from Sudden Cool Dark

Dalton reserved one of the small study rooms available. Inside, there was a table and three chairs. He set up his lap top and waited for Barb to bring him the books or for Ms. Roberts to show up, which ever came first.

Barb showed up a few minutes later, a little flustered but cradling a pile of books in her arms. She laid them out as gingerly as possible on the table next to Dalton’s computer. They were an eclectic variety of texts. Dalton sifted through the pile one by one until he had a few distinct heaps: local geography and history, the Catholic Church, vampire novels. The latter pile included Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Anne Rice and others.

“They checked out these books?”

“Well, they usually just looked at them in here.” She gestured to the walls and then made one of those characteristic pauses before looking back at him. “Well, not here, of course!” She laughed. “I forget that this place is so new. We were in the trailer back then. Gosh, it has been a long time.”

“Tell you what,” Dalton said, “I’ll just look at all this while I wait. When Ms. Roberts shows up, please send her in.”

Barb nodded, smiling and left. 

Dalton perused the piles of books disinterestedly. He had never read any vampire books but he had seen some movies. Gary Oldman. Winona Ryder. Tom Cruise. Brad Pitt. He thought about the stake in the John Doe’s body.

The books on Catholicism were very old. There was an old missal. He had never owned one before but he knew what they were. They contained the guide to liturgies, particularly the mass. He flipped through it. Each page was divided into two columns of words. One in Latin, the other in English. That might come in handy. He started a new pile: Books he would check out.

He started into the pile of history books. There was a history of Arizona, a history of the Southwest, a few books on the Anasazi, the Hohokam and the Mogollon. The latter seemed to be the most worn. Finally, there was one book about local history called the Witch Cave Massacre. He flipped it open and immediately noticed that someone had written a familiar phrase on the inside cover in red ink.

Satan is King.

from Night Life, an American Gospel Story

A taxi pulled up beside us.

“Sean!” Teresa waved one fleshy brown arm out the back window of the taxi.  “Hop in!”  Sean got in the car while I paid for the coffee and tipped the waiter. 

When I got in Teresa had one arm wrapped around her new boy.  She was an American but often mistaken for a local with her mother’s big, dark, Spanish eyes and her father’s Haitian skin and large lips.  She was big all around and you knew that someday she would be very fat.  I don’t know why Mike still kept her around.

She had met Sean two years ago at a Catholic orphanage in Guatemala when he first arrived there as a volunteer.  A few months later she left the missionary life but kept up a correspondence with Sean.  She met me in a club a few weeks after my arrival in town.  She was already with Mike by then, so I never knew her, as did Sean, in her previous incarnation.

I introduced Sean to Mike, who grunted a salutation in reply.  Mike had a black goatee to go with the white T-shirt and rippling arm muscles that perfected his ex-con look.

At a restaurant named “Dos Hermanos” we ordered sea food.  Teresa ordered her favorite.

“Shrimp!” She licked her lips after she said it. “We know what that’s good for, right?” She laughed her evil laugh.

Sean glanced at each of us.  “What?”

“Makes me frisky.” Teresa said, raising and lowering her eyebrows rapidly.

“Oh.”

After we ordered, Sean asked Teresa how the painting was going.

“What?”

“Painting.” Sean smiled. “You’re an artist, remember?”

Teresa laughed her fake laugh. “Right.  I’ve done a few.  It’s not as easy or cheap to get art materials here as I thought.”  She looked around the room as she spoke.

“The night life here is distracting.” Mike interjected.

“Can’t wait to go dancing!” Teresa said, turning suddenly back to us, hair flying.  She smiled and moved her torso as if already at the club.

“Where’s a good place to write in this town?” Sean asked me.

I told him about my favorite air-conditioned café and about the library at the cultural center.

“Not the University?”

“There are too many distractions there.”

“His conquests.” Teresa said, giggling.

“Your conquests?” Sean asked.

“I’ve gotten involved with a few students.”

I changed the subject to college experiences, something Teresa, Sean and I all had in common.  Obviously, Teresa had not been honest with the boy about our lifestyles.  She had invited a vegetarian to a carnivore’s fiesta.  I guess I should have known, since he had been a missionary just days before.  But Teresa had come from the same place and I assumed she had invited a kindred spirit out of repression.

