They Don't Come Home Anymore, page 4
Back out in the bedroom proper and back in her own clothes, Hettie lay on the bed, leaving room for another person next to her. She rolled onto her side, away from the portrait. She imagined lying here with Avery, the real Avery with all of her dimensions, talking about all those clothes, telling each other secrets. Hettie would offer advice on any number of topics that had nothing to do with boys, pulling from her vast knowledge of Redbook and Good Housekeeping that she read from cover to cover at the many doctor’s office visits she endured as a child. Avery would marvel at Hettie’s wisdom. Then she’d cry, the reality of her hopeless situation again breaking back in on her, and Hettie would hold her and all would be right in the world. She’d be her protector. She’d be her everything. What else would they need? Exactly nothing, that’s what.
A tear rolled down Hettie’s cheek. Such a monumental waste. All of it.
She raised her arms above her head and slid her hands under the pillow. Her fingers grazed something furry, and she pulled a stuffed animal from where it was hidden like a lost tooth, waiting for a midnight fairy. It was scruffy, its features rubbed away, the only thing in the room that had any wear on it. It must have been a cat, or a bunny. Probably a bunny. Hettie looked into its blank face and asked the bunny its name. It told her.
10
Later that night, Hettie lay on her own bed, squeezing the stuffed animal in her left hand. She was on her back, her legs bent underneath her, like she slid to a stop. Her body always got itself into this shape when she was lost in thought and didn’t know what her limbs were doing. It was just easier for her to think this way. She sent out her mind to the hospital, to find Avery and tell her it was going to be okay. She closed her eyes and repeated the words she had bought that would allow her the ability of astral projection. Her bunny was safe, and Hettie would bring it to her, she just had to tell her how. She held up the small toy and waited, whispering her words, then sat quietly, listening.
Something deep inside her ears vibrated, every hair on her arms and legs standing up straight. It hummed, then spread out into a melody. Music, coming from elsewhere in the house. It sounded ambient, like a film score. “Fuck me,” Hettie grumbled as she threw aside the stuffed animal and jumped out of bed.
Downstairs smelled like popcorn. It was the second Tuesday of the month, which—according to the rustic chalkboard in the kitchen—meant “Bad Movie Night.” The television flickered in the den, backed by the electronic spike of ’80s synth music. Her parents had rented a C-grade train wreck from the last store in town that not only offered rentals, but rented them in VHS. They were purists, down to the thematic elements, only renting movies made before the post-irony ’90s which were so inscrutably earnest and lacking in any sort of self-awareness or concept of parody that Hettie could barely understand what was happening on-screen. Like it was a sketch comedy send-up of a real motion picture.
Tonight it was her mom’s turn to pick the bad movie, and she chose The Last Boys, a shoestring knock-off of the classic California vampire flick that should have looked and sounded like a music video, back when they still made music videos, but instead looked like a home movie shot with one of those enormous video cameras large enough to accept an actual VHS, recording straight to magnetic tape. This was a bootleg homage to one of the films her parents saw together in college when they were ‘courting,’ as her dad phrased it, which always made Hettie imagine a royal throne room crowded with costumed attendants, all watching her parents eat dinner together at some cheesy neon diner, holding hands across the Formica table, admiring the other’s gelled hair and neon clothing.
Hettie stood in the doorway to the den, behind the couch where her parents were draped over each other like overheated teenagers. Her father had his hand on her mother’s left breast. She didn't want to know where his other hand was.
On the screen, beach punk vampires were eating Chinese food in their boho underground lair that looked more like someone’s basement than an actual boho underground lair. The vamps were clowning Mitchell, the initiate, with various food-related illusion pranks, stoner laughs, and bland mockery an octave too low, inserted during post-production through bad ADR. It was a very stagey scene, even amid an incredibly stagey movie.
