Chapter 4
What Is Normal, Anyway?
I expected a staircase lined with torches burning moodily in a somber atmosphere of cobwebs and decades of sepulchral dust. And I expected that to lead into a crypt filled with half-opened coffins revealing desiccated corpses grown as dry over time as a mummy’s toilet paper.
Instead, what I got was track lighting accompanying a spiraling stairway with sensible no-slip surfaces that opened into a spacious apartment resembling a Bob Timberlake showroom. I had to admit that I was impressed.
My host gestured for me to take a seat on a brown couch fronted by a large gray ottoman. I wasn’t aware of how tired I was until I sat down. I wanted to sink into the fabric and wake up back in my room where this would all just fade away as a bad dream.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” I growled as I shot upright and stiff. This had to be part of the guy’s modus operandi: Lure unsuspecting, exhausted victims into a warm, inviting, comfortable, and dimly lit living space with downhome country furnishings and feed on them in seclusion.
I know I might seem rude, but I was in the lair of a predator.
From the kitchen I heard a refrigerator door open and the tale-tell sounds of someone rummaging through its interior. “I’m afraid all I have is O-positive,” the vampire called out regrettably. But a moment later he gave out a surprised, “Hey, I forgot about this!”
While I waited I picked up a National Geographic off of the coffee table and began rifling through it. The headline on the cover proclaimed, “The Changing Face of Atlantis.” On the picture beneath, bored-looking men in togas were loading happy children onto an amusement ride.
Evidently, much to the delight of New Agers everywhere, Atlantis did finally rise up out of the ocean. And no sooner did the head of the place start preaching forgotten truths and hidden wisdoms than a greedy conglomerate of international interests seized the fabled city. Much to the displeasure of people everywhere, the New Agers ran the conglomerate. They turned the place into an amusement park. Now tourists flock there to have their chakras realigned.
Every year there are attempts by the Atlantians to sneak across the border through Mexico. Life as a carousel operator pays squat. The coyotes were excited at first to have new clients, until they found out the Atlantians paid in ancient Greek drachmas.
When the vampire came back into the room, he carried one I.V. unit of blood and a drink for me.
It was a Bloody Mary.
“I hope you like this,” he said, proffering me the drink. “I don’t entertain many visitors. My name is Mike, by the way.”
“I’m Jack Pittman,” I told him; then I eyed the drink to avoid shaking his hand. “Your . . . um . . . occupation would seem to make entertaining friends bit hard,” I observed.
The vampire looked perplexed for a moment. “Occupation?” He asked, looking as if he had missed something. Then his eyes opened in realization. “Being a vampire isn’t an occupation for me, it’s a curse, Jack. I’m actually a retired tax accountant.”
So. He made a living sucking the blood out of other people before he really had to suck their blood. “How ironic.”
“That one never gets old,” the vampire lamented as if reading my mind.
I cleared my throat and changed the topic before things got too awkward. “So what did the genie do to you?” I knew that we both had a lot of common ground in this area.
Mike sighed and sat down heavily in a soft chair. “The day I brought that venomous little snake’s lamp home from an antique shop over in Queens was the worst day of my life. My wife Rita and I were constantly arguing back in 1986. Usually over money. She wanted an Upper East Side lifestyle and I was just a simple blue-collar Brooklyn guy at heart. Rita was constantly angry with me because I didn’t want to pull more hours at work.”
Mike closed his eyes and his voice dropped an octave. He sniffed once and regained composure. “The lamp was my way of apologizing. When I showed it to her, she was still pissed and snatched it out of my hands. We must have triggered it together. She told me that she wanted to be rich, and then she called me a life-sucking excuse for a husband who shouldn’t be alive. That’s when I told her that I would rather be a life-sucking monster than live in a world she had been born into.” Mike looked up at me. “Such terrible words to tell each other.” His eyes were bloodshot in a way that had nothing to do with his vampyric condition. “I was just angry.”
“Is that when . . .”
Mike nodded his head. “Yes. He burst out of that lamp like a Texas tornado and sent me here.” Mike gave a hollow laugh, “A bloodsucker living in a world where Rita never existed. Just what I wanted.”
I whistled sympathetically. “That sucks. Sounds like Rita got off better.”
Mike shook his head, this time with a laugh that I could not decipher. “No. Here’s the dark mischief in it. You see, she didn’t ask for money. She asked to be rich, Jack. Rich. So he turned her into a cheese cake.”
All I could think to say was, “Oh my.” Then I added, “So this is what the Elvis impersonating psychopath does for fun? I just want to go back home. That’s all I want.”
Mike grunted and made a face. “Elvis, huh? You’re lucky. When I met him, he was on a Woody Guthrie kick. He sent me here singing This Land Was Your Land.”
I winced.
“Is there any way back home?” I now dreaded the answer to that question, but I needed to know.
“Look Jack, I don’t think you realize exactly where you are.”
“And where am I?” God, I hoped he was about to say Disney Land.
He only said two words. “The Playground.”
I shifted uncomfortably. The Playground? What an amazing lack of information that provided. “Um . . . the playground? Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?”
Mike gave a sardonic smile. “It’s short for the Demon’s Playground, Jack.”
I sat back and repeated Mike’s words for myself. Again, I shifted uncomfortably. The Demon’s Playground? What an amazing clarification that provided. I liked the term Playground much better. It brought to mind happy images, like Smurfs singing, or fairies dancing around in a circle.
