Maddy Rigby (maddyrigby) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-10-21 16:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | derek mitchell, maddy rigby |
Road Trip
Who: Maddy, Derek
What: Trickery, Clowns, Graves
When: This Week’s Full Moon, Evening
Where: The World Famous Clown Motel and Old Tonopah Cemetery, Tonopah, NV
Warnings: Language
“It’s TOE-no-pah,” Maddy proclaimed at the expense of one of Subway’s finest sandwich artists. “Not Toe-no-PAH!”
She stuffed a bunch of napkins in the glove compartment and snapped it shut. It took effort to abscond with that much paper but, having been corrected on the pronunciation of the town when all she wanted was a fresh melt, Maddy went the extra mile. Now their stomachs were full and the final stretch of a four-hour road trip was upon them. The fast food eatery was within walking distance of the World Famous Clown Motel, if one was foolish enough to walk down the sleepy stretch of 95 at night (they weren’t).
Derek’s car turned into a parking lot under a bulb-lined sign with a laughing clown.
Clean rooms $42.60 plus tax! Dish TV! Pets OK! Vacancy.
“Oh my god, look at the polka dots!” Maddy leaned towards the windshield and clasped her hands. “Eeee!” Their tires rolled over a sloppy painting of yellow balloons.
The clown hotel was the brainchild of siblings Leona and Leroy David, two entrepreneurs who built it in 1985 on a lot adjacent to the Old Tonopah Cemetery. The patriarch of the family, Mr. Clarence David, had loved clowns and collected nearly two hundred of them before his death. Was this a case of coulrophilia? No. Maybe. Either way, after his internment in the graveyard, his offspring dedicated the motel to his memory and filled it with thousands of clowns. They were sprinkled throughout the thirty-one rooms, the lobby, the gift shop, and even sitting in plastic chairs on the balcony. Their colorful creepiness was an odd complement to the 1900s-era cemetery that opened up beyond the glow of Jolly the Clown, a permanent home to the icons of turn-of-the-century western towns: dead miners, sex workers, barkeepers, and a murdered sheriff.
The David family knew how to milk the internet for paying customers, and they had no qualms about advertising the number of vacationers who died in and around the premises, either by accident or suffering under the notion that a clown-themed motel was an excellent place to off oneself. The unincorporated town of Tonopah leaned into this spirit of the absurd. They turned their abandoned regional medical center into a haunted house. They advertised the existence of the Lady in Red, a ghost at the Mitzpah Hotel. They turned a mining landscape into the number one stargazing destination in America. How? There was nothing else out there, so the sky was as dark as one could get while still having access to public toilets.
The place looked like a set out of a horror movie, but in a knowing, tongue-in-cheek way that Derek found appealing instead of annoying. As he parked the car and placed his sneakered feet onto the asphalt of the parking lot, he shot an approving grin at Maddy. He stretched out his legs and arms before turning to study good old Jolly. “You know how when you see something online, and you think you’ll know how you’ll feel when you’re standing in front of it, but it surprises you anyway?” The vampire nodded at the two-story clown. “This is one of those times.” He popped the trunk and grabbed their overnight bags. Derek’s contained a special surprise he had for Maddy, which he would have to sneak past her somehow.
“Are you going to buy something from the gift shop?” he asked her excitedly as they made their way to the office to grab the keys for their suite, which according to the website was modeled after ‘It’. “I’m looking for something to send to my parents. I’m gonna attach a card that says, ‘look, now your son isn’t the only clown you know.’” Derek pulled his bag closer toward him. “They like my humor when it’s self-deprecating.”
“I wasn’t aware you did other kinds of humor.” Maddy smiled and sipped Coke from a to-go cup.
“I have other kinds,” he countered, and held up the hand that wasn’t holding onto baggage to tick them off. “Like ‘breaking up tense and awkward situations’ humor. I also have some vampire-related jokes, which might fall under the self-deprecating umbrella but I still think it counts as its own genre.”
She lifted a reusable shopping bag from the floorboard. It sloshed. Kitchen towels kept the glass bottles from clinking together, but the liquid contents lapped at the sides of the containers. Snack food? Check. Weed? Check. Good toilet paper? Check, mostly to joke with Derek. He’d never see Quilted Northern coming.
