by Reinke, Sara
With so many stories sharing so many similar threads, the most appropriate point of order is to apply the theory of Ockman’s Razor: the simplest explanation is usually correct. As the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788) once said: 'If ever there was in the world a warranted and proven history it is that of vampires.'
Rather than hypothesize about rare blood disorders, rampant diseases or superstitious folklore, science should examine the possibility that such creatures, documented throughout recorded history, are not only real, but still among us, as prevalent and predatory as ever.
John whistled through his teeth, then forked his fingers through his hair. “What a loon,” he muttered. He took a few moments to skim through the emails Gough had exchanged with Lucy, which John had forwarded from her in-box.
My theories on this subject are controversial and not generally accepted by the scientific community, he’d first written to Lucy, and in his mind, John could nearly see the smug son of a bitch puffing his chest out in self-inflated pride. However, I assure you they’re based on a comprehensive examination of common vampire mythos and folklore, substantiated by documented historical accounts, physical and anthropological evidence and supported by more than 1,500 related accounts of vampire-associated activity.
But after this polite, initial exchange, the two had corresponded sometimes as much as fifteen or twenty times a day, the emails growing more detailed, lengthy and personal.
I’m scared, she’d written in one.
Gough had written back to her: We have to hunt the master down in the daytime and kill it. It’s the only way to stop this.
John pushed the laptop away and leaned back against the headboard. What have I gotten myself into? he thought, shoving his hand through his hair again. He didn’t know which was worse: that Lucy was delusional or that Michael Gough was, too. The pair had been regular birds of a feather flocking together, each of them feeding off the other, encouraging each other in their respective paranoid thoughts.
He thought of her headshot, the one Ruth had loaned him. Sun-kissed and summer blonde, she’d been a beautiful girl, John had to admit.
So here’s betting the good doctor found a picture of her and thought the same thing. I wonder just how many of Gough’s so-called “controversial” theories “based on a comprehensive examination of common vampire mythos and substantiated by physical and anthropological evidence” had really been pulled out of the guy’s ass in the hopes of getting a piece of Lucy’s.
CHAPTER TEN
John fell asleep sitting in bed atop the covers, the pillows propped behind him, his head canted back against the headboard. At some point, the laptop must have slid off his lap, because when he woke up, it wasn’t there.
Sandy was.
Dressed in a pink baby-doll teddy, she sat astride his hips. In the soft, golden glow of the bedside lamp, the filmy fabric of the lingerie became translucent, and through it, he could see the clear outline of each of her nipples, the nubs standing out at attention in round, pert bullet points. Through her panties, he could just discern the shadow of her pubis, shaved to his observation into a well-tailored chevron.
His dick was more wide awake in that moment than his brain.
“Sandy?” He blinked at her, bewildered and groggy.
“‘If ever there was in the world a warranted and proven history it is that of vampires,’” Sandy said, looking down at him, her face uncharacteristically somber.
He blinked again, having been momentarily distracted by the tantalizing, teasing glimpse of her breasts. He’d never been able to so fully appreciate just how perfect they actually were, although he’d often daydreamed about it. “What?”
She continued staring at him with no visible hint of a smile, her blue eyes nearly grey, aloof and somehow cold. “According to vampire folklore, you’re doomed to become a vampire now, too,” she said, repeating what she’d told him earlier, albeit in far more playful fashion upon their return to Little Pink. She leaned over, taking something in hand from beside her on the bed. The spaghetti strap of her baby-doll fell away from her shoulder as she did, drooping down toward her bicep and revealing the sweet, soft swell of her breast bared in full, the rose-colored cap of her swollen nipple.
“It’s too late to stop it now,” Sandy said, sitting up again, hoisting a large wooden stake, rough-hewn and crude, above her head.
He stiffened beneath her, not in arousal this time, but in startled alarm. “What are you—?”
“We have to hunt the master down in the daytime and kill it,” she said, and she swung her hand down, plunging the tapered point of the stake at his chest.
***
John sat bolt upright in the bed, his eyes flying wide. He felt something slide against his lap—not Sandy, but his computer—then grimaced at a loud, ominous crunch! as the laptop made landfall against the hardwood floor below.
Still disoriented and dazed, he looked around blearily, finding himself alone in the bed, alone in the room. A glance down at his chest revealed no puncture wounds, no stake. Only those sliver-like tendrils of black winding just beneath the surface of his skin, creeping out from beneath the proscenium of his bandage.
He leaned over, looking at his laptop. He’d dozed off with the lid open, and it rested on the floor in an inverted V, the vertex pointing up at him. From beneath the edge of the monitor’s plastic frame, he saw a tangle of brightly colored wires protruding that he hadn’t ever noticed before and was fairly willing to bet weren’t supposed to be visible.
He leaned over further, grabbing the computer, hefting it back onto the bed. The front of his flat screen had been jarred loose, listing like a door halfway off its hinges. He tried pushing it back into place and it stayed for a hopeful half-second before falling again, revealing even more of the wired insides of the monitor than could surely be healthy. Turning the computer on, he heard strange whining sounds, never a good thing. When nothing else happened, no lights, no sirens, nothing but that unhappy, insectile buzz, he shoved the computer aside.
