by Lynne Murray
I gravitated to the back yard. It sloped down toward a collapsing fence through which you could see the long drop to the coast road and beyond that, the ocean. The ideal place to smoke cigarettes and drink the odd beer or whatever I could steal from my aunt. My excuse was Aunt Reba never gave me any cash. Even when I asked for bus fare she managed to forget before she gave it to me. I didn’t need much money because I didn’t know anyone in San Francisco to help me obtain the drugs that had been so readily available at my prep school.
The shed challenged me because it was locked up so tight. There wasn’t a window or a crack or a loose board you could pry out to even look in. I hammered at the windows with a rock, but I couldn’t even dent the metal that reinforced them. Barely even chipped off a little of the old green paint.
The summer fogs off the ocean turned the garden into a strange, cemetery-like place. I stayed out of my aunt’s way and got my own meals. She didn’t seem to notice. But I watched the shed when she wasn’t around and discovered one night that the padlock had been opened and hung in the hasp. The shed was empty except for some dusty lawn tools stored there, including a huge, empty box. Sudden, inexplicable terror grabbed me and squeezed the curiosity right out of me. I didn’t stick around to find out more.
The next day I casually walked around the shed and found it sealed up tight, the padlock solidly closed.
I had to find out what was in there.
Chapter 5
Mina Murray’s journal,
red digital voice recorder
August 4th
I don’t know if Kristin believes me about the vampires, but I trust her and talking to her helps. She makes me feel safe in a way no one has since my mother died. Therapists aren’t supposed to talk about themselves, but she did say that her mother had died young like mine did. I feel like she understands me.
Hal is like a star to me. I loved him from the first time he spoke to me. He’s so brilliant and funny and sexy. Knowing he’s chosen me, even though I’m not educated or thin or sophisticated, makes me feel happy. I don’t feel secure, though. Not even since he proposed. It’s the vampire thing. He didn’t start to talk about it or introduce me to his vampire-crazy friends until after we fell in love. He trusts me, and I have to trust him.
Hal seems to be waiting for me to see something—I just don’t know what. Maybe he’s the one who should be in therapy, but he’d never go. If only Hal would at least talk to Kristin. He could use some of her wisdom. I worry about what he’s doing with those vampires, and she could help me protect him. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Kristin.
Chapter 6
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 4th continued
I was going to have to refer Mina to another therapist. Talk about a conflict of interest! I somehow got through the session and I walked her through the garden and out onto Clement Street. I usually walk guests in and out, just to double check that the gate is closed and firmly locked. We live in a nice neighborhood, but it’s also a big city.
The next time I talked with Mina she was going to be very angry.
I drew in several deep breaths of cold, damp air, hoping to clear my head. I closed the wooden gate and stood with my back against it for a moment. The gate was set into the eight-foot-tall wooden fence that ran from the corner of Vi’s house right on the sidewalk on Clement Street. No front yards in this part of San Francisco. Every square foot of land was precious. Vi’s front door was three steps up from the pavement.
I wouldn’t say anything till I confirmed it with Hal. But my gut told me Mina’s fiancé was my Hal. She had shyly showed me the exotic blue diamond engagement ring Hal had found for her in some Eastern European capital, and as I leaned forward to look, I noted that I had been touching the antique amethyst necklace Hal had brought back for me from his last trip. I dropped my hand as if the stones had turned red-hot. Damn it, Hal!
Now my hands were shaking. I wondered if I could make it through the next hour, the next client—and even though it was a quarter till the appointed hour he rang the buzzer.
“Hi Kris, I’m early.”
Luther Kemper was the absolute worst client to follow Mina’s announcement. In his mid-sixties, casually conservative, with an immaculately barbered gray beard, he may have been recommended to me because of my writing about loving one’s body at all sizes. He had married an opera singer, fifteen years older. In recent years she had lost interest in sex and he was looking for romance, without the inconvenience and expense of getting a divorce. I asked if he wanted a referral to a sex therapist. He said no thanks, but he kept coming to therapy—probably to complain. The term hasn’t made it into any diagnostic manual, but essentially Luther was a whiner.
