A through line.
Ed grabbed his flashlight and walked around the house, taking in its faded glory and slow collapse as he made his way to the backyard.
Ed stopped when he saw the gravestone.
It was a white marble cross under a sprawling live oak. There were other crosses too, lashed together from oak twigs, huddled around the marble one.
The rain was beating down, but Ed didn’t hurry. He walked to the white marble cross, knelt in front of it, and wiped the mud from it with his thumb. The inscription read:
Baby Girl
February 21, 2014
So that part was true, he thought.
Ed rose from the grave and studied the other crosses. Fresh earth. No grass on the mounds. None of the graves were marked, but from the sizes of the various mounds, he knew what they contained.
The poor woman had buried her dogs out here, next to her baby.
Some people treat their animals like humans. But this was the first time he’d ever seen them buried alongside a child. Crazy.
Then, from the house behind him, he heard the sound of a screen door slamming.
Ed backed under the live oak and watched the house. In the dark and through the rain, it was hard to make anything out. He could sense movement somewhere, but little else.
Then he saw her, Doña Anna, standing bare-ass naked at her back door. In a flash of lightning, he saw that she was almost bald. What little hair remained was hanging in clumps from her diseased scalp. There was something wrong with her arms. From the elbows down to her fingertips, they looked white and swollen, her hands thick like the meaty end of a baseball bat. Her breasts looked darker than the rest of her, and in the blue glow from another flash of lightning, he saw why. She’d drawn a ghastly, skeletal-looking face on each sagging breast. And as she walked out her back door and around the side of her house, her grotesquely swollen belly rocked from side to side. Ed watched her trek across the yard and gain the road. Even with the rain slashing at her face and naked body, she paused and scanned one way and then the other. Then she turned toward the crossroads, toward the little tarpaper village, and started walking into the night.
Ed followed after her.
Somebody, years ago, had tried to board up the church. There were still a few slats nailed across the windows, and there was one rotten two-by-four still holding on above the front door, but over time, teenagers and varmints and thieves had done their work. Ed had no trouble ducking through the doorway, and when the lightning flashed, he saw the nude woman kneeling at the altar at the far side of the abandoned church.
It was so dark he figured there was no way he could shoot video, but he didn’t have any other choice. He took out his phone and started shooting, careful to stay in the shadows at the back of the church.
A familiar voice spoke behind him.
“You know what you’re looking at, don’t you?” Charles Marsh said.
Ed lowered his phone and turned around.
Marsh walked past him, a few feet into the darkened church, and stopped. He turned and smiled at Ed. “You know what she is, right?”
Ed shook his head.
“Civatateo. The mother of vampires.”
“What?”
Ed’s first thought was that Marsh had lost his mind. He was about to say as much when Marsh waved away his objection.
“Watch this,” Marsh said, and gestured toward an unseen crewman somewhere in the dark. Instantly the whole church flooded with a glare from spotlights mounted on metal racks against the walls.
“Excuse me,” Marsh announced. He cleared his throat and advanced on the kneeling woman. “Mrs. Medrano, my name is Charles Marsh. I host a television show called American Monsters. I’d like to ask you some questions, please.”
Doña Anna shrank from the glare, one white, badly deformed hand coming up to shield her eyes.
“Why are you naked, Mrs. Medrano?”
She hissed at Marsh, her hand still covering her face.
“What can you tell me about the children who were killed out on the road?” Marsh went on. He walked as far as the first pew and stopped. His two cameramen kept moving into the space at the foot of the altar, flanking her. “Did you have anything to do with their deaths?”
“Leave me alone!”
“Not gonna happen, Mrs. Medrano. I want answers. What happened to those children?”
Then one of the cameramen got too close. He knelt down for a better angle, no doubt trying to make her look bigger than the stooped, scabby woman that she was. Doña Anna lunged for him, easily knocking him over. He fell on his back and the camera hit the floor.
“Hey!” Marsh yelled. “Careful there. That’s expensive equipment.”