The Demon’s Playground on the other hand conjured a slightly different set of visuals, like a ring of Smurfs circling a naked virgin tied to a stake while they chanted the title music to the movie The Omen. I shivered and silently swore that the next big investment I was making had to include a cat named Azrael.
“That, I hope, is metaphorical and not literal,” I said.
Mike shook his head slowly. “No one knows why this place exists. Few who come here ever make it back home. Think of this place as a plane instead of a world, Jack. You’ll bake your noodle if you try too hard to pin it down in terms of where we come from.”
“But the paper I saw mentioned D.C.,” I protested.
Mike shook his head. “It is and it isn’t. Did your Washington D.C. exist when you came here?”
I nodded my head.
“Not with the likes of Gamma Ray Godfrey I bet. Everything in our world has corresponding points within the Playground. Sometimes they overlap. And sometimes, something from here gets loose over there. You’ve heard of Bigfoot, Nancy Grace, and the Loch Ness Monster haven’t you?”
I nodded.
“Then think of this as the hole that they crawled out of.”
“But the cemetery looked as normal as any cemetery I’ve ever seen, and the road running beside it looked like Anytown U.S.A.”
Mike nodded his head quickly. “Listen to me. Looks are very deceiving here in this part of the Playground. If you had somehow wondered in by accident, you might not have noticed that anything was off for quite some time. But the farther you go
, the weirder things get. Hell, just a few hundred miles north of us there’s a province ruled by Zombies, and that’s one of the better places to live. Several miles south, and it’s always night.”
I shook my head. “Is there anywhere normal here?”
Mike shrugged his shoulders. “Iowa?”
“Iowa was pretty normal where I come from, too.”
“Good to know that some things never change,” he said in wistful voice.
“But can I go back home?”
Mike shook his head. “I’m not sure, Jack. Gateways can be made from one place to another within the Playground, but only within the Playground, and they’re almost impossible to create. I tried finding a way back, but I eventually found my niche, here. Over time I gave up, and I figured that if I did manage to pop back up after all those years, I’d have to account for too many things that couldn’t be explained—like Rita’s disappearance for starters, and then there’s the problem of my condition. I would never be able to get blood there without hurting someone. Don’t even get me started on my fangs. I had to have the things specially engineered so I could keep some of my powers, and even here, it wasn’t easy.”
“How do you get blood here?” As I asked the question I mentally tabulated the distance from the couch to the door in case I didn’t like the answer.
“Sam’s Club sales it wholesale in I.V. and powdered form.”
“Oh.”
“But I’ve got to go to the closest principality south of us to get it. Sam’s Club doesn’t carry it here.”
I noticed when Mike said that he wore a look of deep loathing. I was about to ask him about it when an awful, high-pitched racket erupted around me. “What the—”
I yelped when I realized dozens of furry brown shapes frantically skittered around at our feet.
“No! Don’t!” Mike yelled as I raised a foot to step on anything straying too close to me.
“It’s a damned rat!” I spat, creeped out by the moving carpet of fur that seemed to be growing exponentially in the room.
“Good God, I’ve never seen so many,” I said in revulsion. Rats have always grossed me out, and the more there are, the worse it gets. There is a fluidity to their movements that’s unnatural. They’re quick, agile, spread diseases, and crap everywhere. Summoning my inner animal lover proved too much whenever I saw anything that looked like a rat. When that happened, it went on strike and didn’t make an appearance again until I came home with an armload of rattraps.
Mike’s voice became stern. “They’re friends, Jack! I’d appreciate it if you didn’t piss any of them off.”
I tucked my feet beneath my legs and watched as Mike extended an arm out, allowing one to climb onto it and crawl up to his shoulder where it began squeaking animatedly. Mike nodded his head several times, grunted once or twice, and mostly cringed.
When the furry thing finally stopped, Mike muttered something in a low voice that sounded like, “Good job.” His face had taken on a livid cast.
To my relief, the vermin began dispersing. As the room became safe to walk in, Mike stood up and barked, “We’ve got trouble!”
I had to move quickly to follow Mike out of the warm room and back up into the cold mausoleum. I heard a dog barking outside. When we stepped out into the cold air, I immediately saw the source of the dog’s distress. Beside me, Mike inhaled sharply.
Overhead, a dozen of the largest aircraft I had ever seen didn’t so much fly as drift across the sky, moving above us at a leisurely pace. They had no discernable wings I could speak of. Roughly triangular in shape, their undersurfaces bore three concave indentions at the center of which glowed a sullen and foul tempered shade of red, as if the color had been forced to remain there, though it wanted to be somewhere else very badly.
I got a bad feeling just looking at them, as if a million voices cried out in the Force all at once and then were made to scream louder.
Searchlights moved in wide sweeping arcs from the craft to the ground below. Once the things drifted about a half-mile beyond the perimeter of the cemetery, the lights suddenly went out and the large ships moved off with the ponderous and slow grace of whales.
Mike spat out a solid chain of swear words. Then he turned and looked at me again, regarding me the way a jeweler might appraise a diamond that he just discovered was radioactive. “I was afraid something like this was going to happen one day,” he growled, and looked down at the black schnauzer I had seen by the tombstone earlier. “Marshal the voles,” he told the dog. “All of them . . . and Max, don’t be seen.”
The dog whined once, and trotted off.
“Is this bad?” I gasped, not enjoying the feeling that the aircraft above us were throwing off.
Mike nodded his head grimly. “We must get you out of here soon; they’re looking for you.”