by P. T. Phronk
“Oh, honey,” she said, her breath on his neck. “Dangerous doesn’t even begin to describe me.”
He turned his head. Those eyes, those lips, they were inches from his.
Suddenly, she tossed her purse halfway down the hallway.
“Why did you—” he began.
“It’s Michael Kors. Don’t want to get blood on it.”
Her teeth were buried in the side of his neck. A trickle of heat ran down the back of his shirt.
As he fell into her grip, he kicked against the door to throw her off balance. Instead, the door swung open. Bloody was a streak of grayish fur, then she clamped on the woman’s leg.
“Get her,” he said weakly. He felt weak, his muscles refusing to work, as if he’d just woken from a long nap.
Dalla unclenched her jaw and pulled away, her mouth dripping with blood that looked black in the flickering blue light. A quartet of fangs, two in the top and two in the bottom, occupied most of her mouth.
She stooped to wrench Bloody from her leg. When her grip momentarily weakened, Stan toppled forward, then scrambled into his apartment. “C’mon, Bloody, c’mon,” he mumbled.
She tossed the dog against the wall. Bloody yelped in pain and hit the floor with a thud. Dalla made to stomp on her with an ugly purple high-heeled shoe, but Bloody sprung to her feet. She deked one way, then the other, avoiding the foot coming down on her. A gray streak again, she was between Dalla’s legs then in the apartment.
Stan slammed the door. He flicked the deadbolt and fastened the chain. Gripping his stinging neck, he stumbled across the apartment, collapsed on the couch, and reached for the phone beside it. His arms felt incredibly heavy.
He had time to dial 9 before the door was kicked in. He rolled off the couch just in time to avoid the door, torn from its hinges, crashing down half on the couch, half on the table beside it. There was a faint bong from underneath as the telephone smashed to pieces.
Bloody ran to cower by Stan’s side. Silhouetted by the fluorescent hall lights, Stan’s blackish blood splattered down the front of her flowery dress, the vampire crouched, hissing like an animal.
4. Held Gaze
“YOU’RE A VAMPIRE! A FUCKING vampire!” screamed Stan, holding Bloody to his chest and scrambling against the back wall.
The vampire hissed.
Blood dribbled from between Stan’s fingers, pressed on his neck wound. A thought occurred to him.
“You are not invited in! When I said you could come up for tea? I meant the hallway. Not. Invited. In.”
The fangs in her mouth retracted into her jaws. Her face contorted in thought.
“Do you think that film nonsense works?” She said it as if it wasn’t a rhetorical question. With her hands clenched into tiny balls, she stood awkwardly in front of the doorway.
Stan and Bloody trembled in each other’s grip.
“Like I’d want to go in there. It’s a right mess. How hard is it to toss out your garbage?”
Stan began to laugh. Slow at first, then increasingly hysterical giggles. He felt life returning to his muscles.
“You can’t come in unless I let you.”
“As if!” She stuck her hands through the doorway, then waved them up and down. “Oooh look, no invisible barrier.” She gripped the edges of the doorway and leaned her head and shoulders inside. Stan flinched. “Now get out here, or I do the dog before I do you.”
He had a feeling she didn’t want to do him in the same way he’d originally suspected.
There was a clunk from behind her. She turned. It was Mrs. Olson, the elderly woman who lived across the hall. She rushed over to Dalla when she saw all the blood, rubbing her hands over the vampire’s shoulders.
“Oh, my dear, are you all right? Did that awful man hurt you?”
Thanks, Mrs. Olson.
Dalla glanced down at her chest, then back at Mrs. Olson. “Oh, this? Just ketchup.” She giggled. “I’m an awful messy eater.”
“Run!” Stan shouted, his voice cracking. He felt clammy, cold.
Mrs. Olson tried to peer past Dalla, but the vampire swayed to block her.
“Is he in there? What is going on here?” asked Mrs. Olson.
Dalla held the old woman in her gaze. “He is fine. Just a little ketchup and a lovers’ spat.”
Mrs. Olson had always been stubborn. “Lemme see in there,” she said.
“What do you need to do that for?”