“What are you doing here, Mike?” Sean suddenly asked.  I wanted to scream at Teresa for letting him come so ignorant.

“You ask a lot of questions.” Mike replied.

“Mike is independently wealthy.” Teresa volunteered, stroking Mike’s shoulder.

“Oh.”

Just then the food arrived.

“Poor little bugs.” Teresa said, bringing a spoonful of rice and shrimp to her lips. “So many must die so that I may be satisfied.”

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.” Sean announced.

“About satisfying Teresa?” I asked.  Mike coughed. Teresa smiled, chewing with her mouth closed and those lips working.  Sean’s simple Irish face turned red.

“No, about death.  The end of things.  You know.  Look at this little thing.” He impaled a shrimp with his fork and raised it to eye level between all of us. “We’re on the other side of him now.  We used to live in the same world, but we’re on opposite sides of a line now.  He’s in the past, we’re in the present.”

“You’re not turning into a vegetarian, are you?” I asked.

“No.” He placed the shrimp in his mouth and began to chew, as if to demonstrate his dedication to carnivorousness.   “I’ve just been thinking about what it will be like to be on the other side of that line, to be in the past, to be dead, to not remember any of this.”

“Ugh.” Mike commented, gnashing shrimp corpses vigorously in his partially open mouth.

“Don’t you believe in Heaven?” I probed.

“I do.  I really do.” Sean replied. “But I don’t really want to go there. I like life.”

Teresa gave him a high five across the table. “I like to hear you talk like that!”

Sean smiled. “It’s always been hard for me to understand those stories of saints that welcomed death and begged for it as a release.  No image of paradise has ever attracted me more than my own life.  No amount of suffering has ever made me want to die.”

“Maybe it’s because you never suffered.” Mike offered.

“Maybe so.” Sean replied.

“But you worked at that orphanage.” I said. “Teresa told me about how awful it was.”

“That’s not suffering!” Mike laughed.  Teresa ate. “That’s watching suffering.  That’s TV!”

“You’re right.” Sean admitted.  “But I was never under the illusion that I was suffering there.”

There was a lull in the conversation and for a few minutes we all ate intently.  Finally, Teresa asked Sean about his poetry.  She expressed admiration for the poems he had mailed her and asked if he had published any.

“Quite a few, actually.”

That bitch had known the answer to that question, I’m sure.  He must have tooted his horn in the letters he sent her.  But she knew that I had not published anything besides tourist journalism.

“I’ve written one of my old professors about putting together a collection through the University Press.” He added.

“You think you’ll ever go back and get an MFA?” She continued, staring into his eyes across the table.

“After a while, maybe.  If I put out a collection I could probably get a position as an instructor in the intro classes to help cover tuition.”

Less than half an hour later we were all done.  Mike tossed a bunch of currency onto the table.  “Let’s go dancing.”

We headed to Club Pasion. Like all clubs, Club Pasion made conversation impossible.  We were reduced to speaking with the facial expressions that are the real root of human language.  Millions of years ago our hairier, thick-skulled ancestors furrowed brows to inquire, smiled with delight, rolled eyes in disbelief.  So did we, using sequences and permutations of sequences to ask and answer questions or simply express some feeling.

I drank a lot that night.  It’s hard for me to remember much.  I do remember the pulsing music, the strobe lights, hundreds of young people writhing against one another, slick with sweat, eyes closed, not smiling.  I remember Mike disappearing for a while.  I remember Teresa dancing with Sean, always very closely.  I watched his face, saw the unbelievable opportunity rise into eyes that widened somewhat while retaining, if not increasing, their focus.

Then they were gone, too.  Mike reappeared and took me home.  Outside my apartment, as I stepped out of the taxi, he grabbed me. “No,” I mumbled, breaking free, and went inside.

This complete story is found in American Gospel, a collection of fiction about the American Dream and its end.

...the folly of all flesh

At the main entrance above the floor of the kiva, at the top of the stairs, two figures appeared. One was Alicia, still dressed as she had been in the desert. She was sensationally sexual, reminding Thomas of those paintings of women in the apartment where he had danced with her so many years ago. Her pale skin, contrasted with her raven black hair, turned heads, even those of the Pseudo-Mogollon. Unenthusiastic before, they now appeared to believe that a goddess had entered the kiva.

