It Drinks Blood

by J. F. Gonzalez

  “If Doug has been the vampire…or the ghoul all along, then why hasn’t anybody figured this out yet?” I asked. “Surely the Tinker family has been in New Castle for many years. Surely somebody would have figured out long before Allen was murdered that Doug was—”

  “That’s why I broke into his house. The door to his basement was locked. I couldn’t get in there. I bet that’s where he butchers them and sucks their blood! I bet he lures the hobos to his home and pushes them down the stairs to the basement and he slaughters them there!”

  “That’s crazy!” Ellen said.

  “Why is it crazy? Nobody has caused a fuss with these latest two murders. You know why? Nobody cares if hobos are being killed. The only reason they cared last time was because the killings had gone on for a long time and people were getting up in arms about it. The police couldn’t catch the killer, but everybody knew it was Allen. What happens when they lynched him? The murders stopped….until Doug began to lose weight and wither away from lack of nourishment! So he had to go out and start killing again.”

  “And if this is the case, why aren’t people up in arms about these latest murders?” I asked.

  “Because the victims are hobos,” Allison stated. “And everybody is looking for the Cleveland Torso Killer now. He’s doing the same thing over there. Those murders are making bigger headlines. The murders here aren’t big news.”

  She had a point. As much in arms people got over the New Castle Butcher killings five years ago, their rage was short-lived. That rage never re-ignited with the 1936 murder, nor the recent murders from that summer of 1939.

  Jack appeared to find this all intriguing. “Robert is right, Allison,” he said. “Promise us you won’t do this anymore and that you’ll stay away from Doug.”

  We pressured Allison into promising us she would lay off of Doug. In return, I promised her I would pay more attention to Doug during his walks around the neighborhood. “I’m up very late too, you know,” I added. “Our spare bedroom overlooks the same area yours does, so I can watch him through my binoculars too. And if I notice anything peculiar, you’ll be sure I’ll let the proper authorities know.”

  Jack clasped his hands together. “It’s settled then! Robert will be our neighborhood watch. Let’s hear it for him! Hip hip, hooray!”

  The rest of that summer was bad. When they were staying with Linda, the fights between Allison and her mother were frequent and violent. Linda was over a few times a week to seek shelter from the storm. Sometimes, she came over to use our phone to call the police. Every time the police came, nothing happened. Nobody would press charges.

  Chapter Four:

  A Night of Violence

  That was the summer Susan and James Nicholson began spending more time at Linda’s home. James had an infectious laugh; hearing it sent shivers down my spine.

  The first time I heard it was late one night in August of 1939. He and Susan were in their backyard drinking beer. Allison must’ve been out there too, because she was crying. Susan and James were laughing at her. Occasionally, they would say something that would make Allison burst out in anger; the fear in her voice was very heavy. The tears that followed were unmistakable.

  Ellen and I laid in bed listening to it. Grace stood at our window, barking out the window at them. Occasionally, James would yell a drunken slur at the dog, then he and Susan would laugh. At one point, Susan barked out to Allison, “Get the hell back over here now!” Allison protested with a whine, then James said, “I just love to hear you squeal!”

  Then Susan and James exploded in laughter.

  “That’s it!” I swung out of bed, pulled my trousers on, and rooted around in the top drawer of my nightstand for my revolver.

  Ellen sat up, alarmed. “Robert, no!”

  I checked the cartridge. It was full. I flipped it back in and said, “I’ll be right back,” and stormed out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out the door.

  Ellen scrambled out of bed behind me. “Robert, don’t do this, come back!”

  This wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten into a physical altercation with somebody. However, it was the first time I brought a gun to what should have been a fistfight. I had no desire to get into a fight with James. I was too angry for that. I wanted to put a bullet in his head and stop his clock.

  Grace bounded down the stairs after me, growling from deep within her chest. She would have bounded after me if I hadn’t blocked her way out the front door.

  As I strode next door, I could hear Ellen dimly behind me at the house, calling for me to come back. Grace barked frantically. Ahead of me, at the Kenyon house, Susan and her boyfriend laughed drunkenly, howling unintelligible gibberish at Allison, who was openly bawling now. I slipped around their back gate and made my way to the rear of their house, a firm grip on my pistol.

  They didn’t notice me until I made my presence known by announcing myself. “Stop yelling at your daughter!” I emphasized this by raising the pistol, aiming it in Susan’s direction.

  The howling laughter immediately stopped. In the dim light from a lamp that had been set on a picnic table, I could barely make them out. Allison was sitting on a small chair away from her mother and James. There was a bucket of beer on the deck. They looked at me as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing.

  “What’s that?” James asked. In the light of the lamp, I could see his face more clearly. He had a wide, full-lipped mouth and even, almost perfect teeth. He was wearing dark trousers, a light-colored shirt, and dark suspenders. For the first time, I realized he looked like a farm boy. He looked at Susan. “When did Mr. Writer become a bad ass?”

  Susan initially looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She quickly composed herself, her features darkening. “What the hell do you want?”

