A Taste for Red

by Lewis Harris

  I said, "On my first day, Ms. Larch gave out chocolates at the end of class—she knew I wouldn't want one."

  "Did she?"

  "She kept me after class.... She tried to give me an apple."

  The old woman cocked an eyebrow. "And you took it?"

  "No, I ran. I was scared." "Of course."

  "But yesterday..." I reached to the bottom of my book bag and found the apple Ms. Larch had given me after class on Friday. I'd forgotten all about it. I had taken it from her in a daze. Her words came back to me: We're going to be great friends, you and I. The fruit was bruised now, splotches of ugly brown forming on the dying skin.

  Lenora Bones eyed the apple coolly, reaching and taking it cautiously from my hand. "And what else?"

  "She said that she knew who I was."

  "Did she?"

  "I asked if..."

  You asked her if you were a vampire? Lenora Bones thought, her face registering surprise.

  "Yes."

  The old woman's lips curled upward at the corners of her mouth, but the smile never reached her eyes. I'm sorry, she thought, I really should have moved with greater urgency after finding you. She reached and lifted the hem of her dress over the top of her black boot. The boot extended slightly above her ankle and was cinched with five silver buckles. Her pale shin, barely the thickness of the slender end of a baseball bat, disappeared into the boot top. A silver knife handle was tucked into the leather. It's only that ... I've never encountered an Olfactive so young. I'd hoped to discuss this with the others. She pulled the stiletto from her boot. Five inches of pointed steel gripped in a tiny fist.

  "The others?"

  "The Circle of Red." Lenora Bones deftly divided the apple in two, tossing the pieces onto the grass beyond the rusted birdbath. A cardinal dropped from the oak, hopping toward the fruit, cocking its head, eyeing us with caution as it darted its beak into the bruised offering.

  The Circle of Red, I thought, turning my attention to the open book and its bizarre list of chapters: Chapter Seventeen—Recognizing Shape-Shifters, Chapter Twenty-two—Modern Ghouls. I thumbed through the pages, crammed with blocky handwriting. Some of the writing was terribly small, barely discernible. Other pages offered crude maps. There were pages spotted with smears of ink, notes in the margins, oily smudges and stains that might have been ketchup—or something else. "You wrote this?"

  "Some of it," she said. "I and other members of the Circle."

  "And you want me to read it?"

  "We should begin with Chapter Thirteen."

  "Because of Ms. Larch?"

  "Yes."

  "Because she's a vampire?"

  "Yes." The old woman narrowed her eyes.

  "And we're not?"

  "No," she said, softly. "We're more than that." She wiped the slender blade across her dress and slid it back into her boot. "We are the ones who know." Once again, she laid a finger to the side of her nose. "I was searching for Diana Frost—Ms. Larch—when I happened upon you. As you say, I have a pleasant odor about me—and you are equally sweet to my nose. I was riding the streets hunting for Larch when I caught your scent: a happy accident."

  "Hunting?"

  "To destroy the Kensington Vampire."

  To destroy? I couldn't imagine this slight woman destroying anything. An aspirin, maybe.

  She smiled ruefully. No, I'm not so formidable as I once was. The Circle of Red grows smaller, and we in it grow older. We have not claimed a new member for many years—until now. I'd not expected to survive the Kensington Assignment, but perhaps with your help....

  "I'm not destroying anyone," I said.

  Lenora Bones nodded solemnly. "It's good that you do not wish to." She looked away from my face, her eyes urging mine to follow. My gaze fell beyond the birdbath to the divided apple, and the body of the crimson cardinal lying dead beside it, poisoned.

  But it's not a choice you have, my sweet.

  Eleven

  According to the book What Is Known, anyone can become a vampire. It requires only the corruption of blood.

  "Corruption?"

  "Blood can become spoiled, tainted by misdeed," the old woman explained.

  I had read the recommended Chapter Thirteen twice. "This is nuts," I said. "You expect me to believe this? So if I drink a frog's blood or something ... I'll become a vampire?" That was ridiculous.

  "No, dear," Ms. Bones corrected. "There's not enough blood in a frog. And only by drinking the blood of a human, can a human be corrupted. A steady diet of blood will lead to the corruption of one's own blood. A corrupted soul dies, and in dying, human feeling is lost. A vampire is born."

