Once he was gone, Michael went to the fireplace and piled a few more logs onto the waning blaze, allowing Carol the choice of going outside anyway or coming back in without his interference.
“He has a point,” Michael said, keeping his back to her.
She watched him for a few minutes, while debating pros and cons. Michael roused such contradictory emotions. She pitied him, admired him and feared him. She wanted to hug him, make him better. She wanted to run away and hide from him. She hated the thought of him dying, but agreed it would be better than the alternative. He fascinated her and horrified her at the same time.
Given the weather, the time of day and the empty countryside, running away might well kill her. Stay and he might kill her. Which was more likely? Probably freezing to death. She took her coat off. Only as she did that did she realize she still held the wood stake he’d given her. She shifted it to her other hand long enough to get her arms out of the sleeves, then she returned to the chair in the living room.
Michael still stood at the fireplace, prodding the blaze with the poker. After a moment, he straightened and turned. “Thank you for staying.” His face looked even more drawn than earlier and she suspected he was still in some pain.
“I debated which looked more immediately fatal, you or the weather. The weather won.”
He tried for a grin and almost made it.
Carol tried to stifle a yawn and failed completely.
“You’re tired. You want to take a nap? There are several rooms made up upstairs. Let me show you.”
“Under the circumstances, I doubt I’d sleep a wink. But it might be a good idea to show me where that room with the sturdy lock is, in case I need it.”
He nodded and led the way out to the hall and up the stairs.
“You seem to be pretty comfortable with modern stuff,” she said as they climbed to the second floor. “I noticed the TV and DVD. You have a dish too?”
Michael shrugged. “The satellite receiver? Yes. I have a lot of time on my hands. It lets me keep up with what’s going on in the world.”
“I know this is probably a rude question, but… Where do you get the money?”
He turned to her and smiled. “It is a sort of rude question. And a perfectly normal one. I’d be curious too. It’s a bit complicated, of course, since legally I’m dead. But there are ways. When I first returned here, it wasn’t hard at all since everything was done in cash and you didn’t have all the paperwork you do now. I managed to set up a bank account. I did odd jobs for people that could be done at night. I began doing research on a freelance basis and actually made quite a lot of money at that. I also started investing in the stock market in the teens and put a lot more in right after the depression. I saw lots of things happening then. I had one big lucky break. I invested heavily in Coca-Cola stock back in the late teens. That alone has made me pretty well off today. But the research was pretty lucrative back in the days before the Internet made information so widely and easily available. I could travel very fast and communicate things to others much more rapidly than they could get them by any other means in those days. Now, there’s not much demand for it, but I can live on what I’ve earned and invested.”
“What do you do when you have to file paperwork and someone wants your birth date?”
He led her to an attractive room off the main hall on the front side of the house. “This is the nice guest bedroom and it has a good lock on the door. Deadbolt. But don’t depend on that if you have to retreat here. Keep the stake handy too. Vampires can be strong. Strong enough to knock down doors if we get really desperate.” He stared hard at her, the blue of his eyes shadowed and dark. “I may well get that desperate. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Stay here now, or come back downstairs?”
“Back downstairs,” she said. “For now.”
He nodded and led the way again. “The documentation thing has been tricky,” he admitted. “Until the whole immigration hubbub started, though, it wasn’t hard. I’ve had to die and be reborn a couple of times, passing my estate on to my ‘heir’. Fortunately I won’t have to worry about doing it again, since it would be much harder now.”
As they got to the bottom of the stairs, he asked, “Refill on the coffee?”
She considered the rest of the night—or more accurately, early morning—that loomed ahead. “Yes, please.”
Again it struck her as funny that a vampire who threatened her life should be so oddly polite at the same time.
He went back to the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a pot of fresh coffee. After taking a moment to pour her another cup, they sat down again.
She sought for a topic of conversation when the silence stretched out a hair too long. “Tell me about your family,” she asked. “How did you celebrate Christmas before?”
He made it to a real smile this time, though it was gone within moments. “I had two brothers and a sister. I left home for school at sixteen, but I always returned for the holidays, even when I got my degree and moved to Atlanta—until that last year, when I stayed to celebrate Christmas with Lucy’s family and to propose to her.”
