Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

FRIENDS IN NEED

CONCLUSION

Brad cooked a huge breakfast that morning. It was about four a.m. when they’d gotten the call from Sunny.

“I’ll be back in a few days,” he said, and they all breathed sighs of relief.

“You can go to work tomorrow in peace,” Nehru had told David.

“If half asleep,” Brad added.

David said, “I already told them I’m coming in late.”

They were so relieved to hear from Sunny it took a while for them to go to bed, and once they had, they were still up a while. It was almost a relief for morning to arrive, and then coffee was on and milk and orange juice were out and Brad was frying eggs and Nehru was doing bacon and toast, and they all sat down to eat in a way which was unusual because none of them was usually a breakfast person which is what David said, stuffing his mouth with toast.

The kids got up a little later, and Brad said he was going to run them around town and maybe head to some music stores in the north part of Lassador. It was then that Nehru took out his cigarettes and David surprised himself by taking one too, and finally, Nehru spoke.

“Here’s the thing,” he said, “When we got that call from Sunny, this is how I felt. I felt like I was much more afraid than I wanted to admit, and then I was a lot more relieved, but not completely relieved.”

“Yes,” said David. “Like something’s going on.”

“Yes,” Nehru said. “Like when a kidnapper tells the person they abducted to call thir friends so they don’t panic.”

“That was in the back of my mind,” David said.

“Can you ping the call?”

“Possibly. But here’s the thing: it wasn’t a ransom call. It was a call that said he would be back in a few days.”

Nehru waited for David to go on.

“I really think that whoever he’s with….I feel like this is beyond the police.”

Nehru looked surprised to hear a police officer say that.

“You mean like, in the way that terrorists are beyond the police?”

“No,” David said, shaking his head. “No… Not exactly. I… I don’t know how to say it. The world… the world is full of all sorts of things.”

“I’m going to see my uncle,” Nehru stood up.

“What?”

“He says shit like that. He is into… weird things. And you seem to be saying that Sunny is in a weird thing.”

“Can I go with you?”

“Don’t you have work?”

“This is part of an investigation. I’ll call and tell them I am at work.”

After Nehru stopped at the townhouse where his uncle lived, he slapped himself in the head and they kept driving until they were on the campus of Wilmington College.

“This is a hell of a nice place,” David said. “It’s like once you get out of Lassador, the air changes.”

“To be fair, as long as you stay largely north in Lassador, it’s all pretty nice.”

They found a man who looked only a little older than Nehru, and not very different from him, in rumpled sweater and cocked fedora, working away in a junky old office that looked very much like what David Lawry would tink of as an old college professor’s office. Books were everywhere, groaning from sagging shelves, and half of them had titles far beyond David while the others were comic books and story books, childrens’ novels along with pulp fiction. David was startled by a copy of Interview With the Vampire.

“Nephew,” the man who was not old, but felt old said, pushing up his glasses, “And… nephew’s friend.”

Nehru embraced his uncle, and David shook his hand, introducing himself.

“David.”

“Uriah Dunne,” the professor said.

“My uncle is a professor of the paranormal.”

“I am a professor of classical romanticism gone philosophy that somehow got associated with the paranormal.”

“Like ghost?” David said.

“And witches and vampires and—” the man threw his head back and howled, making David jump, “werewolves. All of it.

“So what can I do you for?”

“I’d love to say we were just here to visit.”

“If you were just here to visit, you and Brad would bring the kids to my house in the evening, and you can, and you should.”

“Remembered and remembered,” Nehru said.

“We have a friend,” Nehru said, “and he disappeared. He actually came here because one of his friends was one of the guys killed a year ago in the Vampire Murders.”

“Right,” Uriah suddenly looked serious.

“The other night, after a long time of silence, there was another murder just like it.”

“And another like it the next night,” Uriah said.

“What?”

“A block east of Saint Ursula’s,” Uriah said, “in an alley. A young man was found dead.”

David wondered how he hadn’t known this, but he had been obsessed with Sunny. If he hadn’t heard from Sunny, he’d be convinced that he was the victim.

“Also, off of the pattern, but in the north end of Germantown was found a girl, naked throat mangled. The only thing they have in common, but it would be hard for people to tell if they weren’t looking, was that the boy, the young man, was bloodless and had throat bites, and this girl had lost a lot of blood too. Throat crushed as well.”

“Wait!” David sat up. “How do you know all thar?”

“Because I’m not in the police, Detective?”

“How do you know I’m—”

“You walk like police,” Uriah said. “And the truth is, I know lots of things. People tell me many things. People whose secrets are too heavy for them to hold alone. Maybe you know a Tanya Sommers.”

“She was my partner,” David said, feeling the world shrink.

“Well, she was my student. She—and a lot of people—know I’m in this line or work. Always have been.”

“So they come to you,” David said, “because you have an open mind.”

“I don’t know if my mind is open,” Uriah said, “I’ve seen things is all.”

“Uriah’s family is strange,” Nehru said. “I mean, not on my side.”

