"Valentine's Day is still a couple of weeks away," Deirdre was saying, "but I guess someone wanted to express their sentiments early."
I knelt down and studied the immediate area of the front porch. No footprints, no fibers, not even a ring of moisture or disturbed dust to show where the jar had been set before the doorbell was rung. We lived too far out in the boonies for any hope of a CSI: West Monroe so I got back up and looked out into the darkness—something I could do better than anyone with a starlight scope.
Whoever the messenger was, he had to cross the river or the cemetery to leave it here.
And depart again by either of those two routes.
I still didn't believe in ghosts but either of those alternatives seemed even more unlikely.
"So, what do you think?" Deirdre asked.
I was thinking about my little daymare of just an hour ago but I wasn't about to tell Deirdre that she was showing up in my dreams—even if they had a nightmarish bent. "I'm thinking," I said, "of how, back in a more romantic era, the poets and troubadours articulated their passion with phrases like 'I offer you my heart' or 'I lay my heart at your feet.'"
"You think a wandering minstrel did this?"
"No." I thought about giving her The Look but I didn't want her to think I was so easily baited. "And while I've never reconciled myself to today's music distilling those sentiments into something along the lines of 'Yo, bitch' . . ." I contemplated the gory gift in the glass container, " . . . I think I'd prefer a little gangsta' rap over Victorian prose turned to bloody-minded literalness."
"Still, whoever left it was at least considerate enough to put it in a glass jar with a nice, tight lid. Otherwise it would have been very messy."
I gave her The Look after all.
She gave it right back. "I'm not being prissy, it means something! Anyone can cut out a heart and dump the mess on your porch if that's all there is to the message. This is something more sophisticated. The fact that it's in a jar and still pumping away is part of the message."
Oh.
"So," I asked as the fist-sized organ churned and turned in the clear suspension medium, "you didn't get any kind of a look at the messenger service?"
Deirdre shook her head. "Rang the bell and ran away."
"We shouldn't be handling this. The glass should be dusted for fingerprints."
She snorted. "Like whoever is capable of this would be dumb enough to leave latents. You'd do better to run DNA from the tissue through the BioWeb database."
"BioWeb is gone."
"The facilities here are gone," she corrected. "Kurt said there are redundant network facilities in New York."
"Hmmm. Inconvenient, seeing as most people leave their hearts in San Francisco." It was the growing migraine; I was finding it increasingly difficult to think clearly. "This is assuming that it is a 'people' heart. Could be an animal's."
She shook her head and her red hair caressed my shoulder. "Human."
"You sound very sure."
"I am."
"That's rather disturbing." I held it up to gain the advantage of the porch light. "Could be a fake—some kind of latex model with a motor and battery to make it move like that." The heart stirred the semiclear liquid around it like the rinse cycle of a Maytag washer.
"Nope. It's real."
I gave her the eye. "I don't know which bothers me more . . . that you can tell the difference between a human and an animal heart? Or that you can tell that it's real with just a glance in the dark?"
She smiled. "I think you are more disturbed by the fact that I'm not squealing like a seven-year-old girl, doing the jitterbug, and hyperventilating to the edge of unconsciousness."
"Maybe. Maybe I'm more disturbed by the fact that I'm not. I certainly would have a year or so ago."
"You've changed."
"Yeah. Getting killed has that effect, I'm told." I was trying for wry but it came out sounding a little pissy.
"You're not dead," she said with a slight edge to her voice, "you're alive."
"Am I?"
"You're not undead."
"Yet."
She sighed. "You know, some people are 'the glass is half full' kind of folk and others tend toward 'the glass is half empty' sort . . ." She waited.
I obliged reluctantly: "And which am I?"
"You're more along the lines of the glass is chipped and dirty and the water is probably laced with toxic waste."