But Doña Anna ignored him. She climbed on top of the fallen cameraman, straddling him like a lover, and wrapped her hands around his throat.
The man tried to push her away, but before he could, his head was wrapped in a moving, buzzing haze. He made a startled sound somewhere between shock and pain. He began to buck and writhe, trying to get out from under the woman, but couldn’t dismount her.
Ed lowered his phone. The light from the camera was hitting the pair as they wrestled on the floor. In the blue-white glare of the spotlight, the haze that had enveloped the man’s head took shape.
Ed was frozen in disgust and horror. He stood there, his phone at his side, forgotten but still recording, as tens of thousands of specks floated around the man’s face. A memory from his time in the army rose up, unbidden. He’d seen a few men sleeping in their bunks once, swarmed by a similar haze.
Those are mites, he thought. Oh Jesus, she’s got scabies.
The man’s torture seemed to go on forever, but eventually Doña Anna’s victim stopped struggling. In a grotesque moment of defeat and acceptance, his hands fell away from her wrists. His legs twitched like those of a man dangling from the end of a rope and then went still.
Ed had just enough time to realize the man was wearing pressed jeans when Marsh let out a yell. “Help him!” he roared to the other cameraman. “Do something!”
The crewman looked like he couldn’t figure out what to do. Finally he put his camera down and ran over to Doña Anna, grabbing her by the shoulders.
Without getting up from her first kill, she half turned and threw an arm around the second crewman’s right shoulder. The haze of mites enveloped the man so quickly he barely had time to yell out.
Within seconds he dropped to his knees, his expression twisted with shock and pain. Then he fell over on his side and began to convulse, just as his partner had done.
“Stop it!” Marsh yelled.
Doña Anna turned in Marsh’s direction, then slowly rose to her feet. The haze of mites that had enveloped the two fallen men seemed to shrink back into her hands, and she walked toward Marsh, her hands coming up, groping at the air for his throat.
“No,” Marsh said. “You get away from me.”
He backed up, stepped on a pile of loose debris, staggered, and nearly fell.
“Stay back!”
Marsh glanced over his shoulder at Ed, and in that moment, Ed saw unadulterated fear in his old rival’s face.
Doña Anna let out a scream and sprinted for Marsh. He turned to run, but his foot caught on something on the floor and he went sprawling facedown in the center aisle. She fell on Marsh, straddling his back just as she had done to the cameraman’s stomach, and locked her hands around the back of his throat.
“Help me!” Marsh screamed. “Drinker, please, help me!”
Ed didn’t move. He stood there in the shadows, watching the mites float around Marsh’s head. The man’s hair dropped off, and as Ed watched, Marsh’s skin turned white and knobby and puckered.
Inspiration came to Ed at that moment. The little girls who had fallen victim to Doña Anna had the same chalky white skin around their groins and around their necks, and now Ed understood why. When Doña Anna fell on them, straddled them the way she’d done with Marsh’s cameramen
, her legs must have pushed their dresses up around their hips. The mites would have swarmed wherever there was skin-to-skin contact, which would explain the chalky rings around the neck as well. It would also explain why the only little boy to fall victim to Doña Anna didn’t have that chalky skin around his groin. His jeans would have protected him from that.
But even as his mind worked through the mechanics of her kills, he thought of what Marsh had said.
Civatateo. The mother of vampires.
The Aztecs, Ed remembered, bestowed warrior status on pregnant women. There was no higher honor for a woman in Aztec culture. But it was a double-edged sword, for with the glory of warrior status came the crucible of death. The women who died in childbirth were said to come back as servants of the goddess Tlazolteotl, the filth eater, goddess of the moon and of human sexuality. Those servants, those civatateo, were said to haunt the crossroads. They preyed upon children, perhaps to replace the ones they’d lost, and could use their power to seduce men and lead them to their doom.
