“El, I’m here.”
Lucia’s eyes jerked up. “Oh, Mindy, you surprised me.”
“Sure I did. Ready to go?”
“Oh yeah. Creepy old people, here we come.”
Lucia hopped the fence like she was doing nothing more than stepping on and off a curb, crossing the lawn in casual haste, going to one of the windows she’d obviously selected earlier. The window pane was up, but iron bars still divided the view inside. Lucia grasped two bars and fed her head through them, then her shoulders, then bonelessly shimmied the rest of herself inside.
“Okay, didn’t know you could do that,” Mindy said.
“You should see some of my jeans.”
The room was waiting to be a coffin. It was maybe seven by seven, with a toilet like a Porta Potty stapled on. Making it more cramped was the amount of detritus in the room. It wasn’t unreasonable, the inhabitant wasn’t a hoarder, but in a space this small, there was simply no room on the walls for so many clippings and photographs, no room on the floor for the precariously stacked books that longed for a shelf.
Mindy’s poetic mind supplied a backstory: the old man earnestly moving these possessions from his own house to a single bedroom with one of his children, then into this smaller still room, and next he would die. His prized possessions would be reduced to his burial clothes, and his space would shrink to the scale model of this room’s prototype. She reminded herself to call her Grandma next chance she got.
Quickly and silently, Lucia bypassed the heavy sleeper in the room’s cot and went to the door, tried the knob. Locked from the outside.
“Got a hairpin?” Mindy asked.
“Of course. What do you think I am, an animal?”
“Here’s what you do,” Mindy said and walked Lucia through picking the lock. It was easy; the locks were old and Mindy had just read the Wikihow on her laptop. The door swung open, and Lucia slipped out into the hallway, closing the door gently behind her.
The hallway was made up of black and white tiles, and though they’d been mopped recently, that couldn’t clear the cracks that grew like mold along them. The florescent lights were all either cut off or the color of jaundice. And the sounds—the rest home was like a remix of an insane asylum. There were shouts, moans, groans, but all pitched low, hidden under the PA system’s whispered playing of Beethoven. Moonlight Sonata which merged uneasily with the sound of a floor buffer going in the distance. Lucia moved with purpose, following the wall signs to their victim’s room: wing B, room 24. She kept to a subtly rapid speed that reminded Mindy of riding a bike, hugging the walls and placing her feet carefully to make not a sound.
“Here we are,” Lucia said as they came to a double door, closed and locked. The sign above the doors was a simple B. She bent to the lock and went through the routine Mindy had taught her, easily halving the time of her previous attempt. Mindy whistled in admiration as the door swung open—then wondered how a whistle could translate over a mental link. Certainly, their psychic power seemed to transfer whatever Lucia heard, as well as whatever words Lucia thought “loudly” enough.
“I said we’re here,” Lucia reiterated, stepping through the doors. “You still here?”
“Yeah. Just still getting used to, ah—being psychic.”
Lucia went from door to door in B wing, setting her palms against the wood and then seeming to ease her senses through that contact. Mindy suddenly felt the volume of whatever was in the room turn up, hearing the rubber-padded feet of a walker tip-toing along the floor. Lucia went to the next door, now hearing phlegmatic sounds of sleep.
“I didn’t know your hearing was so acute,” Mindy said.
“Everything about me is cute.”
Lucia gave up the perusal, proceeding directly instead to Room 24. Police tape barred the doorway, the sickly yellow like a tumor of the maleficence cast by the coldly humming ceiling lights. Lucia nestled her hand between the tape on the closed door, listening through it. Nothing. She tried the knob. The door seemed to pop off its hinges, swinging inward like there was a pitched imbalance in the air pressure. Looking inside, through the police tape, Mindy could see no real difference between this cubicle—she hesitated to call it a room—and the one they’d come in through. The bed was neatly made, the dresser drawers shut, the door to the bathroom closed.
Lucia picked at the police tape like a guitar string. “There’s nothing here.”
“There must be something you can smell or hear or—”
“A message written in invisible vampire ink? The cops couldn’t find anything; why should I be able to?”
