The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  “But Hoyt Pickens said Leon liked to wander at night and had been creeping in places he shouldn’t. He said this is what happens when people come down from up north and spread ideas in places that weren’t ready for them. He said that Leon Simms sat outside Mr. Early’s store and licked his lips over children and took them to secret places where he slaked his unnatural appetite.

  “The more Hoyt Pickens talked, the more the men thought he sounded right. I must have nodded off because when I opened my eyes it was full dark and the backyard was empty. I heard the train pass, and a hoot owl carrying on out in the woods, and I was slipping back to sleep when the land lit up.

  “A crowd of men came in following a wagon and they had lanterns and flashlights. They were quiet but I heard one hard voice talking loud, giving orders, and it was my daddy. Next to him stood Hoyt Pickens and his ice cream suit glowed in the dark. They pulled something off the back of the cart, a big burlap bag we used for picking cotton, and they lifted one end and something flowed out wet and black onto the dirt. It was Leon, all tied with rope.

  “The men got shovels, and they dug a deep hole underneath the peach tree and dragged Leon to it and he must not have been dead because I heard him call my daddy ‘boss’ and say, ‘Please, boss, I’ll play you something, boss,’ and they threw him down in that hole and piled dirt on top of him until his begging got muffled, and after a while you couldn’t hear it anymore, but I still could.

  “When I woke up early there was mist on the ground and I went out back to see if maybe I’d had a bad dream. But I could see the fresh-dug dirt and then I heard a noise and saw my daddy sitting real quiet in the corner of the porch and he had a jar of rabbit spit between his legs. His eyes were swollen red and when he saw me he gave me a grin that came straight out of Hell.”

  Patricia realized that was why Miss Mary let the peaches rot. The memory of the fruit’s sweet juice running down her chin, its meat filling her stomach, now tasted sour with Leon Simms’s blood.

  “Hoyt Pickens left before the rabbit spit turned brown,” Miss Mary croaked. “Daddy took the wagon to Columbia but he couldn’t find who’d been buying from Hoyt. All our money was in those barrels but no one in Kershaw could buy the rabbit spit at the price Daddy needed and he drank up most of it himself over the next few years. Mama lost my brother child and Daddy sold his stills for eating money. He never worked another day, just sat out back, drinking that brown rabbit spit alone because no one would come by our place knowing what we had buried there. When he finally hanged himself in the barn it was a mercy. When hard times came a few years later some people say it was Leon Simms that poisoned the land, but I’ll always know it was Hoyt.”

  In the long silence, water overflowed Miss Mary’s twitching eyelids and ran down her face. She licked her lips, and Patricia saw that a white film coated her tongue. Her skin looked thin as paper, her hands felt cold as ice. Her breathing sounded like tearing cloth. Slowly, Patricia watched her bloodshot eyes lose their focus, and she realized telling the story had set Miss Mary adrift. Patricia started to pull her hand from Miss Mary’s, but the old lady tightened her fingers and held firm.

  “Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,” she croaked. “They never stop taking and they don’t know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.”

  Patricia waited for Miss Mary to say something else, but her mother-in-law didn’t move. After a while, she pulled her hand from Miss Mary’s cold fingers and watched the old woman fall asleep with her eyes still open.

  A black wind pressed down on her house.

  THE STRANGER BESIDE ME

  July 1993

  CHAPTER 12

  Deep summer suffocated the Old Village. It hadn’t rained all month. The sun cooked lawns to a crunchy yellow, baked sidewalks white-hot, made roof shingles soft, and heated telephone poles until the streets smelled like warm creosote. Everyone abandoned the outdoors except for the occasional midafternoon child darting across spongy asphalt streets. No one did yard work after ten in the morning, and they saved their errands until after six at night. From sunup to sundown, the whole world felt flooded in boiling honey.

