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daemonvols · 7 years

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Chapter Six

Party Preparations

Another five days passed without my noticing much of them. The news buddies returned to downtown shootings, tractor-trailer pile ups on 481 and more house fires. I burned every piece of meat I ate and contemplated going vegan.

One day, and I cannot even now remember which day it was, Charlie left a voice message. It wasn’t as irritating as Derek’s Post-it. However, if I were keeping such a score, Charlie lost romance points when he chose the middle of the night as well to avoid direct conversation. The message didn’t earn him any points to offset the loss, either:

“Yeah, well, I left the old stiff alone, but you probably know that. I have next Thursday night off, so I thought I’d come by again and see your ghosts and vampires and whatever else you got to show me. Nine-thirty’s good for me, so I’ll see you then.”

To be honest, I would have lost romance points, too. I had forgotten all about him since Helen and Nestor. I had forgotten a lot of things, now that I’d seen how fragile even the undead’s existence can be. I rose worked, ate and slept on automatic. It was the routine that saved me: office calls, bookkeeping, and not much more.

I still had regular visits from Missy and Mischa and the other ghosts who thought it now safe to come out and resume their haunting and whining. Missy started to say something about the ending of Helen and Nestor that I knew would be meant as comfort and therefore wholly inappropriate. I stopped her with a raised index finger and a sharp “Don’t!” I did not want them thinking about it anymore than I wanted to think about it.

Fortunately, their spectral minds were easy enough to re-direct. I had only to tell them that Charlie had called and that the party was on. I cannot recommend listening to a ghost squeal in delight, let alone two. It grays the hair. But it got them off the subject of the “ending.” Got me off the memory of it, too, for a while. Though when the memory came roaring back to me just before I fell asleep I supposed that I could pack my belongings, empty my bank account and see what Canada had to offer a bookkeeper/cemetery caretaker.

Two nights, four novels and little sleep later, I drank the musty bitter cup of reality in the form of a cup of tea, the bag for which was months past its expiration, and set to planning.

Not that I hadn’t considered the matter at all since inviting Charlie that night in Section B. In the blissful moments right before falling asleep that first-meeting night, I thought a lot about the little “party” being held on my porch. But I hadn’t thought, said or done anything more about it.

Well, all right, I had compiled a mental “guest list” from the residents. After Charlie RSVP’d to my invitation, I made decisions. The first was that I would not invite any more of the undead into my home. We would stay on the porch.

As for the specific invitees: Derek, no question and no choice. I’d let him pick one or two other vampires to bring along, provided they had all fed before they came into my yard. Missy and Mischa I could not keep out with a banishing spell (presuming I could learn and master one in that amount of time). That made four, six if you counted the living ones: Charlie and me. And I thought about a same-day invitation two younger ghosts, Lallie and Rin.

About two years ago, these two twenty somethings fell victim ago to a double dose of D and D. One dose was driving home at three a.m. from a late-night game of Dungeons and Dragons. The second dose was a drunk driver. The families made such a fuss as to how sweet a couple they had been in life that they insisted on burying them side by side, but with separate headstones for modesty’s sake. The plots they chose in Section H lay near trees (the last of Polehouse’s crab apple trees) and “running water” (the drainage ditch, which could be a third dose of D and D, if you think about it). I’ve often thought Rin would have moved on without a care, but Lallie in death as in life ruled the relationship and she wanted to stay a while longer.

As I said, it’s been about two years. She’s still sticking around and so is he. They would probably disturb Charlie less than an old horror like Benjamin Sharpe. And Rin and Lallie might balance Derek’s pomposity.

And you have another question: Yes, there are special considerations to this sort of affair. Ghosts have no real sense of days or time. They know daylight and nighttime, but couldn’t tell you what day of the week. Also, for them, every year is still the year in which their bodies died. Technological advances are tricks and deceptions. Mischa still thinks I have the poorest design in typewriters because I have to have a separate machine to print out my work. I would have to work out a signal for these four “guests.”

Vampires, on the other hand, are keenly aware of time. I suspect they secretly pride themselves on living so long off the blood of others. Kind of like career politicians in that respect.

