by Winter Reid
I opened my door and made my way down my small hall and into the living room, dropping my keys on the table next to my ‘real phone’, as my mother called the landline I kept for our Thursday night chats. And for 911. Because Mom said I had to.
Natural light is at a premium in any city, and I had light in spades. There were a total of three nearly floor to ceiling windows in the living room, and my bedroom had windows on the south and west walls. I texted Jackson that I was leaving the door unlocked and stripped out of my clothes, tossing them on my bed. The standalone full-length mirror by my closet wasn’t any kinder to me than the one at the tanning salon had been. A few of the blisters had popped on the ride home, fuzzy lint sticking to the tender skin underneath.
I made my way to the bathroom and turned the shower to cool. And that’s where Jackson found me forty minutes later when he came in and pulled back the shower curtain.
“Holy hell, Nadine.”
“Is it still that bad?”
“What did you do to yourself?”
I sniffled. “I went tanning.”
“All day?”
“I don’t really feel like going dancing tonight.”
“Want Chinese?”
“There’s a new menu on the fridge.”
He looked at my back again and shook his head. “I’ll stop at the pharmacy and get some aloe. You need a little pain relief?”
“No, I’ll be fine,” I whimpered, hiding my tears in the shower spray.
He tapped thoughtfully on the side of the tub with the toe of his sneaker. “So, my chances of getting lucky tonight?”
“Get out,” I shouted.
Jackson left before I woke up the next morning. Understandable since it was just shy of noon and he’d been on at ten. Before my incident I would have been up early making him breakfast. After, I just did his dishes.
The bottle of aloe and lidocaine he’d picked up sat on my night table holding up a note that read: Use it, cowgirl. And it included an extremely crude stick figure drawing of our evening activities.
Pig.
I shuffled to the mirror and braced myself, scrunching my eyes shut. Actually, what I saw when I peeked wasn’t bad. My back was still pretty pink, but it didn’t look like a candy shop awning anymore.
Getting dressed was easier than I thought it would be. I pulled on a sundress, yellow eyelet with a gathered waist, and a pair of brown leather boots that hit me just below the knee. In the years since I’d moved to the South, I’d developed a quasi-country boho style. I looked the part enough I was often mistaken for a local. Until I opened my mouth and my Manhattan fell out.
My mother was a secretary from Staten Island when she met my father, a Jewish civil engineer at the firm she worked for in the city. In spite of some stiff resistance from both of their parents, they got married, had me, and lived for twenty years in a third-floor walk-up with two bedrooms and a galley kitchen. And, yeah, that’s love.
I’m not sure why I chose a southern city to make my own life in, except I was tired of New York winters. Dad had taken us through the area a couple times as a family on our yearly summer pilgrimage to the Hoover Dam, but I’d never spent any significant time in my new city. I think, in retrospect, it was love at first sight. I fell in love with the river, with all the parks and people. It was where I belonged.
The route to the library looked totally different in the daylight, the Historic District almost unbearably quaint. Bartlett pear and cherry trees popped with white and pink flowers, and irises bloomed, carefully contained along the wrought iron fences. All the buildings were clean and white, their copper roofs green with age.
The man from the other night was absent when I passed his doorway, but I thought I caught his scent, just under the currents of cake and butter coming from the bakery next door. I hadn’t thought much about him since our run in but he suddenly returned to me with a vengeance, his dirty clothes and matted hair.
The public library was desperately quiet, even for a gorgeous Saturday. I nodded at the girl behind the desk and went over to a bank of computers. Lacey’s Taft gown was fantastic, but I knew nothing about the Frances Smith Company that made it. A lot of research could be done online, but I loved being at the library. I loved the way it smelled and how everything there was intended to educate. It was the closest I got to church or temple as an adult. I brought up the library search engine and put my cursor in the keyword box. It blinked back at me.
