by J Bennett
“It’s going to be terrifying, don’t worry about that,” Dex continues as he unspools a cylinder of green ribbon. “This is for the fresh water tributaries. Notice, I’m using green and brown ribbon instead of blue to signify all the pollution and sewage waste that has left the majority of potable water completely undrinkable. Did you know that there are over a billion people on this planet who don’t have access to clean drinking water? Isn’t that horrifying? Doesn’t it make you want to scream?”
Actually, the entire room makes me want to scream, especially when I notice that a bucket of glue has fallen over and spilled across one of Nathaniel’s priceless Persian rugs.
***
I spend the next two hours cleaning up glue. Or, should I say, trying to clean up glue, as Dex excitedly continues his diorama and explains how soil erosion is leaving vast dead zones on the African continent that will result in continued food shortages and starvation.
That’s when I hear the odd knocking sound on the side of the house.
“…so with the untenable soil, disproportionate youth of the population and continued political instability, Africa will fall farther and farther behind. That should really put a tingle down your spine. Look, I’m making little pirate boats that will continue to strangle trade and tourism…” Dex is saying as he picks up an empty matchbox and some toothpicks.
“Quiet,” I hiss at him. I listen. Something’s definitely happening on the side of the house. Then I hear a soft thump followed by a short exclamation.
“Hells bells!”
I cautiously make my way outside. I’m clutching a broomstick in both hands, ready to flail it ineffectually at any threat that might appear. Somehow, I’m not surprised to see the same old man who was earlier camouflaging his van now stuck in our rose bushes on the side of the house.
What is surprising—and it’s a very unfortunate surprise—is that he’s wearing a tight, black spandex body suit that does everything you’d imagine to suck against his flabby contours. Even his walker is painted black, except for the bright green tennis balls stuck to the bottom of each peg. I suppose this getup would have given him some sort of cover if it had been night
instead of 3 PM in the afternoon.
The man struggles weakly to stand up.
“Uh, Sir, you’re kinda in the rose bushes,” I brilliantly point out. “Need some help?”
“I was trying to climb the vines up to the window,” he huffs. “Almost made it.”
I look at the willowy vines crawling up the mansion’s exterior to the second floor window. Yeah, I bet you almost made it, I think. Apparently this guy plans home invasions just about as well as he dresses.
“You must go at once,” the man continues. “A vampire lives within these walls. He is very dangerous.”
“Tell me about it,” I say as I stretch out a hand toward the old guy. “He won’t stop giving me these boring biographies to read. It’s driving me crazy.”
The man takes my hand, and I pull him to his feet.
“That vampire is evil.” Our wannabe home intruder unzips his fanny pack and pulls out a wooden stake. “He must die.”
***
I know that I shouldn’t invite the vampire hunter into the house, but he’s bruised and scraped up from his fall into the rose bushes. Plus, Nathaniel sleeps during the day, so I figure I’ll get the old guy patched up and on his way without my boss knowing a thing.
While I clean the man’s cuts with antibacterial wipes, he nurses a glass of prune juice and tells me his story.
Silas had a simple life, which he didn’t much mind. He graduated from high school in 1950 and started working at the local Ford plant. He courted a girl named Hannah who wasn’t beautiful but had a pleasant face and a clear and happy laugh. She was the love of Silas’s life. He worked double shifts for a month to save enough for a modest engagement ring. When she said yes, he kept working those double shifts, this time to save up for a house, a family, maybe even a color television.
All those simple dreams came to an end one evening when Hannah begged Silas to go to the drive in movies with her to see the latest horror flick. After a long day at work, Silas just wanted to stay home and listen to the baseball game on the radio. In a huff, Hannah decided she would go on her own.
She came back that night, but she wasn’t the same girl who had left. For one thing, she was pale and cold. For another, Silas remembers, she had long fangs, could now turn into a bat and wanted to kill him. A brutal chase commenced. Hannah enjoyed toying with Silas, letting him run and then appearing in front of him just when he thought he’d gotten away. She even threw him into the coffee table, which broke and splintered under his weight.
