Dante's Awakening

by Devon Marshall

  Sheriff Bartlett seemed taken aback. So did Ellis. I felt the air around her stiffen. The sheriff might also have been a tad suspicious. But I was betting on the town morgue being pretty small, and that she probably would not want the corpse of a Movie Person lying around unclaimed in it for any prolonged period. My telling her that I wanted to take care of the funeral arrangements was one way to get access to the body. I bet right. She overcame her suspicion and gave a nod that only just succeeded in staying on the respectful side of “Boy, am I grateful to have that little problem off my hands!”

  “I’ll call Roger at the morgue to let him know and see to the requisite papers being drawn up for you to sign,” she said, and I nodded my agreement. I actually did think that arranging a discreet funeral for Cherie Dunlop would keep whatever had happened to her under wraps and the studio free from lawsuits and jittery investors. A small price to pay. The deceitful part was that anyone at the studio actually cared about the deceased.

  Ellis and I took a hurried leave then before Sheriff Bartlett got to thinking it might be an idea to call the studio and check us out. Of course she would get a runaround, simply because that’s what studios do—run you around, no matter who you are or what your inquiry is. They even give the guys that deliver the water coolers the runaround. It’s a hobby as much as a professional thing. In the car again, Ellis told me that the sheriff did not appear to be under any kind of glamour, but that she had surely known more than she said, or at least she suspected more. “I don’t know exactly what it is that she suspects, but there’s something telling her that all is not as it should be in her little town,” Ellis opined.

  I considered this. “Could she suspect vampires?”

  Ellis just shrugged. “Maybe. I couldn’t get all the way into her head, not without her noticing. She’s a very astute woman. More than she looks.”

  And she looked pretty damn good. I tried to put the attractive Nordic sheriff out of my mind and concentrate on how we might find our vampire peeper and discourage him from continuing his unhealthy pastime.

  “So where we going now?” Samson asked cheerfully from the driver’s seat. He had found a store nearby selling candy and chilled Cokes. His life was complete. Vampires love chocolate and candy almost as much as they do coffee. Some of them, like Samson, are caffeine junkies who guzzle coffees, sodas and anything else with caffeine in it. If they feed on top of a caffeine-binge, the result can be horrible and frightening. For a while they tried to ban caffeine in their community, but that was a bit like Ronald Reagan’s heroic but ultimately misguided attempt to corral drugs in the 1980s.

  “The morgue, I guess,” I told him without the slightest trace of cheer.

  * * *

  The morgue was part of the town’s one and only funeral home. I would bet on the undertaker being the richest man in town. People are always going to die. The place, owned and run by a man named Roger Colton, had been built in a bright, lively Swiss cottage style, perhaps in an effort to make its business seem a little less depressing, although it made me wonder: if another less garish funeral home were to open in Holly Bush Junction, would Roger Colton still be the richest man in town?

  People are funny about death. Some like it to be dull and depressing, seeming to equate those things with being respectful to the dead. It is as if they think being dead is not bad enough already, they have to rob it of all and any fun whatsoever. Unless they are New Orleanians. Or dwellers upon the strange planet called Hollywood, where even death is turned into a Technicolor production. Roger Colton could always open up in either of those places, I supposed.

  Colton himself was a jolly, rotund little man, not at all what you tend to expect an undertaker to be. He had one of those high fluting that voices would likely get on your nerves after about, oh, say a week, and a tendency to giggle girlishly, especially when Ellis smiled at him. She had absolutely no trouble at all glamouring him into showing us Cherie Dunlop’s body and forgetting to tell the sheriff he had done so. He was only supposed to supply the requisite papers, after all.

  Let me just state this for the record. Despite the fact that I deal with the Undead, I do not make a habit of hanging out in morgues. I am not freaked out by death, or by dead people—not in the slightest. It’s the living who more often worry me. But no one wants to hang around in the chilled atmosphere of a morgue with its underlying bad smell. I don’t care how many times they clean the damn place, or whether they do it with industrial-strength cleaner, I swear there is still a vague whiff of rotting flesh.

