Kristen the Vampire

Kristen Rachel Herbert was submitted to emergency patient care at Freeman General Hospital just after three in the morning of February 16th, 2009. Her heart rate and blood pressure were escalating. She was disoriented, dizzy, hardly comprehensible between shallow breaths and the back-and-forth thrashing of her head. She’d lost blood.

The gash in her throat sliced into her carotid artery. Her face had gone pale as death.

Kristen Herbert

DOB 08/03/1986

5’7

221 lbs

BPM 141

Blood pressure 130 over 80

Condition: serious

They sedated her. They sewed her up so that her stitches snaked a jagged C shape across her throat. While her eyelids fluttered with occasional resistance to the anesthesia, Kristen was otherwise floated far away from the small, crowded hospital room with the buzzing fluorescent lighting and air thick with breath. She had no idea how many people awaited her return to consciousness.

For now, they had only the account of her mother, Jeanne Herbert. Speculations ranged wildly. Jeanne was still shaking three hours after her bloody scramble through the hospital doors. She sat with her legs folded tightly, wringing her hands as she recounted the story of how she’d found her middle child facedown in the backyard, leaking red blood into the snow.

An attack? the doctors thought at first, but Jeanne was sure there had been no footprints in the snow other than those left by her own boots and her daughter’s bare feet. She’d read a murder mystery novel once where the killer dragged a pine limb behind him to erase his tracks. Could that be possible? Did that sort of thing work in real life? As her confidence waned, she admitted that it was dark and she’d been panicking. It was possible she’d missed a third set of prints.

It didn’t help that she had no idea why Kristen was out at that hour. She’d gone into her room just after dinner at 6:30 and hadn’t resurfaced, just like most other nights. Kristen liked her privacy. Or did she dislike her family? Jeanne wasn’t sure, but the dinner hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Herbert’s ate chicken breast and talked about football, about school and work, as Kristen looked at her cell phone. They hadn’t argued like they sometimes did over meals. She’d scraped her plate off and thanked Jeanne for cooking, and when Jeanne went to bed at eleven and saw Kristen’s bedroom light off, she assumed her daughter was asleep.

Jeanne initially thought the scream that woke her four hours later was a dream. It jolted her up in bed still half-asleep, the way nightmares often did, and she forced herself to slow her breathing so she wouldn’t wake Hal.

She looked at the clock. It was almost three.

But when Jeanne Herbert tried going back to sleep, something nagged at her. Something tugged. Something tapped at her arm the way Brandon used to when his own bad dreams woke him up as a kid. She turned to look at Hal. He was snoring so deeply that his mustache hairs floated in and out of his open mouth. She made a mental note to gently imply he needed a trim in the morning, then she shut her eyes. She tossed. She turned.

But what if it wasn’t a dream?

Okay, Jeanne thought, what if it wasn’t?

There were lots of other things it could be. Any Pennsylvanian worth their salt knew the eerie but harmless sound of a fox’s scream. She could remember her father, flanneled and stoic with a cigar hanging from his mouth, lifting a finger for her to listen as one cried in the woods behind her house. The noise had scared her half to death, but when she clung to her father’s side he’d laughed and shaken his head.

“Don’t worry, Jeannie. It’s only a big old fox back there. So unless yer a chicken,” he tugged her pigtail the way he did when he was trying to make her laugh, “You’ve got nothing to be afraid of.”

Jeanne Herbert was no chicken.

But, still.

Something wasn’t sitting right. What if it wasn’t a fox? She supposed Freeman had gotten considerably younger since they built the new college over in Fleetwood. Drunk kids chasing each other through the snow on the way home from a night at the bar wasn’t out of the question.

She flipped her pillow over. She wished Hal would start using his CPAP machine again. She opened her eyes to trace the stripes of the streetlight shining through the blinds and onto her wall. She tossed again, turned.

But it was a Wednesday. And with the way the snow’d been falling, she doubted that even the rowdiest of college kids would have enough gusto remaining to brave the storm late on a Wednesday night. Even herself in college, she thought, would’ve elected to stay drinking in her dorm where the icy wind couldn’t rip into her skin and she wouldn’t have to pile a bulky parka over one of her bar dresses.

She shut her eyes for the final time, though Jeanne understood already that she wouldn’t fall back asleep.

She’d be nodding off at work again. The alarm would screech in less than three hours, and she’d have to stumble into a sweater and slacks like a zombie as Hal stretched and combed his hair and hummed to himself, not thinking to ask if he could help with Bethany’s medication or put a pot of coffee on. She’d drop Sean off at Freeman High School and drive to her shift at the bank without so much as turning on the radio, trying not to fall asleep at the wheel.

