The Nighttime is the Right Time

by Bill Crider

  That got everybody hot under the collar, and two or three of them tried to borrow Elvis' gun. He'd been carrying a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver that night, but he knew it wouldn't do them any good.

  "Never mind, fellas," he said. "Let's us go on home."

  Naturally that's what they did, since Elvis had suggested it. Nobody ever gave him any back talk.

  When they got back to Graceland, everybody wanted to do something different--play handball shoot pool, swim--but Elvis just went to his bedroom. He had to think about what he'd seen, which he was pretty sure was a vampire. He'd dealt with enough bloodsuckers in his career, from the Colonel on down, to recognize another one when he saw him.

  He turned on the TV to help him think, but there was Robert Goulet in some rerun from The Carol Burnett Show, singing a stupid song from Camelot. Elvis pulled out his Magnum and shot out the picture tube, which spouted sparks and blue smoke as it exploded with a noise even louder than the gunshot.

  Nobody came to see what had happened. Either they were used to it (it was the second TV he'd shot in less than a month--the last time had been because of Mel Torme) or they so were intent on what they were doing downstairs that they didn't hear. Elvis didn't care one way or the other. He was tired of trying to explain what pissed him off so much about Robert Goulet.

  It wasn't really his singing so much as the fact that he was married to Carol Lawrence, who, it seemed to Elvis, should have been married to Steve Lawrence, which would have made sense, but Steve Lawrence was married to Edie Gorme, whose last name sounded a lot like Goulet. Carol and Steve Lawrence. Robert and Edie Goulet. Or Gorme. Just thinking about it pissed him off. He started to shoot out one of the other TVs in the room just for the hell of it, but he restrained himself.

  Then he thought of another reason why he didn't like Robert Goulet. Goulet looked a lot like the vampire.

  ~ * ~

  The vampire killed a woman that night; Elvis read about it in the paper the next day: "Woman's Body Drained of Blood," the headline said, and there were fears of a serial killer stalking the city.

  It didn't work out like that, however. There were no more deaths by blood-draining, at least not in Memphis, but over the next few years it happened several times in different places. No one noticed, except Elvis, as he thought the vampire expected him to.

  The vampire was obsessed with being The King.

  Elvis wasn't all that surprised. It was the sort of thing that had happened to him before. Never with a vampire as far as he knew, but people were always identifying with him in some weird way, following him, hanging around the mansion, wanting to be him, thinking that in some freaky way they were him. Hell, even Jerry Lee Lewis had tried to climb the fence at Graceland once.

  But the vampire was something entirely different, which made it interesting, and there was damn little that was interesting to Elvis in those days. He had more money than he'd ever dreamed of, he'd swiveled his hips on stage and made women cry with desire, he'd been a movie star (though there were a couple of those movies he wished he'd never made, especially Kissin' Cousins), he'd starred in Vegas and on TV, he'd had every woman he'd ever wanted (not to mention a few he didn't). But finally he'd gotten tired of all of it. There wasn't a thing that didn't bore him stiff, and so, sure, he did a few drugs. And he ate. Blew up like a goddamn blimp. Shit, Macy's was thinking about hiring him to be a balloon in their next Thanksgiving Day parade.

  He knew he had to do something, that he was killing himself, but he just didn't care. The last time he'd had any fun was in what people were calling his "comeback special" on TV in 1969. He'd liked that because he was doing what he did best, playing his guitar in front of a small crowd that appreciated what they were hearing. If he could've kept doing that, he might've been happy.

  But he couldn't keep doing it. He was Elvis, and Elvis played only the biggest and the best venues in front of thousands of people; he didn't perform in little places where probably less than a hundred people were crowded into the tight space around him. The Colonel would never have let him get away with it. So there was nothing to do except eat and take pills, and there was no way he could pull himself out of the nosedive he was taking, not until he got interested in the vampire.

  Hell, somebody had to stop him.

