I recognized Black and Blue, Mrs. Sherman’s dogs. Mrs. Sherman’s next-door neighbor Brad Something-or-Other held their leashes as they barked at me. Brad shot a look in my direction and tapped the sleeve of the police officer next to him. I kept driving. Oh, God! Was Mrs. Sherman dead? Would the cops try to pin that on me too? Great. By the time they finished “investigating,” everyone I knew would be dead and I would be on Death Row.
I hurried to the deli and parked the car as lightning cracked across the sky. It got dark fast. I raced inside to find Coleman waving me to his booth in the back corner. I barely sat down good before I said in a mad rush, “My neighbor is dead. At least I think she’s dead, and I had a nightmare last night. It was real, man. I swear it was real. I saw the Creep again, and there was another person there. I think her name was Vanessa.”
“Hey, what will it be, Charlie?” A balding man wearing a neat apron approached us with a notepad and a pencil.
“Two eggs and some toast, Tom. Same for my friend. And a pot of coffee. Thanks. Nice apron, by the way. Bonnie late again?”
“You know my daughter. She’s late every Monday.”
Coleman smiled politely, and I held my peace as Tom delivered two white coffee cups and a carafe of coffee. “Be back with those dishes in a few minutes. If Bonnie comes in, tell her I’m looking for her.”
“Yeah, sure,” Coleman joked back with a smile. When the cook disappeared behind the swinging doors that led to the kitchen, Coleman said in a whisper, “Tell me everything you saw.”
“They call themselves the Frenzied, and I think…I think they are more than just killers. I was standing in this room, like an auditorium, with this girl. She was singing, and I had Lizzie.”
“Lizzie?”
“My guitar. I had it with me in my dream. I dreamed about this place before, right before Debbie disappeared. I mean, before she was killed. We both dreamed about it. I woke up to her screaming and she had this weird wound on her wrist and her window was open and I think someone broke in but—”
“Okay, slow down.” Coleman dug a notebook out of his worn briefcase. “I’m going to take some notes, if you don’t mind.”
“No, go ahead. The girl in my dreams, Vanessa, they killed her. They ripped her up.” I sobbed at the memory but didn’t let my emotions keep me from telling Coleman everything. I had to tell someone what I had seen. I couldn’t bear all this by myself.
“Do you know who Jax Staff is? The front man for Urgent? He was the emcee. He shoved her into the crowd.” I shivered as I dumped a few tablespoons of sugar in my coffee. I stirred it with no intention of drinking it. I had no appetite whatsoever. “They call themselves the Frenzied. Their eyes glittered like animals.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever shined a light at a raccoon? Their eyes glitter a little. That’s what I saw. The eyes of the Frenzied glitter when they are hungry. They made the most terrible sounds when they were…well, you can imagine. She begged for her life, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t help her!”
“Keep your voice down. No need to get these people involved too, Levi.”
I don’t know why, but I laughed at his worry. “Oh, it’s too late. The Frenzied know all about us. They mentioned your name. They said if I didn’t come to Crush tonight at nine o’clock, they would kill everyone I knew, including you. I have to go, but not just for that.”
“Good Lord,” he said as he dropped the pen on the table. His face turned ashy pale hearing this news.
“Melissa is alive. The Creep says if I want to see her again, I have to come. I know they are going to kill me, tear me up like Vanessa, drain me like Debbie, but I must go for Melissa. I have to. I love her.”
Charles put his pen and notebook back into his satchel. “I think we should both go to Loomis and tell him about this. Pass right by Reynolds, though. He’s an ass. He’s never going to take us seriously. Even I find it hard to believe even though I know it’s true.”
I shook my head, my longish hair brushed against my neck. “They’ll die if we do. It’s bad enough that I involved you. I’m sorry, Mr. Coleman.”
“Kid, I was involved long before you came along. Don’t sweat it. If I can survive Puerto Rican drug smugglers and a stint in the Army, I can survive the Frenzied, or whoever they fancy themselves to be.”
