Pages From a Vampire's Journal

• Chapter 1: Finches
  
• Chapter 2: Cedric
  
• Chapter 3: Flipper
  
• Chapter 4: The Dark Follower
  
• Chapter 5: Gilchrist
  
• Chapter 6: Camilla
  
• Chapter 7: Clan Cabanis
  

Pages from a Vampire's Journal. Copyright © 2012 by Olivia d'Abo.

Journal Entry 7: “
Ran into my former teacher today. Long convo in coffee shop over his “regrets”. Tried to change the subject but he kept bringing us back to it. I told him we should never regret, per se. That breaks our own rules. Regret is for the weak. Mortals are weak. That is why they bow to Christ: to ease their regrets. Not us, I told him. Lions should never lay down with lambs. He became ill-mannered with this and walked off in a huff, saying I was worse than he. That old fool is going to get me killed someday with the running of his mouth…I just know it. I’ll wake up one day to a battering down of my door with peasants & torches, screaming “Get…her!” I should report him.”

December was the most brutish, bullying month for Trixie. Her semester grades were going to be in the mail unexpectedly early at 2pm on a dreary Friday as she looked out towards the quilted snow from her upstairs window. She wondered if she should brave the upcoming bleak, bashing blizzard to retrieve it before her stepmother Camilla did. She knew her step-mom had been eagerly awaiting it since Thanksgiving, and any excuse to drench Trixie with criticism was enough to get her saliva boiling. What a black, sorceress heart she had, Trixie thought.  On some quiet winter nights as she lay staring up at the stars through the sunroofed ceiling, she looked at her door and could swear she heard the “thump-dump” of her cruel stepmother’s heart in the next room. Sometimes she feared that it escaped her stepmother’s body completely, beating and slinking up and down the stairs at night in the calm darkness, and returning to its lair before the rays of dawn arrived. Perhaps even
it
grew weary of Camilla’s callousness. Trixie didn’t look forward to any of the grades that came and went over the years. She was an average student and not interested in nailing herself to a cross in some competition with other students. She wouldn’t do it for Camilla’s satisfaction. And those other students didn’t have Camilla for a stepmother.

The entire grading system seemed to conspire against Trixie in a maelstrom of half-truths and false faces. She had once dreamed of being overwhelmed by hordes of militant letters comprised of As and Bs, whose jagged peaks and razor edges poked and prodded her to compete and bring her academic arrears to the spotlight of Camilla’s fascist approval.  She had never wanted to aim her lettered darts at the bullseye of the board however, but rather aimed just off center as to not draw the attention of the mob of braggarts and snobs that she despised at school. She buried away any hope of getting straight A’s as these might prove diminishing returns. She imagined some future tombstone which would read: “
Here lies Trixie Cunningham, killed by her squalid As and badgering Bs
” and with a fine inscription: “…
this message sponsored by Camilla
”. Her school resembled a circus where the elephants and tigers were angrily loosed from their cages, and she was left alone, spinning on her wheel in the throwing dagger exhibition tent after everyone had fled. Trixie did dream too lucidly on occasion, however she always kept her dreams to herself. It was safer that way.

Perhaps most importantly, she at least liked herself. She wasn’t about to spend eight hours a day trying to ace every exam and kiss up to every sweaty-palmed gym teacher who flirted with her just to please Camilla. Camilla had hurled fiery, ungodly names at her for repeatedly not suiting up for gym class, and then grounded her for a month for not “being part of the team” as she put it. Trixie hated dodge ball, or getting hit by the other girls in any way. She didn’t like violent competitions. These were petty and egotistical, she believed.

The appetite of the great beast Camilla could never be satisfied anyway. If you got straight A’s, she’d grumble about your lackluster attendance. If you won the “Most Christian-like Student” award, she would say you’re too intolerant of other religions and culture. If you were valedictorian, the high school administration certainly goofed and mistaked you for someone else. You just knew that was what she would say. You just couldn’t win. Ever. Black dragons were never content with their horde of ill gotten treasure. They always flew that extra mile for an extra trinket or two, spraying chaos the entire trip.

