The reflection of the stoplight on the wet street sent long, scarlet smears streaking up the middle of Oak Avenue in the darkness of that late September night. The power on the block was flickering, but that was common during an autumn storm. Natalie Devon thought that view from the window of her apartment bedroom would be the last thing she ever saw. Blood red lights. How fitting, she thought.
How fitting.
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Had she gone to work, she reflected in some part of her brain that seemed to be operating in a calm way, none of this would be happening. If she had just gone to work. But Desiree Caputo was scheduled to be there. As regional manager of the Grinds coffee shop franchise, Desiree Caputo was the kind of person people chewed off their arms to get away from if they became trapped in the same room. Desiree Caputo was a nightmare in an expensive dress.
The franchises were gifts from her mega-rich father, but she used them as her personality cults and when it was time for her to visit, Nat tried to be gone. She was only assistant manager, but Greg O’Neil wasn’t going to be there. Something about an infection, or maybe a bite? He was staying home. So she volunteered to go in and face the spoiled Desiree Caputo who was like a vampire who sucked the souls out of the people who worked in her coffee shops.
But then she hadn’t gone to work. In a moment of unusual self-possession, Nat just decided to let Aubrey, the night barista, deal with Desiree. That was going to have to be okay. Aubrey fed Desiree's need to be the center of attention. Greg would understand and if he didn’t, he could fire her. At this point in her life, she didn’t care. She had a tax refund in her savings account and had been squirreling a little away from every paycheck. She would have to get other work eventually, but it wouldn’t be at Grinds and it wouldn’t be for Desiree. She might even try to talk Greg into leaving with her. A walkout might teach the spoiled bitch she couldn’t suck people dry so easily.
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All of that now seemed to have been a mistake. She stared at the window, wondering if she could open it and break through the screen beyond and land outside without breaking anything. A heavy weight thumped against the door to her tiny apartment. At first, it was a bump, but then it crashed and the door seemed to buckle under the impact. A thin, reedy voice outside the door called her name.
‘Come out here, Nat. I want to show you something. I think you’ll like it.’
There were undertones in that voice that Nat didn’t want to think about. How had she gotten to this point? No one would believe her. Even if she could jump out and get into the wet night, no one would believe what was happening in her apartment.
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Brandon Hurley was someone that Natalie Devon dated off and on for about a year. He worked at Grinds when she started but left soon after to go work on a plantation on a Caribbean island with his church. She liked Brandon, too. Not love, nothing serious, nothing long-term, but certainly they had some fun dates. He was handsome and sweet and he had a natural, in-born sense of courtesy.
Then, about three months ago, Brandon went quiet; he hadn’t answered her phone calls and she assumed that he moved on. That happened sometimes, but then he showed up at her apartment. At first, it took her a moment to realize who she was seeing. He seemed different, as though he was seriously ill.
Her apartment was in what was once a large house that had been renovated so that it could be made into studio flats. There were two in either half of the downstairs separated by a short corridor and the main steps, and three upstairs. Her own was smaller and had a tiny living area, a bathroom and her bedroom. Right now she was the only person renting and the rest of the place was empty. She buzzed down to see on the built-in camera that it was Brandon hammering on the front door in the rain. Immediately, she unlocked it. On the black and white monitor, he looked thinner, paler, even a little pallid. He hesitated, looked inside and then pushed one foot into the main foyer. His head turned, as if, she thought, he was disoriented. He then walked up the steps, still looking around. When he got to her door he knocked hard.
Using the intercom, she asked him where he had been, mainly to give him a hard time, but he did not speak. When she looked through the peephole, he just stood there, looking like he wanted her to invite him in. And there was something in his demeanor that caused her to have a warm sensation in her chest, almost a burst of affection or something a little more primal even though his face was distorted by the fisheye lens.
As he stared back from the other side, the feeling inside her intensified, until she felt herself blush with the heat of it. Then he smiled and waggled his eyebrows at her. She noticed that he seemed to be looking through the door at her. The feeling made her skin prickle as though she were being watched by many eyes.
She was made so uncomfortable by his stare that she wanted to hide. She didn’t like this version of her once dear friend and part of her was sad and hurt by his behavior, but another deeper part of her was angry that he could so easily cheapen what had once been a respectful and caring friendship.
‘Brandon, are you high or something?’
‘... or something,’ he said, dislocated, almost trancelike. ‘Soooomethiiiiiiing.’ He drew out the word as if tasting it and giggled. It wasn’t his usual laugh. It was high-pitched and plaintive and it put cold steel in her spine.
‘Jesus Brandon, you know how I feel about that. Go sleep it off.’