Ed had seen pictures of hieroglyphs from Aztec temples, and he’d seen the fanciful renditions of modern artists, but it had never occurred to him that such a thing could really be. For as much as he wanted to believe, his fate in life had become that of the professional debunker, and that change had hardened him to the faith that had once sustained him. He had stopped believing.
Ed’s gaze wandered across the floor, settling at last upon the death mask of fear and pain still lingering on the face of Charles Marsh’s corpse.
Marsh had seen the truth first, Ed realized. For all the man’s many sins, for all his arrogance and thievery, he’d gotten to the right answer long before Ed had. And it was Marsh, his old rival, who had been the one to pull back the curtain and show him the truth. Ed didn’t know how to process that.
A rotten board made a muffled crack somewhere across the room.
Ed looked up sharply and saw Anna Medrano coming for him.
All his strength left him in that moment. Her tattooed breasts rocked on her enormous, swollen gut. Her hands, swarming with mites, clutched at the air between them. It hadn’t seemed real until that very moment, but looking into her black eyes, Ed realized he wasn’t seeing Anna Medrano. He was looking at the civatateo, the mother of vampires.
He felt stricken, powerless to move. It was like his feet were rooted to the floor.
I’m about to die, he thought.
He didn’t dare look at her face. He stayed perfectly still, certain that if he did try to run, he would be dead for sure.
“Drop your phone on the floor,” Doña Anna said.
Ed closed his eyes. He could hear the air between them crackling like waxed paper. The hairs on his arms stood up as he imagined thousands of mites crawling over his skin, burrowing beneath the surface, draining him.
“Drop your phone,” she said again.
Ed tossed it to the ground at her feet.
“There’s a piece of brick on that pew next to you. Smash the phone.”
In a numb daze, Ed picked up the brick fragment, knelt at Doña Anna’s feet, and smashed the smartphone. He didn’t get up. He thought of swinging the brick at her head. One swift lunge would do it. But he knew even as the thought went through his head that to do so would be suicide. All she needed was a moment. Any contact at all would be enough for the mites to do their work on him, to drain him dry. And if she was truly a civatateo, she would have no trouble catching him.
Off in the distance, a police siren wailed.
Ed glanced over at Doña Anna’s feet. They were caked with mud. Her toenails had to be four inches long, curled and gnarled. She took a few steps toward the altar, leaving a trail of footprints, and knelt down next to one of the cameras. She examined the many buttons and knobs, then in one swift motion hurled it against the altar. The camera shattered into a thousand pieces.
Outside, the siren grew closer, and Ed realized with a strange sort of detached objectivity that it must have stopped raining. He could no longer hear it pounding on the church’s roof.
Then the muddy feet were standing next to him again. He didn’t look up.
“Don’t come looking for me again,” she said.
The sirens were piercing now, right outside. Ed heard car doors open and slam, and the sound of men yelling at each other.
Doña Anna walked toward the altar. The breath hitched in Ed’s throat as he finally found the strength to lift his gaze.
The woman was gone.
He crawled on his hands and knees toward the facedown corpse of Charles Marsh. He grabbed the body by the shoulder and rolled him over onto his back.
Nearly two decades, he thought. I’ve chased this man for nearly two decades. And now it’s come to this.
From somewhere behind him, voices shouted into the church, calling Marsh’s name.
Over the years, Ed had filled his heart with jealousy and hatred for this man. Now Ed had finally won. He had no proof, of course. All of that was gone, erased from the cameras or smashed to bits on the floor. But he had this brief moment of victory.
And yet it held no flavor for him. It only filled him with emptiness.
From somewhere behind him, Deputy Kohler shouted Charles Marsh’s name.
“He’s over here,” Ed said.
He heard boots pounding on the floor and men fanning out around him. He glanced up and winced at the flashlight beams in his face. Everywhere he looked, there was a gun pointed in his direction.
“I’ve got two down over here,” somebody said.
Somebody grabbed Ed and threw him facedown on the ground. They pulled his arms behind his back and he felt the cuffs bite into his wrists.
