The Falstaff Vampire Files (2 page)

Many questions and so far no answers.

“He’s amazing. I love him so much.” She began to smile, and her face took on a just-got-engaged glow, the fear vanishing for once.

“Yes? Go on.” I smiled back and nodded encouragingly, noting the “he” and shuffled the latent lesbian theory to the back of the pack.

Why she was so drawn to this group of people? Could they truly be dangerous? Her fear and isolation worried me. I kept wanting to make a joke to break down some of the tension. But that was my own way to deal with anxiety, not hers. She needed me to pay attention, to listen for clues.

Mina crouched on the edge of the sofa nearest me, as if for protection against invisible enemies. She didn’t seem to belong to the Goth or vampire-fan subculture. No pale make up, visible tattoos, dark lipstick or antique black clothing—at least not when I saw her. Of course she did come to her therapy directly from her administrative assistant job at a business school in the Financial District.

She seemed pathetically grateful when I took her delusion seriously. She showed no signs of paranoia beyond her conviction that she was both drawn to and threatened by a clutch of vampires. I looked up the plural.

I found it sad when she praised the beauty of the thin women in the vampire group as compared to her own voluptuous figure. Mina could not accept how lushly attractive she was. She had glossy brown hair and blue eyes. I did mention that no matter what vampires may think, her sort of hourglass figure is greatly admired by many men of the human persuasion.

It wouldn’t be ethical to talk about my own life to her, but I wish I could have told Mina that even though I’m in my 40s with streaks of gray in my hair and rounded hips and belly, way larger than this culture’s ideal, I managed to attract a handsome man nearly fifteen years younger. Sometimes I wanted to bring my boyfriend in and show him off and say, “See, it’s possible. Some men do enjoy a woman with an abundant figure.”
Zaftig
was the word my lover used when conducting an appreciative inventory.

But Mina surprised me with her positive news. She leaned close enough to whisper, glancing around as if someone might overhear her. “The vampires still frighten me, but I’m so much in love, so proud to be getting married.”

“What’s he like?”

Mina sat back on the sofa and stared, unseeing, at some of the fanciful prints I’d framed on the walls. “He’s tall and athletic, but he likes my body the way it is. He says I’m
zaftig
.”

I laughed. “Ah. Do you know what that word means?”

“Juicy,” she said with a blush, and we both laughed.

“He’s very passionate.” She laughed again, blushing even more. It was the first time she had laughed since we began our sessions. I scribbled briefly on my tablet. “He’s smart and funny. He was born and raised here, but he went to school back East. He’s got a great job but he can’t talk about much because it involves some government stuff. It takes him abroad sometimes.”

Several red flags popped up about the fiancé in that statement. The “great job” shouldn’t be mysterious. Mina admitted to problems sometimes telling reality from illusion. Could this man be lying to her about the government job? I noted questions to deal with later.

The smile faded and Mina tensed, leaning forward again. “The only thing that frightens me is that he wants so badly to be one of them. The vampires, I mean. I’m not sure if he wants power, or if he just wants to be immortal. He’s an older man. He’s thirty-five.”

I sat back just a little, partly to keep from smiling more, remembering my own twenties when thirty-five had seemed impossibly old to me. Now, in my late forties, it seems impossibly young. Scratch that. I happened to be dating—well, sleeping with—a thirty-five-year-old man, so I couldn’t call it impossibly young.

“His name is Henry Roy.” She smiled, happy to say his name.

It became very hard to breathe in my office at that moment. Henry Roy was the name of my own thirty-five-year-old lover. Everyone called him Hal.

“Everyone calls him Hal,” Mina said.

Chapter 4

Hal Roy’s spoken notes

silver flash drive/voice recorder

undated

I came to live in my aunt’s house
by the ocean when I was fifteen and in a state of shock from my parents’ death in a plane crash. Aunt Reba wanted to be kind to me, but she was constitutionally unable to pay attention for more than sixty seconds to anything except herself. Whenever she remembered me she would look up from her
Chronicle
and say, “Poor Hal, you must be sad. I’m sorry that you don’t have any friends here in the city to play with. Look, Nordstrom’s is having a spring shoe sale!”

