Got Framed for Murder in a Dementia Village | Part 3

 

Part 2 | Part 4

I hate dreaming about my unknown grandmother and her creepy Victorian house, which I only recognized because Morpheus’ realm works in mysterious ways. Also, the injury a witch did to me as an infant, apparently cursed me with knowledge of things that I shouldn’t be aware of.

It was the same place where we left it. My old granny was in front of her desk. The torn and dancing blinds, with the storm just right outside, obfuscated the candles that were the only thing keeping our joints over the freezing point. The smell of a just blown matchstick mixed with that of old paper in the edge of defibrating itself wasn’t particularly comfortable.

My grandmother held with her noisy arthritis an envelope that was getting more like a ball than getting open. Finally, her tears helped to contrast the glue effect, which freed the content of the epistle.

Her shaky hands took a picture out of the folded paper. I knew that one. It is me with my ex-girlfriend, Lisa. That was just a couple of days before the tragedy. Before I was thrown into prison. Technically she was my fiancé, but I never called her like that because I didn’t get used to it. The photograph was taken on the day I proposed to her.

My ascendent couldn’t distinguish neatly what was on the photograph with or without her glasses. Nonetheless, she knew exactly what it was.

“Hopefully,” my elder grandmother’s hoarse voice rumbled the fragile building. “You and your family will last long.”

I desired her good wishes would have been more effective.

The owls hooted, storming loudly as if the room was full of those birds.

She kissed the picture with her wrinkled lips before storing it in the pitch-dark void that was her desk drawer, never to be seen again. Then, she turned back to me. Her bones cracked a little and her whole skin was dripping more than previous times. She looked quite different, yet still somewhat familiar.

“Be careful,” she said.

A cold chill inducing force stabbed me in the chest.

***

When I woke up, Luke, the ghost that had followed me from the last couple of months all the way to this dementia village with the hope of questioning who sent him to die at the hands of a murderous psychopathic ghoul, had his ectoplasmic arm inside my chest.

Scared, I pulled back into my bed.

Luke retrieved his cold arm outside of me.

My movement woke up the caregiver who was looking for me that night, following the constant surveillance that I was placed upon by Ms. Rowen. He looked directly at me through Luke’s body, invisible to him.

“Just a nightmare,” I said still recovering my breath.

He just nodded and closed his eyes again.

Luke pointed his bleeding finger to his badly shaped ear.

The caregiver started to snore lightly.

I grabbed my cellphone and, quietly, like Elvis Presley, left the building.

***

“And you got mad with me?!” Luke yelled through my cellphone, since the earphone that we normally used for direct communication was lost. “First you accuse me of murdering the manager, which I told you I didn’t and she fucking deserved it for sending me to die, and now you killed a fucking cognitive held octogenary?”

The cold wind from this Nordic country made it hard to breathe and move. We were in an open area, far from any resident building to avoid waking someone, but that allowed nature to take a clear shot at me.

Steps approached from our left. Shit.

I hid behind the building that during office hours is used as a barbershop.

I waited until the danger faded.

The new nightguard strolled through the avenue and disappeared when he turned left. He didn’t even notice me. Thankfully. There was no way that I could have convinced him a second time that I was on his side.

“I didn’t,” I resumed my conversation with Luke. “I just wanted to incapacitate him so he will not continue biting or sucking me at every chance he had.”

“So, you threw him off a bridge?”

That bastard made it sound so much worse than it was.

“It’s more of a high pass, and I needed an alibi.”

“He died,” Luke pointed.

“After he got stabilized in the hospital,” I remarked.

“You sure got a perfect cover.”

We both stayed in silence, staring at each other. My pride was stronger than the freezing weather.

“There is something evil here.”

Not strong enough.

“I know,” Luke acknowledged. “I need your help.”

The staring contest restarted.

“Please.”

“What you need?”

***

It turns out that the Morlden Village has its own graveyard. On the Northwest corner there is a small lot with as many headstones as empty spaces for future deceased elders.

“I guess is quite often people die here,” I pointed out to Luke. “I see why you had been around this area.”

His silent response was so cold that it helped the hypothermia the weather had been attempting.

