The comic is great because there’s only one story it can tell, really, and so it tells it over and over with as much glorious style as it can fit into a bunch of cheap paper pages: Dracula does something evil, the little band of screwed-up vampire hunters stop him doing it, he slinks away to be elegant and evil another time, and the hunters regroup and wait for the next threat to present itself. It’s a perfect formula, exquisitely rendered in stormy fluid pencil lines.
Bette’s favourite character was always Rachel van Helsing, the cool blonde vampire hunter with a crossbow and a PhD, who ran the team of hunters and had a badass scar on her cheek from the first time she’d tangled with Dracula. Rachel’s tragedy in the comic was that vampire hunting consumed her whole life, eventually driving away every lover and friend she’d make. But even in the face of that, she’d stayed fabulous and deadly, and Bette can remember many afternoons spent lying around with Tommy and Rose, reading fragile old comics and losing herself completely in the characters and stories.
Eventually Tomb of Dracula lost its magic, of course, like everything does sooner or later. Bette hates the way that happens, how stuff always has to change. She wishes that the summer had lasted forever, just her and Tommy and Rose all staying sixteen forever and watching shitty movie marathons in the basement forever and going out to see shows forever, with no death or vampires or anything.
After Tomb of Dracula stopped telling the one story over and over again, the writers seemed unsure of what to do with Rachel: the only thing she had in her life was hunting vampires. The world around her could shift and change, but she couldn’t. Eventually she got bitten and turned into a vampire and, unable to live like that, she’d persuaded Wolverine to kill her. It’s the only time Bette can remember being seriously and genuinely pissed off by one of her favourite superheroes.
And it’s bullshit anyway. Someone as smart as Rachel van Helsing would have known that it was bullshit. No change in circumstances is terrible enough that death is a better option. None. People can learn to cope with anything, eventually. Even being a vampire.
~
Bette’s moved from the box of comics to looking through Tommy’s CD collection by the time Tommy and Rose get home. Rose gives Bette a small smile as she takes the DVD, accepting the unspoken apology along with the gift and offering a wordless sorry of her own in return.
They sit in the basement, the three of them, on the old pullout couch that Rose and Tommy’s dad won’t let Rose and Tommy’s mom throw away. It’s just like things used to be, or close enough that Bette can pretend; a little whisper of the ghost of summer, fluttering thin and pink in the winter air for a moment.
“I love the way that halfway through this movie Tesla shows up and steals the whole movie from everyone else in like two scenes,” Tommy remarks partway through the DVD, and Rose answers “Of course, it’s David Bowie, he rules,” at the same second that Bette answers “Of course, it’s Nikola Tesla, he rules,” and they look at each other and giggle.
It’s a good moment.
~
The next evening Bette and Jay meet Michelle in the mall foodcourt, after Michelle’s dress rehearsal for the school musical is done. Michelle and Jay share a cheese pizza and Bette has a glass of juice. Michelle makes some scathing remarks about crazy psychos who think crash dieting is a good idea, but neither Bette nor Jay correct her. Bette finds it oddly sad and sweet that there are still people in the world who don’t know about vampires.
They catch a cab to Ash’s house, because Ash and Michelle are meant to be doing some band practice stuff, but the door’s unlocked and all the lights are on and Ash isn’t around.
“Addicts make the worst friends, god, seriously,” Michelle gripes, flicking through the zillion television channels that Ash’s parents get on satellite. The TV screen is huge and the lounge furniture is all soft white leather, but Michelle seems to feel at home amongst the luxury. Bette remembers Jay saying something about Michelle’s parents being loaded. Her house must be as nice as this one.
And, sure, technically Bette’s super-rich too, she owns her own nightclub for crying out loud, but that’s a recent thing and doesn’t count in the same way. She’s not at ease in opulence, not like someone who’s so used to everything being beautiful that it becomes expected.
