At first Eloy didn’t know what he’d found. It was behind the set of risers he was helping to move, a square box of a machine with a viewing screen and a wheel of sorts on its front. He knew it was old because it was covered in dust and the metal was painted a peculiar avocado green.
Elita, his twin found him wiping the front of it with his sleeve. “You’re in trouble again,” she lit into him without preamble, her dark eyes darting around the dim storage room, “Mr. Samael was asking where you were and saying you would get a zero for the day.”
“It says ‘Microforms Reader,’” Eloy sneezed, then looked up at Elita, “Like tiny forms? Or like microphone? Like some early sound equipment?”
“There’s no way anyone will believe that you were sitting here all class staring at a Microfilm Machine,” Elita poked her finger inside a cardboard box, “Hey, I think this is the tapes that go in it.” She opened the box and removed a reel of tape, a quarter of the size of an old-fashioned theater movie.
Eloy plugged in the machine while Elita placed the reel on the bracket. It took both of them to figure out how to feed the tape through the machine and into the empty spool. Eloy slid the switch to the “on” position, running his finger over the raised print, “Why do you suppose there’s two off buttons?”
“Wow, Eloy, look, old newspaper pages,” Elita carefully turned the knob in the center of the machine, advancing the tape, “This is from over 25 years ago.” The warning bell for the next period rang, but Elita didn’t seem to notice, her attention fixed on the black-and-white screen. Some of it was interesting, especially the old advertisements; but over time Eloy felt his attention waning. He lay on the cement floor, tucking his backpack under his head and closing his eyes.
He must have slept for a while, for when Elita shook him awake, there was a pile of viewed microfilm stacked next to his feet. He kicked one and it skittered across the room, its long tongue of tape lapping the floor. “You have to see this,” Elita’s face was feverish from excessive reading. She tapped on the screen and Eloy squinted at the article, “Choir to Sing for Governor.” The article itself was nothing remarkable, but the image on the page was puzzling.
“That’s Mr. Samael,” Eloy moved closer to the screen, “He looks exactly the same.”
“No,” Elita shook her head, “he is exactly the same. He hasn’t aged in . . . 27? years.”
“It’s been longer than that,” Mr. Samael’s voice startled them. He stood at the door to the storage room, his curly dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail, “Shouldn’t you both be getting home? School ended fifteen minutes ago.”
Eloy folded his arms in protest, “We’ll leave after you explain.”
“It’s rather simple,” Mr. Samael smiled disarmingly, “all my life I’ve been a vampire and a musician.”
Elita rolled her eyes and stood up, “Let’s go home, Eloy.”
—
Elita was hypnotized by the machine. She moved silently through the night and following morning with dazed eyes. It wasn’t until after school that Eloy heard her speak. “The storage room,” she looked at him sheepishly, “do you think it’s still unlocked?”
“Nah,” Eloy watched her deflate as if she’d been holding a note for too long without taking a catch breath. “I’ll ask Mr. Samael if you can use the Microfilm Reader,” he offered.
Elita’s eyes were bright with a sheen of almost shed tears, “Really?”
“Yeah, sure.” His offer was hardly as noble as it sounded. Eloy had questions he wanted to ask; questions he was too embarrassed to ask in front of Elita. While she was preoccupied with old newspapers, he could make the biggest fool out of himself and no one would know.
So instead of exiting the school into the sunshine, the twins headed back towards the music room. It was on a half-subterranean level, backed up into a hill on one side, a narrow hall on the other that separated the choir room from the orchestral suite. One floor up was the theater, which could be accessed through a stairwell that cleverly put one backstage. The twins took the route more frequently used, a main staircase that passed over the top of the storage and practice rooms before terminating in front of the music classrooms.
Mr. Samael was still in the choir room, lesson-planning for the next day, a metronome ticking on the piano in front of him. “Well, if it isn’t the Skiras,” Mr. Samael switched off the metronome, “What can I do for you two?”
“Could Elita use the Microfilm Machine again?” Eloy tipped the corners of his mouth up, a trick he had learned to make his dimples appear. Elita, who herself had been swayed by this maneuver, was now about to benefit from it.
“Aw, well, I guess I can do that for you,” Mr. Samael fished in his pocket, digging out a set of keys, “You know which one it is?”
Eloy handed the keys to Elita, with the storage room key up, “Yeah, uh, would it be okay if I hung out here? Those old things are kind of . . . boring.”
Mr. Samael chuckled, “You sure you want to hang out with this old thing?” He pointed to himself.
Eloy turned to his twin, only to discover she had already left, drawn to the machine like a magnet to metal. He sat on the bottom tier of the terraced flooring that functioned as permanent risers, “Mr. Samael?”
