Vampire Night

by Alice Bell

  By now I’m shivering. This isn’t a hang-over. I want to crawl back into bed but I have to find Zadie.

  I force myself to drink water. It sloshes in my stomach. I hold it down and slip into flip-flops and head out. It’s hard to think straight. Mist hovers on the snaky path. Monkeys throw things at me.

  At the bar, I force down a shot of Nescafe like it’s medicine. The guy who is always there in the morning, making scrambled eggs and cutting fruit, is an ex-pat from the States. He’s grizzled and heavily tattooed. “You look rough,” he says.

  I drain my glass and wince. “You know my girlfriend, blonde, tall—”

  He waves his hand. “Yeah, man.”

  “She didn’t come back last night.”

  He grimaces.

  “We were here… with friends,” I say. “I took off early.”

  “Shi-ii-it,” he draws the word out.

  “Thanks,” I say. “That’s helpful.”

  “Dude—”

  Afraid I’m going to puke again, I stagger away, stumbling off the wooden steps and into the courtyard. I brace myself against the wall.

  He follows me. “You’re in bad shape. Could be Dengue.”

  Fuck.

  “Or a bad case of amoebas,” he says. “You got to see a doctor.”

  “I’ve got to find my girlfriend.”

  I tell him about Heather and he takes me to her casa, ready with the key, in case she doesn’t answer. But Heather comes to the door looking fresh and rested in a red and yellow sundress. Her hair is wet. I want to strangle her. “Where’s Zadie?” I say.

  “Are you okay?” she says, like she cares. “You look like hell.”

  I walk past her and scan the room. I stride into the bathroom but I know it’s pointless. Zadie isn’t here. I hope to God she’s with one of the guys. Just so long as I find her.

  But she’s nowhere.

  Heather claims she left Zadie with her friends who are already gone, on the ferry back to the mainland. In San Jorge, officials catch up to the ferry but neither Heather’s friends nor Zadie get off the boat.

  Heather turns serious, as if just comprehending the reality of the situation. I’m grateful when she takes charge because I’m sweating bullets and the ‘policía’ are starting to look at me with suspicion.

  Hours or days blur into one another. I’m losing my shit, burning with fever. But I keep walking the beach and scanning the horizon. Three iridescent black feathers blow across my path. One lands softly. I bend over to pick it up, but the ground shifts, and I lose my balance. I reel on the sand, finding my footing, only to stagger away down the beach, like a drunk.

  Somewhere in the midst of an evening rain shower, Zadie’s pink dress washes up on shore. I’m the one who finds it.

  I sink to my knees, before passing out and falling into darkness.

  Scarlett

  “Devon?” I was still reeling from the feel of him in my hand.

  But he moaned. His skin gleamed with sweat. Drugs seemed the most likely cause of his sudden illness. Not that I knew much about drugs beyond the ones prescribed by my shrink. I’d always been scared of anything harder than alcohol.

  Of course, it could be the flu, or worse, sexually transmitted. I knew I should be careful. But his touch was so sure. And demanding. I’d been about to throw caution to the wind. Maybe fate had intervened, giving me a moment to rethink the situation, to be smarter, even self-preserving.

  And yet, taking in the shape of his face, his sensual lips, I felt only pure, irresistible desire.

  I was afraid no matter what I found out about him, whatever might be the cause of his illness, contagious or not, I would throw myself at him, as if to my own death, like a Kamikaze fighter.

  Already, emptiness was starting to gnaw inside me. The idea of spending the rest of the night alone, while he was in my bed, seemed especially cruel. So I climbed in and curled up under the covers. When he put his arm over me, I closed my eyes and felt the strangest sense of ease come over me.

  I never wanted to leave this dark place, next to him.

  NINE

  Scarlett

  Daylight crept under the curtains. Something heavy pressed down on me.

  Devon’s arm.

  I rolled away, thinking he would wake up. He didn’t. He hugged the pillow instead of me. I studied him in the semi-dark. Like always, my breath caught. He’d been in a bad way last night. I thought I should let him sleep but not for his sake. I was afraid when he woke, he would leave.

