Sandorville III

For the Stake & Garlic Contest:

Write a story about a vampire with a faulty sense (taste, touch, hearing, sight, or smell).


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Sandorville III

Steven Sebastian Sandorville III was never sure what caused his loss. It could have been the kind of music he played as a teenager – or at least the volume of it. That’s what his mother would have said if she were still alive. His father, who passed away seven years before that, the result of attempting to climb a mountain far too crumbly and high for an amateur, would have blamed his son’s deficit on all those days of summer surfing when the waves knocked him down into the polluted waters of the Pacific Ocean.

But Steven was positive that his hearing loss was from Mrs. Beffelton, his high school Algebra teacher. Hadn’t she yelled in his ear each time his homework had been incomplete? He could recall the way his ears had rung afterwards, sometimes for days. He’d shaken his head, changed the pressure by pushing down on his earlobes, sucked in, closed off, even chewed gum, hoping to pop something back to normal. He’d even purchased those skinny white sticks with the cotton tips to clean out any wax. Yeah, it was Mrs. Beffelton who’d done it. He was positive of that.

Right after he’d graduated from college with a degree in bio-med, a certificate of phlebotomy, and a strange aversion to daylight, garlic, and food, his ears had begun to roar with such dissonance, it sounded exactly like a truck stuck in first gear. And then it was too late. Before he could get up the nerve to lay his body down for medical tests – tests he was afraid would tell the doctors much more than about the cause of his ear problems -- he’d awakened to total silence. Now he was deaf – deaf as an old, old man.

His senior year at Cal State Dominguez Hills Steven had partied often, knowing that he was one step away from adulthood – having a job, settling down, being responsible. It was the very last of those parties that wrecked his life. He hadn’t known then that he’d soon be deaf. He’d thought the fullness of life was ahead of him – a beautiful and loving wife, sweet kids that looked like him, a mortgage, a green lawn with roses at the side . . . None of that would happen now, not after the Frat party.

Clarence had talked him into going. Who’d ever have thought a guy with the name of Clarence would have dragged him to a party like that. It turned out that Clarence wasn’t the laid-back zombie he’d seemed. The dark glasses, even at night. The red eyes when he was inside on the rare occasions when he actually did take off his glasses. The pale skin like he never got out much. There’d been a reason for all that. Damn.

Steven closed his eyes; they were bothering him some. The moon was heavy and low, giving off too much light, although it was past midnight when darkness should be his friend. He sighed, rubbed his aching stomach, and cursed the fact that once more his small, camper's refrigerator was empty. Steven needed to go out into the overly bright moonlight. He couldn’t continue to hide away anymore. His bones felt weak; his teeth hurt. He ached.

A low moan bubbled up through his throat. “I’ve got to get me another job," he wailed. Then he cursed.

He’d had suitable employment until a week before. Then the blood bank closed when one of his co-workers had allowed the blood supply to get contaminated with AIDS. What a stupid fool! He'd sent it out to the hospital without following proper procedures, ad now everyone had been let go. Even worse, all the blood was gone, taken away by the health department, and dumped as if it were all bad.

As Steven thought about all that waste, his stomach growled again. He licked his lips and allowed his mind to recall how that donkey's ass, Jerry, had put them all out of work. Jerry, the klutz with the fat middle, the pimply skin, the Playboy magazine in his back pocket.

Damn. Everything had been Jerry’s fault. He deserved to suffer the consequences.

Steven pulled on an old gray sweatshirt and walked out the door of the motel room where he was staying. His eyes scanned the area, noting the closed doors. He took a moment to cover his eyes from the light of the neon blinking off and on in front of the manger’s office.

“Damn you, Clarence,” he said as he blinked his watery eyes. “And damn you, Jerry, you idiot of a Phlebotomist.”

Steven’s legs felt limp and ungainly, but he dragged himself forward into the darkness. He couldn’t hear the sound of his feet crunching the loose gravel, but the vibration of it hurt his teeth. He grimaced, put a hand over his mouth, and hobbled forward.

Clouds were haunting the night. They streaked the moon, causing it to lose part of its glow. For the first time, Steven allowed a smile to flit across his lips. “Ah,” he said. “That’s better.”

When he reached the concrete sidewalk that ran along the front side of the motel, he broke into a jog, his runner’s shoes hardly touching the ground. The air felt chilled, damp with dewdrops. He breathed in deeply, almost content for the moment.

Suddenly blue and red lights strobed. Steven stopped and waited, turning his eyes away from the police car’s flashing lights. A burly-looking, belly-hanging officer stepped out of the car. He was alone. As Steven took note of that, his teeth throbbed, aching to grow, to sink down into the warm, musky-smelling fat neck. Steven swallowed hard and rubbed at the burning in his stomach.

Steven could see the officer’s mouth moving, but he didn’t know how to read lips. He shook his head and pulled out a pad of paper with the words, “I’m deaf” at the top. He handed the pencil to the policeman and passed him the tablet.

“Identification,” the man scribbled, his penmanship so bad, Steven stared down at the word a moment before understanding.


Steven sighed and then nodded. He dug down into his pant pocket. His wallet held no driver’s license, but there was an I.D. card instead. Also several credit cards, although none were any good. Steven didn’t offer that information.