She sighed. She pulled on her robe. She went through her bedroom door.

All was still and calm in the Herbert home. Dark, too. She stubbed her toe on the same god damned end table she’d been running into since they moved here in ’97.

She peeked into the room her boys had shared before Brandon moved out, and saw the top of Sean’s head poking out from a mound of blankets, the fish belly bottom of his foot flopped to the side of the bed. Good. She closed the door quietly and moved past the living room to Beth’s door.

She held her breath.

It was hard to admit, but Jeanne couldn’t walk through Beth’s door without thinking, if only for a second, that her youngest daughter was dead. Tonight was no exception. A gasp escaped her as she saw what appeared to be a still EKG monitor, a stiff hand with purple nail polish curled on top of the sheets, a mouth hanging open and a face so motionless and so gray that Jeanne thought, surely, this was it. The scream hadn’t been a dream, or a fox, or a drunk college girl whose boyfriend put snow in her hair. It’d been the sound of her daughter’s heart finally collapsing. She stood frozen in the doorway, letting her brain click easily into the well-worn spiral of thoughts that commenced every time she thought she lost Bethany:

God I’m a terrible mother Beth I’m so sorry and oh my God the funeral how will we pay for the funeral how am I gonna tell Sean and Brandon and Tessa and Kristen what will I do where the fuck is Hal where is Hal Beth I’ve been a god awful mother I’m sorry -

The little waves piqued up on the monitor. If she squinted, she could see Beth’s chest rise. She could have cried with relief that the moment had only seemed to last minutes. In reality, she’d only been standing in the doorway for a heartbeat.

So when Jeanne finally turned to head toward Kristen’s door, she felt silly and almost giddy, already thinking that she’d tell Sean about the whole ordeal on the drive to school in the morning. Sean was her listener. Even when she was blabbering on about things she knew a seventeen-year-old couldn’t possibly give a rat’s ass about, he nodded and asked questions and laughed when he was meant to laugh, frowned when he was supposed to frown. She sometimes thought Sean was God’s way of making up for Beth.

She was so sure there was nothing to worry about that her sleepiness began to creep back over her, and she almost didn’t even bother checking on Kristen.

Until she crossed the hall. Until she saw her daughter’s bedroom door hanging wide open.

Kristen never left her door open. She was private as a hermit crab, and mean as a fucking snake about it. Once, Jeanne had opened the door without knocking and Kristen screamed until her face turned blood red and hurled a hardcover book straight at her mother’s head. Jeanne had only been trying to tell her she’d gotten an acceptance letter to Freeman Community College.

Jeanne Herbert’s panic was ice cold.

Her daughter’s bed was empty.

She couldn’t even recall the last time she’d been in Kristen’s room, she realized as she tore through it and back into the hallway. The air inside it was dense and rotten. The bed was unmade. She nearly broke her neck tripping over a mound of clothes, books, stuffed animals from when Kristen was a kid. Her heartbeat exploded in her ears as she took the steps two at a time and rounded into the kitchen, where her last hope disappeared alongside her daughter.

Kristen wasn’t in the house.

Kristen was gone.

Jeanne breathed to scream her daughter’s name, but forced herself to swallow it down for Beth’s sake - the last thing her poor heart needed was a jolt awake by the sound of her mother screaming. She told herself she’d check for Kristen’s car, and then she’d allow herself to panic.

She was unsure which outcome she would deem a reason to panic.

But then Kristen Herbert’s 2002 Chevy Impala was parked neatly in the driveway, and her mother realized with a dizzying abruptness that this was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, worse than it being gone. Kristen was twenty-two. While Jeanne didn’t love the idea of her daughter sneaking out late at night, it could at least be attributed to secret parties or secret boyfriends. Actually, she thought that some deep part of her would be thrilled to find out Kristen was doing something beyond the confines of her bedroom walls - something that didn’t involve Ashley Stecker, who’d been attached to Kristen like a third tit since the Herbert’s moved to Freeman.

But, her car was there.

And bathed in the glow of the porch light were deep, bare footprints pressed into the snow, trailing around the side of the house.

“Kristen?”

The night was still and silent.

“Kristen?”

Jeanne followed the footprints.

“A wild animal, then, maybe?” Poised the young policeman with pimples on his neck and a gun jutting from his hip. “I worked a case in Raymond where a rabid black bear snatched up a little boy straight from his own backyard. ’Course, the parents were junkies, weren’t watching him, and…” He trailed off, his shoulders drooping as if weighed down by the heaviness of the silence. He looked to the doctors for direction. Officer Ronald S. Peters II was no good without direction.

