Read At the Twilight's Last Gleaming Online

Authors: David Bischoff

Tags: #Paranormal Romance

At the Twilight's Last Gleaming (2 page)

BOOK: At the Twilight's Last Gleaming
12.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

I knew that he was Death but I yearned for this Death.

I ached for it.

CHAPTER ONE

I
LOVE THE night.

I hate to go to sleep and I hate to wake up. This is true even now, decades later.

But today was The Day, and when my alarm rang, I didn’t bash at the thing with horror, nor did I burrow under my blankets in denial.

No, today was The Day.

I sprang out of bed. The bathroom tile was cold on my feet, but Dad had fixed the water heater so that my shower was scalding. I scrubbed myself hard with Ivory soap and washed my hair in Head and Shoulders shampoo. Washed, rinsed, washed again. The hot water sluiced across my scalp and long black hair. Every speck of dandruff had to be banished.

Today was the day.

Black was my color today.

Black felt right.

Not that I hadn’t been wearing black every day for a while.

Mourning? No.

Attitude? A statement? Well, maybe. Goodness knows, Joan Baez wore black in those days. All those other mournful ‘60s “Michael Row the Boat ashore” folk singers who had come out from the gloom of coffee shops and into the glare of concert halls and TV studios wore black.

And while every other suburban American household in 1968 had a color TV, the Williams home of early 1968 still had an old RCA vacuum tube black-and-white dinosaur chained in the basement.

So maybe it was kind of like a protest.

I still wear black.

I don’t know. Sure, black clothing hides some of the lumpiness of my figure, which is good.

But as I think back, back all those years, maybe it would best to be there.

To be Rebecca Williams of 1968 again.

Rebecca Williams then — but I should remain Rebecca of now when I think I should explain something.

How do I do that? How do I journey back all those decades to when I was young.

First I shall dress in black.

Okay. Now I close my eyes. Click my emerald — oops! — black slippers.

And here I am again, looking into that 1968 mirror.

Mostly, when I looked in the mirror back then, with my long black hair and my black eyelashes and my big nose and my big mouth, I didn’t see Rebecca Williams when I wore stylish black. I saw Jane Eyre or Victoria Winters or some other heroine.

But still, somehow, black mostly made me feel like me.

That day, The Day, I combed my hair out quickly and grabbed up my schoolbooks. Then I put the small package in my book bag, the package with the thing that Harold and I had bought at the store in the new shopping mall in Marlow Heights. I thought, Today is the day.

I examined the ensemble in the mirror. Designer duds. Turtleneck sweater. Black skirt. Black stockings. Black shoes.

Then I thumped down to breakfast.

“Good morning, Morticia,” said my father, peering up from the
Washington Post
.

“Good morning, Gomez,” I said.

I grabbed the box of shredded wheat, pulled out a single brick of frosted cereal and placed it gingerly into the bowl. I stared at all the sugar. I cringed and put the brick back in the box.

“Mom, can I just have a single soft-boiled egg and dry toast?” I asked.

“What’s wrong with cereal?” said my Dad, his brow wrinkling beneath his balding dome.

“Oh, Peter, don’t worry. I was just going to make one for myself,” said my mother, wrapping her bathrobe around her midsection and going to the stove.

The newspaper crinkled over the eggs and bacon as my father leaned over to my brother, “Oh, these annoying diets, eh, Donald? Can’t these women see that they’re beautiful just the way they are?”

Donald just shrugged and stared morosely into his Captain Crunch cereal. Donald was in ninth grade and was learning bad sleeping habits too.

“Don’t torture yourself, Gomez,” I said. “That’s my job.”

Dad chuckled wryly as he always did when I used that line. He always set himself up for it. Dad’s heroes weren’t comics, they were straight men. Bud Abbott, Dean Martin, and the king of them all, George Burns. Sometimes Dad calls mom Gracie.

“The Addams Family again,” said Donald. “I hate that show.”

