“Where are you taking me?” Debbie asked, knowing full-well their destination.
“I told you, I can fix this.”
They parked on the expanse of flat grass on the bluff beneath the World War II air raid siren tower. Debbie couldn’t believe she’d fallen for such an obvious trick. In her mind, she was already broken up with Phil. The letter to him was written, addressed, and stamped, waiting to be dropped in a mailbox on the way out of town; a technicality had kept it in the top drawer of her desk with no hope of ever being read by him.
“One round of backseat bingo with me and all this dyke talk will dry up and blow away,” Phil said, sliding closer across the front bench seat of the old Buick. “I’ll get the ring tomorrow and we can be committed by Friday. If you’re my wife, your parents can’t send you away to the coo coo’s nest.”
“No,” Debbie said, trying desperately to sound stern. “I want to go to college. I want to go to New York. I appreciate your saving me, but this isn’t…”
“Ease up, lay back, and all this thinking about college will vanish,” Phil said, inching ever closer. “This is your only way out.”
Debbie clenched her legs tight together and turned her head. Phil pressed on, shoving his hand between the tops of her thighs to try to part her skirt. His insistent mouth lost all the gentlemanly behavior on their previous trips to make out point, spilling sloppy kisses along her neck and ear when she refused to give him her mouth. She put her hands against his chest and pushed away, but he had a firm grip on her leg with one hand and an even firmer grip on the back of the seat with the other; he wasn’t going anywhere but forward. She shifted in the seat to turn her hips away from him, a scream escaping her lips when his hand finally tore a button free on her skirt. He grunted against her, losing his grip when he tried to unbuckle the front of his own belt. She took the opening in his advances and grasped the door handle. She tugged hard and leaned opposite his body weight pressed against her. They both tumbled out of the car. While she fell completely to the ground outside, his lower body remained awkwardly tangled on the front seat in mid-undress. He reached for her, grasping the front of her blouse with a groping hand; rage washed over his face as he began to pull her back toward the car. She tucked her leg in and pushed against the car’s frame to free herself. Her shoe slipped across the metal, dropping off the edge and contacting Phil fully in the face. Her blouse ripped open, allowing her enough slack to escape entirely. She inched away on her back, struggling to gain her feet.
Phil’s nose was bleeding and an expression of fury marred his normally handsome face. She leapt to her feet, turned, and ran down the hill away from where the car could travel with Phil close on her heels. She didn’t think she could outrun him, but she knew she couldn’t outrun the car.
His chase was hampered by the thickness of the forest in ways hers wasn’t. She slipped through the thick underbrush, sacrificing clothing, hair, and blood to escape while he crashed through behind her, swearing and cursing at her for being ungrateful and stupid. Unlike her previous escape into the forest, she had no plans of doubling back, no hope of escaping to return to civilization for help. There was nowhere for her to turn, no one to save her, and even if she found her way back to the police, they would only return her to her parents.
Out of the thickets part of the wooded edge, she grasped the tattered remains of her clothing close and found enough open ground to stumble feebly through. The futility and betrayal of it all weighed heavily on her. She couldn’t imagine why escaping would even matter anymore. Her parents despised her, God wanted to cast her into hell for what she was, Grace thought she was a freak, and the only solutions available were a mental hospital and 10,000 volts or being raped by a boyfriend she only stayed with out of politeness. For a delirious moment she thought she might just live out her days as a crazed forest person eating chipmunks and acorns until finally freezing to death during the winter.
She stumbled into a clearing where the moon riding high over the forest cast a pale light on the tiny, open expanse. She slunk off to the side, just out of the light, concealing herself in a tangled mess of fallen branches. If she hid, held her breath when he passed, he might walk right by her. He’d thrown the flashlight back in the trunk when they got in the car so darkness alone might conceal her.
Before long, Phil stomped out of the woods into the clearing, huffing and puffing from the exertion, grumbling the entire way. His clothes were every bit as torn and dirty as hers by that point, but he seemed unaware of the state he was in. His focus was locked on something across the clearing that Debbie hadn’t noticed in her escape. She craned her neck in her hiding spot to see what had him so transfixed, but the tangled branches prevented her from seeing far enough to the right. She watched Phil cross the clearing with cautious steps until he too passed behind the limbs restricting her view. She considered emerging from her hiding spot enough to see what he was doing. An instant after she considered this, he came flying back into view with a slender, pale figure atop him. His fear-driven struggles so mirrored her own, that Debbie actually felt for him. Whoever had him pinned was clearly as much stronger and determined as he had been with her. Phil’s thrashing came to an abrupt end with a series of sickening pops of neck bones breaking as his attacker twisted his head almost completely around.
The frail figure dismounted Phil’s form, awkwardly angled from dying mid struggle, and began walking toward Debbie’s hiding place.
“Debbie,” a familiar, soft voice said. “I saw you hide.”