“Dunno,” he said finally, dropping his hands into his lap. “Just an idea.”

“Well, sure,” said Dr. John Paul Maldonado flatly. He gave Jeanne a look from the corner of his eye that asked why’d they stick us with the kid?, before dropping his voice to a patient, gentle tone one might use with a preschooler: “But do you really think it’s likely that an animal would approach a human just to gash her throat and leave her bleeding? Don’t you think we’d see signs to suggest the animal’s struggle in getting to her throat?”

Ronnie shrugged. He murmured something about the inability of humans to understand a wild animal. He thought of the blood pooling across the yellowed grass in Raymond, the faded Pittsburgh Pirates ball cap lying forgotten by the treeline - too small for an adult’s head, somewhat caved in on top. Well loved, his mother would have said. He thought of the kid’s parents asking him, through tears, if they’d be offered money from animal control as compensation.

He said no more.

“Sorry, Jeanne,” said Dr. Soto. Linda Soto and Jeanne Herbert were part of the same church and had enjoyed many bake sales, luncheons and Easter egg hunts together. Now, she looked grim. “What happened next?”

“Next…”

Jeanne stared into her styrofoam cup of cold coffee. It’d sat so long in her hands that the cream coagulated into a milky pupil in its center, staring up to join the six other eyes already fixed upon her. She swallowed.

“Next, I heard the gurgling.”

It’d taken her hours to become detached enough from that word to say it without shattering into hysterics. Gurgling. A gurgle was a sound Kristen should’ve stopped making years ago, back when she stopped chewing on the head of her plastic Cinderella doll and shitting in her Pampers Cruisers - with the exception, Jeanne reasoned briefly, of gurgling mouthwash, before realizing that one gargles mouthwash. Not gurgles.

Gurgle.

Jeanne Herbert was beginning to think it was the ugliest word she’d ever heard.

Linda put her hand on Jeanne’s arm.

“And there she was,” Jeanne said.

She’d recited the story so many times (the frantic phone explanation she’d promised Hal when she told him to stay home with Beth, the nurse they left her with after wheeling Kristen into the emergency room, the two doctors and now young Officer Peters, who she wasn’t so sure was worth the breath) that it’d become a series of beats to hit: the scream, the bedroom door, the gurgling. It was nearing daybreak now. Soon, the sun would rise over the blood in the snow behind the Herbert house. Bethany would need her medication. Did Hal even know which pills she needed, and in what quantities? Would he let Sean skip school? Would he think to call Freeman High and let them know?

“I have to call my husband,” said Jeanne.

“Of course, Mrs. Herbert, but quickly first…” Dr. Maldonado recrossed his legs. He leaned inward wearing a mask of somber graveness that Jeanne felt sure was his very-bad-news face, reserved for people with malignant tumors and comatose relatives. Jeanne had seen this expression before. Not on Dr. Maldonado, but worn by Dr. Louisa Bergman in the pediatric wing years ago as she reached across the desk to squeeze Jeanne’s hand, waving for her nurse to close the door, chewing on her bottom lip. Jeanne could remember how unsettling she found the sight of a doctor chewing their own lip.

I’m so sorry, Mrs. Herbert, but it’s not looking as routine as we thought…

“Does Kristen have any mental issues that you know of?”

Exasperated, Jeanne almost asked Dr. Maldonado to name a single teenager on God’s green Earth without mental issues. She almost pointed out the absurdity of the implication that a normal amount of such adolescent angst could drive a person to run out in the snow at night and tear open their own throat.

In the time it took to huff the indignant breath needed to voice these notions, Jeanne remembered that her daughter wasn’t a teenager anymore.

“Well,” she settled for. “She certainly isn’t crazy.”

“Jeanne…”

This time it was Linda’s turn to don the very-bad-news face - one so eerily identical to Dr. Maldonado’s and Dr. Bergman’s that Jeanne was beginning to wonder if it was part of their training at Freeman General.

“We know things haven’t been easy for your family,” said Linda. “That’s a lot of pressure on a person. Plus, at that age, things like this tend to…” She paused, searching for the right wording, before deciding upon: “They tend to come out of hiding.”

“What?” Jeanne leaned back in her chair, afraid somebody might try to reach out and comfort her. The last thing she needed from a group of people implying her daughter had somehow done this to herself was sympathy. “How could she have possibly managed that? There wasn’t any knife, or anything like that. And why would she have gone outside? If she were trying to kill herself, why would she scream?”

