Pages From a Vampire's Journal (5 page)

Journal Entry 143: “
Decided to take a peek into a new blood donor facility that opened today. Snuck in at 2am and sampled a few of the blood samples. Horrid! I could barely walk for hours after taking just a few sips of that cat spew they call “donations”. Silent alarm apparently went off so had to check-out early. Memo to me: Freshly squeezed blood only!”

Cedric walked over to the broom closet, pulled the door open and glanced inside. The dark prevailed. He flicked on a cobwebbed light switch, sending a few baby spiders scurrying. Surprisingly it still worked, and found the room was anything like the broom closet it falsely advertised. It was actually a step towards a larger room. Cedric walked inside and peered within. Lining one wall were dozens of kid’s lunchboxes stacked in rows of ten, all perfectly aligned, like chess pieces on a chessboard. The shadows the swinging light bulb emanated cast a spotlight on various icons from the seventies and eighties. Some of the lunchboxes bared insignias of comic book super heroes long since abandoned by publishers, while others showed stock racers from 70s television shows and Saturday morning cartoons. Cedric couldn’t imagine why Trixie would own so many of them. Where did they come from and why had they been collected here? Did someone have a bizarre obsession collecting these items?

Walking over to the stack of decades-old kid memorabilia, he pulled one off of a shelf. Clearing the dust away revealed a green hulking creature throwing a car over a cliff. He shook the lunchbox a bit. Something rattled inside. Opening it, he could see the thermos was still intact with an empty sandwich bag. Remnants of a crusty peanut butter filling could still be seen creeping the edge. These were used items, Cedric thought, not plucked off of toy store shelves with the intent of future profit as collectibles. At least he didn’t think so. He opened the thermos and gasped at the contents. Vegetable soup long-since solidified by the ravages of time and solitude. Beside it lay a cream-filled sugary treat that might as well have been thousands of years old and burrowed away by the Incas.

Cedric walked back to the door, peered out to Trixie and asked:

“How many lunchboxes did you have as a kid anyway?

“I dunno, maybe four or five. Why?
“Well someone must have really thought they would be worth something someday.”Cedric said.

A creaking sound jutted out of nowhere.

“Was that you?” she asked.

Cedric was too busy in his sleuthing to respond.

Inwardly he suspected some darker purpose though he needed more clues. He went back and opened more lunchboxes. Again, half eaten apples hard as a rock, sandwiches and Hershey kisses that had decayed to nothingness were scattered within the myriad of lunches as if the entire elementary system had suddenly grind to a halt, and some
thing
spirited the kids far away to some dark land of candy and cremes. He remembered she had told him her dad was into some kind of genetic research, but she didn’t say what kind. But what did her stepmother do? A debt collector of some kind, he recalled.

Cedric noticed something on the back of the lunchboxes he had dropped to the floor. On the back of them was taped a piece of paper with names attached to them. John, Marnie, Cathy, Cassandra, all in the same script handwriting. From the corner of his eye, the gleam from a necklace hanging atop a box caught his eye. Walking over, he peered into the box. Inside: boys shirts from a decade past with the same icons as the lunchboxes. Looking further, he saw half-chewed pencils used down to the nub, unopened packs of loose-leaf paper, superhero stickers and tightly packed army-green satchels, the kind kids brought to school with them to store there elementary school things.

In the adjacent room, Trixie looked through box after box for any sign of a flashlight or cigarette lighter. She knew her stepmother was a hoarder of all things that should be thrown out, and she never threw out her collected cigarette lighters she had bought in foreign cities like Toronto, Tokyo and Memphis among a hundred different hotels. Looking further, a kerosene lamp revealed itself at the very bottom of a box marked “throw out”.

“A-ha…gotcha you little devil” Trixie said, while reaching deep into the 4 foot box to retrieve it. When her arm was fully deep within the recess, something heavy rocketed against the back of her neck. The shock paralyzed her as she stood lumped over the stack of boxes, her mind mechanically debating whether to shut-down her entire body. She immediately thought something fell from the ceiling, perhaps a loose 2×4 or a rock. A second later, something else came bearing down on her, striking her head this time. Blackness rained down in front of her eyes, kicking her out of sight and out of mind.