  ~ * ~

  There was a Denny's on I-45, and Elvis drove there in the dilapidated Cadillac he'd been using for several years now. It wasn't pink; he couldn't take a chance on that, even looking like he did. Somebody just might make the right connection, not that it would really matter. The tabloids would just write up another Elvis sighting and everyone would think it was just another story by another demented fan.

  The Caddy was gray, and he didn't like it nearly as much as the first one he'd ever bought, but it was reliable. It had been hauling him around the country for more than ten years not, and it got him to Denny's.

  He didn't eat much, just a couple of eggs over easy with sausage and toast. No one in the place paid the least attention to him. He did nothing to call attention to himself, and he appeared to be just an ordinary-looking man, a little past middle age, with dyed hair, a growing bald spot, and bifocal glasses with cheap plastic frames.

  He was wearing a faded denim jacket over a white cotton shirt and Levis that were faded to nearly the color of the shirt. He might have been a long-haul trucker or maybe a shift worker at one of the chemical plants in Pasadena or Texas City.

  As he chewed the sausage, he thought about the conversation he'd had with Red the day after the vampire had come into the theater.

  "Vampire? Are you shittin' me, E?"

  "No, man. I think that's what we saw last night."

  "C'mon, E. You know better'n that. There ain't no such thing as a vampire. You been watchin' too many of those horror movies on TV."

  Elvis said he'd seen some horrible things on TV, all right, but that they weren't about vampires.

  "I want to know some more about them things," he said. "Who can I talk to?"

  Since Elvis seemed to be serious, Red gave it some thought. "You might talk to Sam. He reads a lot of junk, like about vampires and things."

  "Get him," Elvis said, and Red did.

  It turned out that Sam knew plenty. He told Elvis about the Undead and how they preyed on the living, sucking their blood and robbing them of life to sustain their own foul existence.

  "They sound like bad sonsabitches," Elvis said.

  "They're bad, sure enough," Sam said.

  Elvis grinned. "Not any worse than a lot of live people I know, though."

  Sam knew a little about Elvis' financial arrangements, and he knew all about 'Cilla and how she cheated on E. with her karate instructor. "You could be right about that, E."

  "How do you kill 'em? With a wooden stake like in the movies?"

  Sam nodded. "Or cut off their heads. Do both is supposed to be best. Stake 'em and cut off their heads too."

  "I think I could do that," Elvis said, and Sam couldn't tell whether he was talking about doing it to vampires or somebody else, like 'Cilla's karate teacher, but he didn't ask.

  ~ * ~

  Outside the Denny's Elvis took a deep breath of the Houston air, which smelled like exhaust fumes and fried food and hot concrete and chemical stink, with just a little bit of salt air from the Gulf thrown in. The cars and trucks swooshing by on the Interstate were a constant stream of headlights going one way and taillights the other.

  Elvis wasn't far from Hobby Airport, and he wondered if the vampire knew he was there. Probably. The sonofabitch was pretty damn smart. He'd been eluding Elvis for more than fifteen years now, ever since Elvis had staged his own death. Compared to catching a vampire, that part had been easy. Stuff like that was always easy if you had the money, and Elvis had plenty of that. Even after fifteen years he still had plenty of that; there was an old suitcase full of it in the trunk of the Caddy.

  He'd decided to fake his death after he read about the vampire's fourth killing. Elvis didn't thi
nk they all made the papers, so it was probably more than four all together, but enough of them got reported so that you could see there was a pattern to them, if you were looking for it.

  Elvis didn't even really have to look. He'd figured it out by the second killing. It was like he'd known all along, but it took two more before he decided to do something about it.

  "A million dollars?" the doctor had said. "I can't take that much, Elvis. You're a friend."

  "You'll earn it," Elvis told him. "You're gonna have to take a lotta heat from the papers and all. And you're gonna have to find a body for the box. One that looks a little like me 'ud be best. You know one of them papers'll try to get a pi'ture. I 'magine you'll have to pay off a few people at the funeral home, too."

  "What about your girlfriend?"

  Elvis had been worrying about her. He always had to have a woman around to keep up appearances, though to tell the truth he just wasn't that interested in women anymore. They were like everything else--boring, mostly.