Thomas assumed that the other figure was Miller. Naked, his form was flawless. He appeared neither young nor old. Muscles rippled in his chest, his thighs, his shoulders, arms. Thomas thought of Adam and Eve, prior to the Fall. Looking at the quietly stunned, subdued reaction of the crowd, he also thought of Christ and Magdalen. He thought of Greek gods, Apollo and Athena, Mars and Aphrodite.

The two idols came down the stairway, hand in hand, and moved through the silent, adoring crowd. As they approached the table they separated and maneuvered around each side of the altar table before joining on the other side and standing just a few feet from Thomas, facing him on the cross.

Once they were close, Thomas was strangely unimpressed with their bodies, perfect though they might have been for runway models or exotic dancers. Now they were just bodies, momentarily arranged differently than that of Dominic but ultimately subject to the same derangement and decomposition.

The mysterious two looked up at him. Miller’s gaze was vacant. In Alicia’s dead eyes was the folly of all flesh.

from Sudden Cool Dark

And then there were the devil-worshipers.

They were not a distinct population of Carlson, like the Catholics, the Baptists or the Native Americans. They did not announce themselves but Dalton had teased out their existence from newspaper reports extending back more than a century.

Here and there, incidents of vandalism. The phrase Satan is King had not appeared for the first time over the doors of old Holy Spirit Catholic Church on the most recent Thursday. Someone had been scrawling the words on the walls of homes, in alleyways and on the exteriors of churches for decades. The local Catholic Church had taken the lion’s share of the graffiti.

The incidents had all occurred far apart, separated by years. Only by looking back through news reports for a century could the detective see a pattern. It was as if someone had not wanted to draw too much attention to their animosity.

And the disturbances were not limited to graffiti. There were occasional disappearances, animal mutilations. Public speculation about causes ranged all over and included UFOs.

Father Joe had stated that the last incident at the church had occurred several years ago. A Christ child was stolen from the nativity scene in 2010. But Dalton learned that in 2005 something truly dire had happened. The detective was not sure if local police perceived a connection.

In the fall of that year, a house fire had completely consumed the palatial residence of Samuel Ellsworth, an elderly man and the last remaining heir of one of the largest plots of ranch and farm land in the region. Mr. Ellsworth had not been found in the home nor had anyone been hurt. Indeed, it was believed that Mr. Ellsworth had been suffering from advanced dementia. He remained missing.

Dalton might have ignored this piece of information completely had it not been for something that had occurred at roughly the same time and subsequently had been mentioned in the following edition of the Carlson Gazette.

A deceased John Doe, middle-aged and white, had been discovered in the desert just outside of town. Completely naked, his body torn by wild animals. His identity was never determined but investigators were certain that he was not Ellsworth.

Wedding

[This story is found in American Gospel, a collection of stories by Robert Paxton.]

Claudia Noraima Neria Montufar, a young Honduran woman who had arrived in the US unceremoniously (and without permission) two years ago, was about to become Claudia Barnes, wife of Jeffrey Barnes.  Those around her that Sunday morning at the tiny, Catholic church in Carlson, Arizona thought that this must be the happiest day of her life.  The Americans present, largely Jeff’s family, smirked inwardly as they thought this and glanced at her swelling abdomen.  The Mexicans and other undocumented individuals present envied her.  Most of them had false papers with varying levels of believability.  Some had none at all and lived every day in fear.  Claudia was going to become legal, join herself officially to the great machine of sustenance that was the United States.

She would have liked to feel good about her wedding.  She would have liked to feel good about anything.  Claudia’s barely kept secret, unknown even to her friends and certainly unknown to her future husband and the father of her child, was that she was insane, and had been so since she crossed the border into the U.S.

This insanity she had managed to submerge in constant activity, any job she could take, any act she could perform.  This had carried over into her sexuality when she met Jeff.  At first, before she got pregnant, before he perceived that his life had been ruined and began to drown slowly in liquor until his death in a car accident a few years later, Jeff had joked with his friends that he’d found a nympho. 