“I’m sorry, okay?” I told him while going over a big root that swirled across the main way.

Luke looked at me while leading through the place.

The moonlight shone through him, and got out refracted in different colors as if Luke was a Newtonian prince that brough a little light to this somber place.

I smirked.

He returned it, barely.

He led me to the end of the not so small eternal resting place. Sitting over a grave there was a guy. Young, healthy and, for some reason, in the worst place to be.

“He’s a ghost,” Luke pointed out as we approached him.

“Yeah, this sure seems like a place for him to be.”

Luke wasn’t too fond of my comments. He never was, but never so intensely as that night.

The guy didn’t seem like a ghost. He was quite young, healthy and a complete specimen of the human species, especially for the standards of the people who live and die here.

“Okay,” I directed to my new acquaintance by touching my phone I had pressed against my right ear. “I need you to make contact with this for me to be able to hear you.”

Silence.

I turned to Luke.

“Hey, can you teach him how to do it?”

“It’s not like riding a bike,” he responded.

“What you mean by that?”

“Well, I’m not sure how to teach another spirit how to paranormally jam a phone to talk through it,” Luke argued. “The world beyond life doesn’t work as easy or straight forward as the one before death.”

Fuck. He had a point. I must give him that.

“I’m sorry,” I turned back to the newly met unresting soul. “Just realized when you died. Maybe you just don’t know what a cellphone is.”

The phantom stood up from the grave and started moving his arms in a weird way.

“Yeah,” I expressed full of doubt. “Let me see your grave.”

It read: “1895 – 1935. No last words.”

That was harsh.

“I don’t think this phone thing is going to work,” Luke told me.

“Seems so, he died before even landlines where a common thing.” I said as I turned back to Luke. “Also, this place must be older than the dementia village concept.”

I shut up as soon as I noticed the new ghost kept moving his hands, and Luke stared at them with a lot of attention and an equal amount of incomprehension. I too, watched this scene develop for a couple of minutes.

“Fuck,” Luke and I said at the same time. “He’s mute.”

Just what we needed, a fucking talk-less ghost that even dead still only communicates by sign language.

“When you die you don’t get functional vocal cords or something?” I questioned Luke without taking my eyes from the voguing specter. “You don’t even need air to talk.”

Holy shit. “No Last Words.” Those fuckers were cruel.

“Not know how shit works when you die,” Luke repeated me to concentrated to be annoyed by me not understanding him the first time. “If you could, I won’t think I’ll be still materializing as this half-torn and half-shapeless vestige of a human being.”

I hate to admit it, but he was making some serious points that night.

“I think he says he wants to go to his grave,” Luke pointed out.

The mute ghost jumped (don’t know if they can do that or simply floated a little) in excitement.

“How?” I asked whoever of my two not-completely-gone interlocutors could give me an answer.

The guy pointed to his chest.

“Chest?” I questioned.

“No, Love,” Luke was such a passionate guy.

The mute phantom shook his head.

Kept pointing at his chest, and then his grave.

“You died out of love?”

The impatient motherfucker shook his head again, covering it with both hands in frustration. Fuck him, he had nothing to do.

On the contrary, I did.

“Maybe what happened is…”

“I’m going,” I interrupted Luke. “If you figure it out, you know where you can find me.”

I started getting away from the two phantoms through the small road in the middle of the dark graveyard.

Luke followed me. He was very upset.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” His scream made my phone sound as if I had it on speaker.

“I need to rest,” I replied in a similar tone. “You know, we alive people need that.”

“This isn’t you,” Luke said as if that meant something. “You’re not like this. You should be…”

I dropped my mobile down from my ear before hearing, before listening (which was worse), what Luke was trying to tell me.

“You hear that?” I asked Luke while I turned around.

Yelling, far away. I’m almost positive it was my name.

“AAAGGGHHHHH!” A shriek of pain flooded the whole village.

Fuck.

I ran towards the sound. Abandoned Luke and our new friend behind.

I tripped with a root in the middle of the way. Hit against the dirt road in the middle of the graveyard. Left behind of me a small trail of blood when I resumed my way.

I arrived at the park where the yelling came from.