They’d taken me out of school and the semester was nearly over, so I was at loose ends.

I gravitated to the back yard. It sloped down toward a collapsing fence through which you could see the long drop to the coast road and beyond that, the ocean. The ideal place to smoke cigarettes and drink the odd beer or whatever I could steal from my aunt. My excuse was Aunt Reba never gave me any cash. Even when I asked for bus fare she managed to forget before she gave it to me. I didn’t need much money because I didn’t know anyone in San Francisco to help me obtain the drugs that had been so readily available at my prep school.

The shed challenged me because it was locked up so tight. There wasn’t a window or a crack or a loose board you could pry out to even look in. I hammered at the windows with a rock, but I couldn’t even dent the metal that reinforced them. Barely even chipped off a little of the old green paint.

The summer fogs off the ocean turned the garden into a strange, cemetery-like place. I stayed out of my aunt’s way and got my own meals. She didn’t seem to notice. But I watched the shed when she wasn’t around and discovered one night that the padlock had been opened and hung in the hasp. The shed was empty except for some dusty lawn tools stored there, including a huge, empty box. Sudden, inexplicable terror grabbed me and squeezed the curiosity right out of me. I didn’t stick around to find out more.

The next day I casually walked around the shed and found it sealed up tight, the padlock solidly closed.

I had to find out what was in there.

Chapter 5

Mina Murray’s journal,

red digital voice recorder

August 4
th

I don’t know if Kristin believes me
about the vampires, but I trust her and talking to her helps. She makes me feel safe in a way no one has since my mother died. Therapists aren’t supposed to talk about themselves, but she did say that her mother had died young like mine did. I feel like she understands me.

Hal is like a star to me. I loved him from the first time he spoke to me. He’s so brilliant and funny and sexy. Knowing he’s chosen me, even though I’m not educated or thin or sophisticated, makes me feel happy. I don’t feel secure, though. Not even since he proposed. It’s the vampire thing. He didn’t start to talk about it or introduce me to his vampire-crazy friends until after we fell in love. He trusts me, and I have to trust him.

Hal seems to be waiting for me to see something—I just don’t know what. Maybe he’s the one who should be in therapy, but he’d never go. If only Hal would at least talk to Kristin. He could use some of her wisdom. I worry about what he’s doing with those vampires, and she could help me protect him. I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Kristin.

Chapter 6

Kristin Marlowe’s typed notes

August 4th continued

I was going to have to refer Mina
to another therapist. Talk about a conflict of interest! I somehow got through the session and I walked her through the garden and out onto Clement Street. I usually walk guests in and out, just to double check that the gate is closed and firmly locked. We live in a nice neighborhood, but it’s also a big city.

The next time I talked with Mina she was going to be very angry.

I drew in several deep breaths of cold, damp air, hoping to clear my head. I closed the wooden gate and stood with my back against it for a moment. The gate was set into the eight-foot-tall wooden fence that ran from the corner of Vi’s house right on the sidewalk on Clement Street. No front yards in this part of San Francisco. Every square foot of land was precious. Vi’s front door was three steps up from the pavement.

I wouldn’t say anything till I confirmed it with Hal. But my gut told me Mina’s fiancé was my Hal. She had shyly showed me the exotic blue diamond engagement ring Hal had found for her in some Eastern European capital, and as I leaned forward to look, I noted that I had been touching the antique amethyst necklace Hal had brought back for me from his last trip. I dropped my hand as if the stones had turned red-hot. Damn it, Hal!

Now my hands were shaking. I wondered if I could make it through the next hour, the next client—and even though it was a quarter till the appointed hour he rang the buzzer.

“Hi Kris, I’m early.”

Luther Kemper was the absolute worst client to follow Mina’s announcement. In his mid-sixties, casually conservative, with an immaculately barbered gray beard, he may have been recommended to me because of my writing about loving one’s body at all sizes. He had married an opera singer, fifteen years older. In recent years she had lost interest in sex and he was looking for romance, without the inconvenience and expense of getting a divorce. I asked if he wanted a referral to a sex therapist. He said no thanks, but he kept coming to therapy—probably to complain. The term hasn’t made it into any diagnostic manual, but essentially Luther was a whiner.