But Claudia, unlike real nymphomaniacs, did not want frequent sex because she confused sex with the love and affection which she starved for.  Claudia liked sex because it felt good and it took her mind off the awful thing she had done that drove her crazy, the terrible deed that haunted her dreams, the gruesome ordeal she remembered every morning when she woke and plunged into madness again, her mind filled with the screams that she had stifled.  She had held them inside as she did it and now she heard those screams all day, every day. “Twenty-four seven,” Jeff had said to her once, about her sexual needs.  She knew all about twenty-four seven.

The church was simply a house with one large room devoted to mass.  The Catholic community in Carlson considered itself small, consisting mostly of retirees, snow birds from the East and the Mid-West come to enjoy the weather as they faded away.  There were many young Catholics in the area, but they were Mexicans or Central Americans and felt unwelcome in the church where no one spoke Spanish and there was an insignificant shrine to the Virgin hidden in a back room, like an old, mad parent.  They only came for baptisms, marriages and deaths.  So they had come in large numbers, standing in the dining room because the pews were full, to see one of their own make it to safety.

Claudia hoped, without really hoping, that God would bless her and erase her memory, take the screams from her head.  She had confessed it all the very next day, two years ago in El Paso, only to learn that it was not a sin.  The young American priest, in slow, awkward Spanish, had said that yes, there were sins involved in her story, but that which truly weighed on her was not a sin.

“You were forced to do it.” The priest said, “Besides, she was already dead.” Then he had told her about the team of South American soccer players who had survived a plane crash in the Andes only by consuming the flesh of those who had died.  That was not a sin, either, he explained.  God understands.

Why couldn’t it be a sin so that she could be forgiven?

So here she was two years later, pregnant, at mass in a strange church in stranger land, with a man she didn’t love and could barely understand beside her, ready to be married.  Yet those two years were a series of blurs, scenes barely noticed as she struggled to distance herself from the horror inside, the other scene, the never-ending scene that played again and again in her memory.  That struggle continued right up to the present.  Even a sane person could not have kept from thinking about it. 

A large crucifix hung on the wall behind the altar table, Christ’s tortured carcass nailed to it for eternity.

During the homily that she couldn’t understand, Claudia got up as discreetly as possible and went through the door to the dining room.  Rosa Maria Rivas, a friend from the hotel where they both worked as housekeepers, lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Voy al bano.” Claudia said as she passed.

“Nervios.” Quipped Rosa Maria, smiling and winking at the other Mexicans standing in the dining room, listening without comprehension to the priest they could not see.

In the bathroom, running cool water into her cupped hands before applying it gently to her face, it was no better.  It had happened in a bathroom.  She looked into the mirror at her dull, terrified face and remembered doing the same thing in a filthy bathroom in El Paso after passing the last condom filled with cocaine and cleaning the feces off them in the sink.  She also remembered the sound of Veronica’s body hitting the floor in the other stall, and the sound of someone gurgling.  These thoughts drove her from the church bathroom, her face still moist from ablution.

But walking back to mass through the dining room Claudia could not fend off images of Veronica’s quivering flesh and the foam dribbling from the corner of her mouth.  Claudia had known right away that it had something to do with the drugs inside them, their tickets across the border.   

When she resumed her seat, everyone was standing.  The priest and the white people sang hosanna and it was time to kneel.  She knelt as she had knelt on that filthy floor in the El Paso bathroom to lift Veronica up onto the empty commode, as if she could will the condoms out of a dead body.  But soon Veronica was still and silent forever, the condoms trapped inside, the angry gringo in the bar outside getting angrier.

As she rose for communion, Claudia recalled the great depth of her fear thinking about that furious white man who only knew enough Spanish to tell them to go to the bathroom and take a shit.  She hadn’t seen any weapons, but she knew that he wouldn’t need one to hurt her or kill her.  When she finally had the courage to walk out of the bathroom, sit next to him in the dark corner and tell him, she nearly fainted when he pulled out a knife.  After he handed it to her she remained confused for a moment.  Using gestures, the gringo explained what he wanted. 

It was the wound in His side that did it, that pushed her past her limit.  Approaching the priest, she tried not to look over his shoulder at the gaping wound in Christ’s abdomen.  It took her right back to the moment she had spent two years trying to erase from her memory, the moment that had haunted her dreams, the moment when she cut into Veronica’s belly and sliced through a length of intestine to search for the condoms.  She had told herself that it was no different than removing an animal’s entrails back home, and used her memories of butchering to guide her hands through Veronica’s guts.

