The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow

by Cassandra Duffy

  Grace yanked Debbie’s coat off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Debbie broke the kiss for an instant with the shock of the aggressive move to undress her. She looked like she wanted to respond in kind, but couldn’t find the will or perhaps the know-how.

  Grace smiled and shook her head. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” she whispered to Debbie. Running her hand up through Debbie’s hair, she tilted her head ever so slightly, enough to expose her neck and earlobe. Grace kissed her neck, up onto her ear, and nibbled at the bottom of the lobe teasingly. She didn’t know if Debbie liked this, but Grace knew she sure did, and she had high hopes that all girl ears liked the same kinds of attention. Debbie did indeed appear to enjoy the ear nibbling as she let out the tiniest, most pitch-perfect gasp of pleasure Grace had ever heard in her entire life. She wanted to scream from the rooftops about how she, Grace Corker, had made the Harvest Festival Princess Debbie Poole make that beautiful noise of enjoyment. The moment after, when Grace’s entire body had been brought to the tingly cusp of full arousal at hearing Debbie’s single utterance of delight, her willing partner froze, apparently lost to the act entirely.

  Grace pulled back and strained her neck to catch Debbie’s eye as her focus had gone entirely out the window quite literally. “What’s wrong?” Grace asked, suddenly fearing she’d done something horribly inappropriate and that Debbie’s noise had meant something entirely different than she’d interpreted.

  “Nothing,” Debbie said, although she looked as though she’d seen a ghost herself. “I shouldn’t be here anymore though. I should…”

  Grace glanced over her shoulder to the window. The lawn was empty. When she returned her attention to Debbie, she was already collecting her coat off the floor. “You can’t leave now,” Grace pleaded. “At least tell me if you’re on for New Haven.”

  Debbie froze for a second as though listening to something else entirely—something Grace wasn’t privy to. Debbie shook her head to break the spell, slipped on her coat, and lunged up to grasp Grace in a surprisingly fast rush. She whispered into Grace’s ear so softly it was almost imperceptible. “Yes, to wherever with you, yes.”

  Grace nearly collapsed when Debbie’s hands departed her shoulders. Debbie snuck back out the window with the same poise and alacrity she’d snuck in with. She slid down the tiny expanse of roof and bounded into the yard with the deportment of a ballerina. Grace watched her go until she was safely down the hill and presumably running down the road. Only after did she wonder if she should have given Debbie some warm shoes and socks. Grace rushed to her closet in search of winter boots and raced back to the window, knowing it would be completely frivolous to call after Debbie but hoping the gesture would still mean something when she relayed it later.

  The boots tumbled from her hands when she saw the yard. A girl, a frail, blond girl was standing in the yard. Her hair half draped over her face, dressed in tattered rags that might have once been a white dress, and she was looking straight into the window, right into Grace’s soul. The madness in the lone eye not covered by the girl’s hair was undeniable and accompanied by an inhuman rage of startling intensity. The ancient part of Grace, the place where base desires like hunger and fear originated screamed to her that she must flee, that this was no girl, and that her death was at hand.

  Grace screamed long and loud without any concern for damage done to her voice or ears. The scream was so real, so basic to human communication, that it roused both her parents within seconds, carrying the same message of fear to them. Within moments, her mother and father burst into her room. Her father was armed with a golf club; her mother’s hair still in curlers. They ran to her without knowledge of why she screamed, turned on the lights, checked the window, looked into the yard where she was staring and pointing as she screamed but saw nothing to cause their daughter’s hysteria. Grace’s mother cradled her near catatonic daughter until her screaming slowly fizzled. Grace’s father slammed the window shut and raced back to their bedroom for a gun.

  By the time her father returned from investigating the yard with flashlight and hunting rifle, Grace was whimpering quietly into the crux of her mother’s arm, awkwardly cuddled on the floor in the center of Grace’s bedroom.

  “I found fresh footsteps in the snow,” Grace’s father said. “What were you doing awake with the window open and your boots out?”

  Grace heard him but couldn’t answer. All she could think of, all she could remember was the look in that girl’s eye and knowing she was going to die.

  5.

  Even in the harsh light of day, Grace was frightened. She left the lights on the rest of the night against her father’s wishes, and slept little or not at all, awaking at every creak or crack the house made until finally the sun came up and Grace wearily dragged herself down to the breakfast table. When she plopped down exhausted across from her father, he lowered the paper and leveled his steely gaze on her.

  “The footsteps were small,” he said. “Were you sneaking out with a friend?”

  “Henry, you know she doesn’t have any friends anymore,” her mother so helpfully reminded everyone.

  “What’d you see outside?” her father asked, not to be dissuaded from his course of skepticism.

  “A girl…” Grace said unthinkingly. Although, she didn’t think it really was a girl, but something else in the shape of one. She was certain of two things she had no cause to be certain of: it wasn’t human and it wanted to do her harm.