“Damn it,” he muttered. Reaching out, he pawed at the bedside lamp, turning it off and plunging the room into darkness. Shrugging his shoulders to settle himself comfortably, he leaned his head back again and closed his eyes. Aside from the fact that she’d tried to kill him in it, the dream with Sandy had been unexpected and nice. Maybe I can get back there again, only this time without the stake, he thought.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
John’s eyes opened and he blinked at a ceiling fan turning in slow-moving, lazy loops.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
What is that? He sat up in bed, grimacing at pain that radiated down from his shoulder at the movement. Looking toward the French doors, which stood closed to the adjacent patio, he could see the shadowed outline of palm fronds and tropical foliage through the thin, gauzy drapes, as they bobbed in the breeze outside and rubbed against the glass.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
He crumpled back against the pillows, then tried to close his eyes and go back to sleep, but that noise kept recurring, bothering him. He was aware of it now, too aware of it, in fact, and even though he crammed a pillow over his face to try and muffle the sound, he could still discern it.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
“Damn it,” John said again. He shoved the pillow off his head, then pushed the blankets aside and swung his legs around, out of the bed. Rising to his feet, allowing himself a few unsteady moments to regain his land legs, he shuffled across the room toward the patio doors. All of the plants on the balcony were in large ceramic pots. It might take some effort, but he figured he could shove the ones closest to the door further back to stop the incessant scratching.
Scritch, scritch, scritch.
As he approached, however, he saw the faint but discernable silhouette of someone standing outside on the patio, the unmistakable figure of a woman. She stood close enough to the doors to touch the glass and he watched the outline of her hand grow darke
r, more distinct as she brushed her fingertips along one of the panes.
John.
John drew back in startled surprise. He’d heard his name, not with his ears, but inside his head, just like in the stairwell at the Show Me! bar. Then he’d been able to dismiss the peculiar sensation as an auditory illusion, something caused by the acoustics in the staircase, but now he heard it clearly, distinctly.
It’s her, he realized, blinking at the shadowy figure of the woman on the patio. There was no Louisville Slugger here, nothing he could use as a weapon, and for a moment, he found himself rooted in place, paralyzed by a primitive and nearly childlike fear.
John, she said again, her voice reverberating not just through his mind, but his entire body as well, a soft and delicate caress that stirred the hairs along the nape of his neck. With it, the fear inside of him seemed to dissipate, melting away, leaving him somewhat light-headed and dazed. Let me inside. Open the door.
She touched the glass again, a dark imprint visible through the filmy drapes.
Let me inside, she said again and he nodded dazedly, spellbound.
“Alright,” he murmured, reaching for the handles.
The last thing he remembered after opening the French doors, was seeing Lucy Weston on his patio, not the smiling girl from her mother’s photograph but the emaciated creature that had attacked him in her apartment.
She was smiling at him, of that he was fairly certain. Even as she lunged at him, her mouth falling open to reveal those horrific fangs, she was smiling.
***
“John?”
Sandy’s voice drew him from the darkness, and he opened his eyes slowly. The French doors to his patio stood wide, the drapes fluttering lightly in the breeze, and the plants outside cast eerie, dancing shadows on the plaster overhead.
“Oh, my God!” he heard Sandy exclaim, then the frantic patter of her footsteps as she hurried across the room. Falling to her knees, she leaned into his line of sight, her eyes flown wide with alarm. “Oh, jeez, John, hold still. You’re bleeding.”
Scrambling to her feet, she darted out of view again. A spear of illumination cut across the floor as she turned on the lights in the adjacent bathroom. The unexpected glare hurt his eyes, and he turned away, squinting.
“Here.” She returned, kneeling beside him, pressing something against his neck, a towel. The bandage was so soaked, it had pulled away and flapped to one side. He could feel it against his skin. “Can you sit up?”
“I think so,” he said as she got an arm around him and offered leverage. He grunted, then grimaced as he propped himself clumsily upright. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “You must have been sleepwalking. I heard a heavy thud. You fell, tore your wounds open again.”
His chest was smeared with fresh blood and he’d left a small, sticky puddle of it on the floor beneath him. Forking his fingers through his hair, he struggled to remember. “I had the strangest dream.”
“Let’s get you back to bed,” Sandy said, and he had to lean heavily against her as he stumbled to his feet. His balance was shot, his head swimming, his legs clumsy and leaden. She helped him sit against the mattress.
“Hold this.” She took his hand, clapped it atop the towel at his neck. “I’ll be right back.”
Leaving the bedside, she returned to the bathroom. He’d half-expected her to be dressed in the pale pink teddy he’d dreamed of earlier, but instead, she wore a T-shirt, oversized and frumpy.
He heard running water and when she returned, she had a wet washcloth dripping in her hands, leaving a little trail of spattered droplets on the floor. She squatted between his legs, easing the dry towel aside and using the wet one to bathe the wound. He jerked, hissing sharply and her brows lifted. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “It’s alright.”