With a single black and white cyclops chained in the basement, TV had lately been a bone of contention in the Williams household. My father called the basement the battle dungeon.

As my mother bustled over the stuff, and my brother munched his cereal, I pulled out the comics section from the paper to check out today’s
Peanuts
.

I glimpsed a headline.

“More nasty stuff in Vietnam,” I said pointedly.

“It will be handled,” my father said stiffly. “It’s a ticklish situation, but it will be handled.”

My father was a colonel in the United States Air Force. He was stationed down the road at Andrews Air Force Base. I’ve always been proud of my father. He served in the Korean War, and had been a career officer ever since. But I read the paper and watched the news and listened to the radio, and I was starting to agree with all the people who weren’t happy about this undeclared war.

I held my tongue. I turned to the comics and read
Peanuts
. Lucy was psychoanalyzing Charlie Brown for five cents. I wondered what Lucy would say to me about what I was going to do later this afternoon. Unquestionably she’d charge me more than five cents.

“Mom,” I said. “What time is dinner tonight? I’m going to stay after school a bit.”

“I can make it seven, I guess,” she said. “What, no Dark Shadows, Bec?”

Dark Shadows, I should explain, was a half-hour weekday afternoon soap opera with ghosts and witches and a heart-throbby vampire named Barnabas Collins.

“I can get the plot details from friends,” I said. “Or you could tell me, brother.”

“I don’t watch soap operas,” said Donald.

“I keep on telling you, you’d like it. You like sci fi…”

“Science fiction.”

“You like science fiction. They’ve got time travel in
Dark Shadows
.”

“Time travel and vampires,” said Dad. “Bit of a mishigosh, if you ask me.”

I ignored him. “It’s really very well done and rather thrilling,” I said, with my nose in the air and a snooty upper class attitude – something I do rather well after my time in England.

“Time travel, huh?” said Donald.

“Goodness knows what’s going to happen next,” I said. “It just started out as a Gothic. Victoria Winters comes to Collinwood manor. Then months later…a ghost. A few more months….an Egyptian curse. A few more months…a vampire….”

I enunciated the word with a kind of awe and reverence.

“And a most remarkable vampire. A rare and beautiful vampire of great distinction,” I said.

There was silence.

I looked up.

Mom had turned from her work at the stove.

Dad’s half-frame glasses had swiveled my way.

Now his dark serious eyes were peering at me over them. Even Donald was looking at me in a startled way, his cheek bulging with cereal.

“A thespian,” said Dad. “We have a thespian in our midst.”

I was startled.

“Very nicely put,” said Mom.

“Drama queen!” said Donald, but there was a new kind of respect in his eyes.

I blushed. “I guess I get kind of carried away.”

“Gotta watch this show sometime,” said Dad. “Sounds like they really chew the scenery, huh?”

“Pardon me,” I said, trying to stay in character to hide my alarm, hoping they would change the subject.

“Chewing the scenery,” said Mom, who always acted as Dad’s interpreter, since Dad seldom stopped to explain himself. “That usually means ‘overacting’, but I believe your father means extravagantly entertaining acting.”

She put down my toast and soft-boiled egg in front of me. Steam rose up into my face.

“You bet!” I said, suddenly plain old Rebecca Williams again.

I studied them for a moment, wondering if they had guessed what was up with me, why I wasn’t coming home that day.

But their own preoccupations had closed back in and I was just an egg-sucking piece of the family furniture again.

My secret was safe.

For now.

CHAPTER TWO

H
ERE’S WHAT YOU do if you’re Rebecca Williams of 1968 and you need to get to Crossland Senior High School.

You put on your padded jacket with the hood. It’s January and it’s cold outside. You step out into the gray day. Be careful as you negotiate your way down Ludlow Drive — ice patches on the macadam!

Then you hook a left down onto Acton Road, trying not to fall on your tail as you slip and slide down the hill to where Acton bisects Henderson Road.

There you wait for the school bus.

