From Hell to Breakfast Page 11

  He didn’t mean to find it in the vent. It was just there when he was trying to block the constant billows with a strip of thick insulation. The closet got so hot in the day. It was a quirk of some apartment conversion that there even was one in the closet. Whoever heard of a vent in the closet? It’s because, Dracula has heard, these apartments used to be a motel.

  Dracula knows that he has lost track of something with Lucinda. He just doesn’t know what.

  This is partly why he is out here tonight. He is out here to examine and recall, to retrace his lost footsteps in this life.

  This is not unlike what Lucinda’s father does, stepping over potholes prodigious with seaweed, coming out to comb for some lost and monumental bloat, something that might wash up on shore to return whatever lost part of himself got knocked away on that fateful day. Dracula wonders if the accident is the last thing Lucinda’s father remembers. The last thing Dracula remembers, the first and earliest memory, he has to admit, is the night he met Lucinda.

  He was out on the beach before going to the library—that he does remember. There was a couple that he saw—he almost stepped on them. They said something. Where are you going? They might have even known him, from the braided tone of their voices. Dracula felt rather raked over the coals, that night on the beach. He was walking away from a battlefield strewn with some recent defeat, feeling rather heroic and vastly alone.

  Dracula walks, clanking and loaded down with his burdens, until he is tired. He has not found any answers or corpulent carcasses to consult tonight. He goes home. He doesn’t feel like doing anything other than the chores he already promised himself he would do. He brings the smell of the beach with him, a wet mongrel smell. Waves of salt air roll out of his coat as he stoops to get the bucket from under the sink. Before he can even get started on his washing, somebody is at the door.

  Not somebody. A salesman.

  “I don’t have time,” says Dracula. He had opened the door before the bell buzzed and now he is startled. The man—or upon close observation much less than that—a figure so puny it looks more like a boy shrinking back from manhood—stands cocked in a corndog-colored suit and cowboy hat, both so cheesy that even Dracula knows they must be some kind of jaunty statement about his vocation. He is telling him that a demonstration will only take a moment.

  Dracula doesn’t want a demonstration. Dracula wants a break. Did Warren send him? What’s the gag?

  “No,” says Dracula, “I have to go. I’m late.” He doesn’t really have anywhere to go. He has to go downstairs to get the stain out of the shirt.

  “Gift for the little lady?” The salesman seems to be trying out an obsequious cowboy repartee. “Does she do most of the cooking around here?”

  “What are you selling,” says Dracula, looking around as if to signal the ridiculousness of this to an audience. “Who sent you?” How would he even presume there was a little lady?

  “Knives,” says the salesman. “I heard you were looking for a knife.”

  Now this is unsettling. Knives? Is this who was following him? Was he talking to himself, out on the beach? Highly likely.

  “I don’t want a knife,” he says, now flustered. “I’m trying to get some work done.”

  “Are you sure?” His assailant pauses, and catching his peevish glance says, “Okay, no problem, pardner,” and hunches forward and rustles something out of his big suit coat.

  “Who are you?” says Dracula, now thinking about the knife.

  “I didn’t mean to tie you up,” says the cowboy. He hands over a cheap photocopy brochure, points at a name inked there in pen, and saunters away with briefcase and coat swishing. Kent Wallaby. What a sham. Dracula pauses to watch him go, keenly aware that his sanctum has been singled out for absurd and possibly malicious intent, possibly because of something he said, to himself. He continues downstairs to the utility sink.

  On his way, he knocks into a small cabinet and caneback chair, placed obtrusively in a niche of penitentiary-white cinderblock right inside the door which was previously occupied by only a crunchy rug for scraping feet. A hand written placard atop the cabinet says, Your Local Library. Dracula pauses, blocked at the thigh. He creaks open the cabinet doors. Inside, it’s trashy public castoffs—offerings you would find slumped in a bin at a thrift shop or waiting room. He can see bits of streamer sticking out of one, and finds it scored and frilled inside, hunked apart in the middle when he opens it, like his girlfriend at one point was still trying to make that perfect pigeonhole for ideal concealment. He wonders if maybe she was using the knife to make its own hiding place and then finally gave up and went for the vent. Dracula thinks again of the vent. He thinks again of the knife, and the knife salesman. He should have let him show his wares.

  When he gets downstairs with his bucket and cake of soap he finds a battalion of plastic jugs and bottles oozing fluorescent fluids off a sagging plywood ledge above the sink. He noses among them. On the far side he extricates a spray bottle of stain remover that indicates he should gently spritz the fabric, massage it in, and let it sit for a minimum of one hour before proceeding with machine wash instructions. He looks at his cake of soap. This is for Lucinda. He decides to test his luck with the green chemical sap concocted in the corporate laboratory.

  He leaves the shirt basting in the bucket. On his way back up, Dracula opens the door, and something happens. A little frantic parcel streams past his ear and collides with the overhead light and unfurls at the bottom of the basement stairs. He freezes, frisked with sudden wilderness, and looks down after it. The light in the vestibule is soiled and maligned—a bulb must be out. The bat didn’t seem to have flown in at all. It almost seemed like a hand had flung it through just when he opened the door, like a live grenade, and his first thought is to step outside and look around. Nobody’s there. The air clings like moist breath in an open mouth. It reminds Dracula of spring. Spring will be coming soon. He thinks of the wet splatting snow that floundered down on him last night. He goes back in and looks down the stairs.