Cedric yelled out, “Hey everything OK in there? What did you break?”

He walked over to the doorway peering through. He didn’t see Trixie at all.

“Did she climb back up through the window?” he thought.

He walked back into the lunchbox room and looked through an old oak desk. Inside were test tubes of varying shapes, though all were bloodstained and had names attached to them: John, Marnie, Cathy, Cassandra, among many others.

“Something doesn’t sit well with this”, Cedric thought. He looked over at the corner of the room. A large dresser with a padlock dangled ahead. Cedric pulled at the lock, trying to break it open somehow, someway. He placed one foot against the dresser and pulled with all of his strength, then a large pop rang out. The padlock was still in one piece, however the door had come off the hinge. A foul odor invaded the room. Cedric pulled the door as hard as he could, felling himself to the floor along with several human skulls that poured out of the dresser. Cedric lied on the floor next to them in disbelief. The skulls had been ravished by time.

“What…the..hell?” he muttered.

Quickly lifting himself off the floor he ran in the direction of Trixie.

He skidded to a halt when he came to the doorway separating the two rooms. Standing over Trixie was a person he had never seen in his life, and was certain not related to Trixie in any shape or form. A silver medallion he wore bore the inscription “La eMe”. Cedric had heard that term before on the radio having something to do with the Mexican mafia, which was certainly fitting by the look of this stranger’s sickly appearance.

“Are you Trixie’s dad? Where is Trixie?” Cedric asked.

The stranger stood a few feet from Trixie, and just above a whisper, said to Cedric:

“It’s a rare, rare thing for me I get served with two desserts after a meal. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I feel God’s love a shinin’ down on me.”

He flashed a grin at Cedric that looked like a badly carved pumpkin.

Gilchrist gave Cedric a look of disapproval as he glanced at the bloodstain on his foot.

“I see you and my beast have become acquainted. I can’t say it has usually worked out well for those that have met him in such a fashion, lassie”.

“I said,
are you
Trixie’s dad?

“Do I look it?”

“No, you don’t.”

“Well there it is, kid. You always answer your own questions this way?”

Gilchrist slowly pulled out a seven inch blade that bared a crude drawing of a Mexican bird on the blade.

He motioned slowly towards Cedric, who grimaced at the sight of the wound in the stranger’s swollen, bloody eye.

“You like this?” He pointed to the design on his knife
“It’s called the laughing falcon in Mexico” Gilchrist stated with a chuckle. “They sound like a human crying s-sometimes, and laughter at others. You know laughing, son? I do, and I revel in it, when the moment merits it, heh.”

Gilchrist bellowed out a vile, hideous laughter, like that of a devil ensnaring a saint from the deepest, hottest ravine in hell.

He took a couple of steps toward Cedric, who stood steadfast against this monster who dared him to run. Cedric being the forest working type knew what happened to those who ran from bears: they usually died out of breath.

“Maybe I’ll have your friend here for dessert too. Then go to the local breakfast joint and order me up some ham and eggs, then when missy waitress is gone I’ll reach into my backpack and pull out your little friend’s head and feed some ham to her. She’ll like that I’m sure.”

“You don’t stand a chance, whoever you are” Cedric snapped back at him.

Gilchrist quenched up his face and mocked him.

“Oh Auntie you don’t stand a chance!” Gilchrist said in a little girl’s voice making a flighty gesture with his free hand toward Cedric. He sounded possessed.

“When I am at the diner I am gonna pull your head outta my satchel and show the waitress, then stick my hand up your bloody neck and puppet what you just s-said tough guy!” he grinned.

