The desert asphalt road was so molten that I fancied I could see the tracks of my old body wagon in my rear view mirror. With the air conditioner cranked to high, I figured my car was making three or four miles per gallon, max. Without the A/C, the black beast would be guzzling only seven miles per gallon.
Normally, it would just barely make the six-mile run to the cemetery and back to the funeral home at a stately pace of twenty-five miles per hour at the head of the funeral cortege. Today, however, I had to do a relo on a major artery leading into the heart of the city where the receiving convent was. The convent, from which I had picked up the coffin, was thirty miles to the south, and the late afternoon sun, always the hottest, signaled that soon the desert night would come like the shutters of a shade.
While I was on the road, I did not want the air conditioner or the engine to blow, or the tires to burst in the 120-degree heat because then, while I was waiting for help, the body in the coffin would decompose even more than I thought it had already done. Even now, the body exuded a horrible smell that gave me goose bumps.
I envisioned the kind of rapid microbial decay that would make the abdomen swell and burst with a bang, or the slow, silent oozing of putrid fluids flowing out through every orifice. Pardon me if you think I am graphic with my description, but I do not like to mince words about the serious matters of bodies. It had been a long night for me with another coming just after sundown, and I wanted to deliver my body and get to the nearest gas station before they all closed for the night.
The body in the coffin in the back was not making its first trip in this wagon. Three weeks ago, I drove the same coffin to the convent from which I just picked it up at three o’clock. My former friend Joseph, also in the body moving trade, got me the job, and I was thankful for it in these days of healthful living and supercentenarian aging.
He told me that if I asked no questions, I would have a steady thing with no risk. All I had to do was pick up a coffin when they called me and drop it off where I was told to take it.
“It’s a piece of cake,” Joseph said smoothly, with an unctuous smile.
If I did not think about it, he was right. Money was paid in cash on delivery, and I was always on time or early, so sometimes I got bonuses. Before I knew it, my body wagon was hauling coffins all over the region between all the religious houses.
The wages of my steady job with the funeral parlor could not compete with what the Church was prepared to pay, and the Church paid for gas, repairs and general wear and tear as well. When I received my LLC papers, I finally quit working for the funeral parlor and became a consultant body driver for the Church.
I say I worked for the Church, but that is not precisely correct. What I meant to say is that I worked for Father Corpus, a fat and jolly old mendicant priest with a cellphone and a thousand irreverent stories. At our first meeting, he told me that he would be my dispatcher and paymaster. He had a full-belly laugh and a twinkle in his eyes. His hand shook mine like a gigantic bear’s paw. He gave me the cellphone that I used to do his jobs, and he always paid cash for my hire and expenses.
Where he got his orders and his money, I do not know or care. I was not particularly religious then, and Father Corpus confessed to me that he practiced religion more in the breach than in the observance, whatever that might mean. We had a partnership for hire, pure and simple, but he kept insinuating we formed a cabal. We were, he said, communing in an ancient, mysterious enterprise.
In my work, I see a lot of religious people because they traffic with the dead as a way of life. They are not the technicians that funeral directors are because, they say, they are interested in the souls and not the bodies of the people in their care. Funeral directors, on the other hand, are careerists whose concern is respectful preparation and handling of the corpse. They also are attentive to the feelings of the bereft if only for their future business’s sake.
When I began my trade, I was instructed on how to dress and deport myself with serious regard at every stage of a funeral. I was drilled in all the protocols of funeral driving under stress. What impressed me was the masterful integration of the offices of all those many people who made it their business to process the dead.
In my reflective moments, I thought of writing a Book of the Dead for our culture that might rival the ancient Egyptian work by the same name. All those thoughts vanished when I began working for Father Corpus because I learned that not all the dead are processed in the same fashion.
The coffins I now drove never went to a cemetery or mausoleum. Instead, I drove them from religious house to religious house. I know this because I am a connoisseur of coffins, and I recognize a coffin that I have transported as you might recognize a fine wine by its label. I know for a fact that the dead who lay in my coffins never went to an undertaker, a funeral parlor, a crypt or a grave.
