Vintage Misery: Part One

I’ve learned a few things from car salesmen, televangelists, and other hawkers - how to razzle-dazzle to sell something that many don’t believe exists. For most, what I sell is a form of entertainment - movie franchises, late-night television hosted by busty goths. But it's all too real for me, having inherited my family’s knowledge and a touch of my mother’s gifts.

Much like a traveling salesman, I try to hit up well-to-do neighborhoods. But college towns are also a boon for my business, especially when sororities and fraternities are involved. They usually reside in old houses, children of old money. Old money means new money for me. But it's the old houses that usually hook me - the older the better, and the more columns on the porch, the better. Especially in the south. I love taking business to the old south.

The houses are usually remnants of plantations, and there’s enough history to build off of to scare some idiot kids into making their parents pay for my expertise. Pretending to be a fortune teller and medium and performing for parties is how I started. After that, I would usually have repeat customers come asking for more. And then, bit by bit, the hauntings started.

One party I went to recently was supposed to be a bg break. One of the girls in the sorority was the daughter of a notoriously superstitious beauty tycoon, known to do business deals under the strict guidance of her horoscope and the placement of celestial bodies. She used crystals, tea readings, and all sorts of new-age bullshit to run her business and family. And her daughter was within my grasp.

I pretended to read the young woman as her sisters watched expectantly, with big eyes surrounded by too much eyeshadow. I sometimes think how I could have been one of them, had my parents not dragged me across the globe. But that was me being bitter. “And you, young lady,” I said to one of the girls, “you are currently dealing with unrequited love.”

The girl looked scared, and then near tears. “How did…”

I tilted my head as a cool breeze stirred my hair. “It’s for one of the professors.”

“I knew it,” another girl said as smugly as possible.

The lovestruck girl shook her head at me. “Can I make it work?”

I feel the cold breeze against my ear. “No. He’s your fucking professor, and he’s either gonna use you and lose you, or keep you on the side until he loses everything in the ensuing scandal. Get over it. Besides, there’s a boy in Delta house who has your picture in his wallet.”

The girl, through tears, sniffled and looked at me hopefully. “Who?”

The breeze went through my hair. “Something Buchanen.”

“Max?” The smug girl said.

I checked my wristwatch. “Oh, dear, look at the time ladies.” I tapped my watch face. “Time’s up for me.” I stood and blew out the candles, then turned on the lights.

Smug girl jumped up. “Wait! What did you say about Max having her picture?”

“It’s in your room,” I scoff. “Go and look for yourself if you don’t believe me. Now if you want me to stay longer, you’re going to have to pay more.” A chill ran down my spine. “And buy me some burritos for dinner.”

Smug girl ran to her room to search for the wallet. I left with my money, and descended the front stairs of the old place. It was dark already, and the streetlamps were casting shadows.

“You should have stayed!” The cold wind hit the back of my head.

“What for?” I snapped. “I can get you burritos, Neil. There was a Mexican joint down the block from here.”

“But that one girl had a stash!” The wind materialized beside me, looking like a wrung-out stoner.

“You’re dead. You can’t get high anymore.”

“But I can remember,” Niel whined. “Just by the smell, the smoke…”

I shook my head. “You died stoned. Of course you remember.” Neil was my best friend. I met him ages ago during one of my parents' many paranormal studies, the victim of a ritualistic sacrifice, lured into a trap with food, pot, and a promise for his poetry to be published. His ghost had haunted the site for ages looking for his promised gifts. I promised him everything except the publishing, which by then he had given up on.

“Whoa.” Neil grabbed my arm. “What is that?”

A troop of girls passed by us - beautiful, almost too beautiful, with creamy pale skin, impeccable clothes, radiant hair. As they walked by, another chill ran up my spine. Behind them trailed another girl on forearm crutches. She was just as beautiful as the rest, even more so with her wounded bird atmosphere.

“What on earth were those?” Neil whispered.

“They’re called women, Neil,” I scoffed and continued walking along. The chill from those girls wasn’t new. I was alway anxious around pretty people, but for some reason I couldn’t shake the feeling even as we walked away.

I took Neil to the Mexican place and ordered him the burrito of his dreams. As long as I supplied him with his favorite food, he stuck to our deal. I suppose I scared the waitress when I recited Neil’s order to her. The burrito he craved would have been monstrous even for the likes of bigfoot or a tyrannosaurus rex. When I first met Neil, I equated him with my favorite teddy bear - short, husky, hairy, and wearing a denim jacket. He was all too happy to leave the site of his death, and it was lucky for him I had a droplet of my mother’s abilities so I could free him.

