The Speculative Short Stories of Barbara Paul, page 27
Virtually overnight a vampire industry sprang up in downtown El Secreto—vampire costumes and makeup, vampire comic books, charms against vampirism. An outright boom in crucifixes, and our only bookstore quickly sold out of Bram Stoker. Our one-half-watt TV station held a Bela Lugosi film festival. I felt responsible for this flurry of opportunistic goings on, because I’m the one who tipped off the editor of our local rag that Valachia was Dracula’s true home. In my innocence I even told him how Vlad the Impaler did his impaling—from the bottom up. The sonuvabitch printed every gory detail.
“Nice going, Fritz,” Ellen said dryly. “Don’t you know by now that every word you say to Mike Johnson is going to end up in print?”
Just what I needed to hear. “He’s always going on about how he puts out a nice family newspaper,” I grumbled. “I didn’t think he’d actually print the stuff.”
She laughed. “He’s always hungry for news—nothing ever happens in El Secreto. If Wilson Pritchard is seen sneezing, Mike’ll write a story about it.”
“Um, yeah, but I wonder what Pritchard’s going to think when he learns everybody’s saying he bought a vampire town.”
As it turned out, he loved it. Pritchard had big plans for his relocated town. After restoring it, he intended to run it as a resort. He hired some historian from the East Coast to come in and oversee the authenticity of the place—authentic food and clothing, authentic living conditions, authentic work. If you were willing to pay an arm and a leg, you could go to Pritchard City and live for a week or two exactly the way Romanians lived three hundred years ago. That’s what you’ve always wanted to do, isn’t it? So the rumor of a vampire or two in residence was bound to be good for business.
And business was booming. Pritchard City needed a big work force, people to impersonate townspeople and even more people to run things behind the scenes. Since Pritchard’s new toy was going up right down the highway from El Secreto, our town supplied the first of the labor. But we didn’t have enough manpower to handle the entire job; soon strangers began moving in, technicians and actors and cooks and accountants... and El Secreto was expected to accommodate them all. New motels and restaurants and even an apartment building went up, all built by Pritchard’s own construction company. He made money; the town made money, the influx of new employees made money. Everybody was happy.
Everybody except me. Pritchard City, unfortunately, would lie completely this side of the county line, and that put it in my jurisdiction. El Secreto had been a one-peace-officer town for as long as anybody could remember; but with all these new people moving in, I was going to need a deputy. And whenever El Secreto needed something, you went to see Wilson Pritchard.
So one Friday morning I set out to do just that. Ellen was at home, sleeping the sleep of the dead. She was on duty at the hospital when the Highway Patrol brought in the victims of a four-car pile-up, so she’d been up all night stitching the hapless drivers and their passengers back together. I was backing the sheriff’s car out of the driveway when Mike Johnson pulled up in his Buick, waving at me to stop.
I was still a little ticked off at him for publishing all that vampire crap, so I said, “Can it wait, Mike? I’m on my way to see Pritchard.”
“I’ll go with you.” He left his car and climbed into mine. I said nothing, just turned the car toward Pritchard City and stepped on the gas pedal.
“My dog was killed last night, Fritz,” Mike said without preamble. “We found her this morning, in the front yard.” He paused. “She’d been ripped to shreds.”
At first I thought it was a tasteless joke, still working the vampire gag. But when I saw it wasn’t, I hit the brake. “I’m sorry, Mike... poor old LouLou! God. Ripped to shreds? Show me.”
He shook his head. “We buried her fast—before the kids could see. There... there wasn’t much left.” He started to gag at the memory. “Sorry.”
I put a hand on his shoulder, not knowing what to say. I really needed to take a look at the dog if I was going to figure out what was behind the killing, but asking Mike to watch me dig LouLou back up right now seemed cruel. Another couple of hours wouldn’t change anything. “Do the kids know?”
“Not yet. We couldn’t tell them and then send them off to school as if nothing had happened.” He stared absently out the side window. “Today’s Friday.”
