Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

AND THE FOLLOWING NIGHT

CONCLUSION

When Myron came looking for Dan, after he’d gone all around the club, he went to the parking lot. There was that old El Camino, back among the bushes, and when he looked into it, there was Dan in the driver’s seat, his head turned up, mouth opened. Only a moment later, a woman’s head came up, and snaked backed down.

Myron realized his conversation would have to wait.

David Lawry was called into the Lakeland Hotel for the worst surprise of his life. The Vampire Killer, as they were calling him, had stopped, and tonight there was a young man, naked and dead in a bed, eyes wide open, but white as a sheet with his throat crushed, and when David saw him it was only a moment before he realized it was Dan Rawlinson. He looked for the puncture wounds himself. His stomach swirled around and he went into the bathrom to vomit.

When he came back, after rinsing his mouth, he explained to Tanya, “He went to school with me.”

“Shit,” she said, shaking her head.

Then she said, businesslike because business solved crimes and Tanya believed in justice, “Do we know whose room this is?”

“The name is Ramona Ballard, and she used a credit card, but she doesn’t seem to be a real person. Seems like she came out of thin air. And went back to it.”

“Well, whatever we do, let’s find the bitch and bring her back out of it,” Detective Sommers said.

There was no finding Ramona Ballard, and no one was able to contact any member of Dan’s family, but then things got even worse. For when the coroner went down to do the autopsy, she actually came up into the police station herself to declare: “The body is gone.”

“The what…” began Captain Karney.

“That young man…. Dan Rawlinson…. His body is gone.”

After that, no one was in a hurry to alert his family, and for the next few days a very undercover search for the body of Dan Rawlinson began. They didn’t find it, and no one called in reporting he was missing, and so the Lassador Police Department swept this one under the rug.

It was a year later that Detective Sommers came into the police station with a CD and said, “You wanna see something, David? Yeah, you do. Come in here and close the door.”

They went into the viewing room and she pushed what turned out to be a DVD into the slot under the television. Music. They were in a club. They were listening to music, loud music, but good music.

“I know that you loved me

So that’s why you left me

You loved me so good,

 

But not better than him

 

I know that you loved,

So that’s why you left me

 

You loved me so good,

but you also loved him.”

 

“Do you remember last year? That guy? Your friend, Dan?”

“How could I forget?”

“He disappeared.”   

“Yes, Tanya, I know. I was here.”

       

       “This is truly the last time I’ll ask you to be true

       I never should have better of you

       But its just the same old car that I do…”

 

“Crushed wind pipe, Bloodless, definitely dead, truly a corpse.”

David was losing patience.

“Yes, Tanya. In the midst of a lot of death, I remember his death.”

“Okay,” Tanya said, slowing the video down, “Well, what the fuck is this?”

 The lead singer, sweeping his dark hair out of his face, looked directly at David Lawry, and was Dan Rawlinson.

“You got his old concerts?”

“This is a new concert,” Tanya Sommers said.

“What?”

Dan sang on, murdering his guitar.

“I saw this,” Detective Sommers said, “I saw him—listen—last night.”

Dan turned to him, dark eyes, aquiline nose, sweeping dark hair from his face.

“You’re shitting me, Tanya.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“David, please be quiet. We can go up there and see it. We can go see him tonight.”

Instead David Lawry opened his computer and looked up the Keller Building. He asked for Myron Keller and when Myron answered, David spoke.

“Hey, how are you? I haven’t seen you since… last year. The funeral?”

“Yeah,” David said. “Yes, exactly. I got a question for you? It may seem strange.”

“Uh oh! Is it a police question?”

“Yeah, Myre. Yeah,” David tried to laugh. “Nothing bad or anything.”

“Alright, Detective. Shoot.”

“Have you… heard from Dan? Dan Rawlinson?”

“Of course, I have. He hasn’t gone anywhere. Still in Rawlston, playing at the Grey Note? Is he in trouble?”

“No,” David said, feeling heavy and strange, feeling the distance between himself and his words. “Just, there was an old missing person’s report out on him, but…”

“Yeah, he vanished for a day or so last year. And then he turned up. Good as gold.”

“Okay,” David said. “Okay.”

“You need to know anything else?”

“No, Myron. No. We’re good.”

“Alright.”

“Thanks, Buddy. Talk to you later, Buddy.”

David hung up.

Tanya Sommers looked at him.

David said, “I need to go home.”

That night he didn’t go to Claire’s. He told her he was really fried and feeling half crazy, only being along would do. He went back to the old habit of sitting alone with the TV on all night, and that night when he woke up, the reception was off as it was sometimes, and he didn’t bother to get up, It seemed as if Channel 2 was switching between something else, and then becoming something else, and then quite clearly, he was watching something else.

There was a poor young man holding a shovel, and his yard was full of humps of dirt. A calm voice asked:

“Are you a young drinker who doesn’t know what to do with your victims? Are the throats you crush and the bodies you kill piling up?”

The fuck?

“Do you keep getting sunburn from walking out into the light before you’re ready?

This young man stepped out the door and cringed as he came back in.

“Are your fangs making your life a misery?”

He nodded, woebegone.

“Don’t fret. Yuri Barkaran’s seminar for the newly turned is coming to Lassador Pavilion on May 5th, all day, beginning at noon!”

David could not laugh. He sat up straight, his stomach and head reeling. He wanted this to be a joke, but he was remembering over a year ago, being up this late.

“And when we return, dominating humans in a human dominated world. Doctor of Philosophy, Hieronymous Traub will be speaking to us from his office at Wittenberg, which he had maintained since 1575…”

And then what he had seen before…

“Is your failure to age startling your mortal friends and making it difficult to stay in one place very long?  Is your constantly youthful appearance making a rift with your lovers as they begin to grey?”

Earnestly, sadly, the goodlooking, dark haired man nodding again.

“Well, from the makers of Nutra Negative and your favorite drink, Hemogoblin, comes, Garden of Eden’s Aging Cream.”

And David Lawry threw up his head and screamed. While the television went on the fritz again, and his screams could be heard by his neighbors, he screamed until the paramedics arrived and shot him full of sedatives and then, when he found himself in the psych ward of Saint Elizabeth’s hospital, it was gently suggested that he might want to commit himself, and David, being no fool, agreed.

This was how David Lawry lost his mind or, some would say, began to find it.