A Shade in the Mirror

by Tracey Lander-Garrett

  Billy was regarding me steadily.

  “Is that him?” I asked. My voice sounded strange in my ears.

  “You want me to check his wallet?” Billy said. “You know, it’s not a bad idea, actually. Not sure if we should touch the body though. Police hate it when you do that.”

  “You know a lot about what police hate?”

  “I’ve watched my fair share of procedurals.”

  “Why didn’t you leave with the others?” I asked.

  “Why didn’t you?” he shot back.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t explain it, but I couldn’t leave without knowing.

  “I just want to know if it’s him,” Billy said.

  “Me too,” I said. “It looks like one of those mummies at the Met,” I said.

  “Looks like he was thrown there,” Billy said, shining his flashlight above the seated figure to a spot on the unfinished wall where the wooden frame was broken. Behind, one slat appeared to have pierced the body, impaling it through the torso.

  “That’s a pretty terrible way to go,” said Billy.

  I shined my flashlight on the desiccated corpse again and caught a sparkle of something metallic inside the collar. “What’s that?” I asked. I knelt in front of the body to get a better look, and Billy knelt alongside me. “Shine your flashlight here,” I said, pointing to the collar. It was an awkward position to kneel in—I almost lost my balance, and rather than touching the body, I gripped the wood frame above it to steady myself. The piece of wood shifted under my weight.

  Suddenly, the body slumped forward, detaching from the slat on which it had been pinned.

  Its face was only a few inches from mine when its eyes opened—clear light blue eyes that seemed so wrong in that wretched face.

  The clawed hands moved and gripped my shoulders, digging painfully into my skin. My eyes met the corpse’s for a moment, a moment that seemed to stretch and lengthen as those eyes widened. Then the corpse shouted, “No!” in a guttural voice like sandpaper. It threw me to the side with inhuman strength, where I hit the wall hard, and then nothing.

  My head ached, pounding, and I heard a wet slurping sound before I opened my eyes. The room was dim, but my flashlight was still lit and lying on the floor next to my hand. The body, or mummy, held Billy in its grip, face buried in Billy’s neck, and the wet sounds it was making were unmistakable: it was drinking.

  This is some nightmare, I thought. Some fantasy my mind dreamed up when I thought Michael Adderly was a vampire. It can’t be real.

  I tried to stand and failed. The flesh of the vampire’s face was slowly filling in, the hands coming back to life, almost inflating, the nose emerging, the skin losing its leathery appearance, the hair darkening. It was Michael Adderly. Thinner, slightly older, perhaps, than he’d appeared in the magazines, but that crooked nose, those eyes that stared right through me, that was him. And he was eating my friend.

  “Get off of him!” I shouted, throwing my ragdoll body at the two of them, trying to tear Billy away. Adderly pushed me away with one hand and I fell back to the floor.

  When I looked again, Adderly was no longer in the corner. He was now standing in the doorway, Billy’s limp body folded over one arm. He looked back at me.

  “Chris?” he said, as if he were uncertain.

  And then he was gone. Gone from the room, gone with Billy, just gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “What do you mean you won’t call the cops?” I shouted at Prof. Gannon. “All you wanted to do was call them, but now that Billy is missing, you won’t?”

  “You want to call the police? What do you plan to tell them? Maybe I should be the one calling them and pressing charges!” he yelled back.

  “What?”

  “That’s right! Against the two of you for trespassing!”

  “Trespassing? What are you talking about? You invited us here!”

  “You lied on your release forms!” the professor shouted back. “Legally, you have no right to be here!”

  “So that’s it? You just use people to do your stupid studies and don’t care about what happens to them? You’re a jerk!” I shouted.

  “Madison, calm down,” Derek said, placing his hands on my shoulders.

  I whirled on Derek, knocking his hands away. “I don’t want to calm down! A fucking vampire just stole my friend! Where did he go?”

  “That way,” Zoe rasped from her position on the floor, pointing to the left of the old Zephyr, still sitting in the driveway.

