The Vampires of Vigil's Sorrow

by Cassandra Duffy

  A moment before Annabelle was going to turn from the window and head back to the counter, she thought she saw Debbie walking quickly across the far edge of the parking lot toward a makeshift trail into Vigil’s Grove. All caution was thrown to the wind, and Annabelle raced out the door with barely the foresight to snag her red hoodie on the way. She ran across the parking lot, calling Debbie’s name at least three times, but couldn’t catch up to her before the pale figure disappeared into the tree line.

  Annabelle jogged through the tall grass of the field leading up to the wood’s edge, following the trail blazed by other teenagers who used the cover of the trees for all sorts of illicit activities, but stopped just shy of entering the grove. She was afraid, not only of the darkness, of the possibility of becoming lost, but of the mystery that surrounded Debbie. Was she actually Deborah Poole, lost for fifty years, somehow returned to the world in the exact same condition she’d vanished in? Or was there something less supernatural but no less sinister about their brief, yet intense romance?

  Annabelle had to know.

  She ran into the darkness of the forest after the fleeting image of a white t-shirt. She stumbled over unsure footing on rocks and exposed roots she couldn’t see. An occasional break in the tree canopy allowed enough moonlight through from time to time so that she never lost complete sight of Debbie, although she seemed to be making very little or no progress in catching her. Exhausted, out of breath, and with two sore ankles from nearly turning them both a dozen times stepping on uneven footing, Annabelle began to feel another, less welcoming sensation. She was being followed.

  She began spending equal time chasing the elusive figure of Debbie in white and looking back over her shoulder to an equally elusive black silhouette that vanished among the trees whenever she chanced a glance backward. Annabelle stopped at the top of a low rise in the woods, with the increasingly overgrown trail leading down into the oldest parts of the forest ahead of her. Debbie, at the farthest edge of Annabelle’s limited night vision seemed to stop as well. Annabelle gasped for breath, holding suddenly when she heard a snap of a twig behind her. And then, as if intentional to make sure Annabelle knew, a second twig snapped. She glanced back. The slender, dark figure was closer, much closer, standing perfectly still in the center of the trail, making no move to hide.

  Annabelle ran without concern for finding Debbie or conserving energy anymore. She hurtled down the path, low-hanging branches tearing at her clothes and hair, heart thundering in her ears, with no other goal in mind than escape. The path wound farther and farther downhill into a shallow ravine that swallowed the tiny thread of what was once a path, vanishing entirely into sylvan wilderness. Annabelle’s shoes crunched through dry leaves and twigs, ricocheting off half-buried rocks and fallen branches until her foot finally caught on one, sending her sprawling into a miniscule clearing bathed in the cold white light of the waning moon.

  Annabelle grasped her turned ankle. The joint burned with agonizing pain and she knew any further running was out of the question. She searched the damp leaf-litter around her. The earthy smell of decay on the forest floor flooded up as she rustled through the natural compost. Her hands struck something hard and she grasped it, pulling it free from the detritus. She dropped her would-be weapon and recoiled from it—she’d found a muddy human femur. Scooting away from the bone in a seated position, she rustled across other bones, and wooden totems on propped up sticks holding scraps of clothing and other various trophies of the dead. Her panic-induced tunnel vision widened, her eyes grew accustomed to the new light source, and she came to the chilling realization that she was in the midst of a field of bones.

  The dark figure, slender, not much taller than Annabelle stood at the edge of the clearing, but came no closer. Annabelle tried to back away, still without regaining her feet. Debbie appeared on the opposite side of the clearing, completely focused on the dark figure as though Annabelle wasn’t even present. As with the night before, Annabelle couldn’t hear anything above a thin, unintelligible whisper on the other side of the conversation from Debbie.

  “You can’t have her,” Debbie said sternly.

  The dark figure whispered her response.

  “I’m saying ‘no’ now,” Debbie said.

  The dark figure reared up as though a coiled snake to strike and flew at Annabelle’s stricken form. A brief flash of the moonlight over the suddenly exposed face of her attacker scared a decade of life from Annabelle as a monstrous, pale face, more fangs and death than human anymore, rushed toward her. She closed her eyes in anticipation of the impact, only to have the hit never come. When she opened her eyes, Debbie stood defensively over her with the dark figure knocked to her right, impaled lifelessly on an outstretched limb of a recently fallen tree.

  “She knew,” Debbie whispered as she helped Annabelle up onto shaky legs.

  “Knew what?”

  “Knew I would take her place as you would take mine.” Debbie brushed a few errant dead leaves from Annabelle’s hair. She smiled, showing off jagged fangs of her own.

  Everything Annabelle had wanted, escape from her old life, a change of scenery, melted into Debbie’s embrace and she let go. Taking the new promise of eternal love without question as the painful teeth sunk into her neck.

  Part 7: Unburied Bones

  Autumn 2005 – Annabelle and Debbie

  1.