  “I am sick and tired of listening to you verbally abuse your daughter like this,” I said, the words just tumbling out of my mouth. “You should be ashamed of yourself. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  James stood up. There was no hint of fear in his eyes at all. He took a step forward. “Why don’t you lower that gun there, boy!”

  I trained my sights on him, and cocked the barrel with my thumb. It made a loud click. That stopped him cold.

  “Now you listen to me,” I said, my voice starting to shake. “If there is one thing I won’t stand for, it’s the emotional and physical abuse of a child. I swear that if you do this to Allison again, I’ll…”

  “You’ll do what, pulp boy?” James said, smiling. He wasn’t advancing toward me, but he wasn’t afraid, either. “Write about us in a story? Kill us on paper? Create caricatures of us in one of those slime ball pulp magazines you write for and have us killed by a monster?”

  That stopped me. What was I going to do? I wasn’t going to kill them. As angry as I was, I had enough self-control to know I couldn’t do that. I had changed. I wasn’t like that anymore. He’d called my bluff the moment he’d looked at me.

  Now that the threat was over, Susan took another swig of her beer. Allison sat in her place, still crying. “Let’s see,” Susan slurred. “Me and James are just sitting on my mom’s porch, having a good time, enjoying a beer or two, and you not only trespass, you threaten to kill us. I’m sure your wife will just love to bail you out of jail for that one.”

  I felt myself grow cold then. With Allison’s sobs growing diminished, Susan and James were becoming bolder, more assure of their position. His smile grew wider. “That’s all we were doing, pulp boy. Just having a few drinks and making my lady laugh. There’s no law against that, right?”

  Now it was me who took a step back. All the bravado that had rushed through me in anger at hearing Susan and this good-for-nothing scoundrel mentally abuse Allison was gone. They had me and they knew it. If I shot them, I’d be the one going to jail. And if I lowered my weapon, there would be a fight. I couldn’t have that. I had promised Ellen that my old self was completely gone. I couldn’t break my promise to her.

&nb
sp; “Please keep your voices down,” I said. I took a step back, feeling my way down the porch steps. I kept the gun trained on them. “We’re trying to sleep.”

  “Oh, we’ll keep our voices down,” James said. He remained where he was standing, still smiling, watching as I backed away. “We’ll keep our voices down and we’ll keep our eyes on you. How’s that?”

  I didn’t have an answer for him. I simply backed off the porch and down the lawn, away from them. When I was out of their visual range, I turned and made my way quickly back to the house.

  To say Ellen was upset at me would be an understatement. She was furious. Once I was back in the house, she read me the riot act. “Don’t you ever do that again!” she hissed at me.

  “You heard what they were doing to her!” I yelled back. “What was I supposed to do?”

  “When Allison and Linda get tired of Susan’s abuse, they’ll do something about it! They’ll get tired of being afraid, of being scared that Susan will strike back at them, and they’ll press charges next time the police are called.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said. “Because I am getting sick and tired of this. I just wish there was something we could do to help her.”

  The next morning, Susan, James, and Allison were gone. Linda came over and told me she’d heard my altercation with Susan and James. She was afraid to intervene on Allison’s behalf. “I just would have been beaten up,” she said.

  I tried to get back into my work and forget about the troubles of next door. Ellen tried resuming her duties at home. The weeks passed. We continued socializing with Cathy and Jack and their children. Jack asked about Allison a few times and I kept him updated on the situation. We both kept a watch on Doug, public enemy number one in Allison’s book. I saw no evidence that Doug was a member of the undead, cavorting around town in the dead of night as a ghoul. Nor did I see evidence to disprove it, either. I spent many late nights in my office, looking out the window at the neighborhood, at activities that would seem perfectly normal on the surface in most situations; one of the Green girls arriving home late from a date; Doug walking the streets by himself in a slow creep that seemed predatory, especially when he would stop in front of Linda’s house and stare at it before moving on; the single, matronly lady two doors down named Joyce who would walk down the street and talk to herself, to the plants, to the few cars that were parked in the driveways; and Jack arriving home on a night Cathy and the kids were visiting her parents, then leaving again to parts unknown.

  That was the year I started taking more late night walks; a holdover from my past as a late night cat burglar. There’s so much you can learn about a neighborhood when you walk it very late at night. As you pass each house you can take it in completely; its essence, its structure, the very nature of the people who reside within its walls. People let their true selves out at night, when they are safe behind the comfortable confines of their own personal space: their homes. So it was no surprise that on those nights I went walking, I learned quite a few things about my neighbors, and the people that lived in my immediate vicinity. I learned of the man two blocks over who was a respected banker by day who beat his wife and children every other night; I learned of the devoutly religious woman who played organ in the church a few blocks south of us who, on some weekend evenings, brought home men—sometimes one, sometimes more than one—and allowed them to do whatever they wanted with her sexually; I learned of the teenage boy who lived on the other side of murder swamp who was being brow-beaten by his overbearing father every night to go to law school when all the boy really wanted to do was move as far away from New Castle as he could the moment he graduated from high school; I learned that the Green family were dealing with the unintended pregnancy of their oldest daughter; that Linda would sometimes yell obscenities to herself late at night in her home and then burst out crying, saying that she was sorry to someone she never named; I learned that despite Jack and Cathy’s solid image of a happy couple that Cathy was worried Jack was sleeping around with other women on his business trips—I overheard them argue about this one night; and I learned that on some nights, when he was alone, Doug sat by himself in one of his back bedrooms and cried to himself, his weeping like that of someone who feels like he is damned.

