by E A Comiskey
Richard rubbed his sandpaper eyes. “We’ll have to get past Maddie,” he said.
“I think she’s sleeping. Her night wasn’t much better than ours. Dress quietly. We’ll leave a note.”
A note. Pathetic. She’d never be satisfied with a note. He was headed to the involuntary loony bin for certain.
Too bad he had no better plan to offer.
He dressed, admitting to himself that he really did feel infinitely better for being clean and rested. If he could put a decent meal in his belly, he’d be just about fit as a fiddle. Then again, if a bull had batteries, his horns would blow.
Stanley opened the bedroom door and stepped into the hall. Richard followed and they tiptoed toward the front door. They’d made it nearly halfway across the living room when a voice snapped, “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”.
Maddie sat still as a statue in one of her fussy armchairs. “This is some kind of sick joke?” her voice trembled.
Way back when, Richard got caught putting a frog in Susan Morgan’s desk. Susan had beautiful long red braids and eyes the color of emeralds. For the entirety of third grade, he had thought her the prettiest girl in the whole entire world. Why wouldn’t a boy put a frog in her desk? Where else would you ever think to put it, for goodness sake?
But the plan had backfired when Mrs. Robbins heard the thing croak as he transferred it from his lunch box to Susan’s desk. She had scolded him and issued a good many threats that started with a ruler and ended up with making a phone call to his father.
Mrs. Robbins was old, but she’d been a girl once. Why didn’t she understand the depths of his affection? Was it jealousy?
Girls. Did any greater mystery exist in the whole entire world?
Such were his musings as he walked to school the next morning in the moments before a frog hopped from the sidewalk, right onto the toe of his shoe. Not just any frog—the fattest, greenest, most moist-looking frog he’d ever seen in his whole entire life. A frog that held the very essence of frogginess.
The frog practically begged to be put in Susan Morgan’s desk.
There could be no escaping destiny.
Richard scooped the magnificent animal up and cradled it gently against his chest with one hand while struggling to open his knapsack with the other. All thought of consequence vanished like mist in the morning sun. This was a mission from God. He could not fail.
The perfect moment presented itself when Susan chose to sharpen her pencil just as Mrs. Robbins excused herself to speak to a visiting parent in the hallway.
In a dance of sleek, covert actions, he opened the bag, scooped up the frog, leaned forward, lifted the lid of the desk, deposited the treasure, sealed it in, and sat down once more. The hard part was sitting, still and quiet, through the remainder of the time allotted for handwriting practice, waiting for the moment his glorious surprise would be revealed.
Victory. True love. A happy ending. Every good thing pulsed in his veins.
Mrs. Robbins called out for them to finish up.
Richard’s heart beat faster.
Papers were passed to the front and collected.
He wiped his cold, clammy palms against his thighs, pressing hard to still the excited trembling of his hands.
The teacher announced that they should put their belongings in their desks and prepare to walk to the music room.
He leaned forward, clutching the sides of his desk.
Susan grasped the top of her own desk in her pretty pale fingers.
Surely his heart would burst right out of his chest from the strain!
She lifted the lid with her eyes turned toward the girl next to her, who’d just said something that could only be bland and unimportant in this spectacular moment.
The enormous, glistening frog played his role as though Richard had trained it lifelong for just this moment. It waited for the girl to face forward and look down. Even from behind, Richard knew the moment her eyes met the eyes of the frog. Her spine straightened. Her slim shoulders drew back.
If his grin grew any wider, his face would split.
Susan pushed her chair back and rose quickly to her feet, leaving the desk wide open.
The frog croaked, a magnificent, low-pitched, perfectly enunciated announcement that the water was knee-deep and then it launched itself straight at Susan’s face.
The next few seconds passed in a bizarre flurry of action that seemed to happen in slow motion and yet, simultaneously, so fast, the Man of Steel himself would have been helpless to stop it.
Susan screamed. Her terror ripped through Richard’s heart and the realization crashed down upon him that this did not rank among any of the top one hundred ways to get a young woman to fall in love with you. In her scramble to escape the monster she’d encountered, the girl’s feet tangled in the shiny metal legs of her chair, which fell and clattered across the tiled floor. Susan herself went down hard, first hitting her bottom so hard Richard heard her teeth clack together, and then toppling over and cracking the back of her head against one of the desks behind her.
She lay on the floor, sobbing and calling for her mother. and Mrs. Robbins came racing to her aid.
The treacherous frog once more announced knee-deep and took three giant, moist, flopping hops across the classroom.
Mrs. Robbins, cradling Susan in her arms, watched it and then turned toward Richard with an expression far closer to bafflement than anger. “Really, Richard? Really?”
Anger would have been preferable. This astonishment over his immense thoughtlessness and repeated failure to comprehend the absurdity of putting a frog in a girl’s desk struck at his heart in a way the number of spankings and other punishments he’d suffered over the years never had. Hot tears sprang to his eyes and, before the other boys could catch him crying, he turned and ran all the way to the river bank, scurried up a tree with the fleet-footed assurance of a squirrel, and hid there among the sticky, sap-dotted branches.
