The Mad Trist

Thunder rattled the thin glass window panes as the blood warm rain water washed over the house and the night outside became a blue fog. There were many nights like this over the summer from the earliest time she could remember - drifting to sleep as she listened to the rain and felt the warm mist it left behind. It was usually on nights like these that Uncle Herman told the story of the Shoke Vampire - Mad Man Shoedsack, a stranger who once disappeared on a night like this one a quarter century ago, almost as though he floated away on the same rainy mist and was never heard from again.

Herman rubbed the warm windowpane with his fist.

“You hear that Kate?” his eyes darted around the room. “He’s back. Mad Man Shoedsack…”

By this time, Kate had heard the story so many times that she wondered if Herman was really lowering his voice to check for Aunt Maggie in the hallway, who usually never let him finish the whole thing when he told it to her and her cousins - his two boys. Not exactly the type of bedtime story she approved of - summer time or not.

She had spent the last 12 years of her life living under their roof and the story meant other things to her nowadays. She wondered sometimes, if Aunt Maggie was at one time one of the girls in the story - one who was fortunate enough to jump out of Shoedsack’s truck by the roadside - or just narrowly avoided him on a hiking trail before the unthinkable could happen. After all, the Shoke Vampire wasn’t a character that Uncle Herman dreamed up on his own - and that was a rather unsettling fact for her to find out.

Along the streets of Shoke were where his victims once lived and played - where they still lived in the thoughts of those they left behind. Growing up, she used to imagine she could hear the Shoke Vampire still - a raspy voice she became familiar with in her dreams, echoing behind closed doors.

By now, she and Carl were the only ones still at home - beyond the days when it was the story they requested every night before bed, but she let Uncle Herman still tell it the way he wanted - and sometimes it seemed like the only thing to listen to along with the deluge outside, as she waited for the part where the Shoke Vampire peered through the windows late at night - with sallow eyes that she imagined could pierce the fog - and hearing that let him listen in on every last breath his victim took before he gained entrance.

That’s how he got the name the Shoke Vampire - no one knew for sure how he got in or got out of places - and of course, how he mostly moved about by night, under cover of darkness. Only a few charcoal sketches of him existed even from the not so distant past - a few shadowy features - sallow, piercing eyes, a scar along his left cheek that no one really could agree how long it was, matted hair, and an eye color that no one seemed to be sure about. Uncle Herman said the two eyes were each a different color - one like a cat’s eye that glowed in the dark.

“The last thing she saw,” Herman lowered his voice - signaling the final note of Francine’s life. She vanished on a misty summer night like this one back in 1974. The only way you could tell something was wrong was a single shoe left on the floor. He must have waited for her many long nights in the darkness - even one like this - watching as she hung up with her boyfriend Ted Lartch at too late an hour.

He hung over the room like a shadow for a few days - feeling himself melt into the darkness as he watched over her.

“What’s a little rain to a vampire anyway?” laughed Uncle Herman.

There was a time when the words didn’t really bother her - that she just laughed it off as a lighter part of the story. Now, she wasn’t so sure - looking into the distant, foggy night. She imagined that the night was as warm as Shoedsack’s breath - even wondered if he whispered any last words to Francine before he carried her off into the night without too much of a struggle.

Her cousin Joel said a few times that vampires were killed by running water - that their undead flesh disappeared like smoke under the rain - but Shoedsack wasn’t quite the typical movie vampire. His origins were about as mysterious as the day he disappeared. Some in town would say he was a brother of Adolf Eichmann or maybe it was the Devil himself. The morose recluse who first came to town sometime after the War always showed himself at the worst possible times - and there was hardly anyone in Shoke who didn’t feel the chills before they saw his shadow trailing down the road.

Kate looked down at the bed and curled her toes, burying them between the blankets and mattress and waiting for her circulation to come back. This was always the most unpleasant, and yet her favorite part - hearing about how his shadow flooded the darkening streets and feeling the same feeling that she imagined Uncle Herman got that one time when he locked eyes with Virgil Shoedsack. Just the words seemed to conjure that old effect of having met a man and having no doubt that evil lurked deep inside, that echoed in their footsteps as they moved about by day.