  Chapter Five:

  A Corpse In The Woods

  Susan and Allison stopped in at Linda’s house in early September. As usual, Grace bounded over in pure doggy joy to play with Allison. When the girl turned to greet Grace, I was stunned to see how much she’d changed in the few weeks she was gone. She looked malnourished; her hair hung about her face in thin, greasy strands; her skin looked too pale, almost yellow; she’d lost weight, the bones of her face were very prominent.

  For a moment, I wondered if Allison was right—if Doug had succeeded in breaking in and feasting on her blood. Would her violated corpse be the next one found? When I hesitantly asked if she was okay, she avoided answering my question. Instead, she made some kind of excuse and went into the house. As for Susan, she avoided eye contact with me. The few times I saw her on the back deck drinking beer—either alone, or with James—she never acknowledged me, never looked my way. For the most part, Allison remained in the house.

  My work began to suffer that late summer and early fall. Luckily, I’d sold quite a bit of work in the months preceding this, so I had a nice chunk of change in the bank to tide us over. I would watch for Doug, note his predatory moves through the neighborhood. I began paying closer attention to him now.

  One time, he stopped in front of Linda’s house and stood looking at it. I felt a sense of crushing fear envelope me. I was becoming convinced Allison was right, that Doug was some kind of night gaunt, a vampire that preyed on the living blood of humans. And he had his sights focused on Allison!

  I burst out of the house and yelled at him. “Hey there! What do you want?”

  He turned slowly to me, and when I saw his eyes I felt myself grow cold. His eyes looked hollow. Dead.

  When he left, he did it slowly. He turned his back to me and resumed his walk up the road, almost as if he were gliding away into the shadows of the woods.

  It wasn’t until early October that I really spoke to Allison at length again.

  I was heading out to walk Grace when she approached me. She’d been outside, throwing a softball into the air and catching it in a thick baseball glove. “Taking Grace for a walk?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Can I come?”

  “Sure.”

  We walked, letting Grace lead the way with her nose to the ground. I asked Allison how things were going and she shrugged, not really giving me an answer. She didn’t look as damaged as she did before. We didn’t talk about that night in her back yard, or her mother and James. Allison told me general things about the carnival season, how she finally got to get some work on one of the concession stands. “I earned sixty bucks one night,” she said, her mood brightening. “That inspired me, so I really worked hard and wound up earning a couple hundred dollars over the three weeks we were out.”

  “What are you going to do with the money?” I asked.

  “I’m saving it,” she said.

  “Good for you!”

  “I wish something would happen to my mother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want something horrible to happen to her,” Allison explained. “I want her to just…go away. Or disappear. I wish the kind of stuff you wrote about in those magazines were true. If it was, maybe Doug will cut my mother up and drink her blood, like he does with all those other hobos.”

  I sighed. I knew Susan would come up as a topic of discussion eventually. I also saw this as a way to talk to her about my own suspicions of Doug. “I’m sorry for everything that’s happened, Allison,” I said. “I especially feel bad about that night.”

  “I know, and it’s okay,” Allison said. “There’s nothing you could have done. You would have been in big trouble if you’d shot them.”

  “Yes, I
would’ve.”

  Just as quickly, Allison changed the subject. “I still think Doug’s a vampire or a ghoul. I know it isn’t obvious to everybody else that he’s the one killing now, but he’s the reason why Allen committed those murders.”

  “He’s getting thinner,” I commented. “He looks sickly.”

  “I know! And you should have seen him last night! I was looking through my binoculars and…” Allison rattled on, but I tuned her out. I didn’t bother telling her about my own observations during my nightly walks around the neighborhood. I have no doubt she saw me some evenings walking through the neighborhood, sometimes walking up to people’s homes to get a closer look. If she had seen me, I would have known; Allison would have said something to me by now. Either she had missed my evening excursions completely, or she had seen me and simply chose not to mention it. I couldn’t tell either way. “You know what I feel like doing sometimes?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Getting enough clues to take to the police.”

  “What clues?”

  “Clues that Doug’s the New Castle Butcher.”

  “Ah.”

  “See, if I can get enough evidence, I can take it to the police and they can arrest him!” The expression on Allison’s face was the most optimistic and hopeful I’d ever seen it. Her eyes sparkled, her smile made her entire personality seem to come alive. “Then they can catch him, they can arrest him! And I’ll be a hero and that can be my way out!”