  "And lives forever?"

  "A long time, certainly," the old woman said. "Centuries, perhaps."

  "That's a lot of blood."

  "Yes—and many innocent victims"

  I pushed my empty dessert plate away, glad I'd eaten before all this talk of blood. I put aside the leather-bound book. I was open to weird and strange—but not this weird and strange. Across the table, Ms. Bones watched as I collected my copies of Tarzan of the Apes and Treasure Island as well as the Sunny Hill Bee. I slid them back into my book bag.

  "My mom's gonna be worried if I don't get home soon," I said, ready to be gone.

  The old woman frowned. What did she want from me, anyhow? To help her destroy my science teacher? That wasn't going to happen. I could handle a little ESP and a steady diet of watermelon, but I wasn't going to get into any kind of life and death struggle with anyone or anything. I'd thought that maybe I was a vampire, but I was wrong. Which was all right—I could live with that. After all, I was kind of fond of my soul. According to the old woman's black book, being a vampire was a pretty lousy deal anyway. And I could just as easily live without belonging to the so-called Circle of Red, too.

  I know this is asking a great deal, but it won't be a poisoned apple you're dodging next time, dear girl. And perhaps you'll not be so lucky.

  The old woman's thought seeped into my head. Was this a sales pitch? Was she making puppy dog eyes at me? Yeah? Well, it sounds like it's your job to take care of that—the Circle of Red's job, right?

  "The power this vampire knows is an addiction. Blood is the cost—and murder." Ms. Bones laid her hand over mine. "Now that Sylvia Larch is aware of what you are, she cannot let you live."

  "I'm nothing." I pulled my hand away.

  "You belong to the Circle, whether you like it or not—it's in your blood. You have the nose, Svetlana. You smell the rot on her. To the Kensington Vampire you are equally foul. This is not something you get to choose; it chooses you." Lenora Bones grabbed my hand once more.

  I tried pulling away, but this time her grip was unbreakable.

  "The Circle has been fantastically lucky in discovering the Kensington Vampire," she said. "This creature might have preyed on the blood of innocents for centuries."

  I couldn't turn away from the hardness in the old woman's stare. Her fingers were like steel bands around my wrist.

  "Many have suffered already. I was fortunate to rediscover the monster's trail after she escaped me in London. If I lose her here, I might never again have the chance to defeat her. Is that what you want?"

  Let go. I twisted my arm, willing her to release me.

  She removed her bony hand, perhaps by choice. "You must do what you can to help, Svetlana. The power is inside you."

  The thought I had was this: You might consider changing your name to the Circle of Useless.

  I was not impressed.

  Twelve

  So I wasn't a vampire, big deal. Had it been an unreasonable assumption? I didn't think so: eat only red, sleep under the bed, heightened sensory perception, mind control, looking fantastic in black. It had definitely been plausible.

  "How did it go over there?" Mom asked when I returned home.

  "Okay!" I yelled over my shoulder as I ran up the stairs. I didn't want to talk about it. What could I tell her? That Lenora Bones had tried to recruit me in
to an international secret society of crazy old ladies? In my room, I changed into my favorite black T-shirt and black jeans. Mom had made me dress up before going over to the Bone Lady's house. In the front yard Razor was going nuts, running in frantic circles around the bottom of the Oak of Doom, yapping his head off. I peered down from my bedroom window and wondered if Fumio Chen and Dwight Foote had sneaked through the front gate and climbed up into my hideout. But it was barely four o'clock, so I figured they were probably still at the park, helping with the search for the missing girls.

  I tried to imagine Sandy, Marsha, and Madison sleeping outside in the woods overnight. Two nights, actually—it was Saturday, and they hadn't been seen since Thursday afternoon. I decided the girls couldn't have been lost in the woods for that long, not anywhere around Sunny Hill. It wasn't like there was some big wilderness out there to get lost in.

