Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 6. Whole No. 766, June 2005

Vampire by Joseph Monninger

A mystery novelist, memoirist, and professor of English, New Hampshire’s Joseph Monninger occasionally pens an offbeat short story as well; we’ve published three of his tales prior to this one. His memoirs Home Waters and A Barn in New England: Making a Home on Three Acres have both been highly praised. He is currently on sabbatical from Plymouth State University; we hope he’s using the time to write more in our genre.

The vampire’s house stood on a small knob of New Hampshire granite. Pine bushes pressed against the house and ate the paint. The bushes needed clipping and the house needed scraping. The house also needed a pound or two of nails to hang the shutters back in place, to put the soffits right, to hang the numbers of the address over the front door again. The steps to the front porch had cracked. Frost had found the cracks and widened them. A drainpipe on the south side of the house had come free and dangled against the clapboards, bumping in the afternoon breeze. The empty pipe matched the beat of a tire swing, hung from an oak branch that swayed enough to twist the support chain. November had stripped the oak and a scarecrow’s worth of leaves had collected in the belly of the tire. The rest had made a leafy mat along the front weed patch.

Vampires aren’t much on home maintenance, I thought.

A Goth girl answered the door when I knocked. She looked to be twenty-five. She liked black. She wore three studs in her nose, ten in her ears, one in her bellybutton, five in her eyebrows. She probably had more you couldn’t see. She made you want to grab a kitchen magnet and plunk it on her. She had been pretty once, but now she wasn’t.

“What?” she asked.

“I’m Detective Poulchuk,” I said. “Does Alan Pemi live here?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Why not?”

“You’re a cop,” she said. “Cops suck.”

“Right,” I said.

“Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“I’m not here to search anything. Just want to talk to Mr. Pemi.”

“He doesn’t talk to people until sunset.”

“Because he’s a vampire?”

She shrugged.

“But you’re not a vampire,” I said.

She shrugged.

“You must be in training,” I said.

“Shove it.”

She closed the door.

I drove over to Java the Hut’s, bought two coffees, then drove to Wentworth Park and pulled up next to the statue of a Boy Scout. The Boy Scout posed on one knee, his hands stretched out to give drinks to passing animals. During the summer, water dripped out of his hands into a drinking bowl for dogs. Now, without the trickle of water, the Boy Scout looked like a kid asking for a handout. Not the intended effect.

Wally Hoyle, my deputy, slid into the passenger seat.

“You don’t think it’s cold,” he said, “and then it is.”

“November in New Hampshire,” I said.

“Tell that to the freaking kids,” he said.

He pushed his chin at the usual collection of kids, early high-schoolers, pre-drivers. Girls and boys. They smoked cigarettes and played Hacky Sack and sometimes did drugs. They asked older kids to pick them up a six-pack or two. They didn’t do much that other kids didn’t do, except that they did it in the center of town with the municipal bandstand as their headquarters. Today, from what I could see, they seemed determined to kick their skateboards into the air and slide on them along a sidewalk railing. Nothing new there, either.

“Coffee for me?” Wally asked.

I nodded. I stirred my coffee with a wooden stirrer. Wally took a sip of his. He hardly looked much older than the kids collected around the bandstand. He wore a red mackinaw and musher’s fur cap. His pistol formed a small bulge under his jacket, but you wouldn’t notice it if you didn’t look for it.

“Anything?” I asked.

“They’re not talking,” Wally said. “When I mentioned the vampire, they all shut up. They’re scared of him.”

“They admit he’s been down here?”

“They don’t say yes or no. You know kids. They don’t want to give anything away.”

“The vampire is still sleeping,” I said.

Wally glanced at the late afternoon sky.

“Of course he is,” he said.

“Do what we said then,” I said. “Tell them someone sold Ricky Adelar some dirty Ecstasy and that Ricky’s brain may be scrambled. Tell them that Ricky said it was the vampire, but that we’re still investigating. Tell them to be smart. If they want to turn anything in to us, no questions asked, we’d appreciate it. Tell them Ricky’s parents are completely devastated.”

“Okay,” Wally said.

“And try to sound like Jimmy Stewart when you do it,” I said.

“Okay,” Wally said.

He climbed out of the car. He took the coffee with him.

