—What did you do, Mr. Kindred?
—Well, I ripped the cross off the Archangel Michael's neck, and I pulled off the sword, and like a wild man I charged.
—You attacked a crowd of… sadistic vampire cultists?
—Cultists? Hell no, sir, these people was actual vampires. 'Cause when the shadow of the cross fell upon them, they started screaming. And scattering. And I was screaming, too, a pretty damn impressive scream for a kid, a scream like a banshee, and swinging that big old heavy sword like it was nothing more'n a letter opener. Shit, I scared the fuckers. I think. There was this big flapping noise. Dust everywhere. Swirling. Mist. Everything was whirling, and there was this roar, like a tornado or something. I don't think I actually hit anything with the sword. Everything was dissolving before I could smash bronze against flesh. I saw Jody on the ground there in front of the middle coffin. He was naked, and I swear to God he was half drained already. There was so much blood, just sluicing from a hundred cuts on him, pouring out onto the rocky floor. I knelt down and tried to lift him up, but he was heavy, there won't no give to him at all, it was like he was already dead. I was still all crazed and I shook him, I was all, Wake up, Jody, this is your buddy telling you, come out of it, you ain't dead yet. And then the weirdest thing of all happened. You know all that swirling mist I was talking about? Well, it seemed to gather up the coffins and the cave walls and even the sword-less St. Michael over there, and even the dirt beneath us, and it was all billowing about us and darkening, and the torches were blowing out one by one, and my friend was stirring a little, and I was all, Jody, don't die, don't die, don't die, when all at once the world seemed to melt around us… like a dissolve in a movie… and we were somewhere else. I smelled a fresh wind. Flowers. Old trees and rotting leaves. We were in the hills. The cemetery was way below us… and the moon was shining through the treetops. What happened? When I arrived at the cemetery, there'd been cars everywhere, pickups, Mustangs, a Mercedes, a police car… now I couldn't see a one in that parking lot… and the graveyard was deserted. Jody was still lying across my lap… still bleeding to death… or was he? In the bright moonlight I saw… the wounds closing up… the scratches fading… the blood sort of evaporating, melding into the night mist… I didn't understand. I knew it won't no dream. I knew it had to be real… but… Jody was moaning now. I was all, Wake up, wake up… and, slowly, he did.
—I see. And I awoke and found me here, on the cold hill's side.
—Yeah. I guess so.
—You saved your friend's life.
—Maybe, but he sure didn't thank me for it.
—No?
—Shit, no, sir. When he come to, it was just about twilight, and I'd been watching him, and I'd covered him with my own jacket, and I was trying my ass off to make him come back into the world… and when he finally opened his eyes, well, he didn't look like he was fixing to thank me at all. He looked at me with slitted eyes, and I saw hate. Pure, naked hate. I sure was shocked. I said, Jody, it's me, your best friend, Jer. They were gonna kill you in there. I don't know what happened, but I got you out… somehow. And he whispers to me, gasping for breath between every word, like he's struggling to keep from slipping back into darkness, Jer, I wanted it. That was my chance. I'm nobody in this world. I was about to be something. Let go of me, Jeremy, and don't come near me again. And he shook off my jacket… stood up… just as the first rays of sunlight were breaking over the gravestones below yonder… he stood up, naked as the day he was born, stood up and walked away from me. He was so frail and thin he was almost like a little kid. But here's the weird thing… the scars was all healed. There won't a scratch on that boy. The sun painted him a golden sort of color, and he didn't hardly seem human. And he walked away. Away from the coming light… into the thickest part of the wood… like he was afraid of the sun.
—Did you speak to him after that?
—Not really. I think he tried to go back to one of their cemetery parties… they usually had them on the full moon… but I know he never was able to get back inside that monument. That stone carving of the jaws of hell… well, stone was all it was to him. He had lost the key. I took it from him. I was stupid, I guess. I really didn't understand him after all. He fell in with other kids. Started a new "secret society" of some kind. A wanna-be vampire society. I heard about it mostly from—
—Your Honor, this is all hearsay now.
—Sustained.
—Your Honor, we have already heard evidence about young Jody Palmer's secret society… from all sorts of expert witnesses as well as from the ex-members themselves. I'm not seeking to add anything to the record on that matter from this witness. In fact, I'm going to excuse him now. Perhaps my opponents would care to cross?
—Yes, we would. Just a couple of questions, Jeremy Kindred. You're still under oath.
—Yes, ma'am.
—Isn't it true that no one has related any of these outlandish incidents… except you? I'm not referring merely to the supernatural events you claim to have seen inside one of the town's most famous landmarks… but to these very imaginative orgies you describe as having occurred regularly at the cemetery. If these things were true, don't you think others would have reported them to the authorities?
—Hell no, ma'am. Half the authorities were in them orgies.
