by Jonah Hewitt
“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.
“Really! It’s something that shouldn’t exist yet there it is! Sun and shadow, light and dark, all growing together and happy as clams in the sand. Can’t beat that, can you?!” She gave him a little bump with her hip like her mom used to give to her and nearly knocked him over. That at least got a smile out of him.
She looked back over the garden overflowing with beautiful green plants. Sunflowers over bleeding hearts, ferns next to daisies, and in the back, rows of early corn and vegetables that were just sprouting. Most of it was her mom’s favorite sweet summer corn, but the last two rows were a special breed of Indian corn that came out with blue-black ears with a spare, pearly white kernel or two, like stars in a midnight sky. Mom always hung a bunch of them on the door each fall. She said it was good luck.
“I never really liked gardening or weeding before,” Lucy said regretfully, “It was always my mom’s thing…but…” she hesitated, “It would be sad to see it go away now.”
“C’mon,” she said after another long pause, “I’ll show you the house.” She ran past the rest of garden towards the house, but she skidded to a halt and fell hard on her bottom when she saw what was there.
Parked just in front of the house was an old, rusty pickup truck that Lucy had never seen before. Beyond it, she could see the glass window of the front door and just beyond that, the silhouette of someone just inside.
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?!” Yo-yo asked earnestly.
“Someone’s in my house!”
“Deputy Pruitt, Lancaster Sheriff’s Department. Now what in the world is going on here?”
“Thank goodness you’re here. We have a heck of a situation, Deputy.”
“You’ve got that right. I’ve got two state troopers and a federal marshal out there in a state of catatonic shock. Can’t get a lick of sense out of any of them, and I’ve got a parking lot full of people who are convinced it’s the end of the world. Some think they saw a demon and others think it was an alien or the Jersey devil. What in the heck is going on here?!”
Miles and Tim looked at each other nervously as they pressed their ears against the inside of the walk-in freezer door.
“Nothin’s going on here! It’s just a bunch of dumb kids pulling a stupid prank, that’s all!”
This voice was new, but Miles guessed it belonged to either the owner or the manager.
“Just calm down and tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you what happened! Four kids dragged a feral pig in here and let it loose and those troopers went and wet themselves over it.”
“It wasn’t a pig,” another new voice piped up, “It was a big, fat goose – you could hear it honking.”
“No, it wasn’t, it was a pig!”
“I thought it was a set of bagpipes,” said another voice. Miles recognized that one. It was the young man manning the register.
There was a long silence.
“Are you crazy?!” came the owner’s voice again.
“Well, that’s what it looked like to me!”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Well, maybe it was a pig dressed up as a set of bagpipes,” the young man tried to rationalize.
Miles and Tim slowly turned their heads to look to the back of the freezer. It was a set of bagpipes all right, complete with one black goosefoot, two pig’s feet and a huge butcher knife. It was throwing a small fit and rummaging around in a pile of frozen tater tots and fish sticks.
The voices started up again.
“It was a pig, I’m telling you.”
“No. It was a goose.”
“Maybe it was a ventriloquist’s dummy in the shape of bagpipes.”
“You’re ALL crazy,” came the agitated voice of the owner again.
“Anyway!” the Deputy broke in, “What happened after that?”
“Nothing! That’s what happened! Just a big commotion and then the pig ran off into the freezer and those four kids that let it loose went in after it.”
“Are they still in there?”
“Yes, they’ve gone and barricaded themselves inside!!”
“You got descriptions?”
“Four kids, two short, two tall. Three of them were teenagers, real loser types, one was shirtless in a white blazer and the fourth one was a Hare Krishna or something!”
“Hare Krishna?”
“Yeah, he had a shaved head and was wearing a robe!”
“Really?” the deputy remarked on that last observation. He seemed almost amused as if the cashier wasn’t the only crazy person in here. Miles heard something scratching. The Deputy must have been taking notes.