I swung by Speare Memorial, got Ricky’s room number from a young nurse in a cardigan sweater, then went up in the hospital elevator. As soon as the door opened I spotted Mr. Adelar. He sat in an easy chair reading a Farmer’s Almanac someone had left in the waiting room. The TV behind him broadcasted Granite State Challenge, a quiz game that pitted one New Hampshire high-school team against another. I heard Manchester’s Trinity High School mentioned, but then Mr. Adelar looked up.

“Afternoon,” I said. “How’s Ricky doing?”

“Better,” Adelar said.

He put the almanac aside and stood. He was a tall, thin guy with an outsized Adam’s apple. You couldn’t look at him without thinking about blue herons. He worked for the state’s agricultural department. Something to do with lumber production, out of the Fish & Game Department in Plymouth.

“Still disassociated,” Adelar said. “Really it’s just wait and see. He recognizes us, knows where he is, but he’s not sure of the day of the week, the President, stuff like that.”

“Does he still maintain he took Ecstasy?”

“He isn’t that precise. Have you talked to this vampire fellow he mentioned?”

“Not yet.”

“Are you going to search his house?”

Trinity High School buzzed in on a question. What Caribbean country’s volcano recently erupted, causing the population to evacuate?

Trinity’s team captain said: Bermuda.

The quizmaster buzzed. Wrong answer.

“Guys like this fellow,” I said, “never have the stuff in their houses. A guy up in Rumney buried a school bus in a retired stockbroker’s field. Turned it into a pot factory. Little generator, the whole thing. Grow lights. Made it through three seasons before someone finally spotted him going through a manhole cover into the ground. Most we’d get if we searched the place would be a little pot, if that.”

“So then what do you do?” Adelar asked.

The other team buzzed in, said, Barbados, and got buzzed, too.

Montserrat, the quizmaster said.

“I’m going to see him right after this,” I said. “We’ll make it uncomfortable for him.”

Mrs. Adelar stepped out of Ricky’s room and nodded at me. If Mr. Adelar was a heron, Mrs. Adelar was a trout. Her ankles and neck had about the same thickness. She was as balanced as a throwing knife. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt that had a black dog on it. The black dog promoted beer and a certain bar.

“He’s asleep,” Mrs. Adelar said. “He drops off so suddenly it terrifies me.”

Mr. Adelar slipped his arm over his wife’s shoulders.

I reached down and picked up the Farmer’s Almanac. Sunset, according to the chart, had already happened five minutes ago.

The Goth girl opened the door.

“Is he awake yet?” I asked.

“He’s awake but he says you need a warrant.”

“Tell him he watches too many TV shows about cops. Tell him he doesn’t really want to make this more difficult than it needs to be.”

She looked at me. The streetlight caught the speckle of her studs.

“Stay there,” she said.

I did. I turned around and looked at the street and thought about vampires. If I were a vampire, I figured, I’d live someplace warmer. Maybe Florida. Maybe Louisiana. New Hampshire seemed like a hard place to be a vampire. People stayed indoors in winter and wore turtlenecks.

I turned back to the door when I heard it open.

“Come in,” she said, “but he hasn’t fed yet.”

“Fed?”

She nodded.

“You don’t want to anger him,” she said.

“I wouldn’t want that,” I agreed.

She shrugged.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Wolf,” she said.

“Wolf?” I asked. “Like the dog?”

“Like the wolf.”

“As in ‘bay at the moon’?”

She nodded.

“Got it,” I said.

I followed her down a very ugly hallway, past two doors that might have led to sitting rooms when the house had a different spirit, then into a large ell kitchen. The kitchen, in the dim light, looked as though it had last been renovated during the 1950s. Linoleum floor, vinyl counters, red plastic kitchen chairs. It was retro without having a clue what retro meant. A chicken-shaped clock clicked above the sink. Or clucked. The chicken hadn’t cleaned the dishes below it in some time, and neither had anyone else in the house.

Wolf turned around and left.

The vampire sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette. He wore black. He had a horse-head, a long, thin skull that made his chin hang too far out from his chest. He had as many studs in his face as Wolf. He looked slack and thin, but, I considered, maybe he would look better after he fed. He might have been thirty. He resembled a guy who came back to the high-school reunion and still couldn’t figure out why everyone still wanted to shove him in a locker.

