by K W Taylor
“My grandfather.”
“Quite.” He looks her up and down, devouring, possessing, slowing down on her curves. Most of her is a straight one-line highway, but it bends here and there abruptly and dangerously.
“You seem to have been drinking, Mr. Blandovend.”
“No, not me!” He gasps, mock-scandalized. “Oh, dear girl, promise not to tell!” He lays a skinny index finger against his lips, then hers. “Shh!”
She nods, and can’t help but smile shyly.
They begin to walk. “What brings you to all this glory?” he asks, gesturing about him at the empty streets.
“Passing through. I had a job in Chicago, and my flight had a layover here.” Lying gets easier around him, she notices.
“Poor you.”
She shrugs. “Not so bad, except I don’t know where to stay tonight. Back to the city isn’t until the morning.”
He pushes her from the sidewalk briskly to a building, against which he pins her, crushing her, kissing her, giving her a place to stay tonight. This was too easy.
She feels herself diminish just a little.
It’s morning. Or afternoon. Rebecca is blinking awake against grey, pre-winter light. She groans, trying to rub her face into consciousness, but her hands fall limp against the pillow. Her mouth opens and closes feebly. She is even paler and thinner than usual, with hollow shadows on sunken cheeks, dark circles under sad, frantic eyes.
Evan strolls into the bedroom fresh from the shower. He is whistling, sober and robust, muscular, taut, and nude. He rubs himself with a thick white towel, and slides into the bed next to Rebecca.
“Don’t worry.” He drops a kiss on the top of her head. “You’ll feel more like yourself by evening. Just sleep.”
“What—?” Her voice is a whisper, but sounds like a scream inside her head. “What happened to me?”
“It’s all right. I won’t leave until you feel better.”
When her eyes open again, this time greeting darkness, he is gone. He was right that she would feel more like herself, though. She is able now to get out of bed, pull her clothes on, and leave the room.
At the front desk. “I’m sorry, Mr. Blandovend checked out at noon.” Rebecca has money, she’s not in a desperate situation, and she has a few days off. But not to know, not to remember or to understand...
Within hours she is back on a flight home. An obnoxious father-figure in the seat next to her recognizes her from a magazine. He is visibly greasy. “You’re so pretty,” he tells her. “I have a picture of you taped up in my—”
“Thank you,” she interrupts. “That’s very nice.” She buries herself in a book, but he will not be ignored.
“You read?”
She looks at him with narrowed eyes. “Yeah, I read. And my lips don’t even move.”
She is listless. She flits and wanders and sleeps and frets. Tate leaves messages on her machine. She doesn’t return the calls. She sits in the window seat and sketches pictures of Evan. When she can stand it no more, she goes to his lair.
Plush building of glass. Everyone scurries and hurries. She doesn’t have an appointment, so she circumvents the reception area. The top floor is his private studio. A door is left carelessly unlocked, but the space is crowded. Assistants, technicians, models, designers, artists. Evan is nowhere. As she has before when seeking him, she blends herself into the background and waits for him to appear. Waits for him to be alone.
“What did you do to me?”
“Oh, darling, let’s not be indelicate.” He laughs deeply.
“Be indelicate.” She does not laugh.
He steps closer. Whispers the indelicacies in her ear. She pushes him away roughly.
“Yes, I know all that. But why did I feel like I couldn’t even move?”
“Well, I don’t like to brag, darling, but you’re not the first female I’ve worn out.”
Her eyes narrow. Her nostrils flare. “There is more to this.”
He shrugs a shoulder nonchalantly, starts to walk away. “Perhaps there is, perhaps there isn’t.”
She takes his arm, stops him. Suddenly she’s no longer angry, merely desperate.
“I can understand, Evan. Let me join you.”
His eyes cloud over, and his swagger is gone. “It’s lonely, little one. You wouldn’t like it.”
She knows intellectually that this should surprise her, and yet it does not. “That’s what all this is,” she says flatly. “Hiding in plain sight.”