The guy who was keeping an eye on me that night was on the ground. Worryingly pale. Had a human bite on his neck.

Multiple caregivers arrived.

***

“Why every time something bad happens it involves you?” Ms. Rowan interrogated me using very similar phrase as Professor McGonagall.

Again, at her office. My broken and healed shinbone, as usual in this rustic and warmly lit place, was burning as if a branding iron was pressed against it.

“Maybe, you shouldn’t had imposed me 24/7 caregivers to be behind me all the time,” I replied fighting to contain my smile.

“You were close to both victims,” she indicated. “Seems like you’re behind this. You were also the new one the night my aunt was killed.”

“I got exonerated from that. Mr. Melvin died while in the medical unit; I was right here with you. And when I arrived at the scene the last guy was already bitten.”

“What were you doing out?” She just didn’t quit.

“Wandering. Breathing clear air. Having a second of privacy.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s your problem.”

We both stared in silence for a couple of minutes.

“You’re going to get assigned a new caregiver to your team,” she threatened me. “And have them all make sure you cannot abandon building E.”

She knew exactly how to hurt me.

“Please, no,” I pitifully begged. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do anything. Why don’t you ask the guard, he maybe saw something.”

The violence of the conversation shifted to a peaceful confusion.

“What guard?” She was still playing games.

“The new nightguard,” I replied to her stupid question. “He has just been here for two nights.”

“We don’t have a nightguard,” lied Ms. Rowen at the same time she shook her head.

“Bullshit!” I raised my tone at her. “I saw him, even talked to him. He was wearing the batch.”

Ms. Rowen disbelief started to seem genuine in her face.

“A young guy, with a very prominent mustache…”

“Fuck,” Ms. Rowen’s mumbling whisper interrupted me.

“That’s new.”

Ms. Rowen stood up and speed walked around the room a couple of times.

“Okay, shit. We are in trouble.”

“Why?” I asked genuinely surprised.

“Okay, fuck it.” Ms. Rowen said.

She sat in the chair opposite mine, on the other side of her enormous wooden desk. She took from out of a drawer a thick folder with a record inside. Showed it to me.

“Is he the nightguard?” She questioned me, pointing at a picture.

“Yes.”

Why was his photo on an old patient record? And of a female one?

“Fuck!” She hit her own desk.

I remained silent, expecting her to spill more information.

“Okay,” she stared directly into my eyes all the way to my soul. “I need your help.”

“Fuck that,” I furiously let her know.

“I know who you are,” she told me exhaling with frustration. “I know why my aunt hired you.”

“What?!” Rageful wasn’t enough to describe my tone and emotions.

“I know she hired you to come here to help with some weird thing that has been happening here lately, because everyone was acting more… violently. I’m aware of your whole experience on the Bachman Asylum solving this kind of things.”

“And why the fuck you have had everyone acting like I’m another crazy guy in this nuthouse?!”

I wanted to leave this room so badly. My hot shinbone was almost to its ashing point, but I needed answers.

“I’m sorry, but after the police and the death of my aunt, I was afraid you would’ve left,” she stated.

“Obviously!” I screamed, imitating a mentally impaired person just to upset her.

“I know,” that bastard pretended to be ashamed. “But, if you left, you wouldn’t have resolved the issue happening with this place. I hoped that at least by staying unwillingly you would have done something.”

“But…” I had nothing to argue with.

It was stupid, yes. Some weird way of kidnapping, of course. But, nonetheless, she was right.

“Please, help us with our issue. I’ll get rid of the caregivers. No one will be following you. But I really don’t have a free place in the staff quarters for you to sleep. We really need your help.”

“Okay,” I whispered defeated. “What do you need me to do?”

She smiled with contagious relief.

“Well, you opened the shed and let this fucker off his coffin.”

Fuck, she knows. She pointed to another picture in the record of the same red coffin that I saw a couple of nights ago in the shed.

“Now, you put that bastard back in there before he kills someone else.”

This was insane.

“And how do you expect me to do that?” I buried the sarcasm included in that phrase.

“You’ll get help. William will be with you.”

My jaw dropped at the stupid idea of this woman.

