Authors: David Reuben Aslin
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Horror, #Vampires, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Suspense, #Teen & Young Adult
Red Tide: The Flavel House Horror / Vampires of the Morgue (The Ian McDermott, Ph.D., Paranormal Investigator Series Book 2)
Red Tide
The Flavel House Horror / Vampires of the Morgue
By David Reuben
Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services
http://www.indiebookauthors.com
Cover art by Dakota Ryan
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2014 by David Reuben
Dedicated to my beautiful wife, Denise.
My five fabulous boys: Dustin, Devan, Drew, Cody, and Moe.
Without their loving support, this work would not have been possible.
To Mom, love eternal …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the following people:
Ed Grey, Mary Johnson, Nancy Crow, Crystal Cooper,
Angie McCain, Pam Wilson Portwood
Linda Tooch (Proof Reading)
Mark Taylor, Author
Amanda Shore
And a very special thanks to my editor,
Monique Lewis Happy
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book takes place at locations both real and fictitious in and around Astoria, Oregon, located at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River, around Long Beach, Washington, as well as along the Long Beach Peninsula, an arm of land bound on the west by the Pacific Ocean, and on the east by Willipa Bay. At the northern tip of the peninsula are Leadbetter Point State Park and the Willipa National Wildlife Refuge. To its south is Cape Disappointment State Park and the Columbia River.
Several of the places written about within this book are actual locales, and some persons mentioned as characters in this book are real as well (consensually). Example: The Flavel House
,
also known as The Captain George Flavel House Museum, is located at 441 8th Street in downtown Astoria, Oregon. This location is used fictitiously in the story
Red Tide - The Flavel House Horror / Vampires of the Morgue
as the private home of a character of this author’s own invention/imagination. The Flavel House, along with its carriage house, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Flavel House is a fabulous Victorian mansion turned historic museum, and is owned and operated by the Clatsop County Historical Society. Another locale/business of distinction is Banana Books, located at 114 SW 3rd Street, Long Beach, WA. This magnificent bookstore is owned and operated by Ed Grey and Mary Johnson, who are characters in
Red Tide,
with their permission. Also mentioned and referenced in this book is Marsh’s Free Museum,
a Long Beach, WA landmark business that in this author’s opinion is the most unique, fantastically-intriguing store/museum to be found anywhere. It features
Jake the Alligator Man
. Additionally mentioned in this book are some specific cities, towns, townships, buildings, businesses, state parks, wildlife refuges, and various other places.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the publisher or author of this book except where permitted by law. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously (or, in some instances names/places are used and/or depicted consensually). Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. This book does not purport to provide accurate descriptions of any actual locations, things, or entities. This is an original work of fiction and all intellectual property rights are reserved by David Reuben, Author.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
~ John Donne
Last Night:
She thought a lit match and a liquefied spoonful of Mexican brown sugar injected in the most delightful way would be her ticket to ride away from it all. One last comfortable slip-slide down the rabbit hole, tripping to any destination that wasn’t here and now. She wasn’t worried about going to Hell. She was already there. She’d contemplated for days that it would be the easiest, best way to assure the inexorable end to her abysmally bleak – at its best – darkly melancholy life.
She was ready to climb aboard and take that journey to the beyond right now. The problem was, she had no money and no junk left to facilitate the trip. She was tired. Too tired, and way too high, to try and go back to find someone that she could bob her head or spread her legs for.
She’d just left the waterfront club. She couldn’t even remember the name of the place. All she knew is that she had to get the hell out of there before she got any sicker than she already was. Too much to drink – way too much. Too much oxy and the last two lines of coke that she’d been graciously given by some luckier-than-herself whore in the ladies room not five minutes ago, had added exponentially to her already chemically-induced, spiraling spin-out.
It was a tunnel-dark night, exceptionally dark even for this time of year. The nearly full moon held little sway over the dense cloud cover, one that presently offered little more than drizzle but threatened to open up and pour at any moment.
What little light there was came from a smattering of poorly-placed street and parking lot floodlights. But even with heavily-dilated pupils, somehow she managed to proceed with her intentions in spite of her present condition.
This was it. Her last night in this shitty crap-hole of a town. She’d moved to Astoria from Portland just one week previously under the advisement of, and with, two other of her prostitute semi-friends. The girls had sold her on what they said they’d heard; in Astoria, you didn’t need any pimp for protection; the Johns that frequented this new Astoria waterfront Goth club, though a bit weird regarding their fetishes, for the most part were easy pickings, and they paid well.
She’d decided hours before all of the drugs and booze had rendered their toxic effect, further bending her already severely bent mind – that this night would be the end of the proverbial line. The end of her train wreck of a life, as she saw it.