I held up the jar. "Looks to me like the glass is half-filled with a still-beating human heart." I turned back and stared out into the darkness beyond the porch light. "Jesus, I'm tired. It's been a hell of a year—and I mean that in the most literal, theological context." I raised my voice. "You know, I'm really getting tired of all this monster mafia crap! Somebody wants to send me a message? Write a letter, pick up the phone, send an email!" Well, maybe not an email. "Or be mensch enough to stay on the porch after you ring the damn bell and deliver your message in person!" I ended up bellowing into the faceless night.
The crickets were suitably cowed: they stopped their nocturnal screaming for a full twenty seconds.
Deirdre cleared her throat. "Well . . . that was nice . . ."
"Oh, shut up."
"No, I mean it. You've been like a zombie, yourself, these past few weeks. It's nice to see a little emotion for a change."
"Little" emotion was right. It seemed like the only emotion I could muster this past year was anger. And even that was on the wane, of late. Ever since my wife and daughter died, I had felt my humanity trickling out of me like the fine spill of sand in a dusty hourglass. Each month I grew emptier and more benumbed as the virus took its toll. As it rolled through my body, reprogramming my RNA and mutating my cells, it felt as if a myriad of tiny switches were being thrown, one by one, in a shutdown sequence for my soul.
Looking at the still-beating heart in the jar I knew I was supposed to feel . . . something. Fear? Horror? Wonder? I could barely work up a serious case of annoyance.
Not the best of emotional states for what I had planned tonight.
Deirdre swore at my back and clamped her hand on my arm. "What the hell am I thinking?!" She yanked me back inside the house so fast I nearly dropped the jar.
Spinning me around, she kicked the door shut and shook a finger in my face. "That was stupid! People are trying to kill you!"
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call them 'people.'"
"Well, as your Chief of Security, I'm declaring a state of Orange Alert! From this point on you let me answer the door!"
I touched her shoulder. "And do what? Take a bullet that was meant for me?" She wore shorts and a white tank tee, damp with sweat from the weight room in the basement. My fingers tingled where they touched the faint scars over her trapezius muscle where I had bitten her nine months and a lifetime ago. "You are no longer a vampire."
"Better me than you," she argued. "I may no longer be wampyr but I'm still less human than you!"
That was contestable but I let it slide. "I have a call to make," I said, turning and walking away.
"Hello?"
Even though he was more than half a continent away and filtered by countless telephone relays and switchers, there was a palpable presence in the room even before he spoke—Master vampires were like that.
"Stefan?" My asking was a polite formality. There was no question that Stefan Pagelovitch, the Doman for the Seattle enclave of the undead was on the other end of the line. "It's Chris."
"What can I do for you, my friend?"
How about modulating the subharmonics in your voice so that my head doesn't explode? Pipt hadn't been kidding about the headache. I cleared my throat. "Are you missing something?"
"Missing something?" I could feel his frown through the receiver.
"Yeah. A head."
"A . . . 'head'?"
Mine was throbbing painfully and, rather than play Twenty Questions, I cut to the chase. "Theresa Kellerman's head. Remember? I gave it to you for safekeeping. I've been expecting a report from Doctors Mooncloud and Burton."
"If you wanted a report, you should have given them a little more time."
"A little more time?"
"Look, Christopher; I am no doctor, no scientist. But even I can see that a severed head—one that continues to live without a heart, without lungs, without mechanical life support—that takes time to study."
"Were they working on keeping any other organs alive and functional independent of the body?"
I felt his frown deepen. "What do you mean?"
I looked over at the telltale heart, now atop the fireplace mantel and just below the hanging, curved sheath of the ancient great sword. Like something from a grotesque Timex commercial—Gahan Wilson meets John Cameron Swayze—it continued to beat: Takes a licking and keeps on ticking . . .
"Christopher?"
As I struggled to rephrase my question, some part of my hind brain was observing that the sword should be rehung slightly to the left and the jar moved another eight inches to the right to achieve a more decorous balance of the—er—décor.
"Christopher, are you there?"
I shook my head. "Sorry, I was just channeling Martha Stewart."
"What?"
"Or maybe Attila the Hun doing Fang shui."
"What are you talking about?" The edge to his voice brought me back to the subject at hand.