Silas tosses back the last gulp of prune juice and looks morosely into the empty glass. “Another,” he says in a voice gone husky with emotion. As I top him off, he finishes the story.
Lying in the splintered ruins of the coffee table, Silas knew it was over. Hannah towered over him, her fangs elongating from her mouth. A dark figure stood behind her. His voice was mesmerizing as he prompted Hannah to kill her fiancée and break all her previous bonds to the world of the living.
She pounced, but Silas was ready.
Even though he was a simple kind of guy, Silas wasn’t so simple that he didn’t know that fangs + bat = vampire. As Hannah came down upon him, Silas plunged a sharp sliver of the coffee table into her chest.
At this point in the story, Silas informs me that impaled vampires don’t disappear into a puff of ashes like on Buffy. They also don’t crack like porcelain figurines like the Twilight series would have you believe. In reality, when a vampire gets staked, their bodies rot. Their skin peels off their faces, their blood putrefies, and their hair falls off in big chunks. This is what happened to Hannah. The stench of a dead vampire would make even the strongest of the strong vomit. It is even overpowering to other vampires, which is why the dark figure poofed into a bat and hightailed it out of there, leaving Silas to cradle his poor, dead, rotting fiancée while he simultaneously wept and vomited all over her.
And that’s how Silas became an unlikely vampire hunter. Well, a part-time vampire hunter. He still worked at the Ford plant to pay the mortgage. But on the weekends and during his carefully saved vacation days, he scoured the country looking for answers and killing all the vampires he found along the way.
It’s actually kind of impressive. You see, Silas’s technique was decidedly old school and low-tech. He never did figure out how to hack computer files, infiltrate vampire dens, or develop powerful law enforcement contacts who could tip him off to suspicious homicides. Rather, Silas’s greatest vampire tactic to date had been looking up old sounding names in the phone book, knocking on doors and throwing garlic salt on whomever answered.
Weekend by weekend, year by year, garlic salt container by garlic salt container, Silas slowly racked up a vampire body count. Along the way, he discovered that the vampire who had sired Hannah was none other than my curmudgeon boss, Nathanial.
For decades, Silas hunted Nathaniel. Several times he got close, but never close enough. Then Silas retired, started collecting lawn gnomes to pass the time and just so happened to stumble upon a new and incredibly powerful vampire hunting weapon.
Facebook.
Apparently, vampires are a very vain species. There are a few in almost every vampire-themed Facebook fan group. Paying his neighbor’s grandson to teach him the ins and outs of Facebook was the best money Silas ever spent, and it led him—finally—to Nathaniel.
When Silas finishes his story, I feel bad for him, I really do. But I also feel very protective of…my paycheck, which means that I need Nathaniel alive. Or undead, as it were.
“Alright Silas, I think you’ve had enough.” I nod toward his newly emptied glass of prune juice. “I know you want revenge, but not today. Not on my watch. I think it’s time for you to go.”
“He’s not going anywhere,” a voice booms from the stairwell.
I look up. “Balls!”
Nathaniel is posed dramatically at the top of the staircase. His white hair is slicked back, and he’s wearing his best cape, which leads me to believe that he heard our conversation and has probably spent the last half hour getting ready for the showdown and practicing some really cheesy line…
“Welcome at last old friend to my humble abode. I trust you won’t find my hospitality wanting.” Nathaniel throws back his cape with a flourish.
I groan. He’s got a full suit on, ruffled cravat, and pants cinched up to his belly button. He starts down the stairs. “I’ve been sheathing my fangs of late, but for you, I think I shall make an ex…arrggghhh!” Nathaniel doubles over, pain wrenching his face. His bad back must have gone out again. He grabs for the bannister and misses. “Hell’s bells,” he mutters as he gracelessly tumbles down the long staircase like a sack of potatoes.
“Ha!” Silas jumps up from his chair. And by “jump” I mean gingerly stands up. "They say revenge is a dish best served cold. After six decades, it might even be cold enough for your dead heart." With a palsied hand, Silas unzips his fanny pack and pulls out the stake. He takes three steps toward Nathaniel, cries out, “my bad knee!” and crumples to the ground in a groaning heap of pain.
