An Unattractive Vampire

by Jim McDoniel

  “Very well,” said Yulric. The boy skipped across the lawn, surreptitiously stowing the small hatchet up his sleeve. The skinless one was now alone, his thoughts on the horizon and what would come next. Behind him, a scream rang out followed by the sound of small particles hitting wood. Yulric made his way back into the house, being sure to tread in the ashes on his way.

  Chapter 17

  The phone rang.

  Yulric had learned enough from television to figure out how phones worked, in theory if not specifically.44 Through them, you were able to talk to others over great distances. They used to be attached to walls or in booths, but more and more these days, people were using little metal blocks like this one. All things being equal, Yulric had discovered how to communicate from afar long ago. The difference was, now you had to pay for data plans and overage fees, whereas in his day, it cost only the blood of three pregnant goats and a virgin’s left eye. The jury was still out on which system was better.

  Cautiously, he picked up the device. His long, spindly fingers reached over to the Send button and pressed down. This was how to start a call, or so he’d been told. Then the “cell” was placed to his ear.

  “Yes?” answered the vampire. He was not a hello type of person. He was not, in fact, a person at all.

  “Is this Mr. Yulric Bile?” asked a woman’s voice. It was not the one he had expected. This voice was pleasant but formal.

  “Yes,” responded Yulric.

  “Please hold for The Doctor Lord Talby,” instructed the woman, and with a click she was gone.

  Yulric hung up. A few minutes later the phone rang again.45 Yulric answered it.

  “Yes?” he said again.

  “Mr. Bile?” asked the woman’s voice. “I’m sorry. We must have been disconnected. I apologize for the inconvenience. The Doctor Lord Talby will be with you in just a—”

  This time he hung up while she was still talking. Yulric Bile might have been three hundred years out of time, but he still recognized a lackey when he heard one.

  After a much longer pause than before, the phone rang again. Yulric picked up. “Yes?”

  “Yulric Bile.”

  This time it was not a question. It also wasn’t a woman.

  “Speaking,” replied Yulric.

  “You’ve been quite rude to my assistant,” said this new voice. It was strong, confident, and properly English, which usually lent it an air of authority. Not here, though. Back when Yulric had lived, Anglo-Saxon wasn’t just a term of ancestry, it was the current political state.

  “You shouldn’t have used her to be rude to me, Talby,” retorted Yulric. He could almost hear the other man smile.

  “Touché,” said the Doctor.

  Yulric smiled, too. Thus far, he had faced children and mortals, and the only real challenge he’d found among them was a mortal child. This one was different. He knew how to play the game.

  “I assume you know why I’m calling?” asked Talby.

  “The girl,” said Yulric.

  “She’s quite safe,” Talby replied, mistaking Yulric’s statement as a sign of concern. “Both from injury and you finding her.”

  “I doubt that,” said Yulric.

  “Ah. You are referring to your ‘powers,’” said Talby. Yulric noted how far out of his way the Doctor went to avoid saying magic. “As with vampires, witches are open and abundant these days. A few are even real. I think you’ll find any attempt to track Ms. Linske will lead you to the nearest church.”

  Yulric knew this. He’d already tried. “Well then, I assume you require some sort of ransom.”

  The Doctor laughed. “So open. I thought for sure you’d refuse to negotiate.”

  “In my day, ransom was common. Princes and kings held by other princes and kings,” explained Yulric. “A noble business.”

  “Indeed. I must brush up on my history,” replied the Doctor.

  “Name your terms,” Yulric demanded.

  “The price for her release is you,” said The Doctor Lord Talby, who then had to deal with an earful of barking, shrill laughter.

  Eventually, Yulric composed himself enough to respond. “I don’t think you realize what you’re dealing with.”

  “Oh, I think I do,” said the Doctor. “Yulric Bile. Born sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries, last sighted in Shepherd’s Crook, Massachusetts, in the seventeenth. Supposedly killed a dozen times before that. Vampire, sorcerer, madman, and monster. Alignment—chaotic evil, whatever that means. Modus operandi usually involves creating a cult of thralls, with no other goal than the sowing of violence, madness, and death. How am I doing?”

