A Soft Barren Aftershock

  Then came reports, disputed at first, and still officially denied, of vampires in New York City. Most of the New York TV and radio stations had stopped transmitting last week. And now . . .

  “You can’t really believe vampires are coming into New Jersey, can you?” Bernadette said. “I mean, that is, if there were such things.”

  “It is hard to believe, isn’t it?” Carole said, hiding a smile. “Especially since no one comes to Jersey unless they have to.”

  “Oh, don’t you be having on with me now. This is serious.”

  Bernadette was right. It was serious. “Well, it fits the pattern my students have heard from Europe.”

  “But dear God, ‘tis Holy Week! ‘Tis Good Friday, it is! How could they dare?”

  “It’s the perfect time, if you think about it. There will be no mass said until the first Easter Mass on Sunday morning. What other time of the year is daily mass suspended?”

  Bernadette shook her head. “None.”

  “Exactly.” Carole looked down at her cold hands and felt the chill crawl all the way up her arms.

  The car suddenly lurched to a halt and she heard Bernadette cry out, “Dear Jesus! They’re already here!”

  Half a dozen black-clad forms clustered on the corner ahead, staring at them.

  “Got to get out of here!” Bernadette said, and hit the gas.

  The old car coughed and died.

  “Oh, no!” Bernadette wailed, frantically pumping the gas pedal and turning the key as the dark forms glided toward them. “No!”

  “Easy, dear,” Carole said, laying a gentle hand on her arm. “It’s all right. They’re just kids.”

  Perhaps “kids” was not entirely correct. Two males and four females who looked to be in their late teens and early twenties, but carried any number of adult lifetimes behind their heavily made-up eyes. Grinning, leering, they gathered around the car, four on Bernadette’s side and two on Carole’s. Sallow faces made paler by a layer of white powder, kohl-crusted eyelids, and black lipstick. Black fingernails, rings in their ears and eyebrows and nostrils, chrome studs piercing cheeks and hps. Their hair ranged the color spectrum, from dead white through burgundy to crankcase black. Bare hairless chests on the boys under their leather jackets, almost-bare chests on the girls in their black push-up bras and bustiers. Boots of shiny leather or vinyl, fishnet stockings, layer upon layer of lace, and everything black, black, black.

  “Hey, look!” one of the boys said. A spiked leather collar girded his throat, acne lumps bulged under his whiteface. “Nuns!”

  “Penguins!” someone else said.

  Apparently this was deemed hilarious. The six of them screamed with laughter.

  We’re not penguins, Carole thought. She hadn’t worn a full habit in years. Only the headpiece.

  “Shit, are they gonna be in for a surprise tomorrow morning!” said a buxom girl wearing a silk top hat.

  Another roar of laughter by all except one. A tall slim girl with three large black tears tattooed down one cheek, and blond roots peeking from under her black-dyed hair, hung back, looking uncomfortable. Carole stared at her. Something familiar there . . .

  She rolled down her window. “Mary Margaret? Mary Margaret Flanagan, is that you?”

  More laughter. “ ‘Mary Margaret’?” someone cried. “That’s Wicky!”

  The girl stepped forward and looked Carole in the eye. “Yes, sister. That used to be my name. But I’m not Mary Margaret anymore.”

  “I can see that.”

  She remembered Mary Margaret. A sweet girl, extremely bright, but so quiet. A voracious reader who never seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids. Her grades plummeted as a junior. She never returned for her senior year. When Carole had called her parents, she was told that Mary Margaret had left home. She’d been unable to learn anything more.

  “You’ve changed a bit since I last saw you. What is it—three years now?”

  “You talk about change?” said the top-hatted girl, sticking her face in the window. “Wait’ll tonight. Then you’ll really see her change!” She brayed a laugh that revealed a chromed stud in her tongue.

  “Butt out, Carmilla!” Mary Margaret said.

  Carmilla ignored her. “They’re coming tonight, you know. The Lords of the Night will be arriving after sunset, and that’ll spell the death of your world and the birth of ours. We will present ourselves to them, we will bare our throats and let them drain us, and then we’ll join them. Then we will rule the night with them!”