He stood. He was short, maybe five nine. He wore a chain around his waist. Someone had bolted the chain into the wall behind him. A leash. He offered a chair. I sat. He sat. The kitchen table sat between us. The vampire jabbed out his cigarette and folded his hands.

“We have a kid named Ricky Adelar who says you sold him Ecstasy,” I said. “The kid’s in a hospital acting a little unglued.”

“Kids says the darndest things,” the vampire said, “don’t they?”

He smiled. Now I got the full dazzle. His upper teeth had been filed into points. He had a shark mouth. If you were fifteen years old, and escorted into this room, the combined vampire effect would have been pretty good.

“Kids do say funny things,” I said. “But he says he bought it from you and that’s not all that funny.”

The vampire spread his hands.

“Yippee,” he said.

“If the kid died, it could be murder.”

“Everyone dies,” he said.

“Not vampires.”

“Christians drink the blood of Christ for eternal life. We drink other blood. Different strokes.”

It was a prepared speech. I bet he gave it all the time.

“You always wear the chain?” I asked.

“Always,” he said. “Except when I don’t.”

He smiled to say I couldn’t ruffle him. And to show me his teeth.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “I could get a warrant and come back and search the place and maybe I’ll still do that. Or maybe I could hear that you stopped coming around the kids and that maybe you even decided to leave town. Either way, you’re on notice. If you decide to stay, it will probably be a matter of time before you get picked up. Meanwhile, Ricky may remember more about what went on with his purchase. We may even get a few other kids to remember a few things. It might take a little while, but your string is going to run out. That’s the way these things go.”

He looked at me. Smiled.

“And your name is Alan,” I said. “Alan Pemi. And you come from Berlin, New Hampshire, where your dad is still a logger and your mom does hair. They said to say hello and wondered when you would be home to visit.”

He nodded. If having his true identity presented to him made any impact, it didn’t show.

“Your problem is,” he said, “trying to link me to the kid. And you can’t do that. So buzz off. As to the rest, it’s police harassment. So buzz off again. I don’t sell dope to kids.”

“Maybe I’ll give the kids crucifixes.”

“Maybe you should.”

We sat for a while. He lit another cigarette. He had me and he knew it. I couldn’t prove much. Ricky Adelar, especially in his current condition, wouldn’t make much of a witness. He leaned back and crossed his legs. The chain rattled a little.

“Anything else we need to talk about?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Do you think you’re a vampire?”

“I am a vampire,” he said.

“How about Wolf?”

“Not yet,” he said. “These things take time.”

“If I took a mirror and held it in front of you, would you see your reflection?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m not Bela Lugosi.”

I nodded and stood.

“Up here in New Hampshire,” I said, “the turtlenecks get in the way?”

He shook his head.

“Not too bad,” he said.

I picked up Wally from the town square.

“You give the kids the talk?” I asked as he climbed in, the cold air following him.

“You bet.”

“They buy it?”

He shrugged. Ice had formed on the top of his hat and on the collar of his mackinaw. He rubbed his hands together in front of the heater vent.

“He hangs around the cemetery,” Wally said. “That’s kind of his big thing. Hanging at the cemetery.”

“The kids tell you that?”

He nodded.

“Could have the stuff buried there,” he said. “Not a bad place to stash things.”

“The dead keep their secrets,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not,” he said.

“Maybe issue garlic to the kids,” I said. “And wolfsbane.”

Wally stopped rubbing his hands. “How’d your talk with him go?” he asked.

“He’s not stupid. He knows we have to connect him to Ricky Adelar somehow.”

“Won’t be easy.”

“He’s a small-time pusher. Maybe if we could figure out who supplies him, they would put the vampire out of business. Wolfsbane him.”

“Do you know what wolfsbane is?” Wally asked.

“No idea,” I said, “but I like saying it.”

“Does it work against vampires?”

“It must,” I said. “Garlic can’t be the whole protection system.”

“You’re having fun with this,” Wally said.

“Always wanted to hunt a vampire,” I said. “Now I can.”

