Sallow House

by Phil Malone

  As he approached the third one, though, the creature’s eyes flicked open.

  Its eyes couldn’t focus. The crushed garlic Lucado had already strewn across the vampire was doing some damage, keeping it too relaxed to sit up. He limped a few steps closer, reaching out with a trembling hand.

  The vampire spotted him. Its bleary, unfocused eyes strayed towards his face. The lips pulled back from its teeth, fangs already on display.

  Lucado yanked his hand back. The vampire started struggling, willing the strength back into its deadened limbs. If it wasn’t stopped now, it would rise up, shake the cobwebs from its brain, and make a quick meal of the intruder.

  Hurriedly, Lucado loosened the handle of his cane. It twisted, and he drew out a long, thin blade. The empty shaft thumped to the carpet. The vampire managed to leverage itself up onto an elbow.

  Lucado struck. He plunged the blade, point first, into the middle of the vampire’s throat, just below its chin. The blade punched out the back, just below the base of the skull.

  It coughed. A spatter of blood frothed on its lips, dribbling down its chin. The growl became a gurgle. But it kept coming, reaching a hand towards his attacker, the long, ragged fingernails grasping at him.

  Lucado jerked the blade sideways, slicing through an inch of neck before pulling it out entirely. Black blood pulsed from the vampire’s throat and soaked through its shirt. The hand clawing in the air waved at him, trying to swat the blade aside. It stared at him with wide eyes and a mouthful of its own blood.

  No point in letting it get a second wind, Lucado decided. He raised the blade above his head and brought it down with all the strength he could muster. The razor edge buried itself deep into the vampire’s neck. With a gasp, the vampire collapsed back against the couch.

  Again, Lucado swung the blade and hacked at the creature. Multiple stab wounds became a confusion of inexpert slices, a cut of meat ruined by an overzealous steak knife. The blade worked through cartilage and spinal cord, the toughest cuts of all. Blood sprayed against the sofa cushions and pooled beneath the vampire’s head. Flecks of it spattered around the room every time Lucado raised the sword over his head.

  At last, the vampire’s head rolled free. It settled into a corner of the couch as the limbs it no longer controlled spasmed and twitched. The skin turned a greenish tinged hue of grey and started to shrivel. Blood and pus leaked out from beneath the fingernails, and other orifices thankfully concealed within the creature’s clothes.

  In a few moments, it had become a swamp of rot and greasy bones poking through the flesh that sloughed away. The stench made Lucado gag. Burning the place down now could only improve it.

  He backed away and glanced towards the other two vampires. They shifted restlessly, as if they could smell their friend’s gruesome death. Still, they didn’t open their eyes.

  Lucado retreated to the front hall, where he had left the can of diesel fuel. Unscrewing the cap, he made his way back to the room where the two remaining vampires slept. His knee groaned when he put his weight on it, but it was easier to carry the can in two hands.

  He started with the vampires themselves, dousing both of them. He sloshed more fuel on the putrefying remains of their friend, then started soaking the carpet, the sofas, the curtains, splashing some here and there against the walls.

  He favored diesel fuel since it wouldn’t immediately start to evaporate and fill the house with explosive fumes, the way gasoline would. Lucado finished drenching the room and used the dregs to leave a trail leading towards the front door.

  It was a five gallon can. He ran out much sooner than he would have liked, but the can was empty so he dropped it in the foyer and limped back to the room with the vampires.

  The shaft of his cane rested on the floor where he’d left it. With difficulty, Lucado bent to pick it up. He brought it along with his blade into the kitchen, running water over the blade to rinse off most of the blood. For good measure, he opened the oven door and turned the gas on.

  After sliding the blade back inside the cane, he hobbled back to the foyer, following the trail of diesel fuel that stained the carpet. In one pocket, he had the scrap of paper he’d used to write down the house’s address. In the other, his disposable lighter.