When the priest offered Claudia the body of Christ, the initial scream escaped her lips and her knees buckled. She remembered gently squeezing each length of intestine with trembling hands until she found a lump and pushed it toward the opening she had made.  As Claudia fell prostrate before the priest, hiding herself from Christ’s diffident agony, she remembered the pile of shit and swollen condoms in a pool of blood beside Veronica’s body when she was done, and counting them until there was one less than there should have been because one had broken and killed the Mexican girl.

Her cries were so horrible that Jeff’s family left the church, decanting into the parking lot.  Here and there clusters of people stopped and looked back, apparently considering their return.  Then a new shriek would pierce the calm air of a small town Saturday and they would continue their flight.  A few of them, the older ones, remembered the squeal of hogs being slaughtered on the farms they grew up on.  The rest remembered horror movies.  

Jeff himself did not flee but only retreated to the door way and watched her from there.  The priest had retreated to behind the altar table with his dish full of wafers, one hand held protectively over them.  Claudia screamed until Jeff, ignoring entreaties from his mother to come out into the parking lot, returned to her side, remembering the picture of the ultrasound showing his son.

Claudia rose to her feet with Jeff’s aid, eyes and mouth shut, holding in her breath like a drowning woman, tears darting down her cheeks along routes that would someday turn into wrinkles.  Eventually, the priest came out from behind his shelter and served Eucharist to the man and the woman as the others crept cautiously back into the church. 

The wedding ceremony began shortly afterward.  Claudia was able to open her eyes and breathe raggedly by the time it came for her to take the vows.  There was muted, embarrassed applause as Jeff kissed her briefly on one side of the mouth.

Somewhere in her fragmented thoughts, as Claudia stumbled out the door with her husband into the bright light of an Arizona day, she thought that maybe the worst was over, maybe she would be able to stop thinking about what she had done and enjoy life.

But the truth was that she was just completely broken, for good and forever.

The girl was obviously very young but she was also very attractive. Jailbait, Thomas thought. She was the kind of girl who was good-looking enough to spur you to try something that could doom you to a life of registering as a sex offender everywhere you ever lived. According to her name tag, she called herself Alicia. Jacob proceeded to pursue this fate.

“Why don’t you have a seat?” The cowboy said. He tugged her closer and moved to present his legs as a possible location.

She smiled but looked a little disturbed. She made a perfunctory effort to escape.

“Hey.” Thomas said gently. Here I go whiteknighting, he thought, already certain that he was going to cause himself trouble. “Hey.” A little more strongly.

The girl made more effort to get away, no longer smiling. Jacob grabbed one wrist.

“Now what’s this, honey?” Jacob twisted her arm so that all could see the tattoo there. She winced and cried out. Patrons were staring. The hostess had rushed into the kitchen.

“Nice.” Matthew slurred, leaning against Thomas to see better and enveloping him in the alcoholic stench of his exhaled breath.

The tattoo was a ram’s head inside a pentagram. Not so innocent, Thomas mused, shoving back against Matthew.

Alicia squirmed briefly out of Jacob’s grasp but he rose and grappled with her. Thomas also rose and grabbed at Jacob’s arms.

“Let her go, man. This isn’t cool.”

But Thomas was not really one of the cowboys. He was really a college boy, and his interruption was most unwelcome. Jacob turned on him fiercely, letting the girl go.

Next thing Thomas knew, he was on the floor. Idiot, he told himself, rising to his feet and dodging another swing from Jacob. At least I saw that one.

-from Sudden Cool Dark

from Sudden Cool Dark

The Fiend Ellsworth

Bereft in deathly bloom

Alone in a darkened room

The count…

Bela Lugosi’s dead!

-Bela Lugosi’s Dead, Bauhaus

After Neil parked the car, he turned off the motor but did not perform his usual energetic exit from the vehicle. Instead, he hung one arm over the steering wheel and stared glumly ahead at the Carlson Cliffs, an establishment whose signage announced it as the town’s premiere long-term care facility. A nursing home.