Ms. Rowen clicked a button on the inside of the main drawer of her desk. Or at least it seemed like that was what she did.

I stared judgmentally at my interlocutor. She didn’t bother at all.

The door behind me opened with a blunt sound.

I got startled. Turned back immediately to encounter two caregivers. Both in their twenties, and with the fake big smile caregivers are required to show all the time. One of them was the same that informed Ms. Rowen about Mr. Melvin death last time I was in this office.

“They are Paula and Margaret, two of my more trustworthy employees,” Ms. Rowan introduced them. “They’ll help you with your plan.”

***

I didn’t have a plan at that point. And I am oblivious to what the fuck two young caregivers could do to do to stop a vampire. Yet, to be honest, I didn’t know what I was going to do either.

During the whole sunlight hours, we cover every inch of this enormous place looking for the unmissingable bright red coffin. It was nowhere to be found. Fuck

I came up with the most sensical (at that moment) stupid plan ever. I went to the supermarket and got some garlic, which I hoped hadn’t lost any of its folklore-vampire-hurting properties through the multiple years it surely had been there. Then, from the shed that I had unlocked, and now was one big red coffin emptier, I took a couple of wooden planks and carved them into stakes. I gave half these weapons to Paula and Margaret, me and William kept the other half, and we stayed up all night vigilating this whole place in pairs hoping to get attacked while trusting pop culture had correct ideas on how to deal with blood suckers; even when the one we were up against didn’t had fangs.

So that’s how that night I ended up alone with William wandering through the openness of the main boulevard of the Morlden Village.

“So, why do I need the garlic covered stake?” William asked me as if my plan was something else than idiot proof.

“There’s a vampire guy loose here, and we need to kill him.”

“Right…” William said with way more vowels than needed.

“Did Ms. Rowen didn’t explain you why you are following me?” I asked very frustrated.

“She just told me that you no longer were needing full time watching. But that you had this crazy idea that I must compel with.”

He was not firmly and calmly talking as usual. His voice was shaking and tumbling a little. His whole attitude was a more nervous one.

“That bitch!” I didn’t have those issues.

William glared at me.

“Bottom line,” I indicated him. “I’m not cognitive held so stop treating me like that, because we need to hunt a motherfucking vampire.”

“Sure,” again with the multiple ‘u’s in his pronunciation.

I was too overwhelmed to try to explain it at that moment. I thought, tomorrow I’ll be fixing it with Ms. Rowen.

The new nightguard appeared behind us.

“Hey, what are you doing up?” he asked us still in his fake role.

We turned towards him.

“We’re trying to hunt…”

“Shut it, William!” I interrupted him before spilling the beans.

I approached steadily to our prey.

“What are those sharp wooden sticks?” He asked not with his firm nightguard voice, but with a cautious one.

“They have garlic,” William spilled them all on my face.

“Fuck, William!” I reprimanded him as I threw myself against our foe.

He moved to the side and blocked my attack.

“William!” I demanded his aid.

The guy with the fake badge kicked my left knee.

I lost my balance.

The guy pulled back.

William did nothing.

I hit the ground.

All my air left my lungs.

My weapon rolled away.

“Sorry about that,” William told the kicker while approaching him. “He has this hallucination of hunting vampires.”

Fuck you, William. I couldn’t tell him that because my respiratory system was just restarting itself.

“Don’t worry, I understand,” said with such compassion the man who incapacitated me as he kept getting closer to my useless partner.

With a lot of pain and difficulty, I stood up on one leg.

“But he’s right,” the fucker ended.

The vampire attacked William’s neck.

I completely stood up.

William shrieked.

I hit the blood sucker bare fist on the back of his head.

He left his supper and slapped me with the inertia of his turn to face me.

I flew a couple of feet.

“You bastard!” He insulted me with a, very unlike him, rudeness and anger.

I landed close to my stake.

“William, you okay?”

I grabbed the sharp wood.

William mumbled incomprehensibly.

“Not for long,” the imposing guy threatened.

I rolled still on the floor and pushed the garlic-covered stick against him.

The supernatural entity clasped his hands around it.

I pushed.

He pressed harder.

I screamed with all my strength placed on making my spear go through that guy, or at least stop it from approaching me.