His face darkened for a moment until he dismissed that memory to concentrate on happier ones. She watched his expression lighten, erasing some of the deepest lines. “I had a great family and Christmas was a wonderful time. My mother would bake for a week ahead of time so we had an abundance of cakes, pies and cookies. The house smelled unbearably wonderful with the aroma of it. Of course, my brothers and I would sneak into the kitchen every chance we got and try to snatch some. We got our hands smacked for it a couple of times. My mother made the best sugar cookies.
“And my father and I would go out on Christmas Eve to find the perfect tree and bring it back. We had a special bucket we’d put the cut end in, then shovel in enough dirt all around it to hold it upright. In theory. In fact, it kept tipping over. Or the tree would slide to one side… We had lots of fun getting it to stand up straight. We had a couple of glass ornaments my dad bought for my mom, but most of our decorations were made of paper or beads or pieces of tin we cut and hammered into different shapes. There was no electricity in this area in those days and my dad wouldn’t risk putting candles on the tree except for while we ate Christmas dinner.”
The fire popped and he turned to stare into it for a moment. His voice changed, getting rougher and deeper when he added, “I watched them afterward, though I tried not to get too close. Watched the kids grow up, get married, have kids of their own, mom and pop grow old and die, then the kids got old and died and so did their kids…”
He looked at her, his eyes shadowed with sadness. Tremors shook him periodically, but he didn’t mention them or react except with an occasional sharp, indrawn breath. “The worst, but in some ways also the best, memory of my undead time was a Christmas about fifteen years after I’d been turned. I never feel the cold or heat anymore, so I stood in the snow outside and looked in and listened, though I made sure they didn’t see me.”
* * * * *
Children raced back and forth across the room, sometimes scooting out to the porch, where the chill wind soon fetched them back inside. They yelled with high spirits and tried not to look too hard and too longingly at the pile of colorfully wrapped packages under the Christmas tree. Three of the children belonged to his brother John, two to David and one to his sister, Jenny. Her handsome, sandy-haired husband held an infant while Jenny helped his mother convey food from kitchen to the table. John’s wife mashed potatoes in the kitchen, while David’s stirred a pot of gravy.
Pop sat in a chair, with a blanket tucked around him, watching the chaos of preparation and children’s play. He looked thinner and grayer than Michael remembered. It shocked him to realize Pop was an old man.
Once dinner was ready, everyone gathered round the table. His father stood to say the blessing.
“Lord, thank you for bringing us all together again this holy day. Thank you for the gift of your son given to us on this same day so many years ago. Thank you for the gift of love and family and food you’ve graced us with and the many other benefits you’ve given us this year. And, Lord, we remember the one person who should be here with us this day, but isn’t. We’ll never forget Michael and can only hope that he is with you in paradise this day. Amen.”
There was such sadness in Pop’s voice, even after all these years, it felt like something tearing inside him.
“Who is Michael?” one of the children asked.
“He was your uncle, your father’s brother,” Pop said. “He disappeared on Christmas Eve fifteen years ago and we don’t know what ever happened to him. No one has heard from him.”
“Wow! You think he might have decided to run away or something?”
Pop shook his head. “He was planning to ask his young lady to marry him. We know he left his boarding house to go to her home that evening. But he never arrived. We can only guess he was set on by robbers and they hid his…hid him somewhere. I suppose we’ll never know now.”
“Cool. A mystery!”
Pop smiled sadly and Michael could almost read his thoughts. The children had never known him, so they had no particular interest in or feeling for him. Why should they? They barely understood death and tragedy yet, and that was as it should be.
“We’ll grow up to be detectives,” the boy promised. “And we’ll solve the mystery of what became of him.”
“Yeah,” one of the others chimed in. “Like in those stories you read to us about Sherlock Holmes.”
* * * * *
“They didn’t, of course,” Michael said. “They forgot all about it and went on with their lives. I’ve kept half an eye on them and their descendants all these years. Some of them still live in the old family place.”
He sighed and shook his head. The motion continued as a nasty shaking that spread through him and lasted a couple of minutes before he got control of it.