  Fumio and Foote had said they'd come by later to see if I wanted to go with them to the Spring Fling Carnival. The soccer field at school had been fenced off yesterday so carnival workers could set up amusement rides and booths. It might be fun to go. There was a good-sized Ferris wheel I wouldn't mind taking a spin on. I needed to get out and go somewhere this weekend, not just be cooped up around the house. Mom certainly wasn't going to let me go anywhere on my own—at least not until the missing girls showed up. But she'd probably let me go with Fumio and Foote. I had a couple bucks in my secret stash that I could spend, not much.

  I'd hoped to make some decent cash reading to the Bone Lady, but that job had turned out to be a complete bust. I couldn't go back there. Ms. Bones's eyesight was fine. I should have suspected as much since she didn't even wear eyeglasses. I liked the old woman a lot—you can't help liking someone who smells like cookies. But I didn't see any good coming from hanging around her.

  She was on the hunt for Ms. Larch. Unbelievable! And she actually wanted me to help destroy my own science teacher, whatever that meant. The science teacher was definitely a bit off, no doubt—my nose informed me of that much. But a vampire? A vampire the same as one in Lenora Bones's black book? Heck, I'd thought I was a vampire—and that turned out to be a mistake. Maybe the entire situation with Ms. Larch was just a crazy mix-up, too.

  That's what I told myself. But what I pictured was the apple Ms. Larch had given me, the one Lenora Bones had cut into two pieces. I saw the poor cardinal lying dead on the ground, its bright red feathers gone dull in death. Had Larch really tried to poison me? When I stepped into her classroom, did she smell the stench of rotted meat coming off me—the same as I smelled from her? Was I her foe, then, whether I liked it or not? Lenora Bones said it was in my blood, that I was one of the Circle of Red, a guardian between the natural and the unnatural. She said I had no choice.

  Outside, Razor continued sniffing and barking around the bottom of the giant oak.

  "Svetlana!" Mom called.

  I knew she wanted me to go outside and calm down Razor. Sometimes he went crazy over squirrels, or a cat that had the dumb luck to sneak over the fence. Of course, if Razor ever went toe to toe with a cat, he'd probably get the shock of his furry little life.

  Razor stopped barking and rushed over when I banged through the door onto the front porch. He looked up at me as if to say: What took you so long? His little ears were lifted, and his stinger tail poked up straight as an antenna. He led me to the Oak of Doom, and I climbed up the ladder, but there was no one inside the hideout. I did a double take at the leather-bound book resting on the crate I used for a table. A torn sheet of newspaper poked from between its pages. It was the front page of today's Sunny Hill Tribune. The headline read: "Search Organized for Missing Girls." Above the headline, Ms. Bones had scrawled in black ink: There's no time to waste!

  How had the Bone Lady gotten in and out of my hideout so fast? There was more to that old woman than met the eye, even beyond the fact that she kept a knife in her boot. Ms. Bones obviously believed that the three girls had run afoul of the so-called Kensington Vampire. Now that she knew Ms. Larch was the woman she sought and that she was a teacher at Sunny Hill Middle School, Lenora Bones had connected the missing girls to her. But could it be true?

  I shivered, remembering the science teacher's icy touch, her red-nailed fingers cold against my cheek as she reached across her desk and whispered my name. The memory brought with it the smell of rot, the ripe odor of bad fruit and spoiled meat, the smell of garbage on a hot day when a trash can has been left sitting in the sun. I saw again the sightless eye of the dead cardinal, as black and hard as a button. I imagined Ms. Larch as a nurse, wheeling sleeping patients down a long corridor to a darkened room and their doom. The image came frighteningly easy. I could almost smell the hospital antiseptic and hear the ghostly squeaking of wheels and the tap-tap-tapping of stiletto heels across a cold tile floor.

  "Svetlana!"

  I jerked from my dark dreaming. In the street, Fumio Chen and Dwight Foote had pulled up on their bikes and were shouting at me.

  "Any luck with the search?" I asked, knowing the answer already.

  "Nah," Foote said. "You coming with us to the carnival or what?"

  I decided a diversion would do me good. I climbed down and went inside to ask Mom. She said I could go as long as I was back home by dark, which was still a few hours away. My money wouldn't last that long, anyhow, even with the extra five bucks she gave me.

  I definitely needed to get away from the black thoughts creeping around in my head.