“My mother was Nehru’s grandmother,” Uriah said.

“We’re all odd,” Nehru explained. “But we’re not… uncanny. Uriah’s family, the ones on his father’s side, they are uncanny.”

“Well, they’re witches,” Uriah said, dismissively.

David didn’t even blink.

“What do you think of those killings?” David asked.

“The Vampire Killings?”

“Yes.”

“I think that you, Detective Lawry, are testing me. Because I think that you know the answer is they were done by vampires. Why they were done so obviously I have no idea, for a vampire would have a great stake—no pun intended—in keeping his world secret. But I also think I’m telling you nothing new. I think you already know all this and the only one of us who doesn’t is my dear nephew.”

He turned to Nehru, “Am I right?”

“You haven’t said anything,” David Lawry said.

“Because there isn’t anything to say,” said Nehru, putting down the last of the journals.

“But do you believe me. Believe them?”

“You do believe them?” Nehru said.

“I’d kind of be an ass not to. I mean, I know there are people who deny everything no matter what’s in their face, but you have to remember, the whole reason I came here is because I saw Dan dead, dead on a table in a morgue. Then your uncle’s friend sent me a DVD and there Dan was, alive and well, and here he is, in these journals—”

“Being a fucking vampire.”

“Yes.”

“Dan is a vampire.”

“A vampire on tour with his band.”

At this they both burst out laughing, and they kept laughing until, at last,  Nehru said, “And you think they have Sunny?”

David nodded.

“They want to do with him what they failed to do with Dan,” Nehru said.

“Then you believe?”

“Not that that’s the most important thing,” Nehru waved it off, “but yes. You’re right. It’s only an ass that disbelieves in the face of evidence. The real important thing is how do we help him?”

“I think we just have to wait till he comes back.”

“You believe he’s coming back?”

“He said was, Nehru.”

“You believe he’s coming back a vampire.”

“That’s the only way I think they would let him come back.”

“Then here’s the other thing,” Nehru turned to him. “What are you going to do about that Tanitha woman?”

David looked away from Nehru and Nehru said, “Not just for the sake of your love life. But… if she is who you say, if she is the one in the journal—and I don’t see how she couldn’t be—then she would know how to help our friend.”

David drove into the sun for half of his journey, not allowing himself to think. As he whizzed down the expressway that hung over the east of Lassador and cut through the south, he could not allow himself to think about his next move. The expressway let off onto a strip of restaurants and Walmarts that had become part of Glencastle, and not far from here he arrived at a jarringly old street, and rolled up and down Brummel with its old Victorians.  He came up the 4400 block, the 4500 and at last arrived at the 4800’s, a dense clump of purple and deep red, pink and blue and brick old houses surrounded by little gardens, a regular witch’s village as the summer ended and fall began to touch the first trees.

He parked his car, and walked up and down, remembering what Dan had done, and he saw, old and stately, and very solid, 4844, old brick, 4846, a blue house with white trim, 4850, a pink turreted home with a wrap around porch. A great oak rose up in between the sidewalk and the street, causing the concrete to buckle, and David, looking both ways even on a quiet street, went to the other side and counted house, 4845, 4847, the jump in numbers that occurred when old properties were torn down and made 4853 the next house. It was not unusual to think the very same thing had happened to 4848, but David stood across the street looking at 4846 Brummel, and then at 4850. He was half hidden by a great tree, and he took out a bit of paper and read, carefully: 

“Tazi kŭshta shte bŭde zavinagi vidyana i nikoga skrita ot men. Zashtoto az sŭm krŭv ot tvoyata krŭv.”

It had been a good try, but not one he’d known would turn out. He had taken Dan’s journal and read the phrase Tanitha had recited to let Dan see the house, but of course Dan would not have known to write precisely whatever that language was, and David would not have known how to pronounce it. He copied it into his computer and it said the language was Bulgarian which David thought was vampiric enough, but this yielded no English translation. So he copied the English words Dan had written.

“This house be forever seen and never hidden from thee. For thou art blood of my blood,” and then he changed those words to “hidden from me” and “I am” instead of “thou art” and so the phrase he had just murmured revealed itself.

There was no reason it should work, a guessed spell from someone who was not a vampire, a witch or a wizard and did not believe in magic or practice sorcery, who did not, for that matter speak any other language but English. But this time, with more serious intent than desperation, David pronounced those words again.

“Tazi kŭshta shte bŭde zavinagi vidyana i nikoga skrita ot men. Zashtoto az sŭm krŭv ot tvoyata krŭv.”

Just like a jump on a film projector, or like something seen from the corner of the eye, but right in front of him, suddenly, the space between the two houses snapped and there sat a great purple Victorian with wrap around porch and high tower, and then, it was gone. It snapped back to the regular view and David could not hold onto it. It was the same way as when he tried to stay awake and could not manage it. With more seriousness, he said the words again, and this time, for a flicker the same thing happened, and then the house was gone.

“Fuck me,” David muttered.

“Fuck…. Me.”