Tales from the Haunted Mansion, Volume II

by John Esposito (retail) (epub)

  “Maybe nowadays. But the world was a superstitious place back then. The big takeaway from all this is that we’re related to a count, an actual count.” Ernie clapped his hands in amazement. “Imagine. Us, of all people!”

  His father dropped his fork. “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Us, of all people’?”

  “Well, I’m just saying. You’re a plumber, Mom works in a cubicle. We don’t exactly live in a castle.”

  That did it. His father slammed his fists on the table, and Ernie could have sworn he saw actual steam coming out of his ears. “Sounds to me like you’re ashamed of us!” Ernie didn’t even hear his father. He was still lost in thoughts of his infamous lineage.

  “Did you know that our name isn’t Looper? It’s Lupescu. Our real name’s Lupescu.”

  Seeing the anger in her husband’s eyes, Ernie’s mother ended the conversation. “Excuse me, Your Royal Highness, but that’s enough. Clear the table, then start working on your homework.”

  His sister looked up from her phone, a borderline miracle. “Smooth.”

  Ernie cleared the table and excused himself to his room, where his project was waiting. As he put the finishing touches on his topographical map of Romania, he remembered where he’d seen the family crest before. It was on an old crate in the attic that his father said was filled with junk. Was it possible that the dullest family in America kept a secret hidden in the attic? Ernie decided to find out.

  It was a few minutes after lights-out when he tiptoed into the hall, pulled down a retractable ladder from the ceiling, and climbed into the attic. The Looper attic, like most, was loaded with unnecessary keepsakes: old records, old magazines, old games. Old corpses. (Sorry, wrong attic.) Ernie crawled along creaky floorboards, passing holiday decorations, until he came upon the wooden crate, exactly where he remembered it to be. It was bound with steel chains and secured by a medieval-looking lock, the kind you might use to keep a particularly unpleasant something from getting out. The Lupescu crest was emblazoned on top.

  Ernie gave the lock a jiggle. Hey, you don’t know if you don’t try, he thought. No good. Luckily, he found a rusty crowbar mixed in with some tools. He inserted the flat end into the lock and, with a good heave, broke it in two, releasing the chains.

  Ah, the moment of truth. Ernie wedged the bar in the seal and pried open the crate. Whoosh! The stench was rancid. And being a plumber’s son, Ernie was well acquainted with rancidness. But this smell was singularly different. He’d never been around a dead body before, yet somehow Ernie knew: the crate smelled like death.

  He continued to raise the lid, which creaked like it was supposed to. He was expecting old photo albums or, at best, an electric train set. But who locks up their toy trains and old photos with a chain? As far as he could tell, the crate contained nothing of value. Just some outdated evening wear—a suit and a cloak—along with a smattering of gray dust at the bottom. But then he saw something else mixed in with the dust. At first, Ernie thought it was a twig. He examined it, deciding it looked more like a rib. He poked at the tip. “Ow!” A red bead swelled from his fingertip, and before he could do what came naturally, which was to suckle it, several blood drops landed in the crate.

  On the dust.

  Ernie fled the attic in a hurry, squeezing his bleeding finger as he made a mad dash for the second-floor bathroom. He was looking for the first aid kit when a solid four knocks at the door interrupted. “You okay in there?” It was his mother.

  “Fine, Mom. I’m just, you know, going to the bathroom.”

  “Ernie, there’s blood in the hallway. What’s going on? Open this door!” Thud! Thud! Thud! Thud! Fearing the next four thuds might wake up his dad, Ernie opened the door, and in rushed his mom. “What on earth happened?”

  “Nothing. It’s not serious. Just a paper cut.”

  She took a gander at the wound. “That must have been some piece of paper.” A crimson trail was oozing down the side of his finger.

  “I’ll put some peroxide—”

  “No!” she protested. “Peroxide retards the healing process.” She took hold of Ernie’s protracted finger, bringing it to her lips. “An old Transylvanian cure passed down from Grandpa Looper,” she said before sucking away the excess.

