Author’s note: It’s my habit to make about 1,000 edits, rewrites, etc when writing a novel.
This is a first iteration. Who knows what the future holds?
Even the title is now just a working title and has a good chance of changing.
It helps to be familiar with characters from Psalm of Vampires, but my goal is for this second novel in the series to stand on its own.
Prologue
The report passed to Detective Standmoore Owens was stamped, “For Your Eyes Only.” This was the first time the precinct captain had used his new rubber stamp since the events on Jerrold Mountain.
The report, written by an Atlanta police officer transcribing a statement by a renter named Tyrique Robinson, read like a Stephen King novel.
It began with the words, “I might be dead by the time y’all do anything about this.”
Tyrique was renting space in a rooming house near Midtown. He described the home as a large Edwardian with a modernized interior.
The owner of the house, Tyrique wrote, was a mysterious man named Chevalier (pronounced “Chevall yee yay!” Tyrique made sure to point out), who rarely emerged from his upper floor living space. The main floor of the home was, in theory, space for renters, but only two of four bedrooms on the main floor were rented, one to Tyrique. “Another to a cat I never saw until the end.”
Chevalier was a tall reed of a man, according to Tyrique, the tallest he’d ever known. “Taller than Wemby, I think,” he said. “With weird, but beautiful, brown skin that held a glowing purple hue.”
Owens sat up a little straighter at his desk when he read that.
Through the basement door, Tyrique heard a loud television blaring “60 Minutes” 24/7 on a loop from the “60 Minutes” channel played on a streaming TV platform.
The loop never quit. Twenty-four hours a day, the instructional, branded narratives of “60 Minutes” anchors slid through a bright gap at the bottom of the closed door and into the living room.
Tyrique had never noticed before that the intonation, timbre, cadence, and enunciation of “60 Minutes” anchors were all carefully designed to be the same — branded like a Starbucks roasted coffee. The voices were always muffled. Tyrique couldn’t make out the words. But he knew it was “60 Minutes.” The branded voices said so.
The basement door was always locked. The only way in was by a keycode. When he asked Chevalier who lived there, Chevalier seemed defensive. “You don’t need to know,” he said. Eventually, Tyrique was told that the tenant was in hospice from cancer.
“Well,” the transcript reported Tyrique saying, “That was the story, anyway.”
Every week or so, two “really tall” guys rolled equipment out of a truck labeled “Deep Red Medical.” At this point, Tyrique noted, there was no reason not to believe Chevalier’s explanation.
But the “60 Minutes” loop never changed. The television volume never altered. And where, Tyrique began to wonder, were the tenant’s caregivers? The only person associated with the hospice patient seemed to be one little old lady whom he saw once a week.
At precisely 8 am every Monday, an elderly, tiny, hunched, whitish-grey woman who, Tyrique said, looked like “she shouldn’t be able to walk,” hefted a large laundry bag out through the basement door. The little lady had wild tufts of thin gray hair mixed in with a lot of bald spots.
“I don’t drink or do drugs or nothin’ like that,” said Tyrique. “But I swear this happened. One day, I tried to help her as she opened the door because she struggled to push that heavy bag of laundry through it. This lady, she’s maybe four feet tall, max, hunched over all the time, older than anyone I ever seen. I’m thinkin’, she must be there for that hospice guy. Maybe some kind of caregiver. Even though she looked like she needed some caregiving herself.
“So, I offer to help. I mean, she is looking all sleepy-like and tired as she pushes the door open with that big old laundry bag and stumbles through. But when I offer to help, her eyes pop open like they’re two big ass cue balls coming out of her eye sockets. With little brown dots in the middle of them. Little tiny things.
“And she screams in a male baritone voice, for real. ‘Get Out!’ she yells out in this weird echo voice or something. It did. It sounded like echoes. Like, more than one. And a dude, man. A dude’s voice. Deep, you know? And then I know something’s up. Either that, or I’m messed in the head from something else. But, like I said, I don’t do no drugs.”
If that had been the last of it, Tyrique said, he wouldn’t have reported anything to the police. Just some bad, weird juju. No, he said, there’s a whole lot more.
The owner of the house, Chevalier, owned a small old English convertible with a distinctive enough engine noise that Tyrique could usually hear Chevalier coming or going. Tyrique made a point of saying that he wished he could have seen Chevalier driving, his long, flowing, straight black hair flying in the wind with more of Chevalier sticking out of the little car than in it.
