The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires

by Grady Hendrix

  “What do you want from me?” she asked.

  “He’s treated you like a fool,” James Harris said. “Carter doesn’t see what a wonderful family he has, but I do. I have all along. I was there when your mother-in-law passed, and she was a good woman. I’ve watched Blue grow up and he’s having a hard time but he’s got so much potential. You’re a good person. But your husband has thrown it all away.”

  They passed the Oasis gas station in the middle of the road and entered the Old Village proper, the interior of the car getting darker as the streetlights became spaced farther apart.

  “If Leland gave Slick something,” he said, “Carter could do the same to you. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you need to know. I want you to be safe. I care about you. I care about Blue and Korey. Y’all are a big part of my life.”

  He looked earnest as a suitor asking someone to be his bride as he turned from Pitt Street onto McCants.

  “What are you saying?” she asked, lips numb.

  “You deserve better,” he said. “You and the children deserve someone who knows your true value.”

  Her stomach slowly turned inside out. He passed Alhambra Hall and she wanted to shove open the door and jump out of the car. She wanted to feel the asphalt slap and cut and scrape her. It would feel real, not like this nightmare. She made herself look at James Harris again, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. She kept quiet until he pulled up in front of her driveway.

  “I need time to think,” she said.

  “What are you going to tell Carter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Patricia said, and made her face a mask. “Not yet. This is between us.”

  She fumbled with the door handle, and as she did, she dropped Francine’s license onto the floor of his car and slipped it beneath the passenger seat with her foot.

  It wasn’t his wallet, but it was the next best thing.

  * * *

  —

  She woke up in the dark. She must have turned off the bedside light at some point and didn’t remember. Now she lay there, scared to move, stiff as a board, listening. What had woken her? Her ears strained, scanning the darkness. She wished Carter were here, but he was on another drug company trip to Hilton Head.

  Her ears wandered through the dark house. She heard the higher-pitched heat coming through the air registers, the ticking sound it made deep in the tin ducts. Behind the ticking came the high-pitched rush of warm air, and the drip from the bathroom faucet.

  She thought about Blue. She needed to reach him, somehow, before James Harris got him further under control. He’d lied about a rape, but she didn’t think it was too late. She needed to give him something he’d want more than he wanted James Harris’s approval.

  Then she heard it, behind all the house sounds, the deliberate sound of a window sliding open. It came from down the dark hall, from behind Korey’s closed bedroom door, and in a flash Patricia realized Korey was sneaking out of the house.

  She kicked herself. No wonder Korey acted so exhausted in the morning. No wonder she seemed so fuzzy headed. She was sneaking out of the house every night to see some boy. Patricia had been so caught up with Slick and James Harris and all these other things that she’d ignored the fact that she had two teenagers in the house, not just Blue. And there were plenty of normal, everyday risks to worry about.

  She threw back her comforter, slid her feet into her slippers, and padded down the hall. There was a furtive, rhythmic sound coming from behind Korey’s door and she realized that maybe Korey wasn’t sneaking out, but this boy was sneaking in. She snapped on the hall light and threw open Korey’s bedroom door.

  At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at in the spill of light from the hall.

  Two pale, naked bodies lay on the bed, and she realized the one closest to her was James Harris, his muscled back and buttocks moving slightly, rhythmically, pulsing like a heartbeat. He knelt between the smooth long legs of a girl with a flat stomach and firm, upturned, underdeveloped teenaged breasts. His mouth was affixed to a place on her inner thigh, right next to her pubis. Her hair was spread out across the pillow, her eyes were half-closed in ecstasy, and she smiled with abandon, a smile Patricia had never seen before on Korey’s face.

  CHAPTER 35

  Patricia fell on her daughter, shaking her shoulders, slapping her cheeks.

  “Korey!” she screamed. “Korey! Wake up!”

  Obscenely, they kept going, latched together, pulsing like an engorged sack of blood. Korey gave a small mew of pleasure and one hand drifted down, ghosting lightly across her stomach, toward her pubic hair, and Patricia grabbed her wrist and yanked it away and Korey began to squirm, and Patricia had to get James’s head out from between her daughter’s legs, and she looked down at him, and her stomach gave a warning flop. She was going to throw up.

  She clamped her lips together, let go of Korey’s feverish wrist, and tried to haul James away by the shoulders, but he struggled to stay latched to her daughter. Feeling like an idiot, Patricia grabbed a soccer cleat from the floor and hit him in the head with its heel. Her first blow was a silly, ineffectual tap, but the second was harder, and the third made a knocking sound when the cleats hit bone.

  As she struck him in the head with Korey’s shoe over and over again she heard herself repeating, “Get off! Get off! Get off my little girl!”

  A sucking slobbering noise ripped through the quiet of the room, the sound of raw steak being torn in two, and James Harris looked up at her like a country cousin, mouth hanging open, something black and inhuman hanging from the hole in the bottom of his face, dripping viscous blood, eyes glazed. He tried to focus on Patricia, the shoe held back by her ear, ready to bring it down again.

