by Jim McDoniel
They painted the house pink.10
The legend of the Pink House died out after that. When authors and film buffs were falling over themselves to find the next Amityville Horror or Overlook Hotel, they passed through Shepherd’s Crook with hardly a second thought beyond “My, what an ugly house.” As the town slowly suburbanized, all traces of its unique and colorful history were willfully forgotten by a community longing for uniformity. All that remained was a generic ghost story, used for fund-raising, and the journal of Erasmus Martin, kept by the Shepherd’s Crook Historical Society and only ever read by two people: the society’s sole eight-year-old member and, after a time, his sister.
This long and rambling history is intended to illustrate that the house—over the centuries lived in, inhabited, commandeered, and otherwise populated by various people—had never been owned by any of them, only rented.
The rights to the dwelling were still held in trust by a very old and powerful Swiss bank, in the name of one Master Yulric Dunnwulffe Bile.
Chapter 7
On. Off. On. Off.
Amanda let the revelation of her house’s ownership wash over her.
On. Off. On. Off.
It was one thing to appear in her bedroom and call yourself a vampire. Turning up again and attacking her brother was pretty awful, too. But claiming to have owned a suburban house for over three hundred years was insane, stupid, and utterly inconceivable.
On. Off. On.
“Could you stop that?” she said, her patience snapping as she considered impossibilities.
Off.
“With the light on,” she clarified.
On.
“How does a tiny switch ignite a glass candle?” asked Yulric, partially to her, partially to himself, but mostly to the universe at large.
“Electricity,” she answered. After a minute’s thought, she clarified, “Bottled lightning.”
“Ah,” he said. The intricate workings of various circuits, wires, and fossil-fuel-burning power plants were beyond him, but dominating an awesome power of the natural world and confining it to a jar was something he could easily understand. His respect for the troublesome blond girl grew. “I suppose the jars are kept in the walls, then?”
“Sure,” she said patronizingly. He flipped the light switch off and on again, this time imagining how the action moved a jar lid over just enough for slivers of lightning to eke out, which wasn’t so far from the truth.
“So, you are my landlord,” she reasoned. “All those checks, er”—she paused to think back to what Simon’s books would call them—“notes of scrip I paid, they were all going to a man buried under my cellar.”
“Though it has been some time since anyone considered me a man, I imagine your notes of scrip went to the bank in whose hands I left the deed in trust. So, in essence, yes, your statement is correct.” The vampire picked up a frame off a table. “This is very well done. Who is the artist?”
“It’s called a photograph. It’s a . . .” She sought an idiot’s definition of photograph.
“Picture made from light,” he interrupted. “Photo meaning light, graph meaning drawn. Not that difficult.”
“I suppose not,” she conceded. “So, the bank just kept the house for you all this time?”
Yulric looked up from the picture. He gave a condescending chuckle, which only made Amanda angry. “Brandenberg and Sons, or whatever the bank may be called now.”
“La Première Banque du Suisse,” Amanda said. She’d seen the name on top of her bills enough to know it by heart.
“Ah yes, well, these moneylenders and I have a very . . . special relationship that comes with my being their oldest”—he chuckled again—“living client.”
He glanced back at the light portrait in his hands. It showed a whole smiling family: mother, father, daughter, and oddly placid-looking baby. He wondered how long a light portrait took to make, how one wielded the light, and how much pain it inflicted on the subjects during the process. This last thought made him smile. He would have to look into becoming a photographist.
While Yulric’s mind swam with misguided ideas of how photos were made, Amanda was summoning up powers of her own, powers that she possessed in abundance, powers that her brother called “pure undiluted contrariness.”
“So, over three hundred years go by, and they just hand your money back like that?” she snarked.
Yulric’s head snapped around at her words. “Three hundred years?”
Amanda smiled at finally having made a dent in this thing’s impenetrable superiority. “Over three hundred years.”
