Better off Red – Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

Evelyn Redding didn’t know what she was looking at, not at first. She recognized, at least dimly, that there was a girl and that the girl was chained to a bed. She could grasp all the pieces individually, but connecting them, putting it together—that was a very different thing. And at the moment it was completely beyond her.

All she did know, almost instinctually, was that she needed to smile. It was no different than Thurston bringing home a deer or a rabbit, at least not right now, when she could barely comprehend it. She hated all of his kills, his game. His trophies. They repulsed her, but her feelings didn’t matter. He’d always told her that and he was far from the first man to do so. What mattered was that they were his trophies and he was proud of them. With his family, sometimes his caring was questionable. But his trophies? Those she could easily say he loved.

“This is Lysette,” Redding said, the smile never wavering from his face. “She’s going to be staying with us for a while.” He turned to the family—his audience—and waited for a reaction.

Hearing the name was like a knife in Evelyn’s gut. Looking at the girl, that was one thing. But naming her, contextualizing her, that made the situation a reality and suddenly made Evelyn very uncomfortable.

Thurston had never named any of his trophies before.

Unable to look at Lysette any longer, she fixated her eyes on Thurston and said with a hollow voice that had years ago stopped being her own, “Is she hungry?”

“Well,” Thurston sighed, “that’s the thing. Lysette has a condition, one that’s very popular these days in the news.”

“AIDS?” Patrick asked. The young boy’s eyes were practically bursting out of his head. He was in Heaven right now.

“No, son. That hasn’t been popular in a long time. I’m speaking, of course, about vampirism. It’s a cruel condition. An evil one, too. I think we can all agree on that. We saw those horror movies and read those books. Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, these are depictions of corrupt evil spirits. But I believe there is a soul in this girl. And every single soul can be saved. Every soul is a challenge.”

Evelyn realized this was a sermon. That all of this was an excuse for a sermon, but she said nothing and let him continue.

He didn’t notice her reservations at all. “She is living a life of sin. Probably a longer life than any of us could hope to lead. I want to help this girl, I really do. I want to help make her whole again. Make her human again. But I can’t do that without the rest of you. You, my loving family. You’re who I need to make this work. Good food, good manners. She needs to see how a real, wholesome Christian family functions. We must provide for her a model of perfection or this whole thing could fall apart.”

“She’s a vampire?” Evelyn asked.

“Yes. I said that already.”

“A real vampire?” Patrick was stunned. “I’ve only seen them on the news and TV.”

“Yes, son. A real vampire.’

“Does she bleed like a person does?” Patrick’s eyes were fixated. He couldn’t even blink.

“I would assume so,” Redding said. “But I don’t know for sure.”

“Does it feel pain?” Patrick asked.

“I don’t know,” Redding said.

Eve, his teenage daughter, said absolutely nothing.