“Keep looking. There has to be something.”
Rolling her eyes—Mindy could see, suddenly, the fringe of Lucia’s hair—Lucia went to the next door and the next, palming them, hearing only labored breath after labored breath, until she laid her hand on a door and it swung open.
Lucia blurred backward, giving Mindy motion sickness as she retreated into the darkness at the end of the hall. An orderly poked his head out through the open door, checking right and left. Satisfied, he pulled the door back to nearly closing. All of Lucia’s senses focused on him as he turned around and stepped deeper into the room.
Another burst of speed that twisted Mindy’s insides up like a roller coaster, then Lucia was lurking outside the door, fingers gently settled against the wood, peeking through the keyhole. Another room like an archaeological excavation of a life, a few curios nestled on particleboard furniture. The orderly was seated on the bed, caressing the offered arm of the old man holding onto the bed’s lift button with a kind of hopefulness, like it was a lottery ticket about to be called.
“Must’ve been the wind,” the orderly said, giving the old man’s arm a second quick going-over. There was a tourniquet near the elbow, making the veins stand out on his skin like paper would warp after it had gotten wet and then dried. “Sorry to keep you waiting. This won’t take a minute.”
Lucia’s eyes fixated on a vein worming through his arm, watching without the slightest distraction as the orderly’s syringe neared it, neared it, then punctured. Dark blood oozed inside the syringe and all Mindy could hear through Lucia’s ears was the thrumming of the blood as it still vibrated with the heart’s force.
“Damn, woman!” Mindy called. “I just gave sweet blood to you five minutes ago.”
Lucia snapped out of it, backing away, the sounds of the rest home in remission washing back over them. “Sorry. Kind of a habit.”
“What are they doing drawing blood this late?”
“Probably want to run some test or another. Make sure he’s dying on schedule. God, I hope I die before I get old.” Mindy felt Lucia’s brow furrowing. “Oh, wait, I did.”
The orderly finished, applying a bandage to the old man with a few quiet words, putting the vial in a stout small cart nearby. After moving the old man’s bed back down to a reclining position, the orderly pushed the cart to the door. Again, Mindy felt more than saw Lucia’s withdrawal. The orderly emerged from the room, pushing the cart ahead of him, then turned and carefully closed the door. It clicked, locking automatically.
“Follow him,” Mindy said, and had the experience of Lucia condescendingly tilting her head to the side.
Lucia crept after him with the instincts of a born hunter. She waited behind each corner, watching every little movement, listening to the echoing footsteps
He visited another two rooms, repeating the same procedure. Exchanging a few doctorly words with the resident, then drawing blood. It was so innocuous, Mindy wondered if there wasn’t some reasonable explanation for it. Maybe some of the residents were night owls, and preferred being examined at night when they were awake, anyway?
The next stop proved the exception. This door had a newer lock, with a keypad mounted on the wall. The orderly punched in a number—Mindy writing it down in case Lucia couldn’t recall it—and a little buzzer rang and a red light on the keypad went green. He stepped through the door, pushing his cart. Door closed be
hind him. A few moments passed. Then he came out again.
No cart.
He walked off, hands in his pockets, whistling even, but Lucia’s attention was bolted to the door.
“Um,” Mindy said.
“Yeah.”
Lucia waited for the orderly to move away, then slid to the door. Punched in the code her eagle eyes had caught. A buzz, and the door unlocked with a weighty clang. Lucia pushed her way in.
The room was empty. It looked like it had begun life as a janitor’s closet—exposed concrete, water heater, little ankle-high tank for a mop bucket to be filled in—but now, Mindy couldn’t tell what it was. There were no cleaning supplies. Not much of anything, except a row of carts like the one the orderly had pushed along the far wall. On the near wall were plastic bins, filled with a small selection of medical equipment. Needles. Vials. Rubber tourniquets. And a large chrome refrigerator, the kind restaurants used, the sleek door as featureless and imposing as a monolith.
“Well,” Lucia said, the high-ceilinged room making her voice echo slightly. “Guess that’s where they keep the blood.”
