by Titus, Rose
“Here to hide from the slime oozing through our charming little resort village. Hey, kids, give her some chicken before it’s all gone!”
“Huh?” Rufus looked up at her and was stunned. “But ain’t she—”
“Shut up,” Jimmy whispered.
“My things are in the car,” Laura said. “I hope you don’t mind my parking in the backyard, so my car won’t be seen.”
“Not at all.”
“Please, you really don’t mind?”
“No. I’m glad you came. I’d rather you were here. I’ll get your things.”
“Rick, the mess in my apartment is indescribable.”
The boys slept soundly in his living room and he gave Laura his own bed. “But what about you?” she asked.
He closed the door behind them and shut off the light. “The floor, don’t worry. I’ll be fine. Hey, you’ve had a rough day. Get some rest. It’s Saturday morning, so stay here, you won’t be alone.”
“Rick, why would anyone want to hurt me?”
“Not sure.” He grabbed an extra pillow and threw it on the floor, and then a blanket. “I would like to find that out.”
“Rick?”
It was late, even for him. “Yes?”
She couldn’t say it.
“Anything else I can get you?” he asked.
She could not, would not, say it. “Good night.”
“It’s actually morning, or else I wouldn’t be tired.” He let his lean body sink to the floor.
“You’ve got a room with no windows.”
“You noticed.”
“I guess it’s because...“
“Yes.”
“Rick?”
“What?”
“No. Never mind.”
He was silent a moment. “I’d rather share this space with you than them.”
“They’re cute,” she sighed.
“Sometimes. What is it you keep trying to ask me?”
She hesitated a moment. “Oh. What ever happened to—”
“Happened? I see, yes. The traditional crowd of peasants with torches gathered to hunt our brave heroes down and...”
Pavel rushed downstairs to quickly pay the innkeeper. As he reached the lower level he watched as Katarina stood in the open doorway speaking to the people. “No. They are no longer here, they have gone. Please, quickly return to your homes, and go protect your families.”
He let out a slow sigh of relief and went to find the innkeeper. He found him with his wife, huddled in the darkened kitchen. “Dark Master.” He fell to his knees. “Forgive us for not recognizing you! We did not pay the proper respect—”
“No time for that now, my friends, we must make haste.” He handed the money into the innkeeper’s trembling hands and left for the stables to ready the horses. There he finally found Natasha, trying at having a conversation with Dmitri. “Hurry, both of you, we must go.”
“Pavel, what is wrong?” Natasha demanded. “Why must we go so soon?”
“The villagers, they are hunting us. Now quickly, saddle your horse!” He rushed to saddle his own mount.
Mikhail came into the barn with Katarina and Svetlana. “Pavel, they are coming, they are now searching the entire village with hounds. Soon they may find us!”
“Come on then.” He helped Katarina onto her horse, mounted his own beast, and the others followed him swiftly into the night.
Into the dark forest they rode, with only the light of the moon to guide them. Pavel could still hear the cries of the hounds in fast pursuit, but soon their voices faded. “Katarina. You have saved all of us.”
“It was for my brother. I would not have him die, along with you.”
“But still, we are grateful.” He said quietly. They rode slightly ahead of the others.
“Why?” she whispered, “Why do you do such things?”
“What such things, my lady?” He did not understand.
“Why do you do that? You do not eat meat or bread, you do not show your face to the sun, you drink blood like it is the finest wine, yet you are not a cruel man. The king himself eats night and day, in the bright of morning he rises, only to make war and pillage and burn. I do not understand.”
“Nor do I,” he said simply. “The night is my home. That is all I know. The night I was born to serve. She speaks to me when the cool wind blows and when the night birds fill the dark skies with their song. She feeds me with her ever flowing dark rivers when the stag falls from my bow. She shelters me from the sun’s terrible fire, and lights the sky for me with her stars. This is all I know.”
“If that is all, then that is more than the king knows,” she said, and they continued to ride in silence.