  Even at that he didn't want to make this one feel too bad, but he didn't see any help for it. "I can fake her out. I been in enough bad movies to act dead."

  "Why're you doing this, Elvis? I just don't understand it. You've got everything a man could want."

  "Not ever'thing," Elvis said.

  "What then? If you don't have it, it can't be anything a normal man would want."

  "Sure it is. It's what ever'body wants."

  The doctor frowned and shook his head. "I don't know what that could be."

  "A reason," Elvis said.

  "What kind of a reason?"

  "A reason to give a damn."

  The doctor shook his head again, but he didn't try to argue anymore. He said he'd take the money.

  ~ * ~

  Elvis drove the Caddy to the motel near the airport where the lighted sign announced that the "Elvis Impersonator Contest" was being held.

  The impersonations were something that Elvis figured was a natural outgrowth of people thinking they wanted to be him. They'd started in a small way before he "died," and a guy named Ral Donner had even had a couple of big hit records back in the 'fifties by managing to sound just like Elvis, but Elvis had figured that by now nobody would be interested anymore.

  It hadn't worked like that, though. There was more interest now than ever, and if tonight was like most of the other nights the contest would have plenty of Elvises: overweight Elvises, young Elvises, oriental Elvises, child Elvises, probably some south-of-the-border Elvises, and even a female Elvis or two. They would all have one thing in common. Not a one of them would be able to sing a lick.

  That was the worst part, having to listen to them and having to watch them try to make the moves that were right only when you didn't have to try, and sometimes it was almost enough to make Elvis want to stand up out of his seat, walk up to the stage, give his shoulders a shake or two, and wail out a few lines of "That's All Right" or maybe "Mystery Train" just to show them how it was done.

  But he never did. He couldn't break his cover. There was always the chance that the vampire would be there. Sam had told him that they were shape-changers.

  "They can be animals if they want to," Sam had said. "Not just bats. Wolves, too. Things like that."

  Elvis thought that was a good talent to have. A man that could be wolf wouldn't have to go around renting a whole amusement park just to get a little privacy. "What about different kinds of people?"

  Sam thought about it and decided he didn't see why not. "If you can look like a wolf, you can look like just about anybody you damn well please."

  Maybe you couldn't look exactly like anybody you damn well pleased, though, Elvis thought. But you could probably get close enough.

  So he started getting the papers from every town where there was some kind of Elvis impersonator contest. And sure enough, now and then there would be a story about a spooky murder that had happened in the same city. The murders weren't always the same, and that was before the cops got all their computers together, so no one really noticed. No one except Elvis. He knew what was going on.

  He parked the Caddy and got out. Looked like there would be a pretty good crowd. You could never tell about these things, though. He should know. He'd been to enough of them.

  He'd never caught up with the vampire, though, not quite. In the first place, the vampire didn't go to every single contest no more than one a year. Elvis figured that was done on purpose to keep the cops from seeing a pattern in the killings.

  And when the vampire did get into a contest, it might not be the one where Elvis was. There was no way to predict his movements, so if Elvis was at a performance in Chicago, the vampire might be on stage in Reno. If Elvis was in Shreveport, the vampire would be in Denver. Elvis could track him only after the fact by the stories in the papers, the stories of the deaths of transients or waitresses or bank managers or anyone who fell in the vampire's way.

  Once or twice their paths had crossed. There had been that time in Dallas, and another time in Atlanta. The vampire always used different names to enter the contests, and he always looked different, but Elvis knew he had been there. He just couldn't tell which of the fakes was the vampire, and the vampire didn't give himself away, not until the story in the paper the next day or the day after that.

  But this time was going to be different. Elvis just had a feeling about that.

  ~ * ~

  The cover charge wasn't much, and while there was a pretty good crowd, Elvis didn't have any trouble getting a table close to the tiny stage.

  The announcer was a guy with a desperate smile and a rug that made him look like a ferret had died on his head. He tired to work up some enthusiasm in the audience with a series of bad jokes, but he wasn't having much luck.

