“Good Lord,” I said. Getting to class seemed like a good idea now. I realized I didn’t know where to go, and said as much.
“Come with me,” Voss said, “and you’ll get the picture.”
So, of course, he took me to a small room with a camera set up in it. For my student I.D. he said. The camera was ancient. Though I had seen such things before I couldn’t imagine why Voss would have one. It had an accordion-like protrusion at the front, and he raised a hand-held flash in one hand, his head under a drape directly behind the camera.
He depressed the shutter button and a horrific flash burned my retinas, accompanied by a slight burning smell and a whiff of sulphur. I had tried to explain that I couldn’t be seen in mirrors or photographs, but he insisted on trying. He pulled a photograph out of the camera, glanced at it and said, “I guess school isn’t the only place you don’t show up.”
The small room was lined with framed photographs of students. I was surprised by their vibrant perfection. Each photo captured the essence of a young life. I ran my finger over one of them, startled by the lifelike quality of it. It was strange to me that the ancient camera took such excellent photos, and also that they seemed to come from the box immediately developed. Voss seemed pleased that I appreciated his work.
Much of the morning was filled with paperwork and a short tour. I sat through an interminable math class and then a history class which I found illuminating. I had not paid particular attention to history as I had lived through it. Being a rather poor vampire, I had spent a lot more time and attention on surviving than on news.
The students seemed dull and listless. They drifted from class to class like ghosts. In fact, they were considerably less animated than Richard, who eventually got bored and left me in my high school purgatory.
Alice met me at lunch. She straddled a bench, immediately snatched my lunch box and began digging through it. An apple appeared and she munched on it with a look of pure rapture on her face. “So, you’re a vampire,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Cool.” She squinted at me. “Are you going to suck my blood?”
I shook my head and picked through the lunch box. I couldn’t eat any of it, of course. For some unknown reason Mrs. Holmes had also packed a head of garlic. She never remembered that I couldn’t eat regular food and that garlic burned my skin. “I’ve never been good at eating prey once I’ve met them.”
“So how do you choose your prey? You find homeless people or something?”
I cocked my head and looked at her. “Just because they’re down on their luck doesn’t mean they’re better for snacking.”
“Picky eater,” she said. She threw the apple core over her shoulder and wiped the juice from her face. “Are you going to fall in love with me, then?”
I frowned at her. “You’re sixteen years old. I might have fallen in love with your grandmother, but what could you and I possibly have in common?” I shivered. “It’s a disgusting thought. I suppose you don’t even like barbershop quartets. You probably enjoy that infernal rock and roll music.”
“Geez, just say no next time.” She wrinkled her nose and threw the garlic away. “Do you sparkle in the sunlight?”
I considered this. “In the sense that I catch on fire and burn to ash, I suppose that I do, yes.”
The bell rang and Alice shoved all her garbage onto the floor. “I gotta go get my student I.D. pic,” she said. “I hate that Voss guy. He’s always using bad puns. Really bad puns.”
“It’s terrible,” I agreed.
She shrugged. “Oh well. Call me Alice in Pun-derland.” She slapped my Scooby Doo lunch box against my chest. “See you in Civics.”
###
It was in Civics that I realized something was wrong. The students remained sedate. The teacher didn’t call roll or teach, she just sat at her desk. A spider the size of a car crawled out of a hole in the wall and carried off a football player from the front row.
I leapt to my feet and shouted. The spider turned its great, red-eyed head at me and then scuttled down a bolt-hole as large as the teacher’s desk.
Richard floated in through the wall, a smile on his face. When he saw me standing at the center of the room, the smile faded. “Oh. I hoped someone had put a stake in your heart.”
“A giant spider,” I said.
“Like a spider could even hurt you. Whack it with a newspaper.”
“Giant. Spider.”
“I heard you the first time.”
The spider reappeared, gathered another student, lifted her up and walked into its bolt-hole. The door to the room opened and Alice walked in. Her face was calm, and she took the empty seat in the front row.
“Alice,” I whispered, and when she didn’t turn I repeated it again, louder.
Richard floated in front of her. “She’s tranced out like the rest of these poor saps.”
I walked to her side and snapped my fingers in front of her face. Nothing. The spider emerged again, took hold of the teacher and retreated down the narrow opening of its hole.
I took Alice by the hand and walked her outside the classroom. I shut the door, leaving her standing in the hall. I looked around for a weapon, but there was nothing obvious. I bent a metal leg on my desk and worked it back and forth until it snapped off in my hand.
I glared at Richard. “Was this your plan for me, you disembodied fiend?”
The ghost threw his hands up. “Not at all. I thought you might have to spend four years in high school, that’s all.”
“Well. I can’t have my classmates eaten by spiders,” I said, and started down the bolt-hole. My eyes adjusted immediately, one of the advantages of being a creature of the night.
The passageway opened into a vast underground warren of tunnels. This cavern must be grand central station. Richard floated nearby. The students and teachers had been trussed up and hung upside down next to the photos from their own student I.D.s. A series of torches lit the side walls. I didn’t see the spider.