—So it's a kind of… ah, conspiracy? Half the town involved in dark goings-on, and covering up the mess from the other half?
—You tell me, ma'am. After all, you were there, too.
—Well!
—Your Honor, the witness has just claimed that the state's prosecutor was present at those proceedings, in the light of which—
—Oh, nonsense, Counselor. The boy's a raving lunatic.
—Your Honor, comments like that would tend to throw some doubt on your own impartiality—
—Shut up, Counselor! I'm running a courtroom, not a voodoo stance. If the prosecution would care to continue the cross—
—Ah… no further questions.
—The witness may stand down.
—I would like to remind the defense that this evening's extraordinary timing was designed to let us hear from whoever is supposed to be inside that coffin of yours, and that we are now ten minutes past sundown. And no one has been banging on the lid from the inside. Is that particular bit of nonsense over with?
—I don't think so, sir. At this time I would like to ask the bailiff to remove the coffin lid and invite the next witness to the stand.
—All right. Bailiff?
—There's nothing inside of here, sir, except a headless cat. And a large quantity of garlic.
—That, Counsel, is in very poor taste.
—I don't know how that could have happened, Your Honor! Our resident vampirologist assured us that—
—Ew, Your Honor! It's stiff.
—Dispose of it, Bailiff. So what is the meaning of this, Counsel? Vampire hunters been calling, I suppose?
—I have no idea what's happened at all, Your Honor. We'll have the witness for you tomorrow, I promise.
—Don't make promises you can't keep, Counselor; I'm told that the dead are notoriously inept at keeping their appointments.
—Your Honor is pleased to joke at my expense.
—My Honor has had enough for the day, and we'll reconvene tomorrow morning at… let's say ten o'clock.
—Dr. Shimada, you're a vampirologist.
—Just an avocation, actually. My day job is psychiatric resident at the juvenile division of the state hospital for the criminally insane. My study of vampires, real and imagined, grew out of the ramblings of a patient I have in my private practice; I can't elucidate further without breaching confidentiality, of course.
—And you've studied the defendant at some length.
—Oh, yes. Fascinating boy. Very disturbed.
—The defendant is not, however, in your professional opinion, a vampire.
—No.
—Nor any other supernatural creature.
> —Well, I would take issue with the choice of "supernatural," sir, since, as a scientist, I would prefer a rational explanation for any phenomenon, however supernatural-seeming. But no, Mr. Palmer is by no means undead. He is quite, quite human. He's just like you and me.
—Except that he hasn't talked since… the events that have brought us all here for this trial.
—That is almost true. I was starting to make some progress with that. I think he needs a few more months before he'll actually… be able to say anything to shed light upon this case.
—You were making progress?
—He grunts now, sometimes. I even detected a whimper once. And one time, on my way out, in the doorway, I heard a distinct, if sotto voce, utterance of the phrase, "Fuck off."
—I see. Will he ever talk?
—Everything he wants to say is caged up inside him. It only needs… a key. I've been considering the possibility of circumventing the lengthy period of therapy and just jumping to pentothal.
—Sodium pentothal? The old "truth serum," that cliché of fifties B-grade detective thrillers?
—The very same.
—How many sessions did you have with the defendant?
—I've seen him twice a week since the arrest.
—In your opinion, is the defendant insane?
—I think that would be obvious even to a layman.
—Was he insane at the time of the crime?
—Clearly he was unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the multiple murders.
—What is the nature of the defendant's mental illness?
—In Freudian terms, his superego, the inner voice we often think of as our "conscience," weak to start off with from inadequate childhood reinforcement, has disappeared entirely. It has been replaced by what he perceives as supernatural "beings," creatures who control him. He has experienced a transference of the normal youthful libido… the sex urge… in the direction of violence and bloodshed. The weakening of the superego causes him to be unable to control his beast within, his id. That, of course, is the basic reason for all crime, but in his case the weakening of the ego is clearly at a pathological level.
—I see, Dr. Shimada. I'd like to move that Dr. Shimada's entire report… some two thousand three hundred ten pages of it… be admitted to the record as Exhibit, ah…
—Defense Exhibit QQ.
—Yes. Defense Exhibit QQ.
—I hope you're not expecting our benighted jurors to make head or tail of it, Counselor. Even the last few minutes have been a little, ah, dry.
—Dr. Shimada's learned testimony merely adds to that of seven other psychiatrists, Your Honor, who have all agreed that the defendant is hopelessly, irretrievably insane.
—Quite so.
—Dr. Shimada, if you would state again, in simple layman's terms, the defendant's state of mind before, during, and after the crimes were committed?
—In layman's terms, Jody Palmer was stark, staring bonkers, Counselor.
—No further questions.
—Cross?
