The metal door creaked open. Something fluttered against it in the gust of warm moist air. A sign with old-fashioned lettering, its edges curled with age, warned I was in the Vampire Morgue. As if I needed reminding. It was the only thing I knew, but I’d no idea how I got here.
“Time for your bath,” the vampire said in a soft voice. “There is no need to fear me, Calista. I am keeping you alive for us.” A strand of seaweed decorated one shoulder of his dark clothes.
His face radiated an eerie masculinity. He was a beautiful, dangerous vampire with a mournful deceptive face. The sign on the door warned me where I was, but I didn’t remember him.
My death meant nothing to him because he knew I was undead. Why else would I be here, if I hadn’t been poisoned by his venomous fangs?
The darkness didn’t stop me from watching him.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
He leaned over me and the scent of him reminded me of something lost in my mind. If only I could remember all the things I’d forgotten. As soon as I tried to grasp my memories, they vanished into a gray mist.
I only remembered I hated vampires.
He reached for the hose coiled over a hook on the white tiled wall and adjusted the water to a trickle. It soaked the light sheet covering me, flowed off the plastic-coated mattress and rained to the tile floor to swirl down the drain.
My skin responded with pleasure.
“Feels good, I know,” he said. “Saltwater to soothe you.”
The vampire brought the hose nearer my face. He spread the stream of water with his fingers to let it run over my closed eyes.
He blinded me with water. “Remember how you wanted me to help you. Remember how it all went terribly wrong.”
Intense heat touched every cell in my brain. Something crawled inside my mind until every part of me united in tingling horror. All the dead connections fused together in an agonizing rush of memories and feelings.
A sob rattled inside me unable to escape.
I drifted to a memory emerging from the fog. I was six years old and I wanted to go to school. How small I looked in my new uniform. I needed help and the only person awake was the man in the walk-in freezer. My mother said he was trying to kill himself and not to disturb him, but I needed help now.
My mind tried to remember having a mother, but I could only watch the memory and hope to learn from it.
I tiptoed down the curved stairs to the hallway underneath the music room. I hated the new house. Ever since we’d come here, Momma was different. She stayed away from me and sometimes she growled at Daddy in the night.
The sun was up. It didn’t shine in the rooms down here, so I switched on all the lights I could reach.
The freezer door creaked at me. I propped it open with the little metal leg, just like Nanny had shown me. The man stood next to the shelf with ice-cream, where I’d seen him yesterday. I’d offered to share some with him when he’d helped open the box, but he said he never ate anything.
“I need you to read something for me.” I waved the letter from the school at him. “Nanny has done most of it but I need to do the rest and I don’t know what it says.”
The man turned to stare at me. He looked sad and not friendly. “Ask Nanny Mary to read it for you.” He didn’t speak like us. Momma said he spoke BBC, and that’s what happens when early television travels in space.
Sometimes she talks nonsense. Quinn spoke like English, like Nanny Jillian, mixed with some Californian because he’d lived here for a long time.
“Daddy’s taken Mary to the airport. She wanted to go home.” I watched the frost slowly creeping up the man’s dark clothes. “Does it say I need to take a lunch?”
“Make a lunch if it says to take lunch,” he said in gloomy tones.
“I can’t read what it says to bring. This is my first day of school and I need someone to wait with me for the bus, or I can’t go.” I was sure he didn’t understand anything about school. I had missed Kindergarten and I was determined not to miss first grade. Julie had promised to be there. It was the only place to meet her after Momma banned her from the house.
I stared at the man in a pleading way that even worked on my mother sometimes.
Daddy said the man was very, very old, but he didn’t look it. We’d inherited him, along with the house, from Great Aunt Suzanne. Momma called him a strange name, Quiz Ling. Momma didn’t like him much.
“Why are you trying to freeze to death?” I asked.
“I’m lonely.” He sounded very sad. “I thought it might make time go faster.”
“I’ll be your friend, if you’ll be mine.” I smiled at him. I wanted to go to school and he was the only way I was going to get there. “Julie, she lives next door, she’s my friend too. Her brother sends her postcards and she always shares them with me.”
“Friend,” he said, and he held out a cold hand. I shook it carefully in case his frozen fingers broke off.
I followed him up the stairs to the kitchen. He walked in a floating kind of way, as if he didn’t weigh much.
He made a lunch for me, but I had to tell him how to do it. We waited for the school bus together. I told the kids he was the butler and we’d inherited him with the house, and it nearly wasn’t a lie.
When I got home, he was waiting for me in the same place I’d left him. Momma waved from her window. I thought I’d be in trouble for asking him for help, but she blew me a kiss so I knew I was forgiven.