“Move it, missy.” She tried to push the vampire aside, but it was like trying to move a column of concrete.
Dalla sighed. She was so fast that all Stan saw was the vampire’s face contorted into an exasperated expression one moment, and then the next moment it was embedded in Mrs. Olson’s neck. Her jaw pumped, ripping and chewing so her tongue could worm its way deeper into his neighbor’s flesh. The old woman tried to scream, but all that came out of her mouth was a waterfall of blood.
When Mrs. Olson went limp, Dalla gripped her under the arms to keep her upright while she fed. Her eyes closed as she chugged at the flowing blood; as if she were indulging in the warmth of a latte on a cold winter night.
Stan retched. Bloodhound barked.
She separated from Mrs. Olson. A bundle of flesh and tendon jiggled between her lips. She raised her face toward the ceiling then gulped it down.
“I didn’t want to do that,” she said finally.
Dalla tossed the limp corpse into the apartment. The old woman thumped down by the kitchen island, blood dribbling from her wounds.
“You d-d-d—” Stan tried to get something out, but his head was spinning. Ugly blotches blossomed in his vision.
“I d-d-did have to. She would have brought in the heat, and imagine what a mess that would be. If you had just come out when I asked you to, your chum would still be alive.” She put a finger to the corner of her mouth. “‘Course, you’d be dead, so that’s probably not preferable to you. But I’m sure you taste much better than she did. I’ll find out soon enough, right?”
“Wr-wr—”
“Yes, right,” she said.
She couldn’t enter the apartment. She said she could, but if that was the case, she’d already be in.
“G-go away,” he said. “I’m not going to invite you in.”
“I told you. I don’t want to come in. But I can wait out here all night for you.”
Stan stood on shaking legs. He climbed over the busted front door, to his window. He rotated the clasp, then lifted the window. Behind him, he heard a swish, then a couple of thumps from the stairway leading outside.
When he stuck his head out to yell for help, Dalla was on the street below. She looked up, and even in the darkness her eyes sparkled from under the brim of her flowery hat. Her index finger stood erect in front of her lips.
She said, just loud enough for him to hear: “Do you really want to attract more attention?”
He collapsed backwards, grasping for the couch. He clawed himself onto it. By the time he turned around, Dalla was back at the front door.
“Go away,” he said.
“Not gonna happen, sweetie,” she said.
He staggered to the bedroom, waited for Bloody to follow, then shut the door. He lay on his bed, shaking. The bleeding from his neck had slowed, but a rivulet still trickled between his fingers.
Bloody leapt onto the bed, then sniffed Stan’s hand. She pushed her wet nose between the fingers, nudging them apart.
“Stop it, girl.”
The dog was persistent. Eventually he removed his hand. It trembled, covered in his own stickiness.
Bloody licked the wound. Stan made to shove her away, but it felt strangely okay. Dogs licked each other’s wounds in the wild all the time, right? It’d probably help clean it, stop the bleeding, prevent infection. Perfectly natural.
Not that he had any idea what was natural any more. Not after what he’d seen—that abomination stalking outside his apartment.
“Staaanley,” the abomination wailed.
; “Oh God, this is so fucked,” he whispered to his dog, who lapped at his bleeding neck. “She can’t stay out there forever, right girl? Right? Vampires, they can’t stay out past dawn, right?”
“Wrong again, daddy-O.” Her voice was barely muffled by the bedroom door. “No windows out here, and I’ve got all day.”
Bloody stopped licking and turned toward the door with her bulging eyes full of humanlike worry.
“She’s lying, girl,” he whispered, even quieter this time. “Just like she was lying about the invitation. We just sleep until morning and this will all go away, right? We get to the cops in the morning and everything will be fine.”
She tittered. “Lying you say? What time was it when I first, um, ran into you?”
He burst out of the bedroom. A box of stale pizza lay on the floor beside the couch. He picked it up.
“There’s garlic on this pizza, you bitch,” he screamed, his voice cracking. He tossed a slice at her as hard as it is possible to toss pizza.
She gingerly plucked the slice out of the air.
“Garlic hmm? It’s very kind of you to share, but I’m afraid I’m full.” She smirked, then raised her eyebrows at Mrs. Olson’s corpse.