Imagine, please, bodies cycling among religious venues with no ultimate resting place and, strangely I thought at first, no prayers or religious formalities.
Today’s delivery was an example of what I mean. The sister who showed me down a ramp to the cellar room where the coffin lay on an old oak table told me the time had come to make the transfer. She made no sign of the cross over the coffin. When she passed in front of the cross on the wall, she paid it no heed.
With her long, pure white hand she gently caressed the lid of the coffin as if the wooden form itself were alive and in need of comfort.
Then, as if she were coming out of a trance, she stepped back and told me curtly, “Get on with your job because you’re late and have to get moving. You must make your delivery before nightfall!”
I was dumbstruck. I was not late by my reckoning, but I did not argue with the woman. The dead do not know time as humans do, or so I thought.
I pulled my trolley alongside the oak table and slid the coffin from the table to the trolley. Then I wheeled the trolley with the coffin up the ramp and out of the convent to my body wagon. I lock-loaded the trolley into position with the vehicle so it could automatically retract with the coffin.
As I had walked pushing the trolley, I thought the nun was right behind me, but when the coffin locked in place inside the body wagon, I turned and discovered that the nun had disappeared. I found it odd I was not asked to sign a receipt for the coffin, but I figured the Church trusted me to do my job. After all, I would not be paid unless I delivered the coffin to its proper destination. Besides, what would I do with a coffin anyway?
I shrugged, climbed into my vehicle and drove away from the convent slowly. It seemed to me that no human witnessed my departure because I saw no living thing except for a pair of huge, black boat-tailed starlings with their beaks pointed upwards toward the sky.
When I first started driving coffins with bodies in them, I got a frisson up my spine as when, by chance, I encountered the fresh carrion of some now unrecognizable animal that had been killed alongside a path in the woods. Some kinds of road kill had the same effect on me, and once when I saw a motorcyclist killed right before my eyes, I felt the chill and vomited violently when the rider slammed into a car that cut across its path. The rider was wearing no helmet at the time. When his skull hit the road, his brain instantly became a mass of blood, bone and a gummy fluid that glistened under the street lights.
Now, with what I chauffeured today, I felt only a slight nausea from the noxious smell that escaped from the black box in the back. I had no sense that the coffin held anything that might ever have been human. Its presence was repellent and abhorrent to me, but it was not challenging in the mortal sense. That’s it precisely: the coffin was not a memento mori for me at the time, even though I thought it should have been. I felt vaguely guilty for my insouciance.
My mind wandered with thoughts about the dead and about the physical denotations of death. I must have been crawling along the road because the shadows lengthened quickly, the temperature dropped like a stone and night fell like a cerement over Phoenix. There was no moon that night, and the stars winked on in the blackness as if some great power had thrown a switch.
The nun had been correct: I was running late. I thought I would arrive at the convent within the hour, but then I heard a stirring and a thump in the rear of the wagon. I shook my head and became fully alert because I thought the coffin had come loose from its moorings in the back. I decided to pull over to the side of the road to check that the coffin was secure.
As I did so, the thumping continued and grew louder. It was the sound of knuckles knocking on a wooden door. My hair rose on my head and arms, and goose bumps formed. While I pulled to a stop at the side of the road, I resolved to be sure the coffin was in place and locked down. I got out of the wagon, and the knocking became rhythmical. At first, I thought it was the tapping of Morse code, but it was just regular repetitions of knock, knock, knock, and so forth. The only message I could derive was that something inside the coffin was knocking to get out.
I had eased far enough off the road that the nighttime traffic would have no trouble getting by me, even with the door opened wide. I stepped out of the wagon and went to the back hatch and opened it. I checked to be sure that the coffin was firmly in place, and the trolley was also locked down in its rails.
The knocking continued, so I placed my hand on top of the coffin and felt the knocking through the wood into my hand. I raised my hand, made a fist and knocked back in the same rhythm as I heard. The knocking from inside stopped for a moment. When I stopped knocking, the knocking from inside began again. I deduced that whatever was knocking must have some form of primitive intelligence.
