Vampire

American Grimoire

Story by Ryan Tippets
Illustration by Cory Mendenhall

When I was seven, we moved into a new house one town over.

It was an ancient Queen Anne with high bay windows, gothic towers that would have fit right at home in a Hammer flick, a porch that extended from the front all the way to the side of the house, an acre of perfectly manicured grass that from far enough away looked like a comet sized emerald, and one hungry vampire living in the basement.

I say vampire, but it could have been many things.

A ghoul, a lich, a demon. I don’t know.

I was seven and it drank blood.

When it happened, when I first became aware of it, and, I’m pretty sure, it of me, I was thirsty and didn’t yet have a healthy fear of the dark.

My brother had finally tossed and turned himself into the deep nothing short of an earthquake will make me wake up sleep of four-year olds everywhere. My parents closed-door muffled whispers had long since died down.

I crept down the staircase to grab some juice. One questing toe after another, sure that my boxer-clad father would lumber down the stairway at any minute demanding terrible hell, found the next stair.

I rounded the corner expecting a darkened kitchen but found the vampire.

Again, “Vampire”.

In the dark kitchen the refrigerator door was cracked open.

From that pale light source I saw a floating, almost invisible apparition. I say almost because it looked like Halloween decoration spiderwebs pulled to breaking point. From the assembled mass of almost invisibility a long appendage reached towards the open refrigerator door. And from the end of that spider-like arm stretched forth a single finger into my mother’s thawing hamburger meat.

And the finger drank.

It gulped in big, reckless helpings of bovine plasma.

I ran, because of course I ran.

I told my father, because of course I told my father. He was the stoic shore upon which all fears shattered.

And give credit where credit is due, the old man actually searched. Up and down that old beautiful house he left no stones unturned. He looked under beds, he looked in closets, he checked the backyard and the front, he stuck his cinder block-sized head inside the dumbwaiter left over from a simpler time.

He checked the basement.

I had followed him down the rickety stairs into our dirt floor basement expecting something. If not a confrontation then a revelation. A “monsters are real” moment. Instead, all I saw was one decrepit, long-nailed finger pull itself behind our dryer.

Or maybe I didn't.

Regardless, I pointed, I yelled and I jumped up and down.

My father pulled the dryer away from the wall and nothingness chuckled at me from the spaces between the cinderblocks.

But maybe I saw a wisp of old lattice jerk away into the shadows.

I don’t know, but I know.

The cat’s went first. Tom we found emaciated and drained in the gutter in front of our house. Sawyer, we never found.

My parents still live in that ancient Queen Anne. I moved away as soon as I could.

Of course.

I don’t know what’s kept them there.

The real estate is fine I suppose. The house is still beautiful, if aged. The towers are still imposing, if slightly sloped from too many storms. The yard still looks like a wizards fertile green.

But maybe, and not maybe, but probably, they’re waiting for my brother to come back.

And maybe, no definitely, they should check behind the dryer.