“Well. In answer to your gift shop question, Sir, I have my eye on a really choice clown-face night light. Now I have a question for you.” She climbed the stoop of the motel and stood beneath the awning. Maddy wriggled out of her hoodie and revealed her t-shirt, on which the Hamburglar was robbing Ronald McDonald at gunpoint. “Is this too much?”
Derek came to a halt in front of the office as he caught sight of Maddy’s t-shirt with a mingled look of awe and pride on his face. “It’s amazing. It’s nostalgic, clown-related, slightly subversive but not in an overly offensive way.” The vampire set the bags down and framed her torso with his hands as if she were an art installation at a gallery. “Superb. Might steal later if it fits me.” With that, he pulled open the office door.
After filling out some paperwork, two sets of keys for room 108 were handed to him. He showed them to Maddy excitedly. “They’re like the proper old fashioned motel keys,” he told her, handing her one by the diamond-shaped plastic. “I love these. Those electronic ones have no character. Plus they only work like half the time.” The vampire picked up their bags once again.
“Yeah!” she agreed. “And there’s only a ten percent chance a psycho slipped a hardware store employee a twenty to ignore the ‘do not duplicate’ stamp during his last stay.” Maddy gave an exaggerated wink and followed Derek outside.
The motel’s curmudgeonly clerk glared at the blonde girl’s retreating back. City folk.
The air was cool, traffic along the highway a quiet swirl of noise and a sequence of white and red lights. While Derek slipped a key into a door lock, Maddy gaped at an outdoor rocking chair with a headless circus performer. Above it, a porch light made a halo, and the halo had attracted moths. She kicked an ice machine to see if that affected its hum. It got louder. “I think I’m in love with this place,” she mused. “You know how sometimes, when something is awful, it comes back around to awesome? We are living it. I’m really hoping the bed is coin op. I know in my heart of hearts that it’s not, but it should be. And the phone should be rotary! And the cord should be cut.”
Derek looked from the key to Maddy with a slightly chagrined expression on his face. He hadn’t even considered that. Then he shrugged. “Oh well. If someone tries to come in, I can eat them,” he joked as he pushed the motel door open and held it for her. He was mostly joking. Once she was inside, he took the time to look around their room. His eyes were immediately drawn to the off-model Pennywise standing before what he assumed was Georgie, but the clown could also have been just clutching a yellow raincoat. It was hard to tell. He gestured to the queen bed nearest the life-size depiction. “This one or the bed that’s less clown-adjacent?” Derek asked Maddy with a grin. He was already planning how he would get his smuggled item into place without her noticing.
“You don’t think I came all this way to sleep well, did you? I want the full experience. I want to wake up and get lost in his deadlights.” Setting down her grocery bag, Maddy did a three-sixty turn, running her eyes and fingertips over the stunningly red, yellow, and purple décor. Oh em gee, was that a velvet painting? The red, retro refrigerator was also incredible. She opened the door to stuff their snacks inside. The owners missed a real opportunity to put a man’s head on a shelf.
Suddenly her hand froze on a six-pack. “Wait.” Maddy straightened. “Are you asking me which bed I want, as in, you’re planning to make this a Lucy and Desi night? Do you think we’re not spooning?” She looked from one bed to the other, then at Derek. Math had left her less confused.
He let himself fall onto the bed next to Pennywise and turned on his side to face her with a confused smile. “What? No. I meant like...I was letting you pick.” Derek was tempted to pick up a floral-encased pillow and toss it at her, but didn’t want to give away his plan. Instead he checked the time on his phone. There was something appealing about waiting until midnight to explore the neighboring cemetery with the flashlights he had packed, but he didn’t know if he could wait. The vampire sat up straight and stretched his arms above his head casually. “Hey, I can look for a super cheesy and questionable EMF app while you check the bathroom for potential souvenirs,” he offered with what he hoped was a persuasive grin.
Maddy wrinkled her nose. “You mean like someone else’s poop? Pass.” She shivered and closed the refrigerator door. Oh, but there was the toilet paper to put away, plus a little tongue-in-cheek joke, and the possibility of finding original bathroom fixtures. “Hey, do you think the toilet’s baby blue? I’m gonna check!” She dashed into a tiny facility that smelled like rusted tank water. “Fire up the EMP app!” Maddy slammed the door and turned on the light/fan combination.