When I went to bed he waited for me to wake up, while he watched over the ocean through the window. He wasn’t interested in the beach or the shallow part of the bay, he only liked the deep water. He never hurt anyone, though Momma said he could if he wanted to. Daddy said we had promised to look after him. I didn’t think making him live in the freezer was keeping the promise, but Daddy said he could live anywhere he liked.
He didn’t work like Daddy did, seeing patients and saving them from their own brains. He worked in the deep ocean sometimes, and when he wasn’t doing that he mostly watched me.
Daddy asked him to watch from outside my bedroom, but then he’d just stood on the roof and peered in my window upside down, hanging from the tiles by his toes. I opened the window to let him in because I didn’t want him to fall. He was weird but he was my friend, and he’d do anything I wanted.
“What’s your real name?” I asked one day after school. “Julie thinks Quiz Ling is a Chinese name, but you don’t look like Miss Lee. My guess is you have another name that you’d like better. Momma never gives nice names to people.”
“You can choose,” he said. He wore a pair of old shorts and a golf shirt of Daddy’s that I’d borrowed for him. Great Aunt Suzanne had made him wear a tuxedo but that looked weird when we played on the beach.
“How about Quinn? You can be the Mighty Quinn, like the song. That’s my favorite. Quinn starts with Q. Do you want to play Buffy with me? You can be a vampire.”
“Can I be an expendable vampire?” he asked hopefully.
“What does that mean?” I liked big words. “Expendable?”
His head lowered until it merged with mine. It didn’t hurt, it felt weird. If Momma saw him do it, she might get mad but I didn’t mind. I wanted to be Buffy when I grew up and that meant weird things were always going to happen to me.
Expendable meant not worth saving, like all those bad vampires Buffy staked.
My mind saw Quinn on the beach in the sun. “Do you want to play at building sandcastles?” I asked him.
He gave a weary sigh. “I don’t think I’m a terrestrial vampire. Shall I pretend?”
He merged again to explain terrestrial meant a being from a planet with a solid surface.
“Can I stake you?” I hopped about on one foot to make him say yes.
Quinn agreed. He looked interested in playing the game with me. I had to tell him what to do, because they didn’t play on the planet he was from. That’s what Daddy said when I’d seen Quinn walk on top of the ocean to stare into the deep, and I’d wanted whatever it was that helped him do it.
Then Daddy said Quinn wasn’t Jesus come back to save us all.
Momma said Quinn was damned for eternity, and no one was coming back for him. That made him even sadder. He’d asked if, at the end of time, there’d only be him and Momma left. That question didn’t make either of them happy.
I ran to get the props for the Buffy game before Quinn wandered off. I picked up the heavy stake and mallet Daddy kept beside his bed. Daddy never watched television or he’d have known a little stake worked just as well, and he didn’t need a wooden mallet to stick it in a vampire.
Our house only had one television and it was for the nanny. Nannies never took a job without one. They were always lonely and liked me to watch with them. I thought that would make them nicer to Quinn, because he was lonely too, but they were all scared of him.
I struggled to carry the huge stake down to the sand. Quinn came to help me. I hurried after him with the mallet. I had to get them back before nightfall, just in case Daddy needed them. For the first time I wondered if he was a vampire slayer and if I could be his helper. The idea made me laugh. Daddy wouldn’t make a good slayer. He was always too busy trying to save people from their own brains to kill anyone. I giggled and tripped over my own feet.
Quinn caught me. His laughter warmed my insides and made me laugh more. He was excited about learning to play. That’s when I knew I liked him more than Momma, whose laughter was scary. Even Daddy thought so.
I struggled with the mallet while Quinn lay down to hold the stake where his heart would have been if he’d had one. The mallet was very heavy. I almost dropped it on him. It took several tries before I managed to lift it high enough to strike the top of the long stake.
The stake went through him. Right through, as if he was not solid. It squished in silently. He disappeared in a huge plume of dusty smoke that smelled awful, like death.
Dark deadly bits stuck to my skin and swirled about me. I took a deep breath to scream and some of him went inside me. Every breath inside the dark cloud fried my lungs. Dust stuck to my eyeballs and flew up my nose. I tried to cough him out and swallowed some of my lung stuff. It burned going down. It stung so much when it hit my stomach that I tried to make myself vomit in the sand to get him out.
I’d killed Quinn! Now I only had one friend left!
I’d eaten him by accident!
Sobs shook me even more than the coughing and the trying to throw him up.
I scrambled up path to the terrace overlooking the bay. “Momma!” I howled, outside my mother’s private door.
