Sallow House

by Phil Malone

  He struggled to reorient himself while his vision cleared. Hand over hand, he dragged himself back up the steps. Explosions of pain erupted behind his eyes with every jolt in his kneecap. He didn’t let that stop him, no matter how much his body threatened to throw up or pass out. Only one thought echoed through his mind. Olivia is in trouble.

  But Olivia’s troubles had already ended. Her body was still warm when he reached it. He sobbed as he clutched her to his chest. Time slipped by, unnoticed. Minutes, hours, he didn’t know.

  Finally he forced himself to look around, in case the killer was still there, watching. Of course, he saw no one.

  Choking back the sobs, Lucado closed his wife’s eyes. He stared at her ruined throat, once so smooth and unblemished. Now, it bubbled up slow rivulets of blood.

  The two puncture wounds were the deepest and bloodiest, but teeth marks surrounded them. He had chewed on her while he drank her blood, his teeth scraping at her skin. The marks were deep and repeated where he had bitten her again and again. Her blood soaked into his shirt and stained his hands. He still couldn’t put her down.

  He woke in the hotel room, heart chugging full speed like a runaway locomotive. The sheets were twisted around his legs, making his knee feel tight and painful. It took careful work to extricate himself without making the pain worse. Gingerly, he bent the knee, trying to limber it up, rubbing it with his palms.

  Talking to Kolka about the night his wife died brought the old recurring nightmare back, more vivid than it had been in years. His heart still hammered inside his chest, only gradually getting itself under control.

  Lucado assessed the light coming through the window. His room remained dim, but not pitch black. The curtains were closed, keeping most of the light out. Some seeped in around the edges regardless, the blue glimmer of early morning urging him awake. A glance at the bedside clock confirmed that the sun was barely up.

  He rose, showered, dressed. Kolka wanted him to return home, he knew. After seeing the local murder victim’s body, he was pretty sure that the killer had personal experience with vampires, even if he was still human himself. Either way, Lucado had to at least try and satisfy his curiosity.

  His plan was to hit the local newspaper’s archives. The county had a paper that would probably have a more detailed database of local murder cases than the Washington papers would. He wasn’t truly a private investigator; Kolka had seen right through that lie. He decided to pitch himself as a researcher instead, whenever they asked him at the newspaper.

  The offices of the Fairfax County Times were sleepier than he would have thought. Some employees were just coming in, bleary eyed and carrying cups of coffee. They wore lanyards around their necks with badges they used to buzz themselves in past the lobby.

  Lucado watched them with envy. The girl on the front desk didn’t quite seem to grasp his request.

  “I think the website has an archive,” she said.

  “An archive of news stories, yes. I’d like to visit your physical archive. I’m a researcher.”

  “Oh, you mean the morgue. Let me call my boss and see if it’s okay.”

  He waited an hour for the paper’s publicist to arrive. The publisher had agreed to let Lucado peruse the archives as long as someone accompanied him, to make sure he didn’t damage or destroy any material.

  When she got there, they gave Lucado a temporary badge and the publicist escorted him downstairs. “Not every little fact and figure our journalists accrue wind up in the published stories,” she told him. “We keep all their notes on file down here. Everything’s organized by date of publication, so if you find a story in the online archive and you want more material on it, you just go by whenever the story was published.”

  Lucado nodded and thanked the woman. She got him situated at a computer terminal and then went back upstairs to check her messages. “I’ll be back to check on you in a bit,” she promised.

  Besides being subterranean, the newspaper morgue was crowded with stacks that reminded him of an old, cramped library he’d visited once in Quebec. Some of the old news stories and their associated material were filed in boxes, each labeled and covered with a lid. Others had been racked on the shelves like magazines, sorted according to different sections of the newspaper. Metropolitan, sports, food, fashion. He found a crime beat as well.

  For a while, he played with the search engine, trying to pull up as many stories as he could find that involved unsolved murders in which the victim suffered an inexplicable amount of blood loss. It wasn’t easy. He found the occasional story that looked promising, only to follow up on the victim’s name and learn that the killer had been discovered and apprehended days, weeks, or months later. In none of the cases did they ever determine that the killer was a vampire.

  Searching deeper, he found unsolved cases as well. Most of those victims had died of gunshot wounds, with the occasional vehicular manslaughter or beating death. Once, he found a twenty year old murder case of a schoolteacher who had been stabbed to death. None of the reporting ever made mention of puncture wounds, though, or any dearth of the victim’s blood.

  There were a few other stabbing deaths he discovered within the last couple of decades, almost buried beneath a tsunami of shootings. In two cases, the unidentified killer cut the victim’s throat. But nothing about the cases sounded reminiscent of a vampire attack.

  Several hours had passed and he was on the verge of giving up before finally finding what he was looking for. A twenty-five year old home invasion, in which an unknown person entered a woman’s home and somehow tore out her throat.

  Lucado noted the date the story was published and felt a chill crawl up his spine. It happened the same year his wife was killed. He searched through the stacks until he found the story’s associated material. It kept him engrossed for close to an hour as he pored over it, again and again.