"I'm talking about related experimentation," I said. "Were they attempting to grow or clone organs—say a heart, for example—to extend the—"
"Clone or grow organs? In what? A Petri dish?" He snorted derisively. "Cséjthe, have you ever read Dracula by Bram Stoker?"
"Uh, yes."
"And have you read Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley?"
"As a matter of fact I have."
"And are you aware of why Frankenstein is the better of the two novels?"
"I wasn't aware of any such compar—"
"It is because one amounts to little more than tabloid journalism, playing fast and loose with certain details of history while the other is an ingenious work of fiction, springing from a fertile imagination, unfettered by such constraints as the laws of chemistry or physics."
"Um . . ."
"Do I need to explain which is which?"
"Not real—"
"Petri dish, indeed! The good doctors had just finished constructing an artificial breathing device when you took it away from them. That's artificial in the mechanical sense. As in pump and bellows. The next step was to graft a donor voice box onto the trachea. If you had waited, we might have found out if it was capable of speech."
"She's a her, not an it," I corrected. "And what do you mean 'I' took it away? Took her away."
"Your emissaries came and fetched Ms. Kellerman's head back to the East Coast. Said that you had more confidence in the facilities in New York. Nice touch, by the way, sending twins."
"Dammit, Stefan, I think I can trust Taj. And Gerald seems the decent sort. But I don't know or trust anyone besides Kurt back east. I don't care how impressive the equipment is, I didn't want Theresa treated like some kind of specimen!"
The shrug of his shoulders traveled down the wire. "Then you should have left her here."
"I didn't take her away! The people who came for her weren't my people!" Whisper, I told myself; yelling only makes the headache worse.
"So she's been . . . what? Head-napped?"
"Ha," I said, "ha."
"Who would want to get . . . a head?"
"Calls himself Dr. Pipt," I said, ignoring the bait. Why was yanking my chain such a popular sport these days? I proceeded to recount my evening's email experience, omitting the epilogue concerning my funny valentine.
"Perhaps you should add a human filter to your online interface," he suggested after digesting my story. "Anything so sophisticated as to encode an audio-visual experience and play it back in your brain could have other side effects."
"Like monster headaches?"
"Like post-hypnotic suggestions. False memory implants. You might have some mental time bomb ticking away until some preprogrammed event or time sets it off."
"Time bomb? I've already got a dozen hand grenades going off inside my skull!" I rubbed my forehead trying to massage some of the shrapnel out of my hairline.
"This could well be a political move on the part of your enemies."
"Ya think? Problem is it seems a little too subtle and too sophisticated for the East Village People. So far everything they've thrown at me has been teeth and talons."
"Christopher," he said in that voice that reminded me that he had a couple of centuries of maturity and sophistication on me, "your enemies are not confined to the New York clans."
I sighed. "Now what did I do?"
"Christopher, you may believe that your sudden displacement of Erzsébet Báthory has only stirred up enmity on the East Coast—"
"Gee, only the East Coast."
"—but the shock waves of your ascension have had a great impact on the other side of the continent, as well. I have had my hands full."
"Meaning what?"
"Everything is political, my naïve friend. New York is convulsed with infighting over who will transfer their loyalties to you and who will challenge for succession before your ashes hit the ground." He paused and let that delightful image sink in. "But other enclaves, long fearing the power and politics of the East Coast, now see opportunities during this period of uncertainty. Many feel the time to strike is while Gotham is crippled by weak and uncertain leadership."
"Ouch."
"I thought you were a big fan of the truth."
"Think of me as an 'oscillating' fan. But since we're on the subject of truth, ever consider taking a run at me, yourself?"
"Christopher, you do not have the ruthlessness required to rule the wampyri. You have made one brief visit to New York to meet with the heads of the various clans—and then retreated back to Louisiana where you have no power base, no demesne of your own. You are not fully transformed, not completely undead. You have no real clan or family. The only respect you have, at this point, is that you have survived seven assassination attempts—"
"Seven? I only count five. How do you figure seven?"