  He didn’t stir, not even an eyelid.

  I dressed without turning on the light. I shimmied into a black sweater dress, black lace panties and pink tights. After slipping my watch over my wrist, I tip-toed out of the room, closing the door behind me. It made a hushed click.

  Downstairs I opened the curtains. The sun melted through the clouds.

  In the bathroom, I washed my face and applied a dusting of powder over my freckles. I lined my eyes in black and tried to comb through my tangled hair. I felt tired, almost sore, like I was running a low-grade fever. What if Devon had given me something?

  When the phone rang, I raced to answer it. My hand shook as I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I whispered.

  “Scarlett.” It was Henry.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Um… what am I doing?”

  There was a long pause, like it was still my turn to talk. My mind reeled. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Why are you whispering?” he said, eventually.

  “No reason,” I spoke louder, glancing toward the doorway.

  Another long silence followed.

  At last, he said, again, “What are you doing?”

  “Right now?”

  “Or maybe just before you answered the phone.” I could hear his smile.

  I frowned, wondering if he was making of fun of me. I imagined Georgie standing beside him, trying to stifle a giggle. My gaze swept across the room to the bookcase. “I was in the middle of reading Proust,” I said. “Du côté de chez Swann…”

  “Oh, wow. In French?”

  “Absolutely.” I didn’t speak French.

  “I flunked out of French,” he said. “Forget about pronunciation. I couldn’t even ask someone to go to bed with me which is the first thing everyone learns, right?”

  I thought I heard movement upstairs and held the receiver away from my ear to listen.

  “Scarlett?” Henry was saying. “You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Listen, you want to get coffee? I could pick you up.”

  “Right now?”

  He made a funny noise. “Not quite but soon. Yeah?”

  I twisted the phone cord. “I can’t.”

  I felt a stab of regret. Being asked out by Henry West had once been a big fantasy. But that was before I caught him and Georgie laughing about me in the teacher’s lounge. And it was before Devon.

  I wondered if fantasies only came true after you didn’t want them anymore.

  * * *

  I made coffee and heated a chocolate croissant. Sitting at the kitchen table, I sipped and ate while reading exams.

  The girl who left early wrote: “Being a woman, I find it personally insulting and typically male that the narrator believed Annabel Lee had ‘no other thought’ than him. After the first stanza I knew we were dealing with an unreliable narrator and by that I mean totally psycho.”

  I circled ‘unreliable’ and wrote, ‘interesting’.

  “When I read the part about how he thought the heavenly angels coveted his and Annabel’s love, I wanted to laugh so hard, I was afraid I would end up crying and that scared me a little, like I might get the creeping creepies just from reading the poem. This I experienced all before the whammy of a climax where the narrator claims a ‘wind’ (faaaart!) ‘blew out of a cloud’ and killed his love. Seriously, I heard this clanging music in my head and had the sensation of witnessing a bloody stabbing in
someone’s shower. I liked the movie better.”

  I put an exclamation mark in the margin.

  “So. In conclusion, this is truly an infectious read, like an STI. Oh yeah, and to answer your question, duh, the guy was definitely obsessed. That’s putting it kindly. Maybe I’m not the best audience for this poem since I just got dumped. I hate love. It makes people insane.”

  I underlined ‘creeping creepies’ and wrote: Nice use of alliteration. At the bottom of the page, at the end of the essay, I scrawled C+ and drew an arrow to the next page, where I wrote: Full of passion and compelling ideas that prove nothing, not even that you actually do hate love. Do you believe all love is an ‘insane’ obsession, and therefore, should be hated? If so, you need to tell me that in the intro, prove it and tell me again at the end, when I am ready to believe you. An easier essay to write would be simply to prove to me that the narrator of the poem was obsessive. You might get an A. If you want an A+ then you have to make me hate love too. As it stands, I believe love can, and WILL, make the world a better place.