  Yulric was a bit uneasy. He had always been very careful to destroy any record of himself.46 More than that, he had thought himself unpredictable. That he could even be categorized made his newly re-formed skin squirm. He slapped at it, to be sure it didn’t crawl away. Skin dormant again, he made sure his voice was calm before responding, “You’ve done your research.”

  “Actually, I couldn’t find anything about you at all,” admitted Talby. “Couldn’t even get the bank to divulge its information. I also use La Première Banque du Suisse, incidentally. No, all of this I got from Ms. Linske. Apparently, she did quite a bit of homework on you.”

  Yulric frowned. The only thing worse than his enemy knowing so much about him was the girl and her brother knowing so much about him.

  “Well, since you know everything,” growled Yulric, “you know how likely it is that I will just hand myself over to you.”

  “You misunderstand me,” replied Talby. “I don’t mean an exchange. I simply want to meet you. To talk. Maybe come to an arrangement of sorts.”

  “Is that why you sent the Phantom to kill me?” retorted Yulric.

  “That was a mistake,” sighed the Doctor, “on so many levels. We’ve had to completely reconfigure this season to make up for our . . . losses.” The Doctor seemed on the verge of anger for the merest moment. He regained himself quickly. “You are too dangerous and powerful to fight, and so, I’ve chosen to deal.”

  Yulric wanted to say “to beg.” He wanted to laugh and gloat and challenge this man. But he was careful, very careful. He nearly hadn’t walked away from the last encounter, and there had been just the slightest emphasis on powerful. The Doctor Lord Talby was trying to push Yulric’s buttons. He shouldn’t even know there were buttons to push.

  “You mean to trap me,” Yulric said. It was not a question.

  “Well, certainly,” replied Talby jovially. “If not one way, then another. There is an old saying, or maybe for you, a new saying. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ We cannot beat you. I am equally certain you cannot beat us. Therefore, coming together is the only rational, civilized thing to do.”

  Yulric said nothing. The same thoughts had crossed his mind, though he wasn’t about to say so. Talby likely recognized this and so continued, “Just come to the studios in Los Angeles, and we’ll have a little chat about the future. Our future. Anyway, must go. The bandages are coming off today, and, well, that’s another story. See you soon.” He hung up.

  “Well?” Yulric asked.

  “Duplicitous, at best,” Simon assessed. He was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, listening on something called a “cloned phone.” Yulric understood only that it had enabled the boy to hear the whole conversation.

  “He means to lure me to his place of strength and kill me there,” said Yulric.

  “Possibly, as a last resort. If you don’t agree to his arrangement,” replied Simon. Yulric appreciated how the boy’s mind worked when it was not trying to kill him. “What about my sister?”

  “She is fine,” answered the vampire.

  “How can you be sure?” asked Simon with a little boy’s concern in his voice. Most little boys, however, wouldn’t have added, “He didn’t offer proof of life.”

  “Only because he did not think he needed to,” explained Yulric. “He fancies himself a great man, civilized, honorable. She will
be fine.”

  “We’ll need to know everything we can about Phantom Studios,” said Simon. He tapped a few times on his magic Pad of Eye and brought up a view of the entire structure.

  “If you were holding my sister, where would you keep her?” he asked the vampire.

  Yulric scanned the layout. “There.”

  “The front gate?” Simon asked suspiciously.

  “Yes,” replied Yulric. “She would be tied to it. Her corpse would anyway.”

  “So, that really doesn’t help us, does it?” said Simon, leaving out “foul creature.” The term was implied, though.

