Helens-of-Troy (41 page)

“Don’t just stand there like a bunch of
reporters waiting for the fall,” she said to the three people
below, gaping at her with their mouths wide open. “Tom, go get the
trampoline from the end of the yard and move it closer.” She gave
Stan a light squeeze. “Stan, we’re going to do this together, okay?
We’re going to go for a little bouncy ride.”

“Mrs. LaRose,” Stan asked wearily, “can
you do me a favor?”

“What is it, Stan?”

“Can you not tell Ryan that I peed my
pants?”

Helena smiled. “I think that can be our
little secret.”

“Good,” Stan sighed. “And Mrs.
LaRose…when I wake up…can you give me some medicine so I don’t
dream about the vampire in your backyard anymore?”

“I’ll see what I can do, Stan,” she
said, putting his arms around her neck and hers around his waist
before jumping off the roof onto the trampoline beneath. The two of
them took more than a few bounces before coming to a halt. The
canvas almost touched the ground with the weight of them falling
from such a height. When the motion finally stopped, Helena still
had Stan in her arms. She pulled their bodies from the
trampoline.

“Where are you going?” Helen asked.
“Shouldn’t we take him to a doctor?”

“I am a doctor,” her mother reminded
her. “I’m taking him to my office. I’m going to give him a little
something to help him sleep, and hopefully not remember any of
this. Ix-nay on the vampire-ay, okay you guys? Not a word to anyone
about this. Ever.”

They nodded in agreement.

Alone in her office, Helena sat Stan on
her couch and covered him with the crocheted blanket. She prepared
some valerian tea to rehydrate him. He drank it thirstily. She
could tell he was drowsy from his ordeal, but his adrenaline was
most likely stopping him from falling asleep. She needed him
asleep.

“Let’s read, Stan,” she said, pulling a
book randomly from her bookcase. It happened to be a copy of Grey’s
Anatomy. She opened the book in the middle and began to read in a
low, monotonous tone. It was enough to make Stan close his
eyes.

“Finally,” she whispered, and reached
for another book. It was a small, black, tattered and torn book
with a cover that had ‘Book of Spells’ embossed on it. She gently
thumbed through the weathered pages until she found what she was
looking for.

“Somnus quod alieno,” she sang over and
over again, in a lullaby, until Stan began to snore. “Sleep and
forget, my child,” she whispered softly in his ear. She looked up
to see Helen’s face peering at her through the window. She motioned
for her to come in, indicating for her to be quiet.

“Where are Tom and Jacey?” Helena
asked, looking around the room. Her mother had done a marvelous job
turning the cottage in the backyard into an office. She saw her
doctorate proudly displayed in a frame beside the door.

“They’ve gone to visit Ryan,” Helen
answered. “And to try to find Ellie.”

Helena turned and looked out the
window. Her garden was completely covered in snow, and she hadn’t
had a chance to plant the spring bulbs yet. Just another thing left
undone, she acknowledged to herself.

“Is he okay?” Helen asked her, noticing
Stan curled up on the couch.

“He’s fine. I’ve used a memory spell on
him. When he wakes up, he’s not going to remember a thing.” She
reached over the child and stroked his sweaty hair. “I guess I’d
better get him back to his room. I lifted him once, I can lift him
again. It’ll be easier than explaining why he’s here when he wakes
up.” She looked at Helen. “We’ll have to stay with him until the
kids get back.”

Helen nodded in agreement. “You know,”
she said, “you were really brave this afternoon.”

“Thank you,” Helena replied.

“I didn’t know you still had it in
you.”

“Why? Is it because you think I’m not
exactly young? I’m not exactly old either. Not in our lives. Not in
anyone’s life, actually. You should go see your grandmother some
time.”

“Elaine?”

“Yes, Elaine. She’s still living in the
castle in England. She's not one to leave her home for long, my
mother.”

“How old is she now?” Helen
asked.

“I don’t know…one fifty, one sixty…she
hides her age well. She’s walking with a bit of a limp though, from
that last battle with Beelzebub. He’s her own personal stalker.
How’d you like to have to shoulder that?”

“No thanks,” Helen admitted. “What does
this all mean, anyway?” she asked her mother. “If a vampire did
really take Stan, why would he stuff him in the chimney? Why didn’t
he finish him off like he presumably did to Brooke and
Kevin?”

“Stan’s just the bait,” Helena said
sadly. “It means he’s really after Ellie.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The teenager stepped on the round ring
attached to the base of the old hand-washing fountain in the boys
washroom. Tiny streams of water shot out from the top of the
birdbath-like apparatus and landed in the large granite sink below.
That had surprised him when he first moved in. He would have
thought someone would have turned the water off long ago. He
doubted the old schoolhouse had been used in years.

People in Troy were undeniably stupid,
he reckoned. He couldn’t’t deny though, that their little oversight
would come in handy. He did like to freshen up every once and a
while. The stench on his hands of recently eaten rodent burger
offended him, and he needed to cleanse it off before he could do
anything else. Someone had stolen the copper piping from the shower
room, so the makeshift basin would have to do. It had been hard to
keep clean since she kicked him out of the house. That was just one
more reason to hate HER.

He looked at himself through the
cracked mirror. “Gaspar BonVillaine, you are one scary dude. You
used to be so handsome.” Funny how he could see his own reflection
in the mirror, although no human would ever be able to do so. “I
guess they see what they want to see,” he shrugged, lowering his
sweaty black hair into the sink as best he could. The water was
cold, but he preferred it that way.

He had found the empty building his
first night away from HER. What did she really expect? Did she
think he was going to be able to change his ways when those other
people arrived? He was enjoying a symbiotic relationship with HER
before she had answered the phone that night. Then everything
changed. SHE suddenly didn’t care about him. SHE suddenly
mistrusted him. As if it was his fault. Was he supposed to just
flip a switch and erase everything that had happened to him and
what he had become? SHE knew better than that.

