An Unattractive Vampire (6 page)

The history surrounding the Pink House of Shepherd’s Crook is long, ominous, and surprisingly well documented, since nothing says “Wouldn’t you like to donate to the Shepherd’s Crook Historical Society?” quite like a haunted house. The structure was originally built in 1678 for an unknown English gentleman. He took up residence in 1679 and lived there less than a year before mysterious and violent circumstances led to his disappearance. Modern historians agree that he was likely the victim of persecution on trumped-up charges, based on the presence of infamous witchfinder Erasmus Martin—honorary reverendship given, stripped, given again, stripped again, and now being reconsidered by the Shepherd’s Crook Community College (formerly the Mather Institute of Greater Theology, the Northern Massachusetts College of Science and the Arts, the Mather Institute of Revivalist Theology, and the All-Faith Universal University of Greater Enlightenment and Understanding).

After that initial owner, the house was left empty for nearly fifty years by the nearby Puritans, who were quite happy to leave well enough alone, thank you very much. Then, beginning in 1728, a series of poor Bostonians seeking cheap land occupied the building. This period, marked by a 1,000 percent increase in murders, suicides, and ritual cannibalism, lasted until 1734 when a family of Quakers moved in. Locals started calling the place cursed after that.

The house saw action in two wars during the eighteenth century. During the French and Indian War, tragedy befell a small scout force of French soldiers who’d taken refuge there during a battle
⁷
with Shepherd’s Crook’s plucky native sons. The siege that followed lasted exactly one hour and mainly consisted of the local militia drinking tea outside while waiting for the screams to end. Just over a decade later, it was chosen by the British during the War of Independence as the site for the most disastrously unsuccessful battlefield hospital in the history of battlefields, hospitals, or staying alive. Doctors and historians still disagree as to why, despite above-average sanitation for the time, every injured soldier who’d been treated there, whether it be for a bullet hole or a dose of the clap, had died of acute anemia.

For most of the next century, the house fell into abandonment and disrepair—which was just fine with the citizenry—with occasional bouts of habitation by Irish, German, and Italian immigrants—which was decidedly not. Fortunately, the stays of these foreigners were brief and punctuated by a night when each family ran screaming into the woods, never to be heard from again. This usually warranted a town-wide day of thanksgiving.

Following the hurried departure of a Norwegian couple in 1855, a group of otherwise well-intentioned abolitionists thought to use the Pink House, at this point a fairly awful shade of ramshackle, as a shelter for runaway slaves. After a single night, the former slaves told the abolitionists exactly what they could do with this particular safe house. When pressed, the escapees spoke of queer dreams in which an old white devil drank from their very souls. The Underground Railroad gave Shepherd’s Crook a wide berth in the future. “We may be desperate,” said one of its conductors, “but we’re not crazy.”

In 1891, a visiting Boston architect decided to restore the edifice to its former glory, despite the resounding disapproval of the locals. He would spend the next three years and much of his fortune on the renovation, after which he died drunk, destitute, and alone. Though, strictly speaking, this wasn’t the house’s fault. The rebuilt residence then fell into the hands of New York railroad magnate Gerard D. Huff, whose family traveled there seasonally well into the next century. With occultism all the rage among the upper crust, Mrs. Stephanie Huff would often host séances and Sabbaths for her friends and famous guests. At this time, however, the spirits were not very forthcoming. Even the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, who could raise a spirit out of a snuffbox, was unable to find a single solitary soul.
⁸

Over the next fifty years, very little of interest occurred in the dwelling, except for a dozen deaths by Spanish flu, the murder of an abusive husband, the last stand of a Boston gangster, a War of the Worlds–incited suicide pact, five dismembered pets, and twenty-seven missing children who had entered on a dare—the same as any old house. In fact, when the ’60s and ’70s came around with their own brands of occultism and spiritual interest, the hippies squatting in the building
⁹
were disappointed that nary a ghostly presence could be found. Never ones to remain disheartened, they did what any reasonable proponents of peace and love would do on a boatload of LSD.