“Yeah.” Give them the weekend to get used to the idea that old LouLou was gone. I started the car rolling again and asked what questions I could. When was the last time he’d seen the dog? Was it usual for her to stay out all night? Mike said she’d taken to sleeping on the side porch on hot nights; one of the kids had made a bed for her there. Last night they’d fed her, and she’d curled up and watched television with them for a while before pawing the door to be let out. Same as every night. Neither Mike nor I mentioned vampires.
No automobiles were allowed inside Pritchard City; Pritchard didn’t want his almost-medieval town stinking of exhaust fumes. Besides, most of the reconstructed cobblestone streets were too narrow to accommodate anything wider than a peddler’s cart. As it turned out, Pritchard wasn’t there; a man overseeing the erection of a stone wall said it was the first day he’d been late.
So I headed the car back the way we’d come; we’d passed the turnoff to Pritchard’s mansion on the way. He’d built the place out in the New Mexico desert when he was going through his Howard Hughes phase, theatrically seeking to sever all contact with the human race. That passed, in time; I guess being alone didn’t turn out to be the kick he’d expected. But he’d kept the mansion as his main residence, the place he always returned to from the places he had been. Why not? He was God here. El Secreto had started life as a hideout camp for bandits, the site chosen for its isolation. Now the town’s only secret was why anybody stayed there. El Secreto was dying when Pritchard came along and bought ail those undeveloped acres claimed by the town council back in more optimistic days, when expansion seemed an inevitable next step instead of the pipe dream it had become. Pritchard’s money had saved us, and he never quite let us forget that. But at least he was a benevolent despot.
We’d been riding only five or ten minutes when the car phone buzzed. “Sheriff Brubaker? This is Wilson Pritchard. I need you here at my place. Immediately.”
“I’m on my way there right now, Mr. Pritchard. What’s wrong?”
“My dog has been slaughtered. Viciously, wantonly slaughtered.”
I shot a quick look at Mike Johnson. “Don’t touch a thing.” I told Pritchard. “And don’t let anybody else touch anything. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I broke the connection and hit the gas.
Pritchard’s desert mansion was walled off from the rest of the world; we had to wait while the gate was electronically opened from someplace inside. I took the camera from the car and we went in search of Pritchard; we found him sitting on a patio, quietly breathing fire. Standing unobtrusively behind him was a heavily muscled man in tennis shorts and shirt—a bodyguard, I assumed. Sitting next to Pritchard was a square-jawed blonde wearing a lot of makeup and very little else.
“Mr. Pritchard,” I said. “Mrs. Pritchard.” She nodded. Pritchard sometimes married his ladies, sometimes not. We called them all Mrs. Pritchard.
Pritchard looked at Mike. “Johnson. Well, here’s something for that paper of yours.”
“Where’s the dog?” I asked.
Pritchard got up heavily and led the way, followed by the bodyguard: Mrs. Pritchard stayed where she was. The dog was around back, what remained of him. His face and four paws were intact; every other part of his body looked as if it had been put through a shredder. White intestines, blue veins, yellowish parts I couldn’t identify—all rent into wet little ribbons.
“A mastiff?” I asked.
Pritchard grunted yes. “A big, strong, courageous animal... and they had to kill him. Why do they hate me so? I pump life back into that fetid little town, and this is how they repay me.”
Just like the man; the attack had to be against him. “Mike’s dog was killed last night, too,” I said.
That caught him by surprise. Mike himself was trying not to gag; he pointed to the mastiff’s remains and said, “That’s exactly what my dog looked like.”
At least now I wouldn’t have to dig up old LouLou. I asked Pritchard where his dog usually slept. In a kennel, he said, but the mastiff had the run of the grounds at night. The gate was kept locked all the time. The surrounding wall was twelve feet high and smooth as glass. There were no trees out here to help an intruder climb up. “The only way to get over that wall is to fly,” Pritchard said. He glanced at the bodyguard. “And don’t go thinking any of the staff did this—they didn’t.” He snorted. “They wouldn’t dare.”
I believed him. “Did you touch anything?”
“You said not to.”
“The dog wasn’t moved from another place?”
“No!” Irritated.
I took a deep breath. “Then where’s the blood?” The other three stared at me. “The blood,” I repeated slowly. “This animal has been disemboweled—yet there’s very little blood here. What happened to it?”
