by Ian Hall
“Oh yeah… sure…”
Pathetically, Lyman hoisted himself off the chair like he was in his third trimester then he shuffled off toward the waiting woman like an old man with scathing hemorrhoids. What a nerd.
I got up to follow.
“Are you together?” the woman asked with a plastic smile.
“I’m his sister.”
“Generally only spouses or parents are allowed back with the patients.”
I mimicked her expression down to the obstinate raised brow. “I understand, but…” I lowered my voice and lent in close to her ear, “my brother’s more than a little retarded; I have to go in with him in case he poops himself.”
The woman grimaced and stepped out of my way.
“Why’d you tell her that?” Lyman growled at me once we were alone in the exam room.
“I needed to make sure I got back here with you; besides… the way you were acting out there gave my lie a lot of believability. I mean – if you strained your neck… why would you be limping?”
Lyman responded with an upward thrust of his middle finger.
“Right back at ya, brother.” I returned the gesture. “Besides, she wasn’t our girl, so who cares what she thinks?”
“Are you getting anything at all?”
I inhaled deep just as there was a knock on the door. Before I could blow the air out my lungs a tall woman with shoulder-length graying hair and sophisticated eyes allowed herself entry.
I emptied my lungs. “Hell yes I am.”
Down to the Doctors
Connie Alvares looked to be everything I think I could have wanted in a woman, as long as I looked for one forty-something. She had the usual Hispanic dead straight black hair with fine traces of grey through it, like thin veins of marble. Her beautiful almond complexion held a face out of the afternoon soaps.
I was seriously impressed.
“George?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“What can I help you with this evening?”
Her voice held traces of accent, so sexy, so exotic.
“I twisted my neck.” I made a suitably strained face. “It’s pretty sore.”
She pulled and prodded like a real doctor, and pronounced it muscle strain. What I didn’t anticipate was my hair standing up on end as she stood next to me; almost like she oozed static electricity. Her fingers were cool to the touch, but light, almost a delicate caress.
I walked out of the office with a prescription for a mild painkiller, and a very curious look from Mandy. “Enjoy that, did we?” She looked down at my trousers, and to my shock, they were tented, and I hadn’t even noticed. “She has a presence.”
“Oh, she’s got something, alright.” I rearranged my groin area. “I didn’t even know I had a hard-on. That was weird.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Well, the only lead in town is the doctor, so let’s wait for her to leave and follow her; see what turns up.”
The medical center closed at eight, so we didn’t have long to hang around. We watched her leave the front of the building, and stand by the curb. In seconds, a large black suburban pulled up outside, and she got quickly inside.
Following proved easy, but it just took us to a small Italian restaurant. Even Mandy couldn’t get a decent look inside, so we just waited. Another ninety minutes later, we followed again.
The doctor and her man drove straight into an open garage at the side of the very posh house. The garage door closed behind them.
Two floors, large garden, bigger than average for the area. “Doctor’s salary,” I commented.
“I’m going to do a run-around.” Mandy got quietly out of the car.
“Okay, be careful.”
And she was off.
I never liked it when Mandy went solo. I never knew when the trigger time for worrying ought to start, so usually I worried all the time she’d gone. I anxiously watched the bright green clock on the dashboard.
Eleven minutes, and she opened the door again. She sat down in silence, her face unusually serious. “Something’s wrong.”
I waited for more, but it didn’t come immediately. “Explain.”
“I wanted to go near to the house, you know, get a chance look in the windows, but there was a barrier. I’ve never came across anything like it. It was like walking into a spider’s web – that same fuzzy sticky icky-ness. That’s how the barrier made me feel.” She turned to me. Her face held no trace of amusement, and that wasn’t usual for my Mandy. “It made me think I didn’t want to go farther.”
“It?”
“That’s where it gets weirder. It wasn’t a physical barrier, right. I mean, it wasn’t actually there, but when you got ‘in’, it seemed more than a living thing than inanimate.”
I looked at her carefully. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know, and that’s what’s so annoying. Maybe you should come and see?”
Much against my better judgment, I let myself be guided around to the garage side of the house, and slowly we approached the building.
“I feel it. It’s right here.” Mandy’s outstretched hand felt the air in front. One more step, and her hand withdrew. “There.”
I moved past her and put my hand where hers had been; nothing. I took another step, and suddenly, a smell like I’d never witnessed before swept into my lungs, I jumped back three paces, almost losing my balance. “Shit!” I said, my hand covering mouth and nose. I quelled the urge to throw up.
“What?”
“The smell!”
Mandy pulled my elbow, and we carefully circled back to the car. “Out of here.”
I needed no further encouragement, I could still smell the odor in my nostrils, and needed some distance between me and ‘it.’
“So I feel a barrier, and you get a terrible smell,” Mandy mused as I made my way back to our condo. “At least we’ve got something to report to Weeks.”
It felt like daddy longlegs crawling all up and down my arms the whole way back to the condo. Lyman never stopped itching at his nose. Whatever it had been, it had sticking power.
Soon as we got through the door, I ditched my companion and went straight upstairs to my room, grabbing my copy of Eagle’s journal. Flipping to a passage a third of the way through, I found the lines that I’d marked in yellow highlighter.
