The Cellar on a
Summer Evening
My cell phone rang. The number was unfamiliar — Westchester County, I think. I suppressed a moment’s irritation at the late hour and answered.
“McKellar,” I said.
“McKellar? It’s Filosofia. Are you in a safe place?”
“What’s that? A safe place?”
“Never mind. Just come to my apartment. Come fast. 309 Angell Street, just don’t stop under any chestnut trees” she said, and hung up.
I recognized the caller well enough — another grad student, a year behind me. I had gone out for a few drinks with her, but never really saw her outside the studio, especially not after the fireworks of her first semester. This spring she disappeared, only occasionally turning up, often sporting scratch marks on her cheeks, or smelling of damp earth. But I would otherwise have sat at home and pushed through more thesis reading, and Filosofia’s strange call struck my curiosity.
Nighttime Driving
The drive through dark humid Providence night went quietly, broken only by my swerves around the waist-deep potholes and the occasional slamming on the brakes when another car ran a red light. There seemed more solitary people meandering around the sidewalk, probably because it was Underage Minor Night at the city bars.
I found Filosofia’s apartment easily enough, one floor in an otherwise-dark four-story house long ago chopped into apartments and offices, and left empty some years back. She met me at the door, but she immediately led me down into the empty rooms below the visible lights of her apartment.
“So how’s your car,” I asked, following her down the shuddering stairs into the chill air. The stairs felt squishy, as if some soft substance had eaten into the wood beneath the carpet.
“My car? The police say that they can get it out of the river next time the tide’s really really low. I’m like, totally jazzed, but neap tide won’t happen for another four days,” she said.
We had walked into the office suite under Filosofia’s apartment. The place had housed an orthodontist’s once, but a few unnatural medical experiments by a caffeine-addled hygienist had driven the authorities to close the place; they must have been startling experiments indeed, for in Providence, officials rarely act without bribes. The air down here smelled damp and vaguely like mothballs, and we passed tables covered with 1999 issues of Highlights magazine and walls lined with photographs of smiling toothsome mouths, barely visible in the dim light filtering in from the street. As we moved down the hall, our feet crunched on small granular objects, popping them. The camphor smell burst upon our noses.
“Mothballs! I hate walking on mothballs!” Filosofia exclaimed. “It’s almost as bad as walking on crystalized demon-moths.”
Drink-Crazed Undead Vampires
We reached an examination room and ducked inside. Filosofia dropped into a hygienist’s chair, sneezing in the cloud of dust she raised.
“Okay, let’s talk,” she said, indicating the dental chair.
“Thanks, I’ll stand,” I said. I waited for her to continue.
“McKellar, have you ever met a vampire?” she asked.
“Well — no, not as such,” I said, easing my way a little closer to the door in case she came at me with a set of discarded dental picks.
“You’re going to tonight. I’ll need backup. It’s crazy out there, and I, like, know something’s going to totally happen.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Filosofia whirled in the darkness and stepped closer to me. I felt on the counter for a weapon of some kind, ignored the strange slimy papers under my fingers and grabbed the first cold metal object that landed in my hand. She jumped back as I came back at her waving a dental mirror.
“Okay, okay, we’re all hella edgy,” she said, backing toward the window and the strange half-dessicated ruin of a plant. “That’s what happens in Providence on the solstice. That’s why I need your help. I like what you’ve been doing with occult symbol typography, and I know you spent a few years in Transylvania—”
“—Belgium, actually, but our shipping company worked with a lot of Hungarians.”
“Like, whatever. But you’ve seen, you know, like, dark stuff?”
I thought a moment or two.
“Yes, a few haunted paintings, and lots of moaning oil drums back in 2002, the odd possessed Volkswagen, but that’s about it. And I’ve seen flashing lights in the sky, but mostly after drinking too much—”
“Good enough. Listen up good: Providence is in for another attack of crazed undead vampires. They’re going to get together and have a huge party, and then they’ll all spill out onto the streets, drunk and wanting more action, all their inhibitions gone. And I can’t deal with it alone.”
“Drink-crazed undead vampires. We had a bunch of English tourists like that once, when I was the engineer officer on a ferry out of Stavanger. Terrible incident when they all tried to re-enact the ‘I’m flying!’ scene from Titanic.”
“But they’re not tourists! Take this seriously, McKellar.”
“I am being serious. But all right — let’s pretend that this is true,” I asked her. “Why tonight?”
“It’s the solstice, remember? Astronomical twilight at 10.35 tonight.”
“Well no, it’s not as bad as the winter solstice,” I said. “A longer day, more sunshine, far warmer.”