“But …” She removed her hat. Her long brown hair was thinning up top, showing patches of bone-pale scalp. She slapped the pizza on her head. A mouldy sliver of pepperoni tumbled down her face, leaving a red line of sauce on her forehead.
“Does it suit me?” Her high-pitched schoolgirl giggle hurt Stan’s ears. When she saw that it was bothering him, she giggled louder.
“Go away!” he shouted over the din. He collapsed to the floor and curled into a ball. “Why me?”
“Aw, muffin,” she said. “You want to know why you? Well mostly because I told you all about my embarrassing fondness for Damien Fox. That, plus I already have the signatures I needed, I was hungry, and you seem like the type of human that, when you’re dead, nobody’ll notice you’re gone.
“Oh, in addition, now that you know what I am, I can’t let you run to tell the world. The public is not ready for our big-screen debut.”
Stan nodded. Those were a lot of good reasons.
“No. No no no no no,” he muttered to himself. “Vampires only come out at night. In a few hours she’ll go back to her coffin and leave me alone.”
He looked up. For a moment he stopped trembling. “And that’s when you’re vulnerable.”
“You watch too many movies, kid.”
“No, that’s it. You leave in the morning, then I come visit with a mallet and a wooden stake.”
She yawned. “You know where I live, do you?”
Stan laughed hysterically. He hugged Bloody close to him. “Oh I will. I will.”
The vampire’s gaze shifted from Stan, to Bloody, then back to Stan. “Hmm.”
Minutes passed, then an hour. Stan waited, hoping and praying that he was right about her need to skedaddle when the sun came. Sure, she was up past dawn that morning with Letterman, but she sure was in a hurry to get somewhere, and she still had a lingering sunburn.
Whenever he glanced up the vampire was there, leaning on the doorframe, staring at him with a grin on her face.
Despite it all, Stan was woozy from the loss of blood, and he began to nod off.
He’d just hit a state of blissful peace, when she started to sing. “The halls are aliiive, with the sound of muuusic,” she wailed. The vampire was a terrible singer. She held her arms aloft and twirled in the hallway. “Oh Stanley, won’t you come out and join me?”
He rubbed his face and groaned.
“With sooongs they have sung, for a thousand yeeeaaars.”
Stan rolled into a tighter ball and put his hands over his ears. Bloody curled up by his head.
“Mairzy doats and dozy doats and little vamps eat doggies,” she lilted, her voice carrying straight into his head. “A Stan’ll eat doggies too, wouldn’t you?”
She leaned on the doorframe, then slid down to rest on her butt. She sighed. The pizza was still on her head.
“You’re going to go hungry in there, Stan. I’ve got all the time in the world, and nobody is coming for you. Nobody cares. Your only neighbor is rotting on the floor.
“Did you know it only takes a few hours for decomposition to begin? All those little bacteria in her body will start chewing at her from the inside out, farting out gases that will smell worse than the dump I watched you take last night. Oh, brother, you don’t wanna be around when the flies start coming in to lay their eggs in her crevices.
“Come out and save yourself the misery. I promise I’ll clean the place up real good.”
Stan lay shivering on the floor of the freezing apartment. For the next six hours, the vampire alternated between describing the stages of human decomposition and singing show tunes.
5. Unresolved Sexual Tension
SLEEP DEPRIVED AND BLOOD DEPRIVED, there were times when he considered giving up; stumbling out and letting the vampire have her way with him. Bloody could escape while she was distracted.
His more rational side told him that, even if the monster could stay there 24/7, he had a few cans of tuna in the cupboard. Running water. And at any moment, he could be saved. Maybe the people who owned the shop downstairs would hear her constant, awful wailing and call the police. Or, when morning came, he could get a written message out to someone on the street.
He pictured what he would write. Alert the police. Tell them: don’t bother with guns. Bring crosses, holy water, wooden stakes.
Could anyone take that seriously?
The note wasn’t necessary. Dalla had just finished detailing the butyric fermentation stage of human decomposition and moved onto dry decay, when she stopped mid-sentence.
“See you soon, Stan,” she said.