  I rushed out, leaving Derek’s “Madison, wait . . .” in my wake.

  The pine woods were dark and deep and I stood in their midst, listening, listening for sounds of a large creature crashing through underbrush, breaking branches. I heard nothing but what seemed to be the usual night forest sound of crickets and frogs in a symphonic trill.

  “Michael!” I shouted. “Michael Adderly!”

  There was no response.

  “I know what you are!” I shouted. “I’ve seen Rebecca. I know you murdered Tamara! She’s a restless spirit because of you, Michael! She haunts her old apartment because you killed her! They trusted you! They trusted you like Rosalita trusted you, and she died too!”

  My throat was starting to hurt. The crickets paused in their melody for a moment and then continued.

  “Give me my friend back. Give me Billy back, and I will leave you alone. I won’t tell anyone about you. I swear. Just, please, give him back,” I said, my voice breaking into a sob.

  He had to give Billy back. He just had to. If he didn’t give Billy back, then . . . then I’d gotten Billy killed, as good as I’d murdered him myself.

  “Billy,” I sobbed.

  If the vampire was out there, listening, he was unmoved by my pleas. But then, why would he be? A vampire. A murderer who’d killed his own wives and a girl in my apartment and God only knew who else. And now he was probably murdering my friend.

  I knew his secret. And he knew I knew I knew it. Was I stupid? Was I trying to get myself killed?

  The dark woods suddenly seemed oppressive and dangerous, as if the trees themselves were closing in. The darkness pressed all around me.

  I was an idiot.

  I took a few steps backward slowly, scanning the shadows for movement, and then I ran.

  When I arrived back at the garage, I was out of breath, covered in small scratches and welts from running through branches, but otherwise unharmed. If Adderly had heard me, he’d made no sign.

  The rubber mat was back in place and the Zephyr had been rolled back in and covered with the drop cloth once more. Derek leaned against it, clearly waiting for me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  It was a hell of a question. Of course I wasn’t okay. My friend had just been kidnapped by a serial killing vampire and I’d basically just told said vampire he should kill me next. Not to mention the little cuts and abrasions I’d gotten in the woods all stung.

  I shook my head and put my hands on my knees. I hung my head low, trying to catch my breath.

  “Zoe and Prof. Gannon went back into the house to pack up,” Derek said.

  “Bully for them,” I said.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I went to look for Billy.”

  “He ran out of there pretty fast,” Derek said.

  “What?”

  “He ran out—”

  “I heard what you said,” I interrupted. “Billy didn’t run anywhere.”

  “Madison,” Derek said in an infuriatingly calm voice, “I don’t know what you think you saw, but—”

  “—But what? Are you going to tell me what I already know? Which is that vampires don’t exist? I get that.”

  “If you call the cops and tell them that you saw a vampire kidnap your friend, they’re going to lock you up. Billy is an adult. They’ll just tell you that if he’s still missing tomorrow to file a missing person report. There is nothing we can do at this point.”

  “I know your stance on this, Dere
k. That there’s just nothing ‘out there’ that isn’t explainable by science. But you tell me what happened to the body downstairs, then. You tell me why it’s missing. You tell me where Billy went. Because I really want to know.”

  “I don’t know what happened. But I know whatever was in the basement was not alive, Madison! The only explanation is that Billy took it with him. I mean, I went down and looked. It’s gone. All that’s left are some broken pieces of wood.”

  “I’m telling you, it came to life and attacked Billy and took him.”

  “Do you have any idea how insane you sound?”

  “I don’t care how I sound! I saw what I saw! Zoe saw it too! Why didn’t you?”

  Derek held his hands up in front of him, as if he were trying to placate someone dangerous by showing that his hands were empty. He spoke slowly and quietly. “Madison—I didn’t see him. Neither did Prof. Gannon. We were both facing Zoe at the time. And she had just woken up, so who knows what she really saw, versus what she thought she saw.”