The teacher switched the metronome back on, “I feel like our tempo is somehow wrong on Pulvis. We’ve been singing it as writ, but I’m thinking of maybe taking it down to 100 bmp.”
“Are you really a vampire?” Eloy felt silly the moment he said it, “I mean, you can’t be. You go outside in the daytime without like-“ Eloy did his best impersonation of spontaneous combustion; writhing on the platform, his face in agony.
“A lot of what people think they know about vampires is a distortion of the truth. Vampirism is a recessive disorder like color-blindness. Part of the syndrome is a sun allergy,” Mr. Samael stood up, carefully closing the piano, “Many people are allergic to the sun, but they don’t die when they, say, go near a window.”
The metronome continued ticking, and Eloy felt his speech fall into its rhythm, “What about crosses?”
“What about crosses?” Mr. Samael had moved so quickly, Eloy didn’t see him walk across the room. He stood over Eloy, an amused look on his face, “Are you wearing a cross, Eloy Skira?” Mr. Samael grabbed Eloy’s arm, biting his bicep.
“Get off me!” Eloy punched his teacher on the top of the head. “Oh God,” he thought, “I’m going to get suspended for punching a teacher.” He hesitated for a moment, his mind filling with the tock-tock-tock of the metronome. The bite no longer hurt, it was just a slow, abiding ache. He closed his eyes and thought of sleep. Sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . .
“Better to be suspended than to turn into a vampire,” the thought was spoken in his sister’s voice.
Eloy opened his eyes and winced, “That really hurts! Get off me, Dracula!” This time his blow had the desired effect, loosening Mr. Samael’s teeth from his arm. Eloy jerked away with a spurt of blood.
—
It was peculiar that he didn’t remember leaving the choir room; but the present, if it was to be trusted, indicated that he had. He knew that he had joined Elita in the storage room, because it was there that he had fainted in high, melodramatic fashion. Elita, thinking he was joking, had roused him and marched him back towards the vampire. Eloy fully returned to his senses in a panic, “We can’t go that way,” he pulled his sister back towards the stairs.
“But I have to return Mr. Samael’s keys.”
The first day of class Mr. Samael had written his name on the music staff printed on the whiteboard, using notes in place of the vowels in his name. Turning to face them, he stared silently until the room was quiet. ”Welcome to the South Leonard High School Choir. We will learn and perform music as professionals. I will know if you’re doing the work. If you miss a concert, if you don’t learn your part, if your music is not memorized; I will know and I will fail you.”
Choir was not a class to be skipped, but Eloy could avoid Mr. Samael simply by sticking with the other students. If he was never alone, the vampire couldn’t touch him, at least not physically. Instead, he targeted Elita. Elita had never been one of Mr. Samael’s favorite students, with a stage-fright so extreme that her voice would crack and her tone flatten. Now he took every opportunity to embarrass her; correcting her vowel formation, breathing, and posture in front of the other students.
“We have a concert coming up in two weeks,” Mr. Samael reminded them, “We need to forget our own egos and work together as a team. That is why, I’m going to ask some of you not to sing.” Mr. Samael looked around the room, “Olivia, it’s your first week at this school. You have showed a great deal of promise as a musician, but haven’t had time to learn the music. Elita, well, you know why I’m asking you not to sing.”
Eloy watched his sister flinch from where he stood, surrounded by other baritones. “Enough,” he hissed under his breath. He lingered after class, watching the other students file out the door, black binders stuffed hastily into their backpacks. Once it was just him and the teacher, Eloy descended the risers, one large step at a time. He stopped on the bottom tier, “Leave my sister out of this.”
“Leave my sister out of this,” Mr. Samael mimicked in a whine. He smiled, his overly white teeth glinting in the fluorescent light, “What will you do to have me leave your sister alone?”
“You-you think I’m just going to let you vamp me for that?” Eloy tried to look tough, but he could feel his voice shake.
“No, I would expect you want more than that, but there’s nothing I could possibly do this late in the quarter. I couldn’t possibly give her a solo, Mayson has already been picked for the one solo we have this concert. I couldn’t possibly make her a section leader, that’s already been assigned to Paige,” the vampire ended his speech with a sigh.
Eloy nodded, “You will do all that, if you want my blood.”
—
He was so weary, everything seemed to take too much effort. Just walking from class to class left him drowsy enough to nap. Never having been a spectacular student, Eloy found his grades slipping from Bs and Cs to Ds. The bruise on his arm became darker, but it was easily covered by a shirt sleeve. The more important thing was that he had saved Elita. He couldn’t live with the idea that someone was bullying his sister and he did nothing. As far as he saw it, anyone in his position would have done the same.