***
"Have I mentioned the fact that this is a terrible idea?" I say for about the thousandth time.
"Do you always let the ladies in your household speak in such a manner?" Silas asks Nathaniel.
Nathaniel frowns at me, clearly embarrassed by my lack of proprietary, and then concentrates again on the board. His pale hand lingers over a pawn.
"You going to make your move or just win by default when I croak of old age?" Silas grumbles.
"Seeing as that will be within the hour, I wonder why we're even playing this match in the first place," Nathaniel taunts back, but he snatches up the pawn and nudges it forward a square. Now Silas's thick white eyebrows come together as he studies the scattering of pieces on the board.
"More prune juice," Nathaniel snaps at me.
"Yes," Silas seconds him, "Prune juice. Stat."
They both laugh. I bite my tongue, turn on my heel and walk into the kitchen.
Okay, so when I easily managed to pull the struggling geriatrics off each other and suggested that they duke it out over the chess board, I never imagined they'd take me seriously. But here we are, two hours later, with my paycheck hanging in the balance.
If Nathaniel wins, he gets the pleasure of sucking what little blood Silas has left in his shriveled body. If Silas is the victor, he will be able to march Nathaniel out into the unforgiving sunlight and gleefully watch my boss erupt in flames.
When I enter the kitchen, both house ghosts appear immediately. They’ve been banished from the parlor.
“How goes it?” Dex asks.
“Slow.”
At first I had assumed a refined and extremely old vampire like Nathaniel would sweep the floor with a retired factory worker. But, then again, Nathaniel has lived alone for centuries, and it seems that chess is something of a national pastime at the active retirement village where Silas lives.
“The vamp, he just needs to get some lead and blow that old bastard’s head off,” Sloppy Joe says. He makes a gun with his ghostly fingers. “BAM! How’s we did it in da hood.”
“You know, I looked you up,” I say to Sloppy Joe. “Your name isn’t even Joe. It’s Kevin, and you grew up in Zanesville.”
“Zanesville has a hood,” Sloppy Joe snaps back. “We be some dangerous mofos in Zanesville.”
As I open the fridge and pull out the quickly diminishing bottle of prune juice, I pray that Nathaniel is just toying with Silas, that all those years in his pocket have given him some sort of advantage. And then I realize the irony of praying for a vampire.
“Nathaniel is going to win, right?” Dex asks in a worried voice.
I hear the chortle of old men's laughter from the sitting room. That's the weirdest thing of all. The longer they play, the more they seem to be getting along.
I pour the glasses of prune juice and give Dex my bravest smile. “Oh yeah, Nathaniel’s going to win. Sure thing.”
But when I walk back into the parlor, I’m just in time to see Silas swipe Nathaniel's bishop.
“You’re crafty like the rest of your kind,” Nathaniel mutters to Silas, “but at least you do not partake in their indulgence of pointy hats.”
Silas gives me a confused look.
“He thinks you’re a gnome,” I inform him as I set down the glasses.
My boss’s side of the board is starting to look a little scarce. He seems so damn intent on marching his stupid pawn across the board so he can earn back one of his pieces. In the process, he's leaving the rest of his troops open for attack.
In fact, his queen is sitting there ripe for the picking. Silas's rook could sweep her if Nathaniel doesn't move her out of the way.
"You know, she came onto me first," Nathaniel says.
"Huh?" Silas replies.
Nathaniel is staring at his damn pawn again.
Then I realize that the situation is even more precarious. If Silas knocks the queen out of the way, he'll checkmate Nathaniel’s king. All Nathaniel has to do is swipe Silas’s rook with his queen, and both pieces would be safe.
"Your girl, whatever her name was,” Nathaniel says, “She came to me. I didn't choose her."
"You're a god damn liar!" Silas growls.
Nathaniel shakes his head. "She was trash."
"I loved her!"
"And she was loving two other men before she waved me over at that drive in. That's why I turned her. Took the other two first and was too filled up to finish her off. Human-gnome relationships rarely work out anyway. I did you a favor."
