Kissing Corpses Read online

  “I keep books in my bedroom,” Rawdon said. “Feel free to get a drink of water. Glasses are in the cupboard over the sink. Ice and water are in the door.”

  Rawdon left the room and I crossed to the sink. I opened the cupboard to find only four regular glasses and two crystal wine glasses. There must have been more in the dishwasher. I went to the refrigerator and pressed the glass against the lever for the ice maker. It whirred and clunked, but no ice came out. I opened the freezer door. It was empty. Shouldn't it have more food? He had been here three months. Did he eat out all the time? He could probably afford it.

  Was I being nosy? Maybe. I maintain that I was just on autopilot. For whatever reason I closed the freezer and opened the refrigerator. There was no food. Instead there were racks with hooks and hanging from each hook was an intravenous bag filled with bank blood. For an odd moment I wondered if he had a medical condition, but none of it made sense. He had a refrigerator full of human blood. I didn't know what Rawdon was up to, but I was certain that I didn't want any part in it.

  “What are you doing?” he said from directly behind me. I whipped around, preparing myself to yell or run, but Rawdon put his hand over my mouth. It was the first time he had touched me without his gloves and his bare skin was icy cold. “Calm down,” he said. “I can explain.”

  He took his hand off of my mouth. I was in too much shock to say anything. I was standing inches away from a psychopath. I briefly considered kicking him in the groin and running.

  “Sit down with me,” he said, looking deep into my eyes. “Let me explain and then, if you want to go, I'll let you leave.”

  I'm not a druggie, but I did eat a pot brownie once in college. What happened next felt just like that. I was thinking about things that I should say or do, but before I could catch up to my thoughts, my feet were already moving and I was being guided to the couch. When my head cleared, Rawdon was sitting next to me, holding my hand, and I was already seated. It was as if I had lost a few seconds of my life.

  “I have not told you a single lie,” he said. “I have lived for twenty years, but I have been dead for a hundred and forty-nine years. My name is Rawdon Hale. I was born in London in 1862 and I was killed in 1882. Nothing about this is untrue. I just left some things out, but as we only met two days ago, there are many things I do not know about you, either. My only intention in bringing you here is for companionship. I mean you no harm.”

  I suddenly seemed to find my mouth again and with the glass of wine still coursing through my system, I didn't bother to filter my words. “You seriously expect me to believe that?” I blurted, “That you drink blood?”

  “An unfortunate necessity,” he said. “Outside of that and the sunlight, I try to live as humanly as possible. As you can see, I find non-violent sources for blood. I wouldn't have a ready supply if I had any murderous intent.”

  “This is too weird,” I said. “It's a joke, right?”

  He took my hand and pressed it against his throat. He pressed my fingers against his carotid artery. If he were a human liar, I would have felt a very rapid pulse. I felt nothing. The only heat in his body came from my own. He was dead.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” he replied. He dropped my hand.

  “It's a trick. You took something. You have a pulse, it's just really shallow.”

  Rawdon stood up. He took his time crossing the room to the old jukebox. I glanced around the room to plan an escape route. When I looked back, he had lifted the jukebox over his head. “Does this change your mind?” he asked. He set it on the rug with a heavy thud. I momentarily forgot my fear of him and crossed the room, ready to prove his trick. It was a prop, right? When I pushed against the machine, it didn't budge. Rawdon smiled down at me. “How about now?”

  “How?”

  “Magic?” he said. “It's all rather a big mystery to the community. We assume it's magic because it surely isn't science.”

  “There are more of you?”

  “Well it would hardly make sense for there to be legends about vampires if I was the only one,” he said. “For one, I don't look a thing like Bela Lugosi.”

  I snorted.

  “Well, if you can laugh, then you're taking this better than I thought you would.” Rawdon went back to the sofa and sat down. He patted the seat next to him.

  “I'm a little bit buzzed,” I said.

  “I can tell by your cheeks. They're bright pink.”

  Damn. I had let him get me sidetracked. “But you're a vampire!”

  “I am. But tell me, honestly, before you knew this fact, did you like me?”

  “Well I went on a date with you,” I said, “So... yes.”

  “Then that fact shouldn't change. I'm the same person. Think of it like a disability. I have a unique medical condition where--”

  “Where you're dead!” I cut him off.

  His jaw tensed. “Where I have to drink blood and I can't go out in the sun.”

  “How?” I asked again. I walked cautiously back to the couch and sat down, leaving a foot of space between us.

  “I told you. Magic.”

  “No, I mean... how did you become a vampire?”

  Rawdon took a deep breath and let it out. I realized that his breathing was an imitation of humanity, because he didn't need to breathe to live. He didn't need to breathe to speak, however. This was a cue for me that I was about to hear a long story, rather than any kind of necessary preparation.

  “It starts with a woman named Cybil Helm. She was an aristrocrat in the seventeeth century, tutored in languages and the fine arts. She met a handsome stranger at court, an educated man. He was wealthy and so his good breeding was assumed. He claimed to be a representative of the King of Spain. The Spanish court had no record of him. Cybil suspected that he wasn't as finely bred as he claimed to be. When she discovered his secret, he offered her immortality. Once she was turned, they fled the country. She traveled the world and came back, independent of her maker in the mid-Nineteenth Century.”

