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.”