Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (35 page)

I am sitting with my microscope by the window, with some creek water on a glass slide, trying to adjust the microscope’s mirror so it catches the sun and illuminates the amoebas and protozoans and things.

“Down there at your girlfriend’s house,” she says. “Your wonderful Mrs. Popkin.”

There are four lenses on a revolving nosepiece that magnify 4x, 10x, 40x, and 100x. I turn my lenses and then I look into the tube and adjust the focus. All I can see is a gray, swimmy blur that feels like a hair on my eyeball.

“I could hear that little girl screaming all the way up here,” Mother says. “Screaming like she was out of her mind.”

The proper way to focus a microscope is to start with the lowest-power objective lens first and, while looking from the side, crank the lens down as close to the specimen as possible without touching it. Now look through the eyepiece and turn the focus knob upward until the image is sharp.

“She must be a really terrific mother, your Mrs. Popkin,” Mother says. “Did she eventually kill the child? What’s that girl’s name? Cecille?

“You sure came running home awfully fast, didn’t you?” she says. Mother is so happy. I don’t think I have seen her this happy in a long time. “Maybe your boring old home and your boring old mom aren’t so bad after all!”

I believe I have located a ciliated protozoan, which looks like a
transparent grain of rice. It’s got three black round spots inside it that almost look like a face, eyes nose mouth. A ghost going: “Ooooooh.”

O
ne night there was a dream where I went down to the creek by the Popkin house.

It was the clearing where Karen and I used to play, where we saw the crab apple with
Amanita virosa
mushrooms growing underneath it and the creek is deep where it curves into a meander pool beside the tree. And in my dream, there was Mrs. Popkin bathing in the creek pool. She was standing in the water up to her waist but I could see that she was naked. Her skin very buttery white and nipples on her breasts pink like a cat’s tongue.

The only women I have ever seen nude are the women in actual art, in encyclopedia entries about, for example, Botticelli.

Except that in Botticelli the lady is gentle and dreamy-eyed, and in my dream Mrs. Popkin looked up and saw me standing there in the clearing and she was not gentle at all. Her expression was cold and fierce and my legs were frozen from the force of her gaze. It threaded through my bones in a thin, quivering line, like a noise so high-pitched it was almost inaudible, and I could feel my arms and legs getting thinner and tighter and shrinking away. I could feel my face narrowing and my vocal cords shutting off. My ears grew long and I was running away, and dogs or teenagers were chasing me, and I was running home and then my mother bent down and grabbed me by my long ears and yanked me up.

“Gotcha!” she said, and then I woke up.

This is not a dream that you would tell to anyone, not ever, but I couldn’t help but think of it again when Mrs. Popkin came out of the house.

C
ecilia kicked Bernard, and Bernard went down on all fours hollering and vomited up an amoeba of milk and cereal. Cecilia fell onto his back and began to try to rip up his shirt with her clawed fingers.
She was biting him. Screaming. She was small and thin and Bernard was bulky and big for his age, but he was the one who was crying for his mom.

I just stood there over them. I watched them rolling around on the ground, Cecilia clawing into Bernard like someone drowning.

“You guys,” I said.

And then Mrs. Popkin came out of the door.

She had that look on her face, the way that her green eyes looked in my dream, the kind of glare that could go straight through metal, that could disintegrate you so that your cells fell into a mass of wriggling protozoans.

“Cecilia,” she said.

“Bernard,” she said.

Just those two words.

And I didn’t turn and run but I did leave, I left as silently and stealthily as possible. I didn’t ever want to hear my name spoken in that voice, the kind of voice that stripped your name down to shivering bones.

O
h, Todd
, my mother used to say.
Will I always be lonely?
This was back when she was at her worst, back when we were good friends, back when she thought we should commit suicide together.
Oh, Todd, I am so afraid that I will always be alone like this. Do you think I will always be lonely?

I don’t know
, I’d said, but now I find myself thinking about it.

Will I always be lonely?
I think, and maybe the answer is yes.