“…and I’ve learned my meals taste better if I take my time with em before the grill. Get em all nice and spooked. The gamier, the better. And it couldn’t have been any easier finding the both of you sweet tarts. Yer lil’ missy friend here left a trail of blood straight to her doorstep. Not very bright, is she…”

He sighed and put his hand on his heart and said, “She’s so smart. I’m glad she is gonna be my new wittle pumpkin.”

Cedric thought of the finches in Trixie’s coat.

Cedric backed up a few steps, looking around the room for anything to defend himself with.

Gilchrist walked slowly towards Cedric, looking down at the skulls in amazement and half-grinned. A small book lay on the ground with a simple, metallic lock. He picked it up and popped the lock with his blade. He flipped to a random page.

He read aloud, “Entry 114:
Got another one today. This time a red-headed girl about eight. Her blood tasted dreadful. Thought of going with a blond male originally. Should have stuck with original plan”.

Gilchrist laughed.

Again, he read aloud as if sermonizing, “Entry 145:
Little bastard gave me flack and wouldn’t get in the damn car. I’ll have to fly out tonight and secure him. Getting sicker from not feeding”.

“My my, we’ve been busy down here haven’t we. You and I may just share some communal traits after all. You believe in karma, kid? Well that is me, right here, right now, and you’re gonna reap what you sowed. I am your karma, kid.”

He tapped his chest with his blade and picked up a smallish skull and twirled it around the blade like an outlaw did to boast of his six-shooter in a saloon.

“Enough tomfoolery. I do believe it is time we ate.”

He lunged toward Cedric, penning him to the floor like a cougar would do a small dog.

Cedric thrashed and fought like a swordfish being dragged by a boat, but no leverage meant he might as well have been up to his neck in wet sand. He couldn’t move his arms. He felt Gilchrist’s knees squeeze into him as if he were a sumo wrestler. He felt the air sucked out of him.

Gilchrist leaned into Cedric’s face, nose-to-nose, letting a bit of drool rappel down to his chin unbroken.

“Now I’ll ask you the same as I did my missy over yonder. Have you seen my beast? Look into my eyes…you have, haven’t you?” he sneered. Cedric noticed his pupils were eerily dark, along with the wolfish teeth on either side of his grin.

A flea jumped from Gilchrist’s sideburns into Cedric’s hair.

“Now we’re one son, and I can see right into your witty bitty soul. And I gotta tells ya, you don’t seem so bad really. Just need a bit o’ adjustment. Some seasoning will fix ya right up” he snorted.

Cedric glared at the wolf-like teeth on either side of Gilchrist’s grin while he twisted his waist back and forth…anything to shift the monster’s weight.

In the next moment, Cedric felt a gallon of vile blood and fleas pour down the sides of his neck that reeked of dead flesh and foul disease. He felt the weight of the monster lift itself from him to one side. Cedric opened his eyes and saw protruding through the monster’s ribcage was a long black poker. Gilchrist dropped his knife and grasped the pointed end of the poker, trying to ascertain who or what got the best of him.

Hundreds of fleas jumped off of the sinking titanic of a man birthed from the darkest corner of humanity. Gilchrist slumped to Cedric’s side in a thump of blood with the smell of cheap cigarettes. Standing three feet from Cedric was a ghostly figure squinting back at him in the darkness.

“
Camilla
?” he said, trying to catch his breath.

“Who the hell are you?” she glared at him as if he were no better than the monster she had just slain. Cedric was taken aback at how callous she sounded to him, like a judge issuing a death sentence. She looked like an apparition in a graveyard who had caught two trespassers in her sanctuary, and he was most certainly next on the poker list if he didn’t answer to her satisfaction. He at least owed this strange woman some kind of debt for saving his life. Cedric was completely at a loss for words, as if he had just met an archangel of Heaven, or the vilest demon from Hell for the first time, and anything you said…anything…would in all probability be damned to the core regardless of one’s intentions.

Camilla walked over to Gilchrist’s limp, Mexican body and placed her foot on his leather-jacketed back before yanking out the long poker. Her effort produced a slithering, sloshing sound like a coiled, surprised snake in a rainy, muddy hole in the ground. She pointed the black and bloodied spear tip at Cedric’s forehead.