The teacher was breathing softly. I pulled her picture off the sticky wall. She looked vibrant and alive in the picture, her skin practically glowing. I tapped my fingertips to my lips.
“Help me,” the photo said.
I was so startled I dropped her. The frame broke when it hit the ground and a thin susurrus of air came from the photo. The teacher opened her eyes and raised a blood-curdling scream.
“Miss,” I said. “Miss. If you could stop with the screaming, I believe you might be drawing attention to us.”
“Spider,” she gasped.
“Yes,” I said, just as giant mouth pinchers yanked me backward. I spun and jabbed the desk leg into one of its eyes, and it hissed and pulled away. It had torn my shirt and bloodied my chest. I hadn’t fed in some time, so there wasn’t much blood. It was unlikely that a spider could pound a stake into my heart, so there wasn’t much to lose. I jumped on it and began to methodically stab it with the desk leg. Finally, I jabbed through the back of the spider’s head, and it fell in a heap near the teacher. I tried to yank the leg free, but it was stuck.
An eight-legged freight train struck me from behind and I fell beneath it. Thick, viscous webbing poured over me. I couldn’t move my arms. Officer Voss leaned over, smiling. He held a portrait of Alice tucked under his arm. I watched as he inspected the corpse of the first spider. “Looks like you got a leg up on that one,” he said, wiggling his eyebrows.
“You’re in league with the spiders?”
Voss clucked his tongue. “More like I’m working together with them.”
“That’s what ‘in league with’ means.”
“Oh. Well, in that case, yes.” He showed me Alice’s picture. “I capture the souls of the students with my camera, making them easy prey. Then the Fearsome Spiders of Appo bring their bodies down here. The Spiders of Appo keep ten percent, and I sell the rest to eager creatures hungry for bodies or souls, as the case may be.”
“But why bring me to the school?”
“Oh,” I said. “Them. I tried to explain. That was a binge period for me.”
Voss nodded sympathetically. “It really is difficult when you feast on humans. Precisely what my services are designed to counter balance. I suspect you could be a customer if I hadn’t already promised you to the cult. They’re paying me a hundred grand to deliver you.”
The spider had wrapped me quite snugly and was moving toward my waist. “Richard,” I said. “I might need you to go for help.”
Richard floated over. “Sorry, I was distracted by the aura of pure pleasure I get at the thought that you might be about to die.”
“Caught in my web!” Voss said.
“Really?” I asked. “You really think that’s good enough?”
Voss chuckled. “I’m not going for originality, you know. I thought about saying something like ‘stuck on you’ but it had a more romantic feeling than I wanted.”
I looked at the picture in his arm. “Alice,” I said, hoping she could hear me. “Go find help.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Voss said. “The souls won’t talk unless they’re close to their bodies. I don’t know why. Only exception is if you happen to catch a picture of a ghost. They get trapped in the photo and start talking a blue streak. I had hoped it would work on you, but I guess I caught you easily enough.”
“If you’ve harmed Alice—”
“Don’t worry, she’s a perfect picture of health.” He held the framed photo closer to me.
I couldn’t move my arms, but my legs were still free. I kicked hard, undulating my body, and my head connected with the picture. It spun out of his hands and smashed against the wall.
“Richard,” I said. “Tell Alice to run.”
“I can do that,” Richard said reluctantly. “I don’t like to see high schoolers eaten, after all.” He floated up toward the classroom.
Voss laughed maniacally. He ordered the Appo Spider to hold me tighter. “You think you’re some sort of knight in shining armor,” he said. He pulled out a crucifix and placed it over the tunnel that led back to the classroom. “This should keep you from crossing me.”
He was about to run up the tunnel when Alice came barreling down, brandishing a fire extinguisher from the classroom. Not one for confrontation, Voss stumbled away from her.
“Are you the creep who stole my soul and tried to feed me to spiders?”
Voss rearranged his spectacles. “Technically, there was only a ten percent chance that it would have been the spiders.”
She whacked him in the head with the extinguisher and he crumpled to the ground. The spider on top of me tensed its legs, ready to pounce on her, but she grabbed a torch from the tunnel wall and stabbed it in the face. It fell down, on fire, crushing me.
I caught fire, too. Alice sprayed me with fire extinguishing foam. It was surprisingly cold. I couldn’t move to get out from under the spider. It had crushed multiple bones and left me shuddering in enormous pain.
Richard was laughing.
Alice told him to shut up.
Voss struggled to his feet. He looked down on me and the burnt arachnid and said, “It’s hard to resist hot Appo spider on a cold knight.”
Alice said, “That’s it. I’m going to extinguish your head until puns stop coming out of it.”
When Alice moved toward him, Voss snatched the framed picture of the football player from the wall. “I’ll burn it,” he said, holding it near a torch.
“I never liked him,” Alice said.
“Aha!” Voss said, tossing the torch aside. “I’ll break the frame and return him to normal.”
Alice froze. “You wouldn’t.”
“I will.” He held the picture over his head. “No one follows me,” he said. “I’m going to get in my car and drive away, and anyone who tries to follow me will get exhausted.”
“You really are the worst,” Richard said.