"—destroyed the demons Kadeth Bey and Lilith, known as Elizabeth Báthory, and were sired by Vladimir Drakul Bassarab the Fifth, known as Dracula."
"Not sired, exactly. More like a stepfather," I said. "Godparent, actually—light on the 'God' part."
"Every Doman I have spoken with sees you as a major threat to the demesne system. It was better when you were considered rogue. As the weakest claimant to leadership of the largest and most powerful enclave in the undead underground, you are destabilizing the order of things. Civil war is threatening to break out in a half dozen demesnes. My own people are divided over your status and what they should do about it."
"Gee, Stefan, when did you abdicate in favor of making Seattle a democracy?"
"I haven't," he said dryly, "but you make it very difficult to remain a benevolent dictator. And no, I have no ambitions to vie for the New York throne, myself. I would only consider making a 'run' at you if you threatened me and mine."
"Well, that's a re—"
"Which may yet be the case if matters on the East Coast are not resolved soon."
There wasn't much to say after that. Pagelovitch promised to investigate matters at his end. He also said something about beefing up my security for friendship's sake. Now that was mildly unsettling—the "friendship" remark that is, not the security issue.
The front door rattled as I hung up the phone. "You're late," I said as Lupé made a blind entrance behind a couple of sacks of groceries.
"Talk to Siskel and Ebert," she growled as she swept toward the kitchen.
"Can I help you with that?" I asked, trying to keep up. "And it's Ebert and Roeper: Siskel died."
"Like that makes any kind of difference around here," J.D. groused, trying to close the door behind him with one foot while balancing two more sacks of groceries and a plastic Blockbusters bag in his arms. "My bad. I was tryin' to separate the darbs from the clams. I mean I wanted to make sure I didn't bunko the rest of youse on the picks. But then your barn burner here decided to hook up some business on the side and ankled out . . ."
I looked at Lupé. "I went shopping," she explained.
"She was gone a whole 'nother hour!"
J.D. was barely sixteen when someone with a set of brass knuckles patted him off to lullaby land during a gang war in Chicago. He "woke up" three nights later in a back alley under a decomposing heap of refuse and garbage. He never discovered who drained his body of blood, leaving him to rot like a regular corpse or combust like ignorant kindling upon his first encounter with the killing rays of the sun. Somehow, without benefit of Sire or sponsor, he survived. Impressive enough. More impressive that he had awakened undead in 1937 and survived into the next millennium as a rogue, dwelling outside the organized vampire demesnes.
The undead enclaves tolerated no loose cannons. Their attitude was: "Either you're with us and obey the rules or you're a potential X-File that needs to be canceled." When it came to The Kid, there were times when I could empathize with the latter philosophy.
"I don't know why I hurried," Lupé said, setting the bags down on the kitchen counter with a heavy thump. "When I came back he was still trying to make up his mind."
I caught up with her and caught her around the waist. "Ah, the vagaries of youth," I exclaimed, and kissed her. She kissed me back and then pushed me away. "Youth? He's older than the two of us put together!"
"True, but not half as pretty."
She grinned, her teeth bright against the backdrop of dusky skin and pomegranate lips. My beloved was French Canadian but looked Latin American. Dark hair and eyes, a face that was structured more for sensuality than classic beauty; I affectionately called her my big-nosed girl. "Go start the first movie or we'll be up past dawn."
I slid my fingers inside the fall of her smoky dark hair and cupped her face. "How about a little intermission snack between features?"
"I'll make some popcorn."
"That's not what I mean."
"I know what you mean." She turned her head and kissed the palm of my right hand. "But if you want some downtime before bedtime we need to get the shows started. There's company outside, too, you know."
"Already up and running," Deirdre announced from the back porch.
"When did that happen?"
"Made two trips out to the wall while you were on the phone with Seattle." She came into the kitchen and began toting cans to the larder as Lupé pulled them from the grocery bags.
"What are they watching?" Lupé asked.
"Planet of the Apes."
