The Falstaff Vampire Files
Part I: THE THING IN THE SHED
The Files
The package contained: a plastic spray bottle with a few ounces of cloudy liquid that smelled like onion juice, a grease-smeared menu from a Chinese restaurant, a rubber-banded file folder of typed pages with a few loose, handwritten pages on top, a red digital recorder/MP3 player, a simple black voice recorder and a silver flash drive and digital recorder. The contents are presented in date order except for the first few pages of handwritten notes.
Chapter 1
Kristin Marlowe's handwritten notes, August 5th
My name is Kristin Marlow and I'm supposed to be sane for a living, but my ex-lover stole the one irreplaceable item I own, and god help me I broke into his creepy old house by the ocean to get it back. As a psychologist I know a dozen techniques to calm down and think rationally. Sorry! Too angry to use any of them.
Technically I didn't break in. I had Hal's key, but before I could use it, the front door flew open and the old woman caretaker came bustling out like a wool-clad force of nature. I caught the door and edged past her, mumbling something about getting my stuff.
She stopped right in front of me. "Don't go in the shed," she warned me in a hostile tone.
"I have no reason to go there." Shivering from nerves rather than cold, I started to close the door, but she blocked me and stepped so close that I could smell her personal perfume of eucalyptus cough drops and antiseptic.
"I give you good advice. Take it." She turned and walked away, muttering something about the nephew changing the locks, the old lady being gone and go ahead and take the light bulbs and hospital bed.
Okay, so I could be arrested and lose my therapist's license if the old lady called Hal or the cops. But I needed to get my property back and I was still enraged that Hal had taken it. I walked into the darkened foyer, paved in dark red stone. It was late afternoon but very little daylight filtered in and the lights mounted on the wall glowed already in their twisted copper fittings. The veins in the alabaster globes seemed to pulse like reptilian eggs.
Hal had told me on my first visit that his aunt lived in the ground floor flat on the right. "The corridor on the left leads to the back door. I keep my coffin in a shed out there. Did I mention that I'm a vampire in my spare time?"
Strange how I forgot those words until I stood on the red stone floor again. I started up the chilly staircase, also red stone.
A scrabbling sound nearby made me freeze in my tracks. I stopped to listen. The house seemed to shudder like a ship in the wind. The scratching sound was outside. The wind drove branches whipping against the walls. I went up to the landing. The first step off the stairs onto the floorboards creaked loudly.
Hal's flat sounded empty, with echoing hardwood floors.
When we'd come here before, he'd turned on a dim lamp and we'd walked past three closed doors down a hallway with a narrow Turkish carpet runner. Hal's apartment was as spare as I had remembered, furnished with solid vintage furniture he said he'd harvested from elsewhere in the old house.
An hour of searching yielded no trace of my property. I hated to leave without it. I went down the stairs. A corridor led past the ground floor flat to the rear of the building. I squinted as the setting sun lit up the entryway so that I seemed to be walking on dried blood.
No harm in looking at the shed.
At the end of the corridor, a room with rows of west-facing windows led out to the back stairs and the yard where the shed sat. Rubber mats covered the floor against mud and a row of hooks poked out of the wall. Low shelves just inside the door held only a wind-scrambled umbrella and a single pair of rubber boots. The wind off the ocean had coated the windows with a scum of salt and grit.
The outside door creaked and stuck. I had to force it open and then pull heavily to close it behind me. Standing at the top of the weathered wood steps, I watched the Pacific Ocean gleaming for a moment and the red disk of sun bleeding into the banks of clouds to vanish.
At the bottom of the steps the masses of untended bushes and trees blocked the light and the yard seemed colder. The shed and the trelliswork wall next to it had the same grimy, blistered green paint as the house. The trellis shuddered in the wind that swayed a few, clinging skeletal shreds of ivy.
The shed door held a padlock that had not been snapped closed. I lifted it out of the hasp, hung it on one side and tried the corroded doorknob. Frozen past repair, it didn't turn, but the door opened smoothly and felt as heavy as a safe door. I stepped inside and it slammed shut behind me.
Total darkness. Something brushed against my face. I jumped back and cried out.
The door creaked open when I hit it, letting in a sliver of twilight. A string hanging down from a light bulb on the ceiling touched my face again, swinging back and forth. Laughing a little shakily, I pulled the string and the shed was bathed in harsh yellow light.
It looked empty.
A patch with oil drips on the floor indicated where Hal parked his motorcycle. No sign of my property. Everything looked inches deep in dust. The place had an earthy, grassy smell, with a faint hint of pine shavings. In one corner, an ancient hand-pushed lawnmower leaned on a pile of garden tools rusted beyond recognition.
The door slammed shut more solidly and the sound of the wind died away. The walls seemed thicker than an ordinary shed. My heart beat as fast as if I'd been running.
At least there aren't any coffins, I said to myself. Not funny, Kristin, you should go with your gut and get out of here. I took a quick look around. Where in this shed could Hal have hidden my property?
Half a dozen old fruit crates held piles of dust-shrouded junk. Next to them a huge crate sat, clean and free of dust. About eight feet long by four feet wide and equally as high. A piano case? I'd seen no sign of a piano in the house.
The big box was the only thing in the room that looked as if it were regularly opened. Could Hal have tossed my property in there? Maybe it was full of souvenirs stolen from other ex-girlfriends.
I eased across the cement floor, ready to run for the door at any moment. In the silence I could hear myself take a deep breath.
Walking past the fruit crates stirred up dust and I began to sneeze. More than once.
A sneeze exploded from inside the crate.
I jumped back violently--back into the cloud of dust, which made me sneeze again.
As if in answer, another sneeze and a series of coughs shook the crate. The hinges creaked as if something inside wanted out. The lid began to rise up and open.
© Lynne Murray