Pritchard’s mouth dropped open when it hit him. “That’s absurd! All that vampire stuff—that’s just a publicity gag!”
“Mike? What about LouLou?”
He’d turned white. “I, I didn’t think of it at the time... but you’re right! There was almost no blood!”
Pritchard exploded. “A vampire? You’re saying this was done by a goddamned bloody vampire?”
“I’m saying someone could have gotten the idea from the vampire stories. Copycat stuff, some sicko’s idea of a good joke. Mike, don’t print anything more about vampires. Mr. Pritchard, order your publicity people to knock it off.”
They both nodded, stunned.
The bodyguard was looking queasy, so I took the camera and started snapping pictures of the dog’s carcass. When I’d finished, Pritchard said, “Sheriff, you were already on your way here when I called? Why?”
I’d forgotten. I told him about the need for a deputy, in view of the increase in El Secreto’s population. He said he’d make a few phone calls. That meant it was as good as done.
One other dog had been killed that night, a mongrel that didn’t seem to belong to anybody. But when a week passed with no more mutilations, we began to breathe a bit easier. I still didn’t know who the perpetrator was or how he got over Wilson Pritchard’s wall, but perhaps he was having second thoughts about killing dogs and siphoning off their blood just to give people a scare. Mike Johnson wrote a strong editorial to that effect and announced there’d be no more Dracula jokes in the paper. He also printed one of the pictures I took of Pritchard’s mastiff; vampires stopped being funny real fast.
My new deputy was a part-Navajo from Socorro named Hatch, a young fellow just starting out, on his first assignment and eager to make good. His paychecks came from the county, just like mine; Pritchard’s Rolodex held the solutions to bigger problems than mine. I filled Hatch in on the vampire gag gone sour; he thought the idea of vampires in El Secreto, New Mexico, was hilarious. I cut that short and instructed him to inform me immediately if he got any reports of animal deaths. But no such reports came in; I think he was disappointed.
On the second Monday after the dog slayings I’d taken the sheriff’s car to the garage for a tune-up, so Ellen came by to pick me up on her way home from the hospital. Hatch had just gotten back from checking out a complaint about trespassing cattle and was riding a high; authority was new to him. “Just a little misunderstanding, Sheriff Brubaker,” he announced importantly. “I took care of it.”
Ellen leaned against the door frame, waiting while I finished up something at my desk. “I think I’ve found your next vampire victim,” she said casually. “New patient. Worst case of anemia I’ve ever seen. I actually had to give him a transfusion.”
Hatch couldn’t resist. “Did you check for puncture wounds?”
Ellen grinned. “Not a mark on him. Smoothest, whitest skin I’ve ever seen. He must never go out in the sun.”
“Aha! Never goes out in the sun. Does he speag mit ein aggzent?”
“Yes, but it’s British. He’s one of the actors Pritchard hired for his imported town.”
Hatch was not fazed. “Dracula left a lot of bitten folks behind in England, didn’t he? One of them could have been an actor who took a night flight to Hollywood and—”
I thrust one of the photos of Pritchard’s dog into his hands. “I want you to study that picture, Hatch,” I said. “I want you to study it real good.” I took Ellen’s arm and steered her outside.
“You were a little rough on him, weren’t you?” she asked as we got into her car.
“Maybe. But I don’t want him making jokes about vampires.”
“Oh, Fritz! The sick person who killed those dogs would have found an excuse even without the vampire jokes.”
“Maybe,” I said again. “But there’s no harm in being careful.”
Nothing more was said about it that evening, but at two in the morning the hospital called. Ellen’s anemia patient was hallucinating and “acting wild.”
“That’s a good medical diagnosis,” she said dryly as she got dressed. “I prescribed a sedative, but he hasn’t been to sleep at all.”
Normally when Ellen’s called out in the middle of the night, I just roll over and go back to sleep. But this time I got up and went with her.