I wondered whether someone was playing a joke on me. Could a nun have crept into the coffin to escape her cloister? Could the nun who escorted me to the basement room have somehow gotten into the coffin while I was attending to the transfer? In any case, I reasoned that whoever was inside the coffin would not have much air to breathe. I had to let the person out to save its life.
I decided to remove the trolley with the coffin on it from the body wagon right there on the side of the road. The roadside supported the trolley well enough, so I looked for a way to lift the top off the coffin. Finding that the coffin lid was well battened down, I found my crowbar among the tools under the trolley assembly in the rear of the wagon and used it to pry off the coffin’s lid. As I did this, the lid flew off, and I heard a great whoosh.
Then, I heard great leathery wings beating and then silence. I looked inside the coffin and rubbed my hands along the perforated silk where the body should have lain. The coffin was empty. I lifted the heavy coffin lid from the ground where it had fallen. I restored it to its place on top of the coffin and used my padded hammer to knock the lid back in place. Then, I engaged the trolley and slid it with the coffin into the body wagon.
I was in a quandary about what to do, so I drew a breath and thought about my mission. I had been tasked to convey one coffin from point A to point B. I decided I could still accomplish my mission. I decided to make my delivery as planned.
Around nine o’clock that night, I drove into the U-shaped driveway of the convent that was to receive the coffin that rode in the back of my body wagon. I found a small bell on a string by the door to the main building and pulled the string. After waiting for a few minutes, I pulled the string again. The night was still, and I could hear what seemed to be insects or frogs. In the dim light afforded by a bulb above the door, I made out a scorpion edging across the steps. I crushed the scorpion with the toe of my boot.
A voice from inside the grate that was next to the bell asked, “Have you brought the coffin?”
I answered, “Yes. Where should I put it?”
The voice did not answer, but the door swung open, and a short nun in her habit gestured for me to bring the coffin inside. I went to my wagon and extracted the coffin on its trolley and wheeled it into the convent.
The little nun preceded me down a long hallway, at the end of which lay a double door with a great lock. The nun selected a large key from a ring of keys she carried by her side, and she opened the lock with it. She swung the doors open and continued walking down a decline into an underground cavern with small enclosures set into the circular wall around the floor of the cavern.
The nun pointed to an empty enclosure and told me to put the coffin on the table that I found there. I transferred the coffin to the table and pulled the trolley out of the enclosure. The nun nodded and gestured for me to follow her back out of the cavern up the incline and down the hall to the front door. Instead of opening the door to let me out, she gestured for me to enter a waiting room and have a seat. She then retreated and left me alone with my thoughts.
As I sat waiting, I noticed the room in which I had been situated was furnished in Spartan fashion, with the seat on which I sat and a small table in front of the seat with nothing on it but a framed picture of His Holiness the Pope, a handsome male figure in his Cardinal dress. On the wall behind me, I saw the inside of the grate through which the nun had spoken to me when I stood on the porch ringing the bell. Aside from the grate, the room was windowless. It was also tidy without a speck of dust. The wooden floor was bare. One dim light bulb burned high above me.
When she came, the mother superior made no noise whatsoever. She was not there one moment, and then she materialized before me. She asked me whether I had brought what I had been instructed to bring, and I said I had brought the coffin that I had picked up at the other convent and conveyed it to the enclosure in the basement of this building.
She asked me, “Did you experience any difficulty in transit?”
I hesitated before I said, “The coffin was the same one I picked up. It remained on its trolley until I transferred it to the table in the enclosure in the basement.”
She nodded. Then she turned and, over her shoulder, ordered, “Follow me and bring your trolley.”
I did follow her back through the door at the end of the hallway and down the incline into the underground cavern. There she instructed me to use my trolley to rearrange several coffins from one enclosure to another. As I recall, I moved eight coffins in this way, but I could not see any essential change since the same twenty-five enclosures now had the same number of coffins. Only the locations of eight coffins had been changed.
When I had completed this work, the mother superior nodded with satisfaction and gestured for me to accompany her back up the incline through the door, down the hallway to the main entrance, which she now opened. When I looked back down the hallway, I saw that the doorway to the cavern remained open.