Miles and Tim both looked back to the end of the freezer again. The “Hare Krishna” kid was sitting in the back not far from where the bagpipes were cavorting in the frozen fried foods. He had a five-gallon tub of chocolate ice cream between his knees and he was using a soup ladle to cram as much of it as he could down his face, which was already smeared with chocolate. Near him, tapping his foot in an agitated state was the shirtless “loser” trying to stay as far away from either of them as he could in the cramped freezer. Whether he was concerned more for his safety or was just trying to keep chocolate stains off his white blazer Miles couldn’t tell.
Miles pressed his ear back against the metal door.
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“It’s just a bunch of stupid kids!! I just want them gone and out of here, now!”
“All right, all right, calm down. Let’s give this a try.”
There was some shuffling and then there was a sharp metal rap on the freezer door as if someone was hitting it with a metal flashlight. Tim winced and pulled his ear away.
“You in there! Can you hear me?!” the voice was slightly amused before, but now it had the unmistakable air or authority, “This is the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Department. All I want to do is talk.”
Tim looked at Miles and mouthed the words, “What do we do?!” but Miles just put his fingers to his lips, asking for silence. After a pause the deputy started up again.
“You kids are in a lot of trouble, letting that pig loose and everything. There’s a lot of damage that needs to be accounted for, but hiding out is only going to make it worse. Come on out now, you hear?!” There was another pause.
“You’ve got nowhere to go. I don’t know what happened in here tonight, but you can come out and tell it to the judge, and I guarantee you that will be a whole lot better than if I have to come in there after you.”
Another pause.
“Whatever you’ve done or whatever you’re thinking of doing, I can promise you, you are only getting out of here one way and that is in the back of my cruiser.”
There was one last pause.
“Whatever you think is going to happen to you, I guarantee you it isn’t worse that freezing to death in this icebox!!” He tried the door handle a few times, but the spatula Miles had jammed through the handles on this side held.
Miles and Tim said nothing. Schuyler just rolled his eyes at the situation.
“Well they are a stubborn bunch, aren’t they?” The deputy said at last. “Hey, there isn’t any chance they’ve frozen in there is there?”
“Nah, they haven’t been in there that long.”
“Well, looks like we gotta call this one in and get some back-up. I’ll call in the fire department – see if they can get these doors open. I just hate it when they won’t see reason.” There was a crackle of a police radio and a bunch of quick jargon before the Deputy spoke back to the owner. “You there, keep an eye on this door ‘til my back-up arrives,” he said, probably to the cashier. “Now you can tell me what the stor
y is with these state troopers.” Miles strained to listen, but the voices had moved out of earshot.
Miles and Tim stood up slowly and stuck their hands in their pockets and examined the scene. The bagpipe was rummaging through the frozen foods. He wasn’t eating them as much as despoiling them intentionally, smashing them beyond recognition with a vengeance as if he had been wronged by a fish stick sometime in the past. The boy was head first in a tub of ice cream like a vulture on road kill. Schuyler eyed them both contemptuously.
“Are we clear?” Schuyler asked over his shoulder.
“For the moment…aye,” Miles nodded.
Schuyler began the interrogation, “Okay, kid. First question. How do you know Lucy Miller?”
“I don’t actually, I just know her mother.”
“You mean you knew her mother, right?”
“No, I KNOW her mother,” he replied, clearly annoyed.
Miles took a deep breath. He lowered himself to the kid’s level to break the news to him. “Sorry to tell you this to you mate, but her mother’s dead. She died last night.”
“Yeah, I know, that’s when I met her.”
They all exchanged raised eyebrows.
“Where did ya say ya met her again?” Miles asked, puzzled.
“In Limbo.” He looked at their perplexed faces and decided he had to spell it out for them, “You know…the AFTERLIFE?” Then he craned his neck as far forward as he could, like a turtle stretching its head out of its shell.
There was a pause before Sky spoke, “The kid’s lost his freaking mind.”
