by Jonah Hewitt
Miles jumped. “Ach! Saints ‘n Angels, Sky!”
“Relax, Miles,” Sky said in a whisper, “He’s probably just some emo-vampire-groupie wannabe. Check out the eyeliner. They get younger every year.” Sky walked around to the end of the boy’s table. He shot a look over his shoulder, the cop wasn’t looking this way yet so he went back to looking at the boy intently. “So, kid, what makes you think we’re vampires?” Sky asked folding his arms across his naked chest.
“Well…you are, aren’t you?” The boy shoved a handful of mashed potatoes into his wide-open mouth and kept chewing while he was dumping mustard onto the apple pie and ice cream, all while making noises of unrestrained enjoyment. “Mmmmm! That’s wonderful!”
Sky eyed him curiously. “How do you know we weren’t just talking? Vampire’s just a word, kid. Maybe ‘vampire’ is just the name of our club, like the ‘Werewolves’ or the ‘Zombies.’”
“Or ‘Mermaids,’” Tim added out of nowhere.
Sky blinked furiously, forcing himself to say nothing, but Miles could hear his teeth grinding.
The kid got a perplexed look on his face and looked at each of them as if he was suddenly uncertain. Then he did the oddest thing. He screwed up his face, and with his eyes scrunched up tight, he turned to ‘look’ at each of them with his peepers completely closed. Then he opened them again and smiled around large mouthfuls of half-chewed food.
“Nope. Definitely vampires. Well, he’s not,” he said pointing a food-covered finger at Tim, “but you two definitely are.” He paused, and then exclaimed, “This food is amazing!” Then after shoving more mash potatoes into his mouth with his hands, he gave another weird smile and said, “Hey, you haven’t seen a set of bagpipes walking here around, have you?”
The three of them exchanged odd looks.
“He’s bloody barkin’ he is!” Miles whispered to Sky, but Sky smiled a wry smile and peeked over his shoulder towards the plainclothes cop and the state trooper. Miles didn’t need to read his mind to know what that meant. Sky had found his distraction. Sky quickly shoved Miles into the booth and slid in beside him. Tim grabbed his shake and the red plastic basket holding the remains of his fries and burger from their table and slid in beside the strange boy, who looked a little surprised but obligingly slid over to let him sit down.
“So, you know we’re vampires,” Sky said somewhat menacingly.
“Yes,” said the boy, who watched Tim dunk his fries in his shake with fascination.
“And you’re not scared?”
“Nope.” The boy ignored Sky but dunked his fries in Tim’s shake so far he got vanilla shake all over his fingers. Tim looked a little chagrined, but let it pass. “I thought I might be, but somehow it doesn’t bother me anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m already dead,” he said flatly. “Wow, that’s good! Better than honey-cakes!” he said, eating the vanilla shake off the fries and his fingers.
Whatever Sky expected him to say, it wasn’t that. He decided to take a different tack.
“And how can you tell we’re vampires?” Sky asked curiously.
“Easy,” he said licking the shake off each of his fingers in turn. “You don’t have souls. Well, not your whole souls anyway.”
Miles and Sky exchanged glances.
“Pardon me?” Sky said, somewhat affronted.
“Um…yeah…” the boy said distractedly, deciding what delicacy to try next. “Your chests are full of shadow where your hearts should be.” He grabbed the chicken-fried steak and went to dunk it in Tim’s shake, but Tim pulled the shake away. The kid shrugged and dunked it in the mash potatoes instead. “In vampires, the Yib or heart or whatever you call it here leaves at death, leaving the shadow behind to take the seat of the Yib.”
They all exchanged glances on that one. Miles had no idea what the boy had just said, but somehow it resonated inside his skull like a fly was trapped up there, buzzing around and trying to get out.
“And that means what exactly?” Sky asked.
“That your souls are in hell. That’s what you call it here, don’t you? Hell? We called it Duat, or the land of the unjustified dead,” the boy said matter-of-factly. He squeezed more mustard on the apple pie and started shoving that into his maw. Around mouthfuls of pie and mustard and steak he continued, “Pwobably the pwits of punishment. That’s where all the souls who do violence to themselves go, or so I’ve heard.” He went back to squeezing mustard on nearly everything before shoveling it into his mouth.
“Want some?” he said eagerly. Miles and Sky just politely shook their heads “no,” but Tim leaned over and grabbed a fork from off the table and tried some of the mustard-drenched pie. The kid stared in wonder at the revelation of the fork’s purpose. He quickly grabbed one and aped Tim’s movements as he relished his discovery of this device that could shovel food directly into your mouth in large quantities. Tim was only slightly less enthusiastic. Miles didn’t regret so much not being able to taste normal food anymore.
Sky stroked his chin and decided to change his avenue of attack. He was sizing up the kid and his appetite and something must have occurred to him.
“So, kid, are you from around here?”
“Um…no…not exactly,” the kid said a little nervously. Sky smiled. Whether the accent or the get-up, he had guessed the kid was a stranger.
“What’s your name, kid?”
“Nephys,” the kid said brightly in a foreign accent Miles couldn’t place.