She started to turn away but was held in place. She felt the surge of his strength pinning her in that spot. She felt nausea welling in her stomach.
‘Invite me in, Nat,’ he said. ‘For old times.’ He waggled his eyebrows again when she looked through the peephole and she felt the warmth go out of her as he giggled. The hairs on the back of her neck and arms rose and her heart started to blast against her ribcage.
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They had never been anything more than friends. The few times they tried to make it more than friends felt somehow wrong to both of them and like with everything else, Brandon handled it like a gentleman, apologizing and hugging her gently. That opened things up between them to talk about everything, and they grew quite close after that.
They even discussed what it would be like if they got married and lived together as platonic partners. They had so many good talks and she found that she liked Brandon very much. She didn’t have any unhealthy or disproportionate feelings about it. She also understood that, at some point, either of them might find someone they did have romantic feelings for and when that happened, it would be necessary to step back. This was the 90’s, after all. A young woman could have male friends and not be in a physical relationship with them.
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Now, he was hammering on the door with his fists. She regained her ability to move, but resisted the urge to hide. The angry part of her was taking over.
Another heavy thump on the door.
‘Nat, Babe, it’s great. I can just come in and we can talk until you’re ready. I won’t try anything until you’re ready.’
His voice was grating, metallic. It had no feeling, no inflection. It was cold and flat, like an automated train announcement.
‘Little Nat, little Nat, let me IN!’ he chanted.
Another thump and the door of her apartment gave way at the top, and burst inward, splintering in a jagged diagonal about two feet down from the to right corner. Wood pieces flew inward onto her floor. The sudden noise and rending wood startled her and she fell hard on her backside and she crabbed backwards until her back made contact with the opposite wall.
Natalie Devon experienced a strange moment then, and she realized that part of her brain was icily totaling all this up from some fearless internal realm. It played a memory inside her mind’s eye. She saw Jack Nicholson breaking through a door with an ax in the Overlook Hotel and Shelly Duvall screaming bloody murder on the other side. Only now it was Brandon’s face, dead calm, but something around his eyes made her think he looked very hungry.
His head stuck partially through the triangular hole in the door, but he didn’t reach through and turn the knob for some reason. It seemed as if he was waiting for something. A long tendril of saliva dangled from the corner of his mouth and wavered back and forth, a spit pendulum. She felt sick, and she wanted to stand, turn and jump out the window. Even if she died, even if she broke her neck, it was better than whatever this was. But the cold part of her already knew what this was and it was trying to tell her, but she couldn’t hear it through the rising panic.
The power flickered again. Her ceiling light, jutting down from the center of the room, flashed cold light on the situation. Brandon’s head and torso were leaning into the room, reaching across the space, but his arms were outside.
In the light of her apartment, she could see him well and it was clear he was sick. His eyes were sunken into black pits, but they glinted red in the harsh light. He stopped for a moment and stood, pulling his head and chest back through the broken section of the door and straightening his windbreaker. He turned his head as if listening to something. All Natalie could hear was the rain on the roof.
‘Let’s be reasonable, Natalie. I know you want me to come in there. Let’s talk. What do you say, Babe? Invite me in.’
He never called her ‘Babe’ before. She pushed herself up and wedged her back into the corner of the room furthest from him. As she rose, she could see his face in the light from the ceiling fixture. His skin was tinged grey-green. Deep circles of black surrounded his eyes, and his teeth looked like the jagged edges of a broken mirror, sharp and slick with spit. Despite the exertion he must have used to break the door, he wasn’t out of breath or sweating. A strange coppery smell suffused the air. His face became a clown mask of sorrow and fear.
‘Nat. Let me in. I’m dying. I need your help. Please.’ This was even more unsettling. Beneath the outward sound and appearance, his voice still sounded flat and metallic.
Her brain jarred loose from its mooring and she swooned, the world tipped in around her. She fell forward and landed on the debris from the door.. A long sliver of wood sliced into her right forearm and brought her awake with searing awareness.
She screamed with the pain of it and pushed herself up and moved back into the corner by the window.
Gritting her teeth in agony she turned to the window. She looked over her shoulder and saw Brandon standing silent, rapt, staring at the thick stream of blood on her arm. His face was fierce. His eyes flamed, and his grey flesh deepened to bruised purple.
‘Nat,’ he said around his jagged teeth, and his voice was now deep and hollow as a rock dropped into a well, ‘Nat, let me help you. I can take away the pain. Invite me in.’
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The cold part of her mind said one word over and over in her head. As she stared at Brandon's deformed features and sharp teeth, the word blew through the barrier of pain and panic and echoed in her awareness. As if a switch had been flipped, the fear and desperation that flooded her perception was gone. Now there was only white hot fury and clear, single-minded purpose.