  Roger Colton cheerfully took us to the morgue, slid open the drawer containing Cherie Dunlop’s body, and was happy to leave us to look whilst he fetched his autopsy notes for us to read.

  “That glamouring thing sure does come in handy,” I murmured after Roger had bustled off, leaving Ellis and me alone with the dead bodies. Samson had remained outside with the car and his supply of candies and Cokes. The morgue was apparently full at the moment, which in Holly Bush Junction meant that there were a grand total of six dead people, including our girl. I once had occasion to visit the LA County Coroner Office on North Mission Road. The morgue there was packed to the gunwales. There were literally bodies stacked nine and ten deep on top of each other. And there were gurneys sitting in the corridors with more bodies on them. It had been like visiting the set of a zombie flick. Only six dead here. I think the LA Coroner would have rejoiced.

  Ellis did not waste time. She yanked back the sheet covering Cherie Dunlop so that we could examine the dead woman’s arms. Cherie had bled out sitting in the bathtub in her hotel room. I bet they would be using some of Roger’s industrial-strength disinfectant on that room before they re-let it. I looked down at Cherie Dunlop’s naked body, at the skin marbled by the green of death, at the milky blankness of her eyes, and felt a little green around the gills myself.

  “Jesus, let’s just do this, please,” I breathed.

  Ellis lifted both of the deceased’s arms. At once we could see the cuts. Crude slash marks, but deep enough that she would have hit something vital. I imagined she bled out fairly quickly.

  “This is weird,” Ellis remarked. She directed my attention to the left wrist, to some marks in the greenish marbled flesh that did not seem to fit somehow. I peered as closely as I wanted to get to a dead body, but still I was not sure what I was seeing.

  “It looks like three X’s to me,” I suggested.

  Ellis nodded. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Her tone made me look up. She gave me a grim smile that I did not like and wished would go away. A smile like that on anyone—not just a vampire—always means you are about to be told something you do not want to hear.

  “It’s a calling card,” she told me. She let go of the arm and it thudded lifelessly onto the metal drawer. I felt a bit more queasy. “The three X’s represent the Roman numeral thirty, in this case meaning the thirty pieces of silver that Judas Iscariot was said to have sold Jesus out to the Romans for,” Ellis added.

  I tilted a nod at her to go on even though I was already not liking what she was telling me. Only crazy serial killers leave calling cards on their victims.

  “Have you ever heard of the Children of Judas?” Ellis asked me then. I shook my head. She grimaced. “They are a vampire clan. They’re vicious and dangerous and are outcasts to the rest of the vampire community. We need to call Voshki at once.”

  “Wait…” I jerked a hand up… “are you telling me that this…” I gestured with the same hand at Cherie Dunlop’s body… “was not suicide? It was murder?”

  Ellis shrugged. Her dark eyes were cold and hard as flint. “The Children of Judas have a special power, if you want to call it that. They can convince humans, and some vampires, to commit suicide.”

  Oh, I really was not liking the hell out this now. Saying that someone had been convinced to commit suicide sounded an awful lot to me like just another way of saying murder.

  The door crashed open behind us and we both whirled towar
d it, Ellis being a little quicker than me, but it was only Roger Colton returning with his notes. Ellis let her fangs retract discreetly. Not that Roger would have noticed their presence, I suspected. Some people are more susceptible to vampire glamouring than others, and I reckon Roger was amongst the top ten percent of the totally susceptible. He sauntered over to us, held the notes out with a cheery “There you go. Take as much time as you need, and if you want me to explain anything, I’ll be upstairs in my office. I suddenly feel the need to call my wife and have her talk dirty to me.” He winked at us and walked out again.

  “Dear Lord,” I said, blinking at Ellis.

  She shrugged again. “Glamouring makes some people a bit horny,” she explained and I swallowed bile. A horny undertaker having phone sex with his wife from the funeral home. You could not make this stuff up.

  “Won’t his wife wonder about that?” I asked. Damn my curiosity!

  Ellis paused flicking through the autopsy notes to shake her head. “He’s done it before. Lots of times. I read it in his thoughts,” she said casually.

