by Rose Titus
NIGHT HOME
NIGHT HOME
A Novella
ROSE TITUS
Part One of The Vampire Next Door series
Copyright Page
Copyright © 2014 by Rose Titus
Hypothesis Press
Andover, MA
www.HypothesisPress.com
This book is a work of fiction; all characters, names, places, incidents, and events are the product of the author’s imagination and either fictitious or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any forms by any means without prior consent by the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9990357-5-7
ISBN-10: 0-9990357-5-4
NIGHT HOME
H ER car pulled up into the driveway and she finally saw the house. She knew it from old photographs, but this was the first time actually seeing it. It wasn’t huge for a Victorian era home, but it was big enough. The exterior was painted light gray, slightly faded from time, as if the old home had somehow managed to keep its dignity over the decades. She was the “last surviving heir” of a family almost died out, or so she was told. And the Victorian was all hers now, even though she hardly ever heard much about the eccentric uncle who originally owned the place back in the 1930’s.
She had no idea what to do with the place, or even if she could afford to keep it, repair it, or even pay the electric bills. She wondered if the electricity and plumbing were even functional, although she had been told that things would be in working order. Oh, well, here it is. She sighed. It was a long drive and she hoped it was civilized enough inside that she wouldn’t need to go back up the highway to find a motel to stay in as night approached.
When she got in she found to her relief that the electricity did work, and so did the plumbing. The place was dusty, and needed a thorough cleaning. She had all of spring break from college to do that. And she needed to explore the place. What unusual things would she find lost or abandoned in the old Victorian?
She hoped the place wasn’t haunted. There had been a murder nearby, she was told, way back in 1936. Her granduncle, a professor, was killed, shot to death, by an associate from the university where he taught. The place had bad memories, or that’s what she heard from elderly relatives who would say no more about it.
The place was lived in, from time to time. But it was so far from everything else that most people who lived there would later move on to be closer to the city. The last person to stay there was an elderly aunt that she hardly knew, and who had recently passed away.
It was all hers now. The only trouble was what was she going to do with it?
The first thing she did the next morning was shop for food. There was a small grocery store in the center of the rural town, along with a laundromat, a gas station, a coffee shop, a very small library, a thrift shop, a liquor store, a convenience store, and a pharmacy. Not much else. She wondered if the thrift shop was the most exciting place in town. No nightclubs, no major sized shopping mall...no...nothing. It was definitely what they meant when they described the place as “small-town America.”
She came back to put the few grocery items away and noticed that the chrome-trimmed white refrigerator looked as though it came straight out of the 1950’s. But it worked, even though its constant hum annoyed her. The oven, too, appeared to be a functional antique. The kitchen was lit with a fluorescent bulb, the kind her grandmother had in her kitchen back long ago. It flickered like a strobe light until it warmed up, causing ghostly shadows to appear in the dark corners. The toilets worked, but one of the sinks constantly dripped. The place needed updating badly. Either that or make a museum out of it. Then it dawned on her. There was no television.
“Where the hell is the—?” But then she realized that after Aunt Edna passed away there was talk about the place being broken into a few times. The window in the back door was smashed and had to be repaired soon. There was a piece of cardboard filling where the glass had been. That must have been how they got in. The television must have been taken.
“Whatever,” she sighed, and wondered if the location was even too primitive to receive cable anyway.
Time to explore the place, and see if anything else was stolen.
She found silverware, genuine, she believed, not silverplate. It was beautiful, but needed to be cleaned and polished. She was glad it wasn’t taken like the TV set. An old sable coat and hat in the closet upstairs. Old jewelry still tucked away in the bottom of drawers. It was like a treasure hunt. She wasn’t sure if any of it would be worth anything, but she would eventually find out.
She continued to explore the rest of the ghostly old place.
In the basement there was nothing much but dusty old discarded furniture, a box of hand tools, piles of old books on science, abandoned and left stacked up on the cold stone floor. She noticed the books on science. They were dated from the 1920’s and early 30’s. Science then would be primitive now, she realized. But they were fascinating to look through. Most were on biology, botany, zoology. They must have belonged to the Professor, of course. The eccentric old granduncle. Most in the family simply referred to him as “The Professor.” Professor Benjamin Aubrey—the man was nearly a legend in her family. A legend people seemed reluctant to talk about in much detail. Those in the family who knew of him said he had been working on something really unusual when he was killed. No one knew what it was, though. He was working on it, and kept to himself. He never spoke of his work. Then he was murdered. And no one talked about it much, as if there was a thick black wall of silence surrounding the past.
He was a distant relative, and it didn’t matter now. But she was still curious.
