by Rachel Caine
But here, after his terrible journey, Mungo finally had a piece of luck. The day after he was deposited at Stephen Bram & Associates, Annabel herself came to the office, and, on a whim, swept all the post they’d been saving to answer on her behalf into a bag, saying, “I need to be more in touch with my fans,” and then swanned down to her waiting limousine.
Mungo’s second piece of luck in the Colonies happened right in Annabel’s kitchen—she decided to open her post at night. When she withdrew the squashed coffin from the padded envelope, she dropped it onto the coffee table, thinking it was just another piece of horrible homemade “art” sent by some demented movie-lover. She went back to her third gin and tonic and sighed. But then she saw something move.
Mungo, still somewhat flattened, crawled out of the remains of his wooden coffin. Annabel took one look at him and shrieked, dropping her drink.
And there, because all good things come in threes, Mungo had his third piece of fortune. Annabel’s glass smashed on the tile floor, and pieces flew up, cutting her bare legs. The scent of her blood was more than poor starving Mungo could resist.
He gathered the last of his strength and latched onto Annabel’s calf. She shrieked again and tried to shake him off, but he clung tighter than even one of his ticks would have. Annabel gathered breath to shriek again—she wasn’t the “Scream Queen” in those early films for nothing, after all—but she realized all of a sudden that whatever was happening on her leg felt quite pleasant.
She looked down, and saw—what on earth was it?—it looked like a tiny person in a cape sucking the blood from a cut on her leg.
Mungo stopped drinking for a moment and looked up. “Hullo,” he said. “I’m Mungo Cheswick. And I love you.”
Annabel vowed then and there to quit drinking. Tomorrow.
“Uh… hello.” She noticed that where Mungo had been sucking her leg, the cut had almost entirely healed over. And… she couldn’t be sure, but didn’t her skin look creamier? Mungo moved onto another cut, and began licking the blood from there. The sensation felt even better to Annabel. “Ooooh,” she said.
By the end of half an hour, all of Annabel’s cuts had been licked to healing, and she was pretty sure that most of her varicose veins had disappeared. Not that she would have admitted to having varicose veins to anyone.
Annabel made herself another gin and tonic while Mungo explained his tremendous passion for her after seeing her film poster in Piccadilly Circus. Annabel couldn’t help but feel flattered, even if her gentleman caller was no bigger than a pickle. She wondered how things could work to her advantage. And then Hollywood’s “Scream Queen” thought faster than she’d ever thought in her life. Which usually wouldn’t be saying much, but when it came to her own beauty, Annabel Cartwright was practically Mensa-level.
Maybe she’d get Mungo to use his tongue on her face? He might be the best cure for wrinkles she’d ever found. And that dreadful unicorn tramp stamp she’d gotten in her late teens! Annabel had never felt confident in laser removal or plastic surgery—she shuddered at the thought of the awful scars and mangled facial messes she’d seen on some of her contemporaries. No one was going to film her in soft focus! She’d get Mungo to take care of the tattoo, those little lines around her eyes and mouth—everything. And if she had to give up some of her own blood, so what? Actually, given how good that awful Meryl Streep had been looking lately, she wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Miss I-Can-Do-Any-Accent-in-the-World didn’t have her own tiny little vampire at her beck and call.
Annabel and Mungo settled down to a mutually beneficial existence. He’d nibble on her neck or her cheek, or, if he was feeling really frisky, on the curve of her breasts. He never left any marks, and Annabel’s skin grew simply remarkable. Mungo sucked the terrible unicorn tattoo right out of her skin. Everyone commented on how she looked twenty years younger, and other actresses muttered about how she must have found a really great plastic surgeon. Annabel just smiled smugly.
Everything was going swimmingly until the inevitable happened. Annabel asked Mungo to “turn” her, make her into a vampire like him, so she could be immortal and (somewhat) young forever.
“If only I had met you earlier,” Annabel sighed. “But it’s not too late. I still have my looks, and I look better than ever after your attentions, Mungo!”