“Yes, but it’s the solstice, and tomorrow will, like, run four seconds shorter. Vampires totally celebrate things like that. They’ve got strong imaginations. They, like, picture themselves running around fangs out, dead of night, dark, snow and ice everywhere. It’s hella vampirific.”
A Professional
“Why do you know all this?” I asked her. I had read about these things in my spare time, even helped ward off evil spirits from a supposedly possessed Indonesian tramp steamer when I first shipped out, but that had been another lifetime. One rarely burned incense in a graphic designer’s job.
“I have to know all this. It’s, like, the thing I do — I go around fending off creepy menaces to warm-blooded mirror-reflectin society,” she said. “We’ve all got sidelines — well, my sideline is ridding the world of the vampirific undead. Hourly pay’s good too. Kinko’s didn’t pay me anywhere near enough to fund my mohito habit. Like, mixed drinks are hella expensive.”
“You kill vampires in order to fund your mohito habit?…”
“… And also out of a sense of civic duty. The Undead too, only I don’t kill them, I just dispose of them, and we also get a lot of these weird fuzzy wobbly shape things in the wintertime. Plus I have a nice sideline going in demons. You can think of yourself as an independent contractor.”
“Probably beats fixing Flash websites.”
“I did that for a few months. Pretty gruesome in its own way.”
A noise from the floor caught my attention. “Em, Filosofia?” I asked her, considering the strange dried-out African plant, wondering if its sole remaining fleshy branch was slowly reaching toward Filosofia’s ankle.
“Yes?”
“Why are we down here? It’s really creepy, with these weird drafts and all the dust-covered dental equipment and dead plants and all,” I said.
“Oh! Just this,” Filosofia said. She crossed the room and played her light on the wall until she found an old calendar hanging beside the shattered ruins of a light box. She flipped through the calendar until she found the miniature months for the coming years.
“Here! I said I think it’s the solstice. I just wanted to make hella sure. Yep, it’s the 22nd all right. Let’s go back upstairs where it’s warmer.”
Upstairs
I leaned against the counter in Filosofia’s kitchen upstairs, drinking a cup of tea that she had made. The remains of the dishtowel lay smoldering in her sink, but no other mishaps delayed our repast. Filosofia stood in front of the window where she could see the emptiness of South Angell St. For some reason, she had all of her windows nailed tightly closed despite the evening’s damp heat.
“This really is a two-person job tonight, even without the sketchy guys hanging around making it harder,” said Filosofia.
“A two person job — and I have a car and you don’t, anymore,” I said, staring at her. “That’s also part of it isn’t it? You need a ride.”
“And you have a car. Totally, it’s, like, hella impossible to deal with the Undead without a car. All the undead-disposal equipment’s real heavy, and it’s dangerous walking around this damn city at night. You get mugged,” Filosofia said, grimacing.
“That would make slaying difficult,” I conceded.
“Besides,” she added, peering out the window, “There’s not too many people around here I can trust anymore. Especially not after the whole Bruce incident. Or the whole thing with Jussi. So confusing.”
She turned back toward me. “Don’t go doing anything like that. It’ll just confuse things.”
The whole studio had been whispering about those events for weeks after they happened. I knew a few details. Filosofia had a flair for the inadvertently theatrical.
“As long as you don’t break into my apartment and throw yourself at me while wearing nothing but a bookcloth neck choker…” I said. She flinched.
“Don’t! Sore subject. How was I supposed to know that Bruce’s girlfriend was sleeping with him that night? Okay, let’s concentrate — we’ve got a blood-sucking pale-critter party to deal with.”
“All right, what about the vampires. If they’re celebrating tonight, what do we do?” I asked. This whole proposal worried me. “I say ‘we’ — assuming that I’m in on your scheme.”
“Oh, you’re in all right. You have to be, or Providence is more doomed than it already is, which is like pizza-with-triple-anchovies and extra-garlic doomed. We wait. We wait for midnight and hope that my friends show up,” she said. She rummaged through a drawer, tossing plastic bags and paper sacks onto the floor until she found what she wanted. “Oh, and take this. Not as good for detail work as an X-Acto, but lots more kick.”
She handed me a slim, smooth wooden stake, sharp-pointed but only a foot long. But could this really stop vampires? It felt like bamboo.
“Oof, sorry, that’s a mondo-chopstick that my Uncle Freddie bought at the Chinatown Big and Tall. Here, try this one,” Filosofia said as she snatched the utensil away and offered a replacement. This time the stake measured a good two feet long. I hefted it. I had read about stakes like this, turned on hand lathes from wood carved out of the hearts of two-hundred year oak trees felled by lightning. It might make for an interesting night.
—McKellar Dobbs