  He sparked the lighter and touched the flame to the paper, watching it blacken and curl as a ribbon of flame crept across it. When it burned as brightly as it would get, he reached for the floor. His arm stretched as far as it could without having to bend his bad knee as well.

  The burning paper fluttered from his fingers to the carpet and came to rest in the damp tinderbox of a carpet. Within seconds, the flame backtracked to the living room.

  For a few moments, Lucado watched, and waited. An orange glow glimmered in the open doorway, soon shadowed by oily wisps of smoke. A dark haze crept towards him along the ceiling. Coughing, Lucado covered his mouth and nose with his jacket and made as hasty a retreat as he possibly could. He spilled out of the house’s front door, chased by black tendrils of smoke and suffocating waves of heat.

  The fresh, open air was a glorious reprieve. Lucado leaned on his cane, making slow, halting progress down the front walk. An occasional coughing fit stopped him in his tracks. He bent over, hacking, trying to clear his lungs.

  Eventually he made it to the other side of the street. He turned and stood watching the house. Smoke billowed from the open front door. Wisps of it leaked from the roof. The wood siding started to blacken as the flames worked their way out from the inside of the house. Lucado heard the crack of breaking glass, as the heat started to shatter the windows.

  He watched until he heard sirens in the distance. No one got out.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  With her dad home safe and sound, Melody could get back to life as usual. The morning after his homecoming, she almost lit into her mother for overreacting and pulling her out of school. When she saw the look on her mom’s face, though, she refrained. Her dad didn’t act concerned in the slightest.

  The other students at school had no clue he had been missing for two days. Most news outlets followed the Post’s lead with speculation that Congressman Sanger had a woman on the side, but her classmates didn’t pay much attention to the news. It was a relief to go through her usual routine without suffering the rumor mill.

  Without her mom there to pull her out of school early, she even resumed her after school choir practice. She didn’t mind the academic classes, but choir remained her favorite part of the day. She loved to sing, and some of her friends were in the program with her. As usual, she caught a ride home with classmates who were old enough to drive.

  The Sanger family sat down to dinner that evening together, for the first time in a week. Her mother served a platter of roast beef, sliced thin so her children and husband could serve themselves.

  Chase seized the food first, a slice of meat, a heap of mashed potatoes, two dinner rolls. He drowned his salad in ranch dressing. Some people might wonder how such a skinny kid could consume so much food, but Melody knew better. It was all fuel for the gas factory constantly churning in his guts.

  The rest of the family gave themselves more modest helpings.

  No one spoke a word. Melody’s mother nearly slopped over the bowl of potatoes when she served herself and slammed it back down on the table. As far as she could tell, only Melody noticed.

  She ate in silence, with the rest, watching them over forkfuls of food. Chase wolfed his down, probably eager to get back upstairs to his Playstation. Her parents picked at theirs, eating only sparingly. Her dad pushed the food around on his plate but didn’t eat very much of it.

  “Rinse your plate and put it in the dishwasher,” her mom commanded her brother, when he finished. He disappeared into the kitchen, plate and bowl and silverware all stacked together.

  Her dad glanced at him, then checked his watch. “I have to head out as well,” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer, but followed his son into the kitchen with his plate and the food he
barely touched.

  It must be nice, Melody reflected, to be old enough that no one could tell you what to do.

  Shortly after that, her mother gave up and pushed away from the table. She told Melody to put the leftovers in the refrigerator and vanished into her bedroom.

  For the rest of the night, Melody texted her friends and listened to music. Even when it got late, no one came to tell her to go to bed. She brushed her teeth, washed her hair, scrubbed what little makeup she wore from her face. The whole routine, an hour past her bedtime.

  Briefly, she emerged from her room into the hallway. Aside from the sounds of her brother’s first person shooter emanating from his room, the house was quiet. She considered knocking, telling him to go to bed, but decided against it. He’d be exhausted in the morning, but that was his problem. Instead, she made a tour of the light switches, turning all of them off.