He rose up slowly from the hard wooden floor, bent to kiss her cheek. She stirred a bit, then slept, finally. He drifted out, drifted into the living room. Two boys were sleeping, the curtains were open. He hastily shut them, filled the room with darkness.
He walked softly into the kitchen. “There you are.”
“Oh.” Rufus was bent, peering into the refrigerator. He shut it quickly.
“Real exciting, huh? Sorry kid, no beer.”
“I wasn’t looking for no beer.”
“That’s okay. I don’t care. You sure you don’t want to call your mother?”
“Naw. Her boyfriend just keeps beating me up anyway.”
“Hey, why don’t you get some sleep, Rufus? It’s pretty late, even for me. And don’t worry, okay? You’ll still be alive when you wake up.”
“What about her?”
“She’ll still be alive too, most likely.”
“She’s not, you know...like...is she human?”
“Rufus,” Rick opened the refrigerator and grabbed a small bottle to plunge into the microwave. “Everybody that has got two feet, two arms, two eyeballs, and one head is human. Only a few of us have sharper teeth, okay? Hey, I even once knew a guy who was a stockbroker, he was human too! At least I think he was.” The microwave bell rang and he retrieved it. Rufus stared at him strangely. “Hey, get a sense of humor.” He drank it straight from the bottle.
“Rick?”
What now? “Yeah?”
“Who’s Pavel?”
“Rufus, there is a nice, soft, cushy chair in the next room which just may be soft enough for you to fall asleep on, and do not listen in on other people’s conversations, please.”
The boy wandered away sadly. “I couldn’t help it.”
“He was a Russian folk hero,” Rick needed sleep very badly. “I’ll tell you about it later, okay?”
“Russ. Hey, man,” Fred gazed at his naked muscled and deeply tanned body in the hotel room’s full length mirror, not really paying attention to anything but his own appearance. He got up late again that morning, showered, and walked out of the bathroom not bothering to put on his blue jeans. “Russ?”
“Shut up,” Russ was counting the money once again.
“What’s eatin’ at you?”
“There ain’t hardly enough here.”
“So? You’re the businessman.” Fred flexed a muscle. He enjoyed looking at his bulging chest and washboard stomach. He smiled.
“Hey, do you ever do anything else but look at yourself, jerk? Look, Fred, we ain’t making enough money these days.”
“Okay. So, tonight, I’ll just do only one, a cheap one, maybe.”
“You idiot! No more hookers! Now, put your pants on, and keep ’em on!” Russ fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “We cannot afford this kind of shit. Or else, just do that broad that you picked up, what’s her name, the tarot reader, the ugly one. Just close your eyes, that’ll all.”
But Fred just looked away in disgust. Russ glared out the window into the morning’s bright light. He thought silently a moment. He would need to dump Fred or go broke. The Zontar act was running out of steam, anyway. People just didn’t dig this New Age stuff as much as they did last year. And who was this broad, the fortune teller? Sky or Something, that’s what her n
ame was. Ate a lot of tofu and burnt a lot of incense at the stand where she read palms at. Strange broad. But, hell, he would need to pick up a new act someday soon. “I’m taking a walk.”
“What for?” Fred inspected his arm pit to try and pop a zit out of it. He poked at the swollen red mass continually with no success.
“Just for air, this place smells like you.” He might stop by, have his palm read, buy some amulets, talk to the medium.
“Isn’t this almost like a regular family?” she wondered out loud. “I mean, sort of like one of those odd mixed families they have nowadays.” And she realized her own family wasn’t quite normal, either. In fact, despite her father’s resources and vast wealth, her family, she was starting to realize, was quite dysfunctional.
Rick stopped listening. It was dusk. He gazed sleepily out through the plate glass window of the supermarket. The sky was gray, just starting to darken and fill with the soft light of stars.
The cold dead interior of the market smelled horrible.