There were moments when she would get out of bed, scamper to the bathroom down the hall and watch the shadows billow throughout the house, a strange presence in the hallways that seemed to stare at her. She often wondered what was waiting for her back in her room - that used the shadows as its lifeblood. Her eyes moved restlessly through the darkened hallway as her bare feet navigated the floorboards. She had practiced not making the floorboards screech in the years when she would sneak out late or back in early before anyone could hear her - but this was different. Somehow each night, she felt like there were unlit eyes glancing back at her - ones that could pierce the darkness better than she ever could.

“Goodnight, sport,” Uncle Herman said before finishing and kissed her goodnight. He missed out on her favorite part - which was also the most ominous, and something that even at fifty years old Herman didn’t want to believe was true. The whispers that somewhere out there, the Shoke Vampire still lurked - his sinister voice echoing in the wind, making each pine needle shake. Somehow, even without his body, the evil lived on - as palpable as the late night fog.

Even though he didn’t finish the story saying Shoedsack’s disappearance remains a mystery to this day - some twenty years later, the lightning crackled just at the right spot from outside - illuminating the dark room with soft blue light. Uncle Herman shut the door and stumbled to his room in the darkness, while the raindrops from the windowpane beaded over him. It was as though the night knew it was the right time for him to tell this old story yet again.

In the darkness, Kate tried to write for a moment - wishing the thoughts would come as quickly as the warm, summer rain and turn into words on the pages of the withered notebook that she pressed into with her fountain pen. The only thing she’d had any luck with this year was writing down her dreams when she woke up, usually in the middle of the night, even if it were only fragments.

Her freshman year of college being over - suddenly being free from the marathons of late night study sessions and paper writing - left her inert by the time summer break finally arrived. About a week in, Carl found her that job at Dillard’s that mostly rendered her nocturnal anyway - seeing little need to get up before her 4:30 shift, and little reason to go to sleep at what Aunt Maggie called a reasonable hour.

Maybe that’s what drew her to writing stories in the first place - as the inspiration came at what you would hardly call reasonable hours. When she was 10, Aunt Maggie found her at one in the morning huddled over the hallway night light, finishing Uncle Herman’s copy of Firestarter. Some time after that, she thought it would have to take at least as long to come up with her own stories as it would to read them - and she thought she’d follow the ideas that often came to her in the middle of the night and often found their way into her dreams.

She was seven years old when she came to live with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Herman in Shoke - a good four hours out of Tarpon Springs. She didn’t remember much about the drive - just that it was probably the night after her father’s funeral, and seeing so many roads strewn with white sand that hurt her eyes when she looked out of the car. Peter and Carl - their two boys - were mostly quiet for the entire drive back to the house - and it’s about the longest period of time she remembered them going without speaking for any time since then.

“Well, uh - it’ll be kind of like having a sister for you two,” Uncle Herman sounded about as reluctant as he often did over the whole prospect, without looking at the backseat as he drove over the land that was getting flatter and flatter. He always tried to lighten the moment, she thought - even though he was sometimes hopelessly bad at it. Aunt Maggie didn’t talk too much either - just turned her head towards Kate with eyes that were red and watery not much earlier, and holding a tissue, anticipating the tears from Kate that would probably make her cry again.

At least, when they got there, Carl was the one who carried her bags without being told, and led her to what the boys used to call the secret room. She recognized it as the forgotten room that was off-limits when she went over to play with Carl and Pete - that smelled of paint chips and shrouded off by blankets, and surely hid a much darker secret. The demons of her nightmares would On short notice, Uncle Herman put together a cot that wobbled and some blankets - but even to this day, she could notice the musty smell - one she always felt was a forbidding kind of smell.

It was ruled a boating accident - though Kate mostly remembered it as the night when her father didn’t come home ever again. They were going to watch a good one that night - Creature From the Black Lagoon on Channel 11 as soon as he walked in the door. That’s what he told her the last time they spoke. She fell asleep with the movie flickering in the living room, waiting for him on the couch - and that’s when she had the first of the dreams.