“This,” my new partner said as he pointed one finger of his suspended hand at the building, “is where we conduct most of our business these days.” He shook his head in a subtle, barely detectable and entirely un-Neil-like way. I understood him to mean that the vampire unit was utilizing nursing homes to sequester vampires.

I had nothing to add, so I got out of the vehicle. Neil did the same, slowly, like a teenager going into his house to tell his Dad that he just wrecked the car. For the first time, I walked frustrated in his wake, eager for him to pick up the pace.

Inside, we met our local contact.

“Len,” Neil said, finally resuming his usual smile, “this is Glenn the RN.” Neil chortled with glee at his little impromptu joke. Glenn was a bearded man in blue scrubs, apparently in his late thirties. “Glenn got a promotion, didn’t you?”

Glenn was the new director of nursing at the facility. Neil had explained to me earlier that policy was to use the usual cover story about national security and special dementia patients with these local contacts. We were not to discuss vampires on site. Glenn did not possess any special clearance and was under the impression that our subjects were just what we told him: men in possession of top-secret security clearances who could no longer be trusted to maintain secrecy due to the progression of their terminal disease.

In the privacy of Glenn’s office, Neil explained how our unit had facilitated Glenn’s ascension. “He helped us out a couple years ago with a subject here in Carlson and we helped him out. Now, we have a very solid facilitator here in town.”

Glenn was all smiles.

In Glenn’s office, I learned some of the routines and key terminology used but mostly it was just a meet and greet. I supposed that it was really an opportunity for Glenn to know my face, just in case I had to come in solo from the field.

The next morning, we went out to see Ellsworth.  The demented old man’s estate was east of town and north into the wooded canyons there.

Neil had spent the remainder of the previous day preparing me for my first encounter with one of our subjects.  That was the term that we were to use to describe vampires were potential vampires, especially when we might be over heard.  Neil was no Van Helsing.  Most of my new training was much like most of my old training.  A lot of paperwork, bureaucracy, fast food and coffee.

Our cover for this encounter was the state attorney’s office. Earlier that year, Ellsworth had gotten in an altercation with one of his employees. There had been a struggle and Ellsworth had hurt the other man significantly. Neil and I were posing as a government legal team there to depose him. Neil was the attorney and I was to be his note-taking paralegal.

I rankled a bit at this, thinking that I was certainly a better choice for the role of lawyer, but I knew that I would have to humor Neil for some time.

Normally this would have been handled in court but Neil had already contacted Ellsworth’s representative and proffered this special opportunity to depose him at home, due to the old man’s declining health.

We took Neil’s car.  After eating again at Jimmy’s, where Neil forked away another mountain of pancakes, we drove east on State Route 88.  The landscape there became dramatic.  To the south and on the right, the land sloped down to the trickling Verde river.  The terrain was barren except for mesquite trees and creosote bushes.  To the north and on the left, the land climbed into forested mountains.  Just across the road, there was already a noticeable difference in the vegetation, as if the road marked a sudden and significant change in climate.

After a few miles, with Neil noting the few habitations along the way and relating the idiosyncrasies of their owners or the otherwise obvious purpose of a business such as the Verde River Smoke Shop (you can get cheap tobacco there, Neil stated), we turned north onto an unpaved road.  Initially, there were no markings to indicate the name or purpose of the road.  Several hundred yards later, the road forked.  A small green sign set between the choices named the destinations.

To the right, down in the canyon, was the town dump.  I could not see it from that vantage point but the smoke from its perpetual fires ascended into the overcast sky.  “They’re always burning brush and other stuff in there,” Neil commented.

We turned left.  The Ellsworth Estate, the sign notified us.  The road climbed along an increasingly wooded cliffside.  It felt like we had traveled much farther away from Carlson than could have been possible in just a few minutes.  The woods became thicker.  I noticed what I thought were patches of snow here and there, in the darkness beneath the tallest trees.

When I look for what remains of this property today, using Google Earth, it appears that it is less than two miles from SR 88.  That morning, it felt much farther away.  Finally arriving at the gate which was the terminus of the road, I felt like I had lost time.  Like I was someone in an alien encounter story who suddenly found himself where he had always planned to go but with no idea how he had gotten there.

The gate itself was not unusually impressive.  It was a standard portal made of black rails, the kind you see barring the way into gated communities around the country.  Neil parked the car and waited. Beyond the gate I could see the road continue, winding its way up and through the woods.