But his exhaustion had made him careless, a carelessness he didn’t even realize until he saw his twin over the curls of Mr. Samael’s head. Her facial expression puzzled him; it wasn’t fear or surprise, it was a look of determination. She walked over to the piano, carefully lifting the ticking metronome. She raised it above her head, then in one clean movement, propelled it downwards like a volleyball player spiking a ball. It splintered as it hit the ground; and as pieces of the delicate machinery whirled off in different directions, the vampire himself began to dematerialize. His skin cracked, and through the fissures Eloy could see the gears and springs that made Mr. Samael seem alive. There was a sound, like a toy being wound too tight; then he burst, cogs and tension rods, solenoids and valves, all the machinery showering down on top of Eloy.
“Are you okay?” Elita pulled one of the larger metal plates off of him.
Eloy stood, shaking the debris off him. Somehow he felt more awake than he had all year. “What a strange vampire,” he gestured at the metal housing that had formed the head.
“It’s not a vampire. That’s what I realized. I was researching in the library and I found microfilm from the early 1900s that had been scanned into the computer,” Elita bent and picked up a piece of machinery, “There was a man who made music boxes, his name was Samael Harp.” She held up the piece so Eloy could see the word “Harp” stamped on the metal. “Harp was supposed to unveil a fantastic new invention, when he was found dead in his workshop, a metronome ticking next to him. A man claiming to be his brother took charge of his estate. It wasn’t until Harp’s real brother showed up, that anyone realized something was amiss.” Elita pulled a xeroxed page out of her pocket, “You can’t really tell from this copy, but that,” she tapped the picture under the word WANTED,” is Mr.Samael.”
“So he was a robot-vampire?”
“No, he was a music box,” Elita produced another xerox, this one a faded patent application, “the winding mechanism is the metronome. It wasn’t enough though.”
Eloy nodded. It definitely was not enough.
**********************
Elita, his twin found him wiping the front of it with his sleeve. “You’re in trouble again,” she lit into him without preamble, her dark eyes darting around the dim storage room, “Mr. Samael was asking where you were and saying you would get a zero for the day.”
“It says ‘Microforms Reader,’” Eloy sneezed, then looked up at Elita, “Like tiny forms? Or like microphone? Like some early sound equipment?”
“There’s no way anyone will believe that you were sitting here all class staring at a Microfilm Machine,” Elita poked her finger inside a cardboard box, “Hey, I think this is the tapes that go in it.” She opened the box and removed a reel of tape, a quarter of the size of an old-fashioned theater movie.
Eloy plugged in the machine while Elita placed the reel on the bracket. It took both of them to figure out how to feed the tape through the machine and into the empty spool. Eloy slid the switch to the “on” position, running his finger over the raised print, “Why do you suppose there’s two off buttons?”
“Wow, Eloy, look, old newspaper pages,” Elita carefully turned the knob in the center of the machine, advancing the tape, “This is from over 25 years ago.” The warning bell for the next period rang, but Elita didn’t seem to notice, her attention fixed on the black-and-white screen. Some of it was interesting, especially the old advertisements; but over time Eloy felt his attention waning. He lay on the cement floor, tucking his backpack under his head and closing his eyes.
He must have slept for a while, for when Elita shook him awake, there was a pile of viewed microfilm stacked next to his feet. He kicked one and it skittered across the room, its long tongue of tape lapping the floor. “You have to see this,” Elita’s face was feverish from excessive reading. She tapped on the screen and Eloy squinted at the article, “Choir to Sing for Governor.” The article itself was nothing remarkable, but the image on the page was puzzling.
“That’s Mr. Samael,” Eloy moved closer to the screen, “He looks exactly the same.”
“No,” Elita shook her head, “he is exactly the same. He hasn’t aged in . . . 27? years.”
“It’s been longer than that,” Mr. Samael’s voice startled them. He stood at the door to the storage room, his curly dark hair pulled into a messy ponytail, “Shouldn’t you both be getting home? School ended fifteen minutes ago.”
Eloy folded his arms in protest, “We’ll leave after you explain.”
“It’s rather simple,” Mr. Samael smiled disarmingly, “all my life I’ve been a vampire and a musician.”
Elita rolled her eyes and stood up, “Let’s go home, Eloy.”
—
Elita was hypnotized by the machine. She moved silently through the night and following morning with dazed eyes. It wasn’t until after school that Eloy heard her speak. “The storage room,” she looked at him sheepishly, “do you think it’s still unlocked?”