Trixie looked at the bright golden finches in her iron birdcage. The cage was originally for an eagle. Now, it was a cagey estate for Pog and Wog, who seemed grateful. “I really wish I could be one of you guys right now. Just go and fly away to Bora Bora or wherever I want” she said to herself. “I know you guys probably don’t fly that far or live that long.” She reached into the cage and Pog hopped onto her finger, squinting up at her sideways chirping. She looked under the right wing. It hadn’t healed. A tiny scar was visible, a medal of sorts commemorating a botched escape attempt that almost landed her yellow feathers in the belly of Boris, Camilla’s orange Maine coon. Trixie remembered the not-so-subtle look of disappointment on Camilla’s face when her dad told her to be more careful about closing the cage door at night. Camilla had wished the cat would have gulped down that lackey bird and be rid of it. Several times Trixie suspected her of slipping some kitty litter into the birdcage in the hopes that the little yellow guys might mistake it for seed; their short-lived lives cut even shorter. The kitty litter certainly didn’t get into the cage on its own. Then again, maybe she was just being too paranoid. Nobody could be that cruel, could they?

Trixie let the finches peck about on her bed. They fluttered about, pecking randomly at her white bedspread emblazoned with a Celtic border. She looked out the window and watched the snow flurry down faster. She thought, “If I go to the mailbox and get my report card, Camilla will see my boot tracks in the snow. She’ll know I checked. But I have to do something. She is not going to drip-feed me with her cynicism again!” Trixie always felt that way after a lecture by Camilla: like she had been poisoned with insults beyond normal vernacular which pierced right under her skin. One bee sting was bad enough. Two was hell. Three or more and you might as well have stepped on a scorpion with eight little babies on its back, their pinchers poised for the kill. Unlike a bee, she didn’t weaken or die after the stung had been dredged. Camilla seemed to draw strength from the sting.

She put the finches back in their cage, and then started down the white-carpeted stairs, glancing quickly at the crimson bloodstain on the carpet. The stain was a relic of her finch that had narrowly escaped the brutal torture session by Boris a week prior. She always gave it a quick glance with every trip upstairs or down, to remind her that Boris was Camilla’s cat, not hers. She hated him like rat poison. He was heavy, sedated most of the time on cat depression pills, and blind in one eye. Trixie thought that in his previous life he might have been the infamous Black Bart, terrorist of the seven seas. All that was missing was the eye patch and a peg leg. He looked sickly and unhappy with his lot in this life.

There was a solemn rap at the door. Very faint, yet firm, as if a tree had been stroked up against the copper lion knocker on the door by the wind. She decided to be sure. She opened the door an inch and saw a pale, thin twenty-something with a faint mustache that curled a bit on the ends.

“Sorry but do you know if a Cunningham lives here?” he said.

“Yeah that’s me. I’m Trixie Cunningham, what do you want?”

He momentarily glanced at her quizzically, his pupils looking her up and down in the blink of an eye and said, “Well, I found this letter addressed to this address out on the street. Just lying in the snow mind ya. Your mailbox was open too. I’m bettin the cursed wind blew it open I would say. Not trying to pry, just thought I’d do my good deed for the day you know? Here.” He gave her a faint grin of innocence.

He smelled of tree sap and shredded pine. She gently took the letter, making slight contact with his ringed index finger in doing so. “A Celtic ring” she thought. It was a silver ring with some intertwining elephant trunks with celtic-looking runes swirled about it. She loved anything Celtic. It looked like an old Viking ring though he was far too skinny to be of lineage to a Norseman, she thought. She had studied old encyclopedias that had illustrated Viking warriors. They were all titanic in size. Trixie loved to guess people’s age as well. She not only could guess their age within a year, she could do wonders in guessing their weight, what country their family came from, what color hair their mother had. She knew genes and lineages. Her dad was a geneticist for an out-of-town pharmaceutical company called GeneSmith and talked about recessive alleles like they were tomorrow’s weather forecast. But this guy was different. For the first time in a long while, she couldn’t size up his age within a few seconds of meeting him like she could with others. Something about his penetrating gaze threw her guessing ability off, like he was guessing her age while she guessed his. Somehow their optical equation canceled each other out. Or perhaps they had engaged in some other kind of ethereal handshake.