Inside, she discovered that the room was a disappointing but clean white, the wallpaper seamed and curling. Maddy opened a travel-size shampoo and sniffed. A bubble came out and popped on the tip of her nose. “Hmm. Gardenia.” She set it back down and one-two-three-yanked the shower curtain. No evil clowns, only a stopper on a chain. Oh well.
She reached into her jeans pocket for a bottle with a screw-cap. She dripped fake blood around the perimeter of the sink and watched it run in ghastly streaks towards the drain. Next, she took out a single, red balloon and blew it up. Once it was knotted, she tied it to the shower rod with a short string and gently closed the curtain on it.
Derek stayed put until she was safely in the bathroom. He crept his hand toward his bag and slowly and silently unzipped it before grabbing the two necessary items. The first was a porcelain Victorian doll that had seen better days. The vampire had come across it at a thrift store and he immediately thought of Maddy. Its pale blonde wavy locks had been tucked away slightly to make the hair appear shorter, and Derek had added some embellishments to her outfit, including stick on rhinestones. He had also painted over her eyes with a black sharpie to create two dark, demonic orbs. He suppressed a wave of giggles as he propped the doll on a pillow neatly. And then the piece de resistance, a bag of filet mignon jerky which he set carefully next to Doll Maddy before covering both with the floral comforter.
Then he sprang up noisily from the bed and crossed the room, purposely bumping into the wall next to the bathroom. “Maddy!” Derek called out. “Something happened.” He put a hand against the side of his head.
The knob turned. “Wait, what?”
Maddy went on her tiptoes in a fruitless attempt to see the injury. “What’d you bonk your head on?” She nudged his fingers out of the way and searched for anything: blood, broken skin, bone chips, exposed brain matter. Could vampires walk and talk with their skulls split open? Seeing nothing, she scanned the room for a fallen piece of wall décor or a broken light fixture. Except motels never had overhead light fixtures, just dozens of table lamps.
He let his hand hover, eyes being pulled toward the bed with visible trepidation. Derek nodded in that direction in case she didn’t catch the first cue. “I was lying on the bed looking at my phone,” he told her in a hushed but obviously flummoxed tone. “I swear it felt like someone smacked me in the head. I think it came from the pillow.” The vampire took a step toward the bed, then turned to look at Maddy. “Maybe you should check it out.”
Maddy’s skin did a creepy-crawly thing.
Then she made a face. “What? No way.” She flicked his arm. “There’s nobody here. Anyway, why would you want them to hit me, too, you big meanie?” She went over to the bed and wiggled the corner of a pillow. “See? Nothing doing.” With a bend, Maddy raised the ridiculously long hem of the quilt to show Derek the platform under the mattress. “Besides, nobody could squeeze under here, unless it’s Tooms from the X-Files.”
She plopped on the middle of the bed and crossed her legs. “Damn, this mattress is old.” Maddy bounced up and down.
His eyebrows raised of their own accord when she tugged on the pillow, certain that would unearth the hidden doll and expensive smoked meat product. “Well, maybe it’s not someone,” Derek answered, nodding toward the heavy drapes over their windows and, ostensibly, the rustic cemetery beyond. The vampire moved cautiously toward the bed and sat next to Maddy. “Maybe a spirit from beyond?” How was he going to get her to look under the cover near the pillows? He glanced down at his phone in his left hand and let it drop to the carpeted floor below with a muffled thump. Under the pretext of using his right hand to brace himself, Derek pulled the comforter off the pillow in question at the same time as he leaned over to retrieve the conveniently fallen device. He even let his hand bump against Maddy’s back in the hopes that she would look behind them.
“Or maybe it was only my imagination,” Derek added with a put-upon sigh.
She laughed. “Derek, cut it out!” She squirmed and knocked his hand off her back. In doing so, Maddy looked behind them to fix her shirt. The underside of the floral comforter was exposed, paler than the rest of the bed. It was a magnet for eyes. She reached up to fix it...