  Ernie felt queasy. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots. His mother had a taste for the red stuff. But she wasn’t a member of the undead. She couldn’t be. For starters, she liked extra garlic on her pizza. And she didn’t sleep in a coffin. She slept on her half of a queen-size bed. A pain in the neck, maybe, but a vampire she was not.

  She tended to his finger. “Now go to bed.” But as she leaned in for a kiss good night, Ernie backed away. “I vant to suck your blood,” she said in her best Bela Lugosi accent. “What? You thought I was a vampire?”

  “N-no.” A nervous chuckle followed. Not you, he thought. But what about Dad?

  She kissed his forehead. “Tomorrow’s a school day. Make like a bat and fly off to bed.”

  Ernie did as instructed, going straight to bed. But sleep didn’t come anytime soon. His finger was still throbbing, the blood acting as a transmitter, though he didn’t know it. Something was happening in the attic. Ernie could sense it. Should he go up and see? For our story’s sake, yes, definitely! But Ernie wasn’t reading this story; he was living it. So he wisely chose to stay in bed.

  But we’ll go up and check it out for him.

  Within the eldritch crate, the gray dust had been nurtured by Ernie’s blood and was already hardening, reconstituting into bones. Within minutes, a full-sized skeleton had formed. Muscles grew, adhering to bone. Veins and arteries found their way to a tumorous beating muscle inside the chest. Thump-thump, thump-thump. A wormlike organism slithered into an empty cranium, evolving into a brain. Liquefied skin moved deliberately across the limbs, like a candle burning backward. Eyes took root inside the hollow sockets. The same searing eyes from the painting.

  A living, breathing entity was now lying in the crate, taking in small sips of air. It did not know where it was or what century it had woken up to. All it understood was the hunger it felt. The unquenchable thirst. It needed sustenance to survive.

  It needed human blood.

  —

  A thunk from the attic shook Ernie out of a sound sleep. He sat up quickly, taking his own pulse, relieved to know he was still alive. Again, the best course of action was to stay in bed.

  “Aahhooooooo!”

  He heard that. A mournful howl, like that of a wolf. Maybe it was Buttons, the dog from next door.

  “Aahhoooo-aahhooooooo!”

  Ernie climbed out of bed, went straight to his window, and checked the neighbor’s yard. Buttons wasn’t outside; she was in the window across from his bedroom, not howling, not barking. The dog was trembling. Staring at the top of Ernie’s house. He smushed his face against the glass. What did she see? He opened his window and stuck his head outside. Wet flurries hit the back of his neck. Maybe Buttons was intrigued by the first snow of the season. No, it was something more. He twisted his head, looking straight up the wall. What Ernie saw defied all rational thought.

  The figure of a man had slithered out of the attic vent and was crawling, headfirst, down the side of the house, his hands clinging to the green siding like claws, a black cape unfurling behind him like the wings of a giant bat.

  Ernie yanked his head inside and slammed down the window, as if that would help. He could never unsee what he had just seen, and he was already anticipating a lifetime of nightmares. His first thought was to warn his family. He raced to his door and swung it open to find a figure standing in the hall. It was his father.

  “Why are you up?” Ernie’s father asked.

  Again, Ernie checked his pulse. Still alive. “I saw something!”

  “Calm down.”

  “No! You don’t understand. I saw a man climb down the side of the house. He had hands like a lizard. And wings like a bat!”

  “You were dreaming.”

&nbs
p; “No, I wasn’t!”

  “Yes, you were. It was all a bad dream, honey,” said Ernie’s mom, joining them outside his room. She moved between them, placing an arm around Ernie’s shoulder, and walked him back to bed, leaving her husband standing in the hallway.

  A few minutes after settling under the covers, Ernie decided she was right. (Don’t tell your mother, but moms usually are.) It must have been a dream. How could it not have been? Ernie closed his eyes, taking another shot at sleep. The church bells had begun to chime from Town Square, and as the first snow fell past his window, Ernie entered that state between dreams and reality, thinking about International Day. About Romania. About Transylvania. About the first snow of the season. And about the thing—the vampire—that had crawled down the side of his house, like a bat crawling down the side of a cave. And with this impending horror now loose in the night, Ernie knew that his life would never be the same again….