  But Patricia wouldn’t run errands after the sun started to go down. When she had to go to the store or the bank, she raced to her sunbaked Volvo and blasted the air conditioner while sitting miserably on the scorching front seat until she could tolerate touching the burning hot steering wheel. She insisted that Blue take the garbage cans out to the street before dark, no matter how much he complained about dragging them to the end of the driveway under the relentless, burning sun.

  After sundown Patricia stayed close to home. When Korey or Blue got picked up for sleepovers, she watched from the front porch until they got into the cars, closed the doors, and drove safely off the Cruze. Even when their central air conditioning finally broke and the air-conditioner man told them they should have called earlier and it would be two weeks before he could get parts, Patricia insisted on locking every window and door before they went to bed. No matter how many fans they had running, every night, everyone sweated through all their sheets, and every morning Patricia stripped every single bed and made them up again fresh. The dryer ran nonstop.

  Finally, James Harris saved their lives.

  The doorbell rang during supper one night and Patricia went to answer, not wanting Korey or Blue to open the door after dark. James Harris stood on her porch.

  “I just wanted to check in and see how everyone was doing after the big scare,” he said.

  Patricia had thought she might not see him again after she’d overreacted the night the man got on their roof and shouted at him, as if he were the danger rather than the person trying to get into the house. She’d felt ashamed to think the worst of someone for no reason, so seeing him on their porch as if nothing had happened filled her with a profound sense of relief.

  “I’m still kicking myself I wasn’t here,” Carter said, standing up from the table and shaking James’s hand when she led him into the dining room. “Thank God you came by. The kids say you were the man of the hour. You’re always welcome in our home.”

  James Harris took this literally, and Patricia soon found herself listening for his knock as Korey ate the last roll or Blue complained that he couldn’t possibly finish his zucchini in this heat. Night after night she’d find James Harris on their front porch and they’d exchange comments about that month’s book club book, or he’d ask what the latest update was on getting the air conditioner fixed, or how Miss Mary was doing, or he’d tell her he’d gone to church with Slick and Leland. Then she’d invite him inside for ice cream.

  “How does he know exactly when dessert’s going on the table?” Carter complained after James’s fourth visit, hopping up and down on one foot while peeling off his sweaty socks in the bedroom. “It’s like he can hear our freezer door open all the way down the street.”

  But Patricia liked having him there because Carter had only managed to keep his promise to be home before dark for two days before he started staying late at work again. Most nights she ate alone with the children, and because Korey was going to two-week soccer camp at the end of the month and apparently had to spend the night with every single one of her friends before she left, most nights it was just her and Blue at the supper table.

  Around the fifth night James Harris stopped by Patricia started leaving the windows open later, and then she started leaving the upstairs windows open overnight, and then the downstairs windows, and before long she just left the screen doors on their latches, and the house throbbed softly with fans sitting in open windows all day and night.

  The other reason she was glad James Harris came by was because she didn’t know how to talk to Blue anymore. All Blue wanted to talk about was Nazis. She’d helped him get an adult library card and now he checked out photograph-packed Time-Life books about World War II. She foun
d his old spiral notebooks covered in drawings of swastikas, SS lightning bolts, Panzer tanks, and skulls. Whenever she tried to talk to him about his summer Oasis program or going to the Creekside pool, he always countered with Nazis.

  James Harris spoke fluent Nazi.

  “You know,” he said to Blue, “the entire American space program was built by Wernher von Braun and a bunch of other Nazis the Americans gave asylum to because they knew how to build rockets.”

  Or:

  “We like to think that we beat Hitler, but it was really the Russians who turned the tide.”

  Or:

  “Did you know the Nazis counterfeited British money and tried to destabilize their economy?”

  Patricia enjoyed watching Blue hold his own in a conversation with an adult, even though she wished they would talk about something besides the Third Reich. But her mother had told her to appreciate what she had, not whine about what she didn’t, and so she let them fill the space that had been left empty by Carter and Korey.

  Those evenings over ice cream, sitting in the dining room with the windows open and a warm, salty breeze blowing through the house and Blue and James Harris talking about World War II, were the last time Patricia felt truly happy. Even after everything that came later, when everything in her life hurt, the memory of those nights wrapped her in a soft, sweet glow that often carried her away to sleep.

