Bentley Little - The Summoning

Periodically, he toyed with the idea of running away: packing a suitcase and taking off, not telling anyone, not looking back. It was a nice dream, but that's all it was. The idea was romantic enough to appeal to him, but he was practical enough to know that it could never be anything more than a fantasy. He had responsibilities here. He wasn't some nobody who would not be missed, He was the damn police chief.

And there was a murderer at large.

A vampire.

He finished off the beer and dropped the can into the wastebasket. He remembered that he'd told Ted he would turn off the answering machine.

Reaching over the arm of the couch, he switched the phone over to manual. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to watch TV for a few minutes, but he felt restless, fidgety, and he kept flipping the channels, unable to concentrate on anything. Finally he stood up and walked outside.

The night was warm, the slight chill that had infiltrated the past few evenings gone. He stood at the edge of the porch, leaning on the railing, and looked up at the stars. Venus was visible, and the Big Dipper, and the belt of Orion, but the light of the moon had forced many of the minor stars to fade into blackness. His eyes moved from the sky to the ground. To the north, he saw an army of multi armed saguaro silhouetted in front of the faint glow of town lights. He shifted his weight, and a porch board creaked, scaring the cicadas into silence. From the area out toward ppache Peak came the faint howl of a far-off coyote, a lonely eerie sound that, even after a lifetime of desert living, he still associated with horror movies. Vampires.

The chill returned, and as he glanced around, he realized that because of the lay of the land, he could not even see the lights of his neighbors' houses from the porch. The coyote howled again, its cry low but clear even above the buzzing of the restarted cicadas.

Shivering, Robert walked back inside the house, locking the door behind him.

Corrie dropped Anna off at preschool, then stopped by the video store to return the tapes they'd rented over the weekend. She was supposed to have dropped the tapes off yesterday, but she hadn't felt like doing it, and they'd sat in the backseat of the car until now. She'd been low and kind of melancholy for the past few days, and, truth be told, hadn't felt like doing much of anything. Usually, when she felt down, she was able to cheer herself up by reading or exercising or playing with Anna, but lately her mood seemed to remain constant no matter what she did, and she could not figure out why. She'd thought originally that it might be PMS, but she'd checked her calendar and that was still a week and a half away.

It was Rich, she decided. It was their relationship. They were drifting apart.

Or rather, she was drifting. :;

Rich was staying exactly where he'd always been, anchored securely in place.

The problem was that she did not seem to be drifting toward anything.

She had toyed with the idea of going back to school to get her Master's. She had even halfheartedly considered having an affair. But nothing sounded good, nothing seemed right. Rich, of course, was oblivious to it all. He was as happy as ever, puttering around with his little paper, writing feature stories on ranchers who were making methane gas from steer manure and little old ladies who had once dated the cousins of B-movie actors. She didn't know if he actually thought his job was important, but she knew that he was content with it. He had no desire to do anything more ambitious, no desire to be anything more than the unread chronicler of these unlived small-town lives. And there was nowhere he would rather be than Rio Verde.

She wanted more. She'd known that from the beginning, from the first time he'd brought her back to this town to meet his brother. She'd tried to make a go of it for Rich's sake. She could see how much this meant to him, she knew how much he'd hated California, and she'd wanted him to be happy. But, damn it, she deserved to be happy too, and perhaps it was time for him to do a little sacrificing for her.

And for Anna.

She was not sure what she wanted for their daughter.

She wasn't sure Rich was either. She could see his point about the crime and the drugs and the gangs in the cities, but she knew that he could see her point about the intellectual disadvantages of small-town life as well.

She sighed. Great parents they were turning out to be. The bottom line was that she was not happy. It was time for a change. Even if she didn't know what that change was. Something in her life had to be altered. She was feeling stifled, smothered, though by what she didn't know. She did know that if something was not modified soon, she was liable to crack under the pressure.

It had occurred to her more than once recently that she should try to find another job, get away from Rich and the paper and do something separate, on her own. She had not mentioned this to Rich, but the more she thought about it, the more reasonable it seemed to her. A new job might not solve all of her problems, but it might be a step in the right direction.

She stopped at the crosswalk by the post office, waiting for an old cowboy to cross the road, and looked past the end of the street to the flat desert beyond. To the right, she could see into the unfenced backyards of houses on the next street over: colored shirts and ragged white underwear hanging on crooked clotheslines, rusted cars and parts of cars sinking into sandy lots, discarded bikes and Big Wheels strewn carelessly about depressingly under grown lawns.

God, this was an ugly town ..... An ugly dying town. Despite the influx of Phoenicians on summer weekends, despite the presence of the Rocking D, Rio Verde was slowly but surely turning ghost. It had never been a thriving business community or cultural showplace, but with the closing of the mine in the late eighties and the loss of jobs, what little economic stability the town possessed had been decimated. Rio Verde could not survive on tourism alone, particularly not the kind of weekend recreational tourism attracted to this area of the state, and gradu!!y businesses had started to bite the dust as people began to look elsewhere for work. In the past year alone, three stores had closed, and there were now six empty buildings in the two-mile stretch that constituted the downtown business district

The old cowboy reached the curb, and Corrie applied pressure to the gas, moving forward. She turned left at the next corner, onto Center, and slowed down in front of the care, pulling into the parking lot of the newspaper office.

She was conscious of another feeling beneath the vague discontent and dissatisfaction. read. A murky, intuitive premonition that disaster was on its way. Her mind skittered over the emotion, preferring not to dwell on it. The feeling was strange and darkly alien, having nothing to do with Rich or herself or their relationship but with something bigger, something on the order of an earthquake or a war, and though it scared her to even consider the source of such a strong but undefined impression, she could not help but wonder if this feeling of dread was somehow contributing to her own personal sense of un She turned off the ignition and grabbed her purse from the seat next to her, getting out of the car, locking it, and walking around the side of the building to the front entrance. She nodded to the receptionist as she entered.

"How are you today, Carole?"

The older woman smiled. "It's still too early to tell. Ask me again after lunch." ,

""Ah, one of those days." Corrie smiled at the receptionist and walked around the modular office divider that separated Carole's desk from the newsroom. Rich, as usual, was on the phone, scribbling furiously on a scratch pad he had somehow managed to find amidst the mountain of paper before him, and he waved good morning to her as she dropped her purse on the desk against the opposite wall. Ordinarily, she would have sat down and sorted through her mail to see if there were any items of local interest that she could put in one of the columns she edited, but today she simply leaned against the desk and waited for Rich to get off the phone.