Universal fears; I find them imbedded within the psyche of the human mind in all subjects I’ve studied. Simple things, avoidable and even harmless that rack the nerve and dampen the intellect. To each man, woman, and child, these fears have been handed down, seemingly coded within their very DNA. Yet, to each man, woman, and child, there belongs one uniquely especial terror; or phobias as is the common vernacular of the day. It is not necessary to delve into the personality of the individual and know their particular dread. It is quite enough simply to know that it exists, and how to access that region of the mind. Fear, I find – real or imagined – is a superior motivator and a powerful deterrent.
I took the book across the hall and bust into Lyman’s room. He had his hands down his pants and a glassy sheen to his eyes.
“Wow. That geriatric bitch really got to you, didn’t she?”
He rearranged himself and bounced up and down, fiddling with his zipper. “Do you mind? Whatever happened to knocking?”
“No time.”
I plopped down on the edge of his bed and laid the journal over my knees.
“Did I ever tell you how deathly friggin’ afraid I am of spiders?”
“A vampire afraid of spiders?” Lyman got that pissy ‘I’m-so-much-smarter-than-you’ look on his face. “A creature that lures its victims in, incapacitates them then drains their blood… yep – that’s pretty damn scary. I can see why you’d be put off by them.”
“Smart ass.”
Lyman proceeded to yank the sneaker off his foot and head for the door. “Where is it, you pussy?”
“There’s no spider now.”
“You interrupted
me at a very crucial moment – there’d goddamn better be something that needs killing.”
“Just your libido. Now shut up.”
To my surprise, Lyman did exactly as I’d told him. I read the passage out loud.
“I thought it was interesting when I first read it; hence the highlighting. If memory serves, then there’s more along these same lines further on in the book. Do you know the part I’m talking about?”
“Don’t think I actually got that far,” he admitted with a shrug.
“Seriously? I ate up every freaking word – couldn’t put it down.”
“Not me. That vampire is such an arrogant prick; it’s kind of hard to take his attitude.”
“It’s important to know your enemy, Lyman.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Besides, what’re you thinking? This Connie chick has her own copy of Tomas Lucescu’s journal?”
“Not so much that; but, she’s maybe onto the same kind of hocus-pocus crap that old Bald Eagle was into.”
I could tell by the blank stare that Lyman had no clue what I was talking about.
“The dude was all about control,” I said, emphatically waving the journal under Lyman’s nose. “If you’d read it, you’d know that. He’s spent decades studying human reactions to what he called ‘controlled stimuli’, looking for triggers and ways to play on their fears… even to the point of hysteria. Later on he talks about this woman named Candice English, who was so afraid of snakes that she burned her house to the ground because she believed she could hear hissing through the walls at night; killed her whole family as they slept. Guess who planted that thought in her head and sat back to watch it grow?”
“Tomas Lucescu.”
“The one and only,” I said. “Or maybe not… the one and only, I mean.”
Lyman finally looked like I’d gotten his attention, so I continued before he remembered the raging boner he’d been wrestling.
“Tonight when I got close to that house, I swear I felt like I was walking into a curtain of spider webs; even now I just want to get a wire scrub brush and scratch off about six layers of skin.” I showed him the red, self-inflicted lines down my arms. “You experienced something totally different… What’s up with that anyway? You’ve got some weird fear of bad smells?”
Lyman cracked a grin, but his cheeks pinked up in a slight blush. “Death, actually. That smell – it was like a rotting corpse. Fuckin-A… I still smell it.”
“So, two different people. Two different fears. But, the exact same outcome,” I told him. “We tucked tail and ran – both of us.”
“You’re right,” he said thoughtfully. “And Miss Connie wouldn’t be working so hard at keeping trespassers away unless she had something to hide. Besides the fact that she’s a vampire.”
“I guess the only question is: when are we going back?”
We decided to take another trip after school, get ourselves familiar with the area in daylight, and make plans from there.
I fell asleep, but I knew there was a light under Mandy’s door. She was up reading that journal again, for the nth fricking time.
In the morning, we took our meds and drove to school, our first full day.
“We have to be more observant,” Mandy said as I parked. “Looking for cliques, subtle signs. If Weeks has a report of kids and families going missing, there has to be vampire involvement.”
“But high school is the home of cliques; it’s what teenagers are about.”
“I know.” She gave me her serious look. “We just have to be better. That’s all.”
My first class was Sociology, and I slogged through it with minimum enthusiasm. As we filed through the door into the corridor, I almost bumped into a very pretty girl. Cute smiling face, ponytails, full uniform; the whole welcome committee rolled into one kid. She had the kind of ‘fixed’ expression that made her look fit to burst if she didn’t talk.
“You’re new,” she said. Her lips pursed together as if to stem the further gush of welcomes and accolades.
“Yes.” I pushed past her to allow the other kids to get out of the class. “George Walters. Having my first day’s lesson in confusion.” As a couple of the boys walked past, they saw us together and smiled.