Voss backed out of the chamber and ran back up toward the school.
“Follow him,” I told Richard.
“But I don’t want to get exhausted.”
I glared at him. “It’s better than getting exorcised.”
“Fine!” He floated off, pouting.
Alice set about releasing all of the teachers and students. Once they stopped their hysterical screaming they helped her remove the giant spider carcass off me. We all managed to get to the surface just as the final bell rang, releasing everyone from school.
###
I heal completely when I sleep during the day. It’s not a pleasant experience, but far more pleasant than it is for humans. My broken bones snapped back into place. Mrs. Holmes had been less than pleased at the state of my schooling clothes, but had set off to clean and repair them.
When I awoke it was night. I had several texts from Alice, telling me that Voss had not appeared at school the next day. Nor had I expected him to. He had escaped with his camera and several student photographs. I texted her back and told her I was headed to Voss’s hideout even now.
Richard had tracked Voss to a small hotel three towns over. I knocked on the wooden door and waited patiently. Voss opened the door, dressed in an ill-fitting hotel robe.
“Hello,” I said.
He immediately slammed the door, but not before I got my fingers between the door and the frame. The door swung open again, and I looked down in displeasure at my throbbing fingers.
“You don’t have permission to cross the threshold,” Voss said. “I know how this works.”
“Ah,” I said, putting my throbbing hand under my arm. “Yes. Precisely. I cannot enter your home without permission.”
“Then I will wait for sunrise and be on my way.”
I could see a box of photos on the floor beside the bed. “Give me your camera and the remaining photos. I may let you go on your way without harm.”
“The photos? Maybe. But not the camera. Never.”
I stepped across the threshold.
Voss stumbled backward. “But I didn’t give you permission!”
“This is not your home, Voss. It’s a hotel. I spoke to the manager before coming up.” I smiled, showing my pointed teeth. “He was eager to give me permission to enter.”
“You can have the camera,” he said. “And the pictures. You can have it all. My list of clients, everything.”
“Yes,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I believe I am going to take all of those things.”
“You’re going to let him go?” Richard asked.
“Of course not, Richard. Silence!”
“I think you should listen to Richard,” Voss said.
Richard snorted. “I think you should eat him.”
“Never mind,” Voss said. “Don’t listen to him.”
“This,” I said gently, locking the door, “is going to hurt. In fact, I think you’ll find that I am going to be quite a pain in the neck.”
“That’s clichéd but still funny,” Voss said as I stepped toward him. “I get the feeling,” he said as I took hold of him, “that this is going to be a scream.”
When the shouting and the feeding had ended, I broke all the photos in the box. I found the client list at the bottom and scanned the names. A few vampires, a cult or two, demons, even a cannibal. I supposed I would need to contact them to let them know my high school was off limits.
I picked up the camera and weighed it in my hands. I turned toward Richard. “I feel that you can’t be trusted to wander free anymore, Richard. This little prank of yours got out of hand.”
Richard began to float away from me. “I’ve been framed!” he shouted.
“Precisely,” I said, and touched the shutter button.
I tucked the new photo under my arm and stepped over Voss. I debated cleaning up, but it seemed unlikely any of this would be traced back to me. I could hear Richard’s
muffled complaints from the picture. I promised him I’d hang him somewhere with dignity. Perhaps the dining room. Mrs. Holmes might like that.
“Richard,” I said. “High school wasn’t so bad, but the puns were unforgiveable.”
Richard apologized from within the portrait. “I didn’t know about the puns or the spiders,” he said. “Even I am not so cruel.”
“Well, let’s just focus on getting beyond this,” I said.
“No,” Richard said, groaning. “I’m trapped in this frame. Please, don’t torture me with puns.”
“You’re right, of course. It’s just that photography lens itself to puns.”
Richard began to cry.
“I’m going to expose you to a new pun every day.”
“Make it stop!”
“There’s not much you’ll be able to do about it once I hang you in the dining room.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll have your back against the wall.”
“You’re going to run out of them eventually,” Richard said hopefully.
“Maybe so,” I said. “Maybe so.” I put his frame into the passenger seat of my van and climbed behind the wheel. I sent Alice a text, telling her to start brainstorming. With her help, coming up with several months’ worth of puns should be a snap.
I smiled at Richard. “We’ll just have to wait and see how it develops.”
***
Matt Mikalatos is afraid of ghosts, vampires, spiders and high schoolers. Also sharks. He’s the author of the comedy-theology novel My Imaginary Jesus and the children’s fantasy novel The Sword of Six Worlds. He blogs regularly at norvillerogers.com, disguises conversations with friends as a podcast at storymen.us and records the minutiae of his day on Twitter as @mattmikalatos.
The Discounted Seniors
James Beamon
I was faking a nap, checking out the booties of the few ladies in the dayroom under half-closed eyelids, when I saw the delivery man out of the corner of my eye. The young brother braced himself against his dolly, stabilizing a box that seemed to fill the entire doorway. After he talked a moment with the robo-nurse, they both made their way over to my recliner. I knew right then nothing good would come from that giant box.
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