Scott Nicholson Library Vol 2

by Scott Nicholson

  “Professor, you ask what he’s going to do. Well, I’ll make a proposition for him: I made him a vampire, so in a way, I’m partly responsible. I offer to show him how to live like a vampire. There are many tricks, many tricks that I learned the hard way. The world is obviously very different than what I am accustomed to, as I’ve noticed thus far; but human objectivity and acceptance rarely changes. Actually, it’s quite consistent.”

  “Yeah, you can count on us screwing up and making the wrong choice,” I said.

  “You can travel with me, Andy. We’ll learn together. You show me how to live in the modern world, and I’ll show you how to live in it as an immortal.”

  I wasn’t so sure. All things considered, I’d rather have been traveling with Janice. Why should I go with this creepy old soul-stealer when I’d just rejected the love of my life, the other half of my soul—

  No. I had no soul. Not even half.

  “In a way, I admire you, Andy,” said the professor. A horn blasted and the professor glanced towards the town. “Out of everyone in the club, I knew you were the one who would find the ultimate answer.”

  “This isn’t the final exam in Vampire Studies, Professor L,” I said. “This is reality.”

  The vampire laughed, throwing his head back, his white teeth catching the sun. “He has just asked the question! He has achieved immortality but has yet to learn of the secrets that keep our world running.”

  “So, professor,” I said. “Aren’t you going to beg me to turn you into a vampire?”

  “I’m an old man; in my youth, I would have asked you for immortality like Janice. But I am old now and have long ago accepted my mortality. I have discovered what I sought, so I can die happily with the knowledge that vampires exist. Andy, you’re a great kid. I wish you luck always. Please see me again.”

  “I will. I promise.” I lied.

  I stood on wobbly knees, looked at his creased, leathery face, and then buried my nose into his soft neck. I had no impulse at all to rip his veins from his withered flesh and drink deeply of his essence. Let the old man die in peace.

  We separated, and he said in a low voice. “Live the life I and the others have always dreamed of. Live the good life.”

  I could not answer.

  “And free the other vampires, dammit. The VVV has no right to do what they do.”

  I was stunned. I hadn’t even considered all those others, dulled by silver bullets, and I wasn’t even sure how I felt about rescue missions anymore. “I’ll think about it.”

  Laumer and I watched the professor carefully make his way through the weeds and shrubbery of the forest. Shortly after, an engine growled to life, and with a violent thrust of the accelerator, the truck screeched away, as if that was the only way the club could express its collective anger.

  Laumer was squeezing my shoulder again. I wondered if he’d still be doing that a hundred years from now. I listened for the fading motor until I heard only the wind.

  “Goodbye, Vampire Club,” I said.

  “The young lady,” Laumer said. “You were fond of her?”

  “I thought love was in your heart,” I said. “And I still have a heart. I thought love was in your pants. And I’m not sure what even works down there anymore. I thought love was in your head, because you think so much about it.”

  “Poets have studied it since time immeasurable,” Laumer said. “I’ve met many of them, and none have figured out its mystery.”

  “Well, I have,” I said.

  Laumer took his hand from my shoulder. He gave me a smirk, showing the tips of his canines. “Yes?”

  “You can’t love without a soul.”

  Laumer paused as if considering it, but he’d been without a soul for so long that I doubted he even knew what I was talking about. “You know what I love?”

  I didn’t care, but I saw no reason to be rude at that point. “What?”

  “Blood. I’m a little bit thirsty.”

  “I hear there’s a good little restaurant in town.”

  “Dinner’s on me.”

  “Her, you mean.”

  “Yes. Her.”

  I followed Laumer as the sun sank in the west, as the sun sank on my last memories of being human.

  The Vampire Club.

  I hear they have an opening, if you’re interested.

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  ###

  BURIAL TO FOLLOW

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2008 Scott Nicholson

  Visit Scott’s Author Central page at Amazon

  Table of Contents

  I.

  The Ridgehorn kitchen was a mouth-watering shrine.