“You think that but wait until you can’t move or speak or do anything but obey. It’s like being in hell. Everything is happening to you, and you can’t prevent any of it. I wish I had died instead of Debbie. I wish for it every minute of the day.”
“Everyone who loses someone feels the same way. It’s natural to feel guilt when a loved one dies, especially so young and unexpectedly. I’m sorry you experienced such a thing. Tell me about Debbie. What was she like?”
My voice shook as I told him about her love for unicorns and her family—ironic that unicorns live forever in mythology, I choked back tears. I told him about how Debs also hated it when I stole pens from her desk. How she was always so worried that I was going to leave her, but in the end, she left me. I was dabbing at my eyes with a paper napkin when the food arrived. I didn’t want to be hungry, but I was starving. I thanked the cook and immediately pierced one of the runny yolks with a toast point.
“As long as you remember her, she will always be alive. That reminds me of something. Wait a second.”
He dug in his briefcase and took out a worn manila folder that I could see was stuffed with black and white photographs. He glanced at me worriedly and then picked the folder back up and carefully skimmed through the contents until he found what he was looking for.
“Do you recognize this young woman?” He shoved the picture in front of me, and my throat immediately felt dry. My appetite left me as I picked up the picture and stared at the pretty face that looked back at me.
She had tan skin, short, curly dark hair. Silver earrings and a warm smile. This was Vanessa. Beauty, a victim of the Frenzied.
“That’s Vanessa. The girl from my dream.”
He slid the picture back in the folder and sighed as he leaned back in the booth. “I was afraid of that. This is Vanessa Traywick. She’s missing…or was missing.” He tapped the folder with another sigh and shoved it back in his briefcase. We didn’t say anything for the next few minutes, just drank coffee and avoided looking at each other.
“What’s the matter with the eggs?” Tom asked when he came back to retrieve our plates.
“Nothing. Just leave them. We’re not done yet.” Coleman grinned up at him. “No sign of Bonnie yet?”
“Nah, she’s probably just hungover.” The doorbell rang lightly as another customer came in for breakfast and Tom excused himself.
Coleman poked at his food, but I could see he didn’t have much of an appetite either. “I won’t let you go alone tonight. I’m going with you. I’ll linger in the background. You don’t know what all I’ve sacrificed to nail down this story.”
I shook my head and frowned at that idea. “I can’t let you do that. You have no idea what you’ll be sacrificing. You won’t just die. You’ll die a horrible death. A painful, torturous death. I can’t have another one on my hands. I have to do this by myself.”
“Whether you approve or not, I am going to that club. I can handle myself, Levi.”
I swirled the remnants of the coffee in my cup before slugging it down. “You’re right, of course. I can’t stop you. I’m just warning you. Hey, one more thing. Have you heard of a Sustainer?”
“A what?”
“A Sustainer. That’s what the Creep called me. He said I wasn’t dead yet because I was a Sustainer. I was just wondering what that meant.”
He chewed on a crust of toast. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he said. But come to think of it, it does sound familiar. I’ll do some research today, see what I can dig up. By the way, you mentioned that you won the tickets from a radio station. Was that a call-in thing?”
“No. Apparently I won the tickets fro
m some drawing they had.” My heart sank as I remembered Hillbilly John’s voice on the radio. Rat bastard! He must have been in on it too! “It was a blood drive. My name got put in the hat at last year’s blood drive at city hall. Melissa entered too.”
“Interesting and morbid,” he said as he put money on the table for the bill. I offered to chip in, but he refused. “Least I could do. Look, do you have a few more minutes? I need to share something with you, but we cannot discuss it here.”
“Sure,” I said, wondering why he couldn’t have told me during the last thirty minutes we’d spent together.
“They read thoughts you know, so we have to be careful.”
We left the deli with what felt like a thousand eyes on us, but I’m sure it was my paranoid mind working overtime. He walked to his ramshackle car and he looked around before opening the door and getting in—way to look suspicious, I thought.