Maddie’s voice, as she faced them in the dwindling light of the quiet room, brought every ounce of shame and humiliation back to him and heaped another sixty years of mediocre fatherhood on top for good measure. He couldn’t think of any lie that could possibly explain their behavior to her, and he lacked the physical strength to run away and hide in a tree. That hadn’t work out well last time, anyway. He’d still ended up on the receiving end of a wooden paddle. Left with no other recourse, he held out his hands in supplication and begged his only child, “Hear me out, Madeline. I’ll tell you everything, if you just hear me out.”
“Richard…” Stanley rested a warning hand on his shoulder.
“She deserves to know, Stanley,” Richard said, shrugging off his hand. “It was one thing when it was just us, but she’s in it now, deep as Mississippi mud, and she deserves to know.”
“You can’t tell her,” Stanley said. “Some information must be sought.”
Maddie kept her hands on the arms of the chair. Her nails bit into the soft upholstery. Her knuckles turned white. “Oh, you can believe I’m seeking information. I’d like very much to know what in the name of all that is holy is going on with my elderly father who barely left the house for the duration of my life and suddenly decides to up and run away from a nursing home in the middle of the night, bounce around the country for half a year, and then show up for Thanksgiving at my home and spend the duration of the visit sneaking around and getting arrested. Do tell, Dad. What the hell is going on here? I am sincerely seeking.”
Her words opened up something inside Richard that he hadn’t realized had been closed until that point. He sank down on the sofa and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “You’re going to find some of this hard to believe.”
She stared at him in silence, her jaw firmly set, looking so much like her mother when she was angry that it was almost possible to believe his wife had lived on past her thirties and forties and seen the age where her pretty dark hair started to shift into a glorious silver crown.
“It all
started back at Everest, right? I settled in there and I was just waiting for my number to be called.”
Her grip loosened. “Dad, it wasn’t like that.”
He brushed her words away. “It was and it is. Maybe that’s not what you or anyone else wanted it to be, but I’m telling you, as the one who was living it, that’s what I was doing. I had no reason in the world to keep taking one breath after another except the habit was so strong, I didn’t know how to stop.” He scratched the scruff on his cheek. “Anyway, one night it happened. My time was up. The Grim Reaper knocked on my door.”
Stanley interrupted, “Technically, he doesn’t really do that. It’s simply not showy enough for him. He’s quite the style-obsessed dandy.”
Richard and Maddie both glared at him. He shrugged and took a seat in the darker part of the room, nearer the garden windows.
“Anyway,” Richard said, annoyed by the interruption. He jerked a thumb in Stan’s direction. “This old coot saved my hide. Much as I hate to say it, it’s the truth. He did it then and he’s done it a bunch of times since.”
“I don’t understand,” Maddie said.
Richard clacked his upper plate around with his tongue for a moment. “I know. I’m doing a piss-poor job of explaining. See, not everything was as it appeared at Everest. To look at the place, it was all sunshine and sugar-free tea parties, but the nurses, some of them, they weren’t really nurses.”
Maddie’s brows drew downward. “You’re telling me they were abusive?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he said, but then he thought about it and cocked his head a bit. “Well, in a way, I guess. They weren’t human, Madeline. They fed on humans.”
Her posture slumped. “Oh, Dad.”
Sudden anger spurred him on. “No, young lady, don’t you dismiss me like that. I might be older than dinosaur crap, but I ain’t senile yet, and I’m telling you there were things in that place the likes of which you need to pray you never encounter. I saw them with my own eyes. I helped kill them.”
“What?”
He nodded. “That’s right. Stanley and I, we killed a whole nest of them. Four of them. They came after me, after us, but thanks to him knowing what no one else was willing to believe, we got the jump on ‘em.”
The memory of that night stood out like the full moon amid the twinkling stars of his memory. He’d been born from his mother and died at his wife’s side, no matter if he did keep walking around after that. Killing the strigoi was a second birth and, come Hell or high water, he wasn’t giving up on life so easily this time around.
“After that, Stan Kapcheck told me some stuff. Stuff kind of like I’m telling you now. The kind of stuff that sounds crazier than a squirrel under a leaky moonshine still, but it has the taste of truth, all the same.”
She still gripped the arms of the chair, but no longer appeared intent on shattering them with her bare hands, which he took as a good sign. “Such as?” she asked.
“Well.” He cleared his throat and fidgeted. Off in his dark corner, Stanley remained, for once, still and quiet as a statue. This was Richard’s conversation and they both knew it. “He told me your mama didn’t die from anything natural.” He meant to wait for her to respond, but the silence unsettled him so much, he plunged forward. “The thing that killed her was evil. The kind of evil that infects a man’s nightmares and makes his skin crawl the whole day after. It feasted on a person’s life force. That’s why it wanted your mama. She had more life than anyone I ever knew.” His voice caught in his throat and he cleared the frog away. “Maybe Burke.” The comparison had come to him before. “There’s a whole lot of Barbara in that girl.”
Her fingers clenched again.
Bad idea, bringing Burke up now. He rushed forward, “Anyway, Stanley told me it had surfaced again and was hunting back in Tombstone. We went out there and pulled Finn O’Doyle’s bacon out of the fire. Just in the nick of time, too, by the looks of him.”