“The very first conversation I had with Ash, she offered me pills,” Jay agrees, wandering off to the kitchen, because he’s a boy and boys get to do totally unfair things like pig out constantly and stay skinny. Not that Bette is actually capable of putting on weight anymore—or capable of snacking on ordinary leftovers, either, for that matter—but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s been a complaint Rose has had against Tommy for years; they eat the same amount of junk and yet he’s razor-thin and she’s curvy.
With Jay in the kitchen and Michelle still channel-flipping, Bette feels slightly at a loss, so she begins to explore Ash’s momentarily abandoned and palatial house. There’s a gaming room, with a pool table coated in lush, pristine green felt, which Bette is willing to gamble has never been used for a game. The cues and triangle-rack things and the balls are all neatly stored in their proper places. There’s a dartboard on the wall, and a gleaming marble bar laden with amber liquor bottles and crystal tumblers off to one side. All of it looks like a movie set, rather than a real room in a real house where real people live.
Upstairs are the bedrooms—two guest suites, the master suite, the locked door of Ash’s room with ‘ASHLEY’ on a small brass plaque on the wood, and a matching door with a plaque that says ‘JENNA’.
The handle turns easily when Bette tries to open the door, so she doesn’t feel hesitant about going inside. It’s not like Ash’s sister is still around to have her privacy disturbed.
Inside, the room smells faintly of a fruity, floral perfume and of hairspray and skincare products. Everything’s been packed away into cardboard cartons, which are stacked against the wall and bear thick sharpie labels like ‘coats’ and ‘books’ and ‘small handbags’. The bed has been stripped, the mattress leaning against the wall to air.
“I was friends with Jenna before I really knew Ash. We weren’t close, really, though. We didn’t get a chance to be,” Jay says, leaning against the doorframe. Bette realises she’s walked into the middle of the bare room, the cleaned skeleton of an ended life surrounding her. “I wish I’d known her better.”
Bette makes a face. “You didn’t miss out on anything. She was a total fuckdoll bitch. She was mean to Rose all the time.”
Jay shrugs one shoulder, as if to say that he didn’t necessarily hold bitchiness against a person. Bette’s not exactly shocked by this revelation. Jay thinks that Blake’s good boyfriend material, after all.
Bette looks around the room again. She’s almost disappointed that it’s already dismantled like this. She would have liked to maybe find some kind of common ground with Jenna, some snapshot of the girl when she was a tiny awkward kid with a retainer and pigtails or something. But nothing of Jenna inhabits this room anymore.
Bette thinks of her own bedroom at her mother’s house, still set up as if she’s coming back to it someday. She wonders if it would be better for somebody to tell Bette’s mom the truth, that her daughter is dead and that her room needs to be packed into forlorn cardboard boxes and forgotten. Maybe that would be kinder. At the very least, it would be more honest.
“Alexander’s the one who killed her,” Jay goes on. Bette thinks about replying with some smart remark about how she’s gotta buy Alexander a bunch of flowers as a thank-you for that, but she decides to hold her tongue. Jenna was Jay’s friend and Ash’s sister, and even if Bette doesn’t care at all that Jenna is dead that doesn’t mean she doesn’t care that Jenna’s death has made Jay and Ash unhappy.
And maybe Bette does have common ground with Jenna, just a little: they were both girls in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so they died, and that’s all. Death makes all the little differences between who they each were completely meani
ngless.
“Let’s go see if Michelle’s found anything worth watching,” Bette says, and they leave Jenna’s room to its lonely stillness and its silence.
They watch three episodes of some cop show before Michelle makes a grumbling noise. “I bet she’s sleeping at someone’s house and she’s completely forgotten about band practise tonight. So typical. Sorry about this, guys. If I’d known she was going to pull this shit again, I wouldn’t have invited you around. I’m sure you’ve got better stuff to do than catch up on cop shows.”
More and more, Bette feels like she’s adrift in time, moving from one night to the next like it’s all one inky blur of unending streets and lights and blood and darkness. ‘Stuff to do’ seems like a notion no longer connected to her life: there are things she’ll do, but they’ll be done whenever she does them. The only urgency or impatience she feels properly is hunger.