“I just realized,” he began when she finally ran out of things to say, “This place is around the corner from the gallery. I drive by it all the time, and I’ve never really looked at it, never went in. I knew it was here, but never really noticed it.” He pushed the cart like a horse used to haul a burden. “Yeah, what the hell, we can all play house. Like a regular family.” Sure, he said to himself, like a regular family, a suicidal maniac and three male prostitutes, so that makes me the only normal one in the house. “What is that stuff?”
She tossed it into the wagon. “Pasta! I love it! And it’s so easy to cook too!”
“It comes in a box?”
“Yes. Well, I found that out when I started cooking things. The directions are on the package, I believe.”
Rick hoped that nothing she attempted to cook would smell strong. “Where are the boys?”
“They went to find some ice cream, and I asked them to get some light bulbs. I couldn’t help noticing that some of yours seem to be out.”
“Laura, can’t we leave them out?”
She thought a moment. “Oh. That’s right. Never mind.”
“And what is that stench?”
“I don’t notice anything.”
“Smells like something died around here. Laura, are you sure this meat you’re buying is fresh? It smells like it died.”
She picked it up, held it under her nose, and inhaled. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”
It was too bright in the market. And noisy. There were too many people with their individual odors.
The boys returned, wandering back, each with his own flavor of ice cream, no light bulbs. Rick was relieved.
And Laura wanted vegetables. They were frozen solid, and in a plastic bag, with a picture of little green things on the package. Delicious and Nutritious! the packages declared. They landed in the cart like rocks. The bread, too, was wrapped in plastic. Rick wondered if the place had more plastic than actual food. He picked up a container, read the ingredients of chemical dyes and preservatives, and wondered what it all meant. “Do we have to do this again?”
“Oh, yes, I shop every week.”
It was all too painful. The brightness, the odor, the crowds.
The Catalina had room to spare in its dark cavernous trunk. He started it quickly, and drove them all back to their new home.
The boys carried most of the bags in, and after doing so they each proceeded to devour the ice cream.
“Didn’t anyone ever teach you boys to have a nutritious meal before dessert?” Laura began to boil her pasta and watched, horrified, as they sat in front of the television and ate straight from the containers with some of the spoons from the set of flatware she had purchased. “And don’t you sit at the table?” She stirred her noodles into the boiling water. “Or use dishes, for heaven’s sake?”
“Hell, Laura,” Rick put his own food in the microwave, “Be grateful they’re using spoons. Don’t you know how long it took for me to train them to do that?”
“Hey!” Jimmy shot back, “How are we supposed t’know this table manners stuff, we ain’t got no parents!”
“No parents?” Laura wondered if she ever had parents herself. She had learned to speak well, dress well, be acceptable, but she had no survival skills. The boys had no upbringing, only survival skills. “Would anyone like noodles?” A new idea. Teach them to eat at the table.
“Hey, lady, got any cigarettes? Charlie finished his ice cream but wasn’t satisfied. “I’m dying for a smoke.”
“Cigarettes? But those are not good for you.”
“Yeah. Neither is AIDS. I wanna smoke.”
“Why? What do you mean? How did you get...You don’t really mean to tell me—”
“Got it the same way Jimmy did. We work for a livin’.” Charlie had no sadness in his voice; he simply declared it matter-of-factly.
“Here, take my last cig,” Jimmy pulled one out of his pocket. “Been saving it, but you can have it.”
Rufus sat silently between them, took the cigarette from Jimmy and passed it to Charlie.
“Thanks. Got a light?”
“Hey, smoke that on the back step, kid,” Rick called out from the kitchen. “Don’t stink up my place any more than it already is.”
“What is it that you boys do for work?” Laura wondered, as she set the table.
But Rick didn’t want her to know. “Boys! There’s a rock video channel, you know. Why don’t you watch it?”
“That’s what’s on. Want us to turn it up?” Jimmy reached for the TV control.