  “She made you?”

  “Not quite,” he said, holding up a hand in gesture for me to wait. “She fell in love with a human. His name was John Wesley. He was not worthy of her love, but he was my maker. You see, after she turned him, he took his power and left her. He was supposed to stay with her for at least fifty years to be sure that he knew the ways of our kind. Sires are to raise their offspring, like a parent would raise a child, to teach them how to get along in the world. They learn how to survive and feed and stay hidden. We have a strict code to avoid a mass hunt. If too many farmers are found drained, the pitchforks come out. The fact that you didn't believe in vampires until a few minutes ago, well, that is the point. We prefer to remain legends.

  “But John Wesley was arrogant. He started to go by his middle name, Enoch. He traveled north through England, leaving a trail of exsanguinated corpses. Cybil had to hunt him. He was her responsibility. The humans were starting to suspect that the culprit wasn't human.

  “Vampires can't drink alcohol, but if we drank blood with a high alcohol content, we could become intoxicated. It was my birthday. I was North, visiting an uncle of mine, and Enoch took me by surprise walking home from a pub and fed on me. I was dying, he was drunk, and so he decided to turn me for fun. He left me hungry. I was feral. But Cybil found me before it was too late. Taking responsibility for her offspring's errors, she had the choice to either kill me or foster me. She was compassionate. I suppose you would call Cybil Helm my grand-maker.

  “Together we hunted Enoch across the English country side until we were able to put him down. He was a disgrace to our kind. Vampires were trained to drink a little and leave the donor without memory of the incident. There were plenty of prostitues at the time who would gladly give a little blood for the right price. He took too much pleasure in the hunt and left no one alive.”

  I just watched him as he spoke. He had been so young when he had died. He hadn't asked for this. Was it fair of me to judge him by the bags
of blood in his refrigerator? He hadn't sought to be a vampire. His life was stolen from him.

  “I'm so sorry,” I said.

  “I've come to terms with it,” he said. “I cling on to my humanity to keep sane. Cybil taught me how to turn longevity into profitability. I keep cheap storage units around the world stocked with art and collectibles and fifty years later I come back and sell them as antiques. I only have a few small items left from my living years. They're my insurance. Ebay has made it incredibly easy this past decade. Most of the Hale family fortune is gone. I managed to convince my family that I was alive and just studying and traveling abroad until my father died. Then I returned to London to inherit.”

  “You left your family?”

  “They would have found out what I was and they would have had to kill me. As recently as a hundred years ago there were people exhuming bodies in Connecticut and decapitating them to keep them from rising as vampires. It's considered an act of love from a God-fearing Christian family. Mutilate your loved ones to keep them in the ground.”

  I shuddered.

  “Kendall,” he said. “Please don't write me off. I enjoy your company. You're one of the few women I have met in the past decade who isn't constantly prattling on about Robert Pattinson or Dancing With the Stars. Heaven forbid Robert Pattinson actually goes on Dancing With the Stars. The whole world might explode.”

  I snorted.

  “It's refreshing to talk to someone who can communicate beyond pressing tiny buttons with her thumbs,” he went on. “I know that there are other intelligent, beautiful, women, but I know that you're one of the only woman I'm going to meet who can appreciate an old soul.”

  How was I supposed to walk away when he was saying such sweet things? He hardly knew me, but I liked what he assumed. Maybe I was sticking around for curiosity. Maybe it was for my own ego. I decided not to run away that night.

  By God, I should have.

  We talked about a lot of things before the sun rose. I told him about my time at UW and how I met Geneva in High School after moving from Colorado. He told me about the places he'd lived with his maker. He had traveled to Germany, France, Spain and even Japan before finding his way to New York in 1961 with a fake visa. It was the first time he had been apart from his maker and he had arrived to find the youth, his apparent peers, in an uproar over the Vietnam War. He had lived in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and Washinton DC. I had lived in the midwest all of my life. The knowledge that he had seen the world made him so much more interesting to me. What kinds of experiences could he share? He had seen history.

  As the dawn approached, I realized that I had to be at work in two hours. Rawdon checked his pocket-watch, looking surprised at how much time had passed. “I need to get into the basement,” he said. He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and handed them to me. “Bring it back after dark and I'll drive you home.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, staring down at the key chain. It was a commemorative key chain from the sixties, a medal with JFK and Bobby Kennedy on it. Attached was a set of brand new Bentley keys and a house key.

  He nodded. “I'm sure. You need to go to work and I need to be underground before the sun rises.”

  I nodded. “I'll be careful,” I said. I figured I still had time to go home and shower before work. Maybe I could catch a thirty minute nap.

