3. A Good Luck Gremlin
3
A Good Luck Gremlin
Rory
M ost documented vampire attacks throughout history and even now, in more recent times, are from youngling vampires left unfettered. There was a time, of course, when such behavior was acceptable, even encouraged, from vampires of any age. Rory himself was once known to have such a reputation; he was once a fierce warrior and prominent figure in the more unsavory vampire communities.
But that was thirty-years ago, before the weight of death sat so heavily upon him, before the bloodlust broke him in half and he fled. He traveled aimlessly for many years, denying himself his wants, reducing his diet to mere drops in hopes that he could rebuild his soul. It wasn’t until three years ago that he realized he would never be able to put his soul back together again: it was gone, disintegrated into ash. He settled in Willow Park shortly thereafter. He spends his days in quiet, wretched contemplation and his nights working at the Go-Go Gas for a measly six dollars an hour to help keep the lights on in his house. His hands have been tarnished by spilled life from the day he was Turned; he supposes it was only a matter of time before he found himself with blood on his hands again.
Cleaning up the floor takes less time than he anticipates. His replacement shows up five minutes after he stores the mop in the supply closet. If she notes the strong, acrid smell of bleach, she doesn’t comment, allowing Rory to leave quickly.
He returns home just as the sun is creeping over the tops of the trees. He moves quickly, carrying the woman— Calliope , he reminds himself—into the house, cradled against his chest like a lover fallen asleep on the couch.
The curse of his blood is working its way through her body. Physically, she will remain in stasis as her cellular structure rewrites itself into something new. Some say that a vampire’s biology is more efficient than a human’s inner-workings, that vampires are the alchemized epitome of what existence should be. Rory isn’t sure of this, but his opinion on the matter doesn’t change the fact that it works . After biting her neck, he dripped his own blood into her mouth, forcing the magic down into her throat, and he watched as her breathing stilled and her heartbeat quieted .
Soon, she will be neither living, nor dead. She will be a youngling vampire, a creature of pure instinct. The transition hits like adrenaline and only lets up after a few weeks of adjustment. Her emotions will be raw, untamed storms in her mind, erasing any amount of self-control and conscientiousness that she possessed before her transformation. Unless, of course, she is taught how to control her heightened strength and her unquenchable thirst.
So, Rory does what anyone would do in this situation: he chains her up in the basement.
The chains are iron, left over from the previous tenants of the house, but it’s not the material that matters most; it’s the symbols etched into the cuffs. He doesn’t know what they mean, though. He found the manacles in the spare room in a box labeled To contain a vampyre or otherwise powerful immortal. The previous occupants of the house were witches, so he’s inclined to believe that they will work.
The symbols flare briefly when he clicks the manacles into place, leaving orange lines across his vision. He blinks the light away and tugs on the chain, satisfied that the cuffs are secure. He glances around the basement. The walls are solid stone, at least three feet deep. Even if the cuffs fail, she won’t be able to force her way out. There is perhaps a better way to do this, he knows. Something gentle with some hand holding and soft murmured explanations. A bedside vigil until she wakes up and he can explain. But he can hear her heartbeat slowing and soon, it will stop altogether. She will become conscious again, with sharp teeth and red eyes and an uncontrollable thirst for blood, and he still has to dispose of the other body, preferably before the sun gets too high in the sky.
For once, someone or something is on his side. Not God, per se, but perhaps a lesser deity—a good luck gremlin watching from the rafters—because she stays unconscious as he stands and backs away from her, taking the steps two at a time until he is back in the kitchen.
He begins to hammer a metal panel to the door frame and a matching one to the door itself, snaking an iron chain in between them. A similar symbol that adorns the cuffs is carved into the panel on the door and it flares into life when he clicks the lock into place.
There is a soft displacement of air just above his shoulder, a wayward wisp of his hair ticking the shell of his ear, and he feels the pinch of bird claws soon after as his housemate, Kane, lands on his shoulder.
“Are you sure you made the right decision?” asks Kane, a small squawk added on the end for punctuation.
Rory doesn’t need to see the bird to know that his oil-slick feathers are ruffled with disapproval. He stands and drops the hammer on the table with a loud thud. “It was that or kill her.”
“And what about the man in the trunk of your car?” asks Kane, nipping at Rory’s ear .
Rory, well-versed in Kane’s habits, doesn’t flinch, but he does give him a sideways look accompanied by a scowl. “That was necessary. Besides, he’s the one that shot her in the first place. If anything, I saved her.”
“Is that what we’re calling it, these days?”