The blonde mullet vampire, obviously the leader because his makeup was better, made Mitchell eat maggots. He didn’t appreciate that very much, and told him so, before dropping his takeout box, exposing the maggots to be merely white rice. There seemed to be fuzz and other gunk scattered throughout the rice, as if they had to retake that scene a few times, and only had room in the budget for one box of rice. The other vampires found this hilarious. Supernatural creatures must set the humor bar lower than those burdened with mortality.
The blonde mullet vampire apologized in an exaggerated take on sarcasm that made it seem like it was dubbed into English by a non-English speaker. “No hard feelins, huh?” he said, clapping Mitchell on the back.
With a whisper into the ear of another vampire that had a dirty blonde afro that somehow ended in a mullet, a bottle was produced, covered in a metallic casing most likely inspired by a cursory browse at Pier One Imports. The blonde mullet vampire took a drink, then offered it to Mitchell, who seemed dubious. That, or the cheap Chinese food wasn't agreeing with him.
Blonde mullet vampire shook the bottle, exhorting Mitchell to join them. Become one of them. A brotherhood of bad hair and eternal life. All he had to do was take a drink.
Either not believing that the wine was blood, or befuddled from a bout of intestinal duress, Mitchell received the Pier One bottle and took a drink, eschewing the warning of the ’80s boho version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, who was skulking in the background the entire time. This stuff in the bottle was obviously wine. Not blood. Not poison blood. Oh, Mitchell, you fucking dummy!
Mitchell drank deeply, finishing every last drop of the liquid in the bottle.
Blonde mullet vampire laughed ruefully, apparently trained at the old timey villain school of villainous laughter. Then he clapped that slow clap, taken up by the rest of his crew. He stood, clapped Mitchell on the back and called him “bro,” informing him that he’d never, ever grow old, and he’d never, ever die, but he would have to eat, and he clearly wasn’t talking about Chinese food.
“Well,” said one of the other dude vampires who looked like a girl with incredibly teased hair and an exposed midsection. “Not all the time.”
All the glam rock vampires laughed, joined by Hettie’s parents, who threw popcorn at the screen, commenting about how the script wasn’t even close to The Lost Boys, which somehow made the movie so much better. Hettie might have laughed with them, from her hiding spot, but by then she wasn’t listening.
Somehow, in some bizarre way, the cheesefest she just witnessed struck her profoundly, the line echoing and repeating back to her, becoming less corny with each repetition. The inner gong sounded inside her brain, for the second time in the same week.
You’ll never, ever grow old, bro. You’ll never, ever die.
She again lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling, her eyes blinking quickly, the bunny once again in her hands. The words had worked.
You’ll never, ever die.
Finally, she startled herself by jumping from her bed and pulling the iPhone from under it. She typed in a few words, waited for faraway servers to pull up the knowledge, then read.
11
Twelve hours and two buses later, set into motion by a vague excuse about “extracurricular research at the library” to her parents, Hettie walked up to a run-down storefront in the dingier part of town near the community college. The neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying, but still cheap and sullied enough to host offbeat stores such as this one. Hettie looked down at the piece of paper in her hand, where the words “Sanctum Magickal Bazaar” were written. They matched the sign, almost down to the exact Gothic font.
Wind chimes tinkled as the door opened, accented by the actual sound of wind, that must have come from an electronic device. Good. Anyone who took their front door first impression this seriously must have the answers she was looking for. The shop was small and claustrophobic in layout, which wasn’t helped by the floor to ceiling racks stuffed with crystals and amulets and books and every sort of arcana a community college student would ever need. The place smelled of a heavy, sickly sweet incense and oily candles. It was cloying, not like the smell of Pier One, where the blonde mullet vampire picked up his faux wine bottle. This incense had sweat in it. Jars of herbs lined the wall behind the counter, where a clerk stood reading from a scroll. An actual scroll. He was pale and balding, and wore a loose fitting purple shirt, with a string of puka shells wrestling with his sparse but very long and very black chest hair. Puka shells didn’t seem very new agey. It seemed more frat boy douchey. He also wasn’t wearing any shoes. The hair was just as long and black on his feet.