The mask is gone. His voice is deeper when he speaks again, and all the colors of his face and body are in sharper contrast to one another.
“You are unhappy, little one,” he tells her. “If you join me, that will only make it worse.”
“Then why don’t you end it?”
“I’m a coward,” he says, lifting an arm and gesturing vaguely. “This is what I understand, and so I keep at it. If I were brave, the thought of what’s next wouldn’t terrify me.”
Staring at the ceiling, her heart pounding. She can’t tell if the words she just said are in her own head or if she actually speaks them aloud.
“Did you keep your dream journal this week?”
Must have been in her own head. “Yes,” she replies. She speaks of Evan as if he were in her dream.
“Blood represents the life force. Do you feel as if others drain your energy?”
She rolls her eyes. This hour is costing her half a catalog shoot salary and it is doing no good.
“I met a vampire.” This time, it’s definitely out loud.
“In your line of work, that’s not a surprise.” Scratches from a pen onto paper. “Have you considered...”
The voice goes on but she doesn’t hear it.
On her way out, she studies the glass doors of the office. She’s seen her face here a hundred times coming to and from this useless spill of feelings.
This time, she casts no reflection.
The Storytellers
Brad wiped down the counter and surveyed the room, shadowy but for a few shafts of late-afternoon sunlight streaming from the front windows. The walls of the small club were dove grey, a comforting color but about as bland as the patrons who’d arrived right as he’d opened.
Six men sat sipping dark beers from pilsner glasses. Each had a sheaf of paper in his hands. Other than these six men with their six beers and six stacks of papers, there was only one other group of patrons.
This other group was half the size of the first, all female, and while the men shuffled dead trees and frowned into their beers, the women laughed, gestured, and drank. Each woman held a different beverage: the blonde a martini, the brunette a white wine, and the redhead a mixed drink of mysterious derivation, all dark liquor and pearl onions speared onto a toothpick. Brad knew the redhead and had seen the others before.
The more the women laughed—and, oh, they did laugh, around tipsily-slurred phrases like “intersectionality” and “wage gap” and “pedagogical integrity”—the more the men frowned, brows creasing into unfashionable spectacle frames. The edges of their papers became damp and creased as fists clenched.
Laughter. Footsteps. A cough.
“Excuse me, could you keep it down?”
Brad looked over at this collision of worlds. His mouth fell open. What would happen? Would he have to intervene? He glanced at the back door—by the this time, Maya’s denim-clad frame should have been sweeping through, carting her PA system and lighting rig. But no, the door was propped open but the only person lingering in the last bits of sunlight on the back patio were stylists from the salon next door on the their smoke break.
Brad knew Maya would get a kick out of this, whatever this was, whatever bad idea this invading Requester of Silence had brewing, and he wished he could grab her by the elbow and share conspiratorial whispers with her.
The women’s laughter died at the man’s words, and three pairs of eyes widened at each other. The blonde—seeming to be the bravest of them all—barked out a dumbfounded “What?�
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“We’re a writing group,” the man explained. His jaunt to this side of the bar reduced his group from six to five, and this subtraction left the others looking bereft, their own quiet conversation halted. “We’re having a meeting.”
The blonde found her laughter again; not dead after all but merely sleeping. “Okay, but this is a public place, so I don’t really see why you’re—”
“May we buy your next round?” the man interrupted. “To make up for it?” He glanced over to Brad, who began furiously straightening menus on the counter to avoid looking like he’d been eavesdropping.
Two of the women sported gold on delicate left hands, and these two now exchanged a glance, the redhead arching an eyebrow. The brunette rolled her eyes and turned to the blonde. “I gotta go anyway. I need to video chat with the twins before dinner.”
The sixth man was nearly shaking now, fingers gesturing toward Brad. “But it’s no trouble.”
“It’s okay,” the redhead snapped. She glared at the man until he finally nodded and rejoined his five brethren, and then she locked eyes with Brad for an instant.
The corner of Brad’s mouth lifted, and the redhead returned this tiny hint of a smile.