“Momma! I’ve killed Quinzling!” I mangled his name and didn’t care if the sun had not kissed the ocean! A nervous glance showed it was nearly there. Momma might not get mad enough to kill anyone.
The doors opened and my mother appeared dressed in a long negligee. She stayed in the shadows.
“Momma!” I wiped my tears. Momma hated me to cry. “Momma, I killed Quiz Ling.”
A voice behind me said with a mournful sigh, “Expendable vampires never really die.”
I almost swallowed my tongue to see him there. I wasn’t a murderer! Quinn led me away before my mother replied.
Momma never spoke until the sun kissed the ocean. It was a rule. She was allergic to the sun, and food, and me, and Daddy said it was better to leave her alone, because she’d never recovered after she’d been so sick she nearly died.
Quinn held my hand to comfort me. “I won’t die again,” he promised. “It’s even sadder to die than it is to live. Don’t cry, Calista.”
I nodded and swallowed the snot dripping down the back of my throat. What if Quinn was a vampire? What if vampires didn’t die when Buffy staked them?
I clutched his hand and hoped it wouldn’t hurt when he claimed the bits of him I felt churning inside me. From far away in the sky a voice asked, “What happened?” Only he didn’t say it in words. The stinging bits inside me answered, “Eaten by predator.”
Someone up there laughed.
Chapter 2
I made a sign for the freezer door using red and black ink. Quinn held the box of calligraphy pens I’d gotten for my ninth birthday. It was dark and creepy in the freezer room, with only the light from the hallway and the slow drips of melting ice. Even a vampire morgue needs to be defrosted.
Julie lolled on a shelf, wearing a glowing green necklace and one of my old princess dresses. She never grew any bigger. Most of the time she pretended to be younger than she was. “You should write it in blood.” She gave a menacing growl to add atmosphere, but she always made that sound when she got scared.
“Is Zavier home?” I always asked questions because it freaked people out if I just knew things. Julie always went weird when her brother showed up. She missed him when he was away. It was his return that made her act crazy.
“Yes, he’s back and I wish he’d go away again.” Julie was frightened of Zavier.
I worried about her living all alone in the other house on our bay, but Julie worried about having company. She adored my mother from a distance, because she didn’t have one of her own to love.
Julie’s parents never came home from their cruise ship. She couldn’t remember what they looked like. Her brother played in a band and traveled all over the world. Their house was lit with glowing sticks because Julie didn’t know how to fix the electricity.
Momma said Julie was a liar and her parents were dead. But Momma always said bad things about people. Daddy said just because Momma told her version of the truth, it didn’t make her bad or wrong.
I stuck the VAMPIRE MORGUE sign on the door with tape.
Momma was coming.
Quinn went to the deep, as he always did to get out of the way. Julie fled with him, using him as a shield in case Momma tried to rip her head off. Even Daddy wasn’t sure if that was a joke or not.
We were worried about Daddy. All of us. Even the one up there worried about Daddy. I’d heard him talking to himself in the night. If I woke up and lay still, I could hear him speak. Sometimes he wanted Quinn to do something, though I never understood what it was. I only felt the alien bits inside me react to his voice.
Momma ignored the sign I’d stuck on the freezer door, but she gave me one of her eagle looks, as if she could see into my soul. The one up there watched us, I could feel his interest. Maybe we were like television to him.
After I’d helped my mother wash and dry the floor, I went to find my father. I had to confide in someone and Daddy was used to people telling him horrible things. I thought it might help him if he knew what was wrong with me, because the older I got the more I realized he knew it had something to do with Quinn.
Daddy hated him for it.
The white garage doors were open. I’d heard the music from the freezer room. My father sat in his pale yellow antique convertible, the one he didn’t drive to work. He listened to sad songs about breaking hearts and lost love, and it being over and finished. Sometimes he cried. He always said, into each life some tears must fall because we are human.
Quinn knew all about being lonely and sad, but he couldn’t talk to Daddy. He’d tried and Daddy had asked him so many questions Quinn’s brain had shut down, and he’d gone to the deep to recover for a whole day. After that Quinn left my father alone.
I asked Daddy to take me out for ice cream to get him away from the house. He turned off the music and started the old convertible with its big fins and shiny chrome.
The antique car smelled and the engine made me nervous. Only it wasn’t me who was scared, not really.
My father said, “Let’s go for a long drive.”
I could feel my guts twisting, warning me to be safe. The throbbing noise from space intensified from a background hum to pulsing so loud I could barely think inside it. “Not too far, Daddy.” I worried about taking the alien bits on a wrong trajectory.