“That car? Fired up at all hours of the night. 1:30 am., 2 a.m., 3 a.m. Where he going at two or three a.m? Then he’d be back in a couple hours. His car would wake me up at 3:30 or 4 a.m. So, it wasn’t work. I really got no idea what kind of work he does, but that wasn’t no work shift I ever heard of. And come on. Nothin’ good happens when you’re out runnin’ at two am.
“Then later, I meet a former tenant who comes there once in a while to pick up his mail cuz he ain’t made his address change yet. That’s how I learned about the hospice tenant downstairs and all.
“Man, he tells me that the dude who rented my room before me got murdered outside a bar in Midtown. What time? Yeah, you guessed it. Three a.m. or somethin’.”
Disconcerting, thought Owens as he read the report, but probably not enough for a visit to a police station.
But then he read the next paragraph.
That was written by the officer interviewing Tyrique. He wrote, “Note: The murder victim Mr. Robinson refers to appears to be the guy found in a Peachtree alleyway with the last drop of blood drained out of him. No bite marks. So, vampires ruled out.”
Never, thought Owens. Never rule out vampires.
Tyrique then launched into the next event in words the reporting officer said were filtered by a combination of hushed tones, extreme anxiety, and “some noticeable hand tremors.”
“Finally, I meet the other renter. I never saw him until the morning of that last day. I woke up to pop a breakfast burrito into the microwave. But there was almost no room for me in the kitchen, the dude standing over the stove cookin’ up some eggs was so big. Did I mention it’s a big kitchen? Vaulted ceilings. Way up there.
“Huge ass stove in the middle of it. Ancient thing. Must have been a hundred years old easy. And that dude, he took up almost all the space between where he was standing to cook and the sink area behind the stove. He wasn’t fat, neither. All muscle and brawn. But get this. He was tall, too. I mean, real tall. More than seven feet, easy. This dude could have been the entire defensive line for the Falcons. Where our scouts, man? Anyway, he greets me with a big ass smile, but his teeth are all red and shit. I’m thinking that it ain’t Halloween, so why he wearing them massive fangs? This some kinda joke?
“Hey. I was pretty tired, you know? I figure, musta been cookin’ some eggs after a long night partying. Costume party or somethin’, right?
“I heard about that Jerrold Mountain shit and all, but me and everyone else I know thought it’s bullshit. Like everything else in this country these days. Covering up something, you know?
“I know. Looking back, I was stupid. But none of that shit computes. Then you got those crazy people in Singapore talking about aliens and shit? And some people sayin’ them are vampires, too. I just never believed any of it, man. You feel me?
“So, this dude, he’s looking at me with this shit ass eatin’ red grin, all fangy and shit. And I’m like, man, I just want my fuckin’ burrito.
“So I walk around the front of the stove to get around him, cuz the microwave is next to the sink behind his big ass. He watchin’ me the whole time like he trackin’ or somethin’. Now I’m gettin’ spooked. I mean, this is one big ass human. Big old mean lookin’ brown bald head and that same purple hue as the owner of the place, Chevalier. Smilin’ at me the whole goddamn time, too!”
Owens took a bite out of a blueberry muffin and washed it down with some cold coffee. “This isn’t going to work out well for you,” Owens mumbled to a man he would never meet.
“I said my hellos, zapped my burrito, and got the hell out of there,” said Tyrique.
“The next day, that’s a Monday. 8 am, old hunchback lady bursts through the door like always. I can’t take it no more, so I leap over her laundry bag, slam the door shut behind me, and dash downstairs. She’s shrieking in that big baritone male voice the whole time.
“Downstairs, it’s just a cement basement with a big light hanging from wires in the ceiling, and I kid you not, a beautiful Asian lady lying face up on a metal bed with her eyes wide open but motionless. TV blarin’ and all. I guess it was hanging from a wall or something. Didn’t notice. Too freaked out.
“I can’t remember what she was wearing. Too flipped out, man. She looked dead in a way, but alive, too. I can’t describe it. I...”
And with that, Owens stopped reading. He knocked his chair out from underneath as he ran out of the Atlanta police precinct building, then called Jade Mourning while standing in the middle of a busy Midtown sidewalk.
Tyrique was found dead and drained the next day.
Thanks for reading!
You can check out the first novel in the series on Amazon, where it’s free if you have Kindle Unlimited. It helps to at least read the very last, short chapter, if only to guess if a previous mystery was solved.
I don’t use AI in my writing, so I don’t know how fast I’ll be cranking this out. Thank you for your patience and support of non-AI writing.