  Annabelle awoke to find rain falling on her already open eyes. She considered it awaking simply because there was no word for what had happened to her. She’d died, she’d felt herself pass away from her body, waited in darkness a moment, but before she could fall into the oblivion of black that was beckoning her, she felt something tied to Debbie pulling her back until she was once again within her body. And that’s all it really felt like to her. Like a cord cut and retied, the severing between her true self and her body was permanent even when the ends were tied together. She knew she was unique in the world; she was removed from her body, knew what it was like to be disconnected from self, and knew the nothingness that existed on the other side, only to return into her flawed, dead body, made new by her re-inhabiting of it. A smile played across her lips when she realized one other person, one other beautiful person, knew the secrets she knew.

  She smiled up to Debbie, blinking away the rain falling, which hadn’t bothered her in the slightest for some reason. Debbie returned the smile. She reached up and touched Debbie’s stunning face, truly seeing and feeling her as if for the first time with senses well beyond the power and number she formerly had.

  “Why didn’t you close my eyes?” Annabelle asked.

  “Dead eyelids don’t actually stay closed unless you hold them,” Debbie said. “That’s why the ancient Greeks put coins over the eyes of corpses—to hold them shut.”

  “Creepy,” Annabelle said dreamily.

  Debbie helped Annabelle to her feet although Annabelle suspected she could have leapt from a lying down position to hold onto the tippy-top of the highest tree in the area if she’d felt so inclined. Debbie’s hand found its way into hers; their fingers interlaced.

  “Come on,” Debbie said, giving Annabelle’s hand a little tug. “I should show you our home.”

  Annabelle dutifully followed Debbie down barely broken trails into the deepest, darkest parts of the forest that had likely gone untouched by living human hands for hundreds of years. She half expected the home to be a medieval castle and half expected it to be a high tech mansion or possibly some mix of the two. What she found was a small, windowless stone hut nestled within an overgrown grove of hemlock trees that housed a colony of spiders. Debbie continued walking toward the hut, but Annabelle went no farther.

  Annabelle took a step back from the hut. Something about the place screamed at her through her new senses; one of which she was quickly considering her “creepy detector” as it seemed to sense otherworldly things like ghosts. This hut, this place within the woods, was like sitting in a pot of boiling water at a heavy metal concert fo
r how thoroughly it bombarded her creepy detector.

  “I’m not going in there,” she said. “Not ever.”

  Debbie turned back. Her face was a mask of hurt, confusion, and anger. “You don’t want to stay with me?”

  “I do, more than anything, but we don’t have to stay here,” Annabelle said pleadingly. “You take her place—I take yours. It doesn’t have to be that way.” She didn’t know how she knew so much about Debbie all of a sudden, but she did and what she knew of Debbie’s connection to the creature and the hut frightened her beyond words.

  Debbie blinked as though someone shone a light too brightly in her eyes. “No, she said…”

  “It doesn’t have to be the way she said.” Annabelle dropped Debbie’s hand, taking instead her confused, frighten face between her palms, forcing Debbie to meet her stare. “You told her no. I heard you.”

  “The woods is the only safe place for…”

  “For her,” Annabelle said.

  “I’m not her, and you’re not me.” Debbie glanced back over her shoulder to the ancient stone hut she’d called home for fifty years. Already it was looking smaller, less important, and like it would fade from her memory in no time at all. She was free from Maggie and the home they’d shared, but a sinking realization settled over her and she wanted to scream at the quickly withering corpse of her former mentor, savior, tormenter—so many roles Maggie had played in her life, but the one truth she’d always held back that kept Debbie at her side, and now she’d died without revealing it. “She told me she would tell me someday.” Debbie began to cry, tearing herself away from Annabelle’s hands as a storm of rage began building in her that she wished to vent upon the stone hut, to tear it rock by rock from the ground until there was nothing left. “You told me you would tell me the truth!” she screamed at the darkened sky.

  Annabelle rushed to her side, feeling the hurt rising in Debbie in ways that went well beyond empathy. A bond existed between them bound by something completely inhuman in origin, and it fed tiny tastes of feelings across the tethers that held them together.

  “What did she promise to tell you?”

  “What we are,” Debbie said. “She knew what we are, but she wouldn’t tell me. Grace thought I was a ghost, the people I helped thought I was an angel, and Maggie referred to us as witches although I know none of those are right.”

  Annabelle laughed, actually laughed, which was something she hadn’t done in…she couldn’t remember how long. It felt good, as though she’d been laughing wrong her whole life and was suddenly instructed in how to do it properly. She kept laughing to revel in the feeling until she realized she probably sounded crazy. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’m not laughing at you. I didn’t know laughing could feel like that. I was…it doesn’t matter. We’re vampires, baby, vampires.”

  Debbie didn’t seem at all shocked by the revelation. She swallowed and furrowed her brow, fighting back a fresh onslaught of tears. “How do you know?”

