Richard Laymon - The Traveling Vampire Show

“You could’ve at least made sure she was all right,” I muttered. “That’s all.”

Speaking slowly, in a clipped voice that sounded as if he might be running short of patience, Rusty said, “She told me she’d be fine. She said she didn’t want any help. She told me to go over to your place and she’d be along as soon as she got done bandaging herself up.”

“How was she supposed to put bandages on?” I asked. “The cuts are on her back.”

“Don’t ask me. I’m just telling you what she said.”

I said, “Damn it.” My throat felt tight and achy.

“Don’t worry, Dwight.” He sounded a little concerned, himself. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

Even though Slim didn’t have a father and her mother worked as a waitress at Steerman’s Steak House, she lived in a better neighborhood than mine and in a better house.

That’s because they inherited the house and some money from Slim’s grandparents.

Slim’s mother, Louise, had grown up in the house and continued to live there even after she got married. This was because she and her husband, a low-life shit named Jimmy Drake, couldn’t afford to move out. At the time of the wedding, she was already pregnant with Frances (Slim), and Jimmy had a lousy job working as a clerk in a shoe store. After Slim was born, Jimmy wouldn’t allow Louise to have a job.

Actually, this wasn’t unusual. Back in those days, most men preferred for their wives to stay home and take care of the family instead of run off to work every day. A lot of women seemed to like it that way, too.

In this case, though, Louise wanted to work. She hated living in her parents’ house. Not because she had problems with them, but because of Jimmy’s behavior. He drank too much. He had a violent nature and a horny nature and he enjoyed having people watch.

Slim never told me all the stuff that went on, but she said enough to give me the general picture.

To make it fairly brief, when she was three years old (so she’d been told), her grandfather fell down the stairs (or was shoved by Jimmy) in the middle of the night, broke his neck and died. That left Jimmy with the three gals.

God only knows what he did to them.

I know some of it. I know he tormented and beat all of them. I know he had sex with all of them. Though Slim never exactly came out and said it, she hinted that he’d forced them into all sorts of acts—including multi-generational orgies.

At the time it came to an end, Slim was thirteen and calling herself Zock.

She seemed strangely cheerful one morning. Walking to school with her, I asked, “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re so happy.”

“Happy? I’m ecstatic!”

“How come?”

“Jimmy (she never called him Dad or Pop or Father) went away last night.”

“Hey, great!” I was ecstatic, myself. I knew Slim hated him, but not exactly why. Not until later. “Where’d he go?” I asked.

“He took a trip down south,” she said.

“Like to Florida or something?”

“Further south,” she said. “Deep south. I don’t exactly know the name of the place, but he’s never coming back.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, hoping she was right.

“Pretty sure. Nobody ever comes back from there.”

“From where?”

“Where he went.”

“Where’d he go?”

“The Deep South,” she said, and laughed.

“If you say so,” I told her.

“And I do,” said she.

By then, we were almpst within earshot of the crossing guard, so we stopped talking.

Though the subject of Jimmy’s trip came up quite a lot after that, I never learned any more about where he’d gone. “Deep South,” was about it.

I had my suspicions, but I kept them to myself.

Anyway, the grandmother died last year. She passed suddenly. Very suddenly, while in a checkout line at the Super M grocery market. As the story goes, she was bending over the push-bar of her shopping cart and reaching down to take out a can of tomato sauce when all of a sudden she sort of twitched and tooted and dived headfirst into her cart—and the cart took off with her draped over it, butt in the air. In front of her were a couple of little tykes waiting while their mother wrote a check. The runaway cart crashed through both kids, took down the mother, knocked their empty shopping cart out of the way, kept going and nailed an old lady who happened to be heading for the exit behind her own shopping cart. Finally, Slim’s grandma crashed into a display of Kingsford charcoal briquettes and did a somersault into her cart.

Nobody else perished in the incident, though one of the kids got a concussion and the old lady broke her hip.

That’s the true story of how the grandmother died (with the help of a brain aneurism) and that’s how Slim and her mother ended up living by themselves in such a nice house.

Side by side, Rusty and I climbed the porch stairs. I jabbed the doorbell button with my forefinger. From inside the house came the quiet ding-dong of the chimes.

But nothing else. No footsteps, no voice.

I rang the doorbell again. We waited a while longer.

“Guess she’s not here,” I said.

“Let’s find out.” Rusty pulled open the screen door.

“Hey, we can’t go in,” I told him.

Stepping in front of me, he tried the handle of the main door. “What do you know? Isn’t locked.”

“Of course not,” I said. In Grandville, back in those days, almost nobody locked their house doors.

Rusty swung it open. Leaning in, he called, “Hello! Anybody home?”

No answer.

“Come on,” he said, and entered.

“I don’t know. If nobody’s home…”

“How’re we gonna know nobody’s home if we don’t look around? Like you said, maybe Slim passed out or something.”

He was right.

So I followed him inside and gently shut the door. The house was silent. I heard a ticking clock, a couple of creaking sounds, but not much else. No voices, no music, no footsteps, no running water.

But it was a large house. Slim might be somewhere in it, beyond our hearing range, maybe even unable to move or call out.

“You check around down here,” Rusty whispered. “I’ll look upstairs.”

“I’ll come with you,” I whispered.

We were whispering like a couple of thieves. Supposedly, we’d entered the house to find Slim and make sure she was okay. So why the whispers? Maybe it’s only natural when you’re inside someone else’s house without permission.

But it wasn’t only that. I think we both had more on our minds than checking up on Slim.

I was a nervous wreck, breathing hard, my heart pounding, dribbles of sweat running down my bare sides, my hands trembling, my legs weak and shaky as I climbed the stairs behind Rusty.

Over the years, we had spent lots of time in Slim’s house but we’d never been allowed inside it when her mother wasn’t home.

And we’d never been upstairs at all. Upstairs was off limits; that’s where the bedrooms were.

Not that Slim’s mother was unusually strict or weird. In those days, at least in Grandville, hardly any decent parents allowed their kids to have friends inside the house unless an adult was home. Also, whether or not a parent was in the house, friends of the opposite sex were never allowed into a bedroom. These were standard rules in almost every household.

Rusty and I, sneaking upstairs, were venturing into taboo territory.

Not only that, but this was the stairway where Slim’s grandfather had met his death. And at the top would be the bedrooms where Jimmy had done many horrible things to Slim, her mother and her grandmother.