I thought of the homeless man again, and the odd the way he had sniffed at me—like he could smell me in a way I couldn’t smell him. Like he was extrasensory. Like he was some kind of animal or… bulldog with opposable thumbs.
My breath hitched and my forefinger hovered over the F key. The man hadn’t been the same meth head who’d attacked me on the running trails. I would have known if he had been, but there was something similar about them. Something undefinable.
What’s more, something else was bothering me. Something that had been swimming around just under my consciousness. It broke the surface—like a blue fucking whale. I knew what had happened in that hole beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’d been bitten viciously and repeatedly. If Jackson was right and prosthetic teeth were out, then I was severely limited on the possibilities that were in.
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself, even as my finger dropped a row and hit the V key, then A, M.
A troop of girl scouts poured in through the front door, stumbling over their own feet and knocking into each other. They giggled until the woman at the circulation desk frowned at them, putting her finger to her lips. Their red-faced leader gathered them up, herding them toward the upstairs reading room.
My palms were wet. P, I, R, E.
I hit enter and a list of titles popped up on the screen. Thousands of them: My Bloody Lover, Kiss Me after Sunset, A Coffin for a Marriage Bed, Bite Me, My Darling, etc.
I adjusted the search to exclude romances, erotica, and fiction, and ended up with a much more modest list: The Long History of Vampire Lore, A Beast Among Us: The Myth of Vampires and Why We Love Them, and Dracula: The Evolution of a Folktale. I wrote down the call numbers and looked again at the woman at the desk. We’d had a few nice conversations in the past. Her name was Ginger or Honey or something culinary. I searched books for witches, mummies, and werewolves, too, jotting down a few numbers before I went to the circulation desk.
Librarians are a pretty non-judgmental breed given the wide range of questionable material they check out for patrons daily, but I concocted a cover story all the same.
She looked at my list and smiled, taking it with her when she left the counter and descended the basement stairs into the stacks. I tapped my fingers on the wood and waited. There were a couple of posters lining the wall that led to the conference rooms. New releases that the library was touting. In one, a young man cuddled his girlfriend, her head resting against his chest as he looked out at the viewer with red eyes and fangs. I rolled my eyes. An older man in a blue windbreaker and khakis came up to stand behind me, and the librarian came out of the basement carrying ten or so books.
“I couldn’t find A Beast Among Us,” she said. “But try What Stoker Got Wrong. It’s by the same author.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”
She took my card and checked the books out, touching the spines to an anti-theft device before she stacked them neatly on the counter.
“Vampires sure are a hot item right now,” she said.
I heard the guy behind me snicker.
“Yeah, we’re, um, thinking about doing a monsters exhibit for Halloween.”
“Oh, fun.” She smiled with bright, white teeth, and I nodded, shoving the books into my bag, my cheeks flaming. I hauled the bag off the desk and it almost took my shoulder off.
“Careful, dear,” she said, and the man behind me smirked.
I all but ran out the door and plopped down on the top of the marble stairs outside, hidden from the entrance by a huge column. Leaning against it, I watched a few minutes l
ater as the man in the windbreaker left the building, walking down the path and out the gate. I understood where his derision came from. Had I stood where he had, I might have thought some uncharitable things about myself. In fact, I was thinking some of those things at that very moment.
I slid What Stoker Got Wrong out of my backpack and opened it. Chapter One: Vampires Can’t Fly. I slammed it shut.
Chapter Five
I didn’t think about the books again until Jackson picked me up for a party his high society mother was throwing the following week. I raced around my apartment trying to find my strappy high-heeled sandals and put on lip gloss at the same time. While Jackson would normally plop himself down on the couch with the remote in such moments, we were late, and so he stood alternately tapping his foot and looking at his watch like his horny self wasn’t partially responsible.
I ran into the bathroom and took my hair out of hot rollers only to pin it back up in a mess of dark curls his mother would hate. Jackson said I overreacted to her thinly veiled hostility and that it was a southern thing that made southern mommas, especially rich ones, prefer their sons date proper southern girls. I said I thought it was probably more a Jewish thing. Man, I got in trouble for that one. No one likes to hear their mother is a bigot.