"Heston or Marky-Mark?"
"The original. It's on tape. The remake is on DVD."
I nodded. The DVD player stayed inside. It had taken just about forever to teach some of The Neighbors how to use "play" and "rewind" on the VCR.
The Kid wailed from the den: "C'mon youse guys!"
Lupé gave me a little shove. "Go. We'll be there in a sec."
I fingered the ring in my pocket and considered negotiating for another kiss first. Decided she was right: sooner begun, sooner done, and I could get down to the business of popping the question. "Okay, but I need to borrow Deirdre for a sec."
"Sure. Just make sure it's a quickie. Tempus fugit." Only the way she pronounced her Latin, it came out sounding suspiciously rude and naughty.
"I need your help in backtracking an email," I told Deirdre as we made a side trip to the computer in the study.
"Anonymous?" she asked, moving behind me as I sat and tapped the spacebar.
The seti@home screensaver vanished, revealing the digital desktop. "That and more." I moved the cursor to the taskbar and restored the email client to full screen status.
Which was blank.
"Wow," she said, "that's really anonymous!"
The inbox was empty. I opened the deleted files folder and scanned a list of messages from the past week, culminating with my two African strike-it-rich offers.
Nothing from a Dr. Pipt. Nothing remotely close to the approximate date and time of my missing missive.
I minimized the email program, returned to the desktop, and opened the general trash bin for deleted files. Nothing, nada, zip.
"I've heard of self-deleting emails," Deirdre offered. "Timed to self-destruct after being opened or after a certain amount of time has passed."
"Oh, this was much more than that," I said. "Any chance of still finding traces of it in my system?"
"I can give it a shot," she said, nudging me out of the chair so that she could have a turn at the keyboard. "I'm not really familiar with that particular technology, though. What can you tell me about it? If I have enough info, I might be able to 'ping' your sender."
I thought about that as J.D. bellowed from the den. If Deirdre did manage to ping Pipt, what if he decided to "pong" back?
"Tell you what, just beef up my security," I said, reaching down to hit the escape key. "Virus protection, firewall, the works. Let's back up the hard drive. And don't open any new emails without calling me."
She nodded and began to clatter away at the keyboard. "Just give me a yell when the movie starts."
"Sure."
I started to walk away and stopped to again contemplate my new acquisition. It sat on the mantelpiece like a jar of preserves—a jar of throbbing, organic preserves.
My mutated blood had brought Theresa Kellerman back from the dead and, later, enabled her head to survive separation from her body. Could this be her heart? Had someone found a way to salvage her body beneath the tons of earth and concrete in the basement of the collapsed BioWeb complex?
I bowed my own aching head and rubbed my eyelids. Even though she had tried to kill me I couldn't help but feel remorse for her current plight. Was she aware? Had her brain retained some semblance of intelligence? Did she feel pain? Was she suffering unspeakable torment? It was my blood that had denied her the solace of death; perhaps I had some obligation in matters of her wellbeing and final disposition.
Living, dying, procreating, or passing along untold seeds of mischief and misery—funny how even in matters of the occult, everything seems to come back to the difficulty of keeping our various bodily fluids in their proper places.
"You okay?" Deirdre asked from behind me.
"Migraine," I said, trying to shake off the aftershocks of nausea while trying to hold my head as still as possible.
"Want me to rub it?"
Yeah. Sure. I was hoping to set the right mood for a proposal tonight and all that I needed to make the evening complete was for Lupé to walk into the study and find Deirdre caressing my fevered brow.
Poor Theresa Kellerman would have company because somebody would lose their head for sure.
"What would really help is for J.D. to stop bellowing!" I bellowed back as The Kid bellowed again. I waved her off and lumbered into the den.
J.D. took his new name in 1955, the day after a twenty-four-year-old actor had his own collision with immortality at the intersection of Routes 46 and 41 just outside Cholame, California. Sometimes, when he was tripping, he thought he was James Dean, immortal icon of the Fifties, rebel without a cause, come back to kick Raymond Massey's ass in East of Eden. He wasn't stupid—well, not in that way, at least—but he had acquired a twisted taste for the veins of potheads and heroin addicts.