“Nah,” Eloy watched her deflate as if she’d been holding a note for too long without taking a catch breath. “I’ll ask Mr. Samael if you can use the Microfilm Reader,” he offered.
Elita’s eyes were bright with a sheen of almost shed tears, “Really?”
“Yeah, sure.” His offer was hardly as noble as it sounded. Eloy had questions he wanted to ask; questions he was too embarrassed to ask in front of Elita. While she was preoccupied with old newspapers, he could make the biggest fool out of himself and no one would know.
So instead of exiting the school into the sunshine, the twins headed back towards the music room. It was on a half-subterranean level, backed up into a hill on one side, a narrow hall on the other that separated the choir room from the orchestral suite. One floor up was the theater, which could be accessed through a stairwell that cleverly put one backstage. The twins took the route more frequently used, a main staircase that passed over the top of the storage and practice rooms before terminating in front of the music classrooms.
Mr. Samael was still in the choir room, lesson-planning for the next day, a metronome ticking on the piano in front of him. “Well, if it isn’t the Skiras,” Mr. Samael switched off the metronome, “What can I do for you two?”
“Could Elita use the Microfilm Machine again?” Eloy tipped the corners of his mouth up, a trick he had learned to make his dimples appear. Elita, who herself had been swayed by this maneuver, was now about to benefit from it.
“Aw, well, I guess I can do that for you,” Mr. Samael fished in his pocket, digging out a set of keys, “You know which one it is?”
Eloy handed the keys to Elita, with the storage room key up, “Yeah, uh, would it be okay if I hung out here? Those old things are kind of . . . boring.”
Mr. Samael chuckled, “You sure you want to hang out with this old thing?” He pointed to himself.
Eloy turned to his twin, only to discover she had already left, drawn to the machine like a magnet to metal. He sat on the bottom tier of the terraced flooring that functioned as permanent risers, “Mr. Samael?”
The teacher switched the metronome back on, “I feel like our tempo is somehow wrong on Pulvis. We’ve been singing it as writ, but I’m thinking of maybe taking it down to 100 bmp.”
“Are you really a vampire?” Eloy felt silly the moment he said it, “I mean, you can’t be. You go outside in the daytime without like-“ Eloy did his best impersonation of spontaneous combustion; writhing on the platform, his face in agony.
“A lot of what people think they know about vampires is a distortion of the truth. Vampirism is a recessive disorder like color-blindness. Part of the syndrome is a sun allergy,” Mr. Samael stood up, carefully closing the piano, “Many people are allergic to the sun, but they don’t die when they, say, go near a window.”
The metronome continued ticking, and Eloy felt his speech fall into its rhythm, “What about crosses?”
“What about crosses?” Mr. Samael had moved so quickly, Eloy didn’t see him walk across the room. He stood over Eloy, an amused look on his face, “Are you wearing a cross, Eloy Skira?” Mr. Samael grabbed Eloy’s arm, biting his bicep.
“Get off me!” Eloy punched his teacher on the top of the head. “Oh God,” he thought, “I’m going to get suspended for punching a teacher.” He hesitated for a moment, his mind filling with the tock-tock-tock of the metronome. The bite no longer hurt, it was just a slow, abiding ache. He closed his eyes and thought of sleep. Sleep . . . sleep . . . sleep . . .
“Better to be suspended than to turn into a vampire,” the thought was spoken in his sister’s voice.
Eloy opened his eyes and winced, “That really hurts! Get off me, Dracula!” This time his blow had the desired effect, loosening Mr. Samael’s teeth from his arm. Eloy jerked away with a spurt of blood.
—
It was peculiar that he didn’t remember leaving the choir room; but the present, if it was to be trusted, indicated that he had. He knew that he had joined Elita in the storage room, because it was there that he had fainted in high, melodramatic fashion. Elita, thinking he was joking, had roused him and marched him back towards the vampire. Eloy fully returned to his senses in a panic, “We can’t go that way,” he pulled his sister back towards the stairs.
“But I have to return Mr. Samael’s keys.”
“He, uh, isn’t there,” Eloy scrambled for a lie that would appease her, “He said to put his keys in his box in the office.”
Elita allowed him to pull her up the staircase, “Okay.”
Eloy watched her climb the stairs ahead of him. The momentary burst of adrenaline had worn off and he was exhausted. Each step took a tremendous amount of effort and he slipped farther and farther behind his twin. Alone, every movement echoing off the empty school hallways, he tried to remember how one became a vampire. Did it only take one bite? He was pretty sure his blood had to be completely drained. Or was it that he had to drink vampire blood?