She manages to smile at Michelle reassuringly. “Nah, it’s cool. I can spare a few hours of my youth for this, I think.”
~Bette has to leave Michelle and Jay to enjoy the comforts of Ash’s house without her soon after that, because she’s got some boring meeting about signing over the club from Alexander’s name to hers that she’s gotta go to. She’s worn her most grown-up outfit for it, a beautifully cut black three-piece suit of a skirt and vest and jacket, a white shirt, and a black-and-white striped silk tie. She’s wearing black fishnet stockings and knee-high black leather boots with dozens of tiny black leather buttons up the sides. She feels like she’s dressed up as the most elegant naughty schoolgirl in history. It’s completely excellent and cool.
She’s finally started wearing a coat outdoors, too. It doesn’t make any difference to whether she’s warm or not, but it stops people looking at her so much. They still look, but now there’s less puzzlement in their expressions. Just a kind of gross appreciation from some, and admiration from others, as if being luminescently pale and coldly pretty was something that made her special and worthy. Bette goes out of her way to kill those who look at her like that.
Her coat is ruby-red leather, the softest lambskin Alexander and Timothy could find through the various tailors they use. They’re always doing things like that; going out of their way to take special care of her. She thinks that maybe they feel kind of guilty that she died, since it was sort of a side effect from the stupid games they play against the hunters. For all that Blake’s trying to teach her not to care about the pawns when she plays chess, she’s certainly been kept in style since they knocked her off the board.
Or maybe they just like having a girl around for a change, to give them an excuse to shop for all the crazily expensive designer fashions they glut her wardrobe with.
Halfway down the block from Ash’s house, Bette catches sight of someone in a bedroom window, watching her walk past. They have that staring, seeing look Bette hates so much, like they want to gobble her up with their eyes.
She goes around to the back door of the house, her boots leaving neat black footprints on the white of the snowy lawn. It’s easy to snap the expensive lock on the door open, and even easier to disable the alarm system before it activates. Vampires, if they want to ever get a decent meal, become world-class spies by necessity.
Everyone except the boy who was watching Bette is asleep, but he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, like he was waiting for her. Like he knew she’d come.
He’s Latino, about fourteen years old, chubby and with a scatter of acne on each cheek. His hair needs a wash and a brush, and his oversized black t-shirt has a picture of an airbrushed wolf howling at an airbrushed moon on it. He reminds Bette painfully, achingly of Rose. A lonelier, sadder Rose who never had a twin brother or a best friend.
“Hello,” Bette says, not sure anymore if she wants to kill him. There’s a collection of tiny plaster dragons on his bookshelf. She suspects that the world needs kids like him to stay alive and grow up as often as possible, as a countermeasure against all the vapid assholes whose vapid asshole children populate the place.
“You’re a vampire,” the boy says. “A real vampire. You’re real.”
“Yes,” Bette answers.
“Are you going to kill me?”
Bette shrugs one shoulder. “I’m not sure,” she tells him.
“You can if you like. I mean, I don’t think anyone would be very sad if you did.”
“I think I might be,” Bette confesses. “You seem pretty cool.”
The boy flushes, flattered. Bette decides she won’t kill him, not tonight anyway.
“Don’t tell anyone I was here, okay?” she says. “I’ll come back and kill you for real if you do. And don’t… don’t look at girls like that when they walk past your house. It’s gross, and it makes them feel gross.”
The boy looks down at the carpet, too embarrassed to meet her eyes. “Okay.”
“Okay,” she echoes, and leaves the room. As she treads silently back down the stairs to the ground floor, she hears the low growl of a dog, and the hair on the back of her neck prickles with gooseflesh.
Cats don’t care if someone is a human or a vampire, but dogs do. Dogs don’t like vampires, which makes Bette sad because she loves dogs. If her mom wasn’t allergic, she’d’ve had like a zillion of them when she was growing up—sometimes, in fact, Bette had wondered if her mom had faked, or at least exaggerated, the allergy as a way of deterring Bette from bringing home a different stray every afternoon.