  The bat is now balled up under the cover of its own wings. This is the first bat he has seen up close and under lights. Is that true? His mind tells him so but his feelings seem to back away fuzzily from any certainty. The bundle is a slurry mud color, like mulched and muddy leaves, soft and quivering. He watches it twitch, almost cozily, like a baby asleep and dreaming under a blanket. It is right there in the middle of the floor, where somebody could step on it. Dracula thinks about shooing it up the stairwell and back out into the night. He doesn’t think it will be a quick venture. Prodding wild things into human logic is an inane desecration of wills. Maybe he’ll do it if it’s still there when he comes back with the load of dirty clothes.

  An hour later the bat is now in the corner, huddled up like a clod of dirt that anybody could have kicked there. If he doesn’t do anything, what will happen? Will it simply remain there indefinitely, until it calcifies and dies? Will it implode of nervous exhaustion? He thinks now to open the door behind it and scoop it into the blackness of that other room. That would be the easy way. But it might cause problems.

  Now he is thinking of Lucinda as he goes to dump his clothes into the empty washer drum. How she had met him that day in the room. She would roll over in her sleep if she knew he’d actually found a key, or what he’d done in there.

  Lucinda, however, is not asleep—not right now. She was gone tonight when he came home. He was only pretending to be at work, walking out on the beach, and he came back early. He expected to see her in bed, limbs asunder, face smashed, deep in the underworld lair the way he has been finding her lately. She has been sleeping very soundly. Sometimes he steps from his coffin in the evening and finds her still inextricably asleep. She always says she’s just been napping, but the way she looks, as if pried up from a long, lightless trance, makes him doubt it. He thinks she’s telling the truth, in the sense that he thinks she thinks she’s telling the truth.

  If he is Dracula, then his time in that roo
m is not so damaged or deranged. If he isn’t—which is what he thinks she thinks—then it is. If he tells her about it he doesn’t know which way she will sway.

  Tonight she had her rehearsal again and she could have gone out afterward with friends. He knows she has those two friends who sometimes help her get to where she’s going. Maybe he is finding Lucinda so tired all the time because she’s been doing a lot of social extracurriculars to and from her scheduled events. She has to put things on the calendar or else she’ll forget. Dracula has come to wonder how much of a life she has without him, and how okay he is with that. He doesn’t want to be a jealous boyfriend.

  Is there some explanation, back behind those looks she gives him from the bottom of a well? Where is Lucinda going or coming to? If you don’t look into the dark you can’t ever see. It’s the same thing with that room.

  If you don’t look close in there you see nothing amiss. There are old mattresses, soiled and fistfulled into knots and tilted up vertically against the walls. There are some chain-link partitions for storing materials like paint and PVC pipes. There is an industrial fan and a gasoline smell. But some of the mattresses, most of them, are not loose on the walls. They are stuck with an industrial-grade adhesive, and sagging down from the ceiling like an old circus tent. Dracula had to pull at them to find this out. When you go in with a flashlight it’s like a padded cell, or a makeshift music studio, some room meant to absorb sound and impact. Dracula stood wondering the first time he was in the room. It was right after he found the key inside an open bag of sunflower seeds. He had found the bag of seeds tucked into the hair of the mermaid and a note that said The door with the window. The door with the window was the basement door and it was right in front of him.

  Now there is a noise behind him. Outside the open laundry in the hall he sees the clod of softness twitch as somebody clambers onto the landing and down the steps. A floating bike wheel comes forward at a sluggish spin, and a man drops its back companion to the floor with a pursed expression. He rolls it vertically through the door with a sidelong glance and hoists it to a rack on the wall where it hangs apart from the others.

  “Hi,” says Dracula. He recognizes the man, to the extent that he knows he’s seen him before.

  “Laundry,” says the man, without interest. It must be almost midnight. The man’s watch beeps and the stairwell erupts as if on cue with some swift commotion, like someone or something hurtling down the stairs, and then a gloved hand plunges into their open doorway and grabs the knob and swings the door closed on them. The bicycle man lunges for it but there’s a click in the handle.

  “Shit,” he says, jiggling it. “Holy shit.”

  The deadbolt slides over. They look at each other. Dracula has his hand stuffed down the mouth of the washer. “What just happened?” he says.

  “Why is there a lock on the outside of this door?” the man says in answer. “Let us out!” He is still wearing his white and gold helmet and it clops against the door as he bangs his fist. They both hear the clatter of keys and the creak of the other door opening across the way. It’s all done in a hurry and then with a few foragings and frothy abrasions, like somebody’s hanging bunting, a muffled scurry slams the far door shut. The man turns to Dracula with a look of assailed accusation. “This is unlawful entrapment.”

  Dracula absorbs this. He thinks of the bat stuck in the corner. “There’s a bat out there.”

  “What?” says the man, in a fierce, hostile tone.

