farmer to care for the chicken. Consider the idyllic life of a herd of cattle. They want for nothing. Humans give them everything they need to grow fat and happy.”

  “Yes, but then they get slaughtered and turned into steaks. The cattle don’t know any better, but the humans will.”