He met me just inside the doorway to show off his haul from the video store. "The original Frankenstein trilogy," he was saying, "newly repackaged on DVD!"
"Interesting choice . . ." I skimmed the titles on the packaging. "But 'original'?" I asked, trying not to let my right eyebrow go too high.
He nodded. "Black and white. Vintage. Universal. Karloff. Reet, sweet, and neat."
"Two out of three, Junior."
His eternally teenaged face squinched down into combat mode. "Whaddaya mean?" He fanned the plastic containers. "Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein."
I reached out and snagged the third rental, turning it around. "'Young Frankenstein," I said, holding it up for his perusal.
"Young—?" He grabbed it back and studied the fine print. "Black and white . . ."
"Nineteen seventy-four," I said, "Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman as Frau Bluecher, Peter Boyle as the Creature. Mel Brooks directed." I smiled, trying to make nice. "A classic in its own right. But not 'Son' of Frankenstein. Not Karloff. Not original trilogy."
"I thought . . ."
From the look on his face it was clear what he thought.
The Kid was becoming a regular cinephile under my expert tutelage. At least as far as horror movies were concerned. The previous week he had impressed me with a detailed comparison of the 1971 flick, The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant with its successor the following year, The Thing With Two Heads. My take on the double-header schlockfest was that one starred Bruce Dern just before his acting career took off while the other showcased ex-footballer Rosy Grier and Oscar-winner Ray Milland on their way to Hollywood oblivion. J.D., however, pointed out the pithy social satire that informed the second movie and opined that the Blaxploitation craze had never been better lampooned.
Still, he could be clueless at times. I had once asked him who the cinematic bogeyman of choice was: Jason or Freddy?
"Michael Myers," he replied with a shudder.
I'd started to agree. Never mind the sequels, the original Halloween had it all: killer theme music, Jamie Lee Curtis in peril, and, most frightening of all, an unstoppable force of Darkness wearing a Captain Kirk mask.
Then The Kid went on to say that the Austin Powers movies were the most disturbing things he had ever seen.
I patted him on the shoulder now. "Don't worry, Kid; if you haven't seen Young Frankenstein, you're in for a treat."
"Hey," he said, still immersed in the fine print, "Teri Garr! She's in this? Is it like a romantic comedy?"
"Well . . ." I tried to remember.
"Man, Teri Garr! She could eat crackers in my coffin anytime!"
"Uh . . ." There are all kinds of ways the undead can be unsettling without slobbering on your neck. "There is," I said carefully, "a scene where she—um—has a little roll in the hay."
"Hey, hey, hey, Daddy-o; I can dig it!"
"Farm out," I said.
And then the lights went out.
"Fuse!" everyone chorused. It was a logical deduction based on a dozen previous episodes.
"Well, duh . . ." Deirdre's voice drifted in from the study where a blue glow still emanated from the flat-panel monitor. The computer and the aquarium were plugged into UPS devices giving them a little grace period before their power supplies went down as well.
"I'm guessing more than one, dear," Lupé called from the kitchen. "Looks like the whole house is out. Better hurry, the natives are getting restless!" Indeed, growling sounds were beginning to manifest from the backyard.
"You go settle them down," I told The Kid as I headed for the basement door. "Tell them if they break the TV or the VCR they'll be making do with sock puppets until next Christmas!"
The fanged runt scampered off with a little too much enthusiasm. He could be fearless in a fight, willing to face demons or vampires or even hoards of cranky corpses. But he had this phobia about electricity and I would have an easier time getting him to eat garlic over requiring him to change a fuse.
"Need help?" Deirdre called.
"I think I can manage." Heavy on the sarcasm there. "You just stay on task."
"I am."
Yeah? What task is that? Slipping enough innuendo into enough opportunities to wreck Lupé's trust and self-esteem? The woman was incorrigible! And I wasn't going to incorrige her any further. Maybe after tonight she would get the message, loud and clear.