Mungo, in response, gently nibbled on her earlobe. Annabel giggled.
“So… when do you think you can ‘turn’ me?” she asked. Annabel had seen this sort of thing as part of the plots of many horror movies, some of which she had starred in, and of course on that sexy vampire series on HBO.
“I’m not sure I can do it, darling,” buzzed Mungo in her ear. “You’re so big and I’m so small. I’d have to drain you entirely, and then give you some of my blood… I don’t think I have enough.”
“I’m not that big! Well… maybe we can start with a few drops at a time? Please?”
Mungo could deny Annabel nothing. That very night when he drank some of her blood, he gave her three drops of his own. Annabel woke the next morning feeling better than she ever had in her life, better even than when she was still a little girl and full of gumption. She looked thoughtfully over at the kitchen cupboard where Mungo’s coffin was hidden for the day.
If this keeps up, I’ll be a hundred before I get enough tiny vampire blood to turn me, thought Annabel. And God knows how I’ll look by then.
The next night, Annabel begged Mungo to drink as much of her blood as he could, just as an experiment. Mungo sipped at the vein in her elbow for a good hour and a half, until his belly was distended and he staggered woozily to her knee, where he collapsed in a stupor.
Quick as anything, before Mungo could fly away or come to his senses, Annabel snatched him up, popped him in her mouth and bit his head off.
Then she swallowed the rest of him (mostly) whole and belched in a genteel fashion.
Now I’ll really be immortal, Annabel thought. Would she miss Mungo? Well, certainly, but she’d soon get over that—once she was an even bigger star. She toasted herself with a gin and tonic.
Things did not go exactly as planned. Annabel couldn’t sleep for the terrible stomachache she got. It was as if her guts were literally turning inside out. Even when she stuck her finger down her throat, in hope of expelling the tiny little vampire, it didn’t help. The only thing that came up was a bit of his cape.
After a dreadful night, Annabel fell into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. When she woke, the clock showed it was almost noon. But her stomach had finally settled down. In fact, she felt quite marvelous!
She got out of bed and was on her way to the bathroom when she almost fell onto her face—her pajama pants were loose and she’d tripped over the legs.
“I’m getting thinner,” she whispered in ecstasy as she staggered back to her feet. Mungo’s body and blood were working even greater miracles than she’d expected. She lifted her pant legs and ran to look in the bathroom mirror.
Annabel could barely see over the bathroom counter. She shrieked in horror. It wasn’t possible… was it?
Yes, it was. Annabel was shrinking.
She grabbed the powder-puff stool from her dressing table and stood on it to look in the mirror. Annabel looked like a three-foot tall miniature version of herself. Even as she watched, she grew smaller. As she shrank, she leapt for the edge of the dressing table—and found she could fly. She hovered over the dressing table and managed to land back in front of the mirror. Her face was very pale.
As Annabel opened her mouth to scream her last scream as a Scream Queen, she saw that she had grown fangs, too. Eating Mungo whole had worked. She was, in fact, “turning”—into a tiny little vampire. No bigger than a pickle. And not even a very large pickle.
The news was full of the headlines—“Former Scream Queen Annabel Cartwright Disappears!” and “Hollywood Horror Show: Annabel’s Gone!” and “Vanishing Actress Mystery Puzzles Police.”
Annabel’s mansion ev
entually became known as the “Cartwright Mystery House” and was bought at auction by another film star, then quickly sold and resold several times. There were rumors of strange noises, bedbug infestations, perhaps a haunting? No one ever stayed in the house for long, and its mystique increased.
Finally, the place was bought by a real estate mogul, who would sometimes hint to his guests at drunken parties that he knew the real secret behind Annabel’s disappearance. He didn’t. But he did eventually put his home on the market, just like everyone else, after numerous complaints from his family—they all had very peculiar dreams involving something nibbling on them in the middle of the night, which no amount of fumigation seemed to help, so they concluded it was probably psychosomatic. The mogul’s children eventually developed anemia, but everyone was sure this was unrelated. The kids did say they could hear a strange buzzing near their ears just before falling asleep. Sometimes it sounded just like shrieky little words.