...and shrieked. The cry of terror reverberated through the thin walls of rooms 107 and 109… over the buzz-hum of the ice machine outside... through the ceiling to room 208, where a couple of amateur ghost hunters whispered, ‘Did you get that?!’ and marked it down as evidence of contact.
She scrambled off the bed and peeked through her fingers. The coarse, blonde hair… the blackened eyeballs… the freaky little doll mouth… the rhinestones. “What the fuck!?” Maddy laughed. She grabbed a pillow and beat Derek over the head with it. “You punk!”
As he ducked away from the pillow assault, he was sorely tempted to feign ignorance and surprise at the doll’s appearance. Laughter, however, won out and Derek rolled toward the foot of the bed. He grabbed his phone and used it to snap a quick photo of Maddy next to it. “I wanted to add to the atmosphere,” the vampire explained. “Since there’s no cut phone cord or coin op bed or serial killer crouched and waiting.” He stood up and grabbed the displaced bag of jerky and placed it before the blonde as a peace offering before taking the flashlights out of his bag. “And now if something happens in the cemetery, you’ll think it’s me playing a prank…until it’s toooo laaaate.” Derek blinked his flashlight on and off.
“That’s not fair, you’re already dead!” Maddy picked up the bag. Three Jerks Filet Mignon Jerky. Ooh, it was the gourmet kind from the rich dude’s apartment… She tore the strip at the top of the bag and opened it, fingers fishing for the contents. The scent of marinated perfection wafted into the air. “Yum, dehydrated cow flesh.” A piece was taken before she made a tackle at Derek’s waist. “Do you wanna be Lady or the Tramp?”
Maddy put the piece of meat between her front teeth. The flashlights could wait for two seconds.
“Yeah, but I could get dead-er,” Derek countered, gesturing to his neck. One tragic yet potentially comical accident with an exceptionally sharp piece of metal was all it took. Because he automatically assumed any eventual and permanent demise that befell him would also be one that could be pantomimed with slapstick effect at his memorial. It seemed only fitting. “I’m Lady, obviously,” he told her, arms automatically encircling Maddy when she got close. Still, he tilted his head away slightly and eyed the piece of jerky. “But I can’t get ‘dehydrated cow flesh’ out of my head now, so thanks for that.” Yes, he was perfectly aware that consuming the flesh was a lot more socially acceptable than consuming the blood. “I should have given her a handful of spaghetti, but you know. Messy.”
“Her?” Maddy eyed him. Alright, so he rejected the offer to bite off a piece of her jerky. Her pride could withstand that. The part that had her tossing the beef on the TV stand and arching away was that he seemed to still be talking to the doll, one that was made up to resemble her. “I can’t believe it.” She shook her head. “You promised me you weren’t a doll guy. I specifically asked, and you said no, it was Ms. Milam’s southern belle, and now I’m 250 miles away from home in America’s scariest motel with a doll guy, and you’ve already put your penis in me.”
Maddy made two little fists. “Fffffrick!”
Derek’s eyes widened slightly as he made a mental backtrack through the past twenty minutes. He glanced at the bed and back to Maddy. “I didn’t mean that,” he told her quickly, shaking his head. “It’s definitely, you know, an inanimate object.” To support his point, he picked up his phone and scrolled through a series of random text messages between him and Ronnie that included a heavy amount of memes and pictures of his friend’s cooking. He held up the screen for Maddy and pointed to one photo that the chef had sent him when he had inquired into the whereabouts of Charmaine. “See?”
And then the corners of his mouth started to lift of their own accord as an idea occurred to him. “You should teleport it,” he gestured to the bed-bound doll, “into the gift shop and see if they put a price tag on her tomorrow.”
Maddy frowned. “But she’s not a clown. Do you think they’ll make her one? It does look like a place that keeps doll-sized attire in a closet.” She drummed her fingers against her lips. “It’s either that or we turn her head into a hood ornament.” When it came to weird things to do with dolls, the options were endless. She searched Derek’s face for the solution, one that did not involve bunking with L’il Maddy overnight. “Let’s put a pin in it and go see some graves.”
She put her hoodie back on, took her flashlight, and tested it. A hazy beam bounced across the floor and up the far wall. It worked like a dream. With the plastic casing tucked into her armpit, Maddy was able to uncork a bottle of wine to take along.