Two days later I saw Steve Sweeter pruning trees. He stood on an apple ladder in front of the Simons’ yard. A sign on Sweeter’s red truck gave his phone number. He didn’t have a company name or a yard-service rig. You only called Sweeter if you wanted the best and you only got him if he felt like your plants merited his attention. Apparently the Simons had an interesting tree.

I pulled over and stepped out. The weather had turned colder. The noon sun did what it could. Sweeter wore a fleece, jeans, and a pair of earmuffs. He nearly always wore earmuffs. This day he wore bifocals, had saggy khakis tucked into a pair of outsized boots, and wore a black back brace the size of a heating pad across his beltline.

“Wolfsbane,” I said.

“Monkshood,” he said, not looking at me.

“Keep vampires away?”

“Poisonous,” he said. “Keep just about anything away. Hooded flowers, look like a monk’s hood. Aconitum genus. Also known as aconite and wolfsbane.”

“Why wolf?”

“Why elm? Why birch? Who knows?”

“Werewolves?”

He stopped trimming and looked at me over his bifocals.

“You’re a strange man,” he said.

“Given the source, I’ll count that a compliment.”

He went back to picking at the tree.

“Monkshood probably had various uses. Abortion. Killing your mother-in-law. Love charms. I’m not an expert on its uses. Might work against vampires and werewolves.”

I watched him work for a while.

“What kind of tree?” I asked.

“Metasequoia. Cousin of the coastal redwoods. Also known as a dawn redwood. They thought this was extinct until about nineteen thirty-eight when a Chinese biology professor wandered into a valley and found a shrine built below one. Big race to bring back the seeds. Harvard versus California.”

“Harvard win?” I asked.

“Depends who you ask,” he said. “Tree came back from the dead. Propagated all over the world. This one isn’t happy this far north.”

“Can you save it?”

He looked at me.

“Do you have anything else to do?” he asked.

“Not this minute. Where would I find some wolfsbane?”

“On the Internet, where else? The entire world is on the Internet, didn’t you know?”

“Any Web site?”

“Google wolfsbane, you’ll find it. You could check the health-food store.”

“I’ll let you know if it works against vampires,” I said.

“Is there one hereabouts?”

“Some say.”

“Well, well, well,” Sweeter said. “Vampires don’t like dogwoods, either. Christ was executed on a dogwood.”

“You see why I stop to talk to you?”

He looked at me. His glasses flicked light at me as he returned to his work.

The temperature turned twelve degrees at 9:37 P.M., one minute before I saw the vampire in the graveyard. I knew the time because I checked it on my Timex Expedition watch. It has a glow feature. I knew the temperature rang down at twelve because I used my night-vision glasses to check the tiny L.L. Bean thermometer on the zipper of my parka. I sat against Caleb Potter’s headstone without much else to do. My haunches had frozen and my back felt the thick click of cold dropping into my spine. And I was bored, because after sitting up for six nights in a row, the vampire hadn’t shown.

Until now.

You could not film it better. He came from the south end of the graveyard, moving slowly through fog and mist, headstone to headstone. Without the night-vision glasses, I wouldn’t have spotted him. He wore black. No surprise there. But I hadn’t been quite prepared for the precision of his movement, the graceful way he glided through the mist.

I reached in my pocket. Garlic, wolfsbane, a small crucifix. I took out my cell phone and called Wally.

“He’s here,” I said softly.

Then I turned it off.

Alone in a cemetery with a vampire. I had to smile.

I watched. I sat in the old part of the cemetery, up where the founding families had been buried. That section had been built on a small rise. From Caleb Potter’s grave I could watch most of the newer portion of the cemetery. The newer sections had a dozen mausoleums, attractive, I figured, to the living dead.

I felt pretty good, pretty smart watching him — until he disappeared.

Just like that.

I stood. He hadn’t moved behind a mausoleum, nor had he slid down behind a gravestone. From all appearances he had been walking along and had suddenly vanished. I couldn’t help admiring him. It had been a neat trick.

But when you have eliminated all other possibilities, whatever remains must be the truth. He wasn’t a vampire. He hadn’t flown or turned invisible. That meant he had slipped into a hiding place. The fog and mist had made it more convincing than it would have been on a clear night. I pushed up the glasses. They didn’t help much in the fog.