I sat down and took notes to make myself focus while Luther described his latest personal ad offering a no-strings relationship to a spectacularly unimpressed female population.
Chapter 7
Mina Murray’s journal
red digital voice recorder
August 4th continued
Right after my session with Kristin I went over to Hal’s place. He lives in an old, creepy house on a cliff overlooking the ocean.
He was supposed to meet me there. I was early, but I had a key. Unfortunately so did Hal’s friends, Lucy and Ned. Lucy was one of the reasons I hadn’t moved into the house. The other reason was the shed behind the house.
“Hal went out, said he’d be back soon,” Lucy said as opened the door. She was wearing nothing but sandals and an ankle bracelet. The wood floor must be cold or she’d have ditched the sandals. She didn’t even bother to hide behind the door. Would she sign for courier package deliveries that way? Probably.
She was the palest blonde I had ever seen, very slender, with light green eyes, blue veins visible under her thin skin. At first I wondered if she was trying to seduce me, or steal Hal from me in front of everyone. Then I realized that Lucy only paid attention to other people when she wanted something from them. The rest of the time she amused herself by shocking anyone she could. Lately that had been me.
Ned wasn’t so bad. As usual he sat on the sofa in Hal’s front room. Sometimes he sketched on a little pad. Today he bent over a comically wafer-sized laptop computer. Ned was a very big, hairy guy. His headphones disappeared into a mop of wiry black hair. He had gentle blue eyes, very pale skin and a thick beard that ran up the sides of his face to meet his sideburns. As he tapped away on the keyboard, a jagged line on the screen indicated the audio tracks he was playing that we could not hear.
He wore jeans and a black T-shirt with purple-and-red calligraphy.
“What’s Atrocity Museum?”
He shifted the headphones away from one ear. “My band.”
“I thought it was Recreational Paranoia.”
“You remembered!” He seemed surprised and touched that anyone would. “I changed it.”
I examined the T-shirt again. “I think I like the new one better.”
Ned smiled serenely, nodded and resettled the headphones.
Hal called Ned’s band “Dork Shadows,” even to his face. Ned didn’t seem to care. But he never invited us to hear his band play any gigs, and I never met any other band members. I wondered if the band even existed outside of his audio files.
Ned did look up to watch Lucy embrace me and hold my face an inch from hers so I could look into her pale green eyes.
“You look uncomfortable, Mina.” Lucy looked down at her slender body, firm, small breasts, narrow waist, hips and thighs, and a slight trace of nearly invisibly pale pubic hair. She laughed. “I’ll put on clothes just for you. Ned doesn’t mind if I’m naked, do you, Ned?”
Ned looked up and smiled slightly. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Or don’t.” He smiled at his own pun and turned back to the computer.
“Mina, you’re missing out on more fun with Hal by being such a stick-up-the-butt.” Lucy grabbed a black turtleneck from the sofa and pulled it over her head. I was absurdly gr
ateful that she had discarded her clothes here rather than in Hal’s bedroom.
The twinge of jealousy hit me like an actual knife-stabbing pain. When Hal asked me to marry him, he promised I would be the only woman in his life. I asked about Lucy. He swore that there was nothing between him and Lucy except a yearning for this vampire blood that they shared with Ned and a few other vampire-obsessed people who followed Hal around and went out to the shed behind the house. I didn’t ask details about what happened there. Just looking at the place seized my chest with dread.
I glanced back at Ned. He raised his shaggy head from staring the screen. He watched and seldom spoke. He had been in high school with Hal. Hal told me he came from a prominent family and his full name was Edward J. Harker Poins, but he just seemed quiet and shy.
Lucy wriggled into her tight jeans. She was so slender that she made me feel clumsy and huge, watching her squeeze her thin frame into tiny jeans that wouldn’t have fit over one of my legs. She slipped out of her sandals and pulled on black leather boots.