Drunkenly, she staggered down the boardwalk, straining her alcohol- and dope-blurred eyes, trying desperately to keep herself upright and keep moving forward.
At this point, all she could think was that travel by way of taking the long swim was her last, best choice. Not her first choice of travel to her final destination, but one that would get her there just the same.
Her shoulder-strap purse swung clumsily as it bounced against her waist, swinging in countermotion to the broken rhythm of her shapely, twenty-two-year-old hips. She tried to be mindful of not getting her high heels caught between the boardwalk planks, whereby potentially impeding her from reaching her intended destination … at least without accumulating painful slivers. Her destination: the edge of the parking lot, then onward to the edge of the dock, and finally twenty feet below in the frigid waters of the Columbia River.
Almost hypnotically, the river’s rhythmic tidal waters seemed to be pulling her forward, calling out for her, calling her home. She thought to herself that she wouldn’t be the first person to plunge into the river with no intention of swimming for shore – nor the last. She mused,
This’ll be the least of my sins to try an … explain. Lucy … you’ve got some splain-un’ tah-do. That’s if God even gives a shit. Maybe I’m gonna be interr… interror-grated – given shit by … Saint Peter … er, Jesus … er … fuckin’ Mister Plumber.
She laughed the laugh of the seriously drunk and stoned. Lucy was her assumed name. Her hooker name. It had been so long since anyone had called her by her real name, Brenda, that she had almost forgotten it altogether. To her, Lucy fit who she was, who she’d become: an amalgamation of the words loose and easy. Loose and easy. Lucy. Just another homeless runaway … junkie … prostitute. One who in her view had grown too tired of all the bullshit associated with her life, such as it was, to desire any continuance.
Not long ago, she thought she’d gotten pregnant. That at least would have been some reason to go on, she’d reasoned at the time. That is, until she’d gone to the free clinic in Portland to be checked, driven there by the excessive vaginal bleeding that she’d experienced that morning, only to find out that she in fact had been pregnant but had miscarried. In addition to that little slice of hell, some pasty-faced, wanna-be nurse with all the bedside manner and compassion of a would-be Nazi seemed to have actually taken pleasure in informing her that she was HIV positive.
So here she was at last. Standing at the very edge of her existence. She leaned her chest against the guardrail and began gazing down at the water. After no more than thirty seconds, she almost lost consciousness for an instant due to her intoxicated condition as it mixed with the mesmerizing effect of the undulating water; it appeared to her to look like millions of amorphously-changing pieces of shattered, mirrored glass that sparkled like diamonds as they danced on the surface of the turbulent deep.
She could smell the faint essence of salt in the air and that train-track oily smell of the hundreds of uneven creosol-soaked planks that collectively comprised the boardwalk and waterfront parking lots.
Though her senses were somewhat dulled at the river’s edge, that wharf smell that she so detested was strong. It wafted in the wind all around her, filling her nostrils with the reek of fish entrails. The primary source was the Hawthorn Cannery, located just two blocks further down the pier.
She could still hear and almost feel the waves as they pummeled the pylons thirty feet below the suspended docks. She recognized the low moan of a ship’s horn and the faint clanging/chiming sounds caused by buoys hundreds of yards off-shore. The chiming brought back a memory that, try as she might to suppress, somehow always seemed to revisit her time and again like an evil specter waiting in the dark, waiting to snatch what little remaining soul she might still possess.
The chiming echoed and reverberated almost painfully in her brain, bringing back memories of the seemingly endless ringing of the bell that her morphine-addicted, advanced-stage lung-cancer-stricken mother would ring when wanting – demanding – more injections, more pills, to be fed, or to be changed out of her urine and feces-filled
Depends
.
They didn’t have the money that a nursing home required, so it had been her job to take care of her mother since age twelve. By fourteen, she’d had all she could take of the relentless ringing of that damn bell.
That is until one night when she had changed the last adult diaper that she felt she could. When she had given the last morphine injection that she could stomach. She took a deep breath and once again cleaned her mother up after spoon-feeding her, kissed her on the cheek, and told her she loved her.
Her mother, now too weak to hardly move, let alone ease her own pain, just laid there gasping for each breath until she finally managed to point towards a pillow near the end of her bed. With a half-smile and a nod indicating that she appreciated everything that her daughter had done for her, but that she had endured much more suffering than she could endure any longer, she motioned for her daughter to pick up the pillow.
“I love you … and Sally. Please … help me this one last time,” was all that her mother could manage to say in a soft, gurgle-throated, nearly breathless, desperately pleading voice.