“You’re next if you don’t speak up. So TALK you fucking little idiot.”

Journal Entry 166:

“I killed our parish priest today. I decided to see if these pitiful confessionals were the same now as they were a millennia ago. I decided to have a little fun with him in confessing my “sins”. Didn’t think he would take me seriously! He let spill some details that some in our flock are seeking divine forgiveness??Weak. Thought I heard someone else in the church building, but maybe not. Probably just the wind, which has made a fine mess of my beautiful hair.  Anyway, that damnable detective will probably be going door-to-door again. Will have to stop procrastinating and do something about him. In the meantime, my little collection of childhood trinkets grows a bit unwieldy. Maybe need a bigger house?”

Trixie opened her eyes and glanced slowly at the dark ceiling while raising her hand to her head in pain. She could barely remember her name. Boxes were on either side of her as well as on top.

“My god this hurts…” she muttered as she tried to at least get on her knees. She rubbed the back of her neck, half-expecting something else to fall from the ceiling. Or so she thought. She wobbled up and looked around the dark cellar, which bestowed a strange phosphorescence to the interior. She glanced in the direction of the creeping glow. In one corner was a group of glowcap mushrooms huddled close together, safely numbered.

“Cedric where are you?” she called out. She rubbed her head some more trying to wish away the pain.

In the room of skulls, Cedric looked up at Camilla as if he had been caught in a snare.

“I’m gonna stand up now…don’t go poking that thing anywhere near me”, he said.

“I don’t need the poker to do that. Now who are you already before I run you through…”

Trixie walked in from the room of boxes.

“Wait, he is with me! Don’t hurt him!”

Trixie let out an audible gasp at the sight of the skulls littering the floor.

“W-who do those belong to??” she asked Camilla pointedly.

“They belong to me, if you must know. Twits. Nosing into my things is the last thing your pink fingers will ever get into”.

Her voice plummeted to a tone only an ancient succubus would possess. A crimson curtain of redness crept down over Camilla’s eyes.

“You know what killed the cat don’t you? It wasn’t curiosity. It was appetite. She wanted too many mice for her own good. That is how most alley cats die. They just wander into dead-ends where dogs await them. And they are eaten, just like you will be in a dead-end. Usually it takes two to get one person into trouble, and that someone ain’t gonna be me” she whispered.

Camilla swung the poker at Cedric in an arc that sent empty paint cans flying across the room. Cedric backed up a few paces.

Cedric barked at Trixie, “Is this
thing
your mother?”

“She isn’t my mother! She never was! And now I’m getting the police over here to do what they should have done the last time I called them!”

She motioned towards the top of the stairs, now unlocked by the beast Camilla.

Trixie looked like she was about to vomit.

“I can’t believe you really did it. You were supposed to be tutoring them, and you just killed those kids like they were nothing? Why!”

Camilla barked back, “You’re not going anywhere, and those
kids
as you call em do what they were bred to do, to feed
us
, and they are hardly missed at all from anyone. We only take the sick and the weak. They are young calves they keep the peace between us and
your
kind. Take that away and it is war all over again. We’ve had enough of that mess for eons.”

Camilla looked at Cedric backed into a corner and then back at Trixie. She hesitated, trying to decide which was the more optimal prey.

Trixie couldn’t believe what she was hearing, as if it were an amateur play put on for the amusement of bar braggarts and brigands. None of it seemed real. She looked at Camilla’s eyes, which seem to boil with a black hatred of everything that wasn’t hellspawn. Trixie wondered why Camilla never killed her in the previous years they had lived together.

“We have dined on kings, politicians, world-class thieves and even triceratops, and you balk at our meager demands? You should feel privileged to go out of this life giving your life’s blood to an immortal. Don’t go to a coffin unfulfilled, dear. Come to me. Come and be given mercy.”

Cedric leapt at Camilla, wrapping his arm around her scrawny, pale neck in a headlock, and tried to drag her to the ground. Camilla muffled a laugh into his arm.