A gaggle of students were already there at the bus stop. Plumes of breath misted above their heads. The scene had a mournful quality about it, as though the crowd was waiting for a black hearse on a one way trip to the graveyard instead of a bright yellow school bus on the first day of the rest of their lives.

The sky seemed buttoned down tight over the world, like a cheap coffin lid. The humid Washington, D.C., area weather nipped at my face, and I could almost taste the salt that had been dumped to clear the snow and ice on this important road. The drifts of snow had been herded back from the asphalt and now stood grimy and gritty, like sentinels on the way to Mordor.

The moroseness of this daily winter scene always suited me. It matched the gleeful melancholy of my adolescence. Yet somehow today I felt at odds with it all. I didn’t feel one bit morose or depressed or even a tad bit gloomy. I was excited. But I hid it all beneath my usual scowl.

No one bothered me. I didn’t talk much with my peers in the neighborhood. It was one of those suburban neighborhoods that had sprung up in the early fifties along with the baby boom, and the kids had grown up together. Dad had moved our family to the area last summer after he’d been stationed at Andrews Air Force Base. And so Donald and I were the interlopers here, the strangers. Moving around the country and around the world with your family sounds like a grand adventure — on paper. In fact, it’s pretty hard to make new friends and then lose them after a year or two as you move on to the next assignment.

“Hey, Bill,” I said. “Hello, Susan. Hello, Janet.”

I smiled my usual wan smile. Perhaps if I’d been much younger, we’d be best pals now, since children tend to be indiscriminate about playmates. But they already had busy lives. And while they were polite, I’d never really clicked with any of them.

The old beaten yellow beast that is the Number 54 school bus chugged up, spouting dingy plumes of exhaust. It lurched to a squealing stop in front of us. I pulled myself up with the handrail and made my way down the aisle.

When he rode it, Harold Lumpkin always sat at the back of the bus. Being politically involved, he claimed it was in solidarity with Southern Blacks who had been forced to sit in the backs of buses for decades. In fact, I knew there was another reason. He had a fantasy about what he was going to do one day at the back window, which involved partially baring his backside and pressing it against the glass.

Harold’s parents lived close to the school, but some nights he stayed at his grandparents’ house, which was close to my own house.

When he took the bus, Harold always saved a seat for me.

He scooched over to the window, having warmed up the seat I planned to sit in.

“Hi, Harry,” I said.

“Wow. Harry today? You’re calling me Harry today? Does that mean I can call you Becky?”

“No. The name is Rebecca.”

“Rebecca, not of Sunnybrooke Farm?”

“That’s me.”

“So,” said Harold. “You got it?”

I patted my pack, which was now perched in my lap. “Yes, right in here.”

“I still can’t believe you bought it.”

“I do what I need to do, Harry.”

Harry blinked at me through his thick black glasses.

Harry Lumpkin was my best friend.

Well, Harry was my best friend here in Maryland anyway. I had other friends from the past that I wrote to. Girls from various ages of my past. But lately I hadn’t been able to connect much with other girls here, and I didn’t want to get too much into the cliques at Crossland. Harold Lumpkin was the kind of smart nerd that carried a slide-rule around with him, and had pens and pencils neatly tucked into the pocket of his Sears shirt. He was like my brother and I understood him, so he was easy to talk to. I picked him up the third day on the bus into school, when I saw him with the new issue of Analog Science Fiction and Science Fact tucked neatly into the band around his school books. From the first talk I made it very clear to him that it was a no-touch relationship. He was simply a member of my exclusive club. I could cherish him and he could adore me, but only as friends. Anything else, I assured him, would destroy what we had.

BOOK: At the Twilight's Last Gleaming
12.59Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Shades of Blood by Young, Samantha
Waiting for Ty by King, Samantha Ann
Mistress Murder by Bernard Knight
The Land's Whisper by Monica Lee Kennedy
¡Pobre Patria Mía! by Marcos Aguinis
Cain by José Saramago