When the dismissal came, the officer was surly. He didn’t write anything else on the pad, just waved Steven on. The cop's eyes remained watchful and slightly saggy with disappointment, as if he'd been hoping Steven were someone he could slam against the squad car and snap cuffs on.

Steven was slightly irritated, but still he nodded to the man politely, and then walked on down the sidewalk, his back feeling the pressure of the officer’s glare until he crossed the street and turned a corner.

It was a rough neighborhood to be jogging in, but Steven didn’t mind it. Let some punk try to hit him up. The guy wouldn’t get any money, but he might get his veins cleaned out.

The old joke, one Steven had thought up several weeks before, still caused him to chuckle. It proved that no matter what awful thing happened in life, you could usually find something funny about it -- and something good. Then Steven remembered his lost job and Jerry – the something good he was looking forward to.

Unfortunately Jerry didn’t happen that night. Steven ran into an old "friend," a delinquent from the neighborhood high school who liked to prowl the block in search of drug money. Steven had brutally whipped his ass one night, but the kid still hadn’t learned. Too bad for him. That night, hungry as he was,Steven didn’t feel like offering up a second warning.

The kid was high on drugs, his reflexes speeded up, but his muscles were soft. He didn’t stand a chance. When the punk pulled out a small jackknife and waved it about, his mouth spilling out dirty words as smoothly as a politician campaigning in a prison yard, Steven smiled.

“Okay, kid,” he said. “I get your attitude. Now here’s your adjustment.”

Steven grabbed the boy, one arm wrapped round his skinny chest, and plummeted into his jugular like a diver doing a pike off a low board. The boy's blood was slightly dehydrated like he hadn’t been drinking enough water, but Steven didn’t mind. He’d rectify that later, using a champagne glass full of Sparklets. The fact that the kid’s blood was also loaded with chemicals didn’t bother Steven much either. Thanks to Clarence, everything filtered out. Not even AIDS, that vilest of the vile, was any problem for a vampire.

Steven could have left the kid's body where he’d emptied it; no one was around, but he remembered the officer hunting for someone to arrest. Better take the body elsewhere. It wasn’t a good idea to make one's area of residence something to take note of.

Hoisting the corpse over his shoulder, Steven took a running leap forward and lifted. Wings, he rarely used because he didn’t like having an affinity with an ugly bat, did admittedly have their purposes. Nice convenience. Flying sure beat taking the city bus – especially with a carcass dangling down one's back.

It took only a couple of minutes to flap over to Beverly Hills. Steven planted the kid on a lush green lawn, sequestered nicely by a seven-foot tall, black iron enclosure. The mansion had a roving Doberman, but it was a respectful animal, once it got a good look into Steven’s eyes, it whimpered, then fled, probably all the way back to its kennel.

Steven stepped over the very dead drug dealer, cracked several of his own vertebrae back into their correct position, and then washed his hands in the fountain. For a while he sat on the bench and watched water shoot out of a dolphin’s mouth. Where the water stilled in the concrete pond, it was clear as glass, reflecting moonlight across its tile-blue surface. Steven’s memory played a tape of what he thought the fountain might sound like. He wished once more that Mrs. Beffelton had not been so fiercely loud.

Steven noticed that his shoes were damp from the wet lawn; the grass stains had created dragon pictures around their soles. He worried about that. He couldn’t afford to replace them, not without a job. For a moment he wondered if he should have done something about his fingerprints all over the body, but then he remembered that Clarence had once said,"Hey man. No worries. Vampire finger pads don't leave prints behind."

The sky was paling toward the East. Time to go. Steven took off his shoes, wiggled them about in the fountain water, squeezed them out, and put them back on. Stray blades of grass floated about, destroying the perfect clarity of the pool. Steven shrugged. At least he hadn’t left bloodstains on the grass.

He took off in a shallow leap, circled the mansion once, and then headed homeward. An owl fluttered by, startling him. He dipped sharply before righting himself again. The owl was probably as frightened as he. It dropped into a tree and cowered, its eyes blinking, green headlights in a moving fog bank.

After he landed in the dark alley behind Sam’s Liquor Store, Steven walked the rest of the way back to his room. He felt the slide of the loose gravel underneath his wet running shoes and hoped no one was awake enough to be bothered by the sound of it. The motel neon was off, the vacancy sign dark. Looking around the half vacant parking lot, Steven was pretty sure the motel wasn’t full. Probably the manager had just been too tired to wait for late arrivals.

At the far end of the area, there was a wash machine and dryer for the motel's bed linen. Steven took off his shoes, tossed them into the dryer, and turned the knob. He dropped several quarters in the coke machine beside the laundry room. The bottom red rectangle held bottled waters.

The motel pool was deserted. Steven sat down on the concrete edge of it, stuck his feet in the water, and drank from his ice-cold bottle of water. It was a good night, he thought to himself. A real good night. Tomorrow he’d search out a new job. Then he’d drink Jerry. After that, who knew what the future might bring.

He glanced up at the horizon, noting that he had another hour before the first of the morning rays destroyed the beauty of the night. He smiled, liking the fact that he'd have lots of nights like this one -- an eternity of them.

Laughing softly, Steven took his dry shoes our of the dryer, tossed his empty bottle into the recycling can, and returned to his room, just in time for a very pronounced yawn. With two layers of curtains stretched across the window and a “Do not disturb” sign on the outside of his door, Steven crawled into bed, closed his eyes, and slept the sleep of a dead man.



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