Crimson Psyche

by Lynda Hilburn

  “You’re right. It was on the money, if understated.”

  Of course, I didn’t believe for a minute that she hadn’t come over to interview me. My intuition was shooting up flares to get my attention. She definitely had an agenda, and now I was curious.

  Thanks to my vampire-elders-enhanced emotion-sensing skills, it was easy for me to read the intentions of most humans and immortals. In Maxie’s case, I wasn’t picking up any negative intent. In fact, she gave off an appealing, whimsical vibe. If she really was just prowling for a story lead, I could hold my own, she’d get nothing from me. I was getting better at playing the media game.

  She smiled wide, exposing perfect porcelain. “Can I buy you a coffee?”

  I pasted on a pretend-shocked expression. “And you were saying what about not wanting to interview me?”

  She held up one hand, as if she were preparing to be sworn in for testimony in a court hearing. “I swear on a stack of Dracula novels that our conversation over coffee will be off the record. You’re perfectly safe from the creeping tentacles of the Fourth Estate. What do you say? There’s a Starbucks on the twelfth floor. Is that neutral enough territory?” She pointed to the elevator and plastered an innocent expression on her face.

  Despite my usual tendency to retain an aloof, professional distance with anyone I met who might be even peripherally involved with my psychotherapy work, I was uncharacteristically tempted to relax my guard a little with Maxie. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to be more open-minded? Probably — maybe. After all, I had been thinking about making more human friends lately, to balance the alternative. I wouldn’t ever build any new relationships if I didn’t step out of my therapist role occasionally. There’s a fine line between being careful and being paranoid — a line I frequently tripped over.

  “Coffee? Okay, that sounds good.” Now that I’d made the decision and opted for what would be a novel experience for me, I was actually excited about the idea of a few minutes of chitchat with another woman around my own age — and species — no matter what her ulterior motives might be. As fascinating as it was to spend so much time with the undead, I always felt like an outsider — an other. Not that I needed any help with that to begin with. “I’ve got a couple of hours before my first client session of the day, so what the hell?”

  “Great!” she said, and punched me lightly on the arm. “I think we could both use a little more caffeine.”

  I grabbed my coat off the pegs next to the elevator, and while we rode down to the twelfth floor Carson’s sleazy, frantic voice squealed through the speakers, going on about ‘mondo tits’. Comparatively speaking, I guess I’d gotten off easy.

  ***

  “This is some good shit,” Maxie said as she held her coffee mug in both hands and inhaled the aroma. She closed her eyes and smiled, obviously in the midst of a religious experience.

  I laughed and took a sip from my mug. Another coffee junkie. At least we had that in common.

  As I waited for her to complete her euphoric java worship and open her eyes, I scanned the people in the room. Maxie was attracting a lot of attention, which wasn’t too surprising when you factored in the outrageous hair, the model’s face and body and some indefinable energy that radiated from her. And even though I’d gotten used to generating a little notice in a room myself lately — consorting with vampires tends to bring out a woman’s wilder side — it was actually pleasant to be out of the spotlight.

  “So, you want to know about the hair, right?” Maxie blurted, distracting me from my people-watching.

  Suddenly, distant laughter echoed in my mind and something moved along the edge of my vision. I swiveled my head to investigate, but nothing was there. Goose bumps ran a marathon up my arms and I stared into my coffee, wondering if the special-blend-of-the-day contained an extra ingredient, or if I was simply having an anxiety attack. It was probably just another ghost — they’d become my constant companions. But after my unnatural experiences, I no longer took anything for granted, not even my sanity.

  Especially not my sanity.

  “Doc?”

  “What?” I said as I surveyed the room and reminded myself I was in the normal world, sitting in a restaurant. For the time it took to drink one lousy cup of coffee, I wanted to pretend there were no paranormal creatures waiting to jump out at me, nothing lurking in the shadows. Just regular nine-to-five types, dressed for corporate success, indulging in a bit of overpriced caffeine. Yeah, but what about the vampire who’d called the radio show? He’d really felt like a vampire, and a powerful one, at that. Thinking it was possible for one of them to walk around during the day blew all my carefully constructed denials out of the water. Months ago, acknowledging they existed in the first place had been mind-numbing enough. I didn’t need the terrifying realization that safety was a bigger illusion than I’d already assumed. Part of me longed for the innocent days before I fell into the crack between the worlds.