He was standing by my desk when I came back to the living room, and I turned around making the universal zipper gesture.
“Interesting reading,” he said when he finished.
I looked over my shoulder to where he was smirking. The pile of library books sat beside my laptop.
“Um, yeah.” I reached for the black lace shawl I’d picked up in Mexico a few years before, draping it over my shoulders and tucking it through my elbows. “We’re thinking about a monster exhibit for next Halloween. At first we were going with mainstream ghoulies but now we’re thinking about focusing more on local legends.”
He grinned, the bastard. “Oh yeah?”
“Yup. The Headless Horseman of Booger Holler and the Cotter Bridge Haint.”
He put his hands on my waist and pulled me in closer. “Haint? You mean that spot between your—”
“I thought you were supposed to be a doctor,” I interrupted.
“I like this dress,” he said, grabbing my ass.
I did, too. It was black with huge red roses and a fitted bodice that changed to a swirly skirt falling just above my knees.
“Nadine,” he said, suddenly serious as he kissed the top of my head. “You weren’t attacked by a vampire.”
I struggled to pull away, but he held me tighter.
“You weren’t,” he repeated. “And you won’t turn into one either.”
Oh.
Holy.
Hell.
Because really, what kind of half-wit gets attacked by a vampiresque creature and doesn’t stop to wonder if she’ll turn bloodsucker, too? Even if she’s only wondering it peripherally.
I’d passed out. When I came to, I told Jackson I hadn’t eaten all day, and he bought it. Either that or he was scared enough of his mother to let the lie slide. My vitals were stable, and that was good enough for him. So after a few cookies and a cheese stick, he packed me into his car and we made it to the botanical gardens way faster than we should have.
Someone truly brilliant designed the gardens to bump up along the river, and I sent them a silent thank you as I leaned against a railing looking out across the water, its surface painted pink by the sunset. Party sounds played out amongst the foliage behind me: glasses tinkling, silverware clinking on tiny white plates, the rising and falling cadence of conversations… Jackson’s mother cackling.
I took a drink of wine, reveling in the breeze that blew in off the bank. Jackson came up behind me and put his hand on my back, guiding me over to a bench beneath an arbor of climbing jasmine.
“I want you to think about seeing somebody,” he said, his forehead pinched between his eyes.
I snorted.
He took my hand in his, rubbing over the knuckles with his thumb. “I’m serious. It’s been months and you’re not getting better. You need some help processing all of this.”
“I’m fine.”
“Nadine.”
“Really, I’m okay.”
“Nadine, look at me.”
Oh, I don’t think so.
“Nadine. Please, look at me. What you’re thinking isn’t possible. It scares the shit out of me that you don’t seem to know that.”
“I’m not really thinking it,” I admitted. “I’m only kind of thinking it.”
He didn’t say anything.
I looked at him, at his sweet boy/man face. “You think I’m crazy?”
He nodded. “I do.”
I punched him in the shoulder.
Laughing, he put his arm around me, pulling me close. I leaned into him, resting my head against his shirt, and we watched the party.
“You know who’s crazy?” He asked after a few minutes.
I discreetly wiped away a tear. “Who?”
He bent his head closer to mine. “Dr. Hayder’s wife. What the hell is that on her head?”
I took a deep breath and smiled. “There’s a long tradition of sculptural hats in the South.”
“She looks like Big Bird.”
“I’m surprised your mother let her in.”
“Hey.”
“Sorry.” Not really.
He stroked my cheek with the backs of his fingers. “Let me take you home.”
Half an hour later, Jackson left me at the front door of my building with a quick kiss and a promise to set me up with the best ‘shrink’ in town. I went upstairs, picked up my copy of The Evolution of a Folktale, and read it standing.