Yulric stared at her as if the words themselves hung in front of her face. Could it really have been so long? Surely not. Deep beneath the earth, he had been vaguely aware of events: a war or two, some Quakers, that English mystic with his love of orgies, and those long-haired children who giggled and did not bathe.
So, fifty years then, he thought before looking again at the automatic candle in the ceiling and the portrait of light. Maybe one hundred.
Utterly bemused, Amanda pressed her victory. “For over three centuries, no one wondered. No one questioned. No one suspected you were even here. How is that possible?”
“Cheap rent.”
Amanda’s triumph, striding fast and confident, smacked into the easily given answer like a toddler’s head into a kitchen table: there was a moment of wonder and confusion before realization set in and the child fell to the floor, crying for its mommy. Meanwhile, Yulric examined the room once more with new eyes. Here and there, his seventeenth-century gaze found twenty-first-century technology. Lights lit by themselves. Machines moved on their own. Missing were familiar trappings of household life, like churns and looms and body odor. Those that remained, like tables and chairs, were composed of strange materials and even stranger designs.
And then there had been the horror from last night. The mechanical metal behemoth that had appeared in a flash and trampled him horribly beneath its wheels. How long had it taken to invent such a weapon?
A hundred and fifty years! he thought. No more!
Between her utter defeat and the pathetic old man this creature had suddenly become, Amanda couldn’t bring herself to be combative anymore. She left him to his increasingly frantic analysis of his surroundings and got herself a beer.
If there had been any lingering doubts as to the nature of the thing in her living room, those were settled upon her return.
Yep, it’s definitely a man, she thought.
Yulric Bile had found the TV.
• •
The vampire moped for a week. Not in the way that one might expect him to—with fire and death, blood running red in the streets, and a dark miasma blotting out the sun. No, the vampire moped pretty much the same way everyone else does—he watched television.
Unlike everyone else, though, his legs didn’t get stiff and his butt didn’t get sore. He didn’t have to get up to grab a beer or order a pizza. He didn’t bathe, shave, or excrete any euphemistic number, without which he had absolutely no reason to ever set foot in a bathroom. He didn’t even sleep, or at least that’s what he told Amanda from his position on the couch. She couldn’t help but notice that he did occasionally close his eyes and that he was much crankier when he hadn’t.
Day and night, he watched. Even late at night, when the only programs were infomercials and phone-sex ads, he watched. Every so often, he would appear in a doorway or from around a corner to ask such things as why some movies were in black and white while the rest were in color. He kept the remote in hand and returned quickly to the couch, uttering perfunctory death threats as an afterthought.
It wasn’t that he was intrigued or mesmerized or entranced. Honestly, he didn’t even look very interested. He just seemed . . . empty. The great fire of Yulric Bile, which once had threatened to consume the world, had been doused, and nothing could reignite it.
Except—
“Ow!” yelled Yulric, climbing over the back of the couc
h and rubbing his head. On the other side, a stoic-faced cherub stood, notebook in hand. At the sight of the small boy, Yulric’s eyes flamed, his fangs bared, and even his lungs, which worked selectively, began to creak under the weight of his quickening breath.
“Pestilent, dog-eared offspring of a worm-ridden hag!” he screamed. “I’ll stick your head in that infernal box stove11 till your eyeballs pop. May your hair turn to leeches and the days of your life peter out into . . .” At this point, he became so incensed that he began switching languages, from French to Arabic to some nonsensical, squishing noise, and finally into the most incomprehensible of all, Welsh.
The boy scribbled something in his notebook and walked away. Slowly, Yulric’s rage faded. As it did, he slid down the couch and returned to watching a woman talk to women about women. That is, until—“Ow!”
Up popped the bald, bat-eared head once more. Again, the child stood ready to take notes. This time, the fiery eyes of the beast sought out the objects that had struck it.
