by Meghan Tifft
Rory loosens a stake and flicks it, so it cartwheels hard at Dracula. And what is that—a spray bottle? “How did you get down here?” says Rory. “Why don’t you die?”
“How did I get down here?” Dracula feels a helpless bloom of confusion, even though he is bruised and affronted. “This is a joke,” Dracula manages, raising his hands. It has to be. Such a football concentration on Rory’s face. So this is Rory. He’s seen him, he realizes, all over town.
“You’ve been following me.” Is this who the girl was talking about? He’s anything but Dracula. Especially with his tool belt for killing Dracula.
“I came to lock up. What are you doing here?”
“How long have I been down here?” Dracula asks.
Rory points his finger. “You were not in that coffin when I carried it down. I put it here myself.”
“You put it here?” Dracula wonders why. As he looks around he’s completely without a clue, but the tiny snowball of light is enough to show him the door to back toward.
According to Rory’s bad choreography, he can still get out. Why would Rory back him toward the door?
“Do you have a key?” says Rory. The room feels smaller now, with them inside.
Dracula realizes he wants to know the same thing about Rory. “Did you do the blood? That bucket? What are you doing?” Dracula asks.
Rory bites into a knob of garlic and throws it at Dracula’s face. Does he think it’s a hand grenade? “How does it work?” says Rory, spitting.
“How does what work?”
“Your thing, how you do it.”
“I don’t do anything,” says Dracula, because he doesn’t, and that makes him feel just now like a very lame excuse for who he is.
“You killed Vanessa,” says Rory.
“That—” is confusing. “I didn’t,” says Dracula, because he knows he didn’t kill anybody. He knows he’s never seen death now. Looking up, he knows.
“You were there that day on the beach. I saw you.”
On the beach—everybody was on the beach, it seems.
“Where were you?” says Dracula. Now he’s at the door.
“You’re going to do the same thing to Lucinda.” Rory has stopped advancing now. “Let her go,” says Rory. “I actually love her. I do.” What’s that supposed to mean? Somehow, Dracula can’t believe it. He hurls a chair at Rory. Dracula has no space really to speak and he doesn’t know what he’d say if he did.
Now Rory holds up something. He jingles them at Dracula.
“My keys. How did you—”
“You wrecked my truck, you tool.”
“Oh—” says Dracula.
With a squeak of sneaker Rory lunges.
Dracula finds himself with all the time in the world to deflect Rory’s advancing jabs. He seems to be wielding a stake. Badly. It’s as if he’s picked the wrong grip and can’t find the proper stabbing posture. Maybe he came too close. They grapple half-heartedly, because Rory is now trying something else. “Shit.” Rory fishes in his belt, his hand or weapon snagged. It’s hard to tell what Rory’s actually mad about. There’s a body overhead and he’s talking about his truck. Dracula has been bullying him off with one chair and now he’s practically cleared the door for himself. He decides to put another chair between them, pushing Rory back like a cautionary snowplow. He heaves into Rory’s flank until he stumbles and sits on the coffin lid. Suddenly, and completely, it seems like Rory is drunk. He has to be drunk. Now, not to be deterred, Rory is unfastening the spray bottle and pointing it.
The body is teasing Rory’s halo of hair with its toe.
“Marguerite Green, 1491. Abner Mullins, 1702. Felicia Rhodes, 1636. Robert Mann, driving his betrothed home from an evening of dancing. Dolorous Potts, in the middle of wet-nursing a newborn babe.” Rory seems to be reciting these scenarios with a dull ire, each new register accompanied unevenly by a squirt from the bottle. He reaches back and scratches his head. “Does that hurt?” Then he looks behind him and jolts forward. “What did you do to Vanessa? Where is my sister?”
“I didn’t do anything.” The boot is now hanging further behind Rory’s deadpan head.
“You better not have done something to Lucinda.”
“Why would I do something to Lucinda?”
“Because you’re Dracula.”
Dracula, though he is, has never felt less like Dracula.