  After almost three weeks, Patricia found herself actually looking forward to Grace’s birthday party. She finally felt confident enough to go outside at night, even if it was just down the block, and Carter had promised to be home early and she felt like they could finally get back to normal.

  * * *

  —

  The second Patricia and Carter were out the door, Mrs. Greene stepped out of her shoes and peeled off her socks and stuck them in her purse. It was too hot to have anything on her feet. Blue and Korey were spending the night out, and no one was home to care if she went barefoot or not.

  The carpet felt hot beneath the soles of her feet. Every door and window in the house stood open, but the puny breeze that trickled in from the backyard was sticky and stunk of the marsh.

  “You feel like eating something tonight, Miss Mary?” she asked.

  Miss Mary hummed happily to herself. Mrs. Campbell had said she’d been going through her old photo albums all week, and if she hadn’t lost so much weight Mrs. Greene would think she almost seemed like her old self.

  “I found it,” Miss Mary said, smiling. She rolled her boiled-egg eyes up to Mrs. Greene. “Do you want to see it?”

  An old snapshot rested facedown on her knee. She stroked its back with trembling fingers.

  “Who’s it of?” Mrs. Greene asked, reaching for it.

  Miss Mary covered it with the flat of her hand.

  “Patricia first,” she said.

  “You want me to brush out your hair?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  Miss Mary looked confused by the change of subject, considered it, then jerked her chin down once.

  Mrs. Greene found the wooden hairbrush and stood behind Miss Mary’s chair, and while the old lady looked at the TV and stroked her photograph, Mrs. Greene brushed her sparse gray hair, surrounded by the noise of the rushing fans.

  * * *

  —

  Grace’s parties were everything Patricia thought parties should be when she was a little girl. In the living room, Arthur Rivers had taken off his jacket and sat at the piano playing a medley of college fight songs, which were greeted with boos, cheers, and raucous singing along, depending on the college. He wouldn’t stop as long as people kept bringing him bourbon.

  The party spilled from the living room into the dining room, where it swirled in a circle around a table overflowing with miniature ham biscuits, cheese straws, pimento cheese sandwiches, and a tray of crudités that would be thrown out untouched tomorrow morning, and then it flowed through the kitchen and pooled on the sun porch with its panoramic view of the harbor. The white tablecloth-covered bar stood at the end of the room where the crowd was thickest, and two black men in white jackets made an endless stream of drinks behind it.

  Every doctor and lawyer and harbor pilot in the Old Village had put on their seersucker and their bow ties and they held glasses and bellowed about what was wrong with Ken Hatfield this season, or if those businesses the hurricane had shut down along Shem Creek a few years ago would ever reopen, and when the Isle of Palms connector would be completed, and where all these damn marsh rats were coming from. Their wives clutched glasses of white wine and wore a veritable jungle of clashing prints—animal prints and floral prints and geometric prints and abstract prints—talking about their children’s plans for the summer, their kitchen renovation projects, and Patricia’s ear. This was the first social event she’d attended since the incident and she felt like everyone was staring at her.

  “I can’t tell unless I stand right in front of you so I can see both ears at the same time,” Kitty reassured her.

  “Is it that obvious?” Patricia asked, reaching up and smoothing her hair down over her scar.

  “It just makes your face look a little cattywampus,” Kitty said, and then she caught Loretta Jones’s elbow as she shouldered past them in the crush. “Loretta, look at Patricia and tell me if you notice anything.”

  “Well, that man’s grandmother bit off her ear,” Loretta said, cocking her head to one side. “What do you mean? Did something else happen?”

  Patricia wanted to slink away, but Kitty gripped her wrist.

  “It was his great-aunt,” Kitty said. “And she just took a nibble.”

  Loretta cocked her head and said, “Do you need a good plastic surgeon? I can get you a name. You look lopsided. Oh, there’s Sadie Funche. Excuse me.”