  The island counter, made of polished oak and topped with 1950’s Formica, the kind you couldn’t chip with a hatchet, was piled high with the fruits of condolence: a sweet potato pie, with pecan halves floating face-down in its burnt-orange sea; glazed ham, ringed with pineapple slices and brown sugar; green bean casserole, though beans were out of season so they must have come from some basement-stashed Mason jar; gallons of sweetened tea and diet Coke and banana pudding and gravy.

  Roby Snow looked around and made sure no one was watching. Not that anyone would care. At all the death sittings and watch-overs and grievings and gatherings he’d ever attended, food was usually the last thing on the minds of the bereaved but the first act of sympathy by acquaintances. He dipped a pinkie in the gravy, brought it to his mouth, licked the turkey drippings from his lips, and smiled.

  The marshmallows that dotted the sweet potato pie caught his fancy, and he plucked two, popped them in his mouth, then rearranged the remaining four so that no one would notice the gap in the pattern. The ham was growing cold, and gray-white grease congealed in the bottom of its tin foil container. Roby crossed the room to the cabinets, opened them.

  Crystal. Nice stuff, the kind that would hum if you put water in the glasses and rubbed your fingers around the rim. He’d seen a man on TV once who’d played a whole row of them at the same time, the glasses filled to varying depths, the performer wetting and wiping his fingers, raising a series of full notes that hung in the air like the blowing of lost whales. Crystal symphony, the man had called it.

  “Mr. Snow?”

  Roby looked away from the crystal. Anna Beth had entered the kitchen. She was the youngest of the Ridgehorn clan, and the prettiest. Years had a way of stealing beauty. Of stealing everything.

  Auburn hair. Her nose was all Ridgehorn, humped in the middle but not yet jagged, as it would be in a decade. She had her mother’s bone structure and, lucky for her, not her father’s eyes.

  Because her father’s eyes were glued shut in the back room of Clawson’s Funeral Home.

  “Hey, Anna Beth,” he answered, turning his attention again to the cabinet shelves, the chinaware, the tea set, the chipped bowls in the back, the plastic fast food cups that the family probably used at the dinner table on weeknights.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  “I was looking for the Saran Wrap.” He nodded toward the counter. “Flies are about to carry off the ham.”

  “Next cabinet over.”

  “Much obliged.” He nodded, moved over, and rummaged through the shelves, behind the gelatin molds and paper grocery bags and cereal boxes. He found the wrap and brought it out. Anna Beth stared at him.

  “Sorry about your dad,” he said. The wrap felt as if it weighed twenty pounds.

  “Well, we was kind of expecting it,” she said.

  You never expect it, Roby Snow thought. We all know we’re bound for it, but none of us believe, deep down in our hearts, that it will ever happen to us. Or to the ones we love.

  Anna Beth’s eyes grew moist. They were as bright as the deviled eggs on the silver-plated tray. She was in her Saturday night dress, dark blue with white ruffles. Sunday best would be saved for the funeral. That was only proper. But this dress was plenty good enough for receiving callers.

  “It’s
okay,” Roby said. “You can cry if you want. Wouldn’t blame you a bit.”

  She shrugged. “I’m about cried dry.”

  “Reckon so. You folks have the sorrow round-the-clock. The rest of us get to come and go. And after it’s done, when your daddy, God bless him, is tucked in the ground, you all have to come back here and go at it some more. Grieving don’t let up its grip so easy when it comes to blood kin.”

  From the living room, the widow Ridgehorn let out another long wail, this one a little tired and drawn out, as if her heart wasn’t really in it.

  “Poor Momma,” Anna Beth said.

  Roby put the wrap on the counter, rolled out a couple of feet. When he yanked the clear film across the serrated blade, he caught his thumb on the sharp edges. The blade bit the thick meat above his nail.

  He put the thumb in his mouth. The blood tasted of gravy.

  “You okay?” Anna Beth asked.

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  Someone had been thoughtful enough to bring paper napkins, which lay in a sterile pile near the desserts. He pulled one free and wrapped his thumb. The bleeding stopped. He ripped the piece of wrap, fluffed it in the air so the corners wouldn’t stick, then draped the clear film over the ham.

