witness. In fact, I'm going to excuse him now. Perhaps my opponents would care
to cross?
—Yes, we would. Just a couple of questions, Jeremy Kindred. You're still
under oath.
—Yes, ma'am.
—Isn't it true that no one has related any of these outlandish incidents …
except you? I'm not referring merely to the supernatural events you claim to have
seen inside one of the town's most famous landmarks… but to these very
imaginative orgies you describe as having occurred regularly at the cemetery. If
these things were true, don't you think others would have reported them to the
authorities?
—Hell no, ma'am. Half the authorities were in them orgies.
—So it's a kind of… ah, conspiracy? Half the town involved in dark goingson, and covering up the mess from the other half?
—You tell me, ma'am. After all, you were there, too.
—Well!
—Your Honor, the witness has just claimed that the state's prosecutor was
present at those proceedings, in the light of which—
—Oh, nonsense, Counselor. The boy's a raving lunatic.
—Your Honor, comments like that would tend to throw some doubt on your
own impartiality—
—Shut up, Counselor! I'm running a courtroom, not a voodoo stance. If the
prosecution would care to continue the cross—
—Ah… no further questions.
—The witness may stand down.
—I would like to remind the defense that this evening's extraordinary timing
was designed to let us hear from whoever is supposed to be inside that coffin of
yours, and that we are now ten minutes past sundown. And no one has been
banging on the lid from the inside. Is that particular bit of nonsense over with?
—I don't think so, sir. At this time I would like to ask the bailiff to remove the
coffin lid and invite the next witness to the stand.
—All right. Bailiff?
—There's nothing inside of here, sir, except a headless cat. And a large
quantity of garlic.
—That, Counsel, is in very poor taste.
—I don't know how that could have happened, Your Honor! Our resident
vampirologist assured us that—
—Ew, Your Honor! It's stiff.
—Dispose of it, Bailiff. So what is the meaning of this, Counsel? Vampire
hunters been calling, I suppose?
—I have no idea what's happened at all, Your Honor. We'll have the witness
for you tomorrow, I promise.
—Don't make promises you can't keep, Counselor; I'm told that the dead are
notoriously inept at keeping their appointments.
—Your Honor is pleased to joke at my expense.
—My Honor has had enough for the day, and we'll reconvene tomorrow
morning at… let's say ten o'clock.
—Dr. Shimada, you're a vampirologist.
—Just an avocation, actually. My day job is psychiatric resident at the juvenile
division of the state hospital for the criminally insane. My study of vampires, real
and imagined, grew out of the ramblings of a patient I have in my private practice;
I can't elucidate further without breaching confidentiality, of course.
—And you've studied the defendant at some length.
—Oh, yes. Fascinating boy. Very disturbed.
—The defendant is not, however, in your professional opinion, a vampire.
—No.
—Nor any other supernatural creature.
—Well, I would take issue with the choice of "supernatural," sir, since, as a
scientist, I would prefer a rational explanation for any phenomenon, however
supernatural-seeming. But no, Mr. Palmer is by no means undead. He is quite,
quite human. He's just like you and me.
—Except that he hasn't talked since… the events that have brought us all here
for this trial.
—That is almost true. I was starting to make some progress with that. I think
he needs a few more months before he'll actually… be able to say anything to
shed light upon this case.
—He grunts now, sometimes. I even detected a whimper once. And one time,
on my way out, in the doorway, I heard a distinct, if sotto voce, utterance of the
phrase, "Fuck off."
—I see. Will he ever talk?
—Everything he wants to say is caged up inside him. It only needs… a key.
I've been considering the possibility of circumventing the lengthy period of
therapy and just jumping to pentothal.
—Sodium pentothal? The old "truth serum," that cliché of fifties B -grade
detective thrillers?
—The very same.
—How many sessions did you have with the defendant?
—I've seen him twice a week since the arrest.
—In your opinion, is the defendant insane?
—I think that would be obvious even to a layman.
—Was he insane at the time of the crime?
—Clearly he was unable to distinguish right from wrong at the time of the
multiple murders.
—What is the nature of the defendant's mental illness?
—In Freudian terms, his superego, the inner voice we often think of as our
"conscience," weak to start off with from inadequate childhood reinforcement, has
disappeared entirely. It has been replaced by what he perceives as supernatural
"beings," creatures who control him. He has experienced a transference of the
normal youthful libido… the sex urge… in the direction of violence and
bloodshed. The weakening of the superego causes him to be unable to control his
beast within, his id. That, of course, is the basic reason for all crime, but in his
case the weakening of the ego is clearly at a pathological level.
—I see, Dr. Shimada. I'd like to move that Dr. Shimada's entire report… some
two thousand three hundred ten pages of it… be admitted to the record as Exhibit,
ah…
—Defense Exhibit QQ.
