The Vampire Shrink (24 page)

Vampires really exist. Devereux wasn't role-playing. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge? Where do I put it in my brain? If there are vampires, then I might as well pull up stakes—so to speak—and go work in a fast-food restaurant somewhere, because everything I thought was true, isn't.

I dropped my head back against the cool of the old brick and closed my eyes. The moment I did that, a wave of dizziness swept over me, and I braced myself against the wall, feeling as if the ground had actually moved. I waited, locked my knees to keep upright in the midst of the spinning, and opened my eyes. Everything was subtly different. I blinked a few times to clear my vision but couldn't shake the sense that something was wrong. Something had changed. The darkness was deeper, more textured. The air felt thick and heavy, and was scented with a sweet, coppery aroma. The smell got stronger until I could taste it in the back of my throat, and I gagged.

“Come to me.”

I gasped. The voice was repulsive; it crawled over my skin with slimy fingers. I automatically jerked my head to one side, raising a shoulder to block the sound entering one ear.

What the hell was that? I'm really losing it.
I willed myself not to move.

“Come. Now.”

I couldn't tell if I heard the voice with my physical ears or inside my mind, but it was unlike any I'd ever experienced. It was as if the words attacked my eardrums. The sound split into dissonant octaves again and again, until it filled the entire vibrational spectrum. It reminded me of those experiments where the government used audio frequencies to create madness.

I also had the sense of feeling the voice kinesthetically, of being able to locate places in my body where it resonated, pulsed, invaded. My bones and organs vibrated in time with a powerful rhythm outside of me. The pressure increased as the sound waves echoed around and through me, becoming more painful as they escalated.

“I am here. Come to me, and I will show you miracles. I will grant all your earthly desires.” The voice tore at my ears, repeating the same message over and over.

I covered them with my hands and screamed, “No!”

I felt myself moving away from the wall, as if pulled by a powerful magnet. My stomach tingled and ached and became hypersensitive. I had the bizarre notion that an invisible hand had attached to my midsection, physically compelling me. My head felt fuzzy, my mind disconnected. I couldn't stop myself. I couldn't resist. I walked away from the club into the darkness of the street beyond, the sense of dread and terror growing stronger with every wobbly step.

Then everything went dark.

I woke up in a coffin.

That might sound unpleasant, unsanitary, or maybe creepy to most people, but for me it was my worst nightmare.

This might be a good time to explain my greatest fear.

When I was young I saw an old movie called
Premature Burial
, where—due to a strange illness that caused complete paralysis mimicking death—people were buried before they were dead. The afflicted were put in boxes, placed in holes in the ground, and were very aware of the dirt being piled on top of their supposedly deceased selves. They couldn't communicate their aliveness to any of the grieving mourners, so they slowly suffocated. When the illness was finally discovered and the Unfortunate Buried Alive were dug up, it became clear that at some point in the process the paralysis had worn off, and the bloody fingernails of the Unwillingly Interred gave evidence of their vain attempts to escape. It was a hideous death. I couldn't sleep for weeks after watching that movie.

A psychic later told me that I'd died in a previous life due to being buried alive or maybe drowned or perhaps suffocated with a pillow—just choose one of the air-restricted methods—and that was why the movie had affected me so profoundly. I can't verify the accuracy of my previous causes of death, but I do know that anything dealing with being unable to breathe thrusts me into spasms of terror.

It was perhaps lucky that I didn't know right away that I'd woken up in a coffin. The first thing I noticed was a putrid smell, a unique stench consisting of backed-up sewer, rotted meat, blood, mold, mildew, and death. The smell was so horribly potent that it caused me to become aware of the second thing: it was very dark. The reason the smell triggered me to notice the darkness was because as soon as I got a good whiff of it, my stomach heaved. I tried to sit up, or roll over, because I didn't want to throw up on myself, and I was certain that barf was in my immediate future.

My attempt to sit up caused me to bang my head against an unexpected barrier, which led me to discover there was a ceiling directly above my body. I began to push against it and quickly deduced it was an immovable object, or at least a very heavy one.

Then I panicked.

The feeling of my hands pushing against the resisting material immediately triggered a cellular memory of the aforementioned movie and I started to scream, which shifted my attention away from throwing up. This proved to be very helpful: fear is a powerful motivator. Like the mothers who lift multiton vehicles off their children, imagining myself locked in a box for my ride up the Entry Ramp to Eternity allowed me to become Hulklike in my strength and to force open what turned out to be the bulky lid of an old coffin.

I sat up, still screaming, the sound reverberating off the walls of the small, decrepit building I'd awakened in. A building that smelled extraordinarily bad.

Raising the lid on the coffin allowed me to see the sunlight filtering in through the broken front door. I couldn't tell how much time had passed, but it was obviously daytime. A chunk of my life was missing. I valiantly tried to reconstruct the chain of events that had brought me to this moment, and failed.

I stopped screaming—mostly because it hurt my throat—and let my eyes adjust to the dim light. Being able to see where I was made things worse. Instead of only suspecting I was up shit creek, I now had verification.

The building was an old, run-down mausoleum. Low spots in the cement floor were filled with stagnant, rancid water mixed with blood from several dead bodies. Even in the limited light, it was clear that no one in any state of aliveness could be the color of the remains scattered around that room. The place looked like a human slaughterhouse. Back in a corner were bones and pieces of rotting clothing, which gave evidence to the likelihood that whatever was going on here had been going on for a very long time.