He was not even trying.

“You really can’t do anything against me.”

The vampire playful smile turned into a wide bloodlust abyss.

The stake, with the pointy side towards my adversary, had its dull end stump against my chest.

My yell became a cough.

Smash!

The vampire’s pressure disappeared when William baseballed the undead man’s head with his stake.

The evil creature swiveled into the darkness at a speed that only left a blur behind him.

I retrieve as much oxygen as I could from the almost frozen atmosphere.

Before I complained to William for smashing the blood thirsty beast instead of stabbing it, he collapsed over me.

***

I took him to the medical unit, kind of carrying it, but mostly dragging his heavy ass. I delivered him to the nurse who sleeps at that place and these past days have been having way more work than usual.

She told me that William would be up in a couple of hours.

“Hear that? You’ll be fine, don’t be such a baby,” I told the unconscious guy who had saved me just a couple of minutes ago.

The nurse pretended to ignore me. Such a fragile sense of humor.

She looked for something on her computer, quite old but functional.

“He didn’t lose so much blood,” she indicated me. “With just a bag he should be ready to go.”

“And you have it here, right?”

“I should…” she said with an almost unhearable volume.

She passed her finger through the data shown on her computer.

“No,” she concluded. “Not his type.”

“Fuck.”

“In the last few days many people had been using our universal blood because apparently there is a pandemic of blood drained bodies around here. What do you want from me?”

It turned out she did know how to be sarcastic after all.

“What’s your type?” she asked me.

“Tall and blonde,” I joked.

She didn’t find it funny.

“O negative,” I answered her question knowing what that meant.

“Wonderful!”

***

A couple of hours later, at the brink of dawn, I headed, with slight dizziness and my arm recently poked, to the staff quarters. The nurse Carly (who gave me her name while doing the job the vampire left pending) had told me that in between them, in a building that doesn’t look like it, there is a chapel. I hate chapels.

After watching the cross in the medical center, I thought of religion. Not because I’m a believer, but because maybe, if my theories and movie preferences are correct, we could weaponize it. Also, I needed to go to the manager’s office to understand why that fucker didn’t tell the truth to my caregiver who almost got drained to death for believing I was a loony. Two birds, one trip.

Ms. Rowen’s office was closed. And, as expected, just being outside of that place had my shinbone like New Year’s sky.

“Fuck!”

From the offices that were just outside the waiting room where I got interrogated by the police the second time, Paula and Margaret appeared.

“What happened?” Paula asked.

“We were attacked by the motherfucker vampire. William is bloody bleeding in urgent care right now. And, for God’s sake, I don’t know where this bitch fucking is!” I answered her question in the calmest, politest and underexaggerating way possible.

“She’s out,” Paula replied in a more civil way.

“We didn’t even see anything,” Margaret added.

“Oh, I so much envy you,” I owed them an apology for being such a dick then. “What you mean she’s out?”

“She told us she needed to get out of the country for a couple of days to sort some banking thing,” Paula answered very defensively.

“That bitch,” I whispered this time.

Both heard me.

“But she told us to keep helping you with the vampire,” Margaret sealed their fate.

“Perfect,” I raised my voice masking my anger as conviction. “Do you have some small jars or something like it?”

Both nodded in silence.

“Bring them, and tell me where the fucking chapel is?”

***

After retrieving the miniscule amount of holy water that was available in the cozy and traditional chapel of this place that from outside appears to be disguised as just another staff quarter building, I divided it between the hunters. That left each one of us with one shot against the night creature we were up against.

Good news was that William had recovered, so I wasn’t having to do my guard alone. For the first inactive four hours, it did make a difference.

“Hey, man,” William stole my attention. “I was told about my transfusion on the medical unit. Thank you.”

“Save it,” I replied. “If we don’t get rid of this thing I don’t think I’ll have enough blood for the whole compound.”

Beat.

“And, sorry for not believing you at first.”

William’s sight dropped.

I placed my hand, the one without the stake, on his shoulder.

“Yeah, you were pretty shitty,” I tell him sincerely smiling. “Just don’t treat me like a dement guy anymore.”

“Of course.”

