Familiars

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  Evan crept slowly up the stairs, not wanting to wake Lucy. He kept to the balls of his feet and tiptoed down the hallway. He heard a floorboard creaking and stopped, but nothing stirred.

  He entered his room and crumpled on the mattress and rolled over. He stared at the ceiling and that’s when he saw it.

  Saw him.

  Gideon.

  Perched on the edge of his dresser like a crow.

  “Jesus,” Evan said, flinching, fighting like hell not to shout. “Gi-Gideon – you sc-scared me.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  Gideon pointed to the floor.

  “May I?”

  “Do I need to invite you in?”

  “I think that ship’s already sailed.”

  Gideon eased himself down from the dresser in one fluid motion and closed the door.

  “Wouldn’t want to wake your mom.”

  Evan slid his hands under his legs so Gideon couldn’t see that they were trembling.

  “I’m a little tired, Gideon, so-”

  “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry. So very sorry about what you witnessed before.”

  “Which before?”

  Gideon smiled darkly and as his lips parted, his features somehow mutable. Evan thought, for an instant, that his canines had grown. Evan blinked and when he looked back, Gideon’s lips were drawn closed, his teeth impossible to see. When he spot next his voice seemed to come from every corner of the room.

  “I screwed up, Evan. I mean not once, but a lot of times. Tonight being the latest example. Of course this isn’t news to you.”

  “I guess – it’s - I understand.”

  “That’s a lie,” Gideon replied, some heat in his voice. “I know what you really think. That I’m a freak. A loser. An addict that needs to be what? Put down like some wounded animal?”

  “I never said any of that.”

  “But you felt it. You feel it now don’t you?”

  Evan shook his head, but his look betrayed his words.

  “That’s one my gifts, Evan,” Gideon said softly. “I can smell and sense things people like you can’t. I can sniff fear, I can taste deceit. Lies are like wine, each one has a slightly different bouquet.”

  Evan was silent as Gideon loomed over him. Evan thought he smelled the noxious odor of liquor mixed with the fermented funk of blood.

  He experienced an upswelling of shame. At that moment he hated himself. He hated the fact that he was scared and he hated that he’d never have the guts to tell Gideon what he really thought. An image of his father flashed before him again and Evan clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles cracked. He realized there was no time left for prevarication and so against all odds he mustered the courage to blurt out:

  “You want to know what I really think, Gideon?”

  A curious look swept over Gideon, something halfway between laughter and indignation.

  “Of course I want to know what you think. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Okay, well, I think you choose to be like this.”

  Gideon fell silent. He didn’t move, didn’t even seem to breathe for a few heartbeats and then his eyes rotated around and fixed on Evan. Evan wondered whether this was the last thing so many of Gideon’s victims had seen. Those cruel black eyes as they bore right through you.

  “This isn’t a lifestyle choice, Evan. This thing that I have, it’s a sickness.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “I’m the one talking so of course it’s what I fucking say.”

  Evan felt his temperature rising, the drums and the blood roaring in his ears. He elbowed himself up.

  “All the problems you have, Gideon, they’re of your own making.”

  Gideon’s mouth drooped open, but he didn’t say anything. He seemed to withdraw into himself, somehow becoming smaller, less imposing.

  “There was an old blues singer once upon a time. Robert Johnson. Met him once years ago down in Helena, Arkansas. He had this song about a man being stalked by a hellhound. That’s me, Evan.”

  “Your past-”

  Gideon nodded feverishly. His lancet eyes were shrouded, looking like the dusky backroads of some wasteland.

  “I’ve ripped flesh, I’ve seen the fear in so many eyes and when the red spills, when it comes out hot and pungent you take a taste and that first droplet, I shit you not, is like seeing the face of God.”

  It took Gideon a few seconds to realize he was licking his lips. He stared down at Evan whose legs quivered.

  “B-but that’s all behind me now,” he said, trying to play it off. “For Crissakes, I need you and your mom – really need you – to help me – to help me become better, a better person.”

  “It’s too late.”

  Gideon ignored this.

  “You think I don’t see their faces every night? You think I don’t suffer from some kind of post-traumatic guilt?”

  “So why go on?”

  “Because we, I, am selfish. I admit that. I’ve been given this thing, whether it’s a blessing or a curse, and for some reason I can’t, won’t, give it up.”

  Evan registered this, but it had no impact. He’d heard some version of Gideon’s sob story for as long as he could remember.

  “I didn’t used to, but I feel sorry for you, Gideon.”

  Gideon reflexively threw out a hand with such force that his fingers seemed to split the air. He slashed the air again from left to right, taking a step, nearly tottering. Evan realized he had indeed been drinking.

  “I don’t need your pity, Evan.”

  Evan recoiled as Gideon slapped his palms together.

  “Back at the party. I could’ve let that man, that thing, drain every last drop of your blood, but I didn’t.”

  “My mom protected me.”

  “But I’m the one who saved your life.”

  “You think I owe you?”

  “Everything you have comes from me.”

  “I’d like you to leave now.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “I’ll scream.”