  A veil of darkness made its way across Town Square. Flurries had graduated to flakes, and the sidewalk was carpeted in white, untouched by foot-steps, human or otherwise. It was late. The church at the far end of the street confirmed it, its Gothic chimes announcing midnight. Chelsea Browning’s shift had come to an end. She bid her manager good night and exited the twenty-four-hour convenience store, greeting the snow with a smile. Not so long ago, she would have been hoping for a snow day. But Chelsea was no longer a schoolgirl. These days, the snow represented runny noses and hazardous road conditions.

  She raised her woolen scarf above her ears and began her nightly walk. Her car was parked farther away than usual. After hearing the weather report, Chelsea had moved it under a trestle during her ten o’clock break.

  Smart move. Less snow to clear.

  Her boots were the first to penetrate the new snow, scrunch-scrunch-scrunch. She was the sole person in the square, which was not unusual, considering the hour. It was, by all accounts, a safe area. But lately Chelsea had gotten to thinking: it only took one thing—a single, solitary horrible something—to turn a good area into one that’s forever bad.

  Tonight was the night for that one thing.

  A dark figure was standing in the middle of the road. He hadn’t been there a second before, and he’d appeared to come out of nowhere. Chelsea turned away to avoid staring. But the one glimpse she’d managed to get tripled her heart rate, and her breath appeared as intermittent puffs of smoke in the night air.

  The stranger had no visible breath.

  And there was another detail, one she might have missed had her senses not been telling her to be on guard.

  The surrounding snow was untouched, without a solitary footstep, as if the stranger had been set down from above.

  Chelsea shuddered. She had to keep moving. Have her keys ready. Get to her car, lock all doors!

  Don’t make it look like you’re running, she thought. The trestle was just ahead, its cave-like entrance drooling large icicles. She could see her car, bathed in shadows. Almost there.

  A quick glance back.

  The stranger remained inert, the surrounding snow undisturbed.

  And yet he was closer.

  Chelsea began to run, no longer concerned about what the stranger might think. She had never known true danger. Had never tasted genuine fear. The next day, she might laugh it off. But on that night, it was something to scream about.

  She slid across the icy pavement, making it under the trestle. She disengaged the locks, the alarm chirping, her car a stone’s throw away. And as she reached for the door handle…a large shadow passed over her from above. She craned her neck to see. What was it?

  “Do not be afraid,” came an accented voice from behind her.

  Chelsea spun around. The stranger before her was dressed all in black, not a splotch of color on his person. She could see his face now. He was a middle-aged man, with strong aquiline features. His hair, jet-black, was swept back, and came to a point in the center of his brow, forming a prominent widow’s peak. His eyebrows were bushy black caterpillars; his complexion a ghostly blue pallor.

  Chelsea managed to squeak out, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  The stranger extended his hand as an old-school gentleman would, unveiling the inner lining of his cape, as red as fresh blood. He smiled, and Chelsea could see two sharp canines protruding from his upper lip. “You need not fear me,” he said as he glided her way. “I am a friend.”

  His eyes—the ones from the painting—penetrated hers. Chelsea teetered back and forth, ensnared by his hypnotic glare, a power he had perfected five-hundred years before she was born. She was now his puppet, and would prove her obedience by removing her scarf. The stranger outstretched his arms, his cape unfurling into wings. “You must feed me, Chelsea. If you don’t, I will perish.”

  “But…I have no food.”

  The stranger cupped the back of her neck, holding Chelsea’s head firmly in place. “You are my food.” He surveyed her throat and located her jugular vein. How many years had it been since he had feasted? The stranger did not know. Nor did he care. It was neither good nor evil that dictated his diabolical desires. It was a thirst. A hunger, unendurable. “I need to feed,” he said, and bit down, his razor-like canines puncturing flesh like the skin of an apple, Chelsea’s heart pumping as he feasted, sending blood back up to the jugular…as the stranger satisfied his unearthly appetite.