The takeout order was extremely heavy, most of it from the weight from Neil’s burrito. As we went back to the motel I was staying at, we passed a phone booth. “Wait a second.” I told Neil. “I should call home.”

“Oh, come on! Can’t you call at the motel?” Neil whined.

I entered the phone booth, slid in the quarters and dialed. The phone rang four times before the answering machine kicked in, and I heard my dad’s voice before the beep. “Hey, it’s me. Just giving my weekly update that I’m alive,” I sighed. “Guess you’re still out, or at the museum. Anyways, it’s me. Your daughter. Alive.” I hung up the phone, and as I stepped out of the booth I saw giant globs of beans, beef, lettuce, sour cream spill out onto the sidewalk. “For the love of God, Neil!” I snapped.

He was holding the burrito, practically unhinging his jaw to bite into it even as it went right through him to splatter on the ground. “You’re just wasting it!” I snatched the bag from the ground, not realizing he’d taken it from the shelf in the phone booth while I wasn’t watching. “That was a fucking twenty-dollar burrito!”

The last bit of burrito hit the ground, sending sour cream and beef juice to splatter over my feet and ankles. I glared at Niel, and he just licked his fingers. I rolled my eyes and moved along. No sense in arguing about it now.

The motel smelled like cigarette smoke and bleach, but it wasn’t the worst one I had ever stayed in. The yellow walls, orange bedding and brown carpet made me feel like I was in a sepia-toned picture. “When should I go back?” Neil asked.

“In a couple of days,” I huffed. I sat down at the sticky little table by the window so I could eat my food. “Let them stew for a few days and get comfortable again. Then you can go back and do your business.”

Neil sat down on the bed. “I feel so bad picking on girls, though. I much prefer scaring guys.”

I opened my takeout box. “Well, one of those girls can get us good connections with her very rich, very superstitious mother. We might be able to stop this nonsense and live the high life.” I stopped mid-bite when I grasped my own wording. “No, you won’t be able to get high.”

Neil pouted, then floated away through the wall. After I ate, I climbed into bed and lay staring at the ceiling. There was a huge water stain there. How long had it been there? Was it a sign of pipe damage? A shoddy roof? I thought about these things until I fell asleep, to keep other thoughts from invading my mind.

I woke to the sound of someone pounding on the door. I sat up and caught a glimpse of Niel’s ass before he pulled himself back through the door. “It’s the cops!”

I huffed and got up to answer the door. “What are you doing?” Neil snapped.

“What are you afraid of? We don’t have anything.” I opened the door, but kept the chain latched. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Ma’am, were you at Alpha Sigma Alpha house last night?” the cop outside asked me.

“Good morning to you, too,” I grumbled. “What is this pertaining to, officer?”

The officer was stone-faced, and obviously not in the mood for anything other than being obeyed. “Please answer the question, ma’am.”

“Yes, I was. Now what is this about?”

“Please step outside, ma’am.”

I looked back at Neil, who had hidden under the bed, and rolled my eyes. There went my chance for explaining myself with a haunting. “Not until you tell me why I should.”

“We need to take you in for questioning,” the officer replied, stony as ever.

I furrowed my brow. “Questioning? For what?”

“So we can get your testimony of last night’s events.”

A chill went down my spine. This wasn’t good. Either those sorority girls turned on each other, or I somehow passed by a murderer on the way to the restaurant and didn’t know it. “Can I get changed at least? Maybe a coffee?” I huffed.

“I’ll be waiting here.”

I closed the door and started getting dressed. “Come out, Neil. You have to go with me.”

“I ain’t going nowhere in no cop car.”

“You’re dead, Neil,” I snapped at him. “Besides, you owe me for wasting that burrito last night.”

“You can’t use that against me.”

I threw on my jacket and glared at him. “You know I will, so don’t fight it!” I opened the door and stepped outside. “Okay, I’m ready.”

The cop looked over my shoulder into the room. “Are you in there with someone? I thought I heard a male voice.”

“It’s next door.” I closed the door behind me. “The guy in there has been pacing and mumbling all night.” Crap, this cop might be sensitive. He heard Neil, but I didn’t think he could see him.