“You need that big a fridge to keep blood samples?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Lucia took a step. Another. Another. Each one cemented her further inside the thick concrete walls, blotting out the music from outside, the hum of the fluorescents—everything but the burning noise of the refrigerator’s activity. She reached for the thick handle—the heft of it filled her hand. Then she gave a tug, putting a jiggle of motion through the slab of a door. Otherwise, it did not move.
“It’s stuck.”
“El, are you sure—”
Then Mindy heard someone whistling, through her own ears. It was an odd difference, like hearing something on a pair of headphones versus hearing it in surround sound. She felt herself yanked back into her own body, sitting up in her bedroom. She stood, heart beating hard as if to remind her she was in a living body now. She could still hear the whistling and, no, it sounded like the wind, but louder, more intense, almost willful.
Outside her bedroom door.
Her parents wouldn’t dare leave her home alone without a baseball bat beside her bed. She picked it up, cocked it over her shoulder, almost pointed like Babe Ruth as she went to the door. Hand around the doorknob. Smaller than Lucia’s, fingers, slenderer, more delicate. Turned the knob, threw the door open.
The window was open in the hallway, curtains gently rustling.
Dragging the baseball bat dejectedly across the carpet, Mindy went to close it, at the same time trying to retrace her steps to Lucia’s mind. A bit like walking and chewing gum at the same time. She heard snippets of Lucia’s mental voice as she wrestled the sash back down: Mindy? Mindy?
“I’m here, Lucia.” Mindy said it out loud as well as telepathically, figuring that might strengthen the signal. The window sash plunged downward, cutting off the sound of wind. “It’s fine. What was in the refrigerator?”
Like she had seen a bright light and was now battling the afterimages of that, Mindy saw the inside of the refrigerator—a vast and mostly empty space clogged with caked ice more than anything else. “Nothing. Just a bunch of blood samples and some guy’s lunch.”
Mindy turned back to her bedroom. She spent so much time on the second floor of her house, she could get around with her eyes closed. “Okay, so it’s weird, but it’s not vampire-weird. Probably just one of those stupid little things every business does—”
She heard whistling again.
Mindy turned around.
The window was opened.
Fear jerked Mindy wholly into her body like a dog on a tight leash. She wasn’t alone, she just knew suddenly. Not alone.
“Lucia,” she whispered, trying desperately to summon up the connection once more. “Lucia!”
Something crashed behind her. Mindy whirled around. Another window had been opened, its sash banging against the lintel. The wind rushed in, curtains flaring up, reaching for her. Mindy backpedaled so fast her feet skidded on the soft carpet, almost slipping up from under her, pitching her against the deck railing of the stairwell that led from the first floor to the second. She looked down into the first story of the house to see that every window was open, curtains snapping like angry whips.
The knob of the front door began to turn.
Don’t scream, Mindy told herself. Screaming means panicking, and you can’t afford to panic. She pulled herself to her feet, running for the stairs at the end of the railing. Something brushed the skin of her upper arm, and her mouth opened to scream, mind blanking with fear until she forced, forced herself to realize it was just a curtain.
This time, her terror said. Thistimethistimethistime.
She ran down the stairs, taking steps two at a time. The front door’s hinges creaked. Mindy hit the landing stumbling, the baseball bat flying from her hand. It landed close to the door, too damn close. The door was yawning open now, like a rip between the world of safety and sanity inside her house and whatever was out there that wanted in.
Her breath wailing out of her like it desperately wanted to be a scream, she ran to the kitchen, her knee banging on the island, then her feet slapping on the cool tile, her hands scrambling upon the counter, onto the knife block, ripping a butcher knife from it.
She heard the stolid thud of the front door against its stop, the little rattle of the doorknob settling back into place. She held the knife up high, trying to remember how you were supposed to hold it. There was some special knife-fight way you were supposed to hold it and she knew it wasn’t high up in the air like she was Norman Bates about to murder someone in the shower, but she couldn’t think of any way else to do it, of anything else to do.
She didn’t hear footsteps. Was it inside? Too quiet for her to hear? Or was it still outside?