Coleman leaned across to let me in. “I’ve never shown anyone this before, and just to invite you into this knowledge places me in greater danger. I work alone, but it is becoming a job for more than one person.” He turned the ignition, and I noticed an agitation and fear in him I hadn’t previously noticed.
We exited the deli and he surprised me by taking the road to the left, a direction that will take us out of town. Was this some sort of ruse where the authorities are going to find my body a week or so later naked and in a field with signs of a struggle and sexual abuse?
I looked at him briefly as Coleman kept his eyes on the road to assess my chances of overcoming him should it be required. I wasn’t concerned unless he had a weapon with him. I then considered that he may have put something in my drink or my meal. The eggs did taste a little off, but that is the norm for that establishment. He occasionally looked up at the sky, like he was watching for a bird or a plane.
We drove for a mile or two and reached the storage units situated by the interstate. We pulled in and he reached for a key under the sun visor. Coleman got out and I followed him to the glass front door of the facility. He opened it with the key and put it into the side pocket of his jacket.
The lights flickered as he turned on the switch. They blinked for a bit and then flooded the room with abusive white light.
“Follow me,” he said as we made our way along the cement floored corridor, echoing as we went. If anyone or anything was waiting for us, they now knew we were coming.
We moved past rows of storage units with orange roll up doors, the kind you pull up from the bottom. Each one locked with a different kind of padlock. My mind whirred with what each might contain. A dungeon for erotic play, housing a giant cross with ankle and wrist restraints? And a rack on the wall for a selection of paddles and whips. Or maybe a floor to ceiling stash of the purist white cocaine, all bagged and ready for distribution. How about a witch’s lair, with a cauldron and a pentagram drawn on the cold hard floor in chalk—maybe some shelving with jars of roots, herbs, and animal parts.
I am sure the boring truth was nothing more than children’s summer lawn toys, a contractor's power tools, a snowmobile, and late grandma’s sofa, along with her dining chairs, and muumuus.
We reached the end of this stretch and other corridors splayed out in several directions. Charles Coleman swiftly moved right into the darkness and flipped another switch which illuminated another corridor. He then stopped in front of a unit. It was indistinguishable from the rest, other than to have the number 101 stenciled above the door. He rustled around in his pocket once more as he glanced around, and then bent down to unlock the padlock.
This guy was making me nervous and no amount of screaming in this concrete box on the edge of town would facilitate my rescue. I needed a weapon. Maybe that padlock? I could clock him in the head with it, if it came to it.
I expected him to pull up the rolling door in one swift noisy move to reveal the mysterious contents to me, but in a complete lack of showmanship he slowly clicked it up one inch at a time in a painfully anticlimactic way.
I always thought storage lockers were for two types of people. Men who are married, but still want to hide all their stuff from their bachelor days. Like questionable home projector films, comics, Superman action figures, and neon bar signs. Or women who believe freedom is having a bigger closet—so boxes of shoes, plastic bags full of handbags, and an antique cedar chest sitting on four bricks stuffed with inexpensive jewelry.
I pondered this during this tediously slow disclosure. What was Charles about to present? Coleman wouldn’t likely have anything interesting squirrelled away but then again, it’s the boring ones you least suspect.
The door reached the conclusion of its slow journey to show darkness. Charles reached up and felt along the wall for the light switch. He removed an old kerosene lamp from a hook. He fetched his lighter from his pocket and lifted the bulbous glass lantern. He reached in and flicked a flame that caught on the wick. He brought the glass back down again. It took a second for the light to grow as he fiddled with the knob to adjust it. The 5 x 10 space now presented itself in the greasy flickering glow.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I uttered. “How old is that thing?” He said nothing, but the silence was that of a proud collector showing a semi-interested passerby their lawnmower collection.
“This is two years of work, Levi.”
And it looked like it.
From floor to ceiling, all around the walls on every conceivable space, I saw maps, charts, grainy photographs, police records, and newspaper articles. Notes and streams of writing appeared in every area in a sharpie, and red darning wool stretched across the collage from pin to pin like a giant cobweb.