The chilling weather that was attacking us from all sides of the dark and deserted 4.00 a.m. Morlden Village was deadlier than the folklore-inaccurate vampire.

“He’s not coming.”

“What? How you know?” William questioned me.

“He knows we are hunting him…”

William stared at me confused.

“We need to go back to building E,” I finished.

***

Half an hour later, we were outside again. This time, William and I were hiding behind a big bush in the park that had almost a circular form perfectly fit to cover two grown ass men. And, out exposed, on the bench next to us, Mrs. Mitchell and Mr. Bunn, covered below ten layers of clothes and blankets to avoid them catching a cold, were having a romantic star watching session that we managed to convince both that they had asked us to set up.

My fellow hunter and I were cramping in almost fetal position. Mr. Bunn, as usual, was complaining about being uncomfortable and the night sky being boring. Ms. Mitchell was enjoying herself when not trying to convince his partner to stop talking shit.

Fortunately, after ten minutes, the big fish ate the bait.

“Sorry,” the familiar nightguard’s voice irrupted the scene. “What are you two love birds doing out here?”

“Freezing my ass,” Mr. Bunn replied.

“Don’t be like that, dear,” Mrs. Mitchell was a diplomat. “We’re just watching the stars. You like to join us?”

“I’ll be honored.”

The vampire sat next to the old couple on the bench. To their right. The only available space. Our air-tight planification let him on the closest side to the bush.

“Hey, you know on which building a lady named Marina lives?” The supposedly empathic monster questioned his interlocutors.

Mr. Bunn shook his head with despise.

“Sorry dear, never heard of her.”

Well, probably she had, but using cognitive held people as sources is not a reliable source.

“Oh, don’t worry at all. Did you already have a midnight snack?” The creature of darkness asked.

William tried standing up abruptly.

I held him in place.

“No,” was Mr. Bunn’s talkative answer.

“Not yet, dear,” Mrs. Mitchel was so sweet.

I almost felt bad for using her as bait.

“I have an idea,” the manipulative coffin-sleeper stated. “Close your eyes.”

Mr. Bunn of course just grunted and looked away.

Mrs. Mitchell complied.

I tapped on William’s arm.

The motherfucker opened his mouth up close to the old lady’s neck.

We left our hiding spot.

The teeth were just millimeters away from her skin.

William sprayed the two baby-food-size jars of holy water against the monster.

“What the fuck?!” Said the beast turning back at us.

It didn’t burn him as expected. The holy water just wetted and annoyed him.

Fuck it.

I jumped out of our plant trench with one stake in front of me.

The confused fucker reacted a couple of seconds late.

The pointy wooden weapon slashed his right arm as he attempted to get away.

A shriek of pain rumbled through the night.

A superhuman punch threw me 20 yards away through the air as if I was a football on Superbowl night.

The blood sucker swirled away into the shadows, again.

I slammed against the ground.

***

I was back again in my grandmother’s antique, almost in ruins, Victorian house. The outside permanent storm was flooding the wooden floors that were going to rot and break at any moment. The place seemed like a bedroom.

“Keep me company,” my grandmother’s voice hit my eardrums from behind me.

Her old and wrinkled body, that according to natural sciences shouldn’t be able to move anymore, was stronger and faster than mine.

She snatched my arm with boney unyielding fingers and pulled me with her to the bed.

Seven sheets cushioned my obliged descent into a sitting position.

“Grandma,” I told her trying to conceal my anger at her.

The bitch shushed me.

“I know you’re angry at me and I’m the last person you want to be dreaming about, but you’re in danger,” she took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there or you, but don’t make same mistakes I did.”

The storm wrecked the house.

***

I woke up in the medical unit. William, Paula and Margaret talking between them on the other side of the room. Carly, the overworked nurse, was checking my vitals.

I tried standing up.

Carly blocked my way.

“You need to rest,” she indicated me.

“I need to find Luke,” I said ignoring her.

“Shit, he lost his mind,” Paula laughed.

The three vampire hunters approached.

“Are Mr. Bunn and Mrs. Mitchell alright?” I asked William.

He nodded.

“It was really stupid using them as bait,” Paula stated the obvious.