  Police never determined what the killer used as his murder weapon, though no one ever voiced the possibility that he used his teeth. The killing was far too savage. Investigators at the time even noted a surprising lack of blood at the scene.

  The story’s reporter interviewed one of the detectives. Seems shaken, he wrote, before quoting the officer. We think the killer used some kind of kitchen or gardening utensil, hooked it into her neck, and used that to tear it open. But we haven’t found the murder weapon yet. He might have taken it with him.

  They never did find a murder weapon, but they had a witness. The victim, Dolores Sallow, had a nine year old son who was present when his mother died. Unfortunately, they found the boy practically catatonic. He was terrified, the reporter noted. Police wouldn’t let him interview the kid, but the reporter did find out his name.

  Edgar Sallow.

  Lucado finally went back to the computer terminal and pulled up all the information on the boy that he could find. There wasn’t much, but he found a reference to foster parents, both presently deceased. He found little Edgar’s high school graduating class, his driver’s license, an address in Fairfax county, and nothing else.

  Whoever Edgar Sallow had grown up to become after his mother’s death, he was an intensely private individual. Lucado couldn’t find any reference to him ever identifying his mother’s killer. The story, like Sallow himself, simply vanished from memory.

  On a whim, Lucado went back through the material he’d already set aside. He found the twenty year old story about the schoolteacher, the stabbing victim. The man had taught chemistry at a local high school. The same school where Edgar Sallow attended.

  He felt light headed. Setting that story aside, he combed through the others again, one by one, everyone who got stabbed, the ones who were beaten to death, and the two who had their throats sliced open. He arranged them by date and used the computer terminal’s map function to drop markers in each location where the bodies were found.

  Some he could dismiss as being too far afield, too early in the timeline, or for having other, likelier suspects. He listed the remainder on a
scrap piece of paper. It was a fairly indicative spate of killings spanning two decades. Intermittent, but with a clear pattern of escalation.

  The teacher’s death was crude and brutal, almost thirty vicious stab wounds to the man’s abdomen. Whatever happened, the motive was plainly personal. It was a miracle that the police failed to catch the perpetrator after such a sloppy killing.

  After that, they got a little harder to read. He had no real way of knowing which murders, if any, were Edgar Sallow’s work. Even so, he had confidence that a number of them were.

  He tried to imagine the youngster, traumatized by the violent death of his mother. Lucado had been a grown man when the vampire killed Olivia, and it had a devastating impact on his psyche. How much worse would it be for a nine year old boy? Bad enough to make him a killer in his own right?

  Lucado’s timeline was certainly suggestive. He went over it again. Without police records, he didn’t know who they interviewed or suspected of each crime. They must have talked to some of the teacher’s students, but the journalist covering the story wouldn’t have been privy to that information.

  Sallow would have been fifteen at the time of the murder, according to his date of birth. If he was guilty, it was probably the first time he’d ever killed another human being. A young psychopath just learning his craft. No wonder it was sloppy.

  The murders that followed displayed a straightforward progression. Lucado weeded out a few more early beatings. The kid might have been big growing up, or he might not. Either way, he probably wasn’t beating people to death before his eighteenth birthday.

  In truth, he doubted any of the beating deaths were Sallow’s work. It was just a hunch, but he suspected the budding killer of favoring knives. There was a cleaner, more logical trail that way, from the high school kid stabbing his teacher in a rage to the practiced murderer stringing up his victims, slicing their throats, and draining their blood.

  A few later stabbings were too messy, not skillful enough to fit the pattern of development. Lucado eliminated them as well, and amended his handwritten list accordingly. He held it up, studying it for a moment.

  “I’d bet money that most of these were yours, Edgar,” he muttered. “And there might be other bodies out there that have never been found.”

  He closed out the computer terminal, folded up his scratch paper and stuffed it in his pocket. For half a moment, he considered contacting Detective Kolka, but his suspicions were still just a theory, something based on a vampire attack that Kolka wouldn’t even believe in the first place.

  While in the midst of his research, he’d been so focused that he hadn’t taken any notice of the pain in his knee. It flooded back, fierce enough to make up for the hours he had neglected it. He hissed in pain as soon as he stood up to go shelve all that material he’d pulled from the stacks. He cleaned up after himself anyway, hobbling from shelf to shelf, making sure every folder and every box was in its proper place. The publicist never did return to check on him, as she promised.

  He found her upstairs, in an office just down the hallway from the main news room. Abashed, she apologized for having left him so long, but he waved her off and thanked her for showing him the way.

  He’d gotten what he needed, after all.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Edgar Sallow stashed his car in a church parking lot outside the neighborhood that Bleda pointed out to him. He could flit from shadow to shadow through the darkness of a cold, cloudy night, but he couldn’t cross a distance of miles to get clear across the county before the sun came up. Not without a car.

  At that hour, the neighborhood was quiet and still as the grave. No cars patrolled the streets, no one wandered outdoors, and all the lights behind the windows were extinguished. Not even the dogs barked at strange noises. Sallow had the night to himself.