“I think they had a very small selection of non-clown related merchandise when I was perusing the website,” Derek told Maddy in an effort to reassure her. Then he frowned, wondering about the integrity of his memory. “I mean, don’t quote me on that.” He grabbed his flashlight and the room keys and followed Maddy out of the door. In his own hoodie pocket was an Altoids tin with two pre-rolled cones filled with sour diesel and a lighter. “I read that this cemetery only spans ten years,” he added as they slowly left the neon glow of the motel behind. “Such a short window of time. I mean, I’ve been a vampire for just over a decade. That means everyone buried here must have known each other, even in passing, right?”
“Oh, I think it was more than passing,” Maddy answered, smiling. “They buried prostitutes out here. Sorry. Ladies of the evening,” she corrected, “And the men who came back to the saloon after working all day in the silver mines.” As her shoes left the pavement and started along the dirt path, she took a few sips of wine and offered the bottle to Derek. “It could be that their spirits are still here, knocking boots for eternity.”
It was a more playful take than the hard facts: 300 bodies interred following bar fights, the Belmont Fire, the Tonopah plague… There was a man whose wife shot him, another who was murdered in his nightgown, and a pair who were squashed by a runaway mining ore cart. All of them, forever trapped beside a polka-dot novelty hotel.
He wrapped his fingers around the glass neck of the bottle and took a swig before handing it back. “This is good, but your train tunnel punch is better,” he informed Maddy with a smile. As Derek passed beneath the rusty cemetery gate that no amount of white paint could conceal, he was surprised to feel a strange shiver run through him as the first few graves came into sight. He didn’t entirely need the artificial light to see, but he swept the beam around anyway. It hovered above the rocks that had been placed in rectangular formation to mark each final resting place. Even the vampire would have to crouch and squint to read the scrawl on the makeshift tombstones. “At least people come and visit it still,” he told Maddy. “Even if it’s…well, yeah, it’s a little exploitative on the motel’s part.”
He stepped lightly and carefully so as not to disturb any of the rocks or accidentally break something. “There’s one I saw online that I wanted to visit,” Derek said quietly. He tried to orient himself based on the photo, doing a slow 180.
“Okay,” she agreed. Maddy had a favorite, too. Maybe it would be the same one. For the moment, she was along for the ride, her flashlight dancing along the oblong gravesites, each lined with rocks. Some had crosses, others plain markers, and many were engraved with causes of death. While Derek got his bearings, she knelt next to a mound of dirt, setting down her bottle to sift some between her fingers. The wind carried a bit of it away. “I heard that grave dirt is good for spells.” It was quiet enough that she didn’t need to raise her voice. Maddy brushed the dust off her fingers.
“One time when I was a kid, my mom bought a roasted chicken. I took the bones out of the trash can and I dug a hole and then I stuck some of them in the ground. I convinced my friends I found a baby buried in my backyard. I said her name was Susan and that she was my older sister and she haunted my attic.” Maddy drank more of the wine.
“Like a Boston Market chicken?” he asked, momentarily distracted from his mission by a mental image of Maddy as a mini PT Barnum. “You should have charged admission,” Derek added with a grin. He wondered if it was disrespectful to light up in a cemetery or if it was a fitting tribute to the people society deemed as lesser-than. He realized he felt a sort of kinship here. Instead, he reached out and borrowed some more wine, which gave him high school flashbacks of bonfires and Boone’s Farm and pretending to be way more wasted than he actually was because it got a laugh once. “Separate fee to go up to your attic and experience the haunting.” He lifted the flashlight and returned to his search.
“I’m looking for WM F. Murphy,” Derek explained to Maddy. “His marker says he died while saving others.”
“Oh, wait a minute!” She wobbled up to her feet. “Is that the guy who went into the mines?” If memory served, Mr. Murphy’s picture showcased an impressive set of ears. Maddy’s index finger smoothed a lock of hair behind her own lobe. She began to assist with the search, stepping gingerly between graves and inspecting their headstones. According to its website, the cemetery was abandoned when mine tailings washed over the lot and damaged the original markers, but it had been restored by a town resident who took time to research those who were laid to rest there. Every few yards, she took a small sip of the wine. Her cheeks were warm.