THE LIGHTNING TREE
By Carrie Laben
So Adriana’s doing porn now?
A cursor sat blinking just below the instant message; I’d been staring at it, trying to decide whether to even bother responding, when I saw that Scott was typing again. I tabbed back to my work and waited to see how he was going to try to dig his foot out of his mouth.
… that’s what Emily said. She made me delete Adriana from our Instagram feed. She seemed pretty upset.
You mean the tattoo picture. Our Instagram feed? I wondered what had happened to the man who wouldn’t dog-sit for me lest we “get too entwined.” That’s the memorial tattoo she got for Cody, judgeypants.
He hadn’t replied by the time I was finished with the latest batch of essays. I could only do three or four before I had to take a break; each of them reminded me of the dreams I’d had back when I thought I was getting out of this town for good. A lot of them also reminded me that if I’d had even half the brains and my family had twice the money, those dreams might have come true.
Or if Cody hadn’t died. If my stepdad wasn’t already dead, and Mom wasn’t in jail, and Grandma wasn’t almost eighty and inclined to forget all of the above every morning. If Adriana didn’t only have me.
You can’t do good editing when you’re that angry, not even when the material is as trite as some half-wit rich kids’ college papers. And the last thing I wanted to do was lose this gig making sure that half-wit rich kids had every advantage over people like me.
I needed to get up, get away from the computer. Otherwise I’d just give into the temptation to go over to Facebook and feed the rage more. Anyway, I’d already edited—rewritten, actually, but we didn’t call it that to let our clients save a tiny bit of what they pretended was dignity—enough for today. The pay was high for the effort involved, and the checks showed up fast. And I got to work from home. It was a good job. I should be grateful. If I didn’t remind myself, Grandma would for sure.
I grabbed a jacket—it might cool down as the sun set, or the mosquitos might come out, or both. I slipped out the side door, out of Grandma’s line of sight as she watched Wheel of Fortune. I set out for the lightning tree.
There was going to come a day when we would lose the back forty to back taxes. There was going to come a day when someone was going to bulldoze the lightning tree and the rolling pasture around it and the little creek and put up, probably, a Walmart or an apartment complex. But I was trying to calm down, and I made myself do the deep breathing my therapist had taught me during the brief window of time when I could afford a therapist through the school’s counseling center, when they’d tried to offer me “bereavement support.” It had been kind of nice, to be honest. Someone whose whole job was just to listen to me bitch about the fact that my baby brother was dead and everyone was pretending it was an accident. Beat Grandma’s lectures on Attitude. Beat dumping on Adriana and making things worse for her. Beat trying to find friends in this Godforsaken town. Must be fun to have insurance all the time.
Breathe. Calm down. Let it go.
I’d taken Cody and Adriana on this walk about a million times. With Mom and my stepdad—Cody and Adriana’s dad—when he was alive. By myself after his motorcycle accident, to try to keep things kind of normal for them. I was sixteen when they were born and people were always mistaking me for their mother, partly because Mom had had me when she was nineteen and people just expected bad shit to happen to everyone in my family, partly because I was the one running around picking up diapers and Flintstones Chewables and Dr. Seuss books from the library a lot. Especially after the accident. If that hadn’t happened, Mom probably would have stayed clean and she probably wouldn’t have gone back to jail. People expected bad shit to happen to our family at least partly because bad shit did happen to us a lot.
It was only about a quarter of a mile out to the lightning tree, but it was over a rise and not visible from the house or the road. I could hang out there as long as I wanted, or until Adriana came home—she’d know where to look for me. But that was okay. She’d be hours yet.