“Yet it worked,” I replied proud of my plan.

“Did it?” Paula was being awfully sarcastic.

“The vampire is still on the loose,” Margaret also joined the point-the-obvious game.

I stood up to give more power to my words.

“Hey, capturing and killing a supernatural creature that doesn’t get affected by what legends and myths say is hard. I’m creating a new methodology on the spot. It’s like making a map without…”

A drop of blood splashed on the white and pristine floor under me.

My hand immediately retrieved to my chin. Blood kept dropping from it.

My three companions stared scared at me as if they hadn’t hunted demons just a couple of hours ago.

Carly pushed me back to my bed.

My motivational speech was so amazing the recently placed stitches over my chin injury popped out, letting the crimson waterfall run loose.

“What time is it?” I demanded to know.

Everyone looked at each other confused as if I had lost my mind and I was becoming a true patient of this place.

“What time?!”

“Around three past noon,” Margaret responded in the weirdest way to format a time.

“We need to get to the park where we ambushed him,” I declared.

***

“What are we doing here?” Paula asked that question for the seventh time in the ten minutes it took us to get from the medical building to this park.

I pointed to the place where my second encounter with the blood sucker took place.

“That’s what we’re doing here.”

A trail of blood. Not mine. My adversary fled with an arm injury. Which left us with the, even when undistinguishable at night, clue we desperately needed to follow during the day.

We tracked the blood spilling all the way across the Morlden Village. All the way to the North end. It led us to the supermarket.

“It isn’t here,” Paula was still very defensive.

“We searched the whole place and there was nothing,” Margaret clarified.

Beaten, I inspected the building which was our only hope. It couldn’t be.

“We need a ladder,” I indicated.

William, Paula and Margaret immediately understood. Margaret ran to the shed.

A couple of minutes later, the entire vampire hunter team was on the ceiling of the warehouse that was adapted as an old supermarket.

I encountered a denture that ended up here thanks to me. Decided to ignore it.

At the end of the ceiling, under the warm dusking sun, the bright red coffin waited for us.

“Fucking yes!” I screamed, almost popping my stitches again.

We four approached the coffin.

I was at the front, with a stake ready to pierce this bastard. I kneeled to get the best possible angle. Lifted my weapon up in the air. Opened the casket.

My hand stopped on half its trip down.

Inside the box was our creature, sleeping and vulnerable. His right arm had stopped bleeding, but that area of his coffin and clothes were a little soaked. What held my blow was a picture, an old photo showing an alive looking version of this guy hugging a woman of around his age.

“Why you stopped?” Paula just loved going after me.

“We can’t, this isn’t right,” I assured them. “No more violence.”

“Don’t bust my balls!” Paula was very aggressive.

“We can’t keep on replicating the same things that made him a threat.”

“Sure we can, just for once,” Paula was decided.

Margaret stopped her.

“Remember, Ms. Rowen told us to follow his lead on this.”

Paula stopped fighting.

“Thanks,” I told Margaret.

“So what do we do then?” William asked confused.

“We jail himself in the shed again?” Paula didn’t understand what was going on.

“No,” I replied. “We cannot just push this problem to others down the line. We need to give him what he’s been looking for.”

The other three looked at me confused.

“We need to find her,” I retrieved the picture from the coffin. “I believe her name is Marina.”

***

Twenty minutes later, Paula and I were using a rope from the shed and improvised pulleys to bring down the coffin from the supermarket roof.

Once the box was at ground level, Paula came down the stairs to tie the creature in his coffin, hoping that will make him stay in place at least a little.

From the top of the roof, I called Margaret (she had given me her number for this part of the operation).

“Have you found a match?” I asked her.

“Not yet.” She replied to me through the phone with the little breath her lungs were able to pull due to her racing task. “It’s not on building A B nor C.”

“Keep me posted.”

I hung up the call.

I started going down the stairs. Before the roof got out of my sight, I stopped. I realized that the supermarket was on the edge of the compound, meaning that if I jumped down on the other side, I would finally be outside. Free.

I contemplated the horizon for a couple of seconds. Luke came to mind.

“You’re helping with him?” Paula screamed at me from the street.

She was right.