“Neth puss?” Sky responded somewhat disbelieving, “Your name is “Neth Puss?”
The kid sighed, “Just call me Neppy,” he said dejectedly.
“Neppy’s good,” Sky said smiling. “So, Nep…are you enjoying your meal?”
“Oh, very much!” he said, shoveling in even more food, “The food here is great – even better than bitter, lumpy soup!”
Sky let that odd observation pass over him. “A big meal like this has to cost a lot though.” Sky smiled, but the boy stopped and looked up at him mid-shovel.
“You do have enough money to pay for all this, don’tcha, Nep?”
Nephys slowly lowered the fork and leaned back in his seat, a look of horror growing on his face. Sky smiled. Miles had to give Sky credit. Somehow he had pegged this boy right from the start. He knew the kid had just wandered in here from somewhere, some religious hippie-cult-commune or something where they no doubt ate wheat germ and tofu all day. He didn’t know much about the outside world, probably a runaway, or at least playing hookie from meditation class. He had stumbled in here and couldn’t help but order every shiny new thing on the menu, without thought to money, that is, until Sky brought it up.
Sky leaned in and put on a faux oh-so-concerned voice. “Nep,” he said earnestly, “Do you have any money? Any money at all?”
Nep looked around the table of food he had just been wolfing down with a horribly guilty expression.
“Oh, Nep,” Sky said in fake sympathy, “Do you see those men over there?” He pointed to the cop and the state trooper. Nephys leaned across Tim to get a better look then slowly leaned back with a look of intense discomfort on his face.
“Well, those men are police officers. They arrest kids who don’t pay for meals.”
The kid looked a little uncertain. Sky decided he had to sell it a little harder.
“They’d take you to prison, Nep. You know about prison, don’t you?”
The kid cringed in his seat and tried to scrunch down as if he could shrink down to nothing. The kid obviously knew about prison. He may not be afraid of vampires, but he was afraid of prison. Miles rolled his eyes. Sky really was a piece of work, manipulating some poor kid like that.
“But lucky for you, Nep, we have money,” Sky said brightly. “We have plenty of money. We could pay for all this, and no one would have go to prison.”
The kid’s mood instantly improved. “You’d do that?” he said eagerly.
“Of course!” Sky laughed, and
then his tone got somewhat threatening, “But of course, we’d need you to do something for us.”
“Like what?” he said meekly.
Sky smiled as the boy looked down like he was a condemned man. “Do you know what a terrorist attack is, Nep?” Sky asked seemingly innocently.
Miles conscience got the best of him. He had already conned and terrified one kid tonight and he wasn’t so sure about this plan either. Miles grabbed Sky’s blazer and pulled him over to whisper in his ear.
“Sky! Are you sure we should be doing this? He’s just a kid!”
“Watch the threads, dude! And, YES! That’s the point! He’s just a kid! They aren’t going to lock him up! They’ll probably just ask him some questions and then send him back to his mommy when he’s done. All he has to do is make a disturbance, yell ‘fire!’ or “bomb!” and bingo! Mass chaos, the cops leave the door, then we waltz right out of here and with any luck, they won’t be watching the Impala.”
“I don’t like it, Sky.”
“Geez! We’re vampires, Miles! When are you going to get over your squeamishness! Besides do you have any better ideas?!”
“No, but it still doesn’t solve the problem of how we find the girl! We still haven’t got a clue where Lucy lives!”
“Lucy?” the boy said earnestly. Either he had very good ears or they were whispering louder than Miles thought.
“Lucy Miller?!” the boy said again excitedly. Another french fry dropped from Tim’s gape-jawed mouth, but it didn’t even begin to match the shock on Sky’s face when he heard what he said next.
“Lucy Miller just off East Mohler Church Road?”
Miles didn’t know how much time had passed in shocked silence before Tim spoke.
“Oooo-kay,” Tim said in a far off voice, “That was weird.”
“I have a note from her mom,” the kid said rather urgently.
“Um…what?” Sky managed to force out just as the plain-clothes cop walked up and interrupted him.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said in a sarcastically polite fashion, “And just exactly what is your story?” In their shock, no one had even noticed the cop approach the booth. The cop eyed the strange quartet suspiciously: a shirtless blond kid in a white blazer, a tall, gangly geek in scrubs, (hospital scrubs, that’s a clue right there!) with a swollen eye and a “Han shot first” t-shirt, a ginger midget with a scratched up face and arms (Now how’d you get those marks, kids?) and a skinhead weirdo in a bed sheet. He started chuckling to himself. He obviously thought he had just found his perps.
Sky buried his head in his hands. Tim leaned over and tried to whisper.
“Now would be a good time for that distraction!”
Just then, there was a thunderous crashing of glass and metal followed by frantic screaming and the horrific sounds of slashing and hooting. Everyone in the place was running, cursing or screaming, even the state troopers, but whatever was happening, it was out of view, blocked by the wide girth of the cop at the end of the table. The cop turned to face the source of the commotion, only to start stammering incoherently and then faint dead away. As his body fell backward, it revealed the panting, heaving, stomping-mad, bloody-tongued pig-duck monster that had attacked them earlier.