“No! Never mind.” Rick sat at the empty place at the table with his own supper. Laura politely acted as if she did not know what exactly it was that he was drinking.
“Rick,” she whispered, “Is everything all right?”
“No.”
“How did...or should I even ask?”
“Sex trade.” He finally said it. “The serial killer is out after homeless people, street kids, hookers, that’s how they support themselves, buy food.”
She was speechless, her face went white. “But they’re—”
“Just kids, I know.”
“We’re gonna die, lady,” Jimmy called out boldly. “So what, everybody gonna die.” He grabbed the remote again and turned up the volume. “Everybody except Rick. Everyone dies but him. We just don’t wanna get dismembered, that’s all. We’re scared. We’re more scared of the killer than we are of the vampires. Great world, huh?”
She sighed, and went back to stirring the noodles.
Jimmy kept talking. “Our parents threw us out, for various reasons, got no money, so people use us, then they throw us away when they’re done. Sometimes people beat us up and stuff. We eat when people pay us, we live in a truck, under a bridge. The only guy who cares is a bloodsucker.”
“I would appreciate it if you boys would not use such bigoted and crude language to describe my people; we prefer to be considered ultra violet radiation challenged,” and Rick got up from the table to put another in the microwave, waited for it to heat. “That’s right, Laura, it’s a great world.”
She gazed at them sadly. The pasta was done, but somehow she no longer felt hungry.
Charlie got up to go out to the back step to smoke.
“Well,” Jimmy demanded, “If people were like, after this guy, why didn’t he just run off, and leave everybody else, and get away, you know, just take off like my dad? Like, how come he waited around to get people together?”
Rick let out a breath slowly, and it came out as a sigh. “Because, as I said before, it would be dishonorable to do so.”
“Huh? Like, if it was me, I’d just run like hell, never mind making sure everyone else was okay.”
“I am telling this, not you. And turn off that TV if you want me to continue.”
“Was this a movie?” Charlie asked. He was back inside, sitting on the floor in the TV room, eating Laura’s noodles while she listened from where she sat in the
kitchen. “This had t’be a movie, right?”
“No, Charlie, this was never a movie. Now, they continued to ride through the dark forest, but soon it would be dawn, and they desperately needed a safe place to stay.”
A wolf howled to signal the end of the night, and the birds began their song. The horses were weary, and Katarina could not remain awake.
“He says it will be soon,” her brother told her.
“But why can we not rest here?” she whispered, for she could not comprehend Pavel’s need for immediate shelter.
And soon they reached the cave that hid the long forgotten altar. It once housed silver and gold, colorful tapestries, and was lit by candlelight. Pavel descended down in, remembering the warmth and smell of fresh blood. But now it was cold, silent, and alone. Nothing left but the altar, forever stained dark red.
The sisters followed him. They too remembered better times, the offerings, the good will of people, the freedom to walk freely without suspicion. Next descended Mikhail and Katarina. “What is this cold place?” she asked. But her brother did not truly know. And Dmitri, after seeing to the horses. He slept by the entrance, remembering only the superstitions told by old women. Pavel slept by the great stone table and gazed at it with longing as he surrendered to sleep.
“Don’t stop,” Jimmy demanded. “I wanna hear the rest of it.”
“Hush, she’s asleep,” Rick whispered. Laura rested silently on the couch. “She’s had a rough time. And I’m going out.”
“For what?” Rufus was suspicious, as always.
“To check on things,” and he bent to cover her with the Indian blanket. “I won’t be long. Stay and look after her.” He went for his leather jacket, and the keys to his car were always in the pocket.
“What’re you gonna do with us?” Rufus blurted out suddenly.
“Put up with all your crap, I suppose,” he whispered. “And I said to be quiet.” He went out the back door, down the steps.
Rick guided the car down into a tight alley, dimmed the lights. “So, is this where you want me to park?”
“Yeah, the homeless girl you saw come in a while ago, the one with the kid, she said she saw something big and ugly stalking around.”