A flock of bats flew in through the doorway over and around my head, and they continued down the hall and into the cavern. I was startled, but the mother superior was unfazed. She handed me an envelope of cash as per my agreement with the good Father Corpus. She thanked me for taking the extra trouble and bid me adieu.
I worked my trolley into my body wagon and heard its latch connect. I closed the rear door and went to the driver’s side, opened the door and swung inside. When I closed the door, I realized with a shiver of fright that I was not alone.
In the passenger seat was a male figure in a brown cassock. He wore a tonsure. He held up his bony left-hand index finger and gestured for me to drive.
He said, “I’ve been waiting for a very long time to meet you. I’ve heard many good things about you from my friend, Joseph. Have you seen Joseph lately?”
I told him, “I haven’t seen him for a long while.”
The monk nodded sagely and said, “I thought you might have seen him this very night on your way to drop off the coffin.”
I assured him, “I would know if I saw Joseph or not, and I’ve definitely not seen him.”
The monk said, “If you’ve not seen Joseph, perhaps you have heard him.”
I shook my head and told the man, “I’ve neither seen nor heard Joseph this night. I know Joseph’s voice very well, and I haven’t heard that voice in a long while.”
Then, I thought I heard the sound of a leathery wing, but it may just have been the sound of the monk opening his passenger window for a whiff of cool night air.
He said, “I’ve always marveled at the desert climate where temperatures can drop thirty degrees in a matter of a few hours.”
We continued silent for a while, and then I asked the monk, “Where would you like me to drop you off?”
He said, “I’ll go wherever you are heading.”
I smiled and said, “I’m going home to sleep.”
He said, “That’s fine. We’ll be working together now for a while, so we should get to know one another well.”
This alarmed me. I told him brusquely, “I don’t care whether we’re working together or not, but I don’t like close relationships.”
The monk seemed to understand me. He said, “I don’t like close relationships either.”
When I arrived at my apartment, I parked the body wagon in the garage I had rented to store it. The monk got out and said he was going to walk around the neighborhood a little, but he never returned to pick up our conversation.
I went to sleep thinking about what had happened during that day, and I was confused and bewildered rather than enlightened by my cogitations. When I fell asleep, I dreamed of an enormous cave with bats hanging from the ceiling. I was a figure on the putrid floor of the cave, and I felt the warm droppings of bats like a rain of red blood in the night.
The next day, Father Corpus called early, and he asked me whether I had met his friend the monk.
I told him, “I drove him from the convent where I dropped off the coffin, to my apartment, but he disappeared upon our arrival.”
Father Corpus laughed and said. “That’s just like the monk: he’ll appear suddenly and disappear the same way. The monk is always full of surprises.” He paused to reflect on what he had just said. Then he changed the subject.
“The mother superior is grateful to have had your help rearranging the coffins in her basement. She was reluctant to ask the nuns to help her because she didn’t have the machinery like your trolley to do the heavy part of the work. You’ll now be working hard to fill the unfilled enclaves in the mother superior’s basement.” This was the first I had heard of this task.
“We’ll be working on a tight schedule, and coffins have to be moved at the rate of one each day to be ready in time.”
When I asked him what he meant, he became evasive and told me to focus on the hard work ahead.
As an afterthought, he asked, “Did the mother superior pay what you were owed?
“Yes, she did.”
Father Corpus seemed to be satisfied. Anyway, he gave me my next assignment.
For the next three weeks, I had my hands full hauling coffins from every conceivable religious institution of the Church to the mother superior’s convent in the center of the city. Typically, I would pick up a coffin late in the morning or early afternoon and arrive at the destination convent early in the afternoon or just before evening.
The little nun would meet me at the door after I had rung the bell, and I would follow her with my trolley and coffin. I would transfer each coffin to its designated table, and then I would be escorted back out of the convent with my empty trolley. The little nun gave me an envelope of cash each time upon my departure. I was happy making easy money.