“Finn O’Doyle,” she repeated.
“That’s right.”
“The author?”
Richard nodded.
“The author who just released a book about a shape-shifter who ate people’s souls and the three Fates who were protectors of the innocent?”
He blinked at her. “He wrote that?”
“He did,” she confirmed.
“Huh.” He paused to let this new information sink in.
“You didn’t by chance hear about that story, maybe in a commercial or something? Things can have a way of sinking into our subconscious sometimes, you know.”
“I lived that story,” he told her.
“In the book, the three Fates were beautiful women, sisters, I believe.”
“Well, of course he changed it up a bit. What kind of a weirdo would want to read about two old farts shooting guns at monsters and drinking prune juice to keep their bowels moving?”
“Dad—”
“No.” He cut her off, not wanting to listen to her accuse him of being two cards short of a full deck. “I ain’t crazy,” he insisted. “When that was all taken care of, we caught wind of a...”
She cocked her head to one side. “I’m listening.”
“A vampire coven in San Diego,” he mumbled.
“Excuse me?”
“Vampires!” he barked the word out much louder than he’d intended. “We hunted vampires in San Diego. And other stuff, too. Banshees, nachzehre, wendigos. Stuff.” He rubbed his hands on his pants. “And that’s it. That’s what we do. What we’ve been doing.”
“I see. And these hunting adventures,” her emphasis highlighted her skepticism. “Burke does this with you?”
Pride forced a grin to his lips. He couldn’t have held it back if he’d wanted to. “Oh, you should see her, Maddie. She’s strong and fearless and smart. Good Lord in Heaven but that girl’s got a mind like a steel trap. Smarter than Stan and me put together and multiplied by ten.”
“And now she’s missing.”
Maddie’s words were a punch in the gut.
“We know where she is,” Stanley said from the other side of the room. “And we know who she’s with.”
“You do seem to be the man with all the answers, Stanley Kapcheck.”
Richard wiped his hands on his pants again, a little afraid for Stan who had never seen Maddie truly angry. He thought she was a sweet little church lady obsessed with proper table manners and fine appearances. No matter how often Burke and Richard warned him, they could not get it to sink in that this was the mother of the woman who’d chopped up the devil’s pet with an axe, then squared her shoulders, lifted her chin, and faced the Queen of Hell Herself.
“I wish I had all the answers, dear lady. I know where Burke is and who she’s with, but I have yet to figure out how to get her away from them when she’s clearly bent on staying there.”
Madeline crossed her legs. Her foot bobbed in the air. “If she is where she wants to be, why not leave her there? What makes you think she’s in danger?”
“I’m quite convinced the only reason she thinks she wants to be there is because she’s possessed, or, at the very least, controlled by very dark, very powerful magic. And because I don’t know what kind of spell can compel a person so completely, I’m not sure yet how to break it.”
“By sneaking out into the night, you think you’ll figure it out?”
“I have looked in every book I have and called every source I can think to call. I can’t get any further by sitting around here. I tried to wait, to figure it out, to let the universe send what help would come, but I can’t wait any longer. Burke is in trouble. If we need to tie her up and gag her and drag her back here against her will, then that’s what we need to do or she’s going to end up with a one-way ticket to Mars.”
Maddie closed her eyes and shook her head slowly back and forth. “You’re mad. Both of you. You’ve gone mad and I’m going to have to call the doctors and…” She sniffed. A single tear sparkled like a diamond on the end of her
lash.
Richard knelt down in front of her. “Look at me, Madeline.”
Her eyes remained tightly shut.
He took both of her hands in his. “Look at me.”
Finally, with a shaky breath, she opened her eyes and met his gaze.
“You need to set aside all those things your grown-up brain insists upon and find the wide-eyed kid inside yourself. The one who played with little invisible Rainbow Sparklebraids in the backyard.”
She sniffed again. “Sparkletail Rainbow.”
He nodded. “Look in my eyes and tell me I’m lying to you. Tell me you haven’t known your whole life that every monster we fear in the dark is real. Tell me that when you’re walking in the woods and you hear a stick snap your mind doesn’t say Bigfoot before it says coyote.”
“It’s madness,” she whispered.
“It’s a truth the human race is so scared of they’ve convinced themselves it’s just a story so they can sleep at night.”
Stanley rose and came into the circle of light. “The truth is, Maddie, the real reason they can sleep at night is because your father and your daughter and I, and others like us, keep those creatures relegated to the shadows, but something’s wrong. If creatures like that have a hand in the work being done at Coleum, if they have Burke—”
“We have to get her back,” Richard said.
Her tears flowed freely, a slow trickle of emotion too great to be held inside. “Bring her home safe, then.”
He nodded and stood, offering up a silent thanks that his hip didn’t give out at the effort. Stanley clapped him on the back and they headed toward the door.
“Dad!”
He turned back.
She stood there, arms wrapped around herself in a tight squeeze. “Come back safe.”
He nodded. “You got it, kid.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Richard
The factory was given over to rot and vine. Where shining lights and high-tech windmills stood the night before, scraggly trees and rusty signs now creaked in the cold wind.
