An Unattractive Vampire by Jim McDoniel Read Free Book Online Page B

be found. Never ones to remain disheartened, they did what any reasonable proponents of peace and love would do on a boatload of LSD.
    They painted the house pink. 10
    The legend of the Pink House died out after that. When authors and film buffs were falling over themselves to find the next Amityville Horror or Overlook Hotel, they passed through Shepherd’s Crook with hardly a second thought beyond “My, what an ugly house.” As the town slowly suburbanized, all traces of its unique and colorful history were willfully forgotten by a community longing for uniformity. All that remained was a generic ghost story, used for fund-raising, and the journal of Erasmus Martin, kept by the Shepherd’s Crook Historical Society and only ever read by two people: the society’s sole eight-year-old member and, after a time, his sister.
    This long and rambling history is intended to illustrate that the house—over the centuries lived in, inhabited, commandeered, and otherwise populated by various people—had never been
owned
by any of them, only rented.
    The rights to the dwelling were still held in trust by a very old and powerful Swiss bank, in the name of one Master Yulric Dunnwulffe Bile.

Chapter 7
    On. Off. On. Off.
    Amanda let the revelation of her house’s ownership wash over her.
    On. Off. On. Off.
    It was one thing to appear in her bedroom and call yourself a vampire. Turning up again and attacking her brother was pretty awful, too. But claiming to have owned a suburban house for over three hundred years was insane, stupid, and utterly inconceivable.
    On. Off. On.
    “Could you stop that?” she said, her patience snapping as she considered impossibilities.
    Off.
    “With the light on,” she clarified.
    On.
    “How does a tiny switch ignite a glass candle?” asked Yulric, partially to her, partially to himself, but mostly to the universe at large.
    “Electricity,” she answered. After a minute’s thought, she clarified, “Bottled lightning.”
    “Ah,” he said. The intricate workings of various circuits, wires, and fossil-fuel-burning power plants were beyond him, but dominating an awesome power of the natural world and confining it to a jar was something he could easily understand. His respect for the troublesome blond girl grew. “I suppose the jars are kept in the walls, then?”
    “Sure,” she said patronizingly. He flipped the light switch off and on again, this time imagining how the action moved a jar lid over just enough for slivers of lightning to eke out, which wasn’t so far from the truth.
    “So, you are my landlord,” she reasoned. “All those checks, er”—she paused to think back to what Simon’s books would call them—“notes of scrip I paid, they were all going to a man buried under my cellar.”
    “Though it has been some time since anyone considered me a man, I imagine your notes of scrip went to the bank in whose hands I left the deed in trust. So, in essence, yes, your statement is correct.” The vampire picked up a frame off a table. “This is very well done. Who is the artist?”
    “It’s called a photograph. It’s a . . .” She sought an idiot’s definition of
photograph
.
    “Picture made from light,” he interrupted. “
Photo
meaning light,
graph
meaning drawn. Not that difficult.”
    “I suppose not,” she conceded. “So, the bank just kept the house for you all this time?”
    Yulric looked up from the picture. He gave a condescending chuckle, which only made Amanda angry. “Brandenberg and Sons, or whatever the bank may be called now.”
    “La Première Banque du Suisse,” Amanda said. She’d seen the name on top of her bills enough to know it by heart.
    “Ah yes, well, these moneylenders and I have a very . . . special relationship that comes with my being their oldest”—he chuckled again—“living client.”
    He glanced back at the light portrait in his hands. It showed a whole smiling family: mother, father, daughter, and oddly placid-looking