This dog’s a nauseatingly adorable French Bulldog, a tiny little thing perched on one of the dining room chairs, its too-big ears and button-black eyes making it more like a toy than a pet. It growls at Bette again. Bette wonders how, exactly, it plans to attack her if she doesn’t take the hint and leave—is it going to stand there and look cute at her until she melts into a puddle?
Bette rolls a soft growl of her own in the back of her throat, and the dog shuts up with a muted yelp of surprise.
“Yeah, didn’t expect me to fire back, did you?” Bette asks with a grin. It eyes her warily. She wants to reach over and pet it, but the now-silent dog still looks genuinely hostile at her presence in his territory. The rejection stings, just a little, like the old grazes Bette used to have on her knees all the time, back before she died.
Instead of petting the dog she bares her teeth at it, making a sharp barking sound and giggling as it runs away in terror. Her long red coat swirls around her calves as she leaves through the ruined back door. She’s a wolf in lambskin leather.
TIMOTHY
Life, Timothy has often thought, is nothing if not unpredictable, and he feels that his current circumstances are as good an example of this fact as any.
He’s in the rafters of a school auditorium, the web of triangular struts which laces across the high ceiling above the stage. Bette sits near him, the two of them perched as comfortably as they would be in the sitting room at home. Below, the floorboards of the stage are satin-smooth, polished by generations of young feet.
“Good thing you’re not scared of heights,” Timothy quips quietly.
“I used to be,” confesses Bette. “But not in a bad way. I liked the frightened thrill they gave me.”
Down below, school students decked out in the curious avante garde vulgarities of their costumes go through their scene again. It’s well into the evening; early for Bette and Timothy but late for these school-weary teenagers, stuck in rehearsal as the teachers fuss and demand perfection.
“I feel like the Phantom of the Opera up here,” Bette remarks. “If, you know, the Phantom of the Opera had been an undead teenage girl who was totally cute, and Christine the chorus singer had been playing Peter Pan, and kept sneaking sips of vodka when she could get away with it.”
Below, Rose takes another furtive swallow from the tiny bottle concealed in her pocket.
“I think you’re misunderstanding the role of metaphor in conversation,” Timothy retorts.
“That wasn’t a metaphor, that was a simile. I said I felt like the Phantom, not
that I was the Phantom,” Bette fires back quietly, pairing the words with a feral grin.
Rose has wandered over to chat to the boy playing Tigerlily’s father. Like Michelle, the boy is black rather than Native American; he looks like his heritage is probably Indian or Sri Lankan. He’s listening to an iPod, and offers Rose one of the earbuds. She takes it, the slight drunken flush on her cheek deepening to a pretty pink-red.
“I never understood the characters in Phantom of the Opera,” Bette remarks, changing position on the rafters restlessly as she watches the scene below. “I never understood why Christine went with that totally milquetoast count guy when she could have had the Phantom.”
“I don’t think…” Timothy starts to argue, then shakes his head. “I’m sorry, but this metaphor—or simile, little miss pedant—cannot sustain further discussion.”
Bette gives him a wide-eyed look, blinking in a way that’s probably meant to look innocent. “What? I was just remarking on literature.”
Timothy rolls his eyes. “Sure you were. And the only response I can give you, in our very literary discussion, is to point out that just because Christine listened to a couple of mp3s with the Count doesn’t mean she’s not still into the Phantom, okay?”
Bette looks unconvinced, but does say anything else, leaning out over the empty space to watch the action below instead.
~
Bette leads Timothy on a particularly circuitous route home, through outlying neighbourhoods and small parks and finally an overpass, not that far from the home she used to live in.
“I used to come to a little place in the trees just over there, with Rose,” she tells him, gesturing off past where they can see. “It’s where we saw vampires for the first time, actually. Vampires that we knew were vampires, anyway. It turned out later that we were already friends with one. But we didn’t know that.”
The Wolf House: The Complete Series Page 42