Debbie closed her eyes and shook her head. She buried her face in her hands, holding her breath in hopes it was simply a bluff, that her plan to remain hidden until danger passed might still be salvaged. After what she guessed was only a minute, her lungs burned from how long she held her breath without hearing anything the entire time. She opened her eyes with a renewed hope only to find Maggie Mayhew kneeling at the edge of the clearing, looking her directly in the eyes. Debbie screamed, to which Maggie made no reaction.
“I am like you, Debbie,” she whispered. Her voice was so soft, so uncertain, so sweet, and she looked so frail, Debbie wondered how she had ever been afraid of such a slip of a girl. “When they discovered what I was, they chased me into the woods. They were going to burn me to cleanse my sin.”
“Dyke,” Debbie whispered.
Maggie nodded.
“This is my home now.” Maggie held out her slender hand to Debbie. “Away from a world that would destroy us for what we are. It can be your home too.”
Debbie took the offered hand, reveling in the decision to survive. Maggie helped her from her hiding place. Debbie refused to look down at Phil’s ruined form. She locked her eyes on Maggie’s until a frigid, insistent kiss overtook her focus. The kiss broke and she cried into Maggie’s tangled hair, unsurprised or uncaring when she felt the mouthful of jagged teeth biting into her freely offered neck.
Part 2: The Pariah of Vigil’s Rest
Winter 1955 – Grace
1.
Death created some truly bizarre revisionist history in the wake of the disappearance of Debbie Poole and Philip Cox. The local newspaper caught on the story and dressed it up in the most compelling terms possible, painting Debbie and Phil as teen sweethearts who vanished in the prime of life, catching on the final picture of the couple in front of the Ferris wheel as though it were a totem, leaving enough of an opening for hope that they might have escaped the madman drifter to run away together. Enough people came forward, before and after the disappearance, to substantiate the presence of the drifter in town, giving validity to Debbie’s story in death while ignoring how many people openly questioned it when she was alive. The signs of the struggle found at Philip’s car, including a splattering of blood and a few torn buttons from Debbie’s clothes, led the police to believe the two planned to elope that night, but were interrupted in their lover’s escape by the drifter who somehow abducted them both. With this entirely flattering image of Debbie and Phil warmly acce
pted as fact by the population of Vigil’s Rest, a scapegoat was needed beyond the vanished drifter, and Grace fit the bill as Mr. and Mrs. Poole, being the grieving parents, were an unpopular choice.
Somehow the story became that Mr. and Mrs. Poole were trying to protect their daughter from the drifter who had attacked her, perhaps understandably going overboard in restricting her to her room, but Grace hatched a plan to help Philip set her free to run away together, and if she had just minded her own business, Debbie and Phil would both be alive and the drifter likely caught or moved on by then. Grace knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good to reassert her original position that Debbie made a pass at her and that she’d told Debbie’s parents and Pastor Gunderson as she thought a good Christian girl should, especially in light of the fact that Pastor Gunderson seemed to be one of the people contradicting her story. It was small town gossip at its worst, and Grace assumed the only way out was to weather the storm until people found someone else to vilify.
When the city council voted to rename the records wing of the library the Deborah Poole Reading Room after the deceased Harvest Festival pageant princess, Grace donated five dollars of her own money to help cover the renovations required. Even this act of contrition was taken with suspect motives as most people openly said it was nothing more than an act of a guilty conscience.
Grace held her head as high as she was able, rode her bike to her office job through the fall, eating her packed lunch alone on a park bench until the weather turned too sour to do either. As the approaching winter drove her from her independence, she began riding into town with her father despite the fact that he left for work an hour before she needed to be there and didn’t come home until well after dark, leaving Grace with a lot of time in town to be shunned.
With two weeks to Christmas, Grace held out hope for an end of the year bonus and a few days off. They were small dreams, but also the only ones she had left. On a crisp, clear, Friday morning, she met her father down at the garage while he warmed up his Cadillac. Mist hung low over the hills and treetops of rural Vermont. A tenacious early snow and abundant frost from the night before left the valley with a sparkling sheen. Grace blew warm air into her cupped hands, shifting from foot to foot in an attempt to keep warm. Her father, a stern, hard-edged man with a salt and pepper moustache above thin lips wore suits and hats everywhere, regardless of the occasion. Even in the cold of New England winters he refused anything but a stylish trench coat. Grace waited while he pulled the car out of the garage and then slipped into the passenger seat knowing he didn’t like waiting.
Her parents hadn’t seemed angry with her through the entire process of their daughter becoming the town pariah and Judas to the all American teens in love; they simply seemed very sad. Grace had grown accustomed to not speaking with her father during the car rides. He drove while she sat and looked out the window. The radio was never to be turned on when her father was behind the wheel, and so silence was all they were left with. They wound their way down the hill their large house on the outskirts sat upon, turning right on the highway that would take them into Vigil’s Rest proper.
