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The other bedroom had no bed, but it did have a lot of clothes. The room felt slightly more fresh, more used, than the other, and Saber ran her hand over the suits in the closets, checking the labels—Brooks Brothers shirts and Armani suits, faded and dated, like they were from the 1980s and ’90s. On the vanity, there was bronzing liquid makeup, lip tint, even mascara, a Rolex watch, and a pen with an engraving on it. Saber remembered how he had, indeed, looked quite tan and lively for a vampire.
“Joseph C. Rollands,” Lozen said, reading the engraving. “Derek’s real name?”
Saber shrugged.
“He isn’t very old, as far as vampires go.”
“That’s why he picked the name ‘Derek,’” Lozen said. “I always thought that was really weird.”
Lozen put the pen down. There were some file cabinets and other storage boxes in the room, and Saber opened some of them and rifled through.
“I found his birth certificate,” she said, pulling out the yellowed document. “Born in 1956.”
“How old was he when he—”
“I don’t know. Not older than thirty.”
Lozen nodded and sighed. Saber kept rifling through ‘Derek’s’ papers. She found a picture of a family in very retro, probably 1980s clothes dressed for Christmas dinner, a man, a woman, and two blond children smiling, blurry. Derek was the unmistakable father in the photo.
“He had kids,” Saber said.
“I don’t care,” said Lozen. “Those kids are older than us now. Come on, Saber, if we’re going to do this, we need to do it.”
She sounded resigned and anxious.
“Ok,” Saber said. “Let’s do it.”
Saber led the way back down the stairs, and together they looked for the entrance to the basement, assuming there had to be something. They did, indeed, find a door in the floor, but it was locked from the inside.
“Give me your hatchet,” Lozen said and, as Saber watched in muted surprise, hacked a ragged hole in the wooden door. She hacked at it, breathing hard, the thuds punctuating the unsettling silence, until it grew larger and larger, allowing her to reach in and find the simple latch lock on the inside. She had to stick her entire arm into the hole to loosen it, and Saber noticed that when she withdrew her arm, it was scraped.
“Are you ok?” Saber breathed, and Lozen nodded.
“Yup. I’m fine, come on.”
They dragged open the heavy wooden door and Saber followed Lozen down the creaking steps into the cramped, cold basement.
The basement was very small, but it was also clean, and smelled only of dampness, mildew. In the center was a casket, polished black wood, gleaming in the weak light that streamed down from the open cellar door. It was the most modern, new looking thing in the entire house.
Saber took a deep breath.
“I thought that there would be more in here,” she said. “Why is there only one?”
Lozen walked over to the casket.
“Are you ready?” she said, taking a deep breath. “I open, you stake. Unless you want me to do it.”
“Do you think you can?”
“I don’t know,” Lozen said. “I haven’t done it before. You have.”
“I can do it.”
Lozen nodded and took a deep breath, then flipped open the lid.
For a moment they looked down at him.
In the casket, Derek, or Joseph, looked like a near perfect replica of a real person. His preternatural stillness and whiteness gave away the fact that he was not ‘real,’ not alive. There were strange areas of mottled blackness, like mold growing under his skin, and Saber realized that was vampire bruising, from when Lozen had run over him with her car. He had the blackened mottling on his arm, especially wrapped around a fractured-looking elbow, and beneath his jaw.