Lest you think I was a total vampire virgin, you should know I had, in my youth, read both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Interview with a Vampire, as had all the girls in my eighth-grade class once one of us stumbled on a rerun of the movie.
Thumbing through the introduction of Folktale, I compared its non-fiction notes with my fuzzy fiction memories. Historically, vampires looked less like Brad Pitt and more like the walking dead. On the occasions they actually had a physical body, and weren’t acting as disgruntled spirits, they were described by eyewitnesses as plump and rosy, not pale, with blood oozing from their eyes and noses.
Gross.
They were also less interested in drinking blood than general mischief making: killing people, causing pestilence, stealing babies. Vampires were a cross-cultural phenomenon designed to act as shit-catchers for the things that went wrong in people’s lives before science and medicine took over. TB in your village? It’s your dead cousin’s fault. Dig her up, cut out her heart, and burn it. Voilà!
I dropped the book back onto the desk and closed my eyes, visualizing my attacker in the dark. He wasn’t plump, and he didn’t move like a reanimated corpse. No, he was fast, tricky, and very, very alive.
Olive rubbed figure eights against my legs and I picked her up, her backbone going limp the way kitties like to do. We walked into my bedroom and I opened the window above the fire escape. She hopped out onto the grated platform, settling in next to a pot of begonias I hadn’t managed to kill in three years, despite my sporadic watering.
I looked out over my city. The giant red neon cross on top of the Pentecostal church on First Street stared back at me.
The man who’d attacked me on the trail was not compatible with the legends of vampires from Eastern Europe, so it seemed there were a couple possibilities I had to consider.
First, it made more sense with what I knew of the universe that he was some kind of drug addict or occultist rather than an honest-to-God vampire. Jackson said humans didn’t have the equipment for the wreckage my attacker wrought on me, but people changed their equipment all the time in the modern era. While he was right that a person with a pair of slip-on fangs couldn’t have done it, what if the fangs were permanently affixed? Like veneers or caps? People were actually having metal horns inserted beneath the skin on th
eir scalps. I’d watched a whole documentary on it. Cosmetic dentistry was absolutely within the realm of possibility.
The second option, the one that made me nauseous, was that the legends were wrong.
The full moon cast its silver light on the trees and the path, painting the world a flat picture in blacks and grays. My sense of depth lost, I rode my bike gingerly down to the fork and parked it against a good-sized elm.
The zipper back on my messenger bag made a soft noise as I slid it open, taking out my supplies: my camera, a plastic bottle full of holy water, and a silver carving knife from a set my mother had sent me. To a layperson, it might have looked like a regular old carving knife, but it wasn’t. It was her passive-aggressive reminder that I was almost thirty and still unmarried. I tested its weight in my hand, the cold handle heavy and solid in my palm.
Stowing both the knife and water bottle in my jacket pockets, I slipped my camera strap around my neck, keeping everything in easy reach. I took a few steps forward, stopped, took the bottle and knife back out of my pockets, opened the bottle, and poured holy water on the knife blade.
I know.
I know how stupid all of this sounds. Retrospectively, it’s hard to write, but I didn’t own a gun, and nothing I’d read in the academic books gave me anything useful to defend myself with. The folk legends had as much to do with preventing vampires as killing them, and the vampire slaying that actually happened generally took place in a graveyard with the offender lying in its coffin before being staked. As such, I felt the best course of action was to use the tried-and-true methods of dispatch popular with romance and suspense novelists the world over.
I was ninety-nine point nine percent sure my attacker was just a tweaked out meth head anyway, and if so, my primary plan was to simply brandish the knife, run, and call the police. The difference between our first meeting and this one, I told myself, was that now I was the hunter, and I sure as shit was faster than some cranked-out loser living in a hole in the park.
Which brings me to my final justification for being there. The idea of confronting my monster made me feel stronger than I had since the attack; powerful and brave. But I also knew the chances he was still hanging around were slim to none, regardless of his nature, simply because you don’t mess where you sleep, and I had been very, very messy.