Several minutes passed and that sensation of lost time came and went.  Strangely, Neil added no commentary to our delay.  He just looked out the window, checked the rearview mirror several times and whistled quietly.  I said nothing, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t having an acid flashback.

The next event did not help to dispel my sense of unreality.  A little girl appeared, stepping out of the woods and on to the road perhaps a hundred yards away on the other side of the gate.  She appeared to be on the edge of puberty, wearing a white dress with her black hair in pigtails. She sauntered down to the gate in no hurry, looking down or off to the sides, anywhere but at us.

When she finally arrived, she did not hail us or show any sign that she saw our vehicle. She just reached up to some unseen interface on the other side of the brick posts anchoring the gate on either side of the road. A moment later, the gate began to part. Neil accelerated gently and we resumed our climb. I looked out the window at the girl. She had turned and begun to walk back up the road, ignoring us completely. We were nearly out of sight before I saw her turn back into the woods.

Neil drove a quarter-mile before a large house suddenly appeared amid the trees.  The road made a circle in front of the house.  I thought of the Ouroboros, the ancient serpent that consumes itself.  Neil parked the car off to the right but not directly in front of the house.

The home itself was three stories high.  Originally painted white, it had seen better days.  Paint was peeling noticeably in several areas.  All the windows were shuttered.  Even from so far down below, I could see that the gutters were choked with pine needles and leaves.  There was no one around. 

“Well,” Neil announced, “they must know that we’re here.” And with that he opened his door and got out.  As he lumbered out of the vehicle, I noticed the holster for his service weapon briefly exposed by his movements.  Self-consciously, I touched my own weapon before getting out myself.

We climbed creaking stairs onto the porch and Neil knocked nonchalantly on the front door.  We waited a long time. I noticed a gentle breeze and sniffed the air.  It smelled pleasantly of pine trees and old campfires.

Eventually, there was noise inside the house, footsteps approaching the door.  The door shuddered several times as various clunky locks were undone.  It opened to reveal a tall slender woman dressed in a man’s T-shirt and apparently little else.  Framed by raven black hair, her blue eyes would have been pretty were it not for the bags underneath them. 

“Yeah,” she said.  Like the little girl on the road, she did not look at either of us.  I realized that this was probably her mother.

Neil introduced us and sounded very convincing.  It was the first time I had seen my new partner acting out a role.  I was impressed.  He sounded like a semi-hapless government worker, unsure about his purpose but genuinely sincere and apologetic.

The woman briefly brought one hand to her face.  She pushed one of her long black tresses back behind her ear.  I noticed a tattoo on the inside of her wrist but could not make out what it was.  She looked up and at each of us in turn.  I had seen such faces of devastated surprise on many meth addicts in my career but she bore none of the other normal markers of such habits.  Something entirely different had taken this woman for a wild and unexpected ride.

“What?”

Neil repeated himself and then asked if we could come in, already beginning to move his large frame into the doorway.

The woman said nothing.  She just let us pass and closed the door behind us.

The house smelled like an old house and nothing else. I had been expecting something awful. The dust lay thick on shelves and tables and you could taste it in the air. There was the faint odor of a toilet that had not been flushed after use. Other than that, nothing startled me.

It was dark. Even on a sunny day, the house would have been dark because every window was shuttered. Dull light seeped in at the margins. Otherwise, the house was lit internally by candles. Lamps and overhead lights were available but lit candles on a dining room table provided the only illumination in the entry way and living room.

The furniture was old and heavy-looking. Looking at it, I could tell that it had been hand-crafted some time ago, back when factories were not mass-producing mountains of cheap coffee tables and love seats for the average man.

Paintings of various sorts adorned the walls. Some were portraits, presumably of ancestors. Families gathered in their Sunday best stared back from eternity. Others were still-lifes and landscapes. In one, a river flowed through a desert valley and I presumed that it was a local setting.

I also noted a great empty space on one wall. Only later did I realize that a mirror had most likely occupied that area.

We stood in the dark for a few seconds. I turned to look for the sleepy woman who had let us in but she was inexplicably gone. I looked at Neil. He broke character, smiled like a rascal and winked at me. I said nothing. The silence was oppressive.