—Yes. Defense Exhibit QQ.
—I hope you're not expecting our benighted jurors to make head or tail of it,
Counselor. Even the last few minutes have been a little, ah, dry.
—Dr. Shimada's learned testimony merely adds to that of seven other
psychiatrists, Your Honor, who have all agreed that the defendant is hopelessly,
irretrievably insane.
—Quite so.
—Dr. Shimada, if you would state again, in simple layman's terms, the
defendant's state of mind before, during, and after the crimes were committed?
—In layman's terms, Jody Palmer was stark, staring bonkers, Counselor.
—No further questions.
—Cross?
—Well, yes, I do have a couple of quick questions. Dr. Shimada, in this twothousand-page document which, I admit, I haven't read, although my researchers
have combed through it pretty thoroughly… do you not basically say that the
defendant had no conscience?
—I suppose you could put it that way.
—Well, well, well. No conscience. And for that, we're gonna let him off after
he mutilated his parents, disemboweled his sister, devoured his two-year-old
brother's liver, and led a gang of hooligans on a rampage that culminated in several
more people becoming… unwilling blood donors… not to mention… necrophilia.
—Your Honor, the prosecution's grandstanding.
—Sustain
ed. Just ask the questions.
—Right. Well, I really have just one more question. You say the defendant has
retreated behind a wall of silence.
—Yes. It's called hysterical mutism. It's one of the ultimate defense
mechanisms of the paranoid schizophrenic.
—So you compiled a two-thousand-page report about this patient… without
exchanging a single bit of dialogue with him?
—As I spoke to him, I monitored his vital signs, his brain waves, the surface
electrical activity of his skin.
—But he didn't actually tell you any of this.
—Scientists can read a great deal from—
—He didn't actually tell you. Answer the question, please.
—Ah… no.
—No further questions.
—Natalie McConnell, you've been given immunity because you appear not to
have participated in the actual killing. But you saw everything, and your insight into
the defendant's state of mind is vital to the court's understanding of his motives.
—Yes, sir.
—Are you currently enrolled in Kramer High?
—No, sir. I dropped out. I had to go to work in my dad's doughnut store.
—So you never knew the defendant until a few months before the incident.
—Yes, sir. I met him at Cat Sperling's funeral.
—You knew Cat Sperling, then.
—Oh, sure, sir. Everyone did. She was the town slut.
—How did you come to be aware of that?
—My daddy always said that if I behaved anything like her, he'd whup my butt
till it was bloody.
—What kind of behavior constituted "behaving like Cat Sperling"?
—Um… too much lipstick… wearing leather… standing a certain way…
talking in a sexy voice…
—Your father ever carry out his threat?
—Shit, yeah. He wore me out all the time. When he wasn't making me go down
on him.
…
—Order in the court! Order! Order! Counselor, tell the witness to stay on the
topic.
—Your Honor, the fact that the witness was one of the disenfranchised, the
violated members of society… is not entirely irrelevant to this defense… although
I did not intend to have the matter raised quite this abruptly.
—That's enough. The jury will ignore the witness's life story, and concentrate
only on those facts she raises that bear on this case. Meanwhile, I'd like the bailiff
to make a note of the girl's remarks and pass them on to the district attorney; we
are state employees here, and there are mandatory reporting laws.
—Well, Judge, if you're gonna turn in my dad, you might as well turn in the
pastor of Hillside Baptist Church as well. And the vice principal of Kramer High—
he got me in the closet one day. Oh, and—
—Miss McConnell, enough of that. When your testimony is through, you are
to report to Detective… ah… who's on duty out there?… Detective Arnold. He'll
take it from there. Meanwhile, if the court would care to turn its attention back to
the case… Counsel? Counsel?
—Oh. Yes, Your Honor. So, despite Cat Sperling's reputation, you went to
her funeral?
—Yeah. Her dad had ordered ten dozen doughnuts, you see, for afterwards,
and I stopped by to get directions to the house. And that's when I saw Jody… the
defendant. He was standing in the distance… in the shade of an oak tree. He was
all in black. Trench coat and all. He looked lonely. Not like he was really invited.
He was staring at all the relatives, at the coffin, at everything. With a kind of
longing in his eyes. The guy seemed so sad. I wanted to talk to him. So I did.
—What did you converse about?