Her pale eyes looked luminous in the dusk. “It’s going to happen. Hal’s come up with a plan to make us into vampires,” she said. “Hal is going to move the casket out of the shed and threaten to leave it out in the sun if the vampire doesn’t bring us over. Direct sun kills them, you know.” Her voice was thick was excitement.
“Um.” Hal was smarter than I could ever be in so many ways, but this didn’t seem to make sense. “If you kill the vampire how can it give you what you want?”
Lucy stopped and looked at me and then waved her hand to dismiss me. “It will work. It’s got to work.”
“What if you just piss it off?”
“That won’t happen.” She said it so quickly that I wondered if Lucy would admit to being afraid, even to herself.
“I’d be scared.”
“Come on, let’s go look. You wouldn’t be scared if you saw him in daylight. We keep the door closed because sunlight could kill him. But he just looks like a regular dead body until sunset.”
“Looking at a regular dead body out in the shed. Tempting, but no thanks.”
“This may be your last chance if Hal moves the box.”
“I hope he does move it. It creeps me out.”
“Where’s my cloak?” Lucy rummaged through Hal’s hall closet, tossing coats out onto the hall floor. “He’s going to have a big showdown tonight. Hal won’t let any of us come while he talks to the vampire. He said it was personal. But we’re going to come later. This could be the night we all become vampires. Get Hal to bring you along. Or you could pretend to sleep and then go watch them talk. I wish I could.”
She dug through the pile of clothes she’d dumped on the floor. “Here it is.” She pulled a velvet cloak over her shoulders and fastened it at her throat. Is it cold outside now? I haven’t been out since noon.”
“Yeah, it’s cold.” Had she been there naked with Hal most of the afternoon? Probably. I got a sinking feeling in my gut.
The door slammed as Lucy went out. Ned came over and started hanging coats back in the closet. I helped him. “Doesn’t anybody else have to work around here?” I asked.
“Lucy’s got a trust fund. I do freelance graphics,” Ned said.
“Oh, sorry, I meant no offense.”
“None taken.” The last coat hung, Ned returned to his computer and I went to the back of the flat and looked out the bay window as Lucy’s black-clad frame appeared in the yard below. She turned back to see me in the window and stuck her tongue out at me. Then she advanced on the grungy old shed, her lean body bending into the wind that came up off the ocean. She disappeared into the shed, shutting the door carefully behind her.
The windows had been painted the same green as the wood. Was that to screen out daylight?
A weathered, plain wood fence separated the yard from the open space of the park next to it and ran just a few feet from the back of the shed. More bushes and wild geraniums grew up to cover the half-tumbled down section of fence that faced the ocean. One night I saw a man in a huge overcoat crawling like a giant spider out of those bushes.
After we get married, I plan to seriously ask Hal to get the fence fixed. I feel nervous enough spending the night in the house. If Hal was moving his vampire out of there, I hoped he did it as soon as possible.
Chapter 8
Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes
August 4th continued
Luther finished his hour of whining and left. I had no more clients scheduled for the day, and I desperately needed to talk to someone or at the least walk off some of my anger. My friend Larry Segovia lived about 10 blocks away on Lake Street. As a therapist, and an unattached gay man in his 40s, he understood about boyfriend troubles. Larry didn’t work Mondays, and he never minded company. If he wasn’t home, the walk out in the fresh air wouldn’t hurt me.
Larry’s door was opened by a cheerful-looking man about my own age and Larry’s. I was surprised because so many of Larry’s friends were younger. This man was not handsome, but commanding, with unruly gray streaked dark hair cut short but starting to curl already. Startlingly black eyebrows framed penetrating green eyes with sparks of hazel. What really caught my attention was the mischievous quirk of his mouth, as if he were just about to tell a great secret. I liked and trusted him instinctively without knowing why.