  “A bat. I saw it fly in. I wonder if someone came to trap it. Maybe they didn’t want it to fly in here.” Even as he says it, he doesn’t know why he is making up such a stupid excuse.

  “And locked us in?” the man scowls.

  “Well—”

  “Why wouldn’t they have answered us after we yelled at them?”

  “Maybe—”

  “No. This has happened before.”

  “It has?”

  The man glowers. “This is the second time this has happened to me. There is something going on in that room.”

  “When were you in here before?” Dracula is curious.

  Suddenly, he knows how he recognizes the man. He’s the one who came down the steps the first time he unlocked the door, right after finding the key in the bag of seeds. The man didn’t say hi—he just stood in the open doorway glowering.

  “What is this?” he’d said.

  “I don’t know,” said Dracula. “I just found it open.”

  That was a lie, and when he said it, he got a look from the man that was familiar. The light in the vestibule was casting his face in shadow and he was pretty sure he’d never seen the guy before. But now tonight he’s getting the same look, and he knows exactly where he’s seen him before. At the college. He’s the one who detained him over Warren’s art. He has that distinct chin dimple, and it deepens when he drops it down, like a crude slot for a coin. There’s a kind of avarice about it that sets the man off kilter.

  The man peers at him. He seems to be rethinking his allegation, or rethinking his choice to share it with Dracula. Maybe he recognizes Dracula too. Dracula can already tell that he likes to slide into this posture of obligated authority, and settles in with a kind of plush indulgence, as if he just has to have that tacit position of dominance. It’s unclear what he is implying with the look, except that it seems to be a way to dispense blame. Dracula raises his eyebrows. How is any of this his fault?

  In place of an answer the man is now taking off his gloves. “I’m going to get him,” he says, almost cartoonishly, as if the perpetrator is a bashful ghoul bumping around in a house-dress outside. “When he opens the door.” Or she, Dracula thinks.

  “Who knows when that will be,” Dracula says.

  “Not long.” The man sniffs. “Twenty minutes.”

  “If it’s like last time, you mean,” Dracula says, jabbing him with his own repeat incarceration. He is seeing that the man could use a little bit of humble dunk-tanking while he’s in here. He is actually wishing he hadn’t run up on this man again. After that night at the college he had come to rather like him—or his idea of him, tersely toe-tapping his intrinsic dignity into all the rabble out there. Now, he just wants to battle-ram the Scooby villain all the way out of existence.

  The man peels his second set of fingers out of his glove and Dracula feasts his eyes upon a bright white band around his finger—a blanched ring of nudity beaming out from his brown standard-issue bicycler knuckles. What does this mean—the man is recently divorced? That could be a reason for what he’s doing in this cursed building. He’s between living arrangements.

  Dracula waits. The man waits. The machine fills and agitates. Dracula takes out the brochure from the knife salesman and glances through it. The salesman’s name is Kent Wallaby. In Dracula’s current disposition, it sounds like something fantastical.

  “Did this guy come to visit you?” Dracula says.

  His neighbor squints at him.

  “Kent Wallaby? Knife salesman?”

  He shrugs. “I just got off work. I haven’t been to my apartment.”

  “Oh right.” The machine is rinsing now. Dracula picks up a piece of dropped newspaper. He reads about a local celebrity couple that has gone missing. More than twenty minutes have passed now. The man looks gloomy. “Have you read about this?” Dracula says over the top of the paper.

  “What?”

  “The couple that went missing. This local car dealer and his realtor wife.”

  “That’s old news,” he says.

  Dracula checks the date. “Oh, yep,” he says, though it turns out the date means nothing to him. This he finds disconcerting. “Did they find them?”

  The man frowns. “No. Nor did they find the other six missing people. You don’t get out much,” says the man.

  “I guess not,” Dracula says.

  “They found one girl in the bathtub. Slit her wrists and drowned herself. But they don’t think her case is related.”

  Dracula nods. “Oh w
ait,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I did know her. Vanessa, uh—” he’s blanking on the last name. “My girlfriend was her friend.” He is trying to assure the cop that he is not a cretinous creature from the cellar and he realizes in his eagerness he sounds exactly like one.

  The cop leans on the wall with his arms crossed, not casually. He gives Dracula a beady stare.

  Dracula folds up the paper and offers it. The cop shakes his head.

  “So, have you lived here long? In the building?”

  The man doesn’t answer him. Instead he takes out a phone.

  “You have a phone?” says Dracula.

  The man glances up, as if he thinks the phone is none of Dracula’s business.

  “Can’t you just have called somebody to get us out of here?”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” he says. The man mutters a message into somebody’s voicemail. He folds the phone back under his arm. He is keeping a sideways watch on Dracula.

  Dracula thinks he understands now—the man had been willing to trap them both in here to catch the perpetrator before Dracula started gabbing at him. For months he’s been flexing his social skills, trying to blend in better with his best approximation of geeky affability, which seems to come closest to his demeanor. He wonders how phony it seems, with his jolting smiles and smoked voice and tic-ish neck popping. For some reason he thinks of the knife salesman, flaunting his getup. Behind him the washer is revving into a spin.