  “Can’t have all this going to waste,” he said. “I know you don’t feel much up to it now, but comes a time when hunger helps feed the grief.”

  “Yeah. It’s been a long time since Aunt Iva Dean passed. That was the last one in the immediate family.”

  “You were seven then. I remember, because you were in the second grade, and some boy had kicked you in the shin and you had a big bruise.”

  Anna Beth’s face grew thoughtful and far away, the sadness momentarily gone. “Yeah. Funny how things like that come back. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “It’s the smell,” Roby said.

  “Huh?”

  “Smell. See this sweet potato pie? That’s Beverly Parsons’s favorite recipe. But she changes ingredients a little for a bereavement. Uses molasses instead of brown sugar. So the smell of molasses is a little sad to me.”

  “I never noticed. I probably ate dozens of her pies, her being a neighbor and all, and she makes one for every homecoming at the church.”

  “It’s not how many you eat, it’s when you eat them.”

  The talk in the next room had heated up, and Anna Beth’s second cousin on her mother’s side was asking when the burial would be. The cousin was Cindy Parsons, Beverly’s daughter, maybe a future in-law since she was sweet on Alfred, the sole surviving son.

  Roby shook his head, weary. What had happened to manners? You didn’t come right out and ask the burial time, especially of the immediate family. You looked in the local newspaper and read the obituary like everybody else, or, in a pinch, you called the attending funeral home and asked. Unless you were a professional, you never spoke of the burial when you were calling on the home of the deceased. It was practically like spitting on the grave. Or spitting in the face of the survivors.

  “Anna Beth,” someone called from the sitting room. Sounded like the oldest sister, Marlene. The one who liked chocolate. Roby shot a glance at the bundt cake, saw the swirl of yellow that was exposed inside the crumbling brown wedge. Marlene was clumsy with a knife.

  “I’d best go,” Anna Beth said to Roby. “That’s real nice of you to take care of things out here. Most men consider that sort of thing to be women’s work.”

  “I ain’t most men,” he said. “And it’s the least I can do.”

  “Well, you got that stubborn Ridgehorn blood in you. Just like me. I guess I’m more like Daddy than I ever like to let on.”

  She waved a small good-bye and left the kitchen.

  Roby looked at the sweet potato pie. If only someone had the nerve to mention to Beverly Parsons about the molasses. Maybe it was some old Appalachian tradition. He’d never heard of it, and he was big on tradition himself. He made sure the lid was secure on the bowl of Cole slaw and slipped it into the refrigerator before the mayonnaise turned.

  That Anna Beth was a silly girl for being in her late teens. She wasn’t like her daddy at all. She was still breathing, for one thing. And she and Roby didn’t have anything in common except this house and this wake and this monumental tribute of food. They certainly didn’t share any Ridgehorn blood.

  Roby took a knife from his pocket, eased out a sliver of Beverly Parsons’s pie, and slid it into his mouth. As good as her other death pies, molasses and all.

  He swallowed, wiped his hands, put away the Saran Wrap, and went into the sitting room to hear tales of the late Jacob Davis Ridgehorn’s honorable and God-fearing life. Every sinner got to be a saint, at least for the three days between departure and burial. Yet every saint rotted just the same.

  From the inside out.

  From the heart first.

  Roby would offer what comfort he could. He knew there were worse things than losing a loved one, and there were worse things than dying. His knowledge of those things made him swallow again. The bite of pie went down like a stone.

  II.

  Widow Ridgehorn sat stiff and unyielding by the television. It was a big boxy RCA, a relic from the era of vacuum tubes. A fine layer of dust lay on it like loose skin. The decedent’s photograph leaned backward on the top of the television, framed by a corroded gilt rectangle. Jacob’s celluloid eyes were hard and dull, the face severe, like a mortician’s handiwork done twenty years too early.

  Roby sat across the room on the sofa, where Alfred had eased over. Alfred’s polite gesture not only gave Roby room, but it also moved Alfred closer to Cindy, daughter of the famed pie-maker. Alfred’s eyes were suitably haunted, edged with dark lavender, but something about the lines on his forehead gave the impression that he was unsure of his emotions.