  “Awful lot of hullabaloo over a girl,” her father said, resuming the wall of Sunday paper between himself and his family. “You may legally be an adult, but you still live under my roof and my rules, which means a curfew. Sneaking out will get your hide tanned.”

  “He’s pulling your leg,” her mother said, placing a cup of coffee in front of Grace.

  Grace snorted involuntarily. “No, he’s not.”

  “If you want to stay home from church today, sweetie…” her mother began.

  “She’s going,” her father finished.

  “Now, Henry…”

  “It’s okay, mom,” Grace said. “I want to go.”

  Grace struggled to stay awake on the ride to church. The cloud cover from the night before was long gone and the heat pouring out of the Cadillac’s dash combined with the pleasant light to create a soothing effect. Once they arrived at church, everyone filed into the little white sanctuary dressed in their Sunday best beneath heavy winter coats with the exception of Grace’s father who wore only a trench over his suit. A few eyes followed Grace, accompanied by whispers. She couldn’t hear what they had to say, but she figured it could be her outburst in the diner, her alleged sexual deviance, or her getting fired, maybe all three.

  Even on the hard, wooden pews of the church, with Pastor Gunderson droning on about something from the Old Testament, Grace was able to doze off a few times only to be awoken by a sharp jab from her mother’s elbow. Grace always awoke with a subdued start, and every time she glanced past her mother, she found her father sleeping away without any recriminatory elbows waking him. After the fourth time, Grace pointed to her father as if to say, “hey, jab him for once.”

  “He works,” her mother hissed under her breath.

  “So do I,” grace hissed back.

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  There was no point in arguing. Her mother had never had a job. She went from living with Grace’s grandparents to living with Grace’s father without a single step of independence between. From what Grace could tell, her mother had little or no idea what her father did at work all day. Moreover, she had no idea what Grace did at work all day although she assumed Grace’s father worked tirelessly at tasks too difficult and complex for her mother to even comprehend, and Grace must sit at a desk, doing her nails, and occasionally getting someone coffee as her mother couldn’t seem to imagine a woman doing anything else in an office.

  Grace managed to muddle through the rest of the sermon. After church, when the congregation milled
about within the sanctuary proper, spilling out into the front lawn area a little as well despite the cold, Grace sought out Pastor Gunderson. She caught him just from behind the pulpit, interjecting herself between him and a group of little old church ladies with no doubt a dozen or more clarification questions regarding his sermon. Grace didn’t have the time or patience for manners at that point, and she didn’t care that Pastor Gunderson saw what she did.

  “I have a question, Pastor,” Grace said.

  “Miss Corker, in God’s house we…”

  “It’s about evil incarnate,” Grace said quickly.

  This sparked a shockingly real reaction in Pastor Gunderson. He lit up with eager anticipation of a query regarding true evil manifesting and not simply the ways in which communists could be likened to the devil.

  “Yes, yes, of course, we should speak in my office.” Pastor Gunderson ushered Grace toward the side door, giving the three little old church ladies a knowing nod and gentle gesture with his hand, palm-side down. They seemed to understand the nonverbal communication implicitly, voicing no further objection about Grace’s cutting ahead of them.

  Pastor Gunderson opened the tiny little rectory door to his office and followed Grace inside. The office was as neat as a pin with very little in the way of personal effects. Instead of a desk, there were simply two chairs, a few bookcases, and two end tables with bibles sitting atop both. Pastor Gunderson took one seat and Grace occupied the other in the windowless little room.

  “Now what is this about evil incarnate?” Pastor Gunderson asked, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

  “I saw someone out my window last night, someone that frightened me more than I’ve ever been frightened,” Grace said. “I don’t think she was human.”

  Pastor Gunderson furrowed his brow but didn’t speak right away. When Grace didn’t continue, he made a noncommittal grunt noise and sat back into his chair, tenting his fingers in front of his mouth. “What makes you think she wasn’t human?”

  “One second she was there, and then in the next she wasn’t,” Grace said, suddenly thinking she’d made a mistake in bringing the quandary to him. “Plus, the way she looked at me, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t human!”

  “With the tragic death of Deborah Poole, many girls around your age have had struggles with seeing people outside their windows at night. These apparitions usually turn out to be nothing more than nightmares brought on by an overactive imagination and a healthy fear of unfamiliar men because when they’re investigated…”

  “My father did investigate,” Grace pleaded, tears springing up at the corners of her eyes. “He said he found footprints—a girl’s footprints outside my room.”

  “A girl’s footprints…” Pastor Gunderson harrumphed. “There might also be a temptation to create a hoax of some kind, some girl who is evil incarnate to gather sympathy and attention at a time of social struggle for someone like yourself. Perhaps faking these footprints, perhaps with your own two feet, perhaps with the shoes you had in your hands when your parents discovered you. Your mother told me everything this morning before the sermon. She’s very worried that you might be attention seeking.”