  Annabelle slipped her hand into Debbie’s, once again interlacing their fingers. “Let me show you.”

  2.

  Back at Annabelle’s above the garage apartment, they scrolled through web pages on her old desktop Compaq computer, catching Debbie up on all the things that had happened in vampire lore since 1955. As interested as Annabelle thought Debbie would be in discovering what she was, she seemed far more interested in the computer and stream of information flowing across the internet into it.

  Debbie continued with her research of vampires, picking up quickly on how to use the computer and internet on her own. Annabelle, already tired of the material of vampire boys seducing boring high school girls, or vampire bounty hunters, or People’s sexiest men alive dressed in frilly vampire clothes, before they even started, lay on the bed, closing off her individual senses to investigate how many new ones she had. Her conclusion was that she now had nine. In addition to the usual compliment of hearing, seeing, touch, smell, and taste, which were all heightened well beyond human levels, she now could feel electromagnetic waves of living or electronic things moving in relation to other things, sense supernatural entities with her creepy detector, gained fleeting images into Debbie’s personal state when they were close enough to each other, and see halos around living things that spoke of their state in the world in what she assumed psychic people called auras.

  “Are we to the point of hooking up yet?” Annabelle asked, already bored with the cataloguing of her new senses.

  “What do you mean?” Debbie asked, her eyes never leaving the computer screen.

  “I mean, we’ve gone through hanging out and a little making out, but I don’t know if that counts as hooking up, and that’s supposed to happen before we’re together so we’ll know if we’re compatible.” Annabelle rolled onto her side to give Debbie a long look over. She certainly hoped she was compatible with the undead goddess sitting at her computer because if she wasn’t, there wasn’t likely to be anyone on the planet she would fit with.

  Debbie laughed, looked back over her shoulder, and smiled to Annabelle in her coquettish way. “Is that how dating goes these days?”

  “Well, yeah, I mean, the dinner and a movie stuff is kind of outdated, don’t you think?”

  Debbie shook her head and laughed again. “I’m from the time period that invented dinner and a movie dates, but sure, I think we’re to the point of hooking up—we called it going all the way. Should we move that to the front burner?”

  “We could, I mean, I want to, but I don’t want to tear you away from…” Annabelle scrunched up her face knowing she shouldn’t ask what she was about to ask, but she also knew she couldn’t help herself. “Did you…did you have sex with that thing in the woods?”

  “Her name was Maggie. And I know she must seem skeevy to you now,” Debbie said, “but she wasn’t always like that. We had a falling out a long time ago and haven’t spoken too much since. We were sort of together for awhile, but she didn’t like to be touched and she didn’t want to be loved, so we never went down that road.” Debbie could tell her answer put Annabelle at ease, and Annabelle could tell from their emotional tether that Debbie wasn’t lying, but was very sad things had progressed the way they had. Debbie’s mood shifted with an accompanying smile. “What’s your tale, nightingale? Are you a fast girl?”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m a Kama-Sutra master with porn star skills.” Annabelle laughed and fell back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “Even as a vampire I can’t be cool around you. I’m a mega virgin, like every freaking part of me is pure in nearly every sense.”

  Debbie spun the computer chair around entirely, sitting in her demure, yet attentive way straight out of the 50s with her knees together, hands folded in her lap, and ankles crossed beneath the chair. “We’re getting to be tight here, Anna-Bee, so why don’t you spill with what ‘nearly every sense’ means?”

  Annabelle felt powerfully embarrassed, not just because she hadn’t really expected Debbie to pick up on that part of the comment, but also because she’d never admitted to anyone what the caveat on her virginity really meant to her. She’d also never had a nickname before and really liked Anna-Bee. She grabbed one of the pillows from the bed and pulled it over her face tightly to scream out a little muffled embarrassment. She slid the pillow up her face just enough to uncover her mouth. “I’ve played with myself, which is totally normal. Every health class teacher says so.” The silence wore on for too long, and Annabelle suddenly was afraid Debbie might have pulled her vanishing act. She pulled down the pillow, but found Debbie not only still on the chair, but suddenly very interested in what Annabelle was saying.

  “That’s not what I was told by my teachers, but they might have meant two different things,” Debbie said with a wry smirk. “Why don’t you show me?”

  The request was the kinkiest thing Annabelle had ever been asked. Sure, like most teenage girls, she’d had kinkier things shouted at her from the windows of moving vehicles, but actually asked by someone
with a sincere hope of the answer being yes—that hadn’t ever happened to her. It made her feel special, wanted, and attractive when Debbie looked at her the way she was, with hopeful blue ice eyes sparkling with a little lust, and despite all Annabelle’s misgivings about…well, just about everything, she really wanted to give Debbie what she asked for, even if it meant possibly making a complete fool of herself, and Annabelle was fairly certain she was going to do that.