by Reinke, Sara
“Did she say why?”
“Nope. And I didn’t ask. I figured her mom had found out about her dancing. It’s not like this is a small island.”
“So you didn’t promise her a modeling gig in California?
“I told you. No.”
“Because that’s where the police say she went.”
“Uh, then maybe you ought to be looking for her there, instead of hassling me,” Wilder said. With a wink, he added, “Not to be telling you how to do your job.”
Phoebe and her friends all giggled. There was something decidedly mirthless in the sound. It was the way a group of cheerleaders in high school tittered when someone taped the skinny geek kid’s ass cheeks together with duct tape.
John returned Wilder’s used-car-salesman grin. “Thanks for the tip,” he said, biting back a groan as he stood, closing his eyes against a momentary swell of vertigo.
“You going to be alright, man?” Wilder asked. “You’re looking a little green.”
“I’m good.” John held up his hand. “Just…”
“Stomach bug. Yeah, you told me.” Wilder rose to his feet, all grins and good humor again. “We done here, then?”
“Yeah,” John said, eyes still closed, because the office was still a tilt-a-whirl. “I think we’re through.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Cool shirt,” Sandy remarked as she drove back to Little Pink.
John glanced down at it, a white T-shirt unfolded in his lap, emblazoned with a cartoon woman standing with her back in view. Dressed in a G-string that accentuated her voluminous ass cheeks, she peeped over her shoulder, her eyelashes drawn long and coyly lowered. Beneath her, in large, bold, bright-red letters was the endearing sentiment: The Ass Man Cometh at the Show Me!
“From my personal stash,” Wilder had told him with a wink and a clap on the injured shoulder that had left John gasping for pained breath.
“Wow,” John had replied with a strained smile. “Does this mean we’re going steady?”
Covey and Sandy had met them back in the downstairs lobby and he and Wilder had glanced at one another, as if exchanging some private joke between them. Both had laughed. “I told you he was funny,” Covey had said.
“Like it?” John tossed the shirt into Sandy’s lap. “It’s yours.”
She beamed. “Hey, thanks.”
He leaned his head back, feeling the wind buffet his face, meaning to gaze through the windshield at the cityscape passing by around them. Sandy was chattering about something, but he didn’t really listen. And then he realized he couldn’t see his own reflection in the glass.
What the…?
Surely it was an optical illusion or a trick of the lights, the way the dashboard’s dim glow didn’t hit him the same as Sandy. He could see the pale reflection of his white button-down shirt, the slightly darker image of his pants. These floated, ghost-like, against the glass, but his head, neck and hands were only barely discernable, little more than phantom shadows above his collar and below his sleeve cuffs.
He raised his hand, bringing his fingertips up to the windshield. He should have seen them clearly then but to his surprise and mounting bewilderment, he couldn’t. There was nothing there but his sleeve, not even when he pressed his hand against the glass.
“What is it?” Sandy asked, startling him. He turned and found her studying him, puzzled. “What’s wrong?”
“My hand,” he began, but when he looked back at the underbelly of the windshield, he could see himself now, his own wide eyes, his own pale and admittedly gaunt face. Leaning heavily back in the seat, he pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he said. Just lost it for a minute there, he thought. That’s all. “What were you saying?”
“I said I thought that was a pretty interesting and enlightening experience,” Sandy said. “Talking with Jame Covey. Turns out he knows quite a bit about the Wilder history and filled in some holes for me.”
“Holes?”
She nodded. “For example did you know leucism runs in the family? It’s a very rare hypopigmentary congenital disorder. Boyd Wilder has it, his father had it and his grandfather, too. Their skin and eyes are extremely photosensitive. They don’t go out much in the daytime.”
“Will you watch the road, please?” John reached for the steering wheel and she slapped his hands away.
“Anyway,” she said. “Jame told me Boyd’s grandfather, Samuel, started developing Sister Islands as a tourist destination after the second World War. Before that, the leading industry was salt production. Wilder had all of the salt ponds they used to use filled in and it more than doubled the commercial land available on Big Sister. He dumped tons of sand along the South Shore to make beaches, built some of the first hotels and resorts. He really made this area what it is today.”
“Why would a bunch of albinos want to live in the Florida Keys, the sunniest place on earth?”
“They’re not albino. They’re hypopigmented,” Sandy replied. “And living here has been very lucrative for them. With a net worth of something like one-point-two billion dollars, the Wilders are tied as the three hundred and twenty-fifth richest family in the United States, according to Forbes magazine.”
“Billion?” he repeated, owlish.
“Billion.” She nodded. “Oh, and the Guiness Book of World Records says that Yuma, Arizona is the sunniest place on earth. But there’s been a recent NASA survey that indicated a part of the Sahara Desert in northern Nigeria might have it beat.”
John blinked at her for a long moment. “How do you know these things?”
She blinked back. “How do you not?”
“What if Boyd Wilder is a vampire?” Sandy asked as she got out of the car in the driveway at Little Pink.
John shook his head, then stuck his finger in his ear, wiggling it experimentally. “What?”
“I said what if Boyd Wilder is a vampire?” Sandy said again, more loudly this time, her mouth opening widely as she vaudeville-annunciated each syllable and sound.