There was a trap door for the ashes of the fireplace above, she noticed. It must be stuffed with crap, she thought. Out of boredom, she went to pull it open. She expected to be covered in soot, so she quickly stepped aside.
Nothing.
Nothing at all came out of the chute. She looked down to see if it was totally clean or if the ashes were instead grossly clumped together like a lump of black coal.
“What the—?”
Notebooks. A stack of them. “What the hell are these in here for?” She pulled them out. The yellowed pages were filled with handwriting. His strange project? It must be. Someone hid his notes in there. What a hell of a strange place to hide them. But why? So no one could steal his research? And what the hell was he working on? Maybe he was inventing something? Something that was commonplace today, like a microwave oven or a wireless phone?
Notebooks. A stack of them.
She was alone in the house and had no television. What the hell, she thought, I might as well read over the old man’s strange crap.
But first, she needed to go back up on the highway to find that pizza place she passed on the way last night. It was either that or Chinese. The idea of cooking on that antique stove didn’t excite her much. And there was nothing else in town besides the lousy coffee shop, which she imagined to be run by waitresses with sixties hair and names like Lou Ann and Donna who called everyone “hon.”
The idea of cooking on that antique stove didn’t excite her much.
The first one began with, “I have made an astonishing discovery. The legends are true. ”
What the hell is this stuff?
And she read on. He called his secret project his “Nocturnal Studies,” and she wondered what on earth that could be about, and what the hell could he be studying in a quiet little town where nothing would ever happen anyway, especially at night?
Some of the notes were
often more personal than scientific. All his academic life he had wanted to make a great discovery and finally he had found it—or it had found him. “The Nocturnal Race has made itself known to me after their search for a man of science with a suitably open mind...” Yeah, the Prof was known in the family history as being eccentric. But what had killed him? His discovery? And what was this Nocturnal Race he scribbled on about?
She sat in the out of date but functional kitchen and read on with the whir of the old refrigerator for background music until she noticed an old yellowed and faded news clipping dated September 7, 1936 tucked inside the notebook. Professor Shot Dead. “Oh my God.” Her eyes scanned through the fragile paper. It was a colleague of his from the University who apparently suddenly went mad and shot him. The police hauled the murderer off after apprehending him at his office at the University. He was dragged away in shackles, raving about vampires.
What? The man who killed her granduncle was also wanted in connection with another murder.
And the Professor was studying the Nocturnal Race?
At least now she was sure his mysterious secret project didn’t do him in. Instead, his death was caused by someone he unfortunately worked with at the university. But if the Professor was dead, then who hid the notebooks? And who put the clipping away in the book? Someone stuffed the notes safely away where no one could find them, and put away the clipping as if to preserve a tragic moment in time and hide the truth from the world. But who?
She would never be able to sleep now. She had all night to read. Could it be fiction, or even the writings of a brilliant man gone mad like his colleague? If it was, then why hide it away for years? Late into the night, her head was spinning with what she had read. It was after midnight and she couldn’t stop reading the eccentric old man’s notes. She remembered seeing a black and white photograph of him once, and so she could now imagine him scribbling into the notebooks with an ornate fountain pen. It turned out he bought the property just to study this “Nocturnal Race” he discovered.
“Oh God,” she whispered. Why the hell didn’t I stop at that liquor store? I sure do need it now.
They emigrated from Eastern Europe as a group in the 1850’s to escape violent persecution, he wrote. A large spread of land was purchased for farming, sending people ahead of them to handle the purchase to make the transition more simple. They raised dairy cattle, sheep, goats, pigs.
She had noticed a few farms close by along the highway. The reading all seemed dull until she got to the part where they slaughtered the animals to sell the meat, and drank the blood themselves. They were in the habit of draining off small amounts from larger animals so they would not need to kill so many of them so often.
What?
Here it was written, as if a cold fact.
And the sun made them uncomfortable, so they stayed in during the day and slept, doing most of their work after dusk. Locals believed it was an odd foreign custom and therefore mostly caused them no trouble.
He wrote it as if it was all real. As if he truly believed in it himself.
Could it be? No...that would be just too crazy. She read on.
They were born that way, and certainly not dead or “undead.” And had no supernatural abilities except that they were immune to most illnesses and often lived as long as three centuries. And they could see well in the dark.
Well, naturally.
What the hell am I thinking?
“This can’t be real!” she muttered.
The rest of the notebooks seemed to contain information on various individuals with the “condition.” She flipped through without reading in detail. There were names, ages—some as old as 150—occupations, comments on personality. “It just can’t be real. I don’t want to believe in this.”
But on a deeper level, she did believe it. Somehow, she felt it was true.
She couldn’t sleep at all now. It was one o’clock in the morning. She knew now that the entire night would be wasted reading this crazy stuff.