“Yes.”

I continued going down the stairs.

Ring!

In the middle of my way down, my phone interrupted me.

Ring!

I answered the call.

“Found her,” William indicated through the other side of the phone.

“What took you so long?” I asked.

“It wasn’t in alphabetical order with the others. His file was at the end of the drawer. Was like if it was hidden to be difficult to find.”

I reached the ground level.

“Where is Marina living, then?”

“Building H,” William responded me.

“Thanks, I’ll let Margaret know.”

“Wait,” William prevented me from hanging. “There’s more.”

“Tell me in person, we’re in a hurry.”

I hung up the phone.

Almost dusk

Paula glared at me.

“Building H,” I told her.

She continued tying the guy.

The sun was coming down fast.

I called Margaret, again.

“Yes?” She answered.

“It’s on building H, get there.”

“On it,” she said before hanging on me.

The night flooded Morlden Village.

Our prisoner woke up.

“Wait,” I yelled at him before his supernatural force broke the rope. “We know where she is.”

Paula looked at the scene with a stake up, ready to fall it on this guy.

The vampire stared at me, doubting my words.

“Marina, we know where she is,” I repeated to convince him. “Resident building H.”

He broke the ropes and stood up. Not violently, calm and cooperative. Still imposing.

“I don’t know if you need permission to enter to a building,” I continued. “We got someone on her way there to help you enter.”

The creature smirked and flew towards that address with superhuman speed.

I called Margaret again, as Paula and I followed the vampire at normal human speed.

“He’s going your way,” I told Margaret as soon as she answered.

“Already let him in,” she indicated me. “But there is something you need to know. She’s in a coma.”

Fuck.

***

Paula and I arrived at Marina’s room a couple of minutes before William, but many after the vampire. Margaret was already looking at the scene.

“She is so old, and hasn’t gotten out of the coma yet,” The vampire indicated me as soon as I arrived.

The room, with Marina in the bed, felt more like a museum than a living person’s quarters. Of course, she didn’t use anything in that place. Everything was just decorative. Such perfection, instead of being creepy as in the rest of this place, here was sad.

“I accepted to become this… to be able to find her when she will have gotten out of this state,” the blood sucker continued. “But she has just been in pain for so long.”

He kneeled at the side of the bed. Margaret, Paula and I, with William as soon as he arrived, just stared in silence.

“I’m sorry,” the monster begged with tears in his eyes to the unconscious Marina.

He disconnected the device that was keeping her alive.

Margaret and William looked away.

The beeping sound intensified a little before flatlining.

The demon we had been fighting for multiple nights stood up and with all the patience in the world approached us.

“Thank you,” he said as he extended his arm.

Paula gave him, without complaining (which was something new to her), the stake.

The guy grabbed it before returning to the middle of the room.

This time the four of us looked away.

***

Four hours later, we finished burying them in the village’s graveyard. We just had a single burial, with both bodies cramped together in the bright red coffin that had been a prison for so long but now was a resting place.

Around midnight, Paula and Margaret went back to their chambers to sleep.

“So, what’s what you wanted to tell me?” I asked William as soon as we were left alone.

“Not know what of it is important anymore,” he replied. “But the record said that he was the one who interned her here under an induced coma. Apparently, the manager at that time, told him that could work to cure the cognitive detriment.”

“So, he was tricked?”

“Not only that, but the manager at that time was also a Mrs. Rowen.”

“The one who died when I first arrived here?”

“No,” William sounded very confident in what he was saying. “This happened more than fifty years ago, it was another Mrs. Rowen.”

“Meaning…”

I wasn’t quite following his train of thought.

“I checked all the handwritten patient names in the folders,” he continued. “No matter how old or new they are, all have a very similar written letter. So similar it seems they were written by the same person.”

I knew where he was going.

“All written by one Mrs. Rowen,” I concluded his idea.

William nodded, scared.

“We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” I assured him. “Right now, just go rest.”

William continued nodding as he left the small cemetery. I stayed a couple of extra seconds.

“Luke,” I said to the darkness the leaves-less trees casted upon the terrifying place. “If you hear me, I’m sorry.”

After not getting any answer, I went to sleep.