  It took several hours to finish grading the senior essays. My shoulders were tight when I was done. All of the assignments had one thing in common. They were a mess. Apparently, the seminar I’d given on the five paragraph essay had not been inspiring.

  I made more coffee and listened for signs of life from Devon. I envied people who could sleep like the dead.

  My first roommate in college enjoyed sleeping a lot. She treated it like a sport. When she’d turn off the lights at ten, I’d read under the covers with a flashlight, which drove her nuts, before she passed out cold. “For the love of God,” she’d say, like I was ruining her life. “Why don’t you have an iPad?”

  But I saw flickering shadows and shifting shapes behind computer screens, as if they contained gateways to secret worlds. Computers gave me vertigo, the same as if I was on the roof of a skyscraper and lured by the idea of jumping into thin air.

  I wrote all my papers by hand and went to the library to type them out as fast as I could. I never told my shrink about my phobia because I knew he would force me to confront it.

  Again, I thought of scheduling an appointment with Dr. Ess. I checked my watch. It was nineteen past one. On a Saturday. I’d have to use his answering service.

  The problem was, if I saw Dr. Ess, I couldn’t tell him about Devon. He would say I was in danger of developing an unhealthy obsession. And I didn’t want him to get in my way.

  Gazing out the kitchen window, I saw drops of moisture clinging to my grandmother’s roses. Would Dr. Ess believe me if I told him I’d already seen Devon long before he walked out of the shadows and into my life? What would he say to my fear that I’d somehow conjured Devon out of thin air?

  I cocked my head, thinking I heard movement above me but it was just the old house shifting. I decided to check on Devon and trailed my hand along the banister as I went up the stairs.

  Hovering outside the bedroom, I listened. When I heard nothing, I opened the door slowly. The floor groaned as I walked across it. Devon didn’t wake.

  Standing by the bed, I stared at him. My heart fluttered. I reached out and touched his cheek. When he didn’t move, I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his. I swooned at the feel of his lips on mine.

  Was he breathing?

  I pulled the covers back to look at his jeans that I’d unbuttoned. I slipped my fingers beneath his waistband and closed my eyes. My face got hot. My eyes snapped open.

  Why didn’t he wake?

  I backed away.

  Outside in the hall, my grandmother’s huge house felt suddenly small, as if the walls were closing in. I wanted to run downstairs and put on a record, something loud to drown out the feeling of terror building inside me.

  But I went to the end of the hall where there was a door I never used. My palms sweated. I wiped them on my dress and lifted the latch. Reaching above me in the dark, I swung my hand, looking for the string to trigger the light. Spider webs stuck to my fingers. I gasped and found the cord and yanked. A bare bulb sputtered on.

  I went up the narrow staircase, as if compelled by an unseen force. I didn’t want to find out. And yet I kept going, driven by a perverse need to uncover the distant memory that had started to beat against the edges of my mind, like moth wings.

  The attic was large with slanted ceilings, lit by the afternoon light coming through the long windows to the west. Built-in bookcases lined the north and south walls and two diamond shaped windows faced east.

  In the middle of the room my four poster bed was shrouded in a mosquito net, rigged up by me when I was nine, for the days when I pretended I was in Africa. The fights between my mother and Javier had begun by then, and Africa was as far away as I could imagine.

  The dust floating in the last rays of sunlight, the lemony smell of old floor polish and the few books left on the shelves, comforted me and reminded me of a time when I had felt safe. The attic had been my refuge. When my grandmother came in from some exotic place, resting up for her next adventure, I’d put on plays for her, changing costumes behind the red Venetian screen.

  But now the attic was a tomb of buried memories and hidden artifacts. My gaze landed on a chest pushed against the wall.

  I had trouble unfastening the buckles. My hands shook. At last the soft leather straps fell away. When I lifted the lid, I was surprised by the clean aroma of cedar. I’d been expecting the stench of decay.

  I sat on the floor. It was hard to match the heaviness in my heart with the items in the chest.