It was called the lightning tree because it had been struck by lightning, years ago, when my stepdad was a kid. He’d seen it happen. It was one of the last live American Elms in the whole county, and he’d been playing underneath it when he heard thunder in the distance and headed for home. He was only a couple of yards away when lightning struck out of the clear sky. He’d said that he felt the air buzz on his skin as it happened, and his hearing never was exactly right again—you’d be talking right to him and suddenly he’d be paying attention to something else, a sound inside his ears. Maybe that was why he didn’t hear the fire engine and get out of the way in time.
When he told the story—Adriana and Cody used to beg to hear it over and over, that was why Adriana’d gotten a picture of the lightning tree as her memorial tattoo—he’d always shake his head and say “I was lucky I decided to head for home. I wouldn’t have thought lightning would strike there, with the trees on the rise so much taller.”
Now, standing under the tree, I looked back towards the rise and tried to measure in my mind. Most of the trees that were there when he was young were gone now, rotted and taken down by the weather. The lightning tree, dead, had outlived them all.
I heard a sharp crack and turned my attention up. There was a bird on the tree. Not the hawk that sometimes sat up there to scan the pasture, but something I’d never seen before. It was huge and mostly black and white, with a red crest. Judging by its bill and the sound it made when it hammered against the trunk again, it was a woodpecker. I’d just never seen a woodpecker that big.
It looked at me once, then went back to work. I wondered if it was something rare. It was certainly beautiful, and I felt like it was important not to disturb it. I lowered myself to the ground.
Maybe it was building a nest, I thought, and leaned back in the grass to watch it. The idea of a nest in the lightning tree pleased me. Maybe there would be baby birds to watch all summer.
The woodpecker made its way along the blackened scar that creased the trunk, pausing every few hops to drill at the bleached wood on either side. It wasn’t taking breaks, and it wasn’t getting paid either. It seemed to be on a mission, and on the brink of success. I could remember when I’d felt like that. Now I was just tired.
I woke up in the dusk. How the hell had that happened? I hadn’t felt sleepy. I’d been watching the woodpecker. It was gone now, though it had left a large dark hole where a low broken limb had once been.
I heard a voice, almost in my ear, say “Go home, now.”
I felt my skin prickle.
As I came over the rise, I saw that all the lights in the house were blazing. That meant that Grandma was having a freakout and had forgotten to worry about the electric bills. I started to run.
Grandma took a swing at me with Grandpa’s old cane as I shoved through the door, but I managed to catch it—she really wasn’t strong enough anymore to be a threat with a blunt object. She knew it on some level, too. She tri
ed to wrench the cane from my hand for another shot, but I gripped the worn wood and held on until I was able to make eye contact.
“Grandma. Grandma! Listen. It’s me, Katie. What’s going on?”
“They’re trying to get in the house.”
“Who are? Why?”
“They are, the sons of bitches.”
“They can’t get in while I’m here.” I let go of the cane, but kept my hand raised until she dropped it to the floor. “I won’t let them in. I’ve got it under control.”
“Do you now. Likely story.” It always marked the return of regular, sane Grandma when she started taking digs at me, so I was pleased. “They got Cody, what makes you think they won’t get you?”
I led her to the living room, flipping off lights along the way, and got her settled on the couch with a blanket.
It was only then that I realized what else was wrong with the picture. “Where’s Adriana?”
Grandma looked up. “You were supposed to watch her. You’re always supposed to watch her after school.”
Well, shit.
I glanced out the window—no sign of Adriana’s car, so she’d never come home. Checked my messages. Exhaled when I saw her name on a text, and then wished I hadn’t let myself relax.
Went 2 Fun Land. Back late or maybe 2morrw.
It was good that I’d slept when I did, because the rest of the night was going to be a washout on that front.
Why would she go there? Why would she tell me that she went there? It wasn’t that I wanted my baby sister to lie to me, but just like that, in a plain declarative sentence with no justifications? Back to the place where her twin brother died a few months ago? We’d agreed never to set foot there again, after a late-night discussion that had involved only enough whiskey to get the tears going, not enough to forget what we’d said.