Hearts & Other Body Parts

by Ira Bloom

  Esme had never imagined, for example, that Stephan Reese lived and breathed musicality, but was too shy to perform in public or even talk about it, so nobody knew that there was a potential rock star on campus. She picked up on it as soon as she saw him in the parking lot, recalling that a music teacher in nursery school had mentioned he was a prodigy, before she’d known what the word meant. He was sensitive to sounds and always drumming in a nervous tick, and a thousand other observations all came together to reveal his secret.

  She also noticed that Brandon North had mild Asperger’s syndrome. She just knew. It was rude, but Esme couldn’t help staring, as people’s deepest qualities were revealed to her. The information was overwhelming. She saw a ninth grader who cut her wrists—she always wore long-sleeve shirts with holes cut in the cuffs to poke her thumbs through. Ronnie’s ex-friend Michaela was bulimic; Esme could tell from her skin and teeth and emaciation. Nick was gay. In his heart, he knew it, but didn’t want to admit it to himself, because his family was religious and he feared he’d lose their approval, or worse, their love.

  Esme observed that the defining characteristics of girl after girl she cast her sight upon were vanity, obsession with popularity, or self-loathing. The defining characteristics of many of the boys were overall horniness, macho posturing, or denying their own vulnerabilities, which were often their most redeeming qualities. She’d often suspected, but now she knew.

  The sisters approached the stairs in front of Hampstead Hall. Katy had to keep tugging Esme along as if leading a stubborn dog that was sniffing every telephone pole. Images were coming to Esme in quick flashes now, in the thick of the school with dozens of students around. A tall blond sophomore she’d seen around campus was obsessed with money. A dark-skinned freshman boy with beautiful dimples had a massive inferiority complex. Debra Weller, a girl Esme had known since grade school, was a devout religious fundamentalist who didn’t believe in science. A sophomore boy she’d seen hanging out with guys from the football team was a racist. A few girls were flirting with Zack: Karina, social climber; Nancy Getty, a hormonal nutcase; and Dawn, surprisingly conformist for a Goth. And Zack, of course.

  Vampire.

  Zack had DANGER! written all over him in a very large font with exclamation points. Pale skin, elongated canine teeth, a predatory stance, all were plain to Esme now. He never ate solid food, he only drank liquids. He was a mesmerist and he exuded neurohormones to attract prey. Esme could kick herself for having been so clueless for so long. Of course Zackery Kallas was a vampire. It was obvious.

  Esme’s clarity kept her from exclaiming something awkward, like “Oh my Goddess, Zack is a vampire!” She couldn’t let Zack know she knew. That would be very dangerous. She had to get her sisters away from him immediately. Zack must have been responsible for Miss Edwards’s disappearance, and Sandy’s, and Lisa’s. Katy and Ronnie were next. And Esme was all alone, with nobody to turn to. Was Zack’s dad a vampire as well? Esme focused her insight on Zack’s facade, to reveal … conflict? Tragedy? It was hard to get a good read. But yes, Drake Kallas was a vampire, by far the more dangerous of the two.

  “Katy, Ronnie, we have to go,” Esme said cautiously.

  “Whattaya mean?” Katy asked.

  Calm, calm. “We have to go back home and take care of that thing. That we promised?” She looked pleadingly from sister to sister, begging them to play along.

  “What in the world are you talking about?” Veronica chastised. “You’re out of your mind. You’ve been acting strange since yesterday.”

  Sick! She should have said she was sick and needed them to take her home. Now Zack was looking at her oddly, his piercing intuition penetrating her act. He had some sixth sense, some instinct. It was too late to say she was sick. He’d never buy it. Did he know she knew?

  She had to get away from Zack. She was showing all her cards in a game of poker with the direst stakes imaginable. “I remember, I did it the other day. Hey, I have to get to class.”

  Esme stopped outside her first-period calculus class and scrambled in her backpack for a piece of note paper. She tore off a corner and hastily scribbled a note:

  URGENT! I NEED YOUR HELP! SEE ME AFTER CLASS! DESTROY THIS PAPER!