Her hands were gentle against him, her fingers cool and damp as she drew the washcloth in slow, sweeping movements along the side of his throat, down the crest of his shoulder, following the contours of his chest.
“Lucy Weston was here,” he said and she blinked at him in surprise. “She was standing right there on the patio.” He pointed with an unsteady finger. “I think she came to my boat the other night, too. She was scratching on the doors, trying to get in.”
“Hold this,” she said again, handing him the towel. Rising, she walked out onto the patio, looking around, peeking in and among the palm fronds. “There’s no one out here now.”
“She was there,” John said. “I swear, Sandy.”
“How did she get up to the balcony?” Sandy asked. “It’s a two story climb and there’s nothing to hold onto.”
She leaned over the railing, looking down at the landscaped yard and swimming pool below. Now he could see her panties visible beneath the hem of her T-shirt as it rode up. Nothing skimpy or scintillating, these were the full-bottom, white cotton, Hanes Her Way variety which normally did nothing for him. Still, when she doubled over like that with the panties exposed, it struck him as provocative enough to stoke the first inklings of hard-on. Then he remembered the dream that ended with Sandy trying to stab him with a stake.
We have to hunt the master down in the daytime and kill it.
He shivered slightly at the recollection.
“I’m not imagining things,” he said, squirming to readjust his withering dick back into place in his shorts. “And I’m not hallucinating, either. I don’t care what that doctor told you. I’m not seeing things. She was there.”
“Why would she come here?” Sandy asked. “To your boat?” She didn’t sound skeptical, merely curious.
“Because she thinks she’s a vampire.” He looked up at her. “You were sort of right on that account. She must have followed me from her apartment, seen where I lived, then tailed us here. She’s high on methamphetamines, and if she’s been using for awhile, which I think she has, then the frontal lobe of her brain, the part that controls impulses, has pretty much turned into hamburger. She’s suffering paranoid delusions and she’s not able to keep herself from acting on them anymore, not that she wants to. She’s got a little online pal who’s helped convince her she’s the bride of Dracula.”
Sandy cocked her head, inquisitive.
“Michael Gough, that guy I told you she was emailing.” He pivoted, reaching for his laptop. “Here, I’ll…” The computer remained as he’d left it, half-opened, wires protruding from the cracked face of its flat screen, and he grimaced. “Never mind.”
“So you’re saying she’s fixated on you now?” Sandy asked. “In the psychological sense, I mean. Not one of the twelve vital alchemical processes required for transformation or in the population-genetics sense, where every individual in a pool has the same allele at a particular locus. You know, Sigmund Freud theorized that psychological fixations develop as the result of insufficient gratification during one of the psychosexual stages of—”
“I’m saying she’s stalking me now,” John cut in, exasperated. “As in aggravated stalking, a third-degree felony under Florida statutes punishable by up to five years in prison. As in as the willful and repeated following, watching, and harassing of an unwilling or unavailable target. As in a crime of power and control perpetrated in all likelihood by someone suffering from an Axis Two level psychological disorder, per the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, whereby a subject demonstrates a persistent and enduring pattern of characteristic maladaptive behaviors with a pervasive disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others.”
Sandy blinked at him for a moment, then smiled. “Not bad.”
He nodded, out of breath. “Thanks. Do you own a pink teddy?”
She blinked again. “What?”
John shook his head. “Never mind.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The next morning, he stumbled out of bed, dazzled to the point of blindness by the daylight spilling through the patio doors. He made it into the bathroom, closing the d
oor behind him to engulf himself in the blessed relief of semi-darkness.
With a clearer head and some sounder sleep under his belt, he had an easier time brushing off the previous night’s events. He’d done some strange things while under psychiatric evaluative care years ago, and while sleepwalking hadn’t been among them, weird and even terrifying dreams certainly had been. His psychiatrist had believed these instances to be side-effects from the medication he’d been taking and indeed, he hadn’t experienced anything like that since moving from Miami to the Sister Islands.
But what if I am again? he thought, looking at his shadow-draped reflection in the dark mirror. What if Lucy’s attack at the apartment triggered something inside my head, some kind of latent post-traumatic side-effect? What if I’m losing it again?
In his medicine cabinet aboard the Quagmire, he had a bottle of Xanax, his “just in case” pills, he called them. They were three years old and probably long-since expired, but he kept them around for moments such as this, when he’d begin to seriously question his own mental stability.
Sighing heavily, he raked his fingers through his hair. “Get a grip on yourself,” he whispered.
After showering and dressing, he padded downstairs, wearing his sunglasses because Little Pink had apparently been architecturally designed, like most structures in the Florida Keys, to allow as much light as possible to flood inside from as many angles and outlets as possible. He thought he heard Sandy’s voice, distant but distinct, and poked his head into the living room, looking for her. Beyond the bay windows, he could see her standing with her back to the house by the swimming pool. She wore a white terrycloth bathrobe and her blonde hair was visibly damp. With one hand she held her cell phone to her ear. With the other, she plugged her ear with her fingertip to hear her call more clearly.