“Okay, good. I’m not going deaf. You’re crazy, but my hearing’s okay.”
“I’m not crazy.” Sandy planted her hands on her hips. “It would make perfect sense. Wilder’s family is leucistic so they only come out at night. His great-great grandfather helped to inspire the book, Dracula. Lucy Weston hooks up with him and a month later, she’s got canine teeth like a tyrannosaurus rex and she’s sucking your—”
“Okay, first of all.” John held up his index finger. “Wilder’s great-great grandfather didn’t help inspire Dracula. You told me some shipwreck on the island did. And only a scene in the book, at that. You also said that this loose-a-what’s-it condition…”
“Leucism,” she supplied.
“Whatever. You said it was a real, actual, medical condition, not something out of a horror movie.” He started to hold up two fingers, then frowned and held up three. Then frowned and added a forth. Then, exasperated, just put his hand back down at his side. “Lastly, Lucy Weston didn’t suck my anything. She bit me. She was crazed, strung out on meth and suffering violent, paranoid delusions.”
“Yes, well. According to vampire folklore, you’re doomed to become a vampire now, too.”
“Doomed.” He rolled his eyes, shook his head. “Who talks like that anymore? There are no such things as vampires, Sandy. Next you’re going to tell me a UFO came out of the sky and snatched Lucy up.”
“Hey, don’t knock it,” Sandy said, as they went into the house. “Colonel Joe was stationed for awhile in the Sixties out at Walker Air Force Base near Roswell. He was part of a top-secret military project that tried to establish a communication protocol with extraterrestrial beings.”
“Why am I not surprised?” John asked under his breath, sparing a pleading look skyward.
“Gracie says he told her about it once. Only once, because it was top-secret. Still is. He said he’d seen a UFO before.”
“Lit
tle green men, too?”
“No.” She looked patently exasperated. “Grey. Little grey men. Bald, too. And bug-eyed.”
John groaned. “My head hurts.”
“You should have eaten your salmon,” she replied primly.
***
“Vampires,” John grumbled, shrugging his way out of his shirt in the bathroom adjoining his guest room at Little Pink.
It occurred to him now that Lucy Weston must have entertained similar delusions, however. Her online beau, Michael Gough, a.k.a. “Dr. Mike,” had written what had appeared from tertiary glance to be a post-doctorate thesis on the subject.
In the bright, stark light of the bathroom, he could see how bad the wound on his neck and shoulder had become, not that he needed eyes for that. He’d chewed up a pair of his prescription-grade ibuprofen tablets upon returning to the guest room because the pain from the injury left him virtually unable to lift his arm more than a brief, halting measure.
Wincing, he peeled back the medical tape from the wound, easing the corner of the gauze pad away. The tiny little black fingers that had spread out from the perimeter of the crusted holes now made their way toward his shoulder and chest. The bright red area had darkened to maroon in places, plum in others, a circumference as big around as a good-sized grapefruit.
He undressed his forearm and found things there no less grim. Here, the interlocking network of dark, fingerlike projections snaked their way up his arm. Closer to his hand, his skin was ashen, nearly grey, and his fingertips felt cold and numb. The emergency room physician had given him a shot of antibiotics, then followed up with oral doses. If either had helped assuage the nasty infections he suspected were boiling beneath the surface of his skin and spreading like wildfire, John was hard-pressed to tell it.
Even though the bite wounds were in a narrow arch matching the contour of Lucy’s teeth, the most prominent were the twin points where her canines had punched into him. They’d seemed enormous to him at the time of the attack and his first thought had been not of a dinosaur, like Sandy had mentioned, but of something equally primordial and likewise extinct.
A sabretooth tiger, he thought. Then shook his head. That was my imagination. Either that, or hers, Lucy wearing prosthetics or caps of some kind to go along with her delusions of vampirism.
Because he suspected that’s what had happened to her. She’d become strung out on methamphetamines, prone to paranoid thoughts and had found enough information online to convince herself she had turned into a vampire. God only knew where she’d found the fake teeth to complete the delusion.
Probably made in China, he thought. With lead paint. Just my luck.
He redressed the wounds, then walked, shirtless, into the bedroom. Dropping his pants, he kicked them unceremoniously atop his opened duffel bag, then sat in his boxer-briefs against the bed, opening his laptop.
Origin of the Species: The Etiological Mythos of Werewolves, Revenants and Vampires. That had been the name of the article Dr. Mike had written. John had bookmarked it in Firefox and opened it now, settling back against the pillows to read.
Gough began the document by explaining that as a post-graduate, he’d been part of a cultural anthropology investigation into the deaths of tuberculosis victims in New England during the early part of the nineteenth century. This had apparently not been some kind of Scooby Doo expedition, but a fully funded scientific study. Which only proved to John that people would pay for just about anything in the name of science.
During this time, Gough wrote. Folk beliefs in vampires were prevalent in America, influenced predominantly by European beliefs in such creatures.
