Only the Dead Know Burbank Read online

  DEDICATION

  FOR SOPHIA LACRAMOSA,

  the Vampire Girl of Central Park

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I see them (if you can call it seeing) feint toward the open street, their resolve failing like bad teeth. They are not cops. Their badges of office are printed paper in plastic sleeves dangling from polyester lariats as if they’re junior managers at a hotel convention. He checks the address that rides in blue ink on the creases of his palm. She coughs into her fist. And I would spare them some sympathy if I wasn’t their object.

  They are two.

  A he and a her.

  They almost break my heart. They haven’t done their homework. They haven’t made the doing specific. He ambles up my walk irresolute, listing like a lothario who has been asked to pick up Tampax before the third date. Cued to the duty, uncommitted to the task. And she’s no better. Her hips have petrified, calves pumping like pistons unused to the slap of a hem. And once they get here, once they knuckle-tap twice and announce Child Protective Services and hear no reply then try the knob and feel the door give (I always leave it open), what do they find?

  Nothing. Expanse. The chocolate shag still furrowed from the vacuum blade fully forty-six years ago. Stale air. The kitchen hinges virginal under a second coat of paint. Dust in the sinks. No furniture. No crumbs. They’ll lump around for ten minutes or so, checking the bedroom. All the closets. Save one. The one that shelters the greening plumbing and the mice and the dark. The one where no living child would dare linger. Not breathing. Not blinking.

  A rumor.

  It is a game we play, my landlady and I. I get more quiet than usual and she conjures up a winter passion for my welfare—Oh, that poor little darling in 602, she’s up there all alone. I can’t imagine where her parents have gone—knowing I’ve sat in these rooms alone for four decades, chaperoned only by tangles of spider floss and yellow afternoons. I wonder sometimes what they would think of me if they ever actually caught me. A girl just shy of the exit of her adolescence. Long black hair, pale gray eyes. Long-limbed and thin. Cheekbones and breasts full of promise but shunted in their strides. They might see my skin as flawless if not for its sallow hue. They might think my full lips pretty if they weren’t so freighted with an old woman’s regrets.

  I suppose I could leave here, tuck myself beneath a nice quiet garbage heap in the shade of that ominous H that still beckons and chides from the spine of Mount Lee. But I can’t leave my view of the studios. Everything happened there.

  Perhaps it was enough to have held the drowsy wrist of dear Mr. Pratt when he took those first star-making steps backward. To have whispered in the doubtful ear that allowed Bela’s black lips to spread and dare the world a taste. To have had one finger on the knife switch that woke a world to a thrill of lightning that could do more than just spark our televisions and power our vibrators. When nightmares first learned to speak English and the flickers were hot as scissor arcs. I won’t take credit for the genre, no matter how many times my name may surface in deep blogs dedicated to such ephemera. The Phantom Girl of Stage 28. The Vampire Girl of Universal City. It is difficult to know which legends to trust. Which are born of the idle breath of gossip. And which shadows still have the heft to haunt.

  Confusion breeds nostalgia. And these are confusing times.

  CHAPTER 1

  I wasn’t always in love with the dark. I remember a Bavarian sun, ambering through my eyelids, the veiled light sitting hot on the tender corneas. When I dared open my eyes, the sunlight would sear a white circle onto the retinas. Closing them again, I would delight in the black suns that wavered in the hollows of my skull.

  That was my first camera.

  We lived in woods so ancient some trees still bore the wounds of gladius and pilum, deep longitudes from the days when centurions tried to recruit from the chalked Celts and found themselves quartered in bronze pots, a feast for the Aesir. Our village lay on the outskirts of Laupheim, the town where Carl Laemmle would be born, near the Rottum river in southern Germany. And although it may have appeared a paradise in the daylight, these were closed climes no soldier of Christ could fully purchase. The priests were misled when they pronounced our burg converted. Those were not crosses over the markers of the dead but Thor’s hammer lending fist for the dead’s last fights. This Jesus of the east was only tolerated for he had gained his wisdom, like mighty Odin, hanging from a tree wounded by a spear.

  An open field could not be planted. It was common knowledge such empty expanses served as the incestuous beds of the old gods. Elder groves were left standing for fear the trees might be witches in arboreal suspension. It was well known cribs made of elder delivered up quiet babies in lingering stupors, their spongy bodies blotched with mysterious bruises and cuts. An elder log tossed on a solstice fire could summon the devil. The sewn fields of our village flowed around the bases of such trunks like great snakes sleeping at silent and terrible ankles. Alderwood was a favorite of the nixies and other water sprites and therefore could be used only for well roofs and sluice gates. Willows were known to uproot themselves at night and follow foreigners to their deaths. With such innate motive properties, willow wood was a favorite for witches’ brooms. Ash trees had healing powers, while the buds of a whitehanded birch could cause madness. We children were cautioned never to pick the last apple of the season or our teeth would turn to angry wasps that would nest in our greedy stomachs and brains.