—Well, at first, I was all, like, questions, how did she die and such. And he
said, Anemia. Which wasn't what I heard, I'd heard it was from something to do
with sex, AIDS or such. It didn't matter nohow, 'cause she was gone no matter
how you looked at it. I got him to give me directions to the Sperling place, and
then he got to staring at me in a way I never been stared at before. Like he could
see right into my mind. And he said to me, Are you afraid of the dark? And I said,
Yeah. And he said, Very afraid? And I said, Yeah. And he said, Why? And I said,
Because things come to me in the night. And he said, I can take that fear away
forever. I can take you on a journey with me. Across the river of death. To the
farthest shore. To the kingdom of ultimate darkness. I look into your eyes and I
see you're like me, you don't got nothing to lose. I said, You sure are right about
that. He said, I'm gathering a group of people to take with me on this journey. It's
a quest, you see. Like searching for the Holy Grail. The cup of blood. I just know
you want to come with me, Natalie. I can see it in your eyes. One time, I met these
creatures from a place beyond our world. They called out to me. But I stayed
behind. I had work left to do in the world. I wanted to go, but I thought of all the
dispossessed of the world, all the young ones crying out for release, and I knew I
had to bring a few with me in order to be worthy of my place among the dark
ones.
—Did the defendant mention Jeremy Kindred at all? The fact that his friend
physically prevented him from being sucked into the vampire world?
—No.
—So you had no idea there was any side to the story other than what you were
being told.
—That's right, sir.
—Did you believe him?
—Not really, sir. I thought he'd lost it. But there was something real hypnotic
about his voice and such. He was sexy, too. In a scary kind of way.
—Sexy and scary?
—He was pale and thin. His cheeks were all sunken and his eyes, too. He
looked like he hadn't eaten in days and he'd stayed out of the sun… well, like he
was dead, really. Dead but beautiful. I guess what was exciting about him was…
there was a wrongness. About the way he moved. The way he smiled. Like they
weren't his lips,
his limbs. Do you know what I mean? Like something was
animating his body and such. Possession or something. I touched his shoulder.
Flinched from it. It was cold as ice. But then again I felt I wanted to warm him
up all over. I wanted to give him what I'd denied all those other men who took
what they wanted from me. He was different. I wanted to make love to him. And
later, we went back to the doughnut van, and, in the back, I did make love to him.
I think of it as that, though he didn't really do much. I did all the moving. I'd never
used Dad's van for that before, and it was sticky on account of all the bits of
custard filling and the little patches of spilled powdered sugar and all. He sat back
against a pile of delivery boxes and I didn't care that they were getting all crushed.
I just ate him up, impaled myself on him, rode him up and down, wrapped my
titties around his face, but all the while he was muttering about other things …
about banging and banging on the gates of hell till his fists were raw and bloodied
from the rough stone… I didn't know what he meant until that night, when I met
him again at the Forbin-St. Cloud monument and saw him kneeling at the carved
mouth of hell and beating his fists against the granite… but
I didn't care, you see,
because I'd found someone as lost as me, maybe even more lost, someone I
could give to freely, someone I could love.
—So you became a member of his… secret society.
—If you could call it that. It was just him and three of us girls. He called us the
Brides of Dracula. He drank our blood. He mixed it with vanilla syrup and ice in a
blender. Said he needed the ice because the heat of the blood would send him
straight to the other world, and he wasn't ready yet, he still had things to do in the
human world. The other two girls were Ramona and Chastity. They're dead now.
He found Ramona lurking outside a homeless shelter over there in the city.
Chastity was a runaway. I know what we done was wrong, but Jody, well, he had
a vision and such. When he talked, we felt we belonged to something big. He gave
us a structure, too, our nightly hunts. He taught us to pounce on alley cats and bite
their necks and slurp down the gushing blood. That was disgusting, but it was
kinda thrilling, too. And now and then as a really special treat he'd fuck us. But it
was always with us doing all the work, and him staring off into space, thinking I
guess about his great vision. Which he finally explained to us. The day before…
you know.
—He told you… what? That you were going to go on a killing spree?
—Not exactly. I remember it perfectly because we were having another meeting
in Dad's van. We always used it for meetings now, because I could always get the
van between deliveries, and now, behind the smell of apple -cinnamon and
chocolate, there was also a permanent smell of sex. Because the three of us… the
girls I mean, not Jody… we'd do stuff in there while we were waiting for him.
Thing is, you know how it is when us girls hang out together all the time … our
periods kind of fall into sync. And so all three of us were on the rag at the same
time. And we were all laughing about it, how it had gotten closer and closer in the
last two months and now, this time, third time lucky and such, bang, same day,
same second practically. And we were all idly fingerbanging each other while we
talked about our fucked-up lives. So finally he shows up. And he's all, I smell
blood. God, I smell blood! It makes me feel all… oh, I want it, I want it. And
since we're all already with our panties down, and all moist from playing with each
other, he's all over us, pulling out our tampons, lapping at us like a cat cleaning its