  “Hello, Doc?” Maxie tapped my arm. “You still with me? You’re a little spacey.”

  “Huh?”

  My gaze snapped back to her fish-eyed stare and for a couple of seconds I couldn’t remember where I was. I blinked and reoriented myself. What the hell was wrong with me? I did have a tendency to daydream, but not usually when I was speaking with someone. I’d worked really hard to learn to stay present with clients. She was right: I definitely needed more caffeine.

  “Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to float away on you. Not enough sleep, I guess.” I wiped the corners of my lips with a napkin. “Your hair? Yes, absolutely. I’d love to know about it. You’ve got to admit it’s unique. When did it turn white?” Forcing the vampire thoughts aside, I relaxed into my chair, appreciating the opportunity to discuss something I wasn’t required to give advice on or have an opinion about.

  She scrutinized my face for a few seconds longer, one eyebrow raised, then grinned and scooped the thick whiteness back into a tail, holding it with both hands. “When I was a kid, my hair changed overnight, from blonde to white. I simply woke up one morning with old-lady hair. Let me tell you what a shock it was to my family.”

  Hmm... she believes her hair changed overnight. Interesting. I wonder what really happened?

  “There’s no way your hair could ever be described as old-lady hair. It’s gorgeous.” I studied her, guessing her age to be late twenties to early thirties, then asked, “You simply woke up with white hair? Nothing in particular caused it?” If her hair had really transformed that quickly, there had to be a traumatic precipitating event. Maybe she’d been struck by lightning or experienced a severe fright — or, even worse, suffered an abusive incident. Changes that profound didn’t just happen.

  She stared off into the distance for a few seconds, then turned back to me. Her eyes serious, she said, “Not that I’ve ever been able to remember.”

  Okay, I didn’t want to be interviewed, but I couldn’t help turning the tables on Maxie. Once a therapist, always a therapist; lift up the rock and see what’s underneath, that’s my motto. I’ve never been good at small talk. And, besides, turn-about was fair play: I knew I was sitting with a reporter, and she knew what I did for a living. “Were you examined by a medical doctor?”

  “Sure, scads of them. Medical doctors and shrinks and hypnotists. Nobody could come up with an answer, and since there weren’t any negative effects — except for a few vague nightmares — beyond the color shift, I just learned to live with it.”

  A psychological mystery: did she know that offering such an intriguing interpersonal tidbit to a psychologist was like waving a red cape at a bull? I suspected her strange situation had been the real reason she’d sought me out. Maybe she’d begun to recall unwanted memories.

  I opened my mouth to ask more questions and she scooted her chair closer to the table.

  “Do you believe in vampires?” Maxie fixed her eyes on mine, her lips spreading in a Cheshire-cat smile. “Strictly off the record, of course.”

  Talk about a quick change of topic
, not to mention a masterful evasion. Apparently we were finished discussing her hair.

  I smiled in appreciation of Maxie’s tactics; she was probably a very good reporter. Since I definitely didn’t want to discuss vampires, the wheels in my brain started spinning, kicking up mental dust, as I tried to think of something innocuous to say. I’m sure my inner struggle was obvious, because I felt various emotions surf across my face.

  I must have hesitated long enough that she thought she’d better try something different, because she said, “Okay, I’ll go first. No interview, honest, just a simple conversation, two ordinary businesswomen talking about their daily lives. A couple of regular professionals, discussing alien abductions, vampires, werewolves, reincarnation, demonic possession and other everyday occurrences. Regular run-of-the-mill rock-and-roll.” Her voice picked up speed and volume as she spoke.

