Now he was caught up in something that involved vampires. Actual vampires.
That’s what made Fowler so furious. Vampires should not be any part of the world in which he lived. Vampires were TV and movies. Buffy and Blade and Barnabas-fricking-Collins. Vampires were Halloween costumes and Count Chocula. Vampires were fiction. At worst they were supposed to be myths and legends. Vampires weren’t real. Vampires and geeks do not belong in the same reality, of that he was quite certain.
In vampire stories there were only two kinds of characters—victims and heroes. Newton knew that there was nothing remotely heroic in his nature, but he sure as hell did not want to be a victim.
Waking up and discovering that the world now included vampires and werewolves—let’s not forget werewolves—was too much to ask. Not just one…but two monsters…the big two. The classics. Right here in River City. Shit.
Crow was the hero, Newton knew. He’d already shown that by facing Ruger twice. Val was a hero, too. She’d fought Ruger herself, and she’d killed Boyd. At best, Newton knew, he was the squatty sidekick who would probably not make it to the final reel. Like George from Seinfeld, with a stake and hammer. Yeah, there were good odds on that game.
But what could he do? Running was an option, and he gave that a lot of thought. No one would blame him; no one ever blames the geek for being a coward. After all…we were talking supernatural monsters here. He didn’t have a black belt like Crow or a will of iron and a big-ass pistol like Val. All he had was…what?
That was the thought process that took him from sitting in his car after leaving the hospital—crying like a baby and praying to a God he hadn’t said “boo!” to since his bar mitzvah—to where he was right now. Parked at his computer, working the Net, working sources. Finding stuff out. It’s what a geek would do.
He kept at it for hours, researching everything he could find, punishing the keys with stabbing finger hits. He searched on vampires and werewolves, and at first the enormity of the available information nearly stopped him in his tracks. When he typed “Vampire” into Google the search told him there were 54,200,000 hits.
“Holy shit!” he breathed, then tried adding an “s” to make it “Vampires. ” That dropped the number of websites down to 18 million. “Werewolf” 11,400,000 hits. He chewed a plastic pen cap for a few moments, then he tried it as “vampire folklore” which eliminated most of the film and fiction references and that dropped it down to 773,000 sites. On a whim he refined it even more by adding the word “university,” hoping to score experts. That dropped it down even further to 276,000 sites, and from there Newton plowed it, looking for thesis papers, studies, published works, and for names that popped up over and over again: J. N. Corbiel, an assistant professor of folklore at the University of Pennsylvania.
Newton recognized that name and pulled open his file drawer for the folder of notes he’d made when researching material following his interview with Crow. He riffled the pages until he found one whose contents jarred him. One he’d read but put out of his mind at the time—could that just be a day or two ago? The printout was a historical account of a man named Peeter Stubbe, known in folklore as the Werewolf of Bedburg, a mass murderer executed in 1589 following the most famous werewolf trial in history. Under brutal torture Stubbe confessed to having been a sorcerer and lycanthrope who had practiced black magic since boyhood and who transformed regularly into a savage wolf for the purpose of hunting humans for sport and food. The article also gave the many aliases Stubbe used over the years: Peter Stubb, Peter Stumpf, Abel Greenwyck, Abel Griswald…and Ubel Griswold.
His skin crawled.
There was a URL on the printout and he typed it in, bringing up a page with a lot of history about that and similar werewolf trials, most of which had been conducted by the Inquisition. Dr. Corbiel had a typically dry and detailed academic style, but the case details were nonetheless bloody and sensational.
Newton sat back in his chair and considered this, tapping his lower teeth with the cap of his pen. U of P was in Philly, maybe fifty, sixty miles from where he sat. Maybe he could meet with this Professor Corbiel, pick his brain. Pretend to be doing a story on the folklore behind the pop culture, something like that. Or maybe writing a pop-culture book.
He looked for an e-mail address and found it on the staff directory, and clicked on it to load an e-mail screen. [email protected] /* */ .
“Dear Professor Corbiel,” he began.
3
Before Weinstock even had the door closed, Val said, “Crow told me everything. ”
“Okay,” he said carefully, glancing at Crow.
Crow nodded. “She knows what we know. ”
“That was fast, don’t you think? Val needs rest and—”
“Listen to me, the both of you,” Val interrupted. “I know I’m hurt, I know I’m pregnant, and I know that Mark and Connie’s deaths haven’t really hit me yet, not like they will…but if either of you starts walking softly around me, or hides stuff from me because you don’t want to upset me or some such crap, I’ll skin you both alive. You know I’m not joking here. My family is dead and I need to understand why…and how. ”
She looked at each of them in turn.
Crow took the lead. “Believe me, sweetie, this isn’t a matter of the manly men not wanting to upset the womenfolk. The real problem, at least for me, is that I don’t know how to talk about this. ”
Weinstock nodded agreement.
Val nodded. “Then that’s a problem we’re going to have to solve right now, boys. Are we talking past or present tense?” When they looked perplexed, she added, “Did Boyd’s death end it, or does…what happened last night…indicate that this is still happening?”
“We’ve been chewing on that all morning,” Weinstock said.
“The way I see it,” Crow said, “this part of it—the, um, vampire, part of it—started with Ruger and Boyd coming to town. ”
“You know that or are you guessing?” Weinstock asked.
“Guessing, but before
they got here we didn’t have vampires. ”