  Ernie shuffled into the kitchen, a latecomer to the breakfast table. From the window he could see about three inches of snow covering the back porch. He checked his phone, hoping for a snow day. Three inches? Gimme a break, he thought. On TV, the morning news was already reporting the brutal attack in town. The victim, a convenience store clerk, was receiving a transfusion at Saint Joe’s Medical Center. A doctor with a thick foreign accent called her condition hypovolemic shock, caused by substantial blood loss. Vampires love when doctors explain away their eating habits in clinical terms. Ernie’s mother switched off the set. “Hey, I was watching that!” he said.

  “Not while we’re eating, you’re not.”

  His father lowered his coffee mug. “Hate to break it to you, bud, but school’s open for business. Scarf down breakfast and get a move on. Chop-chop!”

  But for some bizarre reason, Ernie had lost his appetite.

  A banner featuring that year’s International Day theme, “It’s a Small World,” hung from the gymnasium bleachers. You can add the “after all” part if you’d like. You know you want to. But the talk was all about Chelsea Browning. “I heard her eyes were sucked out of her head,” was the gossip coming from the Italian booth. “Not true,” chimed in someone from Poland. “They found her heart in the snow. Still beating!”

  But the only one with an actual clue was the girl in the wooden shoes. “It was a vampire,” declared Vicky van Sloan, receiving chuckles from the surrounding booths—except for Romania. Ernie wasn’t laughing. And when Vicky took a five-minute break, he took one, too, following her across the gym.

  “Hey, Vic.”

  “Ernie Looper. How’s life?”

  “It’s a living.”

  She liked that one, so she smiled. “I’m heading over to the Greek booth. I hear the baklava’s to die for.”

  “Baklava? What’s that?”

  “It’s dessert. You’ll thank me later.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t Don Juan, or even Johnny Depp, but Ernie knew an invitation from a girl when he heard one. So he joined her in “Greece,” pretending to enjoy the foreign pastry. But baklava was the last thing on Ernie’s mind. He waited for the right moment before broaching the subject. “That thing you said back there…”

  “What did I say back there?”

  “About the girl. You said she was attacked by a vampire.”

  “You heard correctly. My opa—it’s what I call my grandfather—he works at the hospital. He was there when the paramedics brought her in. She had two puncture wounds on her neck. Very little blood. That’s Vampires 101.”

  “But…vampires don’t exi
st. I mean, not really.”

  “Aha! That’s their greatest strength. Nonbelievers like you, Ernie Looper, going around spreading their propaganda. Vampires love that.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s crazy.” He laughed nervously.

  Vicky put the brakes on. “My grandfather isn’t crazy! He’s the sanest person I know. He dedicated his whole life to the study of such things.”

  “What such things?”

  “The things adults no longer believe.” She kept walking. So Ernie kept following.

  “Vicky, wait! Let’s say I believe.”

  She looked down, trying to suppress a smile. “Then I’d say you’re smarter than you look. But I kinda already knew that.”

  He skipped right over the compliment. “Okay. Let’s say I was a vampire.”

  “You?” She giggled at the thought.

  “Let’s just say. For argument’s sake. What would you do about it?”

  “All vampires must be destroyed. It’s international law.”

  “How?”

  Vicky tapped her head, coming up with some answers. “I’m not exactly an expert, but Opa taught me the basics. A wooden stake through the heart is still the most popular method. Then you’ve got sunlight. That does them in.”

  “For real?”

  “For real. You ever see a splotch of melted cheese wearing a bow tie? It was probably a vampire.”

  “Sick.”

  “You think so. You want to hear something even sicker?” Ernie nodded. “They have no reflection. Not in mirrors. Or cameras. They can’t even take a selfie.” That reminded her…Vicky took out her phone and snapped a selfie. “One good thing,” she continued, “they can’t enter a home unless they’re invited. It’s part of the rules.”

  “Vampires have rules?”

  Vicky nodded. “Like we don’t? You have to wait twenty minutes after you eat to go swimming, don’t you? That’s a rule. But there is a silver lining to all this, including silver.”