“No, no…wait a bit now,” Miles leaned forward cautiously and examined the kid’s neck. Tim and Sky thought this was odd but leaned in too, just to see what Miles was looking at.
Miles was having a hard time figuring out what he was supposed to be seeing. At first it looked like any normal neck, but then he realized he wasn’t actually seeing the kid’s neck. Rather, he was seeing all around it and that, for some reason, his eyes couldn’t or wouldn’t look directly at it. He squinted his eyes tightly and then suddenly he saw it, a large, black gash drawn across the kid’s throat so deep it must have reached the spine.
“Whoa!” Tim recoiled in shock.
“Holey moley,” Sky said in a low whisper.
“Blazes! Didya see that?! Ya saw it did ya?” Miles asked the other two earnestly.
Tim nodded vigorously, but Sky just gave one nod in affirmation. Miles looked back at the kid. He had resumed consuming what was left of the ice cream. The gash was as plain as day. It was always there, he just couldn’t or wouldn’t see it before.
“So you’re dead right?” Miles queried gingerly.
“Yep!” He replied hardly looking up from scarfing down ice cream.
“So what are you? A vampire?” Miles asked.
“No,” he laughed.
“Are you a zombie?” Tim asked cautiously.
“Heavens no!” he sounded offended.
“Then what are you?!!” Sky demanded.
“I’m a scribe. I work in the scriptorium.” He took another large spoonful of ice cream.
“Don’t get cute with us, kid,” Sky replied.
“I wasn’t being cute. I’m a scribe for the Great Master.”
“Great Master?” Sky sounded suspicious.
“Yeah, you know…Death?”
They all looked at each other.
“Are we talking Death-Death here or just some guy named ‘Death,’” Tim said, asking for clarification.
“He’s the only Death I know,” the kid responded unhelpfully.
“Look, kid,” Sky said, jerking the ice cream tub away from him, “Don’t mess around with us – we’re vampires! Remember? The living dead?” The kid kept on licking the ladle while looking at Sky contemptuously for taking his ice cream away. “We could kill you right now if we wanted.”
The kid wasn’t impressed at all and laughed. “I don’t think so, I’ve been dead for nearly 2,000 years now already.” He grabbed the tub back from Sky and kept digging.
Schuyler nearly laughed at the kid’s chutzpah himself.
“Don’t get cocky, kid, this is serious stuff. We are on a mission about the end of the world.” Schuyler folded his arms across his chest triumphantly.
“You too?!” he said brightly without a trace of sarcasm.
Schuyler blinked, “Are you kidding me?”
“Um…no.”
“Yeah…Well…We are on a mission for the Father of All Vampires!” Sky countered.
“I’m on a mission from the Grand Chamberlain of Death himself,” Nephys replied calmly shoveling in more ice cream.
Sky nearly flipped over this piece of one-up-man-ship, but he couldn’t top it.
“OH, Yeah?! Well…well…just shut up!”
“Sky,” Miles tried to calm him down, “Don’t scare him, we need him.”
“Don’t ‘Sky’ me! Miles! This kid and his thing are just messing around with us.”
“Flubbit,” the bagpipe uttered from under the pile of ruined food.
“And what is that thing anyway?” Sky said, pointing to the mutant bagpipes.
The creature snorted a derisive hoot from the bottom of a pile of onion rings and corndogs he was rooting around in.
“Him?” Nephys pulled his head out of the tub of ice cream. “Oh, that’s Hiero.”
“And what’s a Hiero?” Tim asked, utterly bewildered.
“He’s an imp, that’s all,” the boy said annoyed as if he were pointing out common bird varieties to inexperienced bird watchers.
“Oh, really?! An imp! And what exactly is an imp?” Tim sounded troubled. He had already been introduced to vampires, mummies and mutant pickled baby fetuses in the last 48 hours. He was probably beginning to wonder if the cast of horrors would ever end.
Nephys swallowed, sighed and adopted an officious manner. “An imp is a soulless gestalt, a psychic manifestation of the collective fears of the soul that feeds on the evil obsessions and failed desires of the damned.”