Rory grunts in response, knowing that Kane doesn’t really want an answer to his question. They both know Rory’s justification is flimsy, yet neither of them wants to admit the glaringly obvious reason why Rory would spare her. Because how can a vampire explain that he’s sick of bloodshed, especially after he seemingly recklessly killed someone? Even that excuse feels paltry to him.
Then again, Kane has never been known to keep his opinions to himself. “You just thought she was pretty,” he says graciously, golden eyes flashing with amusement.
“Is she?” Rory asks, eyebrow raised. “I didn’t notice.” This is not entirely true of course. He had noticed but it’s not the reason he bit her, and he’s sure Kane knows that. He can’t help but think that Kane is being oddly charitable.
Kane pushes away from Rory’s shoulder to land on the small kitchen table. His feet click against the wood. “What happens if she escapes and kills someone?”
“That’s what the chains are for,” says Rory, glancing out the window and to the lake beyond. The sun is just beginning to rise, and the placid surface of Graeme Lake reflects the trees like a mirror. From the outside, the house on Graeme Lake is a three-story, three-bedroom Queen Anne Victorian cottage set upon the western shore.
A set of twelve or so stone-hewn steps extend from the back patio and reach down to the water, gently sloping earth on either side. The house is framed by gnarled, ancient oaks and tall, skinny pine trees. There is only one way on or off the property: a dusty dirt track that stretches through the trees to meet-up with the paved road that snakes its way around the nature reserve and out of Willow Park.
The house was commissioned by him sometime in the 1890s, though the exact date escapes him now. The lake was there at the time, but the name came much later; both the house and lake were named Graeme , after the surname of the coven Matron who bought it from him in 1953.
Little has changed of its external appearance since then. With its wraparound porch and shingled turret still intact, the various peaks and points of the house are at once ostentatious and yet still modest in their lack of decoration, painted in muted teals and brick-reds.
Inside, however, the house seems to stretch beyond its physical construction, dimensions and measurements never quite adding up. By all accounts, there shouldn’t be a basement level—there wasn’t one when he sold it to the coven .
Of course, it wasn’t just the house he let go of at the time. He let go of everything—his family, his wealth, his home—as his choices left him with the gaping maw of guilt resting against his sternum. He’s spent decades running away from this deficiency, ignorant of its true meaning, only to realize that the emptiness could only be solved from within. That the pain inside of his heart could never be cured.
So, he stopped moving.
Rory purchased the house back three years ago from the last remaining member of the coven. The witches lived in it for all that time, infusing their magic, perhaps even inadvertently, with the very foundation of the cottage. It’s probably where the basement came from , he thinks.
He wishes they thought to add an air conditioning unit as he unbuttons the wrists of his flannel shirt to roll the sleeves up to his elbows, eyes still trained on the smooth surface of the lake. “Anything happen while I was gone?”
“A small disturbance,” replies Kane, hopping onto the windowsill. He taps the pane with his beak. “Whatever it is, it’s eating all the fish.”
Since Rory arrived three years ago, the lake’s only inhabitants have been fish and the occasional snapping turtle. The surrounding trees are not without their own inhabitants, which occasionally find their way to the lake, wood ducks and warblers and even a Cooper’s hawk once or twice .
But beyond the fish, nothing truly lives in Graeme Lake—until two days ago, when Rory, fresh home from the night shift at the gas station, watched the sun rise over the top of the trees, and, as the light spread to the lip of the lake and beyond, saw a slight disturbance in the facade of the water. Just a hint of something, really, a ripple of a shadow beneath the water, but it was enough to make him worry. He asked Kane to fly overhead, hoping the bird’s eyesight could penetrate the murky depths of the lake, but to no avail.
The creature remains a shadow.
Rory turns from the window and reaches for a blue bottle from the refrigerator, breaking the wax seal on it as he pulls the cork. He doesn’t bother with a glass, taking a swig directly from the bottle.
“Didn’t get enough from her?” Kane asks.
He gives the bird a curt shake of his head. “I didn’t drink her blood.”
What he truly means is that he didn’t drink enough to satisfy his hunger. After all, it’s not the bite or even the consumption of a person’s blood that incites the Turn; it’s reciprocity, as the person who is bitten consumes the blood of the vampire who is doing the biting.
He closes his eyes as he takes another sip, the blood flowing down his throat with a burn like whiskey. When he settled down in Willow Park, he knew he needed a reliable, discreet source of food and was grateful to find a farm a few miles to the east whose owner cares more for money than explanations. Animal blood will never be as good as human blood, but Rory has worked hard to reign in his appetite, and he finds the chicken’s blood palatable, if not somewhat pleasant.