  “Uh,” he said, dully.

  He belched and a line of bloody drool dribbled from the corner of the proboscis hanging beneath his chin. Then it began to curl back up on itself, retracting slowly into his gore-slimed mouth.

  My God, Patricia thought, I’ve gone insane, and she brought the cleat down again. James Harris rose, seizing her wrist in one hand, her throat in the other, and he threw her against the far wall. She took the impact between her shoulder blades. It punched all the air out of her lungs. It loosened the root of her tongue. Then he was on her, breath hot and raw, forearm across her throat, stronger than her, faster than her, and she went limp in his grip like prey.

  “This is all your fault,” he said, voice thick and slurred with liquid.

  Blood coated his lips, and hot specks of it sprinkled her face. And she knew he was right. This. Was. All. Her. Fault. She had exposed her children to this danger, she had invited it into her house. She had been so obsessed with the children in Six Mile and Blue that she hadn’t seen the danger to Korey. She had driven both her children right into James Harris’s arms.

  She saw a lump move down, down, down his throat as he swallowed whatever apparatus it was he used to suck their blood. Then he said, “You said this was between us.”

  She remembered saying that in the car earlier, and she had only meant to stall him, to buy more time, to keep his guard down, but she had said it, and to him it had been another invitation. She had led him on. She deserved this. But her daughter didn’t.

  “Korey,” was the best she could manage through her constricted windpipe.

  “Look what you’re doing to her,” he hissed, and wrenched her head to the side so she could see the bed.

  Korey had pulled her arms and legs in on themselves, retracting into a fetal position, muscles twitching, going into shock. Blood spread on the mattress beneath her. Patricia closed her eyes to let the nausea pass.

  “Mom?” Blue called from the hall.

  She and James Harris locked eyes, him totally nude, his front a bib of blood, her in her nightgown, not even wearing a brassiere, the door standing a quarter of the way open. Neither of them moved.<
br />
  “Mom?” Blue called again. “What’s going on?”

  Do. Something, James Harris mouthed at her.

  She reached up and touched her fingertips to the back of the hand that held her throat. He let go.

  “Blue,” she said, stepping through the door and into the hall. She prayed that the flecks of Korey’s blood she felt on her face wouldn’t show. “Get back into bed.”

  “What’s wrong with Korey?” he asked, standing in the hall.

  “Your sister’s sick,” Patricia said. “Please. She’ll be better later. But she needs to be alone right now.”

  Having determined that this was nothing that required his attention, Blue turned without speaking, went back into his bedroom, and closed the door. Patricia stepped back into Korey’s room and turned on the overhead light just in time to see James Harris, naked, squatting on the windowsill. He held his clothes balled up against his belly like a lover fleeing an angry husband in some old farce.

  “You asked for this,” he said, and then he was gone and the window was just a big black rectangle of night.

  Korey whimpered on the bed. It was the sound of her having a nightmare that Patricia had heard so many times before, and in sympathy she made the same sound back. She went to her daughter and examined the wound on her inner thigh. It looked swollen and infected, and it wasn’t the only one. All around it were overlapping bruises, overlapping punctures, all their edges torn and ragged. Patricia realized this had happened before. Many times.

  Her head was full of bats, shrieking and bumping into each other, tearing all coherent thought to tatters. Patricia didn’t even know how she found the camera or took the pictures, how she got to the bathroom, how she stood in front of the sink running warm water onto a washcloth, how she bathed Korey’s wound and put on bacitracin. She wanted to bandage it, but she couldn’t, not without letting Korey know she’d seen this obscene thing. She couldn’t cross that line with her daughter. Not yet.

  Everything seemed too normal. She expected the house to explode, the backyard to fall into the harbor, Blue to walk out the door with a suitcase to move to Australia, but Korey’s room was as messy as usual, and when she went downstairs the sailboat lamp burned on the front hall table like normal, and Ragtag raised his head from where he napped on the den couch, tags jingling, like normal, and the porch lights clicked off when she flipped the switch like normal.

  She went into her bathroom and washed her face, hard, with a washcloth, scrubbing and scouring, and she tried not to look in the mirror. She scrubbed until it was red and raw. She scrubbed until it hurt. Good. She reached up and pinched her left ear until it hurt, twisting it, and that felt good, too. She got into bed and lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, knowing she would never sleep.

  It was all her fault. It was all her fault. It was all her fault.

  Guilt, and betrayal, and nausea churned in her gut and she barely made it to the bathroom before she threw up.

  * * *

  —

  She made every effort not to treat Korey differently the next morning, and Korey seemed no different than she was every morning: sullen and uncommunicative. Patricia’s hands felt numb as she packed Korey and Blue off to school, and then she sat by the phone and waited.

  The first call came at nine, and she couldn’t bring herself to pick up. The machine took it.

  “Patricia,” James Harris’s voice said. “Are you there? We need to talk. I have to explain what’s going on here.”

  It was a cloudless, sunny October day. The bright blue sky protected her. But he could still call. The phone rang again.