“You’re like family to me,” she had
once said.

“So much for that,” he said to himself.
She had told him he had to get out. Well, maybe that wasn’t really
what had happened. SHE had told him he couldn’t come in. Small
difference, and yet a big one. He physically couldn’t come in
anymore. He wondered why that rule came in to play. Was there some
union somewhere that negotiated the right to trespass out of the
vampire/human contract? He didn’t know. He could only accept that
she had warned him it would be like that, and he had very recently
found it to be true.

So he had searched for a new place to
rest and came upon the deserted schoolhouse. Since no one lived
there, technically he didn’t have to be invited in. Score one for
the bloodsucker. And it really wasn’t so bad. There was plenty of
room. He had his choice of several rooms to call his own, although
he did find the furnishings a little sparse. The desks were all
gone now, but a bed was still in what had been the sick room. The
sick room that had no windows. It was like it had been designed to
his particular taste. “Queer Eye for the Dead Guy,” he
laughed.

Taste. That was the bonus. There was no
one around to care whether he was eating properly or not. Eating
properly bothered the humans, he knew. Here, he wasn’t going to
have to remember to bury the bones. He could stockpile them like
little trophies. Humans found that to be incredibly rude. They
looked upon it with the same scorn they did when someone drank milk
straight out of the carton. They had an odd sense of the uncouth,
humans. T-bones were all fine and dandy, but leave a little rabbit
head around and all hell breaks loose.

Why things like this would suddenly
bother HER, did not make any sense to him. She had been the one who
initially taught him how to feed. True, she didn’t participate
herself, but she had gone to all that trouble to find him that
book. The feeding book. It wasn’t something you could order over
the internet through Barnes and Noble. SHE had taken a trip to
Louisiana to get it for him. SHE had aided and abetted
him.

The book had been a godsend. Ironic,
that. It taught him the kinds of animals that you could take
without people noticing—crows, seagulls, and squirrels. It also
taught him the kinds of animal that you could take but needed to be
quick about—dogs, cats, and rabbits. And it had pictures. Lots of
graphic, how-to pictures of quick and easy dissections.

It also stated very clearly, that when
eventually those dietary choices weren’t enough, one would have to
expand the food groups to humans. SHE knew this. SHE said it was
like going from strained peas to solids. He would have to cut his
teeth all over again, she said, but this time the bleeding gums
wouldn’t bother him.

So it wasn’t like she didn’t know it
would happen sometime. Had she figured out that this was the
time?

He couldn’t fully explain what had
happened to him when he saw the little girl go running around the
corner that night. He hadn’t planned on snatching her. Something
had come over him. It had been fine until she fell and scraped her
knee. Then the aroma hit him. He could taste her just by the smell
of that tiny trickle of hemoglobin. It whiffed through his nostrils
and sent his saliva glands into hyperdrive. He couldn’t control the
drool. She became his fix, and he moved silently and stealthy
towards her until she had no choice but to surrender,
Dorothy.

He had started to take her back to the
schoolhouse, but that had been problematic. A shadow-man and a
teenaged girl, half hidden under the cover of an old bridge had
come across him in his travels. He tried to run by them, but his
prey had summoned some inner strength and called out to them. He
had no choice but to disappear under the bridge with the girl and
take the life from her.

He started to feed.

It hadn’t been like he had expected,
tasting human flesh for the first time. He bowed his head above her
carotid artery and threw any sense of right and wrong to the wind.
His incisors ached as he tore through the young girl’s flesh. He
found it sweet, but tougher than he would have imagined. It was
strangely sinewy like a cheaper cut of meat, pre-seasoned with the
salt from her own sweat. Her blood didn’t taste much different than
his own had, when he was human. She was like sucking on one big
rib-eye, he told himself.

He should have been repulsed, he knew
that. But it was a lot like when he used to crave salt and found
himself eating far more potato chips than he should of. He just
couldn’t help himself. His throat filled with her rich red syrup,
and he found himself choking in his vigor, forgetting to take time
to swallow.

But the girl was bigger than anything
he had fed on before, and he couldn't finish her off. Not then and
there. He was going to have to find a place to store her,
temporarily. He opted to use the cold murky water of the creek as a
makeshift refrigerator, planning to return and feed on her
later.

Except then, that bald headed behemoth
decided to join the party uninvited. The big boy had stumbled upon
his water pantry. He lived next door to HER, with his nerdy little
brother and his big, fat mama. There was a score to settle with
their whole frickin’ family, but now was hardly the
time.

Now he was going to have to fight for
the girl. The earlier feast had left him a little tired and a
little intoxicated, making it difficult to fend off the boy he had
watched play football almost every Friday night for the past year.
True, the jock had conveniently wound up going to jail for the
crime, taking the heat off for a while, but it wasn’t a
particularly proud moment for his vampire legacy.

So, the next time he prepared. He had
located a proper refrigerator to store his dinner in, and he had
picked a little porker boy to gnaw on. But that hadn’t worked out
as planned either.

Damn that old farmer. He wasn’t
supposed to have come out of the house to see the old beer fridge
walking away. He wasn’t supposed to give chase. That had turned the
whole thing into a messy situation that ended with the cops coming
to take away his kill for a second time.

He had been depressed for a moment
until he got a whiff of the Lachey kid, who was conveniently all
alone in the cop car. If only the police had stayed away from the
cruiser for a few more moments, he could have caught the kid on the
first go round, saving everyone so much frickin’ time.

He laughed. He had more frickin’ time
than any of them, when you thought about it.