—Well, yes, I do have a couple of quick questions. Dr. Shimada, in this two-thousand-page document which, I admit, I haven't read, although my researchers have combed through it pretty thoroughly… do you not basically say that the defendant had no conscience?
—I suppose you could put it that way.
—Well, well, well. No conscience. And for that, we're gonna let him off after he mutilated his parents, disemboweled his sister, devoured his two-year-old brother's liver, and led a gang of hooligans on a rampage that culminated in several more people becoming… unwilling blood donors… not to mention… necrophilia.
—Your Honor, the prosecution's grandstanding.
—Sustained. Just ask the questions.
—Right. Well, I really have just one more question. You say the defendant has retreated behind a wall of silence.
—Yes. It's called hysterical mutism. It's one of the ultimate defense mechanisms of the paranoid schizophrenic.
—So you compiled a two-thousand-page report about this patient… without exchanging a single bit of dialogue with him?
—As I spoke to him, I monitored his vital signs, his brain waves, the surface electrical activity of his skin.
—But he didn't actually tell you any of this.
—Scientists can read a great deal from—
—He didn't actually tell you. Answer the question, please.
—Ah… no.
—No further questions.
—Natalie McConnell, you've been given immunity because you appear not to have participated in the actual killing. But you saw everything, and your insight into the defendant's state of mind is vital to the court's understanding of his motives.
—Yes, sir.
—Are you currently enrolled in Kramer High?
—No, sir. I dropped out. I had to go to work in my dad's doughnut store.
—So you never knew the defendant until a few months before the incident.
—Yes, sir. I met him at Cat Sperling's funeral.
—You knew Cat Sperling, then.
—Oh, sure, sir. Everyone did. She was the town slut.
—How did you come to be aware of that?
—My daddy always said that if I behaved anything like her, he'd whup my butt till it was bloody.
—What kind of behavior constituted "behaving like Cat Sperling"?
—Um… too much lipstick… wearing leather… standing a certain way… talking in a sexy voice…
—Your father ever carry out his threat?
—Shit, yeah. He wore me out all the time. When he wasn't making me go down on him.
…
—Order in the court! Order! Order! Counselor, tell the witness to stay on the topic.
—Your Honor, the fact that the witness was one of the disenfranchised, the violated members of society… is not entirely irrelevant to this defense… although I did not intend to have the matter raised quite this abruptly.
—That's enough. The jury will ignore the witness's life story, and concentrate only on those facts she raises that bear on this case. Meanwhile, I'd like the bailiff to make a note of the girl's remarks and pass them on to the district attorney; we are state employees here, and there are mandatory reporting laws.
—Well, Judge, if you're gonna turn in my dad, you might as well turn in the pastor of Hillside Baptist Church as well. And the vice principal of Kramer High—he got me in the closet one day. Oh, and—
—Miss McConnell, enough of that. When your testimony is through, you are to report to Detective… ah… who's on duty out there?… Detective Arnold. He'll take it from there. Meanwhile, if the court would care to turn its attention back to the case… Counsel? Counsel?
—Oh. Yes, Your Honor. So, despite Cat Sperling's reputation, you went to her funeral?
—Yeah. Her dad had ordered ten dozen doughnuts, you see, for afterwards, and I stopped by to get directions to the house. And that's when I saw Jody… the defendant. He was standing in the distance… in the shade of an oak tree. He was all in black. Trench coat and all. He looked lonely. Not like he was really invited. He was staring at all the relatives, at the coffin, at everything. With a kind of longing in his eyes. The guy seemed so sad. I wanted to talk to him. So I did.
—What did you converse about?
—Well, at first, I was all, like, questions, how did she die and such. And he said, Anemia. Which wasn't what I heard, I'd heard it was from something to do with sex, AIDS or such. It didn't matter nohow, 'cause she was gone no matter how you looked at it. I got him to give me directions to the Sperling place, and then he got to staring at me in a way I never been stared at before. Like he could see right into my mind. And he said to me, Are you afraid of the dark? And I said, Yeah. And he said, Very afraid? And I said, Yeah. And he said, Why? And I said, Because things come to me in the night. And he said, I can take that fear away forever. I can take you on a journey with me. Across the river of death. To the fart
hest shore. To the kingdom of ultimate darkness. I look into your eyes and I see you're like me, you don't got nothing to lose. I said, You sure are right about that. He said, I'm gathering a group of people to take with me on this journey. It's a quest, you see. Like searching for the Holy Grail. The cup of blood. I just know you want to come with me, Natalie. I can see it in your eyes. One time, I met these creatures from a place beyond our world. They called out to me. But I stayed behind. I had work left to do in the world. I wanted to go, but I thought of all the dispossessed of the world, all the young ones crying out for release, and I knew I had to bring a few with me in order to be worthy of my place among the dark ones.
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