She reeked of disease and lustful desire, grasping his forearm behind her head as she bent over, throwing him on the ground. The impact of the concrete floor stumped him. He looked up at her as if he had just been swatted by a gorgon from Greek myth.

Cedric ran towards the lifeless Gilchrist, grabbing the Mexican blade from his hand and motioned towards Camilla.

“You’re both murderers, both you and this devil here next to me.”

Camilla smiled a perverted smile at him, looking him over as if wondering which piece of him to savor first.

“Murderers? Your mortal life is a murder, son. It’s a con game diced when you were born and won at your grave. We’re no more murderers than you are. We’re just more honest about it.”

Camilla looked towards the window, pointing to it.

“Out there, we initially started with a few bodily donations. What you call murders. A few here and there. We don’t make distinctions between any of you. But if we catch you while you’re running away, you taste better than a sleeping emperor. So run already.”

“You’re not only a murderer; you’re a damnable liar as well. You lurk around in shadows and secret cabals and call it honest? I’m gonna put you in your place you sick, squalid creature of a human being!

Cedric dashed for the stairs, knocking over more cans of green paint. The air started to breed noxious vapors.

Camilla caught the belt loop on his jeans.

“Gotcha, you little snitch”.

Cedric brought the knife to her neck and pressed it firmly against her throat.

“You let go of me or I’m going to end your miserable existence and send you straight to the Almighty”.

“Be my guest, dearie. The nearer I am to death, the prettier I look”, she smiled.

He sliced as hard as he could, like he was butchering a wild boar for a feast of monarchs.

No blood dripped from her: only dead flesh which seemed to creep into the wound like melted butter.

Camilla threw Cedric against the stairs, knocking Trixie down. The succubus beast menaced towards them, dragging her pale nails across the wood railing every inch she walked.

Trixie yelled to Cedric “Cmon god dammit! Get up!”

She pulled him up by the collar and dragged him up a couple of steps while Camilla seemingly enjoyed their efforts to escape. The gamier, the tastier, she thought.

Trixie and Cedric bashed open the door with all her might, slamming it shut behind them.

Cedric looked around and yelled, “Here help me get this in front of the door!”

Both of them pushed the fridge up against the door for all the good it would do for them.

“Let’s get out of here already”, Trixie stated.

She yanked Cedric towards the front door.

Down below, Camilla regretted waiting too long to make her move. In her lust to get a more gamy-tasting meal she now not only might miss her meal, but dawn would be creeping over the horizon rather swiftly. She walked back to the body of Gilchrist with the aim of using the poker to pry the door ajar.

A gleam of light caught her eye. From her standing position it looked like a watch of some sort on the inside of his black jacket. She leaned down to inspect him more personally. A dozen fleas jumped out of his woodwork and onto her arm. She hastily swatted them away, likening her dark immortality to angelic status and unyielding to the tenets of dogs and ruffians. But there was something else. A faint murmur of voice perhaps, or of something mechanized, like a mechanical bird with broken gears. She heard a “tick…tick” sound emanating from the rotting body of Gilchrist. She pulled the jacket off completely, hurling it to one side. Beneath the jacket’s exterior was a tattooed ogre of an individual with the express purpose of murder and mayhem. Her own purposes were much more deific, she thought, and light years beyond this dog of a man. She turned him over. Wrapped around a ticking watch was a coiled, beige cord that spiraled repeatedly around his waist like a phone cord, along with two tightly packed sticks of what looked like rolled up…nickels, she thought. A note fell out of the inside pocket of the jacket and onto the floor. Camilla picked it up, unfolded it and read it.

“
Meet us tomorrow at the agreed spot. Bring the goods. We should only need one stick but bring more just in case. Make sure the timer works this time or we’ve fucked it up again
”.

It wasn’t hard for Camilla to immediately put it together; however the timer had been prematurely set as soon as the she had speared the leather beast, inadvertently setting the timer for AM in lieu of PM.