Rory is now bulging his eyes and blinking. The stinging jabs of water he squirts are freezing cold. He does not appear to notice what he’s doing.
“This is what my mother uses to water her plants.” His face crushes in.
Dracula, for some reason, can’t seem to leave though he’s at the door.
“I gave up girlfriends,” says Rory, on his own wavelength now. “I moved back home. I’m raising a baby all alone.”
“I—” Dracula finds himself ready to grimace out some lame dime-store encouragement, some magnet-rack inspiration. Can Rory focus on what’s important here? “You can—”
Rory stares at him, pig-eyed.
“I was going to kill you but I can’t even—even though you’re Dracula and—” He smashes the heel of his hand into his nose and rubs. For a while. “Just—” His face is blotching. His body sags. “She doesn’t even like me anyway.”
Rory’s slouch is now complete. It’s the saddest thing. Pitiful Rory. Pitiful in a way that makes Dracula suspicious.
Dracula shakes his head. He thinks of Lucinda, where she might be. “She might have broken up with me,” he says, for no reason at all.
Rory looks at him.
“Let’s—” Dracula goes for the flashlight. “Just—you want…?” Dracula has no template for this. He points the butt of the light over Rory’s head. “I’ll do it.”
Rory turns and stares, blank-faced. “Why did you show up here at all? You killed all my chances.” He’s looking hard at the body. “I can’t keep being by myself,” Rory says at the body.
Dracula, suddenly unsure, floats the light over him. He wonders if Rory killed this body. Maybe this was all about Rory doing something to himself. Because of Dracula? Now Rory does the worst thing. He pushes at the body. Swings it out like a heavy bag. “I sure as hell didn’t carry you in here,” he says and stands.
As Dracula keels back, the light falls upward and hits the waterlogged face, and suddenly there it is, ejecting its secrets, its tongue like a big brute snake. Dracula squishes in on himself.
“That’s not—” It’s not her. It’s not Lucinda but it looks like her.
“Lucinda,” says Rory.
He slugs it with dumb indifference. “That’s for the play.”
That’s when a door outside slams. And Dracula hears it—from outside their cage of confidences the boulder comes rolling down the stairs, just like that other night, when he was leaning elbow-deep in the mouth of the washer: the raucous slamming of one door, and then, as he predicted, the hurtling open of this. It hits him in the elbow and he’s blasted by a supernova of nerve pain, his whole funny bone gone cripplingly haywire.
Rory’s voice says, “What the—” before muffling.
It’s the knife salesman, or something like him, pesky and preternatural in gardening gloves and a beard, reaching down to scoop up the loose letters. A little bundle that Rory had teased apart. The golem takes one look at them and flinches back and runs.
“That was—oh my God,” says Rory, turning his smacked expression at Dracula. “That was my sister. My fucking little—” And up the stairs he goes.
Dracula is left standing in the silence. He’s left staring at the body. Why does it look like Lucinda but not? When he touches it, it’s hard as molded wax. This, he thinks, was not a great way to wake up. There’s a tall set of lockers. Where are the mattresses? There’s his coffin. It isn’t even his coffin.
When he goes outside, he’s in a hallway he doesn’t recognize. Speckled linoleum and gasping furnace. The corridor stretches in front of him.
Behind him, the
plaque on the door says PROP ROOM.
The TV
This could all almost be a sequel to her childhood, Lucinda thinks. It is a sequel to her childhood. Everything is still here, or here again, in variation. Waiting on the steps. Knocking with no answer. Walking through these rooms, lurid with TV illumination. When she got back to the apartment, the TV was on. Dark corridors on the screen, cables snarling. Just like the play. Nobody was there to pick her up from the play. She had to walk home all alone.