  On top lay a white wedding dress. I took it out, holding it to my face. It smelled of cedar and Shalimar. It was a simple dress, adorned only with lace at the collar and sleeves.

  I imagined standing at the altar with Devon. Sunlight came through red stained glass windows. He lifted my veil and had to bend down to kiss me.

  I’d only discovered my mother’s wedding dress after she died. I’d laid it back inside the chest with an ache in my heart. Now I was gripped by the need to feel its silky smoothness against my skin. I was in a hurry for some reason. I tore off my scratchy sweater dress and my tights.

  There was no mirror in the attic, which wasn’t a bad thing. I twirled across the dusty floor in my bare feet. The long skirt flew out and rustled against my skin, like cool water. My mother had been so much taller than I was, the dress dragged the floor when I walked.

  I went back to the chest and sat next to it.

  The next thing I pulled out was an ivory napkin edged in white lace. I refolded it and put it away. There was a set of English Bone China trimmed with pink roses. I found a flat wooden box, intricately carved.

  Knives glinted against black velvet. When I touched the gleaming points, my pulse raced.

  One knife was missing.

  I closed the box and slid it away from me, across the floor. I dipped my hand into the chest again. I ran my finger along the rims of crystal glasses. I took out a flute and held it up. My mother’s name had been etched in curling letters. India.

  I searched for a glass with my father’s name. I examined every plate and cup and saucer. There was no trace of him.

  Nestled in the lap of a linen tablecloth, I discovered a silk pouch. I emptied it. A gold locket slid into the palm of my hand. When I opened it, I found it bare.

  Anger flared in the pit of my stomach. Despite the beautiful things my mother’s hope chest held, it was as empty as her locket. Hopeless.

  I had nothing from her. Not even a picture of my father. She called him the ‘sperm donor’ but I believed he was a real person who would have loved me if he’d been given half a chance.

  I stalked across the floor. Dread churned in my gut. The lowering sun cast pink swaths on the floor.

  Standing by the bed I drew aside the mosquito net and stirred dust. I sneezed. I stroked the white chenille bedspread and breathed in the faint scent of soap. I felt as if I had opened a sealed time capsule. I had an urge to lie down and take a nap.

  But I
had to finish what I’d started.

  I got down on my hands and knees to look under the bed. It was right there at my fingertips—my suitcase from the sanitarium. I grasped the handle and pulled it out, an old midnight blue Samsonite, a hand-me-down from my grandmother.

  When I opened it, my heart thudded. My grandmother had packed clothes that were far too glamorous for a twelve year old mental patient. I guess she thought it would cheer me up to wear a silk scarf or a pair of patent leather shoes, a Chanel dress.

  She never traveled again, after I got out of the sanitarium. She stayed home to take care of me, making sure I followed my prescribed schedule, imbibed the proper medication and ate balanced meals.

  I pushed the clothes aside, looking for a tear in the lining of the suitcase. A memory loomed in the far recesses of my mind. Why had I needed to push it away?

  I found the tear. It wasn’t very big. My fingers hit one side of the case. Nothing. Maybe I had dreamed it. I swept my hand across to the other side and my fingers brushed the fragile edge of a thin piece of paper.

  It was small, cut from a newspaper. I didn’t look at it but held it curled in my hand. I crawled in bed under the covers. My mother’s perfume wafted up from her dress and enveloped me. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes.

  The light in the attic turned gray.

  I allowed myself to picture the young woman from the sanitarium who had so infatuated me when I was a sick twelve year old. How I’d loved to stare at her. She had a rare kind of beauty. Not classical but arresting. She was tall and willowy with white blonde hair, like a flame. I guessed she was in her mid-twenties. She used to sit by the window and watch the courtyard.

  Her name was Zadie.

  I didn’t know why she was in the sanitarium. She didn’t seem ill, like the rest of us. Just quiet, but in a self-possessed way, almost as if she was simply there to pass the time.

  I got the feeling too that she watched the window because she was expecting someone. But no one ever came to visit her.