  Back in her own bedroom, she looked out the window. Her father’s car was still gone. The late nights had begun, Melody decided. If any reporters wanted to follow him to find out what was really going on, they could probably do it any night they wanted. That wasn’t her problem either.

  Sleep didn’t come easily. Even when the subliminal background noise of gunfire and explosions coming from her brother’s room ceased, she tossed and turned. For one half hour at a time, she would drift off, then snap awake as if signaled by some forgotten sound. But every time it happened, the night remained still and silent.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. Melody threw back her comforter and climbed out of bed. That second glass of tea was weighing on her bladder.

  She stepped out into the hallway. To her left, she could easily make out the balcony and the stairs leading down. Her mother must have left a light on in living room. Nothing much, just a reading lamp or something like that. The hallway continued on to her right, turning a corner before finally reaching her brother’s room. He must have gone to sleep at last.

  Across the hall was the bathroom she shared with Chase, already open. She locked herself inside and checked to make sure he hadn’t left the toilet seat up. Experience had taught her that she could never be too careful about that. Life would be so much simpler if their parents made him use the back yard. He pretty much had the hygiene of a dog already.

  Melody burrowed through the cabinet beneath the sink until she found a fresh roll of toilet paper. She always ended up replacing it, no matter how long the empty cardboard roll hung there next to the toilet. Chase certainly never did it. What did he even use, when he ran out?

  Unbidden, her eyes strayed to the brown hand towel hanging beside the sink.

  No. No, he wouldn’t. I’m just exhausted or I never would have thought of it.

  When she finished, though, she pinched the towel’s barest corner between her thumb and forefinger and, with a shudder, threw it in the trash. She found a fresh hand towel in the cabinet, a pink one, and gave it a cursory sniff just to be sure. It seemed okay.

  The water drained out in a rush when she flushed. She rinsed off her hands and dried them. Fumbling for a moment with the lock, she pulled the door open and switched off the light. She stepped back out into the hallway, checking left and right, on instinct.

  A man stood on the landing at the top of the stairs. Melody stared at him, blinking her eyes. I’m dreaming.

  Her body felt paralyzed, rooted in place, as if some invisible force grabbed her by the arms and held her. The man wasn’t facing her. She could see his silhouette, slumped shoulders and stringy hair. The man was not her father.

  He must have heard the toilet flush. Melody considered dashing across the hall, locking herself in her room. That was a stupid idea, even if her muscles loosened enough to let her move. One good kick would break the door down. She was already at his mercy, and both of them knew it.

  Slowly, the man turned. With the light behind him, she couldn’t see his face. One of his hands reached up, brushed through his hair. For a moment, when she heard the quiet hiss, she didn’t even realize he was laughing.

  Melody opened her mouth to scream. The man charged at her, bulled through her with all his weight. Her feet left the floor, carpet and walls and ceiling all mixed up and in the wrong places.

  She landed hard on her shoulder, rolling over, ending up with a mouthful of carpet. The impact squeezed the air from her lungs. All she could do was grunt.

  It took a moment to reorient herself. She scrambled on her hands and knees, falling sideways into a wall she didn’t realize was right next to her. Somehow, she’d been knocked clear to the bend in the hallway.

  Filling her lungs, she screamed as loud as she could. She screamed and cried and called for her mother.

  Chase found her first. He came out into the hallway, hair sticking up from sleep, an open bag of nacho chips dangling from his fingers. “What the hell, Melody?”

  From somewhere below, she heard her mother’s bedroom door open. Melody stared around, wide-eyed, terrified. Whoever he’d been, the intruder was gone.

  Her brother knelt next to her. “What, are you sleepwalking now? Are you awake yet? Are you hungry?" He rattled the bag of chips in her face.

  She shoved him away. “Stop it! Are you sleeping with those? No, I’m not sleepwalking, there was a man.”