They painted the house pink.
¹⁰

The legend of the Pink House died out after that. When authors and film buffs were falling over themselves to find the next Amityville Horror or Overlook Hotel, they passed through Shepherd’s Crook with hardly a second thought beyond “My, what an ugly house.” As the town slowly suburbanized, all traces of its unique and colorful history were willfully forgotten by a community longing for uniformity. All that remained was a generic ghost story, used for fund-raising, and the journal of Erasmus Martin, kept by the Shepherd’s Crook Historical Society and only ever read by two people: the society’s sole eight-year-old member and, after a time, his sister.

This long and rambling history is intended to illustrate that the house—over the centuries lived in, inhabited, commandeered, and otherwise populated by various people—had never been
owned
by any of them, only rented.

The rights to the dwelling were still held in trust by a very old and powerful Swiss bank, in the name of one Master Yulric Dunnwulffe Bile.

On. Off. On. Off.

Amanda let the revelation of her house’s ownership wash over her.

On. Off. On. Off.

It was one thing to appear in her bedroom and call yourself a vampire. Turning up again and attacking her brother was pretty awful, too. But claiming to have owned a suburban house for over three hundred years was insane, stupid, and utterly inconceivable.

On. Off. On.

“Could you stop that?” she said, her patience snapping as she considered impossibilities.

Off.

“With the light on,” she clarified.

On.

“How does a tiny switch ignite a glass candle?” asked Yulric, partially to her, partially to himself, but mostly to the universe at large.

“Electricity,” she answered. After a minute’s thought, she clarified, “Bottled lightning.”

“Ah,” he said. The intricate workings of various circuits, wires, and fossil-fuel-burning power plants were beyond him, but dominating an awesome power of the natural world and confining it to a jar was something he could easily understand. His respect for the troublesome blond girl grew. “I suppose the jars are kept in the walls, then?”

“Sure,” she said patronizingly. He flipped the light switch off and on again, this time imagining how the action moved a jar lid over just enough for slivers of lightning to eke out, which wasn’t so far from the truth.

“So, you are my landlord,” she reasoned. “All those checks, er”—she paused to think back to what Simon’s books would call them—“notes of scrip I paid, they were all going to a man buried under my cellar.”

“Though it has been some time since anyone considered me a man, I imagine your notes of scrip went to the bank in whose hands I left the deed in trust. So, in essence, yes, your statement is correct.” The vampire picked up a frame off a table. “This is very well done. Who is the artist?”

“It’s called a photograph. It’s a . . .” She sought an idiot’s definition of
photograph
.

“Picture made from light,” he interrupted. “
Photo
meaning light,
graph
meaning drawn. Not that difficult.”

“I suppose not,” she conceded. “So, the bank just kept the house for you all this time?”

Yulric looked up from the picture. He gave a condescending chuckle, which only made Amanda angry. “Brandenberg and Sons, or whatever the bank may be called now.”

“La Première Banque du Suisse,” Amanda said. She’d seen the name on top of her bills enough to know it by heart.

“Ah yes, well, these moneylenders and I have a very . . . special relationship that comes with my being their oldest”—he chuckled again—“living client.”

He glanced back at the light portrait in his hands. It showed a whole smiling family: mother, father, daughter, and oddly placid-looking baby. He wondered how long a light portrait took to make, how one wielded the light, and how much pain it inflicted on the subjects during the process. This last thought made him smile. He would have to look into becoming a photographist.

While Yulric’s mind swam with misguided ideas of how photos were made, Amanda was summoning up powers of her own, powers that she possessed in abundance, powers that her brother called “pure undiluted contrariness.”

“So, over three hundred years go by, and they just hand your money back like
that
?” she snarked.

Yulric’s head snapped around at her words. “Three hundred years?”

Amanda smiled at finally having made a dent in this thing’s impenetrable superiority. “
Over
three hundred years.”

Yulric stared at her as if the words themselves hung in front of her face. Could it really have been so long? Surely not. Deep beneath the earth, he had been vaguely aware of events: a war or two, some Quakers, that English mystic with his love of orgies, and those long-haired children who giggled and did not bathe.