  Thirteen

  On the ride over to the Spring Fling Carnival, we pedaled past telephone poles plastered with notices for the missing girls. The stapled sheets fluttered in the afternoon breeze, rustling like dry leaves. The sound made me think of fall, although it was definitely springtime. The sun was stuck in the sky like a fried egg in a pan. Before the carnival even came into sight, I could smell popcorn and fried dough. Festive music piped over the milling crowds and rows of brightly colored tents. The parking lot was jammed with cars, and more vehicles overflowed onto the grass and along the curbsides surrounding the soccer field. The bike rack was full, so we chained our bikes to a railing near the school entrance.

  "This place is packed!" Fumio said, pushing his padlock closed. "Let's check out the bumper cars first, okay?"

  I didn't care. The Ferris wheel rose on the far side of the carnival, half-filled with riders against the blue sky. A banner over the soccer field entrance read: SUNNY HILL SPRING FLING CARNIVAL AND FUND-RAISER. We waited in a long line to get onto the bumper-car ride. When we finally did, it was totally lame. The junky cars crawled as slow as molasses. Unbelievably, one of the rules was to not bump into the other cars. The ride cost three tickets and seemed as if it was over as soon as it began, which was no big loss.

  "What a freaking rip-off," Fumio complained.

  "I get to choose next," Foote said.

  We wandered down the rows of booths, jostling through the crowd. There were more adults at the carnival than kids. Foote and Fumio knew most of the kids, and even I knew a few. I waved to freckled Alison Finch from my gym class with her parents in tow, equally freckled. She waved back. Coach Cooper was there, sitting behind a table, trying to coax students into signing up for summer soccer league. Good luck. Her whistle dangled from a cord around her bull neck—which was hardly a neck at all. She probably wore the whistle when she went to bed at night.

  "Come on, Svetlana," she called, waving me over. I acted like I didn't hear. I didn't know what I was going to do this summer, but it sure wasn't going to be running around and sweating for Coach Cooper.

  Fumio wanted to stop and give the Coin Toss Challenge a try. It was a table arrayed with every imaginable shape and size of glass container: ashtrays, jelly jars, fishbowls, and so forth. The object of the game was to stand behind a rope and toss a quarter so that it landed in a jar or dish without popping out.

  "And what do you win if you do it?" Foote asked.

  Fumio pointed to the rows of clear plastic bags hanging from clothespin
s around the top of the booth. Each had a lonely goldfish swimming in it. "A goldfish, man," he said, pointing, looking exactly like the dweeb he was.

  "What do you want a stupid goldfish for?" Foote asked. I wondered the same thing. Once again, Foote was looking more like the brains of the duo.

  We carried on past the merry-go-round, where bored moms and dads balanced little kids on the saddles of plastic horses. We paused at the Spinning Teacup, but I nixed that idea. Forking over three tickets for the thrill of losing my lunch seemed like a bad trade. The Ferris wheel was reloading, but Foote kept us moving forward.

  "What the heck?" I said.

  "I'm looking for the pop guns, man. That's my game."

  We went by the Jellybean Jar Count, where a ticket earned you the chance to guess the number of beans and win a brand-new baseball glove. Another booth sported a lazy-looking chicken locked inside a glass case. The chicken did math. Honestly, it was the cruelest thing I'd ever seen. Why in the world would anybody force a chicken to do math? Why was this allowed? And why would anyone want to pay to watch a chicken count corn, anyway? In the next booth over, Principal Talbot had volunteered to sit in the Dunking Tank. Two tickets got you three chances to peg a button with a tennis ball and drop the principal into a water-filled tub.

  We passed by it all.

  "C'mon, Foote," Fumio demanded, wanting to do something.

  "It's right ahead," Foote said, pointing to the shooting gallery. A table lined with pop pistols fronted the booth. Tin targets shaped like little buffalo moved in mechanical circles ten feet beyond the table. It didn't seem a very far distance to shoot. The gallery was called Deadeye Shoot-'em-up.

  "How much?" Foote asked, pulling tickets from his jean pocket with his good arm.

  The grizzled guy behind the table had a gut that fell over his pants like a sack of water. "Two tickets, ten shots," he said, uninterestedly, scratching at his whiskered neck and gnawing on a giant pretzel he'd gotten from the booth next door.