  “Really, Derek? Really? After everything else that’s happened here, you’re going to fall back that? On the . . . what did you call it, the fallibility of the senses?”

  His hand, which he’d been about to place on my shoulder, fell to his side, and his voice took on a sad, distant quality. “Do you even recognize the difference between fact and fiction, Madison? I want to help you, but how can I? Your entire existence is fictional, starting with your name. Hell, for all I know, you might have lied about that too.”

  It was like a punch in the gut. I opened my mouth to reply, but there was nothing else to say so I shut it.

  It didn’t matter that he didn’t believe me. Billy was still missing. That was the important thing.

  “So that’s it?” I said. “That’s the end of the investigation? We’re all just supposed to pack up and go home now and forget what happened here?”

  “Look, don’t take it out on me that your death-obsessed friend and co-worker just had a psychotic break. I mean, hell, Prof. Gannon thinks that all three of us were in it together.”

  “In what together?”

  “I don’t know, some conspiracy to sabotage his work on the Adderly House, planting a fake body here . . . your key . . . he even accused me of working for Dr. Hernandez. He said she’s trying to disprove his data.”

  “Are you working for her?” I asked, not because I thought he was, but because I knew it would annoy him.

  “Am I . . . ? Why are you asking me that?” he asked.

  “Well, you hate the supernatural, don’t you?”

  “Hate is a pretty strong word. I don’t think I care enough about it to hate it.”

  “But you don’t believe.”

  “No. And apparently, neither does Dr. Hernandez. That’s what they were doing here. Prof. Gannon was trying to collect data that proves the existence of the supernatural, while Dr. Hernandez was collecting data demonstrating that belief in the supernatural is passed along from person to person, kind of like mass hysteria.”

  “Mass hysteria?”

  “Yeah, that’s why they had that Zoe girl here.”

  “You mean she’s an actress or something who was supposed to get us to believe in ghosts?”

  “No, Prof. Gannon says she’s for real. For him, she proves his theories, but for Dr. Hernandez, she’s the catalyst that kickstarts other people’s belief. That’s why they were looking for people with different levels of belief. The 1 to 5 thing.”

  “So you’re on Hernandez’s side.”

  “I don’t work for her, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “I don’t know what either one of us is saying anymore,” I said. Talking about it was pointless. Billy was gone, Derek didn’t believe me, and the professors were at war. There was no point in calling the police. Derek was right. Like Billy had said: No body, no crime.

  Derek bowed his head and sighed heavily. He was quiet a moment and then said, “I’m going to go into the house to help everyone pack up. Are you coming?”

  “I think I need a minute,” I said.

  He stalked off toward the house, leaving me and my flashlight alone in a small circle of light in front of the garage. It took me about five seconds of listening to the crickets to realize I probably ought to follow him.

  The foyer was a bustle of activity between the two professors. No one really paid me any attention. In fact, they seemed to be ignoring me on purpose. I went to pick up my backpack from the coat rack where I’d hung it and stopped short when I noticed Billy’s leather jacket with the orange stripes on the sleeves still hanging there. Should I take it with me? Leave it there? What if Billy came back? There was a chill in the air and he’d need it. I left it.

  When I turned around, the foyer was empty of people. There were still a few card tables set up, a monitor and two cardboard boxes filled with clamp lights, and the wooden cigar box that held the photographs of Michael Adderly and girl after girl after girl. His victims. I wondered if Tamara was in there, or Rebecca. Or hell, even me. Before I’d even really decided or thought about it, I opened my backpack, took two steps to the table, and slid the box inside it.

  I picked up a box of clamp lights and turned to take it outside. “I’ll take that, thank you,” Prof. Gannon said coldly, taking it from me. Derek took out the monitor and Katie took out the other box of lights, and Dr. Hernandez began to break down the tables. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and began wondering where Zoe had gone to. She was the only one who had possibly seen what I’d seen.