So, fifty years then,
he thought before looking again at the automatic candle in the ceiling and the portrait of light.
Maybe one hundred.

Utterly bemused, Amanda pressed her victory. “For over three centuries, no one wondered. No one questioned. No one suspected you were even here. How is that possible?”

“Cheap rent.”

Amanda’s triumph, striding fast and confident, smacked into the easily given answer like a toddler’s head into a kitchen table: there was a moment of wonder and confusion before realization set in and the child fell to the floor, crying for its mommy. Meanwhile, Yulric examined the room once more with new eyes. Here and there, his seventeenth-century gaze found twenty-first-century technology. Lights lit by themselves. Machines moved on their own. Missing were familiar trappings of household life, like churns and looms and body odor. Those that remained, like tables and chairs, were composed of strange materials and even stranger designs.

And then there had been the horror from last night. The mechanical metal behemoth that had appeared in a flash and trampled him horribly beneath its wheels. How long had it taken to invent such a weapon?

A hundred and fifty years!
he thought.
No more!

Between her utter defeat and the pathetic old man this creature had suddenly become, Amanda couldn’t bring herself to be combative anymore. She left him to his increasingly frantic analysis of his surroundings and got herself a beer.

If there had been any lingering doubts as to the nature of the thing in her living room, those were settled upon her return.

Yep, it’s definitely a man,
she thought.

Yulric Bile had found the TV.

• •

The vampire moped for a week. Not in the way that one might expect him to—with fire and death, blood running red in the streets, and a dark miasma blotting out the sun. No, the vampire moped pretty much the same way everyone else does—he watched television.

Unlike everyone else, though, his legs didn’t get stiff and his butt didn’t get sore. He didn’t have to get up to grab a beer or order a pizza. He didn’t bathe, shave, or excrete any euphemistic number, without which he had absolutely no reason to ever set foot in a bathroom. He didn’t even sleep, or at least that’s what he told Amanda from his position on the couch. She couldn’t help but notice that he did occasionally close his eyes and that he was much crankier when he hadn’t.

Day and night, he watched. Even late at night, when the only programs were infomercials and phone-sex ads, he watched. Every so often, he would appear in a doorway or from around a corner to ask such things as why some movies were in black and white while the rest were in color. He kept the remote in hand and returned quickly to the couch, uttering perfunctory death threats as an afterthought.

It wasn’t that he was intrigued or mesmerized or entranced. Honestly, he didn’t even look very interested. He just seemed . . . empty. The great fire of Yulric Bile, which once had threatened to consume the world, had been doused, and nothing could reignite it.

Except—

“Ow!” yelled Yulric, climbing over the back of the couch and rubbing his head. On the other side, a stoic-faced cherub stood, notebook in hand. At the sight of the small boy, Yulric’s eyes flamed, his fangs bared, and even his lungs, which worked selectively, began to creak under the weight of his quickening breath.

“Pestilent, dog-eared offspring of a worm-ridden hag!” he screamed. “I’ll stick your head in that infernal box stove
¹¹
till your eyeballs pop. May your hair turn to leeches and the days of your life peter out into . . .” At this point, he became so incensed that he began switching languages, from French to Arabic to some nonsensical, squishing noise, and finally into the most incomprehensible of all, Welsh.

The boy scribbled something in his notebook and walked away. Slowly, Yulric’s rage faded. As it did, he slid down the couch and returned to watching a woman talk to women about women. That is, until—“Ow!”

Up popped the bald, bat-eared head once more. Again, the child stood ready to take notes. This time, the fiery eyes of the beast sought out the objects that had struck it.

“Horseshoes?” cried the creature. “Horseshoes? You interrupted the accounts by survivors of the breast plague to test me with iron?” He took a moment to hurl the offending steel back at the boy. Simon, used to an environment where anyone abnormal was singled out and pelted with welt-inducing objects, adeptly stepped aside, with the reflexes forged in a thousand games of dodgeball.