Miles and Tim exchanged weird looks. Miles didn’t have the foggiest idea what that meant and from his expression, neither did Tim. It was odd the way he said it too, like he was recalling it verbatim from some book he read once.
“They torture people in hell,” the boy added quickly, seeing that they needed him to dumb it down for them.
Miles, Tim and Sky’s eyes were all riveted to the strange boy after that comment.
“In hell?!” Tim said, genuinely shocked, “That thing’s from HELL?!”
“Um, yeah…” the boy said nonplussed, “Where did you think it was from?”
“Well, not hell obviously,” thought Miles. Miles looked at it again closely though. It wasn’t hard to believe this thing was from hell. It had that kind of unnatural feeling.
The boy wasn’t finished yet though.
“He’s a lot like you really,” he added, talking to Sky.
Sky nearly swallowed his lollipop, and Miles had to do everything in his power to keep from snorting in laughter.
“EXCUSE ME?” Sky said, genuinely offended.
“Well,” Nephys went on taking large spoonfuls of ice cream in between every word, “Vampires are just a psychic manifestation of the naked desire we all have to live. When the body dies, if the desire to live is strong enough, so strong you are willing to kill for it, then the dark desires and hunger for life rooted in the soul’s shadow take over the seat of the heart. The two, shadow and heart, can never share the same place in the soul, so the heart is expelled to the afterlife and only the shadow remains to animate the body, but the body can’t survive without the life essence, or Ka, a living body with a heart provides.”
“Do tell,” Sky said sarcastically.
“Oh, yes,” Nephys went on. “Since the Ka is most concentrated in the blood, you have to get it from someone else. That’s why you have to drink blood to survive.”
Miles actually understood most of this, much to his own surprise. It was
a bit odd hearing it from a boy like this, but he’d never heard the matter explained quite so clearly before. Sky’s eyes just narrowed in anger, however.
Nephys tossed the half-eaten tub of ice cream to the side and then reached for the next one. Miles was getting a little envious of this kid. Why could this corpse eat but he couldn’t? “You survive off blood, he feeds off misery and pain, frustration, whatever,” Nephys said pointing to the imp, “Same thing really.”
“PHARNT!” Hiero piped up, as if on cue.
“The only difference is that he never had a soul while you lost yours when you became a vampire. So you see, you really are very similar.” The kid said this like he was describing a mundane medical condition like acne. “You’re both soulless.” He dug out some cookie dough ice cream and scraped off a large spoonful with his teeth.
Schuyler stewed in the silence, but Tim spoke first. “Um…just for the record,” Tim held up his hand like a kid in grade school, “I have a soul.”
Sky was done stewing. “Not to rain on your little metaphysics lecture here, kid, but I AM NOTHING LIKE THAT THING!” Sky suddenly bellowed, pointing in derision at Hiero. Nephys cowered and held up the tub of ice cream as a shield. Hiero instantly leapt up and began hissing and spitting like a half dead cat.
“Sky!” Miles decided to interject. Whatever Schuyler’s objection to the kid’s rather deep explanations, they needed his help and he didn’t want to anger this thing any more. He pulled him aside to whisper in his ear, “This ain’t gettin’ us nowhere.”
“Ya think I don’t know that?! But the kid is some kinda lunatic and that thing is his mad-scientist-experiment sidekick!
Hiero pulled his head out of the pile of mutilated food and instantly began honking and frothing while stabbing the floor around Sky’s feet menacingly.
“HEY!” Sky complained. “Can’t you stop this thing?!” he yelled to Nephys while dancing out of the way of the knife blade.
“Um…not really,” the boy shrugged. “That’s just the way he is,” he said while ladling more ice cream into his wide-open maw. “But you might want to put on a shirt.”
“Why should I put on a shirt?!”
“Bare flesh like that is just an invitation for a quick stabbing.” Nephys held the tub up over his head to scrape out the last bit of remaining ice cream.