  I stopped asking questions. Ellis made humming noises as she read, then she abruptly stopped reading and frowned.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It says in here that Cherie Dunlop apparently got in the bathtub and ran the water with the plug out so that most of her blood ran down the drain…” Ellis sneered, shook her head. “How many suicides do you reckon ever do that, Dante?”

  Not many, I would bet. You got in a tubful of hot water in order to raise your body temperature and bring the blood vessels closer to the skin’s surface. Bottom line, you bleed out quicker. It is also a fact that women are more concerned about not leaving too much of a mess behind when they top themselves than are men, hence very few female compared to male suicides use a shotgun or a sharp instrument. Blowing your brains out or cutting your wrists is very messy. Women most often use pills. It was possible that Cherie Dunlop had gotten in the tub with the plug left out and the water running to lessen the mess from slashing her wrists…but it wasn’t likely.

  “The son-of-a-bitch killed her and fixed the scene so that it would look like her blood had drained away, and no one would realize he had fed from her,” Ellis said dully.

  I said, “Oh,” and then, “That’s pretty fucking cold.”

  Ellis gave me a look that said you have no idea. She flicked another page in Roger’s autopsy report, scowled at whatever she saw written there. “She had no alcohol or drugs in her system. How did no one even think this was not suicide?”

  Again, most suicides will either take sleeping tablets or drink heavily beforehand, often both. Killing yourself is a hard thing to do, even if you are hell-bent on dying. Your natural human instinct for survival will fight you the whole way. It’s just easier to get drunk or doped to the gills to do it.

  I shrugged. “I guess they just thought Cherie was another Hollywood flake,” I suggested sadly. I frowned. “These Children of Judas…how come I’ve never heard of them before?”

  “We don’t talk about them,” Ellis said simply.

  “And yet here they are, making a nuisance out of themselves.”

  “Yes.”

  “You must wonder why?”

  Ellis looked at me with a strange expression. “I daresay it’s because they are violent by nature and can’t stay out of fucking trouble for very long.”

  I wanted to get out of the morgue, and back into the warmth and sunshine and fresh air of the outdoors. I raised an eyebrow to Ellis. “Are we done here?”

  We were. Ellis had read everything she needed to, and we had both seen everything we needed to. Ellis closed the drawer containing Cherie Dunlop’s body, dropped the autopsy report on a steel table, and we left the chilly confines of the morgue.

  Upstairs Ellis told me to go ahead, she would take care of signing for the body and making it so that Roger Colton did not remember having allowed us such unrestricted access.

  “Great idea of yours, claiming the body on the studio’s dime,” she said dryly.

  I shrugged. “No one else is claiming her, and it gets her out of the way without embarrassing questions being asked, doesn’t it?”

  After leaving the morgue, we decided to look for our vampire peeper. “So where are we gonna find a window-peeping Child of Judas hanging out in a one-stoplight town like this?” Samson wanted to know. When Ellis had explained to him that she thought Cherie Dunlop was murdered by a Child of Judas and that the same rogue vampire might be the peeper, Samson had frowned and remarked with a mildness which I suspected was deceptive, “Man, I hate those fuckers.”

  We gave it some thought. Well, it appeared that Samson and I did. Ellis just looked out of the window. I got the feeling she would rather have been someplace else, doing someone else. I kind of both wished that were me and hoped it was not.

  “He probably lives alone, somewhere on the outskirts of town, a trailer maybe, or a shack in the woods,” Samson suggested. He shrugged. “A vampire is peeping in windows, he isn’t going to want to be living someplace that his neighbors can see his comings and goings.”