I think of Karen, gone almost a year now, Karen who I loved; and I think of my mother, and how much I loved her back when I was seven or eight, how I would have gladly died with her back then; and I think of Mrs. Popkin, who seems so pretty and interesting, and how I will sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee and pretend that something is happening.

Some kind of relationship. We talk about books, and our philosophies of life, and she tells me about her childhood and maybe I can someday tell her a little about mine.

I don’t know.
Will I always be
 . . . I don’t know what I’m doing wrong . . .
lonely?

I
am sitting here at the window of my bedroom and it is almost midnight and Cecilia is still screaming.

“Ivan! Ivan! Ivan, I love you I am sorry I love you I am sorry . . .”
And it is pretty steady, her voice is hoarse but she doesn’t seem like she’s ready to give up.

If Ivan is dead, his eyes will no longer be the distinctive magenta color associated with albino animals. The eyes of an albino animal appear red because the color of the red blood cells in the retina shows through where there is no pigment to obscure it.

I can feel my mother standing in my doorway.

“Quite a set of lungs on that girl,” she says.

Once we do what we must, it’s over. It’s done. And then, like my mom says, the Lord gives us a new day.

And I wake up to Todd’s mother and my mother talking in the kitchen, and Todd sitting on the end of my bed, staring at Ivan. Ivan is standing on his hind legs, standing right next to my head, right next to the Bundle as if he’s guarding it, and he and Todd are having a stare-off. Todd looks like he wants to say something but he can’t. His mother is laughing loudly at something. The kitchen is directly beneath us.

We can see stripes of them through the vent. Their cigarette smoke curls up through the chipped slats.

Todd: My mom wanted me to give you this.

Action: he hands me an envelope and inside is a card, a picture of a mouse holding a blue umbrella in a rain shower. It says:
HEARD YOU WERE UNDER THE WEATHER.

Todd: She has a card for everything.

Inside the card are two dollars and a poem about getting well soon.

Todd: She said we better check on you.

Me: Thank you.

Action: my mother laughs at something Todd’s mom says, and then they both laugh and they are getting along and Todd’s mom starts to talk about Todd’s screaming fits, how he would howl! Screaming his head off about nothing!

“About me hanging a new set of drapes while he slept,” she says. “About the sound his lamp made when it was off. It was a good lamp. And he buried it! I saw him doing it from the top-floor window and I dug it back up. No damage. I’ve never heard it talk, but Todd . . . ha-ha-ha . . . he swears it murmurs!”

Mom: Murmurs?

Todd’s mom: Isn’t that Todd all over? Murmurs! His vocabulary!

Action: Todd is staring straight at me and I am staring straight at him and there is light falling from a side window that hits his eyelashes in a way that makes them look white. For a moment there is red-eye, a red eclipse, and then normal eyes.

Human eyes. They blink at me.

And now the two mothers are talking about last night’s screaming.

More jolly laughing coming up the vent.

I say to Todd this: We don’t mention it.

Todd: No.

I sit up and he sees it, the Bundle I have kept under my pillow the way Mom told me to.
Keep it warm all night long
, she told me.
My good brave girl.

We are sitting there together on the bed in her room, Cecilia and I, and Ivan is right there in the bed with her, wearing his little blue sweater. He stands on his hind legs and his nose works up and down like he is trying to send me a message in code.

“Hi, Ivan,” I say.

It’s a relief. After all that screaming, I was sure that Ivan was dead. Butchered. I don’t want to believe that Mrs. Popkin would do such a thing, but last night it was all I could think of.
Mawmaw’s stew,
Bernard said, and then Cecilia screaming Ivan’s name. I didn’t want to believe it could happen, but I have seen the kinds of things that mothers will do.
For your own good
, they will say.
To teach you a lesson.
Knowing that you can’t stop loving them. Even now, the sound of her laughter downstairs is musical.

“Are you feeling better now?” I say. And Cecilia makes her lips very small.

I guess that this probably means “no.”

“We don’t mention it,” she says.

“No,” I say, at long last.

It’s so weird to sit in a girl’s room on her bed, especially when the girl is in it. I watch as she turns and gazes out the window, and then I think that
gaze
might be a word, like
murmur
, that my mother and Mrs. Popkin would laugh at.