Maybe they both would.
I clomped down the basement stairs, grabbing the flashlight from the peg at the quarter-turn landing. It was easy to find in the pitch dark: it wasn't like we hadn't been through this before. A half-dozen times. A backup emergency generator was supposed to have been installed and operational by now, not just for creature comforts but for the security system, as well. Things kept happening. The first one didn't arrive. The second one was broken. The third was missing a couple of key parts. The replacement parts weren't the right parts or didn't arrive at all. Deirdre had to hire people to go and fetch the necessary parts and equipment in person as it became clear that someone (or something) was tampering with the third-party delivery services. Then our people went missing. Or came back with certain of their parts missing. Deirdre had finally gone, herself, and we now (presumably) had everything necessary for an emergency backup generator system.
Except the people to install it properly.
That wouldn't happen until sometime in early March or late April—unless something happened to clear the local contractors' calendars. Another blown fuse or two and I was afraid that Deirdre or J.D. would slip out one night and do just that. Especially since my stern admonitions "not to" were becoming less stern of late.
The flashlight was dead.
Too bad there wasn't a wild storm outside; it would have all the hallmarks of a gothic thriller.
And then, all of a sudden, I broke out in an icy sweat. Gooseflesh pimpled my arms as I left the stairs and reoriented myself. I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise as I plunged through the darkness on a trajectory toward the fuse box on the far wall. No . . .
Dear Lord, please . . .
What if the fuses were all blown and there weren't enough replacements?
And on the heels of that thought came a sudden shock to my toes. "Shit!"
"What is it?" Deirdre called down from the open door above.
"Someone," I said slowly, carefully, nursing my bruised toes, "didn't put their dumbbells away when they were done working out!"
"I put them away."
"I beg to differ."
"I like it when you beg."
"Don't taunt him, dear . . ." It sounded like Lupé was suddenly standing behind Deirdre. " . . . that's my job."
With the reestablishment of territorial boundaries the upstairs door was closed.
Now it was really nice and dark.
And quiet.
Deirdre liked to crank up her boom box while she was working out so I had spent the past month stapling insulation, nailing sheetrock, and hanging a thicker, tighter cellar door so I could study to the strains of Wolfgang Mozart while she strained to the sound of Iron Maiden.
I carefully gimped my way across the floor, mindful that dumbbells came in pairs and that I had toes that were still unbroken. At least with the door closed I could cuss at the top of my lungs if I stumbled over any additional workout gear.
Where was I? Oh yeah: the icy fear was just starting to sink in that once I got to the fuse box I would find all of the fuses blown and I was pretty sure we didn't have enough spares to get everything back up and running.
Dead flashlight and shortage of replacement fuses: could it get any worse?
I bruised my shins on Deirdre's tanning bed.
I'd asked her once why she needed a man-made cocoon lined with UV lights when Louisiana provided plenty of natural sun exposure ten months out of the year. Aside from some mumbo jumbo about the difference between UV-A and UV-B wavelengths, I think she pretty much dodged the question. What's wrong with a blanket or a lawn chair? I mean, it's not like The Neighbors or I would be popping out in the middle of the day to gawk . . .
I climbed up on top of the closed lid of the bed to get to the fuse box and realized another complication: how could I tell which fuses to replace with what in the dark? A blown fuse does not make the same "tinkling" sound as a blown light bulb. And as for matching the correct amperages—I slapped the metal box in frustration but pulled my punch: the crapparatus was so old that it wouldn't take much to turn it into so much scrap.
As I prepared to climb back down, I caught the side of the box to balance myself and felt the circuit handle in the down or off position. That was odd—not that it mattered now, of course.
Unless . . .
I pushed the handle back up.
A lone, thirty watt bulb stuttered to life back toward the bottom of the steps. Distant cheers from the first floor and the backyard confirmed that I had solved the power problem.
"You don't look so tough," said an unfamiliar voice from behind me. "I bet you'll scream like a little girl before I'm done."