While she walked, Maddy kept her eyes peeled for her own pet grave. Along the way, she passed Hugh Fulton, who died of a gunshot wound, and John Hill, who died of ‘hart failure,’ a quaint misspelling that made her smile.
Derek nodded in the semi-darkness as a tractor trailer rumbled down 95, its distant red tail lights like two eyes staring back. “That’s the one.” His shoes crunched against sand and brush. “Sometimes I get into these internet search rabbit holes,” he told her as the battery-powered yellow circle flitted from grave to grave. “Eventually I was reading about canaries. You know, how it would warn the miners of gas leaks. Apparently they used birds until 1986. And then I imagined being that last canary. I would be pissed. They had already invented detectors by then. Then I realized I was feeling worse for a bird than the poor miners, which made me feel bad.” It felt strange to voice this train of thought out loud, the unraveling of anxieties that could usually be hidden behind a ghost and a grin.
“Oh! I found him.” The vampire kneeled into a crouch and focused the beam on the marker. It looked like a rusted metal plaque nailed to wood, some of the letters faded by time and the relentless sun of the desert. Someone had left flowers, the wilted and waxy petals drooping sadly. “I wonder if he has family left here.”
“It’s feasible. It seems like people stay in tiny, isolated places, generation after generation. It’s got to be a lot, y’know, making a plan for how to get out and actually doing it. You should offer him a smoke.” Maddy walked past Derek towards the outskirts of the small cemetery, and then looped back on the adjoining row, her beam of light warm and yellow.
“Here she is.” The original marker was a chunk of wood with sloppy letters burned into it, upon which a metal plate had later been affixed. That part was easy to read. Maddy called over to Derek, “At rest, Laura Smith, died September 16, 1906. A kind lady. Life became a burden.” In her opinion, it was a perfect way to describe the choice to die. She stepped towards the top of the plot and poured a small amount of wine onto the hard earth. “This one’s for you, Laura.”
Maddy went to the edge of the grave. She set down her things and laid on the cold ground, up against the rocks. She crossed her ankles and rested her hands on her stomach. It wasn’t a bad view. One could do without the road noise, but no one foresaw eighteen-wheelers bisecting the town when this land was chosen.
“Kinda like Searchlight,” he remarked, though there was a part of him that harbored a strange kind of fondness for his adopted home. Despite the events that frequently occurred, it was an oddly comforting bubble filled with familiarity, an antidote to the way he had felt when he was alive and living in San Jose, where first his sister left to start her adult life, and then slowly all of his old friends. He shifted his weight in order to remove one of the cones and a pink plastic Bic lighter from his pocket. Derek turned and could no longer see the top of Maddy’s head. With his free hand, he reached out and gave an affectionate pat to the top of Mr. Murphy’s marker, as if it were the man’s shoulder he was reaching out to touch, and then got to his feet to join Maddy.
“Life can definitely be a burden,” he agreed, sitting down cross-legged next to where she lay. Derek looked down as the small puddle of wine was slowly absorbed into the thirsty cracks of the dry earth, and he thought of blood. “I’m glad people know she was kind. Kind might not be flashy, but it’s solid.” The flashlight was set on the ground with the beam pointed toward Laura’s final resting place. There was a metallic click and the lighter sprang to life, the flame steady in the mostly breezeless air as he hovered the tip of the joint over the tiny blaze and rotated it. He brought the filtered end to his lips and inhaled, holding the smoke in his lungs until they tingled before offering it to Maddy.
“You know how in, like, zombie films or whatever, the heroes almost always come across the body of someone who killed themselves rather than face the horde of undead?” he asked, his words accompanied by a small cloud of gray and a cough. “And they accept it, and the audience accepts it, because they can logically understand the choice for a quick death instead of being eaten. But real life can be unbearable like that, too. Like a personal zombie apocalypse and all you want to do is escape.”
“You’re making a lot of sense to me.” Maddy reached over and took the joint. “Of course in the zombie movie, they’re alone. It’s a simpler equation for people to solve: the dude who blows his head off is either gonna die fast or die slow, but he’s toast either way, and there’s no one there to have a selfish opinion about it. No one going,” Maddy grabbed Derek’s knee, “Stay, Robert! Let them devour you for me. I don’t want to be aloooone!”