However, Gough’s team had not been charged with finding historical evidence of vampirism. Rather, they’d sought to find a medical reason why stories of vampirism would have been so prevalent. According to Gough’s article, their primary suspect had been:
Tuberculosis, known as “consumption,” an accurate description considering the physical deterioration of tuberculosis sufferers is akin to being “consumed” from within. Following the death of a tuberculosis victim, other family members frequently began exhibiting symptoms as well. Today, we understand that this is due to the pathological nature of tuberculosis, that it is an airborne pathogen spread by coughing or sneezing. The inhalation of even one bacterium of tubercle bacilli is sufficient to cause an infection. For perspective, a single sneeze is capable of producing 40,000 droplets of contagious saliva or sputum.
Gough’s team had exhumed several nineteenth century cemeteries to try and find evidence of familial strains of tuberculosis.
Victims of consumption would have lost massive amounts of weight, which led others at that time to suspect they were being fed upon by vampires. Because victims often came from the same household, it was believed that vampires returned from the grave to prey upon their own kin.
Gough then cited an article that had appeared in 1871 as part of a British publication called All The Year Round:
“A man who, when alive, has had his blood sucked by a vampyre, will, after his death, deal with other persons in like manner.” This common belief, often presented when family members infected one another with pathological conditions like tuberculosis, gave rise to the popular myth that vampires can only enter homes into which they have been invited and often meant that when one family member was suspected of vampirism, the entire clan was subsequently vilified.
Even though there had been nothing left in the antiquated graves but skeletal remains, Gough wrote that they’d hoped to find post-mortem evidence of tuberculosis infection, exhuming the bodies of thirty men, women and children, all related through marriage, from an established family cemetery plot. In one instance, Gough wrote that the team found:
...eriostatic lesions of the left second through fifth ribs which appeared pale in color, visibly pitted, approximately near the rib head in each instance, on the visceral surface of the bone.
Gough added that if not indicative of a full blown case of tuberculosis, the lesions were post-mortem proof of:
...a pulmonary infection with severe symptoms including coughing, expulsion of bloody sputum, related chest pain, all sufficient enough to constitute “consumption” to those living in this rural, circa-1876 community.
This apparently had been the evidence the team had been hoping to find, but before John could either fall asleep from absolute boredom as he picked his way through this tedious narrative, never mind wonder what this had to do with the price of grain in eastern Indonesia, Gough had written three simple words that re-piqued his interest.
We were mistaken.
Because this skeleton, identified in Gough’s essay only as a white male, aged 45, with the initials J.B., was the only one out of their exhumed samples that showed any physical signs of tuberculosis infection. None of the skeletons in J.B.’s family—presumably two daughters, a grandson and a brother, all based on DNA evaluation and age estimation—had any of the tell-tale lesions that had indicated lung infection. And curiously, J.B.’s skeleton had displayed signs of what Gough called gross post-mortem defacement.
The skull had been removed, repositioned with the femora in a "skull and crossbones" cruciform on top of the ribs. This rearrangement appears to have been performed long after any soft tissue had been lost to decomposition. This evidence suggests that J.B. was believed to have been a vampire. Common practice during this era was to decapitate the corpses of suspected vampires, and to either puncture the heart with a wooden stake or remove it entirely to be burned. Lacking any tissue remains to be burned, J.B.’s bones were reconfigured into a cross shape in order to prevent him from “rising” any longer.
Gough then again quoted from All The Year Round, continuing with his own thoughts and personal observations immediately after:
“All the stories of vampyres, ghouls, and werewolves, we may safely assert, can find their solution in a combination of three causes: a sort of epidemic superstition among ignorant persons; some of the phenomena of tr
ance or epileptic sleep and special monomaniac diseases which it is the province of the physician to study.”
But is this assessment accurate? Stories of those who rise from the dead to feed upon the blood of the living have persisted in human cultures pre-dating even the ancient Greeks. Despite nuanced differences, primarily based on the geographical point of origin for the folklore, many aspects of vampire legends remain universally constant, including that suspected victims of vampires suffer from pale complexion, fatigue, fainting spells, shortness of breath and/or digestive disorders. In addition to tuberculosis, scientists today attribute these symptoms to anemia, catalepsy (a disorder of the nervous system causing a loss of voluntary motion, giving the victim the temporary appearance of death) or porphyria (a congenital condition which results in extreme photosensitivity, photophobia, excessive hair growth and receding gum lines, which would make incisors appear more prominent, like fangs).
However, with the exception of tuberculosis, these conditions are genetic abnormalities and rare enough to discount the possibility that they account for so wide-spread and prevalent folklore pertaining to vampirism. While tuberculosis could potentially, and has historically, reached such pandemic levels as to prompt urban legends of vampire attack, the field study conducted in New Hampshire would seem to counter this, as J.B. was the only skeleton discovered showing any post-mortem indications of the disease.
From this point, to John, it seemed like Michael Gough went from being an otherwise normal, rational, if not somewhat torpid scientist to a full-blown lunatic. Because from this point in the essay, Gough went on to make wild theories about vampires being real, extrapolating that if the general consensus agreed there was at some point a catastrophic flood affecting a majority of the world’s population, given the widespread, unrelated historical accounts, including that of the Bible, then the same logic could apply to vampire folklore.