I did not see the mother superior again for almost two weeks. I did not see the monk either. I got my instructions from Father Corpus, and I followed them to the letter. I always got paid in cash, so I asked no questions and had no concerns.
It was on the thirteenth successive day of my special coffin deliveries, that an agent I had never seen paid me a visit early in the morning before I departed for my job. He was a hard man, and he demanded rather than requested that I allow him to share the ride to the convent where I would pick up my latest coffin. He said he did not intend to harm me unless I did not take him along for the ride.
He said his name was Al Capito, and he showed me certain marks on his neck as if they were supposed to tell me something. I asked him to climb in the passenger side, but I told him I would have to drop him off before I picked up my coffin and that I could not see him again until my day’s work was finished. He agreed to my terms, and we set off.
Al Capito said, “I’m a hunter, and my prey is vampires.”
I told him, “I know the bats live in this area, but the real bounty is south of the border in Sonora, Mexico, where they inhabit large caves.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Actually, they range widely in this area all the way to the four corners region, but I’m not hunting ordinary vampires.”
When I asked him what kind he hunted, he gave me a look of surprise as if I should know full well what he was talking about.
Seeing by my expression I was clueless, he said, “I hunt human-like creatures that have been turned into beasts that thrive on human blood all over Sun Valley. It’s a mystery where they dwell during the day, but at night they spread out over the land and find their prey.
“Repellant as it seems,” he continued, “The more they feed on their prey, the more their prey became as they are.” Now, he explained, the Greater Phoenix area was suffering from an outbreak of vampire transformations. Estimates of the numbers for the vampire population ranged from twenty-five to five hundred. He said that if the vampires were not stopped, they would take over Sun Valley. “Humans who are their food will become vampires at a geometric rate.”
I was intrigued, and I asked him, “How do you expect to deal with any vampires you find?”
At this point, Al Capito brought out from under his shirt a pair of stakes that were needle sharp on one end.
He said, “I plan to drive a stake into the heart of each of the vampires until they all perish. The stakes I have are the only antidote anyone knows for the plague. My only hope is to find the sleeping quarters of the vampires during the day so I can ram his stakes through all their hearts before sunset.”
We were approaching the convent where I had my daily pickup, so I dropped the man off on the side of the road and continued to do my job. I did not get the chance to ask Al Capito why he was telling me about his quest. I knew nothing about vampires, and I did not know how I could help him find what he was looking for.
That afternoon, I thought coincidentally, the monk appeared again in the passenger seat of my body wagon after I had made my delivery to the mother superior’s convent.
He seemed to be very well informed because the first words out of his mouth were, “Al Capito has been to see you.” I nodded, and the monk told me a story as I drove home.
The monk said I was lucky that I was still alive because Al Capito was actually a vampire. You could tell he was because of the marks on his neck. Those marks were unmistakable feed marks made by vampire’s teeth that had made his blood flow so a vampire could lap it up.
The monk said, “Al Capito’s strategy is to pretend to hunt vampires so he can protect them, not kill them. Anyone who knows where the vampires stay by day would be a mortal threat to vampires. By testing those he thinks might have the secret, Al Capito can eliminate anyone who might be a danger.”
I felt very lucky indeed to have been judged an innocent, and I told the monk exactly what we had said to each other during our ride. The monk smiled and nodded.
He advised me, “Be very careful because your friend Joseph has not been careful, and he has become a vampire himself. That happened shortly after he recommended you for the job you now hold.”
I shuddered to think of Joseph becoming a diabolical vampire, and I wondered how I could avoid sharing his fate.
It occurred to me only after the monk had vanished that he might have provided counsel about how I could avoid becoming a vampire. That night I had nightmare visions of a vampire feeding at my neck, and in the morning, I ran to my bathroom mirror to examine my neck for the telltale signs—but found none.
Al Captio was hanging around my garage in the morning. He wanted to ride with me again, but I said that we should talk right there rather than sharing a ride because someone had told about our riding together the previous day. I said it might not be good for either of us if we showed a pattern in our encounters.