  “I suppose not,” said the vampire, very bored and not really caring. The small boy continued to plot and strategize how to rescue his sister while Yulric considered The Phantom Vampire Mysteries third-season episode “As You Wish” and the plot holes concerning who turned Phantom. After all, if it was Nora, like so many on the online forums insisted, then how could one account for the fact that in that episode she was controlled by the sire call of the Dead Pirate Rowan47 and he was not? He vowed to have Amanda post a “flame” on the message boards upon her return.

  After an hour of careful study, Simon leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “I’m afraid the other vampires have the advantage. Even if we were to cause a distraction and try to sneak past, I’m not sure . . . What? What are you smiling about?”

  Yulric sat up and spoke only two words:

  “Other vampyrs . . .”

  Chapter 18

  Leaving a country used to be such an easy process; you would simply get on a horse or a boat or, if you were poor, walk and physically travel from where you were to a place where people spoke a different language. Occasionally, you might find yourself in a country where the border was fortified with various checkpoints and magistrates were charged with keeping out certain undesirables: gypsies, tramps, the English. This made a crossing slightly more difficult but was easily overcome by a judicious application of currency.

  In the modern world, though, leaving required detailing personal information, which was checked, double-checked, and then double-checked again until they found some reason to stop you. It was no use explaining to them that you were a five-year-old girl in a wheelchair; if your name was on their list, they assumed you were really a six-foot, thirty-five-year-old murderer in disguise and refused to let you travel. And that was supposing you got that far. Identification was required just to fill out a form to receive identification. If you were an eight-year-old who didn’t understand why a library card didn’t count as ID, no matter how many books you’d read, this was a problem. If you were a one-thousand-year-old vampire with only a handful of cautionary mentions in the biographies of certain saints, it was impossible. Worse yet, those in charge of customs no longer accepted bribes. In fact, they became very cross when you tried. Alarms were pressed. Authorities were called. Guns were drawn.

  When did everyone become so honest? thought Yulric as he speedily fled an airport.

  “I told you so,” said Simon later, back at the designated flee-to place.

  “You didn’t fare much better, I see,” retorted Yulric.

  The boy mumbled something about travel-sized holy water containers. “What we need is proper documentation,” he said.

  The vampire gave it some thought. “In the TV, people forge their documents. Could such a thing work?”

  “It couldn’t hurt to try,” replied Simon.

  He was wrong. It did hurt. At least, it hurt Yulric, who took the full brunt of the 240-pound dock official’s tackle. The look of terror on the man’s face when the vampire exploded into a thousand spiders and crawled all over him was barely consolation.

  “I think we need better documents,” said the boy as the vampire reconstituted himself back at the house.

  Yulric examined the parchment documents with their impressive calligraphy and hand-drawn borders. To him, they looked more official than anything machine-made. “What do you suggest?” he asked, ripping apart two days of painstaking artistry.

  “Well, once I have an adult with me, I can get a proper, legal passport,” Simon reasoned. “The problem is you. You don’t have a social security number or birth certificate.”

  “Bah,” the vampire scoffed. “I can find my way on board easily enough.”

  “And what happens when someone opens the cargo hold in the middle of the day?” asked the boy.

  “What of the Dracula plan?” Yulric suggested.

  “Shipping you in a coffin? We’d still need a grown-up to be my”—Simon rolled his eyes—“chaperone.”

  “That should not be difficult to provide,” Yulric offered.

  Simon glared at his counterpart. “A willing chaperone.”

  The vampire glowered. “I thought you wanted to save your sister.”

  “If we rescue her and it isn’t to her liking, she’ll take away my library card and won’t pay the cable bill.” Yulric hissed.

  “Exactly,” Simon went on, “so unless you know someone with a lot of spare time on their hands, who owes you a favor, we move on.” Simon flipped a few more pages in his notebook. However, there was a decided lack of clacking from the vampire. He looked up. The vampire was smiling again. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “No,” replied Yulric, “I very much doubt you will.”

  • •

  Catherine Dorset was baking a cake in her mind when the ghost came back.

  “I have an offer for you,” it said without preamble, causing her to jump and smash the cake into the stove before dropping it on the ground.