And like all socials of a close knit family, there are those you invite and those you don’t invite because you invited the first ones and those two parties aren’t speaking. I asked Missy and Mischa to talk to the youngsters. They had other suggestions, but I had the answers ready.

“No, we can’t invite Emma Wascher or Susan Kegg because their headstones would loosen the dirt for the whole row and then we’d have to let Old Man Sharpe loose.”

“Don’t you remember, Missy that Fred Marsberg had a crush on Mischa and passed on to the Next Life because she wouldn’t look at him even after death?”

“It simply isn’t the caliber of event to expect a Plutarch to attend, even if he or she had the bad taste to linger here.”

“A small family gathering, then,” Missy sighed.

I looked at them and pictured the rest of my “family.” Then I reconsidered moving to Canada.

I had yet to see, let alone speak or invite Derek plus one.

However, my word had to be kept, if I was to get anywhere with Charlie. Which assumed I still wanted to get somewhere. I did. Let’s be honest: romance novels can only take you so far and pillows warm up only when you hold them for hours. They never “hold” back.

I waited for Derek beside the south arch the night before the “party”. He’d gone casual into a leather jacket and jeans that didn’t quite fit him there as well as Charlie’s, and the death’s head on the front of the T-shirt had to have looked more appropriate on the biker Derek had taken it off of than it did on him. The whole ensemble brought to mind the picture of a mama’s boy trying to look tough, but I could not laugh at him.

“Going a nighttime stroll?” he sneered. “I thought your grandfather had beaten that out of you when you were five.”

“My grandfather never laid a hand on me, thank you,” I said. “And you’re going for a new look. It doesn’t suit you.”

A good way to get a vampire’s full attention: first, make (excuse the expression) dead certain he has no intentions of feeding on you or allowing anyone else to feed on you. Then insult him, especially about his clothes.

“What do you want, Jewess?” Now he was snarling and showing his long, spiky canine teeth.

“I want you to bring one of your crew after feeding to my porch two nights from now. That’s Thursday night. Before you ask,” I interrupted a guttural laugh that Derek saved for occasions like this or a victim’s plea for mercy, “I have a new gravedigger who does not believe that you, your kind or the ghosts exist.”

“Most of your kind do not believe that we exist, either,” he countered. “And by ‘your kind,’ I mean humans, although I am stretching the point in your case.” Derek considered himself quite the charmer, but on this night, he wasn’t even trying.

I ignored the comment. “Look, a digger who doesn’t believe at best disrespects the cemetery and the graves; at worst, he becomes a grave robber.”

“I would kill him, if he tried.”

“I know you would. Trouble is, he’s union, and if you killed him, the union would want answers. They’d likely go to the news media. That would raise the Board’s hackles and get me fired. And who knows they could just as easily fire me and hire a religious nut that’d spend his days staking the lot of you in the ground and burning out the mausoleums.” He snorted. “You heard Treasurer Meecham last winter when the city wouldn’t plow up to our entrances and we had to postpone the Jarvis funeral. He said he has that Bible-thumper Frankfort waiting in the proverbial wings. Besides, you owe me.”

“I what?” The Dangerous Voice. He once scared a young artist with that voice; scared the teenager so badly, the kid peed all over the graffiti he’d spray-painted on Derek’s headstone. For myself, I’d heard that voice enough to hear a sort of blood-sucking version of, “As if!” I shrugged.

I took in a deep breath before I played what Grandpa Dov would call my trump card: “Helen and Nestor.” He took my meaning: word could not spread to other “families” that a human had witnessed one vampire destroy another. That leads to territorial disputes and a possible bloodsucking war. And I’d seen Derek behead two of his own. He understood me, but argued on in true lawyer fashion.

“You were not invited.”

“And yet you dragged me to watch it anyway.”

“You have heard the term ‘extortion’?” He grabbed one rod of the iron and yanked a bend into it. I had won. I folded my arms and waited. “I will have to bring Ian. With Helen and Nestor gone, he’s my responsibility.”