“Horseshoes?” cried the creature. “Horseshoes? You interrupted the accounts by survivors of the breast plague to test me with iron?” He took a moment to hurl the offending steel back at the boy. Simon, used to an environment where anyone abnormal was singled out and pelted with welt-inducing objects, adeptly stepped aside, with the reflexes forged in a thousand games of dodgeball.
Amanda watched the scene play out from the safety of the kitchen threshold. Since the creature, Yulric Bile, had taken custody of the living room sofa, Simon had begun a series of identifying experiments. Mostly, they involved lobbing various supernatural deterrents over the back of the couch to gauge the level of outrage they caused. Inevitably, these tests ended in a chase, which Amanda would have to break up before death or fire ensued. So she would tell Simon to stop disturbing their guest, and she would tell their guest to halt his attempts at murder. Both would mutter under their breath and go to their respective corners until Simon found something else he could easily toss.
Except this time. Amanda had suggested the horseshoes.
It hadn’t been a problem, the vampire and the TV, it really hadn’t. Amanda was usually asleep or at work, and Simon, well, he didn’t really watch TV anyway. And despite the occasional outburst of unbridled wrath when he tried to remember how the telephone worked, Yulric’s presence was more than bearable. It was actually kind of comforting. So long as he was lounging around, he couldn’t hurt anyone. And as long as he didn’t hurt anyone, she had nothing to feel guilty about.
But day followed day, and still the vampire retained his spindly clutch on the remote. The weekend came and went. Monday passed and Tuesday, too, and still no sign that the vampire would voluntarily relent from his channel surfing vigil. Amanda had grown concerned that her haven, her sanctuary, the one bright spot in what had become her tedious existence, would be sacrificed on the altar of this intruder’s brooding. Something had to be done. And so, something was. As the creature and Simon began their grand chase, Amanda stole into the living room. With his fists full of horseshoes, the vampire had left behind the remote, which Amanda took up now. Her fingers moved on their own to press the channel number. With bated breath, she sat through five car-insurance commercials until finally the screen turned black, two silver eyes opened, and a husky voice said, “Last time on The Phantom Vampire Mysteries . . .”
“What is this?”
Dread crept into Amanda’s body. As last week’s recap commenced, she looked up to see the ancient vampire staring at the television, in his right hand a horseshoe, in his left, a struggling eight-year-old held by one foot.
Amanda hadn’t a second to lose. In a whirl of blond hair and sweatpants, she was over the couch and advancing on Yulric with her mother’s cross. The vampire was forced against the wall, using Simon as a protective shield against the twentytwo-year-old’s holy wrath.
“Look,” she spat at the vampire, “I’ve let you stay, despite my better judgment and the fact that you tried to kill me and my brother. For some reason, I feel responsible for you being here,12 and so I’ve taken pity on you.”
The vampire hissed angrily at the P word, but Amanda continued, “. . . and let you spend day after day sitting on my couch watching my TV. However, Wednesday at eight is my time. And, during the next hour, I control all. The couch, the remote, gravity, if it gets in the way. So get behind me, or begone, or whatever. I don’t care. But you will not. Interrupt. My show!”
The cornered vampire and the human shield gave each other The Look, the universal look of one male to another when they realize the world is not actually theirs. Then slowly, Yulric Bile set the small boy down and, raising his hands in submission, said, “I merely wished to know what you were watching.”
The furies that had risen up in Amanda packed their bags and left, leaving her feeling kind of silly. She tried not to let it show too much. “The Phantom Vampire Mysteries.”
There was a twinkle in the vampire’s cloudy gray eyes at the program’s name, if twinkle is what you call it when such a being shows interest. Spark would be a better term. Ominous foreboding, better still.
“May I join you?” he asked. His tone was formal, polite even. Different from before, when any sense of genuine manners was marred by arrogance. There was also a hunger there. A need.
Need. Amanda knew that feeling all too well. It was need that had got her into this mess. Need that had driven her to her brother’s books. Need that had brought them to this house, and, ultimately, to the secret buried deep in its foundations.