  “Patricia,” he said to the machine. “You have to understand what’s happening.”

  He called three more times, and on the third, she picked up.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “Come down and listen to me,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  “How long?” she repeated.

  “Patricia,” he said. “I want you to be able to see my eyes, so you know I’m being honest with you.”

  “Just tell me how long?” she asked, and to her own surprise her voice broke and her forehead cramped and she felt tears in the hinge of her jaw. She couldn’t close her mouth; there was a howl inside that wanted to get out.

  “I’m glad you finally know,” he said. “I’m so tired of hiding. This doesn’t change anything I said last night.”

  “What?”

  “I value you,” he said. “I value your family. I’m still your friend.”

  “What have you done to my daughter?” she managed.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said. “I know you must be confused and frightened but it’s no different than my eyes—it’s just a condition I have. Some of my organs don’t work properly and from time to time I need to borrow someone’s circulatory system and filter my blood through theirs. I’m not a vampire, I don’t drink it, it’s not any different than using a dialysis machine, except it’s more natural. And I promise you there’s no pain. In fact, from what I can tell it feels good to them. You have to understand, I would never do anything to hurt Korey. She agreed to do this. I want you to know that. After I told her about my condition she came to me and volunteered to help. You have to believe I would never make her do something against her will.”

  “What are you?” she asked.

  “I’m alone,” he said. “I’ve been alone for a very long time.”

  Patricia realized it wasn’t repentance in his voice, it was self-pity. She’d heard Carter feeling sorry for himself too often to mistake it for anything else.

  “What do you want from us?”

  “I care for you,” he said. “I care for your family. I see how Carter treats you and it makes me furious. He throws away what I would treasure. Blue thinks the world of me already, and Korey has already done so much to help me that she has my eternal gratitude. I’d like to think we could come to an understanding.”

  He wanted her family. It came to her in an instant. He wanted to replace Carter. This man was a vampire, or as close to one as she would ever see. She remembered Miss Mary talking in the dark all those years ago.

  They have a hunger on them. They never stop taking. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and eat and never know how to stop.

  He’d found a place where he fit in, with a nearby source of food, and he’d become a respected member of the community, and now he wanted to have a family because he didn’t know how to stop. He always wanted more. That knowledge opened a door inside her mind and the bats flew out in a ragged black stream, leaving her skull empty and quiet and clear.

  He had wanted old Mrs. Savage’s house, so he took it from her. Miss Mary had endangered him with her photograph, and he’d destroyed her. He had attacked Slick to protect himself. He would say anything to get what he wanted. He had no limits. And she knew that the moment he suspected she knew what he wanted, her children would be in danger.

  “Patricia?” he asked in the silence.

  She took a shuddering breath.

  “I need time to think,” she said. If she got off the phone fast he wouldn’t hear the change in her voice.

  “Let me come there,” he said, his tone sharper. “Tonight. I want to apologize in person.”

  “No,” she said, and gripped the phone in her suddenly sweaty hand. She forced her throat to relax. “I need time.”

  “Promise you forgive me,” he said.

  She had to get off the phone. With a thrill of joy she realized she had to call the police right away. They would go to his house and find the license and search his attic and this would all be over by sundown.

  “I promise,” she said.

  “I’m trusting you, Patricia,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I want yo
u to know all about me,” he said. “When you’re ready, I want to spend a lot of time with you.”

  She was proud of the way she kept her voice calm and steady.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Before I go, the damnedest thing happened this morning.”

  “What?” she asked, numb.

  “I found Francine Chapman’s driver’s license in my car,” he said, his voice full of wonder. “Remember Francine? Who used to clean for me? I don’t know how it got there, but I took care of it. Strange, right?”

  She wanted to dig her nails into her face, and rake them down, and rip off her skin. She was a fool.

  “That is strange,” she said, no life left in her voice.

  “Well,” he said. “Lucky I found it. That could have been hard to explain.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ll wait to hear from you,” he said. “But don’t make me wait too long.”

  He hung up.

  Her one job as a parent was to protect her children from monsters. The ones under the bed, the ones in the closet, the ones hiding in the dark. Instead, she’d invited the monster into her home and been too weak to stop it from taking whatever it wanted. The monster had killed her mother-in-law, seduced her husband, taken her daughter, and her son.

  She was too weak to stop him alone, but he had to be stopped. There weren’t many people left she could turn to.

  She picked up the phone and called Mrs. Greene.

  “Yes?” Mrs. Greene said.

  “Mrs. Greene,” Patricia said, and cleared her throat. “Can you make it downtown Monday night?”

  “Why?” Mrs. Greene asked.

  “I need you to come to my book club.”

  CHAPTER 36

  On Monday, temperatures plunged around noon and dark clouds started piling up overhead. Leaves skimmed the Old Village’s empty streets. On the bridge, sudden gusts blew cars sideways, forcing them to abruptly shift lanes. It got dark by four, and windows rattled in their frames, doors blew open suddenly, and the wind tore limbs from live oaks and smashed them down in the middle of the street.