The women scattered after hugs and waves, off to lofts and trendy cars. Later, Brad suspected, the women would have conversations that began with “You would not believe what just happened to us at the bar.”
Brad knew the redhead well enough to know she would be changed by these strange moments. He patted his jeans pocket to make sure his phone was there.
Long after the women’s departure, the men continued to frown into their dark beers, streak more palm sweat across their papers, and murmur in hushed tones. Phrases like “point of view” and “meter” and “consistent verb tense” rumbled up from their table with a kind of joyless monotone. It could have been one man or it could have been twelve, their voices were that indistinct and indistinguishable.
Fifteen minutes passed, the bar began to fill up, and Brad poured reds and whites and martinis, but no more beers. He finally felt a vibration in his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“I’m writing a story about this,” the text message read. “I’ll show it to you guys tomorrow.”
The redhead. His writing professor, the novelist. Brad chuckled and slid his phone back into his pocket.
As the light changed from dusk to night, as Maya arrived, unpacking lights and sound to sprinkle across the growing young crowd—younger and younger, making the men seem older and older— the men each took a final quaff of beer. Brad longed to cross the floor to flirt with Maya, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the writing group.
These men, insular and ancient, not realizing the difference between story and life, not distinguishing inspiration from interruption, demanded his attention. Brad watched, rapt, as the men nodded to one another, and vanished, spirits on the winds of moldering time.
The music roared into the night, and twelve hours later Brad listened to a story.
Trichotomy
The triplets were already so different, even at ten. The youngest was lost, his eyes slightly unfocused, his hair messier than his brothers’. The middle brother was gentle yet forceful, always the athletic one, the one who would catch the eye of the girls on the playground without effort. And the eldest was the protector, dependably there to run off bullies and keep his siblings from knocking over each other’s castles in the sandbox.
Their mother gazed at them from across the playground, sitting with her feet tucked under her, a book left unread on her lap. There was something more than coffee in her paper cup, and she sipped absently at it while blinking the summer sunshine away. The more liquid she imbibed, the more unfocused her gaze became.
Across the playground, another boy stood, half in shadow, watching the polo shirt-clad trio gamble and laugh and push each other on the swings. White-blond heads reflected glittery light, making their hair glow like halos. But the other boy, dismissed and ignored by the triplets, did not share their mother’s hazy love for their angelic beauty. He was dark-haired, already sprouting fuzz from his arms, too, and perpetually scowl-faced.
I’ll show you, he thought, watching blond heads bounce in and out of his field of vision as they took turns on the see-saw.
I’ll show you all.
Madge’s smile was slow and seldom reached her eyes or even caused her lips to part. She had the same faraway, languid look she usually had, which Stewart suspected was due to a combination of barbiturates and multiple white wine spritzers.
“I’m so proud of you, all of you,” she said, dusting imaginary fluff from the lapels of Stewart’s tuxedo jacket.
“Thank you, Mother.” Stewart sometimes felt like crying at the sound of his mother’s slurred speech, but he never brought it up, never told her she might be overdoing it with the pills, the booze. It wasn’t his place. His role was to be perfect, placid, and for God’s sake never disturb the calm of the house.
There was a knock at the door. A young man entered. He had the same flaxen hair as Stewart, but he was wider, more solid, not the spindly, awkward assemblage of elbows and knees Stewart was. His hair was also shorter, slicked down, much tidier than Stewart’s unruly mop. “You ready, little bro?” the other man asked.
Stewart rolled his eyes. “Stop calling me ‘little bro,’” Stewart admonished. “Walter, I’m the youngest by ten minutes,” he said. “That’s hardly the decades you make it seem.”
“Besides,” added another tall, sandy-haired boy, sauntering in after Walter, “you’re both younger than me.” This third brother sported wire-rimmed spectacles and biceps looking ready to bulge through his tuxedo jacket.
“Than I,” Madge corrected.