She put the joint between her lips and breathed in. A moment later, she said, “If I were buried here, I’d want my tombstone to say, ‘Here lies Madeleine Rigby. She ran with scissors.’” As she spoke, the smoke and her warm breath drifted around Laura’s headstone. Maddy sat up long enough to pass it back to Derek, shaking dust from her hair. Above them, thousands of stars twinkled, interrupted by wisps of clouds. The moon was enormous and the color of egg shells.
“It’s like, I’m not afraid to die. I’m afraid of being bored. Or boring. Or cautious. Or wearing beige.” She picked up the bottle of wine and had a big sip, then swiped a thumb beneath her bottom lip. “If someone you knew died in front of you, and I mean a completely freak accident… say they were leaning back on two chair legs and they smacked their head on the floor of a Pizza Hut, would you turn them just in case, and then see how they felt about it after?”
Derek looked down at her hand on his knee and smiled before taking a drink of wine. “You could never be boring, not even if you tried. I think being interesting and cool and amazing is coded in your DNA.” He set the bottle down carefully and laid down next to Maddy. Looking up at the sky, he realized it would have been the perspective of everyone laid to rest around them, if their eyes weren’t sightless and covered in dirt. The corners of a darker thought threatened to burn and peel back, and only the high that was forming in his brain chemistry kept it at bay. Still, there was a brief flash, a shovel and blonde hair stained with blood. “I’ve thought about this before,” he admitted. “And like...part of me thinks about the person’s family. Would they be grateful or horrified? They get more time with the person they love, but you’re never exactly the same afterward.” The red tip of the joint brightened and sparked as he took another hit. “I watched as my friend Ronnie’s mom was dying. It was slow, unnecessary and cruel. No pizza or chairs involved.” His eyes traced the path of smoke upward toward the stars.
“I offered to turn her, but she said no. And I tried not to make it about me but I couldn’t help it. It felt like a rejection. She made it clear that she thought being a vampire was no kind of life at all.” Derek turned his head to look at Maddy, her profile in shadow. “But then I wondered if I was a hypocrite, because back when I was first turned I thought about…” The vampire trailed off. “Like picking a fight with a hunter and losing on purpose. Stuff like that. The only thing I knew then about being undead was from my maker, and it was depressing as hell. So instead I visited my best friend with the intention of making him like me, and I chickened out.” He had never admitted that to anyone before.
“It’s probably a good thing,” Maddy said. “What if you weren’t chickening out, and instead it was your gut saying, nah man. You know like, just because you’re best friends with someone doesn’t mean you should live together? But the immortality edition.” Maddy rapped on his knuckles and took the joint back. She coughed, arching away from the ground and kicking an over-dramatic foot, then handed it back.
If she covered the moon with her hand, the pale band of the Milky Way came into better view. It was beautiful and it made her contemplative. “Maybe one day, though, after he’s checked off the things he needed a pulse to accomplish. And it’s never really ‘forever’?’” she asked, making quote marks. “One could check out. Hey… I wonder if there’s a service where a vampire can get staked and skip a decade, and when their timer goes off, they pull the stake out. The vampire has a look around, they get a feel for things, and they either say, this is great! Or, I’m goin’ back under. Or… nope, still sucks, let’s make this permanent.”
Maddy gasped. “Ooooh we should do that! There’s so little overhead. This is better than the custom t-shirt idea. This is better than the Escape Artists idea for bad dates.”
He held up a hand and swept it across their field of vision. “‘For when unlife becomes a burden.’ We can repurpose a cold storage facility, and offer a range of prices like on an airplane or a hotel. Economy to luxury.” Derek’s face lit up with excitement. “Oh, I know a vampire businesswoman, Victoria. The one who took me on the helicopter tour. I bet she could be, um, what do you call it…an investor!” Maddy had such amazing ideas. With this thought in mind, he turned and pressed an admiring kiss against her cheek. “I need to not forget this.” His phone was retrieved from his pocket and he hastily began typing in his notes app. When he was done, he tucked the device safely back into his hoodie pocket.