Hettie walked up and stood in front of the counter. Her heart thudded. Not because she was nervous or anything, this place scared her. Her pulse raced because she was in a hurry. If Avery died, there would be nothing Hettie could do. So, she cleared her throat. Twice.
After a moment, he nodded, then rolled up the scrolls with care and quite a bit of ceremony. He tied it firm with a piece of golden cord, then slid it into the sleeve of his shirt, before crossing his arms and regarding her with a sigh. “Can I help you?” he said, closing his eyes and keeping them closed for several seconds, during which time Hettie placed the stressor of the sentence on each word individually, still coming up with the same sense of put-upon annoyance. Framing your opening question as unbreakable sarcasm isn’t an easy thing to pull off.
“I’m looking for books on vampires.”
“Of course you are,” he deadpanned, not even trying to hide his irritation.
“Not,”—she waggled her fingers around her face—“those kinds of vampires.”
“Then what kind of vampires, exactly?”
“The real kind.”
“The real kind,” he repeated. This guy hadn’t blinked since he opened his eyes again.
“I need to learn how to summon vampires. Or a vampire. I’ll only need one.”
“Maybe you can just leave out a bowl of blood on your back step, and they’ll come flocking like feral cats.”
“I know you think this sounds silly, or you’re trying to make it incredibly clear that this sounds silly, but I also know that this is just a front. A dupe.”
“A dupe.” Deadpan alley had an echo.
“Yes, a dupe. The website I found—”
“Oh, you read a website!”
“—said that whomever worked here—”
“I own here, darling.”
“—would act like they didn’t know what you were talking about, but that they really do. That they—you—have a book, that isn’t available online, that can summon vampires. I need that book, or just access to it. I can pay.” Hettie opened her satchel and placed several large stacks of cash, wrinkled bills of various denominations wrapped in rubber bands, onto the glass countertop.
The man’s eyes bulged, then narrowed. “Where does a girl your age get this kind of money?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
The man looked at her, then threw his head back and unleashed a Broadway laugh that you could hear up in the penny seats. He clapped his hands, and kept the laugh going longer than was necessary.
“You’re an odd duck, aren’t you?”
“I guess I am.” Hettie felt a sideways grin stretch her cheek. She liked the sound of that. Maybe she’d put it on her license plate someday when she decided it was time to start hating the planet and buy a car. ODDVCK.
The shop owner’s whole demeanor changed, either due to her odd duck status, or the thousands of dollars she was carrying with very little regard for security. Probably the latter. Odd ducks were a dime a dozen. Rich ducks required many, many more dimes. “Follow me,” he said.
He led her deeper into the store, which was only a few feet. “Regardless of what you read, we don’t normally deal in the darker end of the spiritual spectrum, but we kept getting people like you coming through here that I figured we better start stocking some vampire stuff.” He stopped at a very low, two-tiered wooden shelf. The top had a cat bed on it, and in front of it was a litter box. Paperbacks held sway in the middle. “We keep them back here so the teeny boppers have to walk through the entire store to look for their Team Edward or Team Whateverthefuck fan club stuff.”
“I’ve never seen those movies.”
“Yeah, and I’ve never seen The Fast and the Furious.”
Hettie looked through the books, which were mostly all fan fiction and cheap rip-offs of mainstream novels, with lots of long hair and open shirts. There were a few self-published history books on vampires and vampirism, something that looked like a wacky vampire comedy, along with some locally sourced supernatural erotica. Each cover was worse than the last. “Are these all of your books on the topic?”
“Yes. We’re an esoterica shop. Not a horror store.”
“But the website said—”
“You sure they spelled it right? There’s another store that spells ‘Magick’ without the ‘K’ that’s up in Portsmouth. They’re way more into the hardcore occult stuff. Black magic and conjuring and all of that. We get our signals crossed sometimes. Works out for both of us, most of the time.”