I thought for a moment of how many parents I’d heard say as much with as much regret when they came to bury their children. It’s heartbreaking to them and more than likely devastating to their children’s spirits. The CPF has very few cheerful child ghosts. Most wail through the night for their loving parents.

Not that all parents love their children. That’s a simple fact, of which I’ve had some experience. My mother left us before I was two months old. I’ve neither seen nor heard from her since.

“He’ll be a little hard to explain,” I agreed. “But I think I may have an idea for him.”

Derek looked at me hard. I am no expert on vampire brains, but I suspected from his darting eyes that he was desperate to find a way out of it. He found none. “Then we shall attend your porch soiree.” He started to leave.

“After you feed,” I said.

I won’t repeat what he said to that.

Two phone calls the next day to our garden center served two purposes: to replace the frosted rainbow gravel my Grandma Rose used in the flower beds and to signal the ghosts that it was Party Day.

Thursday morning, the red garden center truck dumped a mountain of colored stone on my front lawn. Missy and Mischa saw the signal. They roused the youngster ghosts in the early evening. Then the “ladies” floated through the house, making verbal lists of all the places I needed to clean. When they got to my bedroom, I cried foul.

“Do I go into your coffins and critique your housekeeping?” I said.

“We don’t hold parties in our coffins, dear,” Missy reminded me. She laid the shadow of her hand on my shoulder. I shivered from the cold.

“Nobody’s going into my bedroom tonight.”

Missy tutted. “That’s too bad, dear. You need somebody sometime, you know. Birds and the bees.”

“Well, if I do, there will not be dead things in my bedroom!”

They both sniffed and floated outside through the front windows with the Cat Move.

“Not much help are they?” Rin offered with an opaque shrug.

Rin must have been a sweet, if erratic young man when he was alive. It was a pity his family saw fit to send him through Eternity in a black suit, black shirt and tightly-tied black tie. His spirit looked about six foot-two inches and he wore his blonde, straight hair samurai-style: the front locks pulled back into a mini-ponytail that sat atop the shoulder-length hair on the sides and back. He had dark eyes, a sad smile, a soft voice, and a huge desire to help me.

He’d not been dead long enough to learn how to move physical objects with any accuracy, but still he tried. And failed. Six times he tried to move dishes to from the dining room sideboard to the kitchen. Six times, they rattled and refused to budge. In high frustration, he thrust energy at one of Grandma Rose’s china cups and sent it crashing to the floor.

I ceased cutting up celery and bell peppers when I heard it and came out of the kitchen to insist that he stop ‘helping’ and park his non-corporeal behind on one of the four three-legged stools I had around the kitchen island.

He obeyed, and sank down through the stool’s wooden seat up to his nose. I pretended not to notice and kept cutting celery ribs. It doesn’t do to mock a young ghost. It spoils any other interactions they might have with the living. And ghosts, for all their blissful ignorance of time, have a long memory. Rin withdrew from the stool, gauged it in distance and height, and in a moment was hovering in a seated position two inches above the seat.

This might have resulted in a reasonably tranquil scene. However, Lallie had discovered that she could pass through ceilings as well as walls. Even as a ghost, she was a sight: her family had dressed her in a red, drop-waist dress with a white silk rose the size of a soccer ball at her hip, and black-and-white striped stockings. She dangled from the rose down from the load-bearing beam in the kitchen ceiling and then used it as her own gymnastic bar to do forward and backward flips. She may have expected Rin to applaud her efforts, but her path swung her through his head over and over, despite his efforts to avoid her. Once she realized where they intersected, she started making kissy noises. Rin looked (excuse the expression) mortified. I cut more celery.

I probably cut too much celery. There would be two to feed that night, as long as Derek kept his word. He and Ian wouldn’t care for vegetables anyway. Still, I had the celery and peppers, some crackers and a dip my Grandma Rose swore would bring a husband into the house.

Well, what she had

said

was that it would bring marriage partner. She also told me she’d made it with crackers and celery the first time my father brought my mother to the house at the CPF. In hindsight, I may well have been (excuse the expression) dead wrong to make and serve it to Charlie Tischler.

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