  The houses were extravagant. Miniature mansions, some of them towering three or four stories above street level, and all with vast lawns that kept their neighbors at arm’s length. Bleda tried to get Sallow to write down the house number so he wouldn’t forget it. A useless gesture. He never forgot these things when he was hunting.

  It took no time at all to find the right house. Outwardly, it looked the same as any of the others, but even from across the street, Sallow could smell the blood. Old blood, seeped into the floors and foundations, its metallic tang lingering in the air.

  For over an hour, he watched the house. He waited across the street, concealed in the shadows of the animal shaped topiary parade that lined the neighbor’s front walk. His eyes never strayed from Napoleon’s house. Nothing moved in all the time that he watched. He listened, and occasionally caught a snatch of muted conversation, so he knew Napoleon wasn’t alone inside. Even with his improved hearing, it wasn’t enough to discern anything specific they said. He would have to get closer.

  Things would only get more dangerous after he strayed onto Napoleon’s property. He had only just become a vampire two nights previously. He was still adjusting to his new senses. They were sharp, focused, picking up details he never would have noticed as a human. He heard a spider picking its way along a strand of web, somewhere within the shrubbery’s tangle of leaves. In the air, a syrup of honeysuckle assaulted his sinuses, forcing him to breathe through his mouth until he acclimated to the smell. He could see in the dark, through all but the deepest of shadows. If he was gifted with such senses, then so were the vampires he hunted.

  He circled the ground floor of the house twice while checking for unlocked windows. He didn’t find any, but he could hear murmured voices coming from one of the rooms. His feet barely touched the ground as he crept past that window.

  Just to make sure they wouldn’t hear him, he went to the opposite side of the house. The exterior there was constructed from stones mortared together. Easy enough for a vampire to scale and probe the second story windows.

  It took longer to explore the upper reaches of the house’s exterior while crawling along the wall, though soon he found a window he could open. Like all the others, it was locked, but the window had no screen and the latch only needed to be twisted to one side. He worked a knife blade between the windowpanes and pushed the latch aside.

  Soundlessly, Sallow eased the window open and slipped through. He spared one quick glance up and down the street, just to reassure himself that no one observed him. Then he closed the window.

  He found himself in an upstairs bathroom. A sink was there, a shower, and a mirror that he avoided looking at too closely. There were no towels, no toiletries or shower curtain, not even a roll of toilet paper. It looked like a bathroom in a vacant house.

  The hallway just beyond was similarly unadorned. Sallow thought back to the clutter in his family home, several generations worth of accumulated memories. So far, this vampire’s home was antiseptic by comparison.

  Voices from downstairs drifted into earshot. He had a pretty good idea of where they were. With the size of the place, though, and the number of rooms, he wanted to make sure no one would surprise him by coming down the stairs after him.

  He ventured down the hallway, grateful for the carpet that softened his already light footfalls. At each door along the way, he stopped and listened. He smelled the air, trying to capture the scent of other people that might be lurking within. Instead, he smelled only musty linens. Every time he risked opening the door a crack, he saw disused bedrooms, or rooms devoid of furniture altogether.

  Only once did he come across something interesting. Just outside one of the doors, the reek of blood grew sharper. In his haste to get a better mouthful of that odor, he entered the room without listening.

  It wasn’t empty. Three cages crowded against the far wall. Blood spatters marred the carpet. Two of the cages had people in them, both women, both naked. One woman slept on when he entered, but the other stirred and lifted her head.

  Sallow saw the woman’s eyes fill with hope. She scooted closer, fingers gripping the wire mesh of the door. His mouth opened, and the fangs of hi
s canines descended into view.

  The hope in her eyes died. She whimpered and retreated to the back of her cage. Sallow took a few steps closer, eyes fixed on her. He could tell another vampire had already fed off her once or twice, but the blood called to him anyway.

  His hand hovered near the bolt on the outside of the cage when he stopped himself. He looked over his shoulder. The door to the hallway remained open, leaving him in full view of anyone who might happen to walk by. Luckily, no one had.

  He would have to master that thirst for blood. It seized him, barely controllable, at the mere sight of a woman helpless in a cage. But Napoleon would taste it if someone else fed off her. In itself, that wouldn’t have stopped him, but he didn’t want to leave his scent on the girl.

  She must have silently rejoiced as Sallow backtracked without laying a finger on her. Leaving her was risky. She might cry out, draw attention. Somehow, though, he doubted she would. Attention was probably the last thing she wanted in this place.

  The rest of his upstairs tour yielded nothing more. No more people, no vampires, nothing of interest. Sallow listened to the conversation play out as he crept down the stairs.

  “No, no. They are much too stubborn. Too set in their ways. You saw how quick they were to side with Caligula. He failed to even offer any arguments.”

  “Most of them, sure. They didn’t vote in any particular order, did they? Is it done by seniority, or just a free for all?”

  Once he reached the ground floor, Sallow could listen to them talk no matter where he roamed, as long as he didn’t venture as far as the garage, or go back outside.

  “It would make sense to establish an order, but no.”

  “That’s good, then. What about Gudit?”

  “What about her? She voted with the rest of them.”