She trembled almost beyond control as she placed the pillow over her mother’s face. At first, she didn’t think she could do it. But then something welled up inside her as though a force beyond herself began guiding her actions. Right or wrong, she began pressing the pillow down with a strength she didn’t know she possessed. With both hands, she pressed the pillow to her mother’s face, harder and harder. She began holding her own breath as she pressed the pillow down with all her might just to see how long anyone could last, until finally, the bell fell from her mother’s quivering, shriveled hand.
Almost two minutes and a dozen kicks from her mother’s legs passed before it was done, offering the first peaceful shank of an evening in over two years; once, that is, the police had left and the coroner had taken the body (which would later be cremated) –all satisfied that her mother, Helen, had died a natural death.
She thought about a quote that she’d heard a hundred times but one that had never held any significant meaning to her until this very moment.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Some people run away seeking adventure. Some run away from their past, though it always seems to catch up with them, starting their bell ringing all over again. Standing near the dock’s edge, she could clearly make out, though blocks away, the sounds of cars and trucks that were rushing to and fro, heading to their pointless destinations. Her destination wasn’t pointless. To her it was more to the point than any she’d ever known.
She could see the tiny, faint lights from some ship and a tugboat downriver. Just then, her peripheral vision caught a glimpse of something just above her head. She immediately looked up, straining to focus on what it was. All she could make out was a dark, flying, bird-like silhouette. Almost instantly, she surmised it to be a seagull. It flutter-flapped its wings, body bobbing with every flap. It hovered briefly just above her head before it disappeared into the night.
Her long, ebony hair began whipping in the wind. She had to occasionally spit long strands from her mouth and pick away the strands that clung to her tear-soaked cheeks. Diluted mascara mixed with foundation, looked like an iridescent oil spill as it cascaded down her cheeks, creating facial-art that resembled dead, spindly branches – or the thin jagged fingers of lightning … if lightning were mostly black.
She thought of how nice it would be to never be cold again. She was beginning to sober up a little, to feel not quite so sick, as she remembered that she’d written a FUCK YOU note to the world a couple of days ago. She’d been toting it around in her purse for this very occasion. Just a note asking anyone who’d give a shit to tell her sister, Sally, that she was sorry that she hadn’t been strong enough to have stayed with her at their Aunt Evelyn and Uncle Roy’s house after their mother’s death. What Sally was too young to understand at the time was that Uncle Roy was often a bit too friendly with her big sister. Aunt Evelyn was either blind to that fact or, more likely, simply found the solace she required to deal with that knowledge from an endless supply of Valium prescribed to her by her favorite pill-pushing doctor. Aunt Evelyn usually chased her pills with frequent pulls from her twice-weekly-purchased fifths of cheap vodka. All aboard the S.S. Reality Escape. Now departing on its daily 3 p.m. voyage down the exotic River Denial.
But mostly, she wanted the world to know that she hadn’t always been Lucy. That once, a lifetime ago it seemed, she’d been a frightened, innocent little girl named Brenda.
She dropped her purse by her side, hoping that someone wouldn’t just snatch it, vanishing her last words into oblivion.
One by one, she kicked off her shoes as she began hiking her near skin-tight, black leatherette skirt up to a point where her panties would have been well exposed if she’d been wearing any. She then began climbing over the guard-rail.
As she stood on the other side of the guard-rail, holding onto it with only her left hand, she closed her eyes and began to lean forward. She was ready to let go. Suddenly startled, she opened her eyes wide, instantaneously becoming aware of an unseen presence behind her. She stood wobbly-kneed. The heels of her bare feet were supported only by the thin plank that overhung slightly on the river-side of the strong, wooden guard railing.
In one deft motion, one that to even the sharpest of eyes would have appeared to have been no more than a blur, a hand reached around and covered her mouth, preventing any chance of her screaming.
Mere seconds later, absolute terror set in. It took a moment for her mind to catch up and begin comprehending what was happening. In that instant of realization, her olfactory sense was assaulted by the thickest, most putrid, noxious odor she’d ever smelled. What felt like warm drool began dripping onto her neck and shoulders, instantly causing goose pimples to well up and the tiny fine hairs on her neck to stand erect.
She didn’t see anything other than the long, dirty fingernailed hand that held her in its powerful grasp. She felt her shoulders being kissed and caressed by corpse-cold lips as she felt herself being lifted up.
What came next was instantaneous, excruciating pain caused by what felt like razor-sharp daggers that penetrated the side of her neck in one great thrust. Then momentary euphoria overcame her. Then, there was ... nothing except the enduring, cold kiss of ultimate darkness.
Lucy died that night just moments before midnight. Just not as dead as she’d intended.