Needless to say, I had to get out.

I assumed that whoever had killed all those people was probably coming back to get me. I didn't have time to think about why I was still alive, why the murderer had left me in the coffin instead of adding me to the collection on the floor. It occurred to me I was probably in shock, which explained the strange fuzzy feeling in my head.

Since the lid of the coffin had only swung back on its hinges and was still standing straight up on one side, I couldn't brace myself by holding on to both edges to lift up. Grabbing the available edge, I put my other hand down alongside my legs and felt it sink into clumps of dirt or sand. As I pulled my knees underneath me, I heard a soft clattering sound as something knocked against the inside of the coffin. I reached my hand out to find what had made the noise and closed my fingers around a long, sticklike thing. I brought it up into the light and found myself in possession of a human bone. I had been lying on top of whoever had been buried in that coffin.

Holy shit!

My stomach lurched again, and I rose to my feet as if pulled by ropes. Looking down, I could clearly see the remains of the original resident. With shaking hands I brushed off as much of the desiccated decomposed material as I could from the rear of my pants and apologized silently to the person I had scattered into the air.

The coffin I was now standing in was situated on a pedestal about three feet off the floor. The area close around it was filled with dead bodies and pools of bloody water. I would have to jump, which under the best of circumstances called on grace I hadn't cultivated, and to jump while wearing four-inch heels would guarantee a painful outcome. But if my choice was to wait in the coffin for the psychopath to return or take my chances with a sprained ankle, I'd choose the sprain anytime.

Since I was far from adept in physical situations, it took me a moment to work out that I could sit on the open edge of the coffin, swing my legs out, and scoot down, then find a small space for the ball of my foot on one of the few dry spaces on the floor and ease myself away from the pedestal.

Kismet, the nerd who flunked gym class in ninth grade.

That's what I did, all the while listening for any sound that would alert me to the return of the monster who'd brought me there.

I walked on tiptoes through the carnage to the door, unable to avoid wading through puddles of slimy, bloody water, and finally reached the stairs leading up to the light. My stomach had been clenched so tightly I'd barely breathed since I left the coffin. I climbed up the stone steps and shoved the door. It swung open on rusty hinges, making that sound always present in horror movies. Then I stepped out into the sunshine and found myself in the middle of an old graveyard.

I heard sounds of traffic nearby and moved in that direction. I kept glancing behind me to see if it had been a trap, if someone—or something—was going to spring out at me from behind one of the huge gravestones and haul me back into the pit of hell, but I was alone.

Doubtless I must have been quite a sight as I walked out of the ornate cast-iron gates of the graveyard and crossed the parking lot of McDonald's.

CHAPTER 13

I
had no idea where I was.

Another beautiful day in Paradise had gotten all dressed up and started without me. The sun beamed almost directly overhead, making it about noon. I shielded my eyes with my hand, spun in a slow circle, and searched for the mountains to give me a sense of location. Denver is a consistent distance from various distinctive peaks, and I always got my bearings by checking my position in relation to them, as well as the ever-present downtown skyscrapers.

Turns out I was within walking distance of Devereux's club. I never knew there was an old graveyard tucked away back behind Fast-Food Row. Well, you know what they say about learning something new every day …

High-pitched giggles drew my attention down from the horizon, and I found myself gazing at a gaggle of little girls. They all held dripping ice cream cones. As the children surrounded me, one sticky-fingered angel said, “You're funny!” This caused another wave of gleeful laughter.

“I'm funny?”

That was apparently hilarious.

Another sweet cherub said, “What are you doing in the middle of the parking lot? Are you dancing? What's all that stuff on you?”

I looked down at myself and saw I was covered in samples of everything I'd found back in the death pit in the graveyard, including dried blood, which stained my hands.

With a gasp, I immediately leaped to the most drastic conclusion: that the blood was mine. I inspected myself, searching for wounds or cuts, anything that would explain the stains, but I found nothing. Since I had no recollection of what'd transpired during the missing hours—and at that moment I wasn't up for exploring the disgusting possibilities—I gave myself permission to stuff the entire matter deep inside my psychological Do Not Enter zone.

A pretty little brown-eyed tyke ventured a couple of tentative steps in my direction, pointed, and yelled, “You smell!”

That was definitely some kind of cosmic cue. Simultaneously, anxious mothers scurried forth from everywhere, retrieved their children, and whisked them back to the play area.

“What did I tell you? Never talk to strangers!” one mother scolded as she pulled her child away, tossing frightened glances back over her shoulder.

I raised my arm up to my nose and sniffed. Yuck. I did smell. In fact, I smelled worse than horrible. Just like that ghastly place. No wonder the moms had treated me like a carrier of the Black Death. I could only imagine what I looked like.

Wondering if my cell phone had survived the ghastly experience, I retrieved it from my pocket and hit the “on” switch. It was as dead as the bodies in the tomb.

Shit! Perfect.

I fished in my pocket to see if the cash I'd put there the night before had survived my mysterious experience. I pulled out a handful of bills and coins. Even though I could've walked to Devereux's club, the memories of the previous night left a bad taste in my mouth. I had no desire to make a return visit. All I wanted to do was go home, take off the toe-smashing boots, and crawl into a hot bath.

I'd just spied an old telephone booth and headed in that direction to call for a cab when a police cruiser pulled into the parking lot and blocked my path. Either I really did look suspicious enough to draw the attention of a passing cop car, or someone in the restaurant had alerted the police to deal with the crazy lady.