“What did you do?!” Kohler screamed at him. “What the hell did you do?!”
But Ed didn’t answer. He’d turned his head toward Charles Marsh’s body and found himself staring into the dead man’s still-open eyes. Little Amanda Valdez’s face had looked much the same in her autopsy pictures, her eyes just as empty, her cheeks just as sunken and puckered.
It was funny how things had a way of coming full circle. Ed had searched for answers, for fame, and yet when it came right down to it, he’d been unable to look above the civatateo’s muddy feet. He thought about her cracked nails and her cauliflowered skin and wondered if he’d ever be able to drive that image from his mind.
Somehow, he didn’t think so.
BLOOD
ROBERT SHEARMAN
In the morning, Donald and Chrissie would go down to the breakfast room, and there they’d have croissants. Donald would have his croissants with confiture and with beurre. He liked saying confiture and beurre, he liked exaggerating the accent, he especially liked rolling the Rs in the beurre. Chrissie told him that if he wanted to look French he should eat his croissants plain, that was the proper way to do it, and Donald noticed how disapproving the waitress was when he hacked away at his croissants touristlike with his knife fair bleeding jam. But then, as Donald thought privately, maybe you could get away with eating good croissants plain, but these croissants weren’t very good. The hotel itself wasn’t very good. It was small, and it was discreet, and that was enough.
There’d be cold meats too, threadbare slices of ham and salami, and Donald would eat these as well. Chrissie stuck to her croissants; she was a vegetarian. She said she didn’t mind Donald’s eating meat, and that was one of the reasons he liked her—she was so sweet and forgave him all his flaws. So long as he brushed his teeth before he kissed her, just in case any scraps of dead animal were sticking to them.
And after breakfast, the happy couple would set out and explore Paris. They had done all the popular tourist sites, and there was nothing wrong with that; no doubt they were popular for a reason. They went up the Eiffel Tower. They walked down the Champs-Élysées. At Montmartre, Donald paid twenty euros so that an artist could draw a sketch of Chrissie, and Chrissie was delighted, and flung her arms around Donald nice and tight, and she told him that she loved him very much.
/>
She told him she loved him quite often, and he was always pleased to hear it, but he sometimes thought the words came out a little too easily. Still, it was probably nothing to worry about.
Of an evening, they would stroll hand in hand by the bank of the Seine, no matter that it was quite a hike from their hotel, no matter that it was usually raining. They looked up in the sky, right up at the moon, and pretended it was a different moon from the one they had back at home.
“I love the Paris moon,” said Chrissie.
“Me too,” he said.
He told her he loved her quite often as well, and each time he said it he felt a little giddy, and he had to force it out, as if it were a confession.
Chrissie was the one who said they shouldn’t go back to England. She said it on the fourth morning, just before they went downstairs for the croissants. They’d just stay here, together, forever. And Donald had already had the same idea. He’d had it a week ago. He’d had it when he’d locked the front door to his flat in Chiswick, when he’d got the taxi to the airport—he’d kept on expecting that someone might stop him—he’d kept expecting he would stop himself—he’d thought, Everything’s going to change, I may never be able to go home again. He hadn’t told Chrissie because he hadn’t wanted to scare her. He never wanted her to be scared, he just wanted to protect her, always, always. Through the entire flight he’d been shaking and he’d had to pretend it was excitement.
“Do you mean it?” said Donald. “Do you really want to stay here?” And Chrissie said yes, didn’t she? As if it were the simplest thing. She asked whether he had enough money to support them, and he told her not to worry, but the same thought had been nagging away at him ever since they’d arrived in Paris. They wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in a hotel for long, not even a budget hotel like this. They could get a cottage somewhere, maybe in the countryside, that would be cheap—he’d have to get a job, and so would she—maybe they could be farmers!—maybe they could keep chickens and grow their own food and things!—maybe they wouldn’t need money! Maybe, maybe.
Seize the Night Page 37