I drew my revolver and walked down the hill toward the spot where he had disappeared. I wondered if I needed silver bullets. If he didn’t go up, he had to have gone down, I figured. I looked back at Caleb Potter’s gravestone to calculate distance and line. When I arrived at the spot where I had last seen him, I stopped. I used my flashlight and searched the ground. It took a few minutes. Next to a clump of winterberry I saw the trapdoor. The vampire had done a good job with it. He had covered the lid with sod and had placed the hole back among the plants so that no one strolling through the cemetery would step on the trapdoor. He could disappear quickly and he could reappear when he liked. It would freak kids out to see him suddenly materialize in the cemetery when no one had seen him coming. Maybe Wolf walked kids nearby, escorted them to a fixed point, and then the vampire would appear magically.

I was still admiring his work when he suddenly snorkeled a periscope out of a breathing hole. Again, a pretty slick feature. He could scan the area to make sure no one was around. He probably told himself that he was smarter than anyone else and no one could catch him. The periscope scanned slowly in a circle.

I put my hand over the periscope lens.

I resisted the impulse to say peekaboo.

Out on Millcross Road, I heard Wally arrive in the department Cherokee.

I pulled some wolfsbane out of my pocket. Garlic, too. I pushed the periscope back in, then dropped the wolfsbane in and the garlic. I stepped on the trapdoor.

“Wally,” I yelled, “bring the wooden stake and the holy water.”

The vampire started yelling under my feet.

Two days later Wally gave me the report. The vampire’s hideout had been an old refrigerator, enlarged at the foot and head with two plastic boxes. It had been tight, but he had been able to go inside, fish out whatever he needed, then tuck it into his jacket. He had three flashlights, a PVC air stack, and a blanket. He could sleep in there to hide out. Maybe it made him feel like a vampire.

He also had a small pharmacy.

“Did you watch a lot of vampire movies as a kid?” Wally asked.

He sat next to my desk in the rolling chair. He liked the rolling chair because he could push back and glide to his desk. He delivered the report by sliding to me.

“As many as I could.”

“I always thought they were stupid,” Wally said. “All that hypnosis. The bats in the eyes.”

“The vampire could control Frankenstein. That’s something.”

“But didn’t the wolfman kill the vampire?”

“In Abbott and Costello. Real vampires would never let that happen.”

Wally looked at me.

“You meeting the vampire’s parents?”

I nodded.

“You think they can get him to admit selling the stuff to the Adelar kid?”

“Doubt it.”

“Then what’s the point?”

“You never know until you know.”

“Is that Zen?”

“If it’s not, it should be.”

The vampire didn’t look great in orange. His Concord State Prison jumpsuit sagged around him. His pointed teeth looked merely old and decayed. When he sat down across the table from us, his mother reached for his hand. He let her hold it. She was a gray woman who wore a gray raincoat and brown slacks. She wore Merrells on her feet. She made no sound when she walked. She reminded me of smoke.

“You have to stop all this nonsense,” his father said. “No more of this vampire crap.”

His dad wore plaid. Plaid coat, plaid shirt, plaid hat. He looked like a Scottish potato. He was no taller than his son, but twice as broad.

“My lawyer said not to say anything,” the vampire said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “But you could help yourself. Tell us who supplies you, who else is selling things. All you need to do today is agree in principle. Then we can talk about the details later.”

“Alan,” his mother said, “you listen to Chief Poulchuk.”

“I can’t squeal on other people. It wouldn’t be good for my health. I’ll tell you this much, though. Ricky Adelar helped himself to whatever drugs he took. He used to sell the stuff all the time. One of my competitors.”

His dad blew air between his lips. His mom kept the vampire’s hand in hers. She looked at my expression to see if her son’s confession had any impact on me.

“Interesting,” I said.

“So he got a little nutty from the stuff and he had to blame someone. So he blamed me,” the vampire said.

“Might make sense,” I said.

“Put me out of business and cover things with his parents.”

“Got it,” I said.

I stood. Mom and Dad remained seated.

“What was that shit you threw down at me?” the vampire said. “Into the hole, I mean.”

“Wolfsbane.”

“Thought so.”

“And garlic.”

“Cut it out,” his dad said. “Just cut it out.”

Copyright © 2005 by Joseph Monninger.