“Quinn can wait for you. You are not his slave.” Daddy tried to smile at me. He’d given me lots of talks about free will and my equal rights, while someone else listened with me.
The bits stopped hurting so much. Someone up there used my mouth to talk to Daddy. He spoke actual English words through me for the first time. “Slavery is wrong. Free will must not harm others.” I sounded like Quinn.
Daddy slowed down until someone honked at him as they sped by. “Did you just talk for Quinn?”
“Don’t get mad, Daddy.”
“Hey, I never get mad,” he said, but his voice went a bit strange. He coughed and tried to be honest. “Upset and sad sometimes.”
We didn’t speak again until he pulled into the parking lot in front of the ice cream parlor with the sun making long shadows from the palm trees. “Can you hear Quinn when he’s not with us?” he asked casually.
My secrets spilled out in a rush. “I can hear lots of things. Sometimes Quinn talks to someone up in the sky and sometimes the one up there says things to me. That’s the first time I’ve heard him talk like we do. He wants you to know he understands. Usually he speaks in streams of light.” I wanted to tell my father everything, all the weird things I knew, even if they were supposed to be secrets. “Sometimes, I think he might be God.”
A tickling sensation swept over my entire body. I giggled and couldn’t stop. Someone up there was laughing, and I had to laugh with him.
Daddy stared at me as like I was crazy. “What’s so funny?”
My laughter ended, though the tingles still tickled. For a moment I only remembered the one thing the alien being wanted me to say. “He says he’s not God.”
Daddy stared at me like I’d grown another head. “Who said he is not God?”
“The one Quinn is waiting for. Sometimes I can hear them talking but it isn’t very interesting. It’s mostly about light stream trajectories.” I talked too fast, but I wanted to get it all out. “Quinn is a beacon to lead him back here. That’s why Quinn doesn’t know much. He’s only part of him, an emanation.”
“Can you talk to the real one, or does he only tell you things?” Daddy liked to ask neutral questions, instead of reacting to what was being said.
“We don’t have things to talk about, not like you and I do. He’s up there, far away.” I waved at the sky, glad Daddy didn’t look like he wasn’t going to die from a heart attack, like Pappou had in Greece. “He won’t be here for a long time.”
“How long?” Daddy went all pale and sweaty.
“A long, long, long time from now in human years, Daddy. Do you think he might be God and maybe he doesn’t know it?”
“Not a chance, my darling girl. No.”
I gave Daddy a tissue from the glove box. He wiped his face, but it took a while for him to calm down enough to buy our ice cream. We ate in the car. I was very careful not to get any on the leather seat.
“You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?” asked Daddy.
I nodded. I knew I’d told him more than Quinn and the one up there wanted me to say. Not that they’d tried to stop me from saying it, but I could feel them waiting for his reaction. And we all knew I hadn’t told the worst yet.
“Does your mother have anything to do with Quinn and the one in the sky?” asked Daddy. “Are you afraid of her?”
“No, Momma doesn’t know. She thought we were playing.” I didn’t tell him about listening to him and Momma fighting, and how it frightened me. I said, “Sometimes I worry about you.”
Daddy thought about that. “I worry about you, too. Shall we go away and live somewhere else. Just leave the house, leave Quinn, just go?”
My father wanted to save me by taking me away. I knew from the churning bits inside me that I risked my life and something worse, if I tried to leave Quinn. I didn’t want to talk about it. “Momma would miss us.” Not that I was sure about that.
My father wanted my mother to love him again. But she stayed away from him after we moved to the house and she got sick. When she recovered, they didn’t hold one another and kiss and laugh like they used to. We never had family hugs. They never went out on dates with Momma dressed in blue jeans and her sparkly shirt, wearing her dancing cowboy boots. He never sang Wild Stallions to make her laugh.
I ate ice cream to stop my tears. There was no escape for me, no way to leave and not die from it.
“Your mother can come with us if she wants to, or she can stay,” said Daddy.
“We can’t leave!” Those weird bits inside me jiggled strangely. I’d have to give back Quinn’s bits and then I’d die. Dead as is not coming back ever.
Daddy ate his melting ice cream. I waited until he’d finished, trying to think of a way to tell him about my problem. Not that I expected him to be able to fix me, I just wanted him to understand what was wrong.
I started off sideways. “I’m good at math. Really good.”
“Great!”
“Not so great, Daddy. I got the power from Quinn. Answers jump into my head before I understand the question.”
He turned his head away for a moment and took a weird breath. It took him a while to look at me again. He smiled as if nothing was wrong. “How did you get the power from Quinn?”