  On the way to her seat, Esme walked past Norman’s desk and, concealing the note with her body, dropped the paper, folded twice, onto the desktop, making sure he saw it. Then she sat down to wait out the class. The teacher spent the whole period reviewing the semester and giving them reading for winter break. Over her shoulder, Esme watched Norm shred her little note into tiny strips, and cross-shred it into confetti.

  After class, Esme made sure she was the first out of the room, so she could catch Norman whether he was willing to talk to her or not. She didn’t know what else she could do. There was nobody else to turn to. Nobody else would believe her.

  Norm exited the classroom and nodded, tilting his head toward the east exit of the hall, which nobody used because it opened opposite the quad. They pushed up the hallway against the tidal wave of students, Esme moving in the giant’s wake like a jet skier behind an aircraft carrier. Outside, she found him, back against the building to the right of the doorway. His huge presence was very reassuring. She felt safe with Norman. Feeling the need for a protector was a female weakness she’d always disparaged—who needed a man, for anything?—but her nerves had been on edge since her revelation about Zack.

  Norm looked down at her expectantly. “So, what’s the emergency?”

  Esme couldn’t shut off her clarity. She could see Norm, for the first time, as he truly was. He was humongous, was what he was. But not just physically. Everything about him was huge and powerful: his intellect, and his empathy, and his sense of humor, and his integrity. The tragedy of his life was huge, the loss of his mother, his illness, and the monstrosity he’d become. His remorse, his regret about what he was and what he could have been, was overwhelming. He was so wounded, and yet he accepted it all with dignity. Esme’s heart chakra pulsed with compassion. Yes, he was physically unattractive, but with her insight she saw his spirit, which shone like a beautiful, blazing star. No boy she’d ever met was his equal.

  But Norman’s most defining characteristic, which he could not hide from her, caused Esme to turn away from him, ashamed that she’d read the truth in his heart: Norm loved her, deeply and with unrequited, tragic futility. Loved her the way a boy should love a girl, for what she was, all of her, the good and the bad, and for no other reason.

  But he was waiting for her to say something, so she cleared her throat and spoke up:

  “Zack is a vampire,” she said.

  “So?” he replied. “What else is new?”

  “Okay, I need you to send a text,” Norman instructed, glancing at his watch. “Wilson has second and sixth periods with Zack, Nick has third period, you have fourth period. Nick and I have fifth period. We’ve been monitoring him for weeks, so we’ve worked out the surveillance.”

  “Why don’t you text Wilson yourself?” Esme asked.

  Norman held up his hands. His fingers were as thick as bratwurst, his thumbs like pepperonis. “I can’t text, except with a stylus, and it takes forever. You’re much faster.”

  Esme opened the app. “He’s trying to get Ronnie or Katy,” she said.

  “We’ll track him,” Norman promised. “If they get within fifty feet of his car, we’ll all converge and get them out of there.”

  “We have to call the police! Zack’s father is a vampire, too! We have to do something!”

  “No police!” he insisted. “It’s too dangerous. You need to come to my house after school. My dad’s there, he can explain everything. You have to trust me on this.”

  At the end of the school day, Esme herded her sisters to the car. There was a jovial mood among the students, despite the bleak weather. They assembled in small groups in the student parking lot, comparing vacation plans. Some girls had on their pointy red Santa hats with white fur lining. Boys were already sporting u
gly Christmas sweaters. Winter break had begun.

  Esme could see Nick by the exit to the parking lot, and Norman by his huge SUV. Wilson was near Zack’s Mercedes, pretending to hold a conversation with someone on his cell phone while he paced back and forth. Zack was talking to Melody, Karina, and Dawn. Esme had the distinct sense that Zack was watching her out of the side of his heavily tinted goggles.

  Esme dropped Katy and Ronnie off at the house, at their insistence. Esme tried every trick in her repertoire to cajole and threaten her sisters into coming with her, but they would have none of it. But they agreed to have the tea ceremony when she got back home. It looked to be a long meeting, so Norm had suggested dinner. Esme and Norm had discussed the advisability of leaving her sisters alone in the house with bloodsucking predators on the loose. Norm arranged for Wilson and Nick to keep the house under surveillance in two-hour shifts until Esme got back home. If they saw any vampires, they’d call in the fire department and Norman, and everyone would converge.