Al Capito agreed and asked me whether the person who mentioned our meeting was a monk. I said the monk was exactly who told me about the meeting, and he seemed most knowledgeable about the quest and the motives for it. Al Capito smiled an evil smile and asked me whether I knew who the monk really was. I told him I only recently met him, and I did not know his name.
He said the monk was a famous vampire who was reputed to be over two hundred years old. The monk had come from Eastern Europe in the mid-1800s and feasted on humans throughout America, always moving from place to place using the Church as his cover. Al Capito said the monk was the vampire who put the teeth marks on his neck, but he had foiled the monk’s attempt to make him a vampire by producing a token of his faith.
At this, Al Capito pulled out a silver cross that hung around his neck. He held it in the palm of his hand and said that no vampire could do that because of the vampires’ fears of the power of the holy cross. He asked me whether I had ever heard the monk say a prayer or make the sign of the cross. I admitted that he had done neither, but then I had not seen the mother superior do either of those things or the little nun or Father Corpus.
He nodded sagely and gave me a silver cross on a chain to wear around my neck. He said it might save my soul one day. I am not superstitious, but Al Capito was so convincing I hung the cross around my neck anyway and pressed forward to complete my day’s work.
I did not see the monk that day, but when I took my envelope of cash from the little nun after I had completed my delivery, I let my cross fumble out of my shirt to gauge her reaction to it. She might have averted her eyes, but perhaps she only nodded at the sight of the cross and then she retraced her steps. I thought she mumbled something about getting back to her duties and needing to talk with the mother superior about something important.
The next morning, I heard nothing from Father Corpus, though I was sure that our schedule had not changed. Al Capito knocked on my door at around ten o’clock and asked to come in for coffee. I suggested that instead of coming to my apartment, we should go to a local Starbucks. That was all right by him, so we went.
Over coffee, Al Capito asked me whether everything was going well with my business. I told him that everything was going fine until he came along. He seemed to be alarmed by this news, and he pressed me for details. I saw no harm in letting him know what I had seen.
I told him about the little nun’s reaction to my cross. I told him that Father Corpus had not called this morning as he had planned to do to give me my next assignment.
Al Capito then asked me, “Where do you drive your vehicle all day within Sun Valley?”
I told him the truth: “I drive it moving coffins all over from one religious house to another. I work as a freelance consultant, but I formerly worked for one of the best funeral homes in Sun Valley. A close friend recommended me for special work that’s become my entire focus now.”
Al Capito seemed to be very interested in my personal history, and he asked who had recommended me for my present job. I told him the man’s name was Joseph, but the monk told me that Joseph had subsequently become a vampire. I laughed to think about the coincidence, and I pulled out the cross that Al Capito had given me and dangled it before his eyes.
The man was suddenly very interested in a woman who was sitting at a nearby table tucked in the shadows. He grabbed his own cross from his neck and went over to say hello to the woman. He showed her his cross, and she recoiled like a snake. She actually hissed at Al Capito and bared her teeth.
Before she could avoid him, he pulled down the green kerchief she wore around her neck to find the telltale marks of the vampire’s teeth. He then drew one of his stakes and drove it through the woman’s heart right there in Starbucks. The woman reeled and then became a puff of smoke.
Al Capito returned to our table as if nothing had happened. No one else in the Starbucks seemed to notice what had just happened. I wondered whether I had been the victim of hallucination. After I calmed down, I asked Al Capito whether I could have one of the stakes he carried, and he gave me three of them.
He said, “There will be more if you need them. All you have to do is ask for them.”
That evening, I spent a lot of time surfing online, studying vampire lore. I must have spent four hours gorging on the lore, and also the hard evidence of vampire activity in the American southwest. I learned that there never was a time in the southwest when vampires had not been a threat to humans. Until recently, the number of vampires had been fairly constant because vigilantes had used sharpened stakes to strike back when their population reached a critical mass.
I thought that Al Capito might be an equalizer of the kind that always seemed to emerge when the vampires became too numerous and when the balance was about to tip out of control. The more I read, the more I became convinced of the righteousness of Al Capito’s cause. At the same time, my bills had to be paid, and I wondered how long it would be before Father Corpus called me again with work.