A man trips as he bursts out a service door. An empty lot. Much like the one she had stood in behind the theater. The TV flickers its candlelight of images. She doesn’t blame Dracula. She knows it’s her fault he doesn’t have a coffin. She knows he has no reason to trust her or do what she asks. Some men come running into a building, the wind peeling their coats. Stairwells of clattering footsteps. One man stands on a rooftop, panting. Another finds a patch of suspicious black in the ceiling, a tile skewed out of place. Now cut to the man of her nightmares ducking out of a car that he just swerved to the side of the road. Here he is climbing the hill. Was he chasing the woman up the hill? The one she just saw? Or was that actually him the first time? Perhaps the plot has just looped itself back to the scene where she first walked in. She didn’t expect to be coming back here tonight. She only came back to look for Dracula.
As the man climbs, the wig slides back on his head like a block of melting chocolate. He looks absurd but no less sinister. The man is the woman. She sees that now. “You’re not supposed to be here.” The man puffs and pants beneath the wig.
It was her father who said that.
You’re not supposed to be here. His hand flushed her out of the room.
This was one of the shows Vlad liked to watch. She can recognize all the characters now. It’s just hitting her this instant like a mallet in the knees. On this television, passing through rooms muted to Vlad’s nightly entertainment, without knowing it, she has been commuting back and forth across the very bedlam of her childhood. Now it is finally back to the same episode, on repeat.
“Vlad?” Lucinda can’t help it. Her voice comes out in a corroded whisper, afraid to stir some sleeping intruder. Why is the TV on? He never leaves the TV on.
Lucinda knows he must be somewhere—she knows it because of the clues he keeps leaving, little bland crumbs he has dropped here and there, declaring his continued existence. First the note that Lauren found, now the TV.
She wonders, what wild fangs of fate might he be snagged on right now. With her coffin tomfoolery, her adolescent gambling of his eternal constraints, Lucinda wonders if she killed him.
She looks down at the note. She doesn’t know how she can possibly keep thinking like this. About Dracula. She doesn’t know what suspends her in its cruel allure. It’s like something she can’t look away from.
Without the sound, cars swarm the screen and the room turns red and blue. Dracula had a thing about cop shows. Her father did too. She remembers that. Now the credits are rolling. It’s already over.
Her father would have left the TV going. He always got up and walked away when his show was over. It was up to somebody else to change the channel or turn it off. Vlad was different. He never did that. He always turned the TV off, with prompt intention. That’s why this was so strange. It was like her father was here tonight in place of him.
“You’re not supposed to be here.” That’s what her father had said. Lucinda had heard him and then she had ignored him.
That night, getting up from the TV, he was answering a knock on the door. She remembers following him. And the voice of the salesman, the way his drawl came drilling into the house like it was bringing with it some emergency. The knock on the door had been that way too. “Lemme ask you something,” she heard his voice say. She hears it now. “You got problems with vermin, contamination, plague? Something inside that’s got to be got rid of?”
It makes Lucinda think of the dog now. And of Dracula. Though this happened years ago.
“This can get it out,” the salesman said.
Her father had looked back at her. Then he had bought the knife.
Her mother seemed to think there was something special about the knife too. Whatever it was, they both wanted it when he was gone. When the knife had been his no one ever touched it.
Where is Dad? she remembers saying to her mother. Or maybe Daddy was what she had said. On that day, bright gray light was drifting down on them like a silent movie—or like surveillance footage. A clutch of birds galloped through the sky without a sound. Or else this was a dream. One of her childhood nightmares. In her dreams, her father always came out of the ductwork. He came out of the ductwork in her room and said if you want to do that, then go outside. I have work to do, said her mother, this time from behind the hedge. She was holding the knife. This was all in the dream.
What does the dream mean? Lucinda doesn’t know. Just like the play, it clings in scary little bits that she can’t shake off. She doesn’t know what these things are telling her about herself.
By now, the people have all left the play. Lauren said she was going straight to the party. Rory, when Lucinda left, was lost somewhere in the theater, putting away the props. She had no idea where he had gone to put the coffin. Had he brought it down there? It was not out here anymore. Lucinda needed that coffin, if she was going to have it for Dracula. It seemed like Rory had forgotten all about this. Or else he didn’t want to help her. It seemed like every person in the world had deserted her.