Stewart cringed. Actually, “me” can be correct, he thought, depending on whether the verb is implied or you’re using the pronoun as a direct object. But he stayed silent on this, just as he did everything when it came to their mother. She could drink, she could self-medicate, she could even be wrong, but no one could say anything.
“But Bradley, you’re the dull one,” Walter said. “I’m the fun one, Stewart’s the screw up, and so who cares if you’re oldest if you’re so boring?”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Stewart said. “Since when am I the screw up?”
Madge looked clear-eyed long enough to give Stewart a stern glare. “Darling, you’re not a screw up,” she said, though her tone was cold. “You’ve always resolved your mistakes.”
So I do make them, he thought. Swell.
“Look, boys, don’t quibble!” she said, suddenly pasting the serene smile back into place and holding out her arms to her sons. “I really am proud of you, all of you. I want you to go out there and enjoy your graduation party.” She gave each son a hug in turn. “After tonight, you’ll be out in the world, and I won’t be able to protect you.”
She clung to Stewart last, a little longer than the others. “You did well to cut Mr. Mordona out of your life, son,” she said as she released him. “He was an opportunist. He would have destroyed you.”
Stewart felt panic rise in his heart. “Mom,” he said, his voice low. He glanced over his shoulder. His brothers were already exiting the den, joining the rest of the guests in the parlor for their shared graduation party. “Mom, I thought we weren’t—”
“Oh, please, they ought to know,” she interrupted. She passed him and headed for the door after Walter and Bradley. “For God’s sake, darling, we should warn them, don’t you think?”
Louis Mordona wasn’t invited to the party, but that didn’t prevent him from attending. He sipped a strawberry-infused champagne from a flute costing more than he made in a year, wore a tuxedo with the tags still attached and tucked up inside the jacket sleeve, and had three credit cards in his wallet bearing names other than his own. In the garden, Mordona knew Stewart and Madge wouldn’t be able to spot him, but maybe if he could catch one of the others’ attention ...if only the Verrat triplets weren’t so bloody hard
to tell apart.
But then there was Stewart, his hair more mussed than the other Nordic youths, and Mordona smiled in spite of himself.
A night six months earlier unspooled in Mordona’s memory. A broken-down car by the side of the road, a thunderstorm, and a good Samaritan. Mordona had gone so far as to stab himself—carefully—to give the charade some much-needed verisimilitude.
He’d run up and down the highway, his shirt soaked and clinging to his skin. Many cars stopped, but it was Stewart Verrat’s he sought, partly for its tax bracket...
...and partly to settle an old score.
“Are you okay?”
“No, I had a flat and this guy came and—Oh, my God, I’m bleeding all over! Please help me!”
Mordona’s blood streaked his palm as he held it out to Stewart, who threw arms around Mordana’s shoulders and steered him back to his car. As soon as Stewart popped his golden head in the driver’s side window, Mordana was torn. Con or...something else? Did he want the guy’s money? Did he want to ruin him, the way he’d fantasized for years? Or did he want...well, who said he had to choose?
A careful friendship. Weekend getaways where Stewart brought a series of bland young women along but somehow always wound up alone at midnight in a room with just Mordana. Alcohol was important, because with enough imbibing Stewart was less interested in the sleeping girl in his bed than he was in Mordana’s mouth and hands and whispered promises. If sometimes Stewart’s wallet was lighter than he thought it should be when he went home, he chalked it up to forgotten pizza orders or how they split a particular check. Surely that nice new friend of his would never. No, there was that tip to the porter he forgot or the room service—that was it.
Cadging cash from Stewart’s wallet was soon no longer enough. The investment opportunity that fell apart was inexpertly crafted. It only took Stewart a month to put two and two together, and now Mordana was stuck on the outside looking in.
But tonight, Mordana knew, tonight was different. He smirked, the full moon reflected in his eyes. Tonight he would infect the family, pass on the curse. Tonight he would have his revenge for the sad-eyed little boy he’d been all those years ago, he’d have revenge for the loss of his meal ticket, too.