old man hadn't been any help, a failure himself, dying of the hereditary disease that he had passed on to his son. He could only look to his grandfather's notebook and his collection of medical books for comfort. His father had been a fool, but his grandfather was a great man, a great doctor.
Teach sat before an old Victrola record player, which had also been his grandfather's. It was spinning in lazy whorls the strings of a Mozart concerto, the record without a scratch, but still some static chipped up from the diamond stylus. Getting parts for the old player had become near impossible, but he had found a shop in a small town on Main Street in Wekosha, Wisconsin, that was wonderful. It was like walking back into the past. The shop had some vintage 78s which he had gotten at a steal. He had also picked up some singles at Pernell's Music Emporium in Wekosha. It had cost him a month's pay, but listening to the lovely strings now made it all worthwhile. It soothed his taut nerves, this simple hobby of his, his love of music of a far-gone world, the world of Strauss, of Mozart, and sometimes he'd play music from Benny Goodman and the big-band era. He believed he had been born in the wrong time. He detested the music he heard today blaring from the radio.
The old Vic was sometimes used to listen to Hamlet, Lear and other Shakespearian plays, a collection of which he had gotten at a bargain rate in Paris, Illinois, where a Catholic monastic order had shut its doors and had sold off all of its library assets and holdings. He had gotten Olivier and Barrymore doing Shakespeare, along with a full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream by the Royal Victorian Symphony Theatre in London, England. These, along with his freezer filled with blood, were his most prized possessions, which he shared with no one.
He turned up the volume as loud as it would go and returned to his red bath. Nude, he slid into the reheated blood bath. He had had to use more jars. His supply was getting dangerously low, and he believed in the domestic truth: one off the shelf, replace it yourself
In the warm crimson bath now, he resumed where he left off before they'd called him into the office that morning. He'd have to be on the road the following day early, but tonight, he had all evening to enjoy himself with Renee.
Listening to classical music and reading his favorite passage from the Bible, he heard his cat mew. The cat, a big, black torn, was left often to fend for itself, put on the street whenever he was gone. But Snuffy-so named for a chronic congestive disorder-always returned. He liked the smell of blood, too, and whenever he could get it, he'd lap it up.
“ The vital essence of a living thing… the life of the flesh is in the blood,” he read aloud to Snuffy. The cat came near enough for his extended hand to pet. But it wasn't interested in a caress, turning back on his hand and licking frantically at the bloody moisture there.
The cat knew. It somehow knew what he knew and what the Bible said was true, that the way to health, to a cure, to longer life-quality time-was through the intake of blood, orally, through the pores, any way you could get it. He rubbed the blood into the animal's thick, black coat violently and it came back for more. This made him laugh and say, “You like it, don't you… don't you, boy?”
After an hour's languishing in the heated bath, he pulled the plug, rinsed off under the shower head, toweled himself down and went into the next room, and down the corridor of the old house he had inherited from his father when his mother died. For sixteen years he had seen to the needs of his ailing parents, and he had watched them both wither and die, and it had both sickened and terrified him. At the end of the corridor, he went into what was once his grandfather's study, which was now his study. The old man had been a general practitioner in the days when doctors worked out of their homes, and beside his den there was a small examining room. He had wanted him to be a doctor as well, and he tried to be what he wanted to be, but it just was not to be. There were too many people in the world set against him: his teachers for one, his superiors, the doctors who made the decisions in medical school, the ones who created hurdles for him to jump over, and then there were his parents. Their illnesses had come on like a fire but then lingered for years, sapping the family of finances just as it sapped him of any compassion he might have otherwise felt for his essentially weak father and dominating mother.
So he had turned to teaching, because those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. But he learned quickly that teaching itself was yet another science-an art really-like being an actor, and only the best actors with great inward confidence and the best scripts survived teaching. His too soft approach, his too gentle demeanor and his essentially introverted nature and lack of confidence, along with the fact he had never acted, never scripted anything in his life, had failed him in this as it had failed him in medicine.
Finally, three years ago, he had turned to the want ads in the Chicago Tribune and in the Sun Times, and he searched for any jobs having to do with medicine that he might qualify for. He went through a series of such jobs before becoming a salesman for a Chicago firm specializing in medical supplies, from new pills to new forceps. The only sort of supplies they didn't supply was linens.
Into the den he carried with him his large Bible, but he now placed it aside, and below the student lamp on the oak desk, he picked up the Old World pen from the inkwell before him and now he dabbed off the feather quill in the inkwell and watched the blood drip from its end.
He had a letter to write, a response to the misrepresentations of the news coming out of Wekosha, Wisconsin, that he was some sort of vampire. He was far more than any fictional nightmare. He was quite real, and his purpose should not be confused with cinematic nonsense or lurid novels.
Using the blood of Candy, mixed with an anticoagulating agent in the inkwell, he wrote out his first line which he intended to send to a woman named Coran at FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia. He had already used an ordinary red Bic pen for the envelope, finding the address easily enough in the Registry of Law Enforcement Agencies at the library. He had read the feeble accounts of the so-called slash-and-drink vampire killer of Wekosha, now making the rounds of the various papers from USA Today to the Enquirer. None of them had the story right. He felt relatively secure about keeping his identity and his home safe from all the people who would enjoy getting at his throat with a scalpel.
Although careful to print, Teach wrote with a flourishing hand where once he had written with a pinched and tiny hand the words he so wanted to convey to Dr. Jessica Coran. She proposed to corner him, to bring him to what they called justice. We will see, he thought as he wrote:
Dear Dr. Coran,
Read Leviticus and you will understand me. I am far from a vampire, and do not consider myself one.
Candy was sweet; that is, her blood was sweet, but I am once more reduced in my supply. As you see from this note, I use blood for every little thing. Perhaps someday I will be fortunate enough to have some of your blood? Please, don't let the newspapers disparage me again. Put your mind at ease. My thirst is, from time to time, quenched. So I will not take any more than my needs dictate. I am fundamentally an environmentally conscious person, and do not squander blood. You know this from your own experience, do you not? So rest assured.
Perhaps someday we can meet, and perhaps you will give me some of your blood? I believe women have much more character than men, don't you? At any rate, you can never hope to catch me before I catch you.
Sincerely,
Teach, the one you seek.
The fools hadn't a single shred of evidence to link him to the deaths. They hadn't even placed Candy Copeland in the hospital where he had first met her in the cafeteria, sipping on a big milkshake. He had seen her in the hospital before on his trips, usually doing the scut work of mopping floors and taking out bedpans, but recently she'd been given more responsibility and she hadn't been able to cope with it. So her days were numbered, and she talked of having to go back on the streets, back to a pimp who kept her. She'd been feeling sorry for herself, and he saw his chance and he took it. He offered her some relief from her sorrows, pointing out some of the types of drugs he peddled for his company. She wanted relief from her life, her pain, and ultimately she felt no pain.
She had liked the candy cane uniform. She had liked being known as a candy striper. She took on the name “Candy” as a result, casting off “Annie.”
Now that he'd finished his letter, Snuffy, who had followed him into the den and had so calmly sat over his feet for the duration of the letter, suddenly snuggled against his leg. The torn then leapt up onto the desktop in a blink and was going for the inkwell and the feather pen and the smell of blood.
He dabbed a bit on his finger and fed it to the cat. “Reach out and touch someone, heh, kitty?” he asked.?
FIFTEEN