  “I’ve been writing for this magazine for five years and I’ve heard every preposterous story you can imagine. I think I could surprise even you. In all that time, as I’ve investigated each bizarre allegation thoroughly, I’ve never come across anything that could be even remotely considered paranormal. Not one real vampire. No werewolves. No aliens. No demons. Just a lot of sick, weird, fucked-up humans craving attention or behaving very badly. I now know for a fact that what you see is what you get. There is no magic. There is no Wizard of Oz. Just the demented little man behind the curtain, pulling the levers.” She flopped back in her chair, breathless.

  Her passionate diatribe had captured the attention of everyone in the coffee shop and the room was so quiet you could hear a vampire fang descend.

  Noticing she was center-stage, Maxie smiled, stood and spread her arms wide, acknowledging one side of the room, then the other. Her long veil of hair swayed as she moved. “Thank you, America. Thank you for this honor. They like me! They really like me!” she said, imitating a famous old Academy Awards acceptance speech.

  I straightened in my seat. Holy crap — bipolar? Borderline Personality Disorder? Either Maxie was a certifiable candidate for a rubber room, or she was the most free-spirited — definitely exhibitionistic — person I’d met in a long time, maybe ever. I really hoped it was the latter.

  “Give ’em hell!” yelled a young man wearing a backward baseball cap. He thrust his fist into the air and the other customers applauded.

  She bowed dramatically, lifted her hair out of the way and dropped back into her chair.

  “If I hadn’t found fame and fortune as a magazine reporter, I woulda gone into acting. And who knows? If this job doesn’t pan out, I still might.” She slapped her thigh with her palm, threw back her head and howled like a wolf.

  Shit. She howled! Maybe we should head over to my office...

  The other Starbucks customers applauded again, some howling back at her. Apparently they were used to her theatrics.

  Temporarily setting aside my concerns about her mental health, I clapped along with the rest of the audience, giving her the benefit of the doubt.

  “Don’t mind me, Doc.” She drank from her mug, and then patted my arm. “I don’t get many chances to perform, so I take my opportunities as I find them.”

  I watched her bask in the adulation and decided she was probably normal-weird as opposed to clinically weird. “Wow, you’re passionate about your skepticism. No fence-sitting for you, eh?” I sipped my cooling coffee.

  “Yeah, that’s me. The Opinionated Cynic, the Know-It-All Pessimist. The Been-There, Done-That-And-Found-It-Boring Mocker. So, what about you? Are you a skeptic, or do you really buy all the stuff your clients try to sell?” She lasered her gaze to mine for a moment, and then leaped up. “Off to the powder room. Be right back.”

  Yikes. Another mood shift.

  “Okay,” I said, watching her hair disappear toward the bathroom. I played with the corner of the napkin, curling and uncurling it. Was I a skeptic? Tricky question. If she’d asked me six months ago, I’d have honestly said I agreed with her assessment completely: vampires, wizards, witches, ghosts, and all those other preternatural phenomena were all imaginary, or delusional. No rational person could believe in fairy-tale or horror-movie creatures of the night, no reasonable, sane person would give credibility to nocturnal creepy-crawlies.

  But in the last half-year I’d peeked under the bed and found the monsters. There really was a vampire tapping at my window. Hell, forget tapping. Devereux didn’t bother with a window, he just popped in wherever he wanted and dazzled me with his platinum hair and turquoise eyes. Skepticism was no longer an option.

  Unless, of course, I’d gone completely bonkers and all my experiences could be explained away by a brain aneurysm or epileptic seizures. I took the possibility of medically-induced insanity very seriously. I’d actually gone as far as to have myself tested, just to rule out those probabilities, as the scientific part of me stubbornly refused to acknowledge what appeared to be happening. As glad as I was to find myself aneurysm-free, that meant the simplest explanations were probably true, or to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, when analyzing a complicated situation, after you remove all the unnecessary elements, whatever is left — no matter how peculiar — must be true. Not being able to blame the vampires on a brain disorder meant that the simple fact, that vampires exist, must be accurate. But just because I understood that twisted reality didn’t mean I’d totally made peace with it, no matter how many vampire clients I had, or how enmeshed into the bloodsucking culture I had become.

  Maxie waved her hand in front of my face and tapped my nose and I jumped. My gaze reconnected with hers.