  “Loretta always was a pill,” Kitty said as Loretta disappeared into the crowd.

  * * *

  —

  The big box fan stood in the door of the den where it was supposed to suck in hot air and blow it out cool in the garage room, but it barely stirred the sludge. It was intolerably hot. Ragtag lay, miserable, under Miss Mary’s bed, panting.

  Maybe she would give Miss Mary a cool bath, Mrs. Greene thought. The water would feel nice for both of them. She started to get up when she felt a living gaze on her. She looked to the den door and saw an enormous, wet, black rat sitting motionless beside the fan, staring at her. The air over its patchy, piebald back practically shimmered with disease. Mrs. Greene felt her bowels fill with ice water. She’d seen plenty of rats in her lifetime, but never one as big as this, and certainly not one sitting all cool and collected as if it owned the place.

  “Shoo!” Mrs. Greene said, flicking her hands in its direction and stamping her foot. Ragtag lifted his head as if it weighed five hundred pounds and gave her a look, wondering if that “shoo” was directed at him.

  “Go on, Ragtag,” Mrs. Greene said, recognizing her natural ally. “Get that mean old rat. Get it!”

  Ragtag’s head tracked her gestures and saw the rat and, without moving a muscle, he began to growl from deep inside his throat. The rat oozed its body out long and flowed down onto the first step, and Mrs. Greene saw that it was as big as a man’s shoe. Ragtag’s growls went up in pitch, but they didn’t seem to trouble the rat. Ragtag scrambled out from under the bed and faced the rat square on, his growl escalating, building toward a bark, and then it cut off with a yelp as three other, smaller, equally filthy rats poured down the steps on either side of the fat one and scurried across the carpet, coming for Mrs. Greene.

  Ragtag ran at them without hesitation and seized one in his jaws and shook his head twice, once to break its neck, and again to fling its corpse against the wall. The second and third rats vanished beneath Miss Mary’s hospital bed.

  Mrs. Greene had pulled her bare feet up onto her chair, but now she realized she had to get involved. There would
be a stick or a mop in the utility room behind her, and she needed to chase these rats out of the house before they bit someone.

  “We got some rats in here, Miss Mary,” Mrs. Greene said, standing up. “But me and Ragtag are going to get rid of them.”

  She went to the utility room door, then stopped when she saw the padlock they’d put on to secure it after that night Mrs. Campbell thought a man tried to get in the house. No one had given her a key.

  BANG!

  Something crashed behind her and she whirled to see Ragtag skip back in fear from the box fan that slid to a stop facedown at the bottom of the steps. Several new rats had joined the huge one on the steps, and they looked filthy, fur missing in patches, bodies encrusted in scabs, noses twitching. The box fan made a low, muffled moaning sound, unable to suck air from the carpet, and more rats jammed the doorway. Ragtag ran at them, barking, but they didn’t budge.

  “Get ’em, Ragtag!” Mrs. Greene said. “Get ’em!”

  Mrs. Greene knew what to do. She would shut Miss Mary in the small bathroom across from the utility room, and then she’d get a blanket and she and Ragtag would drive these things back. As long as Ragtag stayed with her she could handle this.

  “Miss Mary, I’m going to take you to the powder room for a minute,” she said.

  She leaned down and got her hands into Miss Mary’s damp armpits and started to lift her up. Miss Mary gave a miserable groan and then Mrs. Greene smelled something rank. She looked up.

  Rats covered the den, spilling from the door and falling clumsily onto the top step: wet and muddy, three-legged and four-legged, long-tailed and no-tailed and vile. Black eyes shone, whiskers twitched, tails squirmed, their seething bodies packed together in the doorway. None of them made a sound. A carpet of rats covered the floor of the den so thick, Mrs. Greene couldn’t see the yellow linoleum, and more piled in from the dining room, from the back door, from the front hall, surging into the den, covering it like a seething pool of matted fur, crawling over each other, forming a packed, squirming mass.