  She wheeled on the ugly old man. “Look what you made me do!”

  The ghost looked confused. “It is not real.”

  “That’s not the point,” she sputtered. “It isn’t polite to just pop into someone’s mind unannounced. I could have been naked.”

  The ghost raised an eyebrow. Catherine sighed. Living the life of the mind could be hard sometimes. Trying not to think of an elephant often resulted in an elephant barging through your room and treading on anything you told it not to. Saying “I could have been naked” posed similar problems.

  “Turn around, please,” she told him, covering herself with her arms.

  “I assure you I—” began the ghost.

  “Now!” she demanded. The ghost rolled its eyes and turned around. She quickly ran upstairs where she found the clothes she had been wearing not moments ago, folded in a dresser drawer, and put them on. She would have gone back downstairs but found the ghost behind her, the same distance away, still with its back to her.

  “All right then,” she said, signaling that it was okay to look. “First of all, hello again.”

  “Greetings,” it said reluctantly. “I have an—”

  Catherine held up a finger. “I didn’t get your name. Before you make any offer, I feel it only right that I know who keeps invading my mind.”

  A look of deepest disgust crawled across the ghost’s face. Literally crawled. It slapped its own face, hard, to make it stop.

  “New skin,” explained the ghost to answer the look of disgust that had much more metaphorically crawled across her face. Then, with a low and patronizingly theatrical bow, he introduced himself. “I am the vampyr Yulric Bile.”

  Catherine tried to catch a snicker before it came out. She failed. Yulric Bile rose back up, angrier than before.

  “So you said something about an offer. Is this about me dying again?” Catherine asked hopefully. She had made up her mind on this, or rather network TV had made up her mind for her by canceling her favorite sexy-lawyer show.

  “Actually, I need you to accompany me on a trip,” said Yulric.

  “Excuse me?” Catherine uttered. She was sure he must have misspoke. Or been kidding. Or . . .

  “I will be traveling overseas and require someone to watch over a small boy,” he clarified without kidding or misspeaking.

  “You’re talking about . . . in the real world, right?” she asked, f
eeling this point needed further clarification. She had, after all, done quite a bit of traveling in her head: Paris, London, Sheboygan.48 But that was very different and somewhat unsatisfying, as she had never been anywhere outside Massachusetts before and could draw from only old black-and-white movies she’d seen. In other words, everywhere she went looked like a gray California.

  “The real world, yes,” he responded.

  Catherine sighed. “I thought we went over this last time. I’m in a coma. I can’t wake up.”

  “What if you could?” he asked.

  Catherine’s metaphorical heart skipped a beat. Or was that her real heart? Whichever it was, it lodged itself in her throat. “What—what do you mean?”

  “If I could give you a measure of control over your body, would you serve my needs?” he proposed.

  Catherine raised the suspicious eyebrow of someone who watched too many sexy-lawyer shows. “Serve your needs how?”

  “Mostly what I already said,” he explained. “Watch and care for the boy while we travel. Also, you will be required to pick up my coffin at our destinations.”

  “And the, uh, sleeping arrangements?” she said, trying to put it delicately.

  “You can work that out with the boy,” he replied. “I will be spending my nights out.”

  She felt this point needed clarifying. “What I’m trying to get at is . . . Well, I’m gay, so even if you were thinking about—”

  “You may prostitute yourself on your own time, so long as you fulfill the duties you are given,” replied Yulric with his seventeenth-century definition of the word gay.

  “Whoa!” Catherine cried. “I am not a prostitute, okay? I—I’m trying to say that I like girls. Women. Not men.”

  Yulric glared at her. “I do not see how this is relevant.”

  “So . . . no kissing, right?” she said.

  “No. No kissing,” he answered, as if kissing her was the most disgusting thought a person could have.

  “Just so we’re clear,” she muttered. “So, what’s the catch?” She remembered his problem with words. “The drawback? The downside? The—”