In the background of the standoff, the opening credits began to play. Amanda realized that, without meaning to, she had missed the opening scene of the show.
In desperation to save her evening, she relented. “Fine. But no questions. And no bathroom breaks, except during commercials.”
“I don’t go to the—” he began but stopped once he saw her look. Logic, obviously, had no place here.
• •
“Who is that?”
The question broke the silent anticipation that followed the commercials. Amanda tried to let the interruption go. She tried to ignore the fact that it had been exactly two minutes since her ostensible guest had promised not to do precisely this. However, she could feel his eyes on her, patiently waiting for a response.
“Phantom,” she said tersely without looking away from the television.
“Ah,” he said, “the mortal protagonist.”
“No,” she corrected, “the vampire protagonist.”
“Ha!” Yulric let out the hearty laugh of one who thinks they understand sarcasm. Amanda smirked knowingly. He would see soon enough.
He did.
“What are those people doing?” he exclaimed. There was a certain anxiety in his voice that pleased Amanda.
“Why, I think they are drinking blood!” she responded in fake astonishment. As she did, she looked at the old thing on the couch. He was sitting up now, wide-eyed and pointing.
“But why would mortals drink blood?” Yulric asked.
“Because, they aren’t mortals.” She grinned. “They’re vampires.”
Yulric stared at her, eyes wide in panic and fury. His mouth opened and closed. His claws raked at his own skin. And then, without a word, he sank back into the couch, eyes fixed on the screen. Amanda was able to enjoy the rest of the episode in peace.
Once it was over, she turned to face her burden. His eyes remained on the television, his arms folded. He was pouting again.
“So, this Phantom is a ghost?” he asked without looking at her.
“The ghost of a vampire,” she said kindly. Now that her craving was sated, she found herself far less annoyed at the beast. “He refused to drink blood and so starved himself to death.”
“Impossible,” he muttered, still not looking at her. He seemed to blame her for the program’s existence.
“Maybe,” she conceded. “But not in the world of the show. Anyway, this action of sacrifice gives Phantom a special kind of
power and allows him to come back to the world of the living as a ghost.”
“And then he solves crimes,” she added rather lamely.
“And the friend?” asked Yulric. “A vampire,” she answered.
“And the lover?” he continued.
“A human,” she told him.
“And the difference?”
Amanda looked at him, an eyebrow raised. “I don’t understand the question.”
“What is the difference between the friend and the lover?”
“Well,” began Amanda, “Sasha is the woman Phantom loves and the reason why he died as a vampire. He refused to drink blood, for her. Nora, on the other hand, is Phantom’s best friend, confidante, and comrade-in-arms, who secretly loves him and is, in all actuality, a better match, but—”
The creature waved his hand to cut her off. A good thing, too, as it allowed Amanda to retain a semblance of dignity. She had very nearly divulged the hours of message-board discussions and fan fiction she had spent on the Phantom-Nora relationship. Not that he would have known what any of that meant. To Yulric, a shipper was someone who hired out boats.
“What I meant,” he clarified, “is how can you tell which is the vampyr?”
“Because Nora drinks blood and Sasha doesn’t,” replied Amanda.
“But did not this Sasha drink the blood of a vampyr”—he said the last word as if a skunk had just sprayed directly into his mouth—“to heal herself?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Then how?” The old man was now looking at her again. His eyes were growing in anger, but the muffled, futile anger of one who refuses to believe the sky is blue, gravity works, or people evolved from primates. “Well, Nora is super strong—”
“Marginally,” he interjected. “Superfast—”
“Barely,” he interrupted.
“Immortal.”
“If you can starve to death, you are not immortal,” he countered.
“And much hotter than Sasha.”
“Ha!” Yulric laughed mirthlessly. “Incorrect. Nora was said to be quite cold to the touch.”