  Esme was surprised when she met Dr. Stein. If not for the acromegaly, Norman probably would have been as short as his father. The doctor was in the kitchen when they arrived, fussing over pots and pans. Esme was taken instantly with Dr. Stein’s intellect. Channeling her clarity, she’d honed in on the man’s brain. He was defined by it.

  “We’ll let the brisket cook until it’s dry enough to choke a shark,” Dr. Stein said, rinsing his hands in the sink, scrubbing under the fingernails with a bristly brush as if prepping for surgery. He dried his hands on a kitchen towel, then offered one to shake. “Please, call me Fred.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.” She’d been worried about this moment, having betrayed Norman to the vice principal.

  “Did you hear that, Franklin?” he asked his son. “I told you it was an honor to meet me.” He turned and confided to Esme, “He thinks I’m an embarrassment.”

  “The man wears Bermuda shorts, black socks, and Birkenstocks,” Norman returned affectionately. “I rest my case.”

  “Einstein said, ‘Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy,’ ” the doctor retorted.

  “Well, yeah,” Esme said. “Stripes and plaids, fine, but Bermuda shorts with black socks? I don’t think so.”

  Dr. Stein’s eyes lit up with a spark of mirth. He pinched Esme’s cheek. “You’ll do, kiddo.”

  In the living room, Norm’s dad launched into a very long narrative about his time in Europe while Norman was frozen in a state of suspended life, raising funds for research and bouncing theories off the brightest minds in medicine regarding his son’s case. He met with pharmaceutical companies and medical researchers, mostly people in fields related to cryopreservation, neurosurgery and stem cells. In the evenings, he met with unsavory characters who traded in human body parts. No lead was too obscure, no back alley too seedy, no character too ghoulish for him to ferret out, in search of what he needed: tissue-typed limbs and organs of extreme size. There was a black market for such things.

  Dr. Stein would meet with a few colleagues periodically, people more interested in advancing medical science than in ethics and legalities. He found his way into the society of the most brilliant and secretive scientists in Europe. He picked up the nickname “Dr. Frankenstein,” as his son’s state of cryogenic suspension and rumors of his search for large body parts became known. An elderly Nobel Prize laureate whose name Stein promised never to reveal was introduced to him in a secretive men’s club in East Berlin. The laureate in turn referred him to a man who lived in a castle in the Austrian Alps who had a rather exotic private library of esoteric medical texts dating back many centuries …

  “Perhaps we should skip over some of this,” Dr. Stein proposed. “I went to Austria, and stayed with the duke at his castle for a month. I came upon a very old tome that referred to an unsanctified graveyard in a tiny hamlet in Estonia where was kept, in a long-forgotten crypt, a decapitated corpse that had not decomposed at all in four hundred years. Which was of particular interest to a doctor worrying about the cellular degeneration of his son in a cryogenic freezer.

  “I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except I judged the book to be at least three centuries old, and full of the most uncanny medical information you can imagine. I soon departed Austria for Estonia. It was a rustic village, bleak and nearly deserted. I contacted an unpleasant man to whom I’d been referred by one of my grave-robbing acquaintances. We located the vault and stole into the crypt in the dead of night. We found the sarcophagus in an alcove on the lowest level, behind a rusted iron gate, undisturbed for centuries. We broke open the padlock with a pickax and entered the alcove. It was far creepier than I could possibly describe. We worked the stone cover of the sarcophagus until we discovered the trick to it, and then slid it back. And do you know what we found, in that forgotten sarcophagus?”

  “A body?” Esme ventured, on the edge of her seat.

  “The brisket,” Dr. Stein said.

  “There was a brisket in the sarcophagus?” she asked skeptically.

  “No, in the oven. I just remembered. It’s probably done by now.”