Linda raised her hands defensively. Dr. Maldonado recrossed his legs. Officer Peters fidgeted with his belt loops, wondering if now was a good time to suggest the Freeman Peeper’s potential involvement. As the silence lengthened, he took his shot with one finger stuck up in the air - a gesture he recognized the cartoonishness of too late. He couldn’t put it back down now.

“You know,” said Ronnie. “I’ve been telling everybody to lock their doors at night, what with that sicko that’s been prowling around. You never know what sort of thing a guy like that could get up to.”

Dr. Maldanado sighed deeply enough to rustle the admission papers on the side table.

“I guess anything is possible,” he said. “And we won’t know a thing more than that until Kristen wakes up.”

One by one, all gazes fell upon Kristen Herbert.

Taken from INNERWORLD.COM

Posted October 12th, 2008

6:17PM

Kristen_the_Vampire: I fucking hate my life.

Every day, I feel more like nobody’s ever going to understand me. Nobody’s ever going to like me. I don’t have any friends and my family are a bunch of meatheads with no substance. I have been alone my whole life and I feel sure that I’ll die alone.

Ashley Stecker was a creature of routine.

Every morning, she woke up at seven exactly. She showered first because showering was the worst part of every day. She’d do her best to swipe sudsy hands over all the important areas without looking at herself, without lingering. There was no hell more perfectly tailored to Ashley Stecker than that of her own body.

She always did her hair and makeup the same way. As her head was wrapped in a towel, she smudged black liner around her eyes and shimmied mascara over her lashes. She resented their blondness, their visual nonexistence on her face. She resented her eyebrows, too. So much that she’d plucked them to two skimpy lines of eternal nonchalance, flat and dwindled down to a number of hairs that could be counted by the naked eye - Josh Matz nextdoor had probably counted them himself, with the way he stared at her. Ashley resented that, too.

She straightened her hair. It was thinning and fried from years of this daily routine, but she straightened it anyway. The blond was growing back in. Her roots glinted with a paleness that looked more like graying hair than blond. Aging. She’d buy more dye today.

Next, she dressed herself. This was the easiest part. Ever since Kristen started dressing exclusively in black, the sun had set over Ashley Stecker’s wardrobe, too. Black t-shirts, black hoodies, black jeans. a few pairs of black knitted socks to combat the chill of her floorboards. Nowadays, she only felt comfortable draped in murky shades. Only felt real.

Next came the second-worst part of every day.

Mr and Mrs Colin and Samantha Stecker meant well. This was something Ashley’s therapist, Diane, made a point of mentioning so extensively that Ashley never forgot who was signing her paychecks. I’m sorry your mom and dad failed you in some ways, Ashley, but they mean well. They might have only called you beautiful when you were anorexic and stopped after you gained weight, but that doesn’t mean they don’t mean well. And, sure, maybe they told you to stop wearing camisoles as shirts after Mickey Maldonado cornered you in third grade and forced you to show him your chest, but they’re from a different time. Have you considered replacing your anger with the knowledge that THEY MEAN WELL?

Ashley hadn’t considered it.

One thing she had considered quite extensively in the small yellow office of Dr. Diane was suicide. A swipe across the wrist or a stomach full of pills. Nothing too dramatic. No setting herself on fire or driving her car over a bridge - there would be no burn damage from the death of Ashley Stecker, and her car could be sold for the benefit of Colin and Samantha. Maybe they could use it to fund that trip to Europe they were always talking about.

Besides, Ashley got the sense her parents had already long mourned their daughter.

“Good morning, Ash!”

Colin was stirring a rubber spatula around a pan of half-cooked eggs, watery and too yellow to be natural. Samantha was juicing an orange. Ashley wondered if she was doing so because she actually wanted fresh squeezed orange juice, or if she just thought it looked healthy and productive and TV-set-perfect. Sam smiled at her, though it didn’t reach her eyes. Samantha Stecker had the dull, dark eyes of a plastic doll.

Ashley slumped at the table. Even if she woke up feeling alright, every ounce of energy was zapped from her the minute she saw her parents in the morning. She thought she could put her forehead down on the table and sleep like a baby for the rest of the day, and let them cook and smile and juice oranges around her like rapids bending around a boulder. She pondered how long it might take her to start growing mold.

Ashley ate the too-yellow eggs. She ate the whole grain toast with butter and strawberry jam. She ate the side of under ripe cantaloupe, and she ate the tiny pile of greasy, slippery breakfast sausages. She drank the freshly squeezed orange juice. It tasted like stomach acid.

