“Winston!”
The others looked at me, their eyes full of fear.
“Lay him on the table!” I ordered.
It took only the briefest examination to realize that he was beyond any help I could offer. He was already growing cold. “He’s dead.”
I thought I heard sighs of relief, and I turned to face them. They all stood silently, hats in hand.
“Who did this?” I asked.
No one answered, and all lowered their eyes.
“Who did this?” I asked again.
“Vampires,” I heard someone whisper, but I was never to know who spoke the word. No matter what I asked, no matter how I pleaded to be told the truth, they remained resolutely silent. Winston’s blood was on all of them; there was no way to distinguish a single killer from among the group. I went to my basin, to wash his blood from my own hands. The thought arrested me. These were neighbors, friends-my father, my brother. I knew what had driven them to this-I knew. Had I not lived in Carrick Hollow almost all my life?
“What shall we do with him?” one of them asked. I dried my hands and said, in a voice of complete calm, “I believe it is said that for the good of the community, one who is made into a vampire must be cremated.”
I could show you the place in the woods where it was done, where the earth has not yet healed over the burning. Nature works to reclaim it, though, as nature ever works to reclaim us all.
I would like to tell you that the last vampire of Carrick Hollow had been laid to rest there, and that we now live in peace. But it is not so.
Not long after Winston’s death, people who had lived in our village all their lives began to leave it. Farms were abandoned. We would tell strangers that it was the economy-and in truth, some left because it was easier to make a living in the cities. But that would not explain the mistrust the inhabitants sometimes seem to feel toward one another, or the guilty look one might surprise in the faces of those who hastily travel past Winston’s farm.
I thought the peddler was unlikely to return. He had seen something that frightened him, though he might not know enough to put a name to the emptiness in a young doctor’s eyes. I knew it for what it was, for I had seen it in my father and Isaac and Mr. Robinson and so many others-Carrick Hollow is a haunted place, haunted by the living as well as the dead.
Oh yes, I believe in vampires-though not the sort of bogeyman imagined by fanatics like the late and unlamented Winston.
But if vampires are the animated dead, dead who walk upon the earth-restless, hungry, and longing to be alive again-then I could never deny their existence. You see, I know so very many of them.
Indeed, I am one.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While Carrick Hollow and its inhabitants are entirely fictional, some New Englanders were ascribing the cause of consumption (tuberculosis) to vampires late into the 19th century; newspaper accounts and other evidence indicate rituals such as the one described here occurred at least as late as the 1890’s in rural Rhode Island.
Mea Culpa
It was going to be my turn next, and I should have been thinking about my sins, but I never could concentrate on my own sins-big as they were-once Harvey started his confession. I tried not to listen, but Harvey was a loud talker, and there was just no way that one wooden door was going to keep me from hearing him. There are lots of things I’m not good at anymore, but my hearing is pretty sharp. I wasn’t trying to listen in on him, though. He was just talking loud. I tried praying, I tried humming “Ave Maria” to myself, but nothing worked. Maybe it was because Harvey was talking about wanting to divorce my mother.
It was only me and Father O’Brien and Harvey in the church then, anyway. Just like always. Harvey said he was embarrassed about me, on account of me being a cripple, and that’s why he always waited until confessions were almost over. That way, none of his buddies on the parish council or in the Knights of Columbus would see him with me. But later, I figured it was because Harvey didn’t want anybody to know he had sins.
Whatever the reason, on most Saturday nights, we’d get into his black Chrysler Imperial-a brand spanking new, soft-seated car, with big fins on the back, push-button automatic transmission and purple dashlights. We’d drive to church late and wait in the parking lot. When almost all the other cars were gone, he’d tell me to get out, to go on in and check on things.
I would get my crutches and go up the steps and struggle to get one of the big doors open and get myself inside the church. (That part was okay. Lots of other folks would try to do things for me, but Harvey let me do them on my own. I try to think of good things to say about Harvey. There aren’t many, but that is one.)
I’d bless myself with holy water, then take a peek along the side aisle. Usually, only a few people were standing in line for confession by then. I’d go on up into the choir loft. I learned this way of going up the stairs real quietly. The stairs were old and wooden and creaked, but I figured out which ones groaned the loudest and where to step just right, so that I could do it without making much noise. I’d cross the choir loft and stand near one of the stained glass windows that faced the parking lot and wait to give Harvey the signal.
I always liked this time the best, the waiting time. It was dark up in the loft, and until the last people in line went into the confessional, I was in a secret world of my own. I could move closer to the railing and watch the faces of the people who waited in line. Sometimes, I’d time the people who had gone into the confessionals. If they were in there for a while, I would imagine what sins they were taking so long to tell. If they just went in and came out quick, I’d wonder if they were really good or just big liars.
Sometimes I would pray and do the kind of stuff you’re supposed to do in a church. But I’m trying to tell the truth here, and the truth is that most often, my time up in that choir loft was spent thinking about Mary Theresa Mills. Her name was on the stained glass window I was supposed to signal from. It was a window of Jesus and the little children, and at the bottom it said it was “In memory of my beloved daughter, Mary Theresa Mills, 1902-1909.” If the moon was bright, the light would come in through the window. It was so beautiful then, it always made me feel like I was in a holy place.
Sometimes I’d sit up there and think about her like a word problem in arithmetic: Mary Theresa Mills died fifty years ago. She died when she was seven. If she had lived, how old would she be today, in 1959? Answer: Fifty-seven, except if she hasn’t had her birthday yet, so maybe fifty-six. (That kind of answer always gets me in trouble with my teacher, who would say it should just be fifty-seven. Period.)
I thought about her in other ways, too. I figured she must have been a good kid, not rotten like me. No one will ever make a window like that in my memory. It was kind of sad, thinking that someone good had died young like that, and for the past fifty years, there had been no Mary Theresa Mills.
There was a lamp near the Mary Theresa Mills window. The lamp was on top of the case where they kept the choir music, and that case was just below the window. When the last person went into the confessional, I’d turn the lamp on, and Harvey’d know he could come on in without seeing any of his friends. I’d wait until I saw him come in, then I’d turn out the lamp and head downstairs.
Once, I didn’t wait, and I reached the bottom of the stairs when Harvey came into the church. A lady came down the aisle just then, and when she saw me she said, “Oh, you poor dear!” I really hate it when people act like that. She turned to Harvey, who was getting all red in the face and said, “Polio?”