  A flip switched in Grace, the usual one she knew she got from her father that made her lash out, overreact, and become very cross with people when they questioned her. “Fine, why don’t you tell me why you lied to the newspaper about what you were really doing at the Poole’s house the night Debbie disappeared? Why did you tell people that you never talked to me that afternoon? Why did you lie, Pastor?”

  “We’ve been over this, Miss Corker.”

  “You were going to have her committed. You were going to have them give her electroshock!” Grace stood, trying her best to loom over the much bigger, much taller Pastor Gunderson, which only worked as long as he remained seated.

  “How did you know that?” All the blood instantly drained from his face. He’d told her he would go to the Poole’s and counsel them on how to help Debbie get over her sexual perversions, but there were only three people left alive who would know what the real plan was, and he’d already discussed the extreme need for silence with the Pooles and they seemed more than willing to behave as though the subject of committal had never come up.

  “It doesn’t matter how I know,” Grace said. “It doesn’t even matter that I do know since nobody would believe me anyway. I just wanted you to know that someone else out there knows what you really wanted to do. I may be an outcast, but you’re a monster.” Grace stormed out of the office leaving the Pastor stunned in his seat. She was so possessed by her self-satisfaction that she almost didn’t notice her father standing outside the door until she nearly collided with him. He had a small, bemused smile on his face, and it struck Grace that she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him smile.

  “Bless your mother for trying her best to raise you right, but you turned out mostly me,” her father said, the knowing smile never fading. He wrapped his strong arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the office. “That sanctimonious idiot deserved all that and a little more, but we’ll skip telling your mother the content of your conversation with him since she still seems to think he’s worth a damn when it comes to the man upstairs.”

  “Do you believe me?” Grace asked. She didn’t want to push her luck with what was probably the first touching moment she’d had with her father since she was a child, but she had to know if anyone was truly on her side.

  “Your desperation in bringing your case to that horse’s ass is more than enough proof for me,” her father said. “Let’s go buy you a jelly donut, kiddo—your mother’s weigh-ins be damned.”

  Grace’s father sent her mother along with the woman’s rotary club, saying they’d pick her up back out in front of the church by 3 PM. Grace’s mother asked what they would be up to, to which Grace’s father said it was father-daughter stuff she wouldn’t understand. They walked over to the diner, the same one Grace had been thrown from a few days past, and strolled in like they owned the place. Grace knew her father was one of the most important men in town and commanded respect both from his war record and his entrepreneurial vigor. Nobody would whisper about Grace while he was there and Dennis and Nora would be on their best behavior under the withering stare of her father.

  He ordered jelly donuts, one for each of them, and two cups of black coffee to go with them. Nora was all smiles and good manners as she fetched the food and drinks. Grace’s father slowly, deliberately, with steady hands rolled two cigarettes from the leather pouch kit produced from the interior pocket of his suit jacket. He handed one to Grace and placed the other in his mouth. He produced the Navy issue Zippo lighter from the exterior breast pocket of the suit, lit his own cigarette and then lit Grace’s.

  “My PT boat was part of a patrol flotilla in the Mediterranean hunting for the last of Hitler’s oil tankers coming back from Africa,” he began, focused more on the lighter in his hand than Grace. “The ones we’d hit to that point were half or more empty. They usually sank without much of a struggle. It was nighttime when a radar cruiser picked up a target for us. The first two ships of the three were like the rest, mostly empty and soft for the picking. But the third, the one my boat hit, was full. I mean to the brim full of diesel fuel. We came in close enough for a knife fight expecting it was like the first two. It spilled on the first two passes hits, blew on the third, and spread fire on the water when my boat’s torpedo’s hit home.” A pronounced shake entered her father’s ineffably unshakable hands. “You’ve never seen anything like it. Waves on fire with pyres taller than ten houses, black smoke so thick it blotted out our spotlights to a dozen feet at most, and we were stuck right in the middle of it. It was the most frightened I’ve ever been and likely ever will be. I don’t know how we found our way back out of that ocean of fire when nobody else made it, but we did. When the fire washed over us, socked us in for what we all thought would be the end, most of my crew had the same look on their faces that you
had last night. I don’t know what you saw out that window, but I know the fear was real.” Her father clamped his cigarette between his lips, set the Zippo aside, and reached into one of his pant pockets. He withdrew his Shur-Snap push-button fisherman’s knife. He hit the button to extend the spring-loaded blade, and slid it across the tabletop to Grace. “What happened to the Poole girl isn’t happening to my daughter. You get chased by a man with ill-intent, you let him get close enough to think he’s got you, then you extend the blade, aim for the softest part of him you can reach, thrust in, twist the blade, and pull it back out. The inner thigh works well. There’s a big artery in there that this knife will reach.”