The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,121
it was a woman.
“If you don’t tell me who this is, I’m going to hang up,” she said.
“I didn’t…” the woman repeated. “…I didn’t make a sound…”
“Slick?” Patricia asked.
“I didn’t make a sound…I didn’t make a sound…I didn’t make a sound,” Slick babbled.
“What’s going on?” Patricia asked.
Slick hadn’t called—not to apologize for abandoning her, not to see if she was all right—and that was all the evidence Patricia needed to know that Slick had told James Harris she was breaking into his house. Slick was why he had come home early. As far as she was concerned, Slick could go hang.
Then Slick began to cry.
“Slick?” Patricia asked. “What’s wrong?”
“…I didn’t make a sound…” Slick whispered over and over, and gooseflesh crawled up Patricia’s arms.
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”
“I didn’t,” Slick moaned. “I didn’t…”
“Where are you?” Patricia asked. “Are you at home? Do you need help?”
Patricia couldn’t hear Slick wheezing into the earpiece anymore. She hung up and dialed her back and got a busy signal. She thought about not doing anything, but she couldn’t. Slick’s voice had scared her, and something dark stirred in her gut. She grabbed her purse and found Korey on the sun porch, eyes glued to the TV, which was showing a commercial for Bounce Gentle Breeze dryer sheets.
“I have to run out to Kitty’s,” Patricia said, and realized that lies came easier the more she told them. “Can you get the door?”
“Mm,” Korey said, not turning around.
Patricia supposed that was yes in seventeen-year-old language.
The Old Village streets were packed with a parade of kids and parents, and Patricia wove through them too slowly. The fathers looked pleasantly loaded, their steps getting heavier, their dips into the candy bags becoming more frequent. She couldn’t imagine what had happened to Slick. She needed to get to her house. She crawled through the crowds at fifteen miles per hour, passing James Harris’s house with its two jack-o’-lanterns flickering on the front porch, then turned up McCants and hit the brakes.
The Cantwells lived on the corner of Pitt and McCants, and every Halloween they filled their front yard with fake corpses hanging from the trees, Styrofoam headstones, and skeletons wired to their shrubberies. Every half hour, Mr. Cantwell emerged from the coffin on the front porch dressed as Dracula, and the family performed a ten-minute show. The Wolfman grabbed at the kids in front; the Mummy stumbled toward little girls who ran away shrieking; Mrs. Cantwell, wearing a fake warty nose, stirred her cauldron full of dry ice and offered people ladles of edible green slime and gummy worms. It ended with all of them dancing to “The Monster Mash” followed by mass candy distribution.
The crowd around their house spilled off the sidewalk and blocked the street. Patricia’s face twitched. Was it just Slick? What about the rest of Slick’s family? Something was wrong. She needed to go. She took her foot off the brake and rolled onto the edge of the Simmonses’ front yard on the far side of McCants, flashing her lights to make people clear the way. It took her five minutes to get through the intersection, and then she picked up speed as she headed to Coleman Boulevard, and hit fifty on Johnnie Dodds. Even that wasn’t fast enough.
She pulled into Creekside and wove around trick-or-treaters as fast as she dared. Both cars were parked in the Paleys’ driveway. Whatever had happened had happened to the entire family. A flickering white candle sat on a kitchen stool on the front porch. Next to it sat a bowl of pamphlets emblazoned with orange type reading: Trick? Yes. Treat? Only Through the Grace of God!
Patricia reached for the doorbell and stopped. What if it was James Harris? What if he was still inside?
She tried the handle and the latch popped and the door swung silently open. Patricia took a breath and stepped inside. She closed the door behind her and stood, eyes and ears straining, listening for any sign of life, looking for a single telltale detail: a drop of blood on the hardwood floor, a picture knocked askew,