Darrell Schweitzer - Full MoonCity

“You are one disobedient minion!” Momma screams as she oozes toward me in that odd, rolly-polly slink that is so hard to describe. Her eyes are all fire, too, and her fangs are out.

“Damn it, Mother! I’m not a minion! I’m your daughter!”

Just then Max shambles into the room, a gigantic, live cockroach wriggling between his teeth. His back has been broken in several places, almost tied into a pretzel, though he doesn’t seem to feel any pain. Vampires really do have powers science can’t understand. Max is now a genuine hunchback of the finest quality, two-humped like a dromedary.

“Now that’s a minion!” I shout.

Momma shouts, too, orders to Max, who is surprisingly agile despite his condition, and surprisingly strong, not to mention horrible smelling, as he grabs me and drags me up the front stairs like a sack of laundry, while both of my parents are hovering over me, their faces hideous masks with red eyes and gleaming fangs, like something seen in a dream, and the cockroach in Max’s teeth seems to be saying, “You’re a naughty, naughty girl and you’re grounded for life !”

Maybe they’ve put the whammy on me, because there is a gap in my memory, and when I wake up I am on my bed in my bedroom. The first thing I do is put my hand to my throat to see if I feel warm, and I do. That calms me a little, but I get up woozily and only gradually discover, to my increasing rage, that the door to my room has been nailed shut, and there are boards nailed over all the windows.

My little prison consists of the bedroom and the adjoining bathroom. Someone or something (probably Max, who seems to have razor-sharp teeth these days) has gnawed a bit of the bottom of the door away, enough to make a slot where food can be slid in to the prisoner.

There’s a bowl of soggy Cheerios on a plate, but there’s a bug swimming in it and I push it back out.

So that’s how it is.

Yes, it is. I can’t go to college anymore. I can’t go anywhere. I am held prisoner, starving, occasionally able to nibble on the less disgusting things Max provides. (The lunch meat isn’t too bad. I can even manage the stale doughnuts.)

Every evening I hear my parents rise from their coffins. I hear everything. I think my senses are heightened beyond what is normal. The lids creak, I think, because they like it that way. They could oil the hinges, but it would be against proper vampire style. They go out. They come in a little before dawn, exchanging a few pleasantries. “Did you have a good time, Morris?” “Yes, Honey Love.” Sometimes I overhear a few words about “What are we going to do with our daughter? What can we do?” followed by assurances (from Poppa) that all parents go through this with teenaged daughters and things will work out.

Yes, they will. Thank God for the Internet. Max is too addled and I don’t think my parents ever quite understood what computers are for, particularly a wireless connection through a laptop. (They’ve ripped out my phone.) If I am typing away, they think I am doing my homework.

(“ Could we let her go back to school?” Poppa asks. “She’s still working so hard.” Momma just hisses like a snake and that settles that.)

I type away, day and night. By day, idiot Max the hunchback is there to make sure I don’t escape. At night, my old friend Sylvie still hovers outside the window like a Halloween version of Tinkerbell in a trailing shroud, tapping her skeletal fingers on the windows, asking me to let her in. I don’t, but she’s still out there, certain to make sure I can’t go out.

Where did she get the shroud, anyway? She was wearing jeans and a top when we buried her. But I can’t bring myself to care anymore.

I type and type. I find Heinrich again, and we exchange e-mails fast and furious.

I too am a creature of darkness, he types. You might not be happy with me. I have a terrible secret.

Yeah, yeah. I DON’T CARE!

You sure?

YES I AM SURE. COME AND GET ME!

I shall rescue you, then, as a knight would rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower. It’s very romantic, really.

Yes, it is, and I spend my days and nights dreaming of him, imagining that I am with him, that he is in my bed, doing things a nice girl like me doesn’t talk about. I spend hours before my mirror trying to make myself presentable for him. We talk over the Internet every day, sometimes all day, but the one thing I can’t understand is why I have to wait. Why can’t he come and get me right now ?

These things have to be done right, for the sake of romance, he types.

I don’t care!

But you should, my sweet. There is, too, the matter that my power will not be at its greatest until the end of the month.

I have experienced enough of his power to last me a lifetime and I want more, but I do, ultimately, have to wait. The routine goes on. I listen to what Mom and Dad say to each other every morning after they come back from terrorizing the countryside. I can even hear the soundtrack of the movies Poppa plays inside his coffin.

I cross the days off the calendar.

28th, 29th, 30th.

And then, just after sundown, the front door explodes like it’s been dynamited, and I hear Max yelping and then such screams and snarls as you’ve never heard before, like there’s a rabies outbreak at the zoo, and furniture is crashing.

Then Max is whimpering outside my door.

“It might hurt the Master and Mistress! It might hurt them!”

Crash! Smash! Howl.

It?

I pound on the door.

“Max, can you hear me?”

He whimpers and whines and slobbers. I hope I have his attention.

“Max! Let me out!”

“Can’t!”

The chaos downstairs continues. It doesn’t sound as if Mom and Dad are getting the best of it. The whole house begins to shake and sway. If this goes on much longer, the place may be ripped off its foundations.

“Max! I can help them!”

Max stops whimpering, and, in a voice that sounds almost like his old self, asks a surprisingly intelligent question. “But why should you help them after what they’ve done to you?”

“Max! They’re my parents ! Can’t you understand that?”

Then he’s tearing away the boards nailed to the door, and in a moment, I’m walking downstairs into what used to be the living room, with Max shambling somewhere behind me.

There isn’t much of the downstairs left. The walls are out. The TV is smashed to bits and smoldering. Most of the furniture is in splinters. Wading through what used to be the dining room, a huge, hairy Thing faces off against my parents, circling as they do. Momma’s dress is in tatters. Poppa’s cape is gone, and his vest and starched shirt are shredded, and everybody’s claws are covered with I-don’t-want-to-know-what. Everybody’s eyes are blazing like furnaces. They lunge at one another, jump out of the way, parry, and thrust with their whole bodies like fencers.

“Stop it! All of you!” I scream at the top of my lungs, and somehow, like my hearing and my sense of smell, my voice has become something it didn’t used to be, and the whole house shakes with the sound of it, and they all stop and turn toward me, their eyes still blazing, fangs gleaming.

Quickly I reach into one of the few surviving pieces of furniture, a little sideboard cabinet, and take out two of the long silver nails I had carefully placed there when we opened my parents’ coffins for the first time.

It’s trite, I know, and not what you’d expect from someone of my background, but I actually hold up the two long nails like a cross as I say, “Now everybody back off.”