  “You were dreaming, stupid. There’s nobody here but us. And we’re supposed to get up for school in like an hour and a half, so thanks a lot for that.”

  Their mother appeared on the landing and rushed down the hallway towards them. “What is going on?”

  Melody scrambled up from the floor, unable to stop the tears from springing to her eyes. She hugged her mother. Shocked, Dawn hugged her back. Chase munched on another mouthful of chips.

  “What is going on? I heard you screaming." Melody’s mother clutched her. The girl couldn’t stop trembling.

  “There was a man in the house." Melody’s voice quivered, sounding small as a baby bird’s. “He ran at me. Knocked me over.”

  “She was dreaming." Her brother set the bag of chips down by his door and bent to pick up something else. “You dropped something.”

  His mother and sister turned to look. Melody swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. It was still dark in the hallway, and difficult to see exactly what her brother held. The thing looked like a piece of wood.

  Dawn, still hugging Melody around the shoulders, stretched out her free hand to flip on the hall light. She took the object from her son, turning it over and over, so they could all get a closer look.

  “That’s not mine." It was a piece of wood, sharpened to a point on one end. The handle was carved with tiny depictions of swords and spears, each painted in shades of red, orange, and brown. Melody felt the terror well up inside her again. “The man,” she said. “The man must have dropped it.”

  Her mom turned it until a single word came into view. It was inscribed in the wood, carefully smoothed and polished. Melody had no idea what the word meant.

  Bleda.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Andres Kolka was getting nowhere with his investigation. The victims were killed in one place and moved to another, but there seemed to be no geographic pattern that he could discern. He had each location pinned on a map in his computer, but they were spread out across the county. Part of him wished one would turn up in Maryland or D.C. so that the FBI would take over.

  No one ever saw anything. People discovered the bodies, but no one ever witnessed the killer dumping them. When each victim was identified, Kolka questioned their families, friends, acquaintances. It didn’t do much good. He could establish a timeline leading up to each murder, could figure out more or less where the victim was and what they were doing.

  But the killer himself remained maddeningly invisible. The victims had no points in common, no shared persons in their lives who might be able to link them. They were taken at different times of day, from different parts of the county. Kolka couldn’t even establish any commonalities between the locations where the bodies we
re dumped.

  Whoever the killer was, he ranged widely and stayed on no obvious schedule. That suggested to Kolka only that he had a lot of free time.

  He was on the verge of searching for unemployed surgeons, since such an individual would have time, steady hands, and no aversion to blood, when his cell phone rang.

  “I’m calling for Andres Kolka, Fairfax County Homicide,” the person on the other end of the line declared.

  “You got him.”

  “This is Colin Wright with the Winchester, Virginia police department. Do you know a man named Mario Lucado?”

  Kolka snatched up a pen from his desk and started incessantly clicking it. “I know him. What’s going on?”

  “We’ve arrested him on an arson charge. He was observed coming out of a house and watching it burn until the fire department was nearly there. Then he tried to flee, but fortunately we have a witness who got his license plate number.”

  Kolka’s heart sank. He’d hoped Lucado would just go back to Connecticut, prayed that the old man wasn’t dangerous, and that it wasn’t a mistake to let him go. “Was anyone in the house?”

  “We haven’t determined that yet. Fire’s still on the scene sifting through the wreckage. Anyway, he had your card on him and he insisted on talking to you.”

  “Why me? I’m not his lawyer, and that was definitely no get out of jail free card.”

  “I’m not sure, Detective Kolka. He said he had information pertinent to your investigation.”

  “Well, he should have shared that the last time we questioned him.”

  “New information, he says.”

  Kolka sighed. Arson cases were notoriously hard to close. Even with a witness, a competent lawyer could argue that Lucado escaped the house, but wasn’t the one to set fire to it. He could practically hear the desperation in Colin Wright’s voice, hoping he could foist off this case onto someone else. Winchester wasn’t even in Fairfax County.