  "Yessir," the man said, "I don't know about you, but I ate dinner right here in our very own restaurant. No wonder they call this place Heartburn Hotel."

  There was a half-hearted rimshot from the drummer of the three-piece combo that was set up to accompany the impersonators, but Elvis was the only one who laughed. He'd always liked that joke; he'd used it often enough himself.

  "Hey, folks, these are the jokes. Don't put me in a mystery strain!"

  Rimshot, then silence, except for Elvis' brief guffaw.

  "Well, people, you gotta admit I take a lickin' and keep on tickin'. It's like the gasoline said to the car, 'Now and then there's a fuel such as I.'"

  Another rimshot, another laugh from Elvis, another round of silence from the fans.

  "OK, OK, I get the picture. You want some Elvis. Well, all right. Whoops, that's a Buddy Holly song!"

  No laughter, not even from Elvis.

  "Never mind, never mind. You people must have wooden hearts. Let's get the real show started. First up tonight is a man who calls himself Johnny Tender. Let's have a big hand for him as he sings 'Lovin' You'!"

  There wasn't much of a hand, but then Johnny Tender didn't deserve one, not to Elvis' way of thinking. He butchered the song, his hair was combed bad, and it wasn't even black. He moved like an eighty-year-old with fleas.

  The next three weren't much better. They tried, but that was about all you could say for them.

  Then came number five. He called himself The King, and Elvis knew he had his man.

  The King had brought his own music, provided by a portable Bose Acoustic Wave Machine and a CD that played the theme from 2001. He was wearing a white jumpsuit and a heavy white cape that he swirled dramatically as he jumped up on the stage. His face was just a little puffy, and he had a red scarf around his neck.

  The tape segued from "2001" into "Viva Las Vegas," and he began teasing the crowd, swiveling his hips woodenly and swinging the mike on its cord. A couple of women screamed.

  "Elvis!" someone yelled. "It's him! It's really him!"

  It was enough to make the real Elvis sick to his stomach. And then the vampire started to sing.

  Elvis' mouth fell open. Holy shit. The vampire sounded just like Ro
bert Goulet.

  The crowd didn't notice. They were completely taken in. It was probably the jump suit, Elvis thought.

  The vampire concluded, holding the slightly flat final note on "Las Vegaaaaaaaaaaaaassssssssss" interminably, setting Elvis' teeth on edge while slipping one scarf after another from around his neck and giving them to the women who came up with outstretched hands. There must've been twenty of them.

  Then the vampire was gone, taking his music machine with him and disappearing down a corridor back of the stage. Elvis went after him, the applause fading behind him.

  There was a door at the end of the corridor and Elvis saw it closing. Then he heard it click firmly shut. He broke into a run.

  The door led into the parking lot, and the vampire was standing there under the blue glow from the mercury vapor lamps high on their silver poles.

  The light made everything look strange and Elvis thought that he and the vampire might probably looked like they were standing under the blue moon of Kentucky. The Bose was sitting on the pavement nearby, not far from the Caddy that Elvis had arrived in.

  The vampire stared calmly at Elvis. He didn't look a thing like he had looked inside the hotel. Maybe it was the lights, but he looked older and more evil, though the jumpsuit still looked sharp.

  "I was very good, wasn't I?" he said.

  Elvis looked him up and down. "Hell no. You were awful. You sounded like Robert Goulet."

  "They loved me!"

  "They loved the way you looked. The jumpsuit ain't bad. The rest if bullshit."

  The vampire's eyes flashed red. "You lie."

  "You're the liar," Elvis said. "Tryin' to be somethin' you're not. You can't sing. You can't move. Why don't you give it up?"

  "You wouldn't understand," the vampire said.

  Elvis shrugged. "Try me."

  The vampire sighed theatrically. "You humans are so limited. But very well. Imagine you have lived for a thousand years. Impossible, no?"

  "No," Elvis said. Sometimes he thought he'd lived a lot longer than that; he'd just done it in a lot less time. "I can imagine that pretty easy."