Finally, when her father was clearing the dishes and her mother was dabbing her mouth clean of her cantaloupe-exclusive breakfast, Ashley deemed enough time had finally passed. She could see if Kristen was awake.

She checked her phone.

Nothing.

Her heart sunk. Her stomach was sick. Suddenly, she was all too aware of the things she’d just put into it. The things that were now digesting. Suddenly, putting her head down and sleeping was not enough. Ashley Stecker would need something much denser than sleep if she ever hoped to combat this dissettlement, this frenzy, this trembling of her very cells. As she watched her parents kiss each other’s cheeks, as their goodbyes fell upon her ringing ears, Ashley sat and wished for death.

When death did not find her, she sucked a breath in. She took a sip of water. She smacked herself hard across the face and called herself a pussy, first silently and then aloud. Diane would disapprove of this method, but it was tried and true. It was the only thing that helped.

The only thing, of course, besides Kristen.

On some level, Ashley must have understood that this was dangerous. That such a reliance on another person could only end badly. But if this knowledge did exist somewhere within her, it was buried so deeply beneath memories and anxieties and doubts, catacombed safely among every other thing she’d ever suppressed, that she had no conscious awareness of it. These things were better left unacknowledged. They did her no good.

She watched her hands. She watched the way they folded, the way they creased. The way they reached for her phone to check, just one more time, if Kristen had woken up yet. The way they fell in limp disappointment.

She needed a cigarette.

Her Camels were in the smallest drawer of her vanity, hidden beneath a long unopened package of false eyelashes and a gaudy silk hair scarf that’d been a birthday gift from her grandmother. She opened them greedily, wrought with a new sort of hunger, and hung out her bedroom window.

The sky hanging over the morning of February 16th, 2009 was unremarkable. It was dreary, pale blue and cloudy, average. It was so chilly it stung Ashley’s eyes, but she was alright. She had ways of warming herself. The friction of her thumb against her lighter came first, a tiny spark to signify what release awaited her within the clean white paper of her cigarette. The flame was orange and striking, wavering slightly but pulled by the greed of her breath, sucked through the tarry brown tobacco to fan tiny fires throughout her whole being, to alight her inch by inch until she buzzed and the world felt alright again, if only from the rectangular perspective of Ashley Stecker’s bedroom window.

“Ah,” she said aloud. The smoke from her throat plumed in ghostly accentuation through the winter air. “Ahhhhh.”

She stubbed her Camel against the windowsill just as the Matz’s front door opened and Joshua’s head bobbed down the stairs, blanketed by a hooded sweatshirt to fight the cold that was suddenly much more prevalent now that Ashley’s cigarette lay crumpled among her father’s landscaping, dead. She ducked down low like a soldier and watched, waiting for an opportunity to draw her shades without him noticing.

His head began to tilt upward. Ashley hit the deck. She thanked herself internally for keeping up so diligently with the cleaning of her bedroom as her face stooped low to an area rug that was regularly shaken, shampooed and vacuumed. She even found herself somewhat enjoying the mingling of her floral-scented carpet cleaner with the musk of cigarette smoke on her fingers. She inhaled deeply. She waited.

Josh Matz was a born starer. She remembered the day the Matz’s moved in for this reason alone - it was the summer her tits really came in.

She was fourteen, and though she’d dutifully learned to stop wearing camisoles as shirts, her favorite striped polo was suddenly hugging her in places that made men stare. She hated the way they stared. She could distinctly recall wanting to tear them right off her chest, to revert forever back to something most of them didn’t want to put their dicks inside of - this was only months before she decided that trying to starve them down to nothing would just have to do. She already felt dirty, then. Felt filthy. Then Josh Matz first laid his moon eyes on her, and seemingly decided that he’d never again tear them away.

At least she had Kristen. Most of the time, it felt like Kristen was all she had.

She checked the window. Josh Matz was gone. She held her breath (ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four…) before checking her phone.

No text from Kristen.

It was 8:43, and still no text. Didn’t Kristen have work at 10? Ashley reasoned that Kristen had always been a late sleeper. She tossed her cell phone down on the bed, but startled to grab it when she heard a faint vibration sound from the folds of her comforter. She clicked it back on. Still no text.

Ashley’s stomach twisted. While she usually didn’t feel quite right until she heard from Kristen, this level of anxiety was unusual. It was intense.

It would be over twelve hours before Ashley Stecker would learn that it was also entirely warranted.