She curtly said thank you and closed the door. She wouldn’t have to track through the snow to the mailbox after all. She could make up anything she wanted. She could say she had no idea where the report card was and with no tracks in the snow who would be the wiser? There was a fifty-fifty chance that Camilla would believe her. Or maybe it was seventy-thirty. Who knew, since there was always those off days where she couldn’t predict Camilla’s behavior. Like some old junkyard dog, you just couldn’t set your watch by her, even when the outside was filled with blue jays, sunshine and daisies. Trixie pulled back the lavish, purple curtain and peered through the window to the cobblestone street. No tracks in the snow at all. The envelope might have been lying halfway down the street for all she knew, but it belonged to Trixie now. It had Trixie’s name on it, not Camilla’s. Nothing good ever came from Camilla knowing about her academic “progress”, because regardless of that progress, rain and failure was always the end result from Camilla. Always, except today. Today was her day.

Trixie ran back to her room upstairs. A few minutes later, she heard Camilla’s Cadillac crunch the hardened snow in the driveway. Trixie always dreaded the sound of that car, like a pile driver in a construction site, announcing to everyone that peace was forbidden and a blissful sleep was rewarded with a smack to the head. She heard the obese Boris trot downstairs to greet its master like Igor to Dr. Frankenstein. Trixie for all her maturity might as well have had iron shackles and her auburn colored hair tied up in a hangman’s noose. The cold winter only seemed to tighten Camilla’s icy grip on her since she had made few friends since moving to Montreal and had nowhere to conceal her day from her.

“Camilla! Come!” her stepmother screamed.  Trixie’s blood turned ice cold. She took her time getting up from the bed to drag herself downstairs, which she thought of as a minefield.

“You already know what I’m going to ask Trixie. Where is it? It wasn’t in the mailbox. Did you get it?” she barked.

“No I didn’t get it. I’ve been in the house all day.”

Camilla looked at Trixie’s shoes in the corner of the kitchen, eyeing them for traces of fresh snow.

“You’re lying aren’t you? Go and GET that card or you’re going to be in more trouble girl” she snorted. Sometimes Trixie could almost see a short spark of flame under Camilla’s nose. It reminded her of trying to strike a stubborn match.

Trixie threw Camilla a contemptuous stare.

“I’m always lying aren’t I. So why do you bother asking? Anyhow I did not go near the mailbox and even if I did I wouldn’t lie about it! Besides it’s probably the same old “you made C’s again and you’ll never get anywhere in life being a C student, and blah, blah, blah freakin blah”.

Trixie ran upstairs before Camilla could blink. Camilla had never hit Trixie, but she had only married her father a couple of years back. So maybe there wasn’t enough time for that kind of dictatorship to evolve. Or maybe she knew that Trixie was a fighter and just might belt her a good one on the lip is she went too far. She stood up to the female bullies at school, and was fiercely confrontational without being a bully herself. It was an art she had mastered. For all the elementary years spent in school learning French, Geography and History, the most she had learned which she actually found useful was learned out on the playground. What the hell did she need to know about Greece, Bombay or Timbuktu? She didn’t plan on going to any of those places and even if she did, there were lots of quicker ways to learn than sitting in a humid lecture with forty other terminally smelly, bored students.

Trixie shut the door quietly. She didn’t need to slam it. That never worked anyway, and only risked breaking the door which would have upset her father, whom she adored at all hours of the day. That is, when she saw him. What he saw in Camilla she would never know. Maybe Camilla could give him something that she couldn’t, but whatever spell Camilla cast on him, it was a sphinx-level mystery as to how to break it.

“She isn’t coming up!” she thought. What a nice surprise. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes Camilla had had a brutal day at work and just couldn’t dish out any more punishment, even for Trixie.  “Being a student loan debt collector must be a tiring job I guess. I bet she is really good at it. What a monster. When she isn’t making me miserable she is making everyone else more miserable”, she thought.

She didn’t want to wither away in her upstairs room like some elderly woman with a lone cat who had died with no friends, but that is how she felt. Christmas was approaching and for all the striped candy and shimmering tinsel it gave, she simply could not look forward to breathing the same air as her arch-enemy. Better to overdose on black licorice laced with rat poison, she thought.

“No, I shouldn’t think that way” she thought. She had made a vow to herself that she would not treat evil for evil. She had remembered a similar line in some Shakespeare sonnet, but couldn’t remember which. So many sonnets dictated by a motley crew of bald, thin, and aging teachers and so few sonnets remembered, partially on account of slaving through three hours of dreadfully lifeless science classes. English writing for some unfathomable reason was the last class of the day.