Her black heart seemed to immediately turn to stone as the timer ticked down: “five…four…three…”

In a flurry of panic and regret she dashed towards the window, sending battered boxes flying everywhere as she crudely shifted forms from a hot-tempered debt collector into a winged succubus of plague and disease. Time slowed down as she leapt towards the window, sending shards of smoked glass to the ground. The basement exploded in a vortex of splinted timber, dried paint and melted lunchboxes with No.2 pencils launched in seemingly contradictory directions as Camilla flapped her dark wings to escape the maelstrom of light and heat. On the front yard lie satchels, thermoses and wrapped pastries that were decades-old, given by overzealous mothers who wished solitude from their boisterous children. Small clusters of fire pelted the lawn like meteorites. The smell of burnt, plastic lunchboxes permeated the air.

Camilla flew faster and faster, not looking back.

“Safe” she thought.

Her secret was now out in the open, broadcasted by a circus of fire and light…with Trixie as ringmaster. She would eventually repay, no matter the cost.

No sooner that she thought of what she would say to her husband about her stepdaughter’s treachery that she noticed her dark wings smoking as they caught the rays of Earth’s early gaze as it unzipped itself upon the cloudy sky. She screeched a high-pitched scream as holes started to pepper her wings from the power of the titanic sun. The wind joined the sun’s rape upon her seeming corruption as it blew through the holes forming in her wings like hail on soggy bread. Camilla plummeted to the earth in a cataclysm of bellowing curses and misfired enchants.

Camilla not only thought of Trixie, but police sirens, lunchboxes and bizarre explanations as she fell from the cloudy sky. She cursed them all, but especially Trixie, a girl who relished the averageness of her life and the absence of conflict, except that conflict that launched and perished with Camilla.

The judgment of the earth had yanked her perverted form out of the sky, ordering her velocity towards a suburban pool turned to ice from the blizzard elements.  She hit the ice with a fleshly thump as her wings flailed around atop the frozen summer reprieve; its tiny shards of ice stabbing through her unholy wings and cutting through vile artery and bone.

“The…little…snitch”, she murmured as she lay atop her frosty grave, bleeding and burned by the light’s disapproval. A heavy stench of burning pervaded the area.

Cedric held Trixie’s hand tightly as the walked towards his home five blocks away. The storm had seemed to leave as soon as it arrived. Trixie looked over at Cedric, wiping away her tears.

“Cedric what am I going to do now?”

“We’ll take it one step at a time. We’ll go to my parents. They’re won’t hurt you. Then we’ll go to the police, and we’ll call your dad.” he said reassuringly.

“He is in Toronto. I don’t even know if he knew about her. Like really, really know for certain? He had to know, right?”

“Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was hoping for some miracle cure for her craziness, who knows.” Cedric quipped.

She sighed and said, “My life is so insane. It always has been. Just filled with insanity.”

Cedric shook his head.

“I’ll tell you what is insane…letting that sorry excuse for a human being get to you when she is dead and six feet under. That’s insane.”

Trixie smiled and kissed him.

Within seconds, four Montreal police cars raced by them toward the burning sanctuary of Camilla and the many children she seduced and perversely buried under the cellar. The children would be found, she hoped, and given proper graves and rites. The walls of Camilla’s hidden Jericho had been blown down not by a trumpet, but by the light of discovery.

In the days that followed, there would be long and arduous explanations given to detectives, neighbors, and her dad, who would return from his duties to a home of ashes and demonic failure. If there was any justice in Heaven, Camilla’s dark brethren would meet the same fate as her. Trixie thought that whatever the result of all of this, she would not let what happened tonight cloud her season of joy, as she was now free of the iron shackles that Camilla had snapped upon her. Time would tick by and things would get better, as the tide always changes, and the seasons rarely blessed the same fate twice.

“Sometimes you have to set your Self free, Trixie”, he said encouragingly.

She took out the second finch from her coat pocket and released it into the air. The finch flew up to a nearby telephone pole and looked down on her longingly.