  It sounded like a canned speech, one she must have delivered time and again to her black-clad troupe.

  Carole looked past Carmilla to Mary Margaret. “Is that what you believe? Is that what you really want?”

  The girl shrugged her high thin shoulders. “Beats anything else I got going.”

  Finally the old Datsun shuddered to life. Carole heard Bernadette working the shift. She touched her arm and said, “Wait. Just one more moment, please.”

  She was about to speak to Mary Margaret when Carmilla jabbed her finger at Carole’s face, shouting.

  “Then you bitches and the candy-ass god you whore for will be fucking extinct!”

  With a surprising show of strength, Mary Margaret yanked Carmilla away from the window.

  “Better go, Sister Carole,” Mary Margaret said.

  The Datsun started to move.

  “What the fuck’s with you, Wicky?” Carole heard Carmilla scream as the car eased away from the dark cluster. “Getting religion or somethin’? Should we start callin’ you ‘Sister Mary Margaret’ now?”

  “She was one of the few people who was ever straight with me,” Mary Margaret said. “So fuck off, Carmilla.”

  The car had traveled too far to hear more.

  “What awful creatures they were!” Bernadette said, staring out the window in Carole’s room. She hadn’t been able to stop talking about the incident on the street. “Almost my age, they were, and such horrible language!”

  Her convent room was little more than a ten-by-ten-foot plaster box with cracks in the walls and the latest coat of paint beginning to flake off the ancient embossed tin ceiling. She had one window, a crucifix, a dresser and mirror, a worktable and chair, a bed, and a nightstand as furnishings. Not much, but she gladly called it home. She took her vow of poverty seriously.

  “Perhaps we should pray for them.”

  “They need more than prayer, I’d think. Believe me you, they’re heading for a bad end.” Bernadette removed the oversized rosary she wore looped around her neck, gathering the beads and its attached crucifix in her hand. “Maybe we could offer them some crosses for protection?”

  Carole couldn’t resist a smile. “That’s a sweet thought, Bern, but I don’t think they’re looking for protection.”

  “Sure, and look at it after what I’m saying,” Bernadette said, her own smile rueful. “No, of course they wouldn’t.”

  “But we’ll pray for them,” Carole said.

  Bernadette dropped into a chair, stayed there for no more than a heartbeat, then was up again, moving about, pacing the confines of Carole’s room. She couldn’t seem to sit still. She wandered out into the hall and came back almost immediately, rubbing her hands together as if washing them.

  “It’s so quiet,” she said. “So empty.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Carole said. “We’re the only two who are supposed to be here.”

  The little convent was half empty even when all its residents were present. And now, with St. Anthony’s School closed for the coming week, the rest of the nuns had gone home to spend Easter Week with brothers and sisters and parents. Even those who might have stayed around the convent in past years had heard the rumors that the undead might be moving this way, so they’d scattered south and west. Carole’s only living relative was a brother who lived in California, and he hadn’t invited her; even if he had, she couldn’t afford to fly there and back to Jersey just for Easter. Bernadette hadn’t heard from her family in I
reland for months.

  So that left just the two of them to hold the fort, as it were.

  Carole wasn’t afraid. She knew they’d be safe here at St. Anthony’s. The convent was part of a complex consisting of the church itself, the rectory, the grammar school and high school buildings, and the sturdy old, two-story rooming house that was now the convent. She and Bernadette had taken second-floor rooms, leaving the first floor to the older nuns.

  Not really afraid, although she wished there were more people left in the complex than just Bernadette, herself, and Father Palmeri.

  “I don’t understand Father Palmeri,” Bernadette said. “Locking up the church and keeping his parishioners from making the stations of the cross on Good Friday. Who’s ever heard of such a thing, I ask you? I just don’t understand it.”

  Carole thought she understood. She suspected that Father Alberto Palmeri was afraid. Sometime this morning he’d locked up the rectory, barred the door to St. Anthony’s, and hidden himself in the church basement.

  God forgive her, but to Sister Carole’s mind, Father Palmeri was a coward.