It jumped up on the fallen body of the cop triumphantly and blasted another bilious hoot from its anteater snout and all three pipe-like spikes emerging from its bulbous back, spraying the whole booth and nearly everyone in it in a froth of bile and phlegm, all the while swinging its enormous, rusty butcher knife around like a maniacal food processor from Hades.
“Wharr-ANANANT-PHOONT!!!!!”
Only then did Miles realize he and Schuyler had been clutching each other, screaming the whole time. They stopped instantly and pushed each other apart awkwardly only to stare at Tim opposite them. He was white as a sheet, gape-jawed, clutching his chest and pounding on his heart as if to restart it. Next to him, the strange boy, other than being slightly annoyed, was not fazed in the slightest.
“There you are, Hiero. Where have you been?” Nephys muttered to himself and went right on shoveling mustard-and-phlegm-covered apple pie into his mouth.
“This is it, Yo-yo!!” Lucy swung open the rusty gate and tore down the dirt road in her bare feet. She had done it many times before. She ran past the small, tree-lined path that was much neglected. It hardly looked like a driveway to a large farmhouse – more like an abandoned hiking trail. Mom had never bothered to fix the rutted, overgrown drive that their sedan could barely manage. Now Lucy knew why. She understood a lot of things now. Why they didn’t have a mailbox but used a post office box in town, or why her mom had insisted on taking her out of school and home-schooling her away from any potential friends or contacts, or why she had taken a job as a middle-school librarian and given up a better job in Texas in the first place. They had been hiding. It all seemed so obvious now. She was protecting her. “She should have told me,” she thought, but then maybe that was a way of protecting her too.
She reached the end of the drive and came out into a clearing that held the old, dilapidated barn and the giant house. It was a simple, clapboard structure with small windows, practical, nothing fancy, typical of early colonial farms, but even that small amount of grace was ruined by many later artless Victorian additions, hapless lean-tos and a variety of twentieth century protective coverings laminated over the top of each other. The latest was vinyl siding put down in the seventies. She had always hated the thing and thought it was ugly but now that she saw it, she realized how happy she had been with her mother there despite everything else. She felt so guilty that she had given her mother so much trouble over the house, the fights about leaving Texas, the fights over décor and clothes and home-schooling everything else she hated about Pennsylvania.
There, not far from the drive was her mother’s garden. It looked exactly as she remembered it. It seemed ages ago that they had left for that midnight snack at the truck stop, but it had only been a day. It felt like the garden should be dead and brown and covered with vines and weeds, but there it was, fresh and green as if nothing had happened. She sniffed back some tears. It had to be close to midnight now.
Yo-yo finally caught up to her. He was bent over, huffing.
She smiled at him. “C’mon,” she said, taking his hand and dragging him to the edge of the garden. There on the corner was a massive, Japanese stone lantern standing in a patch of hostas and spring lilies. Grandma Holveda had brought it back from Japan a long time ago. It was one of the few things her mom had taken to Texas when she left before Lucy was born and it was one of the only things she brought back, even though it had cost them a fortune to ship and it took four guys and a forklift to get it here.
She didn’t do it that often when the lived in Texas, but every night since they came back to Pennsylvania, her mom would put a small tea candle in the stone lantern. It was one of her mom’s many rituals. The stubs of several spent candles were still there, but their wicks were all burnt out now. She let go of Yo-yo’s hand and ran her own hands lovingly over the worn surface of the old lantern. The stone was light grey granite but the top was stained by several, dark brown streaks that ran down its surface. “Bird or tree stains,” thought Lucy, though it wasn’t under any trees here or in Texas either and she never saw birds perch on it. Though completely still, it seemed to vibrate with some kind of energy as if alive. It had always felt that way to Lucy. She laid her head down on top of it and felt the hum of its stillness, if that made any sense. It made her feel closer to her mom now somehow.
Yo-yo backed away slightly. Lucy laughed. She guessed hugging a lantern was pretty weird so she stood up and went back over to him.
“It’s ok,” she said. “This was my mom’s garden,” she said absentmindedly.
“You’re mom grew things?” he sounded surprised
“Sure!” Lucy said proudly. “She was always out here working on things. My mom could grow anything! Look here!” She grabbed him by the hand and pulled him
closer to the lantern, though he held back somewhat.
“Hostas and lilies.” She pointed to them triumphantly.
Yo-yo just stared at her puzzled.
She smiled and realized she had to explain why this was special. “Lilies like the sun, hostas like the shade, and yet somehow she could get them to grow together. The stone lantern somehow managed to give them a perfect microclimate with just the right mixture of both.”
“Oh,” Yo-yo remarked, sounding unimpressed. Lucy just wrinkled her nose at him. Kid obvious didn’t know a thing about plants.
“C’mon…” She dragged him down the wire fence line to the far end of the garden.
“There’s heliotropes and below them is monkshood.”
Yo-yo just shrugged, “So?”
“So?!” she laughed, “Heliotropes have to have a lot of sun and monkshood just hates it!”
“Really?” he sounded a bit cold and impassive again. It really bothered her when he sounded like that.