After a minute, I heard movement in the dining room, a chair scraping the floor. Then another. I leaned to peek and saw that there were people in there. Neil was already moving in that direction, lugging his hokey briefcase that was filled with a lot of official looking documents.

In the candlelight, I saw Ellsworth in the flesh for the first time. He sat with his hands on the table before him, staring at the lit candles in the centerpiece. As in his most recent photo, his hair was snow white, his skin smooth though still blemished with age spots. He looked like the definition of a hale and hearty old man. In fact, he appeared to be in better condition than everyone else in the house.

Everyone else included the man sitting beside him. Middle-aged and tired-looking, his mussed blond hair stood up and revealed thin spots on his scalp. He wore a T-shirt that advertised Dick’s Sporting Goods. Unlike Ellsworth, he looked directly at us.

“How can we help you gentlemen?” He said, providing us with a goofy smile.

Neil introduced us again. We were here to depose Mr. Ellsworth so that the case could move forward. This would allow the land-owner’s representative to proceed with the plea bargain already proposed. Again, I was stunned by Neil’s pitch perfect performance. I half-believed that we really were here to depose the old man.

While Neil was still speaking, Ellsworth finally looked up. First, he looked at Neil, who ignored him and gave all his attention to the disheveled man sitting across from him. Even then, just enjoying a presence in his peripheral vision, I was entranced by the old man. I could see that his eyes were exceptionally dark and deep. I wanted him to look at me. I barely restrained the desire to move, to raise my hand, to get his attention somehow, like a child begging for adult attention.

Then, as Neil summed up his opening presentation to the tired, bored-looking man sitting next to the object of my devotion, everything changed. Ellsworth turned his head and looked directly into my eyes.

I will not compare it to sex. The sensations, though, are related. When he looked at me it was the same shock, the same hit, that I got the first time a girl took my hand in middle school. It was not a climax of sensation but the first step into a world of pleasures that I had never considered possible before. I had the same desire that I had with that girl decades ago. To wrap her hand more firmly in mine, to get closer to her, to inhale her scent, to dive into the sea where she awaited me.

I began to get up, intending to walk around the table and take a seat at Ellsworth’s side.

Neil bumped into me. He had risen from his chair suddenly, more quickly than I would have thought possible for a man of his size and age.

“I’m very sorry.” He said, his voice now gravelly. “My assistant seems to have become ill. Give us just a moment, will you?”

He had me by both shoulders and manhandled me out of the room. I was looking back over my shoulder. I noticed Ellsworth’s unkempt companion and the amused look on his face before I got one last glimpse of my first vampire, staring into my soul as I was pulled away.

Neil worked the locks on the front door unbelievably fast and had me on the front porch, inhaling that pine scent, that taste of wood smoke in the air. It had grown darker outside, though the day had advanced.

“I think we got everything we need, buddy boy.” Neil said, pushing me toward the car. “Let’s split.”

As Neil drove the car around the circular driveway, the car naturally pulled right in front of the porch. From the passenger seat, I looked out the window. Standing there in his wrinkled T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants, Ellsworth’s human agent leaned on the wooden railing and smiled.

I was speechless until we were within Carlson town limits.

“Your briefcase!” I blurted. In my mind, I had been returning again and again to that scene in the dining room of Ellsworth’s mansion, analyzing a little more every time as I crept back up from whatever depths had claimed me there. Eventually, I had remembered Neil’s briefcase and Neil leaving it on the table.

“Hey, he’s back amongst the living!” Neil laughed. He patted me heartily on the back. “Don’t worry about it, scout. There wasn’t anything in there but those bullshit papers. Nothing that would tie it to us or incriminate us or anything. I was prepared for that little scene. It gave me all the confirmation I needed.”

As we neared the motel, I considered the difficulty of our challenge. If Ellsworth was going to stay on his estate, we would need a swat team to pick him up, given that the Temple may have had hidden resources in the surrounding woods. That did not seem to be within our bailiwick after learning everything that Neil had taught me about the parameters of our work and the scope of our authority. I expressed this concern to Neil.

“You’re right, this is a tough nut to crack.” He responded as he placed the car in the parking spot outside his room. “We’re going to have to settle this one the old-fashioned way and grease the motherfucker.”