The next day, when it was time for Father Corpus’s call, I received a call from my friend Joseph, who wanted to meet on an urgent matter that he could not discuss over the phone. I asked him to meet me at the Starbucks where I had met Al Capito, and Joseph agreed. He said he would be sitting at a table in the back of the place where we could talk without being conspicuous. So we met at the same table where the woman vampire had been slain by the stake of Al Capito.
That was so coincidental that when I reached out my hand to shake Joseph’s, I held my cross in my hand. When Joseph gripped my hand and felt the cross, he might have been given a 50,000-volt charge. He bucked and dropped into his seat holding his right arm as if I had shocked it. I thought his palm smoked.
He looked up at me with such malice, I could not restrain myself. I drew one of my stakes from my belt and thrust it deep into Joseph’s chest. He worked his jaws, and I saw his fangs. He writhed against the stake, but then, like the woman the day before, he disappeared in a cloud of smoke.
The monk had been correct: Joseph had been turned into a vampire. He was sent to try to convert me. He had failed. I was sorry to have had to eliminate my old friend, but he was no longer the man he was when I knew him. As a vampire, he had become a menace to society, and to even his closest friend.
I backed away from the table in the shadows and held my cross aloft, showing it to everyone in the Starbucks. The patrons thought I was some crazy born-again Christian to flaunt the cross like that, but I saw no reaction that seemed the least suspicious. I went out into the street and put the cross around my neck so it lay outside my shirt now.
When I arrived at home, I carefully cleaned the stake that I had driven through Joseph the vampire’s heart and put it back with the other stakes in my belt. Father Corpus called me an hour later with a late delivery order. He apologized for being out of touch, but it had been unavoidable. He said we would have to make up for lost time if I was willing. I said I was most willing and eager to do the job.
When I arrived at the garage to get my wagon, Al Capito was there.
He said, “I don’t have much time, but I want to know whether you are with me or against me. I know what you did to Joseph. You hold the key to my quest, and if you do exactly what I require, we can together take care of the vampire problem in Sun Valley tonight.”
I told him I was definitely with him. He examined my neck carefully to see whether I had been contaminated, and he touched my cross and asked me to clasp it in my hand. Satisfied that I was still myself, Al Capito outlined his plan for us.
He rode shotgun in my wagon to the convent where I had a scheduled pickup. He got out of the wagon before I entered the convent grounds, and he re-entered the wagon after I left the grounds with my coffin. On the side of the highway that led to my destination, he and I rolled the coffin on the trolley out of the body wagon.
I opened the lid of the coffin and there lay a corpse that sent a chill through my body. It was the monk, who appeared to sleep peacefully, only I could see the humps where his fangs lay beneath his sallow upper lip. Al Capito wasted no time but took out one of his stakes and drove it through the monk’s heart. The monk seemed to come to life for a moment with a look of total surprise on his face.
He grabbed the stake with both his hands and tried to push it out, but Al Capito pushed his hand down hard. The monk vampire perished with a whistle and became smoke. Al Capito wrapped himself in the monk’s now empty garment and climbed into the coffin. I laid the crowbar in the coffin with him so he could do what he planned to do at the convent. I then restored the lid of the coffin but did not hammer it closed.
Al Capito could push the lid off easily when it was time to do so. Then, I reloaded the trolley and the coffin in the body wagon and drove to the mother superior’s convent. There, I went through the same process that I did with all the other coffins. Once I had situated the coffin on the table in the last enclosure in the cavernous subterranean location, I followed the little nun back to the entrance, received my envelope of cash and departed.
I returned to my apartment apprehensive about what was going to happen next. I had left Al Capito in what he thought was the central repository of vampires in Sun Valley. I had no idea what risks he was running into or what would happen to me if things went awry.
At midnight, I was dreaming of vampires taking over Greater Phoenix when I received a call on my cellphone. It was Father Corpus asking whether he could drop by in a few minutes to talk. He said he knew it was extraordinary to see me, but he thought there was something I needed to know before the morning light.