She giggled at my lame joke. “Tamara Hutchins.” Her hand came up almost automatically, and we did a very close handshake thing. Her hand was cool, dry, somehow I had expected clammy. “I’m on the orientation board. One period around the school.”
“Oh, we had the tour yesterday, with the headmaster.”
“This is different; this is run by the student body. Where are you next?”
I looked at my laminated sheet. “Geography, Room 64.”
“This way.” And off she went, with a somewhat bemused George Walters in tow.
The teacher in Room 64 just nodded assent when Tamara called, “Orientation” across the room, and suddenly we were back into the corridor. I was amazed at how quiet the whole school sounded.
“Okay, George, let’s get started. I have a survey as we walk. Nothing too probing, but we do need some additional information.”
Well, I gave away as little as I could, and to be honest, she gushed back with fantastic details of afterschool clubs and associations. There were inter-school competitions in a diversity of forums, from the usual debating, to robot wars; seemingly a great favorite. By the end of the period, I had seen so much of the school, I felt there wasn’t a janitor’s closet I didn’t know of.
Tamara shook my hand again, gushed more welcomes, and left me at my next classroom door just in time for the bell to ring. Total clockwork.
When Mandy and I got in line at the cafeteria, we looked at each other and harmonized; “Orientation!”
“Did you smell vampire at all?” I asked. Her tour guide had been a football science senior; a Logan Hereiderson.
“Not one whiff.”
All vampire things considered, on our first day, Red Roses High School seemed quite disappointing.
I finished my salad when a guy stopped at our table, his eyes on Mandy. ‘Oh, yes’, I thought, we may have hooked a fish.
“Tracy Walters?”
Mandy looked up, and I turned around to see our visitor properly. Richard Gere at eighteen. “That’s me,” Mandy said. “What’s up?”
“I’m Malcolm Fredericks, senior. I chair the Parapsychology group on Wednesdays. Logan tells me you might be interested?”
I sat back from the two, and watched Malcolm gush about comparative religions, and Mandy throw in buzzwords like clairvoyance and psychokinesis. It felt like watching a fire grow from a single match. When Malcolm left, Mandy had signed up, and seemed ready for tonight’s lecture.
“That was exciting.” I felt almost breathless myself. Of course, dearest Malcolm hadn’t taken one look in my direction the whole time.
Mandy’s eyes sparkled. “I’m not sure, but I think we may have our first hit.”
“Vampire?” I said softly.
“I’m not sure, but there were similarities in his mannerisms with Chris when we first got together. I may be stretching here – maybe just wanting to see something – but I’m willing to give it a shot.”
“Okay. Well, I got nothing, so let’s go with instinct. You want me along?”
“No, I don’t think so. If he’s interested in Tracy for her mind, maybe better if I go alone.”
The rest of the school day proved, of course, boring; I mean, when you’re actually there to learn, it can be fun, but when the lessons mean absolutely nothing, it takes any zing right out.
That evening, I drove back to school and dropped Mandy off at the library for her seven o’clock ‘lecture’, and took a trip back into town. I drove past the Alvares place, and took a couple of pictures of the house. With nothing else to do, I toured a couple of coffee shops, but without Mandy’s companionship, felt totally bored. Time passed so fricking slow, that I sat outside the school again half an hour early. I phoned Helsing headquarters for
news of our friends, but it was all disappointing; no changes all around.
I’d expected a crew of zit-faced geeks, afraid of their own shadows, yammering on about “cold spots” and “tingles up their spines.” I was way off. The members of the Red Roses High Paranormal Club were some sharp kids. Only four in all, they appeared a tight-knit group and seemed to communicate in a sort of shorthand that people who spend a lot of time together tend to develop.
Malcolm seemed their apparent leader. He sat at the head of the rectangular table, laptop open, pulling up footage of their latest investigation. He had the high-tech thing going on; infrared cameras, digital voice recorders, electromagnetic devices. Three words: rich ass kids.
A brunette named Bernadette – cute but with the figure of an ironing board – was bubbling with enthusiasm as Malcolm highlighted a stretch of wriggly lines on the audio playback. They listened to it a good half dozen times – some guttural rumbling. My vampire ears easily recognized the refrigerator’s icemaker kicking on, but I just sat back and appeared every bit as astounded as Bernadette herself.
“Clam,” Malcolm said after the umpteenth play-through, “mark it down as a possible EVP; we’ll play it for the Comptons and let them decide.”
A brainiac-looking guy in a Hawaiian shirt made a note on a yellow legal pad. “Got it!”
I piped up for the first time that night. “Who are the Comptons?”
All eyes turned to me with as much curiosity as if I was one of their otherworldly apparitions. I got the impression none of them were half as comfortable with the living as with the dead.
Malcolm, looking sheepish, finally remembered to introduce me. “Hey, everybody, this is Tracy. She’s gonna be sitting in with us tonight.”
Clam was the first to smile and rise. “Nice to meet you, Tracy.”
As soon as I grabbed his hand to shake, I knew how Clam had earned his nickname. At least, I hoped it was a nickname.
The only black kid I’d encountered since arriving at Red Roses followed Clam’s lead. “Hey. I’m Nebulous.”