  Gideon grinned.

  “Your mother’s not around to come to your rescue. Besides, it takes your ilk three, sometimes four seconds to undertake the physical act of screaming, Evan. I speak of this from experience. I’d be on top of you in less than one.”

  Evan’s bravado wilted as fear stole into his heart. His hand dropped down to the side of the mattress and his legs quaked. He was so scared he couldn’t remember whether he’d hidden his stake there.

  “Looking for this?”

  Evan’s eyes leapt up to see Gideon holding his stake. The contempt in the vampire’s eyes flashed like heat lightning.

  “You think you’re so goddamn smart, don’t you?”

  Gideon snapped the stake in half with two fingers.

  “Remember what I’ve always told you? There are two universal truths in life. The first I still won’t speak of, but the second, as you know, deals with the preciousness of life. Never risk your own trying to take someone else’s unless you’re certain of succeeding.”

  Gideon flipped the broken pieces of the stake at Evan.

  “And ash doesn’t work on us, remember?”

  Gideon spun with a mewling note of disgust and was gone so quickly through the door that Evan didn’t seem him go. He heard the bolts on the kitchen door open and the door close and then all was silent.

  Evan raced to the door and checked to see that it was locked and then he looked down. Looked down at the puddle of urine from where his aching bladder had just emptied itself.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The next morning Evan slept late and Lucy didn’t bother to wake him. She was giving him his space, fully cognizant of how the prior night had been an unmitigated disaster.

  When Evan did wake he sat in his room, stewing for hours, angry at how his mother had conspired with Gideon to convince him that everything was above board, normal even. But he’d seen behind the curtain. He knew what they were really like now.
The Gentry might possess a veneer of civility, but in reality its members were little more than a nest of bloodthirsty vipers ready to strike at anyone or anything that posed a threat.

  Evan sat on the mattress, clutching the pieces of his broken stake. He practiced daggering them over head as a likeness of Christopher Lee (aside from Robert Quarry, Lee had been the best Dracula, Evan thought) appeared and moved menacingly forward. When an imaginary Peter Cushing failed to materialize and come to his aid, Evan brought the stake halves down and pounded them into Lee’s chest as the monster squirmed and hissed like a rabid cat.

  Evan turned over and looked at a scrap of paper on the floor. In the all the bedlam and terror he’d totally forgotten about it. It was the note Harmony had written. The one with a date and location for their next rendezvous. He smiled, realizing, at the very least, that he might get another chance to see her.

  Evan headed downstairs an hour later. Lucy was nowhere to be found. He called out for her, but she didn’t respond. The dragging of a chair in the other bedroom on the first floor got his attention and that’s where he found her. Seated at a small desk, loopy smile on her face, squaring off against a bottle of booze and a small glass. He considered telling her about Gideon’s appearance in his room the prior night, but realized she was in no condition to do anything about it.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What does it look like?”

  “Getting wasted.”

  She pointed a finger gun at him.

  “I’m going out,” he said.

  She nodded, her eyes vacant.

  “Do you know what I think, Evan?”

  “No, mom.”

  “I think you think you’re the only one who ever had dreams, but you’re not.”

  Evan took the bottle away from her.

  “I had dreams once too. Such dreams…”

  “You’re worn out…”

  “Your father and me were going to buy some land in the mountains of North Carolina. Just enough to have a small garden and a few animals. God, that sounds so silly now doesn’t it?”

  “Not at all.”

  “We didn’t do it because we’d just had you and were afraid of what they’d do if we left. Do you know I realized the other day that almost everything I’ve ever undertaken in my life was done out of fear?”

  “You should go lay down…”

  “You were right I think,” she said softly.

  “Right about what?”

  “About what you asked before. About whether we’re evil.”

  Evan stared at her.

  “I know you’re not,” she said, smiling warmly. “I thank God for that because it’s the only thing that matters.”

  Her smiled slipped away. She reached out a hand and touched his wrist.

  “You’ll always be my little boy, Evan-”

  “Jesus, mom.”

  “-till the end of time, you’ll always be the best thing I ever did.”

  Lucy sobbed. Evan backed up out of the room, uncertain of what to do so he grabbed the keys to the Cressida. He was confused, the events of the last few days having left his mind disordered. He was about to go back and check on Lucy when his phone buzzed. He slipped it out of a pocket. There was a text. He didn’t recognize the number, but it read: “U coming tngt?”

  Evan fought off a smile, realizing it had to be from Harmony. He couldn’t remember whether he’d given her his number before, but so what? She had it and was texting him and that’s all that mattered.

  He looked back at the room where his mother was. For some reason, an old quote he learned in Sunday school years ago came to him. Something about how when you grow up you’re supposed to put away childish things. A few years ago he would’ve run back to his mother and buried his head under her arm, but not now. Now he was older, on the cusp of official adulthood and it was high time he stopped acting like a baby. He couldn’t hide behind his mother forever. It was time he went out on his own.

  Besides, his mother was a badass just like Bram had told him back at the Gathering. She could deal with her own problems and handle anything that came her way. She didn’t need him and so he struck off through the rowhouse and stopped one last time when he spotted it.