Silas doesn't say anything, but he doesn't have to. His rheumy eyes linger on his rook. He sees what is so obvious to everyone but Nathaniel.
"You're a smart enough lad," Nathaniel says. "I'm sure you suspected."
"Of course not. Hannah was a saint." Silas's response is automatic, but I catch the hitch of doubt beneath his words.
"I don't kill saints," Nathaniel says. He lifts his hand. I watch as he moves toward the queen.
Thank God, Thank God, Thank God.
He brushes right past his jeopardized royalty and pushes his pawn one more block up.
He's two spaces from the edge of the board and glowing with pride, thinking he has a clear path to the end.
"I don't kill saints either," Silas says. His rook knocks Nathaniel's queen over and he stamps his piece where she was standing. "Just vampires. Checkmate."
***
Nathaniel stares at the chess board, at the black rook cornering his king. I tense, expecting him to swipe the pieces from the board, leap across the table and suck Silas dry.
Except, for all Nathaniel's faults, he is a vampire of honor.
He stands up, adjusts his cravat and holds out his hand. Silas gets to his feet with more effort—bad knee. He is suspicious, but accepts. The man and undead entity shake.
"The match is yours," Nathaniel says is a cool, dry voice. "Would you prefer to march me outside or stand me in front of an open window?"
Silas seems as taken aback as myself. "You mean you're going through with it?"
"Of course I am," Nathaniel frowns, clearly offended. "I made a deal. I lost."
"Well...then door, I guess."
"Very good. Less mess for the servant to clean up I suppose," Nathaniel murmurs.
"I'm not a servant," I inform him automatically, not like it matters at this juncture anyway. "I'm a housekeeper."
Nathaniel ignores me, turns formally toward the door, straightens his already straight cravat again and begins to take slow steps forward. Which each step, I see future paychecks vanishing. I mean, let's face it, this is a horrible economy and there are tons and tons of people looking for work, including many housekeepers who actually know how to do things like cook, steam vacuum and ge
t blood stains out of white lace kerchiefs.
Nathaniel comes to the door and stops. His face is grim but stoic.
"A moment if you'll allow; to get my affairs in order," Nathaniel says to Silas.
The old man is actually looking a little pale himself. "Of course."
"Deidre,” Nathaniel starts, “I shall like my estate and holdings all liquidated and donated to the Eisenhower re-election campaign."
"I have no idea how to liquidate stuff, and Eisenhower's been dead for decades," I reply.
"Very good,” Nathaniel continues. “Even though you have been a particularly inept housekeeper, I would like you to have all of my biographies. I hope that they might give you some small comfort as they did me."
"Thanks, I guess," I say. A weird feeling is coming over me.
"In the future, I hope that you endeavor to present yourself in a more pleasing and feminine manner," Nathaniel goes on. "Perhaps if you work on your housekeeping skills and improve your melancholy disposition you shall find a decent husband. Even at your...er, advanced age. One must never give up hope."
I realize that Nathaniel is trying to be nice. That feeling inside of me is growing. I look at my old, cranky, completely anachronistic boss, and I realize that I will miss him.
"And you," Nathaniel turns to Silas. “You have impressed me with your determination and dogged pursuit of vengeance. You are one of the smartest gnomes I have ever met and undoubtedly the tallest.” Nathaniel lifts his chin a little higher and continues in a steady voice. “Though I wish not to die on this day, I am glad that it is by your hand and that it shall bring some amount of peace to your soul. I am proud to call you my Facebook friend."
"I've waited so long for this day," Silas says, his voice gruff with emotion. "I didn't imagine it like this."
"You may open the door at your leisure, Sir," Nathaniel says. He stands off to the side, placing his hands behind his back.
Pushing his walker in front of him, Silas makes it to the door and cranks it open. The
ghosts hover behind me. There’s nothing more that I want to do than slam that door shut and stand in front of it. I know, however, that I cannot interfere in the proceedings. This is about honor.
Nathaniel takes a deep breath. "And Deidre, for God's sake, don't bury my ashes next to the Mormons," he says and then takes a step into the daylight....