  Nick arrived in time for dinner, having been spelled by Wilson from the stakeout of Esme’s house. Esme set the table and filled water glasses. They dined on a full beef brisket and a mound of asparagus in butter and lemon, a coarsely cut rye bread, and crisp, hot potato latkes, which Norman advised Esme to slather in sour cream and eat quickly while they were still hot. The latkes were amazing.

  Dr. Stein continued his story over dinner. In the sarcophagus, he and his colleague discovered a perfectly preserved body, sans head. The body had been subject to numerous autopsies. In the bottom of the sarcophagus, they found the skull. It had a complete set of dentals, and the fangs at maxillary 6 and 11 were prominent. The skull had been burned of flesh in a fire. There were scrolls in a tube of hollowed wood, which Dr. Stein removed carefully and photographed extensively, before returning them. He also harvested miraculously well-preserved tissue samples from every major organ. Then they returned the cover to the sarcophagus and closed the iron gate, leaving the body in the crypt where it had lain for more than seven centuries.

  “I returned to my labs in London with my tissue samples and my photographs and my notes,” Dr. Stein lectured. “I had the photos of the scrolls translated. There were medical notes from researchers who’d come to examine the body in centuries past, with their observations. The fourth scroll retold the story of the corpse:

  “He was described as a man of indiscriminate age, killed by locals of the village in the year 1306. He had settled there two years prior, and his arrival had marked the beginning of unusual goings-on. Maidens of the village had started walking around in mesmerized states, smiling a lot as if in love. Bite marks had been found on their necks and wrists. The maidens all had very high fevers, but seemed in good spirits. Few in the village would speak against the stranger. He had a charm that people found irresistible. When some of these lovelorn maidens started to turn up dead, a magistrate—an elderly man who’d never succumbed to the lothario’s charms—started to decry him about the village. The father of one of the girls who’d died became suspicious also, when a younger daughter caught ill with the fever. He waited up at night, saw the stranger enter his daughter’s room through a window, and witnessed him drinking her blood. But he didn’t intervene, because he knew the man then for what he was. A few like-minded individuals of the village got together and sent for a specialist, a self-proclaimed vampire killer, who managed to stir up support in the village to ambush the predator. Five villagers lost their lives in the struggle, as the villain was inhumanly strong, fast, wily, and brutal.

  “As part of his payment, the vampire hunter bade the villagers keep the corpse in the crypt, for proof, and for others to come and examine at will. By burning all the flesh from the skull, they killed it beyond regeneration and resurrection, which the slayer informed them tended to
be a problem with vampires.”

  “Well that’s an amazing story, Dr. Stein,” Esme said. “You actually knew about vampires, having studied one. When did you make the connection with Zack?”

  “I first became suspicious when I examined young Jackson, and heard reports of Zack’s superhuman strength and his ability to inflict post-hypnotic terror. That plus the reports of missing young women, and Norman’s musings about so many girls in his school walking around mesmerized as if in love. When Norman obtained the blood sample, I was able to confirm my suspicions. Zack and the body in the sarcophagus have the same pathology. The genetic markers are unmistakable. By the way, I heard you were at the scene of Jackson’s fight?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “I was there.”

  “You never thought to tell anyone?”

  “Uh … Zack asked me not to. Until last night, I guess I thought I was in love with him.”

  “What made you come to your senses?” Norman asked.

  Esme hedged. “I guess … meditation and prayer? And I had some very strong herbal tea.”

  Esme got home after midnight, Norm following in his SUV, and they found Nick, on his second surveillance shift, in his car across the street. The temperature was in the twenties. Nick was in high spirits. He said nothing eventful had happened, and Esme thanked him again and again for his help. Norm insisted on staying overnight on the couch, just in case, but Esme assured him that there was no reason to expect Zack and Drake that particular evening. Katy’s dogs would certainly wake the house if anyone approached. She promised to keep Norm’s number handy and her phone with her at all times. In truth, Esme would have felt safer with him staying, but she couldn’t allow it. The debt of gratitude she felt to Norm, his father and the guys was already overwhelming.