“I couldn’t stand to think Mom and Pop would die not knowing anything about me. One night, shortly before Pop died, I snuck into the house and into his bedroom. My mother was there with him, sitting beside the bed. I stayed in the shadows in the room and they thought I was a ghost. I told them I was okay, that I’d been attacked that night in Atlanta and killed. I let them think I was a spirit, come to ease Pop’s last hours. I couldn’t bear for them to know the truth. They’d be horrified. Fortunately, because I can move so quickly, I was able to come and go without them realizing I just ran in and out. I didn’t stay long. I don’t even know if it made them feel better or worse.”
His lips curled in a wry twist. “I’m sure they’re in heaven, so I guess they know the truth now. I wonder what they think.”
The clock tolled three o’clock.
Michael shrugged then, and a wry, sad smile spread across his face. “I guess I’ll find out shortly. Just a few more hours to dawn.” Another series of tremors shook him, and flashes of red showed in his eyes. It took him longer to get control again. He shut his eyes in concentration and kept as still as he could manage for several long minutes. Finally he drew in a long breath and opened his eyes again. “I’ve talked enough about myself and probably depressed you half to death.”
His deep blue eyes held a world of shadows and trouble when he looked at her, but no hints of red for the moment. “Help me make it through the rest of this.” His voice shook just a little. “Distract me. Tell me about your family. Your most memorable Christmas.”
Carol stared at him for a moment, wondering if she should go lock herself in the room upstairs. But he wanted her help. Needed it. She couldn’t find it in her to refuse.
When he asked about memorable Christmases, one came immediately to mind. She laughed as she recalled it. “Well, the one I remember best wasn’t exactly your postcard pretty sort of Christmas. In fact, we call it ‘The Year Christmas Fell Apart’. “
His lips quirked in a grin. “Did it actually fall apart? Literally?”
“Pretty much. You have to understand that my family isn’t your picture postcard sort of family to begin with. I’m the middle one of three kids. I have a flaky older sister, an annoyingly brainy younger brother and a pair of eccentric parents. The year Christmas fell apart was about five years ago. I was in college at the time, but home for the holidays. By then, my sister Laura was married and had two small children, a three-year-old toddler, Matthew, and the baby, Sally. Her husband was in the military, deployed overseas. She missed him and worried about him, and sometimes she would lose track of where the toddler was.
“Anyway, some things don’t change much. My mother bakes up a storm before Christmas too—cookies, sweet breads, rolls. Unfortunately she’s not very good at it. She’s kind of forgetful and easily distracted, especially when she’s working on a project. She’s a game designer—does scripts for video games. Sometimes she’ll have an idea while she’s got something in the oven and just goes ‘to jot it down’, and the next thing you know, you can smell it burning all over the house.
“Anyway, this particular year, Laura’s kids were all over the place. My mother burned at least three pans of cookies and cooked a loaf of banana bread so hard it could double as a paving stone. I tried to help out as much as I could, but I kind of had my hands full too, since I had to do all my shopping and wrapping as well—and shopping and wrapping for my dad, since he won’t venture near a retail place in the month of December. Or just about any other month either, unless the place sells electric trains.
“Trains are his hobby, his passion, and December is when he really puts it on display. Remember when it was all the rage to set up a train set under the Christmas tree?”
Michael shrugged. “Not really.”
“Well it was,” Carol said. “In the fifties or sixties, I think. My dad never quit. In fact, his under-the-tree layouts have gotten bigger and more elaborate each year. It now takes up almost a third of the living room. So, anyway, the day before Christmas I go out to do some last-minute shopping, with a pretty long list for both my dad and myself, plus a couple of requests from my sister. I’m gone most of the day and get back right at supper time. I don’t know how to explain to you what it’s like to go shopping the day before Christmas. Trying to find a parking place, the crowds, people pushing and shoving to get things, empty shelves, long, long lines at the checkouts… Anyway, I was pretty frazzled by the time I got finished.”
A tight smile curled his lips. “I’ve seen movies. I have some idea.”
“By the time I got back to the house, I wasn’t in a great mood, but the chaos at the shopping center didn’t begin to prepare me for what I found at home. I got there right in time for the show.”