I could not refuse him, so he came, and we had coffee at my kitchen table. When I had made and poured the coffee, I asked Father Corpus why it was so urgent for him to see me. He had an uncharacteristically wild look in his eye when he said that tonight would determine whether good or evil ruled in the world. I remarked that it was perhaps extreme to place the primacy of good or evil on a single night or a single action. He said that everything depended on what happened at the convent where I had delivered all the coffins.
I asked Father Corpus what he meant. He was quite open with me.
He said, “I know you’ve been placed between two great forces for good and evil. On the one hand, is the figure you know as the monk. On the other hand, is the figure you know as Al Capito. For the moment, it appears Al Capito has the supremacy because he thinks the monk perished under the stake he drove into the vampire monk’s heart.
“Yet the ways of evil are devious and profound.” He said this with such conviction that I could not help but draw out my cross and dangle it in front of the priest.
He and I drew from our belts the same stakes at the same time, but I was faster than he, and he perished right at the table.
His smoke smelled like brimstone. I picked up his stake, which had fallen to the ground, and I discovered that it was identical in every respect to my own. I washed them both and stuck them in my belt. I now knew what I needed to do with the rest of this night because I had finally discovered both the riddle and the answer to it.
I was glad to have gassed up my body wagon because I did not know how far I would have to drive once my job had been completed. For the first time, I drove not to some remote religious house and then to the mother superior’s convent; instead, I drove directly to my destination. There, I rang the bell and waited—and waited. Finally, the little nun sleepily spoke through the grate.
She asked, “Who’s calling at this ungodly hour?”
I told her, “I need a receipt for the coffins that I delivered earlier. I can’t wait an instant longer to receive it.”
The little nun admitted me into the little room where I had waited before. She said she would have to awaken the mother superior. She turned to depart, but I grabbed her shoulder and forced her around to look at my cross while I pulled aside her vestment to see the vampire teeth marks. She shrieked and I stabbed her in the heart with my stake. She fell to the ground writhing and disappeared in a sulfurous plume of smoke.
I picked out the key ring from the vestment that lay on the floor, and I hurried down the hallway toward the door to the basement cavern. Suddenly, the mother superior appeared before me with her vampire’s teeth bared. She seemed ready to spring at me, but I rushed her and plunged my stake into her heart.
She writhed against the stake and tried to drop to the floor to dislodge it. I held on and pushed the stake home again and then held it fast until she gave up the struggle and became smoke.
Now I unlocked the door and raced down the decline. There, I saw that Al Capito had pushed the lid of his coffin open, and he had pried open the other coffins and thrust a stake into the hearts of all the vampires that had been sleeping there. Twenty-five vampires, less one, had been killed in that cavern tonight.
Crouched on the floor at the center of the cavern was Al Capito, exhausted from his herculean effort and hyperventilating as if for another effort. I knew that the hero had only one final act to accomplish to make his night complete.
I stepped in front of him and dangled my cross in front of his face. He threw up his hands as if he had seen a horror, and I thrust the stake into his heart just as he was about to thrust his stake into mine. It was a very close thing, and Al Capito struggled with greater strength than I had expected. He perished and vanished like all the rest.
I picked up all the sharpened stakes that he had used to wreak havoc here tonight, and I carefully locked the door to the cavern as I left and finally pulled the outside door closed after I had locked it from the inside. I placed all the stakes in the passenger seat of my body wagon, and I climbed into the driver’s seat.
Glad to be alive, yet now without a job or any prospect of a livelihood, I drove back to my garage and parked my vehicle. Then, I went back to my apartment, showered and went to bed.
As I fell asleep, I heard the thump and thump of small creatures hitting my window screen. It was probably bats, I thought. They could detect insects flying outside the screen in the dark, but they were so intent on feeding they did not realize their momentum would hurl them into the screen after they caught their prey.
As with those bats, so it was, I thought, with vampires. The last face I reviewed before I fell asleep was the pale white visage of the little nun. She knew that my stake was going to be the death of her, but she looked at my neck as if it was the most delectable thing in the world. If only, she must have thought, she could use her razor-sharp vampire teeth on that neck and feed, she would have died in ecstasy.