We could hear him before we got to his room. Hysterical laughter followed by deep moans, both interspersed with a rapid babbling of unintelligible words. “He’s been like that for an hour, Dr. Brubaker,” the nurse said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
In the room, an abnormally pale, frighteningly thin man of thirty or less was pacing and ranting. His dark hair stood up in spikes and his eyes were, well, wild. The voice that gurgled out of his throat was raspy and his hands were shaking. He seemed to be seeing things that the rest of us couldn’t see.
“Now, Mr. Michaels,” Ellen said soothingly. “Wouldn’t you feel better back in bed? Come along now.”
He whirled toward her and screamed, “My bed is gone! My bed is gone!”
“No, it isn’t—it’s right here. See? Come lie down, now.”
He started babbling something again, but with the help of the nurse, Ellen got him back into bed. “He won’t stay,” the nurse panted.
Ellen stood frowning down at him a moment. “This looks like an extreme case of sleep deprivation—the hallucinations, the wild mood swings... first thing, we have to calm him down.”
Under Ellen’s directions, the nurse hooked up an IV. Whatever Ellen gave him, it did calm him some. The state he went into wasn’t exactly what you’d call sleep, but it was more restful than the wild ranting that had been going on before. When Ellen was satisfied he was settled for the night, we left.
“His name’s Michaels?” I asked on the way back to the car.
“John Michaels. A worker at Pritchard City found him collapsed in one of the streets there. He was able to tell us his name and that he was an actor before he lost consciousness, but that’s all. No I.D., nothing in his pockets except a rolled-up copy of the newspaper. He was in pretty bad shape. Malnutrition, anemia, and now sleeplessness. No wonder he was hallucinating.”
“John Michaels,” I repeated. “And the only thing in his possession was a newspaper?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s the name of the editor of that newspaper?”
Ellen’s head jerked around. “Mike Johnson.”
I nodded. “Mike Johnson, John Michaels. Tomorrow I think I’ll ask a few questions about your Mr. Michaels.”
The next morning I parked outside Pritchard City and walked inside. The reconstruction was coming along nicely; already Pritchard’s Romanian town was generating an atmosphere of its own—dark, otherworldly, and most of all, old. The stones in the buildings gave off a damp chill that was the accumulation of centuries. Many of the buildings met over the streets, so the streets themselves were little more than tunnels where New Mexico’s hot sun would never penetrate. The place made me uncomfortable; I couldn’t imagine people spending their lives in a place with no sunlight.
Pritchard City’s operating offices were skillfully concealed inside the town’s agricultural exchange building, like one of our old granges. But inside was all modern efficiency; the personnel director was able to tap a few computer keys and tell me Pritchard City employed no one named John Michaels, either as an actor or in any other capacity. When I described him, she just shook her head; didn’t know him. I thanked her and headed for the castle.
El Secreto was laid out on a 180-degree plane, so Pritchard had had a little hill built up to hold his castle. Only the first floor had been completed; the place looked as if the top stories had been sliced off with a giant knife. A number of workmen were visible on the exposed second floor, guiding the blocks of stone a crane was lifting up to them. Wilson Pritchard was standing by the entrance to the castle, and so was Mike Johnson—getting his daily Pritchard story, I supposed. They both greeted me with unfriendly looks; after all, I’d failed to catch the nut who’d killed their dogs. After a few amenities, I asked Pritchard if his purchase of the castle included any underground areas—basement, dungeons, a torture chamber or two.
“I got everything,” he growled. “Even a couple of crypts.”
“May I see them?”
“What’re you looking for, Sheriff? Real vampires?” When I didn’t say anything, he shrugged. “All right—come on. I’ll show you myself. I’ve been down there only once, and I’m not all too sure what’s there. Storage crates, mostly.”
“Have you opened them?” Mike Johnson asked.
“Not yet. I was kind of saving them for dessert.” The three of us went inside. If I’d thought the streets were damp and chill, this place was an icebox. Pritchard gestured toward high casement windows, all of them shuttered. “Nobody’s lived here for over two hundred years. The place hadn’t seen sunlight in that long. This way.” He led us to an ornately carved wooden door toward the rear of the place; the thing was so heavy Mike and I had to help him open it. Inside the door were half a dozen lantern-type flashlights; we needed them to see our way down the steps.