It took effort to open his eyes after squeezing them shut for so long, but when he did, the first gray signs of daylight were dribbling through the window, and the vampire was gone.
He stood up on stiff, shaking legs, and approached the doorway. Surely it was a trick. He devised a plan to attach a hand mirror to a broom handle, so he could see into the hallway without leaving the apartment.
Wait, would a vampire even be visible in a mirror?
Before he could begin gathering the materials, Bloody bounded past him.
“No, girl! Back! Come, girl!”
The dog ignored him. She stuck her head into the hallway, looked both ways, then trotted out. She turned to Stan and gave a quick bark, as if to say all clear.
Stan edged out of the apartment. Even though he was only emerging into the pallid light of the hall, he felt like a trapped miner seeing sunshine for the first time in a month. Dalla was not there.
He needed to act quickly. He used a kitchen knife to pry up the edge of the soiled hallway carpet, then rolled it up and tossed it into his apartment. With a bucket of soapy water, he washed away the blood that had soaked through the carpet as best he could. He replaced the door crookedly in its frame.
“She said she’d see me soon,” he muttered as he worked. “She’ll come back night after night, probably find me wherever I go, just like you, right girl?”
Bloody sighed gravely.
“No no no sir-ee. We aren’t gonna let that happen, are we girl? We were right about daylight. She thinks she’s hidden safe in her cave, or her castle. Wherever she hides in her dirt-filled coffin. Like a worm. Hah! Like a worm, eh girl?”
He used his fingernail to scrub at a tricky drying smudge.
“She doesn’t know what you can do. You may just save my life. Oh, Bloody.” He leaned over and kissed his dog on the forehead. Bloody scrunched up her face. “I’m gonna give you more burgers than you can eat.”
When the floor was as clean as it would get, he went inside. At the tiny desk in the corner, he flipped through some folders and pulled out a map of Manhattan. He unfolded it on the floor in front of the couch.
“Let’s hope she’s still in town.”
He c
alled Bloody over to Mrs. Olson. He put his sleeve to his face; already she smelled like shit, though he couldn’t remember which stage of decomposition that represented.
“Sorry. It’s life or death, girl.” He pointed to the mess that used to be Mrs. Olson’s neck. “Hope she left something for you to use.” Bloody reluctantly gave it a sniff. She raised one eyebrow, then looked out of the apartment, at the open door to Mrs. Olson’s place across the hall.
“No no, not her, the other one. You know,” he held two downward-pointed fingers up to his mouth.
Bloody gave the gore another sniff, then pranced to the map on the floor.
She would take a while to work. In the meantime, Stan got a good smear of Mrs. Olson’s neck on a dish cloth, then rolled up the body in the carpet. He broke the head off his broom, snapped the shaft into two pieces, and sharpened each half to a point with a steak knife.
A steak knife, to make stakes! Giggling made his head hurt.
He placed the stakes into a bag, along with a hammer, a hand saw, and the knife. Next, he grabbed an old pewter cross that his mother had given him, and tossed that in too.
He took an empty bottle from the recycling bin, then went to the bathroom. He washed his neck wound and taped gauze over it. He filled the bottle with tap water, then, even though he was only religious by heredity, prayed to whoever was listening to bless this water, please, amen.
It was worth a try.
Bloody sat on the map with her eyes closed. She lifted her nose to the air, sniffed, then shifted slightly, one paw held out in front of her. She opened her eyes, then barked.
“You got it, girl?”
Her paw was just south of Canal Street.
“Good girl,” he said, scratching behind Bloody’s ears. “That’s not too far. We can walk it. You wanna go for a walk?”
Bloody’s tail raised slowly, reluctantly wagging back and forth.
She didn’t need a leash, but to avoid dirty looks from strangers, Stan strapped one on anyway. He grabbed his bag full of goodies, and they were off to slay the vampire.
A market down the street sold fresh garlic. The powdered crap they put on pizza didn’t work, but fresh from the ground might be a different story. The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow at Stan, who had clammy skin, purple bags under his eyes, and a blood-spotted bandage over his neck. He dropped a handful of garlic into his bag, then rejoined Bloody outside.