Kane is eyeing him curiously, head tilted to the side. Rory challenges him with a raised eyebrow, but the bird just looks out the window again.
Rory knocks back the rest of his drink and then places the empty bottle in the sink. “And we’re sure it’s not just another gator?” he asks, even though he knows the answer.
“We’re sure,” says Kane. “I can feel it.”
Kane’s background may be as murky as Graeme Lake, but if there’s one thing Rory can trust, it’s Kane’s ability to sense other creatures like him: cursed spirits, so twisted by magic that they’ve forgotten their true form.
That’s really all Rory knows about Kane, though.
The great-tailed grackle showed up at the house shortly after Rory, looking for the last witch who lived here. When Rory informed him that she retired to a senior citizen community down south only to succumb to a sudden case of pneumonia shortly thereafter, he expected Kane to take off again. He hadn’t though. Instead, he cawed out some excuse about the quality of frogs nearby and suggested that he could pay for his rent by ensuring that no small rodents infiltrate the house .
Rory pointed out that he’s never seen any rodents scurrying about the house. Kane ensured him that maintaining the same level of rodent-to-vampire ratio will be top on his list of priorities should he be selected for the role.
Rory still hasn’t seen or heard any rodents in the house, so, in a way, he supposes that Kane has made good on his promise.
“I don’t like this,” says Kane. “First the creature in the lake and now…” He glances back at the door that leads to the basement.
“It’ll be fine,” Rory says with more confidence than he feels. “Watch the door. I’ll be back soon.”
* * *
The air is thick with moisture, the sun already making its way over the tall, skinny oak trees, ineffective against the humidity. He marks a route that avoids direct sunlight, preferring to stick close to the trees and their shadows.
The sun isn’t as detrimental to his kind as various cultural and literary references will have one believe, yet there is some truth to the myth, of course: vampires who stay too long in the sun can sometimes succumb to sun sickness, like how humans fall prey to heat stroke. The difference, however, is that sun sickness in vampires can set in after only a few hours of direct contact .
So, he sticks to the shadows, his sleeves unrolled and buttoned firmly at his wrists. The heat is uncomfortable, and made doubly uncomfortable by the body, cold and rigid, slung over his shoulder. The shovel he carries scrapes against the dried brown leaves that cover the ground, hiding the halfhearted trail. He finds a spot beneath a tree where a yarrow plant is making a valiant attempt at life.
He gently places the bundle of blanket and body against a nearby tree and begins to dig. The slide of rusty metal against hard-packed earth is a song he wishes he didn’t already have memorized. With each thrust of the shovel, he tries and fails, as he so often does, to not recall tears streaming down dirty cheeks, mouths open in terror, words—random and embarrassing—tumbling out in an attempt to change his mind, to prevent his hands and his teeth from taking .
As the cavity in the earth gets bigger and bigger, he thinks about the last time he buried a body. The cries of battle had faded, the war was ending, and he had reached his breaking point. An image of his brother’s eyes flashes in his memory, and he tries not to compare the smooth wood handle of the shovel to the stake he once held to his brother’s chest. He tries not to remember the smell of the ocean, and the coppery tang of blood.
When the hole in the ground is deep enough, he drops the body in and begins to cover it up, asking for forgiveness from a nameless deity—maybe even that good luck gremlin who must be looking out for him. When he is done, he lets the shovel fall with a clatter and realizes that his hands are shaking, the regret and guilt hanging over him like a gray veil.
He shouldn’t have killed the Kid.
Because that’s all he was: just a kid.
A lost child. There’s a niggling, rotting thing in his chest that whispers scathing rebukes, telling him that Kid was going to turn his life around, that he would do good things. Telling him that the woman will hate him for Turning her. That he should have just called the cops like a human. That he is evil, and he’s taken one life and ruined a second.
And what else is new? He fell into a habit, a trap of his own making. It’s a reminder that the darkness is inside of him and hiding out in the middle of nowhere will do nothing to bring light to the dark.
He stuffs his hands in his pockets, only to find a forgotten pack of cigarettes and a cheap, plastic lighter. He pulls out a cigarette, lighting it without thought. It’s a terrible habit, acquired sometime in the seventies while squatting in New York City. The nicotine does little to his body, but the ritual of it is soothing. He blows out a steady stream of smoke, tasting a hint of sweetness on the tip of his tongue as he looks down at the mound of earth, freshly packed.
The air is wet and heavy.
A bird calls from overheard.
He snubs the cigarette out on the bottom of his boot and stuffs it back in his pocket. He grimaces at the freshly concealed grave and then turns, making his way back to house on Graeme Lake and a youngling he very much hopes hasn’t awoken quite yet.