  The thing lying on a chair near a window.

  Lucy’s black backpack.

  It symbolized all that was wrong with being a Familiar. Instead of checking the house’s traps and defenses, he grabbed the backpack and headed outside.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The last tatters of daylight streamed down as Evan drove past Dez who was shooting baskets from his wheelchair into an old milk carton.

  Evan waved to Dez, but didn’t have the strength to talk to him. There were too many emotions welling up inside.

  He cranked the radio and willed away every last thought of his mother and Gideon. He projected an image of the house in Santa Monica, the beach, the weather.

  An hour later he stopped near a defunct warehouse down past Boston Street and chucked Lucy’s backpack into the Patapsco River. He smiled, watching it disappear from sight, and then drove on by himself, exploring the city for the next several hours.

  Much later, the moon hung low as he drove past the bars and cantinas in Fell’s Point.

  Guided by Harmony’s scrap of paper, he soon found the name of the bar, “Slippery Slope,” and being thirty minutes early, made a few circuits around the block to kill some time.

  He was air-drumming to Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life,” when something caught his eye peripherally.

  It was Harmony, or a person he believed was Harmony. He could only see the back of her head, but the hair and the way she carried herself made it look like her. She was moving down an alley off to his left, toward a stand of old rowhouses.

  Evan stopped the car. He was conflicted. On the one hand, he knew how fatal it was to be branded a stalker by a girl. On the other hand, he couldn’t help but be curious, Lucy having drilled into him the notions of exploring every angle, trusting, but making sure to verify. These things were ingrained and it would likely take years of therapy to break the habits.

  He found himself slipping away from the Cressida which he parked on a sidestreet. Heading out, Evan slid by a crush of people until he was strolling down the alley.

  Turning a corner, Evan saw Harmony (it was definitely her, he could see that now), speaking with a man who was leaning out of an SUV. The man looked similar to someone Evan had seen before. One of the guys at the bar the other night? Back in the Inner Harbor? He hoped like hell she didn’t have a boyfriend and then the SUV peeled off and she entered one of the rowhouses alone.

  Evan searched in every direction, but there was nobody in sight. He paused and then padded down the alley toward the rowhouse. There was no way he’d ring the front door or let Harmony know he was there. No, he’d just sit tight and do a little surveillance to see what was up.

  The rowhouse, an end unit, was two stories high with an apron of quarried stone and brick above that. It had a stoop that fronted the alley and an eight-foot tall wooden fence that surrounded the backyard.

  The front door pushed open and Evan assumed somebody was coming outside so he crept to the right. A hand appeared from inside the rowhouse and dropped a bag of garbage. The front door closed and Evan hid behind a car before stealthing toward the backyard.

  The gate on the backyard fence wasn’t locked and so Evan nosed in and looked around. There was a small garden and a single fruit tree along with a walkway made of cobblestones that snaked to a tiny deck.

  There was a sliding glass door above the deck.

  The door was partially open.

  Evan made himself small in the garden’s shadows. Doubt began to eat at him. That still small voice told him to back up, to leave, that it wasn’t worth it. You’re gonna blow this, buster, the voice whispered. The first real girl in a long time and you’re spying on her?

  Evan planted a foot to leave when a woman’s muffled scream sounded from somewhere
inside the rowhouse. Don’t go anywhere, he chastised himself. What if she’s in trouble? What if somebody like Gideon was doing terrible things to her? Wasn’t it possible he’d followed Evan? Wasn’t it possible that he knew who Harmony was and had come after her as a result of what Evan had said to him before?

  Evan paused, heard another scream and then the tom-toms, his internal drums, started up again. They were thicker this time, resembling a foot stepping into a puddle. It was as if the tension on the heads on the drums were out of whack.

  Evan felt his foot sliding out, taking one step and then another, ten more in all as he crossed the distance between the garden and the back door.

  He was up on the deck, peering through the open slider. Darkness peered back. He sucked in a breath and stepped inside and stumbled over an object that caused him to pitch forward.

  Evan landed on something wide and soft and rolled to his left. He found himself in a rear room of the rowhouse that was unlit. His eyes acclimated to the gloom, allowing him to see the mattress he was slumped on. Squinting, he could see the room he was in was filled with at least four or five other mattresses.

  Rising, he realized the space resembled one of the flophouses he and Lucy had stayed in between Gentry-approved abodes while on the run down south.

  There were the mattresses and small piles of clothes covering the floor. Evan waded across carpet heaped with food wrappers and takeout containers until he was near an interior door.

  Hearing the woman’s scream again, he edged through the door, entering an adjacent room to see a television.

  There was a horror movie playing.

  Evan watched as a young lovely ran through a field, chased by a brute wielding what looked like a lawnmower blade.

  He held up his cellphone for more light and his blood froze.

  The walls behind the TV were covered with photos.

  Photos of Evan and Lucy.

  Some had been taken at great distances, others were close-ups. Evan could tell by the length of his hair that they’d shot over the last year or two.