  The widow wiped at her nose with a tattered handkerchief. “Shame about the timing of it, but I reckon there’s no good time to meet the Maker,” she said. “When the Lord calls, and all.”

  “Late harvest was coming up,” Alfred said. “Corn first. Daddy always looked at home up there in the seat of the Massey Ferguson, his hat pressed down to his ears.”

  “What about the tractor?” Marlene said. She had taken the chore of sorting things out, scheduling arrangements, seeing to the practical matters. “You going to sell it, Momma?”

  The widow looked at the photograph on the television as if seeking advice. “Don’t hardly know yet.”

  Sarah, the middle sister, stood with a rustle of her patterned dress, a sleeveless rayon thing from off the rack at Rose’s Discount. It was a spring dress, really, not fit for early September, all light blue and yellow and pink. Roby felt sorrow for the family. In these parts, people couldn’t afford to go out and invest in an entire wardrobe of black just for a short period of use. They mourned in their best. How come their best was never good enough?

  He supposed that maybe all that really mattered was how you felt inside your heart.

  “Let’s not worry about that kind of thing,” Sarah said. “It’s like grave-robbing, to start splitting up the goods before Daddy’s even in the ground.”

  Buck, her husband, nodded in agreement. Buck had twenty acres on the back side of Elk Knob, four of it cleared for crops. He could use a tractor. He’d been making do with a walk-behind tiller, the kind that fought you when the tines hit a rock.

  Buck had asked Roby about the procedure for getting a tobacco allotment. All Roby knew about it was that the government was involved, told you how much to grow and how much not to grow, and the allotment could be passed on down as an inheritance. It was the same government that had sued the cigarette companies for millions. Damned if Roby wanted any piece of such nonsense, and had shared that opinion with Buck.

  “Reckon the will spells all that out,” Alfred said. “Who gets what, and all.”

  “If you don’t mind a lawyer getting a big fat chunk of it,” Marlene said.

  The air in the room was heavy with perspiration a
nd cheap perfume. Marlene’s blonde hair clung to her neck in damp strings. She was a natural blonde, all over, Roby had been told. She didn’t meet his eyes, as if she were somehow aware of his secret knowledge.

  “Well, there’s the whole funeral thing to pay for,” the widow said, wringing her leathery hands.

  “Bet that thing there cost a hundred bucks to rent.” Alfred pointed at the maple lectern at the room’s entrance. It had a brass-plated lamp and on its slanted surface was a notebook filled with thick, creamy paper. The guests had signed their names, a keepsake book. As if this were a time to be remembered, picked over at some future date to share laughs and what-could-have-beens.

  Roby had signed it himself, in his looping, swirling death hand, the florid signature reserved for these special times. He had almost written “good pie” after his name, but he didn’t know the widow well enough. He thought of all the lonely nights waiting ahead, an empty space beside her in the bed where Jacob Davis Ridgehorn’s shape had pressed a hollow over the years.

  He knew all about lonely. In life, you had to give your heart to somebody. When you died, all you left behind was the love you thought you had given. And when you died, that was all you got back.

  Roby had nobody, no family. Except, for the next few days, these Ridgehorns. And he wanted them to appreciate what they had lost, and what they were gaining. “Now, your pa deserves nothing but the best, so don’t skimp on the arrangements.”

  “They ain’t much money,” Sarah said. “Daddy worked for himself all his life, pretty much hand to mouth.”

  “We’ll work it out.” He nodded to the widow. “I’ll help you straighten out the papers, ma’am. And I know old Barnaby real well. I’ll make sure he does you right.”

  Barnaby Clawson had been the county’s sole undertaker for forty years until a corporate chain had set up shop five years back. But Clawson still got the local trade based on brand loyalty. In the tradition of morticians everywhere, he’d found a woman who could put up with hands that caressed the dead. He had two sons by her before she decided she could no longer bear the smell of formaldehyde. She up and moved to California, some said with a Bible salesman, others said with nothing but a suitcase and a scalpel.