I sat down and took notes to make myself focus while Luther described his latest personal ad offering a no-strings relationship to a spectacularly unimpressed female population.

Chapter 7

Mina Murray’s journal

red digital voice recorder

August 4th continued

Right after my session with Kristin
I went over to Hal’s place. He lives in an old, creepy house on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

He was supposed to meet me there. I was early, but I had a key. Unfortunately so did Hal’s friends, Lucy and Ned. Lucy was one of the reasons I hadn’t moved into the house. The other reason was the shed behind the house.

“Hal went out, said he’d be back soon,” Lucy said as opened the door. She was wearing nothing but sandals and an ankle bracelet. The wood floor must be cold or she’d have ditched the sandals. She didn’t even bother to hide behind the door. Would she sign for courier package deliveries that way? Probably.

She was the palest blonde I had ever seen, very slender, with light green eyes, blue veins visible under her thin skin. At first I wondered if she was trying to seduce me, or steal Hal from me in front of everyone. Then I realized that Lucy only paid attention to other people when she wanted something from them. The rest of the time she amused herself by shocking anyone she could. Lately that had been me.

Ned wasn’t so bad. As usual he sat on the sofa in Hal’s front room. Sometimes he sketched on a little pad. Today he bent over a comically wafer-sized laptop computer. Ned was a very big, hairy guy. His headphones disappeared into a mop of wiry black hair. He had gentle blue eyes, very pale skin and a thick beard that ran up the sides of his face to meet his sideburns. As he tapped away on the keyboard, a jagged line on the screen indicated the audio tracks he was playing that we could not hear.

He wore jeans and a black T-shirt with purple-and-red calligraphy.

“What’s Atrocity Museum?”

He shifted the headphones away from one ear. “My band.”

“I thought it was Recreational Paranoia.”

“You remembered!” He seemed surprised and touched that anyone would. “I changed it.”

I examined the T-shirt again. “I think I like the new one better.”

Ned smiled serenely, nodded and resettled the headphones.

Hal called Ned’s band “Dork Shadows,” even to his face. Ned didn’t seem to care. But he never invited us to hear his band play any gigs, and I never met any other band members. I wondered if the band even existed outside of his audio files.

Ned did look up to watch Lucy embrace me and hold my face an inch from hers so I could look into her pale green eyes.

“You look uncomfortable, Mina.” Lucy looked down at her slender body, firm, small breasts, narrow waist, hips and thighs, and a slight trace of nearly invisibly pale pubic hair. She laughed. “I’ll put on clothes just for you. Ned doesn’t mind if I’m naked, do you, Ned?”

Ned looked up and smiled slightly. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Or don’t.” He smiled at his own pun and turned back to the computer.

“Mina, you’re missing out on more fun with Hal by being such a stick-up-the-butt.” Lucy grabbed a black turtleneck from the sofa and pulled it over her head. I was absurdly grateful that she had discarded her clothes here rather than in Hal’s bedroom.

The twinge of jealousy hit me like an actual knife-stabbing pain. When Hal asked me to marry him, he promised I would be the only woman in his life. I asked about Lucy. He swore that there was nothing between him and Lucy except a yearning for this vampire blood that they shared with Ned and a few other vampire-obsessed people who followed Hal around and went out to the shed behind the house. I didn’t ask details about what happened there. Just looking at the place seized my chest with dread.

I glanced back at Ned. He raised his shaggy head from staring the screen. He watched and seldom spoke. He had been in high school with Hal. Hal told me he came from a prominent family and his full name was Edward J. Harker Poins, but he just seemed quiet and shy.

Lucy wriggled into her tight jeans. She was so slender that she made me feel clumsy and huge, watching her squeeze her thin frame into tiny jeans that wouldn’t have fit over one of my legs. She slipped out of her sandals and pulled on black leather boots.

Her pale eyes looked luminous in the dusk. “It’s going to happen. Hal’s come up with a plan to make us into vampires,” she said. “Hal is going to move the casket out of the shed and threaten to leave it out in the sun if the vampire doesn’t bring us over. Direct sun kills them, you know.” Her voice was thick was excitement.