“So...it really doesn’t bother you? Me being a vampire?” The question popped up from midair in his head. He knew he had sort of asked the same thing before, and she had seemed fine with it, but after Secretsgate, he felt the need to inquire again. “And just so you know, I would never hurt you. Creepy pranks are as far as I go.”
The word ‘no’ was on the tip of her tongue, but Maddy tapped on the brakes. Better to process it aloud. She took a deep breath and looked at Derek. The skin on her cheek still felt like his kiss. “I don’t mind that you’re not among the living,” she said. “You don’t scare me. I have pretty good creep radar. I guess if anything gets to me, it’s something I can’t control, and it’s, like wayyyyy out in the distance.” Maddy gestured at the sky. “Which I normally wouldn’t think about this early, if at all.”
She sighed and propped herself on an elbow, attempting to drink from the wine bottle without it running down her neck. Her lips came off the bottle noisily. “Okay,” she said. “I know we’re close to the same age, years-wise, but you died what... a decade ago? Sooner or later, if we keep hanging out, I’m gonna get crepey skin and my ass is gonna sag.” Maddy looked dejected. “I don’t even know if I have gray hair! I dye it too much. And I don’t want to get breast milk and sheep placenta facials.”
“I haven’t been around long enough to watch the people I care about grow older,” Derek told her. “I mean, except my parents, but that’s normal.” He looked back up at the sky in time to see a plane sail through the wispy cover of dark clouds. “It’s not how you’d look that would bother me. You had to go and be so unique. There’s never gonna be another Maddy.” The vampire smiled at her and reached down searchingly for her hand, the skin cool from the night air. “But we have time. If you’re game, there’s gonna be plenty of adventures, great sex, joint business ventures, security guards to punch, and hair color changes.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. Those were bright sides. “Anyway, I’m gonna age like a champ. You should see how much sunscreen I wear.” Maddy squeezed his fingers. “Wait, you said it’s not how I’d look that would bother you. What part would?” She looked at the wine bottle, trying to figure out how many glasses’ worth she drank. She felt pretty good. Languid. Loose but not slurring her words. More into verbally sharing than normal, if such a thing were possible. She wouldn’t count on herself to do math, though.
“You know, losing you. Not that you’re mine to lose or anything, but you know…I’d be really sad.” Derek tried to rein in his innate need to over-explain, but it was a difficult habit to break. “And just so you know, even if you decided that things should go back to being strictly platonic, I’d still want to hang out with you. Anytime I see something cool, I think ‘I wanna do that with Maddy.’ Even the stuff that kinda terrifies me.” He lifted his head to look around them. “We should have brought some of the snacks with us. Is it weird to eat in a cemetery?” Despite living off blood, the habit to eat after smoking had never fully worn off. Maybe it was a comfort thing.
“Maybe it’s weird not to eat in a cemetery.” Maddy sat up and got onto her knees. “But there’s eating a bag of Doritos and then there’s bringing a picnic basket, and somewhere in between the two, you cross over. C’mon, let’s go back before Pennywise eats all our food, and also because, haha, platonic my ass, I’m trying to get in those pants tonight and it’s definitely weird to do that in a cemetery.”
She got to her feet and offered Derek a hand...
… then snatched it back.
Her eyes went wide.
“Derek! Am I a necrophiliac?”
He propped himself up on his elbows, momentarily stymied as he considered it, his expression mirroring hers. Derek was technically dead…maybe. He wasn’t entirely sure of the specifics. After the initial shock wore off, the vampire sat up properly. “No, wait,” he told Maddy, holding up a finger. “Because I’m not just like dead dead. I walk around and talk and…also, I can consent to stuff and they can’t.” His eyes dropped down to the grave beside him and grabbed his flashlight before standing up. “And I don’t want to Google it because I’m afraid I’ll end up on some kind of watch list, or worse…start getting really disturbing targeted ads.” Derek half-feigned a shudder.
“Good. That’s good.” Maddy picked up her things. “Because I don’t plan to stop even if I am, but I wasn’t ready to wave that flag. I’m imagining an even Jollier Roger.” Grinning, she began their retreat to the gate of the cemetery, weighing what she needed to do to keep this comical idea from popping up later when she straddled Derek. ‘Skeleton... bones... boner... stoppit.’
At least her seasonal lingerie was bat-themed.