Had to be outside. She hadn’t invited it in. Lucia was a vampire and she needed to be invited in.
Unless it was someone she knew. Someone she had invited in already. Someone she’d seen a thousand times, never knowing, never suspecting—
“I know the rules!” she shouted, choosing to believe that it was a stranger, someone with no invitation inside, because that was the only choice where she survived. “You can’t come in unless you’re invited! And that’s not happening, asshole!”
She heard the door banging against the doorstop, caught by the breeze. First the creak of the hinges, then the pop of the doorstop. Again and again.
But it couldn’t come in. It couldn’t.
Mindy screamed, rage and fright and frustration tearing her throat raw, screaming at the top of her lungs to fill the house with sound because it was better than the unknown that had crept in from the night, replacing all the comfort of the place with fear.
The door creaked its way into the doorstop.
Mindy couldn’t take it anymore. She had to see, knowing the thing was waiting for just that, daring her to do it. She threw herself out of the kitchen, facing the front door, the gaping open wound of the doorway.
There was nothing there.
“FUCK YOU!” Mindy cried, clutching the butcher knife so tightly in her hand that her knuckles hurt.
Then she heard the backdoor crash open behind her, the footsteps on the tile floor. She whirled, arm in motion, knife swinging, and sunk the blade deep into Lucia’s chest.
For a moment, they stood there, stunned by the impossibility of it. Mindy looked down at the expanse of shirt over Lucia’s pectoral muscle, bloodlessly interrupted by a short length of steel and then the long brown handle that itself led, inexorably, to her hand. As if this were about to infect her, contaminate her, Mindy ripped her hand away. The handle quivered upon Lucia’s chest, rattling with her as Lucia took a long, sodden breath.
“It’s cool,” Lucia said, reaching up tentatively to try for a grip on the knife. Successfully, if gingerly, wrapping her hand around its handle. “It’s cool,” she repeated, then gave the knife a pull. It jostled a half-inch. Th
en, as the muscles in Lucia’s arm carefully strained, the blade began to slide free. “Ouch. Owwie. Ow. Oouch. OWWWWW—and we’re good!” she proclaimed, the knife now held aloft.
Mindy wondered how feminist it would be to faint, under the circumstances. She stumbled to the living room, the couch, mumbled “sorry,” and proceeded to do just that.
She came to a few minutes later. Lucia had closed and locked all the doors and windows in the house, which brought an instant sigh of relief to Mindy’s lips. Then Lucia showed her the skin under the tear in her shirt. “Don’t worry, okay? Just like new.”
“That’s good to hear,” Mindy mumbled, her head still spinning, her lungs only beginning to get as much air as they needed. “For a second there, I thought you were dead.”
“Well…yeah. Only now my shirt is too.”
“Sorry,” Mindy said, feeling an impalement was grounds for more than one apology.
“It’s okay. Makes it look vintage. You don’t think this is like pre-ripped jeans, do you?” Lucia asked, fingering the cut. “I mean, a stabbing’s normal wear and tear. I’m not a poser.”
“Definitely not.” The wooziness was rapidly passing. Mindy sat up. “It was him. The vampire.”
Lucia nodded. “I know.”
Mindy supposed she wouldn’t have wanted Lucia to see her scared out of her wits either. “I don’t think he could come in. Just open the windows, the doors—like he was trying to flush me out. Scare me into making a run for it so he could—”
“Hey, your dad keeps beer in the fridge?” Lucia came out of the kitchen, holding two Shiner Bock bottlenecks between her knuckles. “Nice.”
“I don’t drink,” Mindy said, taking the bottle Lucia offered her anyway.
“It’s medicinal,” Lucia replied, picking the bottlecap off with one fingernail. “Now, drink. Doctor’s orders.”
Mindy took a gulp for peer pressure. It tasted bitter as hell—like biting into a lemon without the Vitamin C.
“Finish the bottle,” Lucia told her without enough assurance that Mindy didn’t think to question her. Didn’t want to. “Then you’re going to bed. You’ll feel a lot less like shit after a good night’s sleep.”
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 25