  “It's insured,” he shrugged. Then he leaned forward and caught me off-guard, pressing his lips to mine. I've kissed a few guys in my life. One of them had terrible breath. One of them was way too slobbery. One of them tried to ingest my tongue. Rawdon's lips weren't warm, but they weren't slobbery and his breath was quite pleasant. He touched my jaw delicately with his fingertips as he kissed me. When he pulled back, I found myself sighing. The kiss itself hadn't been particularly steamy, but I realized that the excitement of someone wanting me, even if he was dead, was something I had been missing.

  “Good morning,” he said. Rawdon stood up and walked towards the door to the back of the house.

  “Good morning,” I replied with a smile. “I'll see you tonight.”

  The work day that followed was miserable. I nodded off at my desk more than once and kept having to sneak off to the bathroom because of the four cups of coffee I drank. At my lunch hour, I grabbed a package of mini chocolate-covered donuts from the gas station around the corner and ate it before going to sleep in my car. I set an alarm on my phone and after forty-five minutes it took a battle of willpower to go back to the office.

  I went straight home after work, and passed out on the couch. It had been twenty-eight hours since I had really slept. I dozed from six until midnight, when Geneva poked me and asked if I was going to go to bed.

  “Shit!” I shouted. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a banana and a Luna bar. I ran to my bedroom, trying to fix my hair and do makeup white eating those two things.

  “Where were you last night?” Geneva asked, leaning on my doorframe. “And why do you have Rawdon's car?”

  “I stayed too late talking and then...” I took applying lip gloss as an opportunity to think of a lie. I couldn't possibly explain to Geneva why Rawdon couldn't drive me home without revealing the big secret. “He had someone coming to pick him up to carpool to a big meeting so he gave me his car. I have to bring it back.”

  “At this hour?” she asked.

  “Yes. At this hour.”

  Geneva pulled out her phone and started texting. I brushed out my hair and finished with mascara. “Who are you texting?”

  “Noah,” Geneva said. “Gotta let him know his sister stayed up all night 'talking' to a new guy.”

  “Geneva!” I snapped, “We talked. Seriously. I didn't assume you slept with Jimmy when you stayed out all night.”

  “Jeremy,” she corrected.

  “Whatever. Guy was an ass. We should just call him Jerkemy from now on.”

  “Jerkemy? You wit.”

  “I've slept six hours. I'm not at my best.”

  “Well hurry up and go bring that car back. It's twelve-thirty. I'm sure Rawdon wants to get some sleep, too.”

  I laughed. “See you in a bit,” I said, walking from my bedroom to the living-room to grab his keys. “And don't make things up for Noah. You know how he gets.”

  “You're his own personal Rom-Com,” Geneva replied.

  “I've already got one busy-body asking too many questions about my love life.”

  “Love you, too,” she said, blowing a mock kiss.

  I sat behind the wheel of Rawdon's car. I rubbed my face. Then I promptly checked the mirror to make sure I didn't smear eyeliner all over it. I was going back. I was returning to the vampire's home. Home? Domicile? Lair?

  When I got to Rawdon's house, I took my time approaching the front door. The lights were on inside. I looked at the little rectangular basement window next to the front steps and realized that it was painted black. Rawdon opened the door before I could knock. His cheeks looked flushed. I wondered if that meant that he had just eaten.

  “You came back,” he said.

  “I wasn't about to steal your car,” I answered. True, I could have left it in daylight. “Sorry it's late. I had to sleep.”

  “Oh, yes. I'm sure you were quite exhausted all day. I apologize.”

  “It's fine,” I said. “I allowed myself to stay so late. So early,” I corrected. I dangled his keys between us. He wrapped his hands around the keys, catching my fingers and pulling me close so that he could kiss me.

  “You look beautiful,” he said when the kiss was broken. He stepped back into the house and I followed him. Rawdon placed the keys on the table by the door, walked to the jukebox at the corner of the room and dropped some change from his pocket into the machine. The neon lights flashed and he flipped through the cards and chose a song. A bass started up and I recognized the tune immediately. My grandmother was a huge Elvis fan and “Can't Help Falling In Love” was a wedding staple.

  Rawdon turned and offered his hand to me. “One dance, an
d then I'll let you go home and sleep.”

  My dance experience was limited to high school dances, and the last of those had been five years ago. I had been to a few family weddings but only once with a date, and I don't think our slow dances had followed any recognized ballroom standard. When I took Rawdon's hand, he pulled me close. He placed a hand on my hip and, with the other hand, held my own. There was plenty of space between us, but the intensity of his eye contact made me feel like he was pressed against me.

  Wise men say, only fools rush in.

  I didn't know how to waltz, but I quickly learned that very little experience was needed on my part. I shuffled a bit awkwardly at first. He was a strong leader and so long as I moved with his steps, I kept from stepping on his feet.

  Shall I stay? Would it be a sin?

  I experienced an odd sense of time. I was being transported back fifty years by the music, but the formality of the ballroom dance took me back even further. When the three-minute song was over, I had gravitated farther into his arms.

  The jukebox continued with the next song and the dance changed. I dropped my hand around his shoulders and he slid the hand that had rested on my hip up to cradle my back. It was turning out to be more than one dance, but I didn't mind.

  Just running scared, each place we go. So afraid, that he might show...

  “What is this?” I whispered.