Of course, I’d been wrong before. Witness my reaction to Hal. But something about this man drew a pang of attraction from me that was welcome in that it dulled the pain of Hal’s betrayal. Larry’s friend was most likely gay, but I felt better just knowing there were still attractive men in the world. Oops, I was staring.
“Oh, sorry, I was looking for Larry,” I blurted out.
“He’s just gone out to run an errand.” He moved aside. “Want to come in and wait? I’m house sitting when Larry goes to Edinburgh next week.”
Suddenly I felt like an idiot. “I’m not a client, I’m a therapist too. I should have called, but—”
Some of my inner turmoil must have crossed my face, because the stranger leaned forward. “Seriously, why not come in and wait? Larry should be back any minute. Something about picking up his dry cleaning.”
I followed him in, introducing myself.
“I’m Abraham Van Helsing,” he said over his shoulder, leading the way down the hall. “But please call me Bram. Abe just doesn’t suit me. Honest Abe Van Helsing sounds like an accordion-playing used car salesman.”
I laughed and felt a little better.
We went into the little front parlor of Larry’s Victorian flat. “I’ll be house sitting when he takes off tomorrow for that conference in Edinburgh. Did Larry warn you about me?”
“No, this is kind of a spur-of-the-moment visit. He didn’t mention you.”
“I don’t know if I should be reassured or insulted.”
“Um, are you the new boyfriend?”
“Nope. The old friend from college.” He settled on the sofa. “Still, you’d think he’d say something about me. He can’t have that that many friends who’re researching vampire cults.”
I stopped halfway in the middle of sitting in Larry’s burgundy-colored wing chair. “Did you say vampire cults?”
Bram smiled with a bit of mischief in his eyes. “I didn’t mean to shock you.”
“No, it’s just that I have a young client who’s fixated on vampires, and she said something that bothered me today.”
“If you ever need to talk about it I’m always glad to discuss vampires.”
“Wait a minute.” I suddenly put the name and the subject together. “Wasn’t there a Professor Van Helsing in Dracula?”
“There was. That was fiction, but my grandpa from Hungary didn’t find it amusing. He was a trade unionist. But as a kid when I found Abraham Van Helsing in Dracula, I got interested in the culture. It’s a pretty good stand-in for whatever you’re afraid of. In the 1930s it was sinister Europeans like Bela Lugosi in the old movies. Lately vampires and blood-drinking are a
metaphor for sex.” Bram settled back on the sofa. “Who knows? Even if it were my calling to hunt vampires, there would be the small problem that there really aren’t any, so I have to make do.”
“What are you researching now?”
“I’ve written a few books on the so-called ‘real’ vampires, the history of the belief in the old country. Now I’m interviewing kids who are drawn to vampire cults. If you ever want to feel old, try interviewing a few dozen teenagers and twenty-year-olds.”
I laughed. “The client who is into vampires is twenty-three.”
“There you go. Graduates of Ann Rice University.”
“What’s that?”
“People who’ve read every book, seen every movie. Some even do the RPGs.”
“Sorry, you’ve lapsed into Greek again.”
He laughed. “Role Playing Games based on vampires. So far it’s all wishful thinking. But show me a real live vampire and I’ll get out the stakes and silver bullets and go to town.”
“Or go to jail—you might have some trouble explaining the dead body.”
“Oh, the legends all say that the body disintegrates into dust once it’s properly destroyed. So convenient.”
I just managed a wan smile. “I wish I could have talked to you earlier. But for reasons that have nothing to do with vampires, I’m going to have to refer this client to another therapist. That’s part of what I need to talk to Larry about.”
“Well, I’ll be in town for two weeks, so if there’s anything a certified vampire expert can help with, let me know.”
“They have certificates for that sort of thing?”
“I’m self-certified.” He smiled and patted me on the hand. “Sorry, I can see you’ve had a rough day. But Larry will be back and have you sorted out in no time.”
“He has a way of doing that. Larry really saved my sanity during the months after my husband died.”
“He’s a good ‘un.”
