Emily

[Deagan (DELETED 7215)]

These days it just felt like a cheese grater was constantly being rubbed over his heart. It was a big improvement. In the months that followed Emily's death, he could have sworn there was a crack in the universe that always coincided with the exact position in which he was standing, was sitting, was laying down. Through this crack everything good about his life was being sucked into some void from which it could never return. His heart in those days was a black hole. No light escaped it. These days he was just walking through life (buying groceries, going to the post-office, getting gas) like a trapeze artist, balanced on raw nerves. He avoided human contact and conversation as much as possibly he could. How could he explain to them that the sound of any human voices not dipped in permanent sadness made him want to scream. Made him want to tip over the cart and throw the groceries across the aisle. Made him want to pull letters and packages and money orders from the other customers hands and tear them to shreds. Made him want to spray down everything including himselt with the gas hose and light a match.

It was important not to think like that. Someone who was too lost in his own thoughts, too lost in those feelings, would never be properly able or equipped to find Emily's killer. And that was the motivation that drove him and kept the demons at bay. Long nights that turned into grey mornings as he pored over the internet for cases similar to hers. He had plumbed the depths of the crackpot insanity that the world wide web had to offer. And yet, the instances of people actually practicing vampirism to the degree required to do what had been...done to his wife, were rare. He would close out the library, and then the bookstore, most nights of the week as well. He was old friends now with texts like Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend by M.C. Jenkins and Barber's Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. They weren't telling him much of anything he didn't already know, however. His work as an author and folklorist had lead him down these dark alleys of primitive superstition before, but he tried now to look at them with fresh eyes, for Emily's sake. It wasn't working.

Vampires were simply man's fear of death personified. They were the Madonna/whore of ghost stories, not just terrifying in their revelation that we all must someday die and become something else, but also captivating in their imagining of a life after death that allowed one to stay forever young and attractive and sexually viable, as long as you became less than human; as long as you gave up basic aspects of life like dependence on the sun and food and water, and traded them all for a unholy blood thirst. But he still hoped that studying the origins of the superstitions would help him understand the mentality of the person who had committed that terrible crime, and that understanding that mentality would somehow lead him to Emily's killer.

And then the voices had started

Deagan I miss you.

Please help me.

Deagan I have something important to tell you.


Many people, lost acquaintances and estranged friends, already considered his obsession a form of insanity at this point, and had written him off for it. Hearing Emily's voice and even sometimes seeing her appear in front of him; well that would seem to clearly be the nail in the coffin of his mental health. Unless he believed what he was seeing and hearing was real. If it was real, if that was truly Emily's ghost delivering cryptic messages from beyond the grave, then he was not insane. And he couldn't find her killer if he was insane.

So the final nail went not in the coffin of his sanity, but of his disbelief. He had to believe in the supernatural now, or else nothing made sense. This opened up the previously unheard of possibility that it might not have been a person posing as a vampire that had killed his wife, but that there might really be such a thing as a vampir, preying on the people of Harper Rock. Though the grain of salt he continued to attach to everything was of a healthy size and proportion, Deagan McNanamara had no idea how dangerous the waters were that this new thought was sailing him into. One simply didn't ask about vampires in Harper Rock, unless one was prepared to know more than they ever dared about that topic....