“You know you are going to lose your deposit, right?” I said sarcastically as I followed him. He ventured further in, and I followed him.
A single tubular steel chair positioned in the middle of the floor was the only piece of furniture in the place. I gazed in amazement at the forensic photographs of half-eaten bodies, mostly female, in various states of mutilation. A portrait of a fine-looking girl was pinned to each one to remind the viewer this was not the window of a butcher’s shop, but a daughter, mother, or wife. They were mostly high-school or college graduation portraits.
I noticeably gulped. Yellow and faded newspaper articles linked many of the parts together with his cats-cradle of wool.
I also saw and recognized the sleeves from all the Black Knights’ albums from my own collection—he’d scribbled the lyrics out on notepaper. Ticket stubs from all over America were attached to them with paperclips. I noticed Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Minneapolis, and many more.
“Have you not considered stamp collecting or the merits of caring for small, caged birds?” He closed the door back down behind us.
I stepped back to gain a wider perspective. I saw the ceiling and floor glistening in the lamplight like dewdrops on a moonlit lawn. “What is all that?” I asked and pointed stupidly.
“That is like silver foil. I use it like wallpaper to cover every inch of space before I place the evidence up. I don’t know if it works as a barrier for the creatures to not access my thoughts and in turn find this location, but I have been here sometime… and so far, so good.”
“Isn’t foil made from tin or aluminum?” I questioned.
“Yes, this has silver in it, I buy it in sheets from the South Asian store in town. The one with the Bruce Lee posters and the nunchakus. They have bags of rice outside, and pyramid walls of canned coconut milk in the window. They call the sheets vark, they use it in desserts or some such thing. It sticks to your fingers and clothing with static and is a bitch to get up!”
I nodded in agreement, as if I’ve spent a lifetime cursed with South Asian dessert disasters.
I ran my hands over all the evidence and information in a state of awe. He followed me with the lamp to make sure I didn’t miss a headline from any newspaper. Then I saw some zoom lens photographs of some individuals I recognized.
It was Mr. Johnson, my school shop teacher. I tho
ught I’d recently seen him on the bus, but it has been a few years since my school days. “What is he doing here?” I asked.
“That is a very brave man, he is a resistance fighter, an underground militia leader.”
“You mean a vampire hunter?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say so.”
“You are shitting me… old Mr. Johnson is Van Helsing! He was marking me down on my spice rack during the day and slaughtering vampires at night!”
“Not quite,” Charles said, “But there are underground movements, little pockets scattered across the states. He was much younger when he started. He lost his niece to one of these vile creatures twenty years ago. He can now dedicate his time fully in retirement with other elite crack team slayers.”
“Well fuck me, who knew!” I couldn’t wrap my head around all this.
“He has come up against many of these beings over the years. He has the scars to prove it. Several fingers of his fingers were bitten off in one famous encounter with a vampiric mall cop outside JC Penney in 66.” I could scarcely believe what I was seeing and hearing. I guess he wouldn’t have a shortage of stake making materials.
“I remember him smelling like onions all the time!”
“Garlic, Levi. Would you go into battle not surrounded by garlic? It is sewn into his coat, and he distills the oils to use on his skin.”
“I bet Mrs. Johnson is happy with that arrangement.” I quipped.
In the same image I noticed the kid with the lazy eye from the same bus. Mr. Johnson was talking to him and they were handing each other equipment. “I’ve also seen that kid too.”
“Yes, that is Nick Stransky, one of the deadliest shots with a crossbow… a garlic infused bolt through the heart slows them down pretty quickly.”
This was a crazy world I was entering. I wanted this cold sea of reality to stop lapping at my feet and be replaced with a reality I was more comfortable with. Perhaps one that involved mac and cheese, hot baths, Q-tips in my ear, warm bread, the smell of leather, Grandad’s toffees, and the theme to Sesame Street.
The Vampire's Song (Vampires of Rock Book 1) Page 11