But the man died over it. So how could it be just nonsense? She needed to go outside, get some air and think. She needed to just get out of this old, creepy, poorly-lit house. The refrigerator was still humming. She wanted to tell it to shut the hell up, but felt that if she did, it would mean that she was losing it.
“Shut the hell up!” It didn’t work. The refrigerator still moaned.
She remembered there was an all-night convenience store off the highway, near the exit that led into the little town. It was well lit, and there would be other people in there, maybe. Maybe she would buy a few magazines, something else to read during her exile at the haunted mansion she’d been saddled with.
There was the usual convenience store stuff on the rack: Tabloids, celebrity gossip, fashion magazines, newspapers. The store sold lottery tickets, junk food, candy, beer, a few grocery items, even a few small appliances. She noticed the guy who owned the place was watching her. It made her nervous. Not because he watched her, but because he was so pale. He did not look unhealthy. It was like he just never got out into the sun.
“You must be the new girl.”
“Huh?” She spun around to face him.
“You’re new in town. You just moved into that old house.”
“H-how do you know?”
“Well, how could I not know? I live across the field and saw the light was on for the first time in a long time.”
“Oh.” She felt silly. “Yeah. That’s right. I’m new in town. The house will need some work, but it’s not really that bad. My eccentric old uncle owned it a long time ago and—”
“I know. Professor Aubrey. He was a good man.” There was sadness in his voice.
“Yeah, that’s what they say.” How the hell would he know if he was a good man? This guy looked no more than thirty. The old guy had been dead for at least since 1936, according to the old newspaper clipping.
“Elton.” He seemed to smile as he introduced himself. “Elton Masaryk.”
“Muriel Aubrey.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
She went up to pay for the magazine she picked.
“You let me know if you need anything over there, all right? I live just across the field. If you need anything, don’t hesitate. Really.”
“Thank you.” She went for the door but turned around. “You sound as if you know something about Professor Aubrey?”
He hesitated. “A little. Why?”
“He was related to me, but I hardly know anything about him. I heard he was murdered by his colleague from the University and—”
“Yeah. That’s right. The same guy who murdered your uncle also killed three other people too. They gave him the chair. Bastard deserved it.” But then he was silent. He was beginning to sound as if he knew more than he could tell. As if it still angered him somehow. “Oh well.” Then he went silent.
“Okay. Thank you.” She left. She returned home as the sky began to brighten, and finally slept.
In the morning after getting very little sleep, she had coffee and toast and sat with the notebooks at the table, reading them again. She promised herself she would put them all away, but she couldn’t. She sipped her coffee and read the Professor’s words. Were they the ravings of a madman? Or were they true? No. They couldn’t be. It was impossible.
They truly did have a reflection in a mirror. It was explained to the Professor that superstitious people believed that a mirror reflected one’s soul, and also believed that the vampire had no soul, so therefore could have no reflection whatsoever.
Religious symbols had no effect.
The sun did not kill them outright. It slowly burnt whatever flesh was exposed. Heavy clothing gave some protection at times. But they preferred to sleep during the day. Well, of course, she thought. But she stopped herself again, reminding herself none of it was real.
“Intermarriage between the species is of course possible,” one passage went on. “And it has occurred often enough throughout history for them to
know that the child will most likely be like the father.”
“What?” This is not real. It’s so not real. It’s just not real.
“Of course the wife is and always has been fully informed, although her family knows so little about the situation that they are more concerned for the fact that she is marrying a foreign immigrant from a land so far away they can hardly pronounce it or find it on a world map. She laughed and told me she found her father looking the country up in a book to find out where on earth it was.”
Muriel recalled that one of the things she was told about her uncle was that he was the only professor at the University to advocate that women be one day admitted. He did get his wish many decades after his unfortunate death. On one occasion he was booed by an angry and shocked audience when he openly stood up to protest the University refusing to admit an African-American student who had applied, but that was the way things were then. He almost lost his position, and was from then on continually passed over for promotion. Professor Aubrey was the type of man, she was told, who saw people as the same no matter who they were or where they were from. But back then, that just wasn’t the way things were done.
“The difference in their culture has always been that women by necessity had to hunt alongside the men before domesticated animals became the main food source.”
Hunting what?
“Centuries ago they went into the forests at night in small groups to hunt down deer or wild boar. Logically the women could not wait at home for the men to bring food home. A stag would be shot with an arrow, its throat cut as it fell dying. If anyone wanted to feed they needed to be present.”
They hunted animals.
She was relieved.
Why should she be? It wasn’t real!
“And so their women were almost never left at home with household drudgery.” He went on to describe their women as more physically fit than usual, “unlike our own women who become exhausted so easily.”