The cop looked me over. His badge read Mercy. “What’s your name?”

“I’ll tell you when I’m questioned, Officer Mercy.” I followed him to his car. It wasn’t my first ride in a cop car. I leaned close to the cage that separated the front from the back. “Am I allowed to request a coffee, Officer Mercy? You did wake me up rather rudely.”

“We have coffee at the station,” he said sternly.

“You play the part really well. Let me guess, it’s a family thing. Father a cop? Brother a cop?” I waited for Neil to climb into the front seat. “Your mother’s a cop, too. But she retired, right? To raise a house full of boys.”

Mercy twitched and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “What are you talking about?”

“She ran the house like a bootcamp, right? Is that why you have trouble with constipation? You’re still stressed about it?”

At the stop sign he braked hard and turned around in his seat to look at me. “What are you talking about?”

There was a bottle of constipation pills in the glove compartment, along with a note from a doctor suggesting he take time off for stress. There were also a lot of pictures in Officer Mercy’s wallet. Sentimental, despite the bitterness of his upbringing.

“Coffee first? Or do you not understand what your last name means, Mercy?”

Officer Mercy gave me the eye before turning back around in his seat. “You really are psychic,” he muttered.

“Oh, so you do get it?” I leaned back in the seat while Neil came back to join me. “What happened last night? Did someone die?”

Mercy was quiet, but in the mirror I saw his tense brow and the look of fear in his young eyes. I knew that look, unfortunately.

“How bad was it, Mercy?”

“Ma’am, I won’t talk about it here. You’re being brought in for questioning.”

“That bad, huh?” I murmured. “Was it your first time seeing…”

“Ma’am!” he snapped.

I stopped, knowing I might be making his stress-induced constipation worse. I sighed, crossing my arms against my chest. Once we arrived at the station, I was led to a room where I saw some of the girls from last night. They looked awful, frightened, and I felt for them, whatever they had to witness last night. I was taken to the back and made to sit in a very cold, dimly-lit box with a two-way mirror.

“How do you take your coffee?” Mercy asked.

“With enough cream to make it beige,” I answered.

Mercy furrowed his brow at me.

“It’s not the worst thing you’re going to deal with today, Officer,” I scoffed. “I’ll behave, promise.” He left and I sat, knowing I’d be kept waiting a while. I learned that from my parents, who’d done it before during their studies.

Another cop came in, bigger and more like a pitbull than baby-faced Mercy with his thin mustache coming in. “You are Alice Young, correct?” he said in a chain-smoker wheeze.

“I prefer Al, but yeah. Can you tell me why I’m here? Officer Mercy was chintzy on the details, as well as the coffee he promised me.” I leaned back in my chair, waiting for Neil to return.

Officer Pitbull tossed some pictures onto the table. I recognized them as Smug Girl and Hot-For-Teacher Girl. “Did you speak to these young ladies last night?”

“Yes. This one hired me.” I pointed to Hot-For-Teacher.

The officer placed his elbows on the table and one of his chins on his knuckles. “Can you explain why?”

I looked away from the picture, still waiting for Neil. I hoped I could hesitate long enough. “What were you told?”

Office Pitbull was obviously there to intimidate me, but I had seen much worse than him. “It doesn’t matter. I need to know what you were doing at that house last night.”

“I was hired for a job. The girls were having a party and I was brought in to perform as a medium for entertainment. I performed, then I left and got food at Habanero.” I met his gaze. “Why am I here, officer?”

The door opened and Mercy came in with my coffee. He looked white as a sheet, but he quietly placed my coffee before me on the table. I took a drink as Neil whispered to me, having followed Mercy in. “Thank you, Mercy. This is perfect.” I sat the cup down. “The girls were killed? I’m sorry.”

“You told her?” Pitbull snapped at Mercy.

I shook my head. “They were found in their beds, doors locked, windows open.” I looked directly into Pitbull’s eyes. “No blood, but…”

He slammed his palms down on the table. “You stop your voodoo priestess horseshit this instant! I won’t have it in my building!”

“It’s real…” Mercy started but quieted himself and went back to his uptight stony demeanor from before.

“They said you were hired as a psychic,” Pitbull spat.

I nodded. “I was.”

Pitbull thought he had me there. “And yet you couldn’t predict they were going to be murdered? Or did you not warn them?”

I glared at him. “What do you think?”