  “Shit, Doc, where’d you go? Does dementia run in your family? That was another long pause. You must drive your clients nuts with that silent, staring thing. I’ve never understood how you shrinks do that.”

  “Sorry. I’m just distracted.” I got enough sleep last night. What the hell’s going on?

  “Should I go all Freudian and read something into it? Are you avoiding the topic?” She smiled with her mouth, but her eyes were serious, calculating.

  “No, I’m not avoiding the topic.” I straightened in my chair and ignored the questions I saw in her eyes. “I’m just thinking about how much I want to say. No matter what my personal opinion might be about vampires, I do have clients who either believe they’re bloodsuckers or who want to become one. Even if you aren’t interviewing me right now, it’s possible you might be tempted to use what I tell you in a future article and I can’t take the chance that my clients might be harmed. If I say I don’t believe in the undead, that could crush the trust I’m building with my clients. If they think I’m humoring them, they’ll feel betrayed and our progress will stop. So I can truthfully say that I’m keeping an open mind about whether or not vampires exist.”

  Not bad — actually sounds plausible, especially as I’m keeping more than my mind open to the idea.

  Maxie took a breath, maybe getting ready to ask another question, but I was on a roll now. “I will say that I’ve seen things that shake my notions of what’s real and what isn’t. Even in my non-vampire-wannabe clients, the mind is capable of creating astounding things. Think about all the horrors humans have caused throughout the ages. It raises the question of who really are the monsters.”

  “Yeah.” She sat back in her chair. “You’ll get no argument from me there. People definitely suck. Monsters are everywhere. I hear what you’re saying about your clients, so I’ll respectfully stop talking about vampires.” She clicked her spoon on the side of her coffee mug and absently ran her tongue over her front teeth for a few seconds. Her eyes were still riveted on mine, but she appeared deep in thought. “This whole discussion has given me a terrific idea. Are you free this evening?”

  My eyebrows crawled up my forehead. I hadn’t expected that. Despite my intention to respond in my habitual way, with my standard “I’m already committed” speech, I surprised myself by saying something totally different: “Maybe. My plans are flexible. Why do you ask?”

  Perhaps I really
was willing to make some changes — to step outside my rigid social comfort zone. Whaddya know? Therapist, heal thyself.

  She smiled widely. “I’ve been invited to a vampire staking. Wanna come?”

  Chapter 3

  A vampire staking.

  My mouth dropped open and I stared at Maxie. How silly of me to assume she’d suggest something totally inappropriate, like meeting for dinner, or going to a lecture, or maybe listening to a local jazz band. What was I thinking? That would’ve been the height of boredom, the epitome of the mundane, so pitifully human. Why settle for routine when we could watch vampires being killed?

  No, thanks. I’ve already seen that movie.

  I closed my mouth and cleared my throat. “Run that by me again?”

  She threw back her head and laughed. “Wow. I wish I could read minds right now, because I’d pay money to know what just flashed through your brain. You should’ve seen your face! Like I kicked your puppy. Or you thought the topic was serious.”

  “You mean you were kidding about being invited to a vampire staking?”

  “Oh, hell no. I get invited to that sort of weird shit all the time. Vampire stakings, werewolf hunts, devil-worshiping ceremonies, exorcisms, witch burnings — any and every freaky thing you can imagine. Welcome to my sick little world. It’s all bullshit: blatant cries for attention from the perverts and deviants who populate my journalistic universe.”

  “So you’re covering the event for your magazine?”

  “I am indeed. I’ve got to admit that sometimes the costumes and fake monster props are worth the price of admission. I know you’re dedicated to helping the terminally confused, but in my line of work, the mentally ill can be downright entertaining. I thought you’d enjoy exploring another aspect of the vampire wannabe community. Wouldn’t the Vampire Psychologist want to understand as much as possible about her potential clientele? Who knows, some of these folks might end up on your couch.”

  If she knew how crowded my couch already was, and who — or what — regularly came to sit on it, she’d be in yellow-journalism heaven. As much as I wanted to make some new friends, I was pretty sure that Maxie’s idea of fun dangled a little further over the abyss than mine.