“Not on purpose, I got it by accident. I breathed him in. We were playing Buffy and I hit him with your stake and it all went wrong when he turned into dust and I breathed him in.” I wiped away my tears.
Daddy watched me, pale as the paint on the car.
“Quinn didn’t know not to do it. It’s my fault not his. I’ve got bits of him stuck inside me. In the night, when it’s quiet, I can hear things.”
“Is that why Quinn wants to be close to you?” asked Daddy.
“He’s lonely and he likes me.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. People were crossing the parking lot. “One day he’s going to need those bits and I’ll have to give them back.” There, I’d told my deepest, darkest secret and no bolt from heaven had struck me dead. I peered up at the blue sky and tried not to shiver.
“How do you know you must give them back?” Daddy tried to put his arm round my shoulders, but I slid away from him. I didn’t want to get him blasted.
“Quinn told the one up there, when I was listening. Now they mostly talk when I’m asleep. Quinn said it’ll kill me. I cried, and the one up there said he was going to save me and not to worry because it wouldn’t be for a very long time.”
“How long?” Daddy tried to control the expression on his face.
“A long, long time.” My body went silent to listen to its alien bits. “The one up there says he’ll get here before I die.” I felt my heart start to beat with a strange energy pulse that magnified the tickling sensation.
Daddy stared at me as if I’d just shot him. I tried to distract him by telling him something new. “I can hear his voice all over my body, like an electric power is flowing in me. All the alien bits send information to him all the time.”
“If he’s in space, far away, how can he communicate with you over such long distances?” Daddy always wanted to know how things worked, but he was gabbling to hide his pain at knowing I was doomed sooner or later. “How can there be no time delay? What does it feel like when he talks to you without words?”
I put my hand on Daddy’s chest. “Feel it, Daddy.”
His heart stopped with one last enormous beat. It stopped with a bang I could hear. Then it just jangled inside him without beating properly. His blood didn’t go anywhere that I could hear. He died from a jangling heart.
I’d killed Daddy by accident!
I opened my mouth to scream and Quinn appeared beside the car. He restarted my father’s heart by reaching into his chest. I could hear my father’s heart squishing. It suddenly started again.
I’d almost killed Daddy. Shock made me silent and froze my body, not even my heart worked, but I knew that wouldn’t kill me. I silently swore never to touch a human again. I swore it on my heart and hoped not to die. Not yet. Not soon. Not before my father. He’d cry too much over me.
We all went home together. I sat in the back with Quinn and held his hand.
Daddy didn’t blame me, he never blamed me for anything. He drove us home and never said a word about me killing him.
My mother was out when we got there. Quinn made Daddy a special drink. The glass was huge and round, and the drink was pale and glowing, like the moon. He drank it and fell asleep. He only whimpered a bit in the gap between his snores.
Quinn and I watched over him. My alien bits calculated the length of my life as energy versus output, and then compared the result to my father’s probable life span.
I couldn’t survive long enough to wait him out. There were too many variables to be precise, but if I wanted to survive my teenage years I’d have to conserve energy and reduce output.
Why were the bits so concerned with that! I’d almost killed my father by touching him. I could never touch a human, because I wasn’t human! What use was my life? I might as well die now to get it over with.
“What if my father dies again and you are too busy to save him?” I asked Quinn. “Take your bits back, right now. I’m ready to die so I don’t kill Daddy again.”
“I can’t take them back, Calista. You have to live until we get here,” said Quinn. He said it sadly, because usually he did whatever I wanted. “He can save you, I can’t.”
I knew he meant the one zooming in space, but we both knew he was also we. Quinn was a place holder, a cosmic bookmark, a part of him he’d left behind to collect if he ever made it back to Earth. That meant I was the same thing, half a shadow, and his return meant my death. For sure I’d have to give the bits back to the space alien. God might have let me keep them.
There was no use arguing with Quinn. I went to bed because it was midnight and I had school tomorrow, and I had to work out how to not touch anyone ever again.
My mother came home just before dawn. I was awake, taping up the ends of my fingers. I’d decided to say I’d burnt myself baking cookies. She raged at Daddy for nearly dying, and pleaded with him to live with her forever, but he refused to listen to her arguments. He said he wanted me to be happy for as much time as I had left, and he didn’t care if he lived a moment past the end of my life.
Quinn came in later to tell me it was time to get ready for school. “Don’t worry, Calista. Momma wants to make Daddy a vampire to keep him safe. He doesn’t want her to do it. I gave Daddy the antidote, just in case Momma gets scared for him and bites him.”
My mother was a vampire. I had alien bits that could kill people. What else could go wrong?