  I went outside, and there she was, sitting in the driver’s seat of the old wood-paneled station wagon, leaning back against the headrest, her eyes closed.

  “Zoe?”

  “Yeah?” she replied groggily.

  “Did you see what I saw?”

  “I’m not sure. I saw a blur. Motion. Then? Nothing.” She pressed her fingertips to her temples and massaged in small circles.

  “You okay?”

  “Not really. I just feel tired, and my head’s all fuzzy pain. Dust bunny massacre up there.”

  “Dust bunny massacre, huh? You need a broom? Or how about coffee? Maybe just some sleep?”

  “Sleep. Yeah, that’s all I really want to do right now. My head is killing me. I, uh . . . I don’t suppose you can drive? I can give you a ride home later on when this passes.”

  I thought about it. “Well, Derek’s my ride . . . but slide over,” I said. She slid.

  I opened the door and got into the driver’s seat. This was the steering wheel, and the key to start the ignition would be on the right, kind of under . . . there. Yeah. I turned it. The car started. On the left side of the steering column somewhere below the dash, I felt around and found a button the size of a fat cigar stub. I pulled it. The headlights came on, and above the steering column, circles of numbers and a line of letters lit up. P was for Park, R for Reverse, D for Drive. One of the circles measured speed, the other measured RPMs. I knew this. I put my hand confidently on the lever for the transmission, pulling it toward my body and then smoothly moved the indicator to N for Neutral and then back to Park. “No problem,” I said with a smirk.

  Derek came out, awkwardly carrying a card table under each arm. He seemed astonished to see me behind the wheel. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Zoe needs a ride home,” I said.

  “But you can’t drive,” Derek said.

  “I can, actually.”

  “Can’t she just catch a ride with us?”

  “She can’t,” I said.

  “I really don’t want to leave the car here,” Zoe mumbled, rubbing her temples again. “Plus, my mom needs it to get to work tomorrow.”

  “So you’re just . . . leaving?” he asked.

  “Well, I was gonna say goodbye first.”

  “Oh,” Derek said. He seemed a bit crestfallen. What did he expect? What did I expect? It wasn’t like it would be a pleasant ride back with him thinking I was crazy and me thinking he was a clo
se-minded jerk. I didn’t even know how we were supposed to get past that, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen in the Adderly House driveway.

  “I’ll, um, call you,” I said, throwing the transmission into reverse. “Bye!” I waved as I drove off, my wrist moving a bit too enthusiastically as he stood there with the two tables and an unhappy look on his face.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Zoe’s apartment was covered in mystical symbols. Hand-painted designs wrapped around the walls beneath the ceiling and over and around every doorway and every window, probably hundreds of sigils, symbols, and patterns slapped on in thick black paint. Multiple wind chimes, made of wood, metal, clay and other materials hung suspended from the ceiling with different colored string, interspersed with sparkling crystals of every shade. The air felt different once I crossed the threshold. Was it warmer? Colder? Why was I getting goosebumps?

  “Whoa,” I said.

  It was hoodoo. I didn’t know why the word hoodoo seemed fitting to me—or why I would even know it—but I knew, and somehow I could tell that the stuff painted on Zoe’s walls was real.

  “Yeah, I don’t bring too many people home,” she said, shrugging out of her coat and hanging it on a hook near the door. It was a small apartment on the first floor, with the bedroom and living room separated by a hoodoo-covered archway and a couch facing a little TV in the corner. “Give me your coat. I’ll hang it up for you,” she said. We’d already discussed that I should crash on her couch that night and she’d drive me home in the morning. She seemed to be feeling better after napping in the car for most of the way back.

  “So . . . all of this?” I asked, gesturing at the symbols and doohickeys hanging from the ceiling. “Does it keep ghosts out?”

  “A girl’s gotta sleep at night,” she said.

  “Huh. What about salt?” I asked.

  “I hate all of those little grains under my feet,” she said.

  “But it works?” I asked.

  “It can. For a while. Eventually it wears off, though.”