“Where are your brothers?” I say. “It’s so quiet in the house.”

Cecilia shrugs and she looks at me for a second and I stare down at my knees.

“They’re not even my brothers,” she says after a long time. “Not really. Every time we move somewhere, my mom finds a new one. She likes boys better than girls.”

“Oh,” I say.

I watch as she shifts the lumpy package under her covers like
she’s trying to make it comfortable. It’s wrapped tight as a mummy, with a blanket turbaned around and around it. A stuffed animal, I guess. But then I think I see it move beneath its swaddling, and I watch Ivan smell it and put his ears down flat.

For just a moment she pulls back a flap of blanket, and I imagine I see a mouth, a wet tongue clutched between teeth. Then she covers it quickly and our mothers’ laughter comes rising up again through the vent.

“S
he’s not half-bad,” my mother says as we are walking home. She swings the clear plastic grocery bag that Mrs. Popkin gave her back and forth, forth and back. “I don’t mind her.”

“Mmm,” I say.

“She’s funny. She has a nice sense of humor.”

I nod.

“I can see why you have a crush on her,” my mother says.

“No, I don’t,” I say.

She smiles. In the grocery bag, I can see a package wrapped up in aluminum foil, a little smaller than a baby, but it seems to have about the same weight.

My mother whistles for a little while, and then stops whistling.

“So,” she says. “Guess what we’re having for dinner tonight?”

Three days later. Standing on a chair next to the stove, pouring a box of elbow macaroni into a pot of boiling water. And then a second box.

“Cecilia,” Mom says. “Get me my cigarettes.”

She is making balls of meat with her hands.
The catchall grind
, she calls it. Into the metal funnel of the silver grinder screwed hard onto the kitchen table. Rough-chop your meat scraps, throw in
anything else you want, salt the hell out of it, let it sit, and run it through.

Throw in the meat, all kinds, torn-up stale bread, leftover pancakes, mashed potatoes, oatmeal, peeled-off chicken skin. Layering everything just so.

“Well. Todd’s not hers,” Mom says. “She got him somewhere.”

Into a small frying vat she drops a test ball of catchall. She eats one raw.

On the radio, singing is interrupted by static. Then a signal. Mom walks toward the radio, picking something out of her mouth. “Tickles,” she says, and keeps trying to grab whatever is there, which seems to be moving quickly down her throat. She coughs into her palm.

“Hair,” she says.

The warning signal stops. It is only a Test of the Emergency Broadcast System, the man on the radio says. If it was a real emergency, there would be better instructions.

Mom says: “When it’s done, you’ll run a covered dish up to Todd and his mom.”

And until it is done, I am free. Go. There is a part of grinding catchall that no one is allowed to see. The part Mom calls
the binder
. What is it?

Mom turns from the stove and looks at me and even now I love how beautiful she is. Could have been a pinup girl, she’s done the pose for me, Mom asking me do I know why she looks so good?

Because she never had any natural children.

Around dinnertime, Cecilia Popkin shows up at our door with a covered dish. “Just some meatballs and sauce and elbow macaroni,” she tells my mom.

It has been three days since I spoke to Cecilia, and she doesn’t look at me. She just stands there at the door like a little girl who delivers a package in a play. “My mom said to tell you that it would go good with that bread she made,” she says.

“Oh, how nice,” my mother says. That bread! When I first saw the bread that Mrs. Popkin made, it was wrapped up in aluminum foil and it was in a clear plastic grocery bag. I watched the bag swinging back and forth in my mom’s loose hand, the foil glinting, and I had the terrible image of a skinned naked rabbit inside of it, I thought of Cecilia screaming and her mom with a knife. Not Ivan, at least, I thought—just one of the others. But I definitely imagined that when Mother undid the foil, we’d see the glistening pink muscle, the feet and hands and head removed.

I think my mom had thought that too, because when she unwrapped it she seemed disappointed. It was just a loaf of brown bread. The shape of the bread was a
little
like a rabbit, I thought, a hiding rabbit with its ears tucked down and its body held close.