In front of her were the chunks of shattered door that blew in when Brandon broke through it. Among the splintered pieces, one caught her eye. It was long, like a narrow wedge and broken to a splintered point. She straightened, took a deep breath, walked to the piece of door and picked it up.
The calm voice in her head told her what had to be done. Even though her emotions and reason seemed to totter at her thoughts, she saw what she had to do to survive.
Hefting the broken section of the door in her hand, she moved to the middle of the room.
Brandon stopped moving but he was still talking to her.
‘Nat, Babe. Invite me in. I want to help you. Then we can be together. You know I love you, Babe, right?’
She held the long splinter in her hand and felt its weight. It was a strong, old fashioned door. It was sturdy enough, she knew.
Brandon could break down her door, but he wasn’t able to come in. In a flash of doubt and revulsion at what this meant, she considered the window again, but the calm voice in her head prevailed. She turned and looked at the window in the garish light. It was painted shut. The only way for that scenario to end would be for her to run and dive through the window and be cut to ribbons and maybe die of a broken neck if she didn't bleed to death in the grass under her window. He would get to her before she died, she knew. That left facing Brandon, or, what she was now beginning to understand, had once been Brandon.
She took a deep, shuddering breath and felt the cold edge of hot rage in her mind. Thunder cracked overhead and the lights flickered. In the brief darkness, she saw Brandon’s eyes glinting coldly red. They looked like the stoplights in the darkness out her window. Then, her doubt was gone.
‘Brandon, I want you to come into my room,’ she said softly. There was only a second’s hesitation and he was inside. He seemed to expand with gruesome joy at having worn her down. He didn’t say anything, only gibbered in his throat. The lights flickered again and he closed the distance fast. He was only a few feet away.
‘Brandon, I’m ready,’ Natalie Devon said. It was her, though she didn’t recognize the voice coming out of her. She stretched her arms out, tossed her head back and opened her posture to him.
‘This won't hurt ... for long’, he said and his face split into a horrible grin of nightmare teeth and his tongue swept out like the forked tongue of a monstrous serpent.
‘No,’ Nat said. ‘Not for long’. Thunder cracked overhead and the lights flickered again. Several things happened. Brandon moved forward with impossible speed. Natalie Devon flipped the grip on the long splinter and raised it, pointing outward. As Brandon reached her, the point of the wood pierced into his chest. He gasped. The lights flickered and went out.
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Pale grey-blue light was beginning to oppress the darkness outside her bedroom window when the power came back on and she moved again. The stoplight still cast long streaks of blood-red light up the rain-slicked street, but in the iron-grey pre-dawn light, the view was less threatening.
Natalie Devon sat down on the edge of her bed. The shaking finally stopped and her body went cold, stiff, rock still. Her hand was a wreck of torn skin and splinters from the jagged wedge of broken door. The wound on her forearm was dried and clotted, but it throbbed with dull pain. Her breathing was deep, calm and stolid.
Brandon Hurley—had it been Brandon?—lay in a blood-soaked pile on the floor of her apartment. The grave color had gone out of him and the glinting red fire in his eyes had been snuffed. He was just Brandon again, the thing that he had become was gone.
By some incredible luck, she stabbed him in the heart and he died with a final shriek and a burst of arterial red light. Now, her room was the scene of a murder. She played the scene over and over. An old friend had broken into her apartment and tried to attack her. She was injured and grabbed at anything she could find to defend herself. She killed her assailant in self defense. She wasn't convinced it would hold up. No one would believe her. She was a murderer, now.
The calm voice in her head wasn’t quiet yet. The thing that she killed was not Brandon, it said. It needed an invitation into her room, it died with a stake of wood through its heart. It wanted to do more than kill her. It wanted to eat her; to draw her life blood into itself. She had seen enough movies and read enough books. Brandon had become a—could she say it? A vampire. Brandon had become a vampire and tried to kill her. She defeated it and would probably now be tried for murder. At least she was alive.
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In the receding darkness on Oak Avenue, hundreds of sets of glinting red eyes moved back into the shadows. Doors closed and window shades were pulled. In the gloom beneath a large magnolia tree across the street from the girl's apartment, a tall, thin woman stood, her eyes glowing blood red. Natalie Devon called in sick from work. Natalie Devon, a bane to the woman’s existence for too long.
And now, Desiree Caputo thought, as she gazed at the window of Natalie’s apartment, unslaked hunger burning inside her, the boy failed to do his work. So, after a little rest, darkness would descend again. And once it did, Natalie would become one of them or she would die.
As the woman faded into the morning mist, the traffic lights at the intersection switched from emerald green to glowing amber and then to brutal crimson.
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