“Your mother and I think it might be best if you moved in with your Aunt Lorna in New Haven after Christmas,” her father said, never taking his eyes from the road. “It’ll give you a chance to make a new start.”
Of all the things that had been said to Grace through the fall, and there had been some truly hurtful words hurled in her direction, this single comment from her father was by far the most damaging. She loved her Aunt Lorna and even liked New Haven from what little time she spent there, but it didn’t feel right that she should leave when she’d done nothing wrong.
“I told the truth and now I’m being punished for it,” Grace said, tears welling at the corners of her eyes.
“You know I don’t like talking while I’m driving,” her father said, putting an end to any further discussion of the topic.
Grace’s father wordlessly dropped her off in front of the stone office building on Main Street where she waited in front for another half hour before old Mr. Cavendish came along to open the accounting office. Her boss moved with the slow careful steps of an elderly man in constant fear of falling and breaking something. His back hunched him forward until he resembled a question mark. And his oversized bifocals refused to find purchase on his papery skin, threatening to slide down off his button nose whenever he looked in any direction but straight forward or even slightly up.
“How are you this morning, Mr. Cavendish?” Grace dutifully asked.
“As fine as can be expected, I suppose,” Mr. Cavendish replied nervously. His hands, which had something of a natural tremble anyway, were shaking with such force that morning that it took him several attempts to even get the key into the lock.
Grace held the door open for him, waited patiently, and then followed the bundled little old man up the stairs through the cold, lonely office building. She took his coat, hat, and scarf before hanging up her own. The tottering old accountant practically walked out of the coat when she grasped it, immediately making for his office without even bothering to smooth his frazzled white hair in the mirror that hung on the waiting room wall, which was his usual routine. Grace’s emotional state was fragile enough after her father all but asked her to leave the family home; she didn’t feel the need to go poking around in the old man’s personal affairs to see why her boss was behaving so strangely.
Grace hung her own jacket, scarf, and hat on the coat tree, checked her hair in the mirror for any errant runaways, and then set to the filing tasks left in her inbox. She made slow work of the stack, placing client information in the corresponding file cabinets based on whatever notes Mr. Cavendish had written on the outsides of the folder. It was mind-numbing work made all the more difficult by the high-heel shoes, nylons, and skirt she was required to wear. When she’d first started the job, falling over when attempting to hold a heavy stack of files while kneeling to get at the lowest drawers of the file cabinets was not an uncommon occurrence. She was usually left alone to her work though so it was never embarrassing, but for some reason, that morning, Mr. Cavendish followed her from a respectable distance as though he had something pressing to say, but couldn’t quite work up the nerve to say it. Finally, with an hour to go before her lunch break, Grace pushed the matter into the light.
“Is there something you’d like to say to me, Mr. Cavendish?” She didn’t mean to sound irritable or demanding, although she knew she probably sounded both.
“Yes, well, actually, yes,” Mr. Cavendish stammered. “You see, my son-in-law is going to be taking over the business after the New Year. I believe you’ve met him. And his wife, my daughter, is a little concerned with having someone as young and attractive as you working for her husband. I know it’s just a wife’s silly paranoia, but she is my daughter and I would like to accommodate her happiness if I can. Why don’t you tidy up a bit and then take the rest of the afternoon off? Have a nice long weekend before you finish up your last week here.”
Grace went from hurt by her father to fuming at her boss. Mr. Cavendish’s son-in-law, Heathcliff Oswald, was in his late fifties, bald, sweaty even in winter, and afflicted with a skin condition that left his forehead red and peeling. The notion that Grace would somehow find herself uncontrollably attracted to the ghoulish man and steal him from his dumpy wife was so far beyond preposterous it was insulting to all parties involved. She skipped the tidying up she’d been asked to do, grabbed her things, and exited the office with a slamming of the door that left the windows rattling.
The frigid, dry air outside did little to quash the fiery anger building in her. She would have to wait until 7 PM for her father to get done at the office before she could get a ride home. With no friends left, no job, and an entire town full of people with reproachful stares and disappointed shaking heads, she started to think it might actually be a good idea for her to go to New Haven for a fresh start. It seemed hurtful on the surface, but perhaps her parents were a
ware of how miserable she was and simply wanted to help her out. Grace could take a perceived slight with good intentions a lot easier than she could take much more of Vigil’s Rest.
She pulled her knit cap on tight and strode down the street toward the diner that used to be the hangout for her and her high school friends, but had since become a frightening fishbowl of social ostracization. She was going to have a hot chocolate and a piece of pie regardless of who looked at her funny. She strolled right into the diner, setting the little bell above the door into a ringing fit with how hard she pushed. She slid into one of the booths beneath an enormous window and situated herself with an “I dare you to ask me to leave” demeanor.
The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow Page 3