  That made sense. I suggested we take a spin around the town’s less salubrious outskirts. All small towns have insalubrious outskirts. Doesn’t matter how storybook-perfect they might be otherwise, those ugly fringe areas with their doublewides and rusted pickups, their weed-infested, broken-down empty lots and their chemical-spewing factories, their muddy semi-dried rivers and their burned-out trunks of trees, their old bald tires, door-less refrigerators, crumbling piles of bricks and their hollow-eyed, toothless residents—they will be lurking in the background, just beyond sight of the good burghers, but always present in their nightmares and at town council meetings. Samson drove us to Holly Bush Junction’s own version of this fringe nightmare and we drove around for an hour, stopping a couple times to observe likely habitats. The likeliest abode was a shack on the edge of some straggly woodland. The shack leaned so far to one side it looked like it was just about to sit down. The roof was tarpaper, warped and mildewed, the yard an incongruous mix of rubble and rusted bits of iron, all of it overgrown with weeds. If you had wanted to build a set featuring a shack that a vampire with a dirty little peeping habit might be living in, you could not have done better.

  We figured on swinging by again at dusk. Maybe our vampire peeper would be up and about by then. All of the peeping incidents had taken place after dark. He either worked during the day, or, more likely, holed up in his shack and slept. I shuddered to even imagine his sleeping quarters. I’d pretty much decided it was a “he.” To hell with equality. How many women do you know that would live in a hovel like this?

  “What now then?” Samson asked as he steered us back toward town. Some of the roads were so narrow that the enormous SUV barely fit between the curbs. I wondered what would happen if we encountered another vehicle coming in the opposite direction? Samson was not the kind to politely give way to another driver. The radio was on again, another of those nostalgic rock stations. I wondered how Ellis kept finding them. This one was belting out Bad Company’s Feel Like Making Love and Ellis exercised her not inconsiderable lungs along to it. How in hell could Samson be so apparently oblivious to the caterwauling? My ears were ready to start bleeding.

  “Ellis! Knock it off,” I snapped.

  She stopped yodeling and gave me a curious look. “Someone hasn’t been getting enough love lately,” she cooed. I wanted to scream. Hit something. Someone. Ellis patted my knee, winked at me in a way that went straight to places it should not have and proceeded to do bad things there. “Maybe we can fix that tonight,” she added.

  “Maybe not,” I told her in a strangled voice. I leaned abruptly between the front seats and yanked the volume knob all the way around. The vehicle filled with thundering silence.

  It did not help as much as I had hoped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I returned to the hotel. Samson and Ellis took the SUV and went off someplace—I neither knew nor c
ared where. To feed, most likely. In the peaceful, vampire-less lull I lay on the double bed (I was still chafed about that), reading a book I had brought with me. I always take a book with me wherever I go. Reading helps me to unwind. I prefer horror or cop thrillers. Sometimes I’ll tackle a biography, or even something profoundly philosophical. I never read anything about movies, actors, or Hollywood in general.

  You could say that my life has been privileged—if you are inclined to be impressed by ridiculous amounts of wealth and the mindless spending of it. My parents were both very successful, certainly very rich and pretty damn powerful. The Sonniers have always been considered part of the Hollywood hierarchy. My entry to the dizzy, nosebleed upper echelons of the glitzy world they inhabit was pretty much guaranteed, although I’ve never been one for schmoozing with the Hollywood set unless it is for work. I’m a loner when I’m not working. I like it that way. I don’t own a lot of fancy cars, nor do I own a jet, and although my house is comfortable and probably a little bigger than I need, it is by no means luxurious. I had my fill of conspicuous consumption growing up. At one time my parents were earning so much money between them that we were all flying to the bathroom by private jet.

  With that kind of wealth and status come super-sized addictions and outrageously bad behavior. To illustrate: one day, in my thirteenth year, I came home early from school because I had bad period cramps. I could hear the rock music blaring from all the way down the drive and as soon as I stepped through the front door I smelled the marijuana. You could have got high off the smell coming out the front door alone. I found my mother in the living room, in the company of a young and very hirsute director, one whose star was on the rise in Hollywood at that time, both of them down on their knees on the floor, scrabbling frantically amongst the carpet fur. They were giggling madly.

  My mom paused giggling and scrabbling when she realized I was standing in the doorway, watching them. “Oh. Dante. Hi.” She gave me a stoned smile, made some gestures in the vague direction of the floor. “Contact lens. Lost. Looking for it.”