  “Oh, I do wish he’d open the church, just for a little while,” Bernadette said. “I need to be in there, Carole. I need it.”

  Carole knew how Bern felt. Who had said religion was an opiate of the people? Marx? Whoever it was, he hadn’t been completely wrong. For Carole, sitting in the cool, peaceful quiet beneath St. Anthony’s gothic arches, praying, meditating, and feeling the presence of the Lord were like a daily dose of an addictive drug. A dose she and Bern had been denied today. Bern’s withdrawal pangs seemed worse than Carole’s.

  The younger nun paused as she passed the window, then pointed down to the street.

  “And now who in God’s name would they be?”

  Carole rose and stepped to the window. Passing on the street below was a cavalcade of shiny new cars—Mercedes Benzes, BMWs, Jaguars, Lincolns, Cadillacs—all with New York plates, all cruising from the direction of the parkway.

  The sight of them in the dusk tightened a knot in Carole’s stomach. The lupine faces she spied through the windows looked brutish, and the way they drove their gleaming luxury cars down the center line . . . as if they owned the road.

  A Cadillac convertible with its top down passed below, carrying four scruffy men. The driver wore a cowboy hat, the two in the back sat atop the rear seat, drinking beer. When Carole saw one of them glance up and look their way, she tugged on Bern’s sleeve.

  “Stand back! Don’t let them see you!”

  “Why not? Who are they?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’ve heard of bands of men who do the vampires’ dirty work during the daytime, who’ve traded their souls for the promise of immortality later on, and for . . . other things now.”

  “Sure and you’re joking, Carole!”

  Carole shook her head. “I wish I were.”

  “Oh, dear God, and now the sun’s down.” She turned frightened blue eyes toward Carole. “Do you think maybe we should . . .?”

  “Lock up? Most certainly. I know what His Holiness said about there not being any such thing as vampires, but maybe he’s changed his mind since then and just can’t get word to us.”

  “Sure and you’re probably right. You close these and I’ll check down the hall.” She hurried out, her voice trailing behind her. “Oh, I do wish Father Palmeri hadn’t locked the church. I’d dearly love to say a few prayers there.”

  Sister Carole glanced out the window again. The fancy new cars were gone, but rumbling in their wake was a convoy of trucks—big, eighteen-wheel semis, lumbering down the center line. What were they for? What did they carry? What were they delivering to town?

  Suddenly a dog began to bark, and then another, and more and more until it seemed as if every dog in town was giving voice.

  To fight the unease rising within her like a flood tide, Sister Carole concentrated on the simple manual tasks of closing and locking her window and drawing the curtains.

  But the dread remained, a sick, cold certainty that the world was falling into darkness, that the creeping hem of shadow had reached her corner of the globe, and that without some miracle, without some direct intervention by a wrathful God, the coming night hours would wreak an irrevocable change on her life.

  She began to pray for that miracle.

  The two remaining sisters decided to keep the convent of St. Anthony’s dark tonight.

  And they decided to spend the night together in Carole’s room. They dragged in Bernadette’s mattress, locked the door, and double-draped the window with the bedspread. They lit the room with a single candle and prayed together.

  Yet the music of the night filtered through the walls and the doors and the drapes, the muted moan of sirens singing antiphon to their hymns, the muffled pops of gunfire punctuating their psalms, reaching a crescendo shortly after midnight, then tapering off to . . . silence.

  Carole could see that Bernadette was having an especially rough time of it. She cringed with every siren wail, jumped at every shot. She shared Bern’s terror, but she buried it, hid it deep within for her friend’s sake. After all, Carole was older, and she knew she was made of sterner stuff. Bernadette was an innocent, too sensitive even for yesterday’s world, the world before the vampires. How would she survive in the world as it would be after tonight? She’d need help. Carole would provide as much as she could.

  But for all the imagined horrors conjured by the night noises, the silence was worse. No human wails of pain and horror had penetrated their sanctum, but imagined cries of human suffering echoed through their minds in the ensuing stillness.

  “Dear God, what’s happening out there?” Bernadette said after they’d finished reading aloud the Twenty-third Psalm.