He slammed both palms down. “You could be an accessory!”

“I was there, yes, I admit it. But all I did was tell them things they already knew. I can only tell things about people when I’m near them. I can’t tell the future. My abilities lie elsewhere.”

“Yes, I saw your card.” The officer slid it out from the same folder he took the pictures from. “Exorcisms and ghost removal. What sort of bullshit are you trying to sell?”

“Is this about me, or are you going to do anything about those poor girls?” I pressed my finger into the picture. “I’m not at fault here, officer. I’ll tell you what I saw last night, but I had nothing to do with this. I was just in the house as a guest, a party act.”

Office Pitbull glared at me with his lip curled.

“I passed a group of young women as I walked down the street. One had forearm crutches. It was late and dark, and I didn’t really see many people out and about. Even the restaurant I went to was empty aside from a few drunks at the bar.”

“Those girls must be the Harvey sisters,” Mercy said.

Officer Pitbull glared at him. “You’ll have to give me a full statement of what happened last night. Everything from the moment you arrived to the time you left.”

This guy wasn’t going to let me off easy. He probably thought I committed the murders, just because I was a stranger claiming I had powers. He probably thought I was crazy, and for him that was enough to label anyone guilty. I gave my statement from top to bottom as best I could. Then I was allowed to leave, but since Officer Mercy brought me here I had to walk myself back to the hotel.

“This is bad, Al,” Neil shivered.

“We did nothing wrong. What’s bad about this?” I huffed.

“No,” he shook his head. “Those girls, how they died… It’s bad, Al. Really bad.”

I stopped to look him in the eye. “What happened? You only said the bare minimum in the police station.”

Neil’s eyes were bloodshot and dilated. That was usual for him, but there was something new to them, a fresh look of fear. “They were ripped apart.”

“But you said there was no blood,” I huffed.

“There wasn’t!” Neil shook his head wildly. “It was like they’d been… partially eaten.”

A stone sank heavily into my gut. “Oh.”

Neil looked distressed. “I’ve seen some things, but I ain’t ever seen anything like that, Al. Those pictures… those poor girls.”

“Well, there goes my big payday,” I scoffed.

“Is that all you care about?” Neil snapped.

“Look, we’re lucky this is all that this has to do with us. We’ll get out of here and that’ll be the end of it. I’m sorry you had to see that, but there was nothing we could have done. Nothing we can do now. These aren't ghosts, obviously.” I huffed and shoved my hands into my pockets, continuing the walk back to the motel.

Once there I began packing, which wasn’t hard. The bus wasn’t leaving until that evening, so I stayed in the motel the rest of the day. Then, just as I stepped out of the motel office, I saw the girl with forearm crutches outside. She was very petite and lovely. Her long hair was tied back into a sleek braid, and she was wearing a plaid skirt with a matching jacket. She reminded me of a doll. “I’m glad I caught you!” she said breathlessly. “You’re the psychic from the Alpha Sigma Alpha house, right?”

“Not anymore,” I huffed. This girl was so pretty it was almost criminal. My hands were getting sweaty just looking at her.

“Please, I need your help.” She came closer to me. “It’s about what happened last night at the house.”

I walked away from her. “I’m sorry, but I don’t…”

“I saw something last night, and no one will believe me! Please, you have to help. If anyone will believe me, it's you.”

I stopped in my tracks, but only because Neil had grabbed hold of me.

“My name is Beth,” the girl said softly. “I can pay you for your help.”

Neil forced me to turn around. “What did you see?”

“It climbed up through the window last night. I saw it when I was coming back from class,” she said. “It looked like a demon.”

“Last night?” I frowned. “You had classes that late?”

“There are night courses I have to take,” Beth replied. “I even drew what I saw.” She took a piece of paper from her jacket and handed it to me. I unfolded the paper and inside I saw a contorted, long-limbed figure. The mouth was opened, stretched wide and filled with jagged long teeth.

“It reminded me of that movie, the old one,” Beth said, breathless. “The tall man with the hunched shoulders, bald head and pointed ears and teeth.”

“Nosferatu,” I grimaced. “Vampires aren’t real.”

“But I saw it!” Beth argued. “Please, you have to believe me. You’re the only one who can possibly help us.”

I looked back at the picture. “This won’t be cheap.”

Beth shook her head. “I don’t care. I need you.”

I folded the picture and stuck it into my own pocket. “Let’s talk, then.”