Hettie pulled the paper from her pocket. Sure enough, no “K.” Just regular old Magic. She folded the paper and put it back into her pocket.
“You give me a hundred bucks, you can have the whole lot.”
“No thanks. None of these are what I need.”
“Poke around online. You’ll be shocked at what you’ll find.”
“I did. Lots of conflicting theories, message boards full of shit talking, some rituals, but … I need something close. Something in town. I need …” She didn’t know how to put it into words, especially because it didn’t make any sense to the person she was before Avery got sick.
The shop owner thought for a second, then raised his finger as an idea came to him, like they do in the movies. “I saw a post about Nightvayne Ravenscroft doing a reading at one of those bullshit bookstores out in the boonies.”
The obscene alteration gave her pause, but only for a second. “Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who’s this Ravenscraft whatever?”
He leveled her a ‘you’ve got to be fucking kidding me look.’ Her blank stare moved him to put it into words. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t get out much, do you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Nightvayne Ravenscroft only sold about fifty billion books last year, all of them about vampires. She claims that she knows a few of them personally through some hook up in the supernatural underground. They tell her stories, and she adapts them into her novels. Her Dark Muses, she calls them. I guess it makes for some popular books. No real gore, but lots of romance and missionary sex. Lots of adjectives, too. Real lace curtain kind of stuff. Not that I ever read any of them …”
Hettie was about to say something, but the man cut her off.
“Okay, maybe one, or probably two. Yeah, definitely three, but that’s only because I was seeing this guy who wouldn’t stop talking about them and left them at my house and … What was his name? Okay, I read four of her books, but only liked one of them.”
She waited to make sure he was done. He was. “Which one?”
“Which book? I can’t remember the—”
“No, I mean—”
“The Bleeding Moon. Man, that ending …”
“No, which bookstore is the reading?”
The man seemed irritated that she had cut off his weak denial that no one asked for. “I don’t know. You think I ever visit the suburbs?”
Hettie looked around. “We’re in the suburbs.”
“We’re in midtown. I’m talking about the real suburbs. Strip malls. Fake Australian steak houses. Megachurches.” He shivered, only half dramatically.
“But—”
“Do you want to argue about geographic labels, or do you want information on how to find a real-life vampire?”
“You think they’ll have them there?”
He wrote down the name of the bookstore, and sketched out some quick directions and landmarks. “If there’s a real vampire within five hundred miles of here, they’ll be at that reading, either behind the microphone, or sitting in the audience, soaking in all that dolled up prose.” He handed her the paper.
“Is she a vampire?”
“I guess there’s only one way to find out.”
She took the address gratefully. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” It was the most earnest he had sounded all day. Probably even longer than that.
Hettie smiled at him, then turned and headed toward the front of the store and the door.
“Hey you,” the shop owner said.
She turned.
“You look too smart to think any of this is real.”
Hettie glanced around the shop, at the crystals and sage and tapestries and chimes. She looked back at the man standing beside the cat bed. “So do you.”
12
He wasn’t kidding about the suburbs.
Hettie had no idea street numbers went up that high and still were considered part of a city. 245th Street? The bus kept forging ahead. They were going to hit the three hundreds soon. It seemed akin to dimensional travel. And yet the streets kept going, and so did the stores, and gas stations, boxy churches, fast food joints, and massive supermarkets, and the huge, angular, similar-looking houses that were grouped into spacious developments built over the graveyards of farmland, sporting names like Fox Run and Battle Creek. All attempting an East Coast vibe in title, but landing nowhere near the ocean. Towering model homes made to look like nineteenth century chalets that couldn’t have been over five years old. Spindly trees no taller than a man were planted in each front yard, yoked by collars attached to metal poles. Maybe they needed to be shown how to grow up straight.