  Life in our village required an advanced understanding of diplomacy. The woods teemed with all manner of fairy folk, each with its own etiquette, customs, and particular channels of offense. A trip to the outhouse could be delayed upward of ten minutes in obeisance to all the attendant rituals needed to avoid maladies as divergent as tapeworms to chronic flatulence. And if for one minute we doubted the necessity of all these calisthenics, there was proof enough in the myriad deficiencies and deformities that surrounded us. Cows born with six heads whose milk stunk like vinegar belonged
unerringly to those who dared cross the thresholds of their homes with their ax blades facing heaven. Wens that wouldn’t heal, diseases that fed on nose tips and earlobes, all were justified responses to any rudeness leveled at the little people.

  My own grandmother, once a hive of energy, suffered until her death from a listlessness so pervasive it could take a full minute simply to lift a teacup. And how had she been cursed? As a newly married woman, she had indulged in a dalliance with a Jewish petticoat salesman. When dawn came, after her tryst, a smile would not leave her sleeping lips. Her throat was covered with livid love bites. A gentle blow to the head, a bracing douse of icy water, nothing would rouse her. It was clear she was a victim of a vampire. Suspicion immediately turned to the undergarment salesman, as everyone knew Jews had no life force of their own.

  He was caught at sunrise rocking gracefully with his morning prayers under the shade of an alder tree. My grandfather hammered the ash stakes into the four cardinal points of the Jew’s body and quartered him cleanly with his best ax. He was buried in four separate graves, each site divided by a north-running creek to prevent his reeking soul from crossing and thereby coaxing his flesh back into service.

  It seemed my grandmother’s transgression had left her more than lushly exhausted. She was full with child. My mother was born loathed. But my grandfather was too conscientious a man (as his concern for the soul of the petticoat salesman had shown) to slake his vengeance on the innocent. Besides, my mother was extremely fair, even if she was a cub of Beelzebub. He thought her red hair would keep the boys away, at least until he had extracted several seasons of work out of her. He was wrong.

  I don’t know why she carried me to term. She was feared by the people of our village. It’s not that they were afraid of witches. Witches were as common as clover in my village. It was her. The wantonness of her that mystified them. Widows crossed to the other side of the path when she approached, spitting three times as she passed. It was rumored she knew the language of slugs and cats, that she could turn the teeth of a violent man to glass, so I’m sure she knew the herbs that could have stilled my quickening. But she let me grow, her pale freckled flesh becoming harder and rounder. By the winter solstice my time had come. She made a fire of green willow branches she tore with her left hand and stood naked in the smoke until the blush of the first winter sun. Then she walked to an open field, her skin and hair still reeking from the willow smoke and, squatting in the chamomile, pulled me from her body without a single sound. A young cowherd, up early from delivering a breech calf, said he saw her raise the afterbirth to the sun before swallowing it whole.

  I remember her touch. A song she would sing.

  My mother disappeared one evening when I was still in swaddling. She stuck me in a sack and tacked me to a tree beside the summer scythes, an empty dipper at my dangling feet. I was found by my grandfather, who was furious. He was convinced I was destined to be as wicked and unruly as she. I spent years listening to him brine himself in his own invective whenever her name was mentioned. And I learned to hate parts of my body.

  I don’t know how old I was when she finally came back. I had all my molars and had suffered shamefully through two cycles of my monthly bleeding. She was wearing a striped dress of yellow and black, high collared and badly worn at the hem. Her slim waist was bound up in a secondhand corset, the whalebone shrill through the cheap batting. My grandfather opened his mouth to protest. But one look from my mother and the sound was stilled in his throat. I remember black flies crawling at the corners of his drying lips. She offered no explanation, no greeting. She merely held out her arms and I came running, like a planet drawn to its death by an immovable sun. She had brought a mule with her. In place of a saddle, a man’s pinstriped coat was draped over the animal’s backbone. She sat me on the bundled coat and we walked the twelve miles to Ulm.

  The mule’s spine cut deep into my cursed places. My rattled thoughts were not on my mother’s sudden return, her purpose in repossessing me. The animal’s belligerent shifting caused a welcome if fearful friction that addled my mind and kept it seared to where my grandfather had taught me it should not linger. I was courting devils with goaty faces and long dexterous limbs who would stuff me with spider sacs and stitch me shut. I tensed my insides and focused ahead, on the back of the woman walking before me. Even under layers of rank flounce and cheap twill, her backside lolled like a possessed pudding, a moveable confection for the damned.

  The tree finches and frogs lost their voices. We were leaving the forest. The path became more packed. The wind reeked of sour congregations, open pits buzzing with the smell of fingered copper and ammonia. I was afraid. It was the farthest I had ever been from home. We were nearing people. Nearing strangers. We stopped at a clearing of fresh stumps, the raw circles still skin-bright and smelling of raped pine. She turned to me and, lifting the edge of her skirt, applied it to her wet tongue. She sponged me with the rough fabric.