—The first day of class Mr. Samael had written his name on the music staff printed on the whiteboard, using notes in place of the vowels in his name. Turning to face them, he stared silently until the room was quiet. ”Welcome to the South Leonard High School Choir. We will learn and perform music as professionals. I will know if you’re doing the work. If you miss a concert, if you don’t learn your part, if your music is not memorized; I will know and I will fail you.”
Choir was not a class to be skipped, but Eloy could avoid Mr. Samael simply by sticking with the other students. If he was never alone, the vampire couldn’t touch him, at least not physically. Instead, he targeted Elita. Elita had never been one of Mr. Samael’s favorite students, with a stage-fright so extreme that her voice would crack and her tone flatten. Now he took every opportunity to embarrass her; correcting her vowel formation, breathing, and posture in front of the other students.
“We have a concert coming up in two weeks,” Mr. Samael reminded them, “We need to forget our own egos and work together as a team. That is why, I’m going to ask some of you not to sing.” Mr. Samael looked around the room, “Olivia, it’s your first week at this school. You have showed a great deal of promise as a musician, but haven’t had time to learn the music. Elita, well, you know why I’m asking you not to sing.”
Eloy watched his sister flinch from where he stood, surrounded by other baritones. “Enough,” he hissed under his breath. He lingered after class, watching the other students file out the door, black binders stuffed hastily into their backpacks. Once it was just him and the teacher, Eloy descended the risers, one large step at a time. He stopped on the bottom tier, “Leave my sister out of this.”
“Leave my sister out of this,” Mr. Samael mimicked in a whine. He smiled, his overly white teeth glinting in the fluorescent light, “What will you do to have me leave your sister alone?”
“You-you think I’m just going to let you vamp me for that?” Eloy tried to look tough, but he could feel his voice shake.
“No, I would expect you want more than that, but there’s nothing I could possibly do this late in the quarter. I couldn’t possibly give her a solo, Mayson has already been picked for the one solo we have this concert. I couldn’t possibly make her a section leader, that’s already been assigned to Paige,” the vampire ended his speech with a sigh.
Eloy nodded, “You will do all that, if you want my blood.”
—
He was so weary, everything seemed to take too much effort. Just walking from class to class left him drowsy enough to nap. Never having been a spectacular student, Eloy found his grades slipping from Bs and Cs to Ds. The bruise on his arm became darker, but it was easily covered by a shirt sleeve. The more important thing was that he had saved Elita. He couldn’t live with the idea that someone was bullying his sister and he did nothing. As far as he saw it, anyone in his position would have done the same.
But his exhaustion had made him careless, a carelessness he didn’t even realize until he saw his twin over the curls of Mr. Samael’s head. Her facial expression puzzled him; it wasn’t fear or surprise, it was a look of determination. She walked over to the piano, carefully lifting the ticking metronome. She raised it above her head, then in one clean movement, propelled it downwards like a volleyball player spiking a ball. It splintered as it hit the ground; and as pieces of the delicate machinery whirled off in different directions, the vampire himself began to dematerialize. His skin cracked, and through the fissures Eloy could see the gears and springs that made Mr. Samael seem alive. There was a sound, like a toy being wound too tight; then he burst, cogs and tension rods, solenoids and valves, all the machinery showering down on top of Eloy.
“Are you okay?” Elita pulled one of the larger metal plates off of him.
Eloy stood, shaking the debris off him. Somehow he felt more awake than he had all year. “What a strange vampire,” he gestured at the metal housing that had formed the head.
“It’s not a vampire. That’s what I realized. I was researching in the library and I found microfilm from the early 1900s that had been scanned into the computer,” Elita bent and picked up a piece of machinery, “There was a man who made music boxes, his name was Samael Harp.” She held up the piece so Eloy could see the word “Harp” stamped on the metal. “Harp was supposed to unveil a fantastic new invention, when he was found dead in his workshop, a metronome ticking next to him. A man claiming to be his brother took charge of his estate. It wasn’t until Harp’s real brother showed up, that anyone realized something was amiss.” Elita pulled a xeroxed page out of her pocket, “You can’t really tell from this copy, but that,” she tapped the picture under the word WANTED,” is Mr.Samael.”
“So he was a robot-vampire?”
“No, he was a music box,” Elita produced another xerox, this one a faded patent application, “the winding mechanism is the metronome. It wasn’t enough though.”
Eloy nodded. It definitely was not enough.
**********************
This story was inspired by the recent choir reunion I attended. Someone commented that the director hadn’t aged, and I responded with, “She must be a vampire.” Everyone just gave me odd looks, but I kept thinking about what an interesting idea that was. Once I thought of the line, “A musician and a vampire,” I knew two things: 1. I am hopelessly cheesy and 2. I had to write this story.