Lucinda clasps her coat. She looks around the shabby apartment. She often thinks that these things—these things inside her apartment, these thoughts and dreams inside her—are not really hers. They have always been just the set dressing of her life, plugged in and switched out and substituted. None of this is who she really is. Just like in the play she is not the woman but the woman’s spirit. Just like in the play they are all here to clutter around and tell her something. What they tell her is she shouldn’t be here.
Lucinda knows that already. She is ready to leave. She really is this time.
Outside, walking, she can’t decide where to go. She could go anywhere. But there is here, and there is where she just came from. Those places are real. The air stirs. It carries a mild mildew scent, a deep cellar chill into which she gropes along, down the damp cement, her shoes like tired tongues lapping and smacking. She can feel the fur of her parka going sticky on her neck. It seems like the clouds are moving too quickly, shredding apart and swishing off, half dissolved in their cosmic rush. Where to? That’s what Lucinda asks. She doesn’t blame him, but she can’t believe he didn’t come.
“Hi.”
He says it before she even looks. There he is walking up just like her but from the other way. She’s in front of the bus depot. She was just looking in the yellow vats of window, trying to see if the concessions girl was there. The one who used to stare at Dracula.
Lucinda’s a little surprised. What’s he doing here? Rory botches his smile. “Where were you?” he asks. She doesn’t know how to answer.
She used to come here to spy on Vlad. Why was Lucinda always spying? Her mother used to say—go your own way, steer your own ship. But it always seemed like she was joking, making fun of her. Lucinda never went her own way, steered her own ship. She should. That’s what she was thinking right now. She didn’t blame him, but she couldn’t wait for him.
Rory takes a big sniff of the cold. “It seemed like you—I thought maybe you were mad.”
“Oh,” says Lucinda. She realizes, dimly, what he’s talking about. The missed ride? “No,” she says. She does feel a soreness in her chest. She doesn’t want to leave Dracula. It seems so obvious now. He was never there.
“He took my car.”
She almost doesn’t hear him. “What?”
“I was really late for the play. Did you see me whiff my first lines?”
First lines? Why are they talking about this? Lucinda shakes her head. She can’t tell where Rory has really
come from. He doesn’t seem to know what he’s saying.
“Anyway.” Rory leans back and looks over her head, as if hair might be floating up there. Lucinda realizes how bad he feels. He really does feel bad for stranding her. Rory’s not so awful. He’s fine. She has to remember that. “So are you going in there? Gonna jump town?”
Lucinda looks in the window. She shakes her head. Maybe to get warm. She probably was going in there. Maybe.
Lucinda feels a little strange. “TV,” says Rory, following her gaze to the window. “Family court.” He leans back and grins. “Fun. My sister used to work here.”
“Really?” Lauren didn’t seem the type. Not for public drudgework.
“I ran into your boyfriend,” says Rory.
Lucinda looks from the TV. She feels a gaping rush. She feels a space that starts to fall.
“He was sleeping in the prop room,” says Rory, looking slightly fake amused. “He was just there in the coffin when I went to lock up.”
Lucinda can’t tell what Rory’s face is doing right now. She can’t tell what it’s telling her. “Are you serious?” she says.
“That guy sleeps like a corpse,” says Rory.
Now Lucinda is waiting for him to tell her he’s dead.
He’s not quite looking at her. “I read my lines over him. I even locked him in and left and came back. He would not wake up.”
“You locked him in?”
“I mean, isn’t he supposed to get up at night? Does Dracula like to sleep in or something?”
Lucinda feels a little bit banged around by Rory’s words. They seem like they’re turning into some kind of joke, by accident or on purpose. She can’t exactly tell.
“I had to lock him in.”
Lucinda feels so utterly unsure right now.
“I didn’t know what he was going to do. I mean, he’s Dracula. And I couldn’t find you. I thought—” he cuts himself off, now looking just as hurt by his own blunt force. He sips at the stinging air.
Lucinda really wants to ask a question.