  “You can’t face townsfolk looking like a whore fit only for a two-penny upright,” she said. Her touch was practical and loveless, three rough strokes that raised the blood on my cheeks and chin. She tore a strip of cloth from her soiled petticoat, pinched it between her teeth, and ripped it cleanly in two. She raked her hard fingers through my hair, gathering it into two greasy hanks. She tied these into limp horns on either side of my head.

  The beginning of power is when fear turns to wonder.

  So it was the devil I was finally to meet.

  CHAPTER 2

  The path must have given offense, for what was once living earth lay scabbed with smooth black stone cut at sharp angles, set tightly as snake scales. I had never seen cobblestone before. Two feeble creeks, wrestled straight, ran foul on either side of the path. Rising just above the running filth were ledges of smooth stone that ran the whole length of the main street. The barns and hovels were not made of dung and sticks. They were built like enormous coffins, set on end, shiny as beetle wings. The porch rungs grinned like skulls. Each building bore a curse in a bold symbol above the door or over expanses of bewitched air where the symbols seemed to float in perfect stillness. Behind these expanses, headless and armless torsos were trussed in straight-stitched cloth with cruel-looking shoes and cagelike hats. Other windows were filled with bloodless meat, hanging from hooks, obviously meant as offerings, never for civilized consumption.

  All the buildings seemed to be patched together with the same hard angles, the same unwavering lines fit only for boxing the dead. This was no quaint city square. This was the ripe hell spoken of by the skalds. A half place where she-demons wore human faces and stuffed their deformed bodies in bell-like dresses and hid their cloven feet in spade-shaped boots. The males wore collars of thinly pounded bone, cunningly constructed to look like cloth, that pushed the blood purple into their naked chins. Bulbous felt and feathered hats covered what surely must be their horns. I reached up and touched the loose hanks that sprang from my own head. I feared I couldn’t fool any of these creatures.

  The mule caught a scent and lifted its head. Its short legs began to churn. I was jostled forward. Small sparks shot from beneath its tiny shoes as it loped over the stones. Then it stopped before a post and waited. My mother lifted me off the animal and tucked the coat I had sat on under her arm. It was warm and damp from the combined heat of our bodies and I moved to stroke the mule’s velvet, but my mother slapped my hand away and pushed me toward a doorway blocked by two swaying shutters. There was a smell of sawdust and spilled beer. A tinny music trailed above raised rough voices.

  The men looked up. All I could see at first were men.

  Fair heads. Raw blood in their cheeks. All wore mustaches, grotesques things damp with beer froth that camouflaged their wet leers. They wore rolled sleeves with black in the bends of their arms and a similar black in traces of crude tattoos that rippled over sinews and veins. I had seen tattoos before, in sigils and runic spells that arched over the hearts of certain men in my village, protecting them
from blights, busted bones, and other evils. But these men in the tavern were stained with what looked to be a child’s musings. Dull dripping knives and silly skulls and overfed women ready for their bimonthly baths. These men must have been repositories for devils and these marks on their skin kept the demons caged.

  All eyes hung heavy on my mother’s passing but she seemed not to notice. She walked straight toward a table in the back, pushing me before her. The table was strewn with the lounging bodies of several women, all overripe and spilling from their tight bodices. All I could see at first were their lush backs and the dull black of the hair piled above their small ears. They could be sisters, so common was this black hair among them. I was later to learn this color was a badge of their profession, a requisite rinse of coal tar thinned with vinegar and pine spirits that distinguished those in the life.

  All but one.

  My mother’s rebellious red locks cleaved the throng of night-headed whores. They parted reluctantly like corrupt petals spreading for a ravenous bee. And what was at the heart of this ruined flower?

  A man, of course.

  Volker Kemp.

  But such a man. He was veiled in smoke of his own making, a soft red ember glowing from a dark stub in his teeth. He had full lips as lustful as any woman’s. His black mustache curled on waxed tips to the smooth boundaries of his face. He wasn’t dressed like the other men, radiated none of their roughness or weakening desire. He glistened with a relaxed sheen. But he wore no silk thread. The glow was an effect of his eyes. Just his black liquid eyes. Flanked with a spray of thick lashes, those eyes pierced one like fingertips beneath bodice buttons. I knew of such eyes, knew they belonged to wicked gypsies who could steal years from your life by counting your teeth. But still I stared back and must have smiled, for I felt my gums grow dry as my smile was returned and my cursed places began to tremble. He seemed pleased by my discomfort and his eyes surged. But I did not look away.

  “You should have warned me she would be so becoming,” he purred, his eyes never leaving mine. When he leaned forward I could smell traces of bergamot laced with his tobacco. “You know, love, if you put on a little weight, washed that face and neck of yours, you’d be quite a pretty little pet.”