Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker

Author:Christine Wicker
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

8.

The Vegetarian Vampire and the Wooden-Headed Death Puppet Have Something to Say

In our first conversation Mistress Tracy, Queen of the Vampires, told me that as a child she liked to wander around jabbing things with a stick.

“Things?” I asked.

“You know how it is. You see something dead and you poke at it,” she said. I didn’t know how that was, but I made encouraging sounds and kept listening.

Tracy Devine is a sanguine, or blood-loving, vampire. She is not immortal and not the kind who kills people by biting them on the neck. She doesn’t bite people or animals, living or dead. She’s vegetarian. The two fangs permanently implanted on her incisors aren’t thin enough to pierce skin even when they’ve been freshly filed, and perhaps she isn’t quite savage enough. Vegetarians aren’t generally known for their ferocity.

She does like tasting the blood of her lovers. “What’s more intimate than that?” she asked.

I went to meet Tracy on a dark September night. When Shawn the Witch and I arrived at her isolated New Hampshire house, orange Halloween lights glowed in the windows. The yard was filled with a hearse and pickup trucks—hers, her boyfriend’s, and two others. A magical stone sat at the side of the doorway. It protected the house. Out back were horses, a pig, and geese.

We climbed steps toward the back door, knocked, and were admitted by Tracy’s boyfriend, Jeff, a tall young man whose head was shaved except for long silky tufts of black and pink at the top and back of his head. We entered a room decorated with a crepe paper banner of skulls and orange jack-o’-lantern lights. A string of red-veined eyeball lights lay in a tangle on a side table. Through an open bathroom door, I saw a black shower curtain with a skull and crossbones. Most of the dining room was taken over by two huge wood-and-chicken-wire crates for Tracy’s dogs: a greyhound rescued from a racetrack and a Doberman. The greyhound had limpid eyes and dark raised scars on its flanks. Pickles the Snake lived upstairs.

A tablecloth imprinted with jack-o’-lanterns covered the table. On a shelf above the table were glass jelly dishes shaped like hens. Tracy collects chicken art as well as bones. It’s something we have in common. The chicken art.

Shawn pointed to the end of the living room where a human skeleton hung from the ceiling. Next to it was a rocking horse that Tracy’s four-year-old daughter rode. Oddfellows, a Mason-like group, once used the skeleton in ritual ceremonies. Animal bones and skulls also sat around the living room. A brass pot contained what appeared to be human bones—a hand, a femur, and other parts I couldn’t identify. Shawn put the pot on the table and invited me to root around in it. I did. Then I washed my hands.

Tracy is a tattoo artist. Figures, doesn’t it? Blood. Pain. Something that lasts forever. The paintings around the house were hers too: Tracy with outspread cape, hovering over a

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