  She huddled on her mattress, a blanket thrown over her shoulders. The candle’s flame reflected in her frightened eyes and cast her shadow, high, hunched, and wavering, on the wall behind her.

  Carole sat cross-legged on her bed. She leaned back against the wall and fought to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion was a weight on her shoulders, a cloud over her brain, but she knew sleep was out of the question. Not now, not tonight, not until the sun was up. And maybe not even then.

  “Easy, Bern—” Carole began, then stopped.

  From below, on the first floor of the convent, a faint thumping noise.

  “What’s that?” Bernadette said, voice hushed, eyes wide.

  “I don’t know.”

  Carole grabbed her robe and stepped out into the hall for a better listen.

  “Don’t you be leaving me alone, now!” Bernadette said, running after her with the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders.

  “Hush,” Carole said. “Listen. It’s the front door. Someone’s knocking. I’m going down to see.”

  She hurried down the wide, oak-railed stairway to the front foyer. The knocking was louder here, but still sounded weak. Carole put her eye to the peephole, peered through the sidelights, but saw no one.

  But the knocking, weaker still, continued.

  “Wh-who’s there?” she said, her words cracking with fear.

  “Sister Carole,” came a faint voice through the door. “It’s me . . . Mary Margaret. I’m hurt.”

  Instinctively, Carole reached for the handle, but Bernadette grabbed her arm.

  “Wait! It could be a trick!”

  She’s right, Carole thought. Then she glanced down and saw blood leaking across the threshold from the other side.

  She gasped and pointed at the crimson puddle. “That’s no trick.”

  She unlocked the door and pulled it open. Mary Margaret huddled on the welcome mat in a pool of blood.

  “Dear sweet Jesus!” Carole cried. “Help me, Bern!”

  “What if she’s a vampire?” Bernadette said, standing frozen. “They can’t cross the threshold unless you ask them in.”

  “Stop that silliness! She’s hurt!”

  Bernadette’s good heart won out over her fear. She threw o
ff the blanket, revealing a faded-blue, ankle-length flannel nightgown that swirled just above the floppy slippers she wore. Together they dragged Mary Margaret inside. Bernadette closed and relocked the door immediately.

  “Call 911!” Carole told her.

  Bernadette hurried down the hall to the phone.

  Mary Margaret lay moaning on the foyer tiles, clutching her bleeding abdomen. Carole saw a piece of metal, coated with rust and blood, protruding from the area of her navel. From the fecal smell of the gore Carole guessed that her intestines had been pierced.

  “Oh, you poor child!” Carole knelt beside her and cradled her head in her lap. She arranged Bernadette’s blanket over Mary Margaret’s trembling body. “Who did this to you?”

  “Accident,” Mary Margaret gasped. Real tears had run her black eye makeup over her tattooed tears. “I was running . . . fell.”

  “Running from what?”

  “From them. God . . . terrible. We searched for them, Carmilla’s Lords of the Night. Just after sundown we found one. Looked just like we always knew he would . . . you know, tall and regal and graceful and seductive and cool. Standing by one of those big trailers that came through town. My friends approached him but I sorta stayed back. Wasn’t too sure I was really into having my blood sucked. But Carmilla goes right up to him, pulling off her top and baring her throat, offering herself to him.”

  Mary Margaret coughed and groaned as a spasm of pain shook her.

  “Don’t talk,” Carole said. “Save your strength.”

  “No,” she said in a weaker voice when it eased. “You got to know. This Lord guy just smiles at Carmilla, then he signals his helpers who pull open the back doors of the trailer.” Mary Margaret sobbed. “Horrible! Truck’s filled with these . . . things! Look human but they’re dirty and naked and act like beasts. They like pour out the truck and right off a bunch of them jump Carmilla. They start biting and ripping at her throat. I see her go down and hear her screaming and I start backing up. My other friends try to run but they’re pulled down too. And then I see one of the things hold up Carmilla’s head and hear the Lord guy say, ‘That’s right, children. Take their heads. Always take their heads. There are enough of us now.’ And that’s when I turned and ran. I was running through a vacant lot when I fell on . . . this.”