Do You Know How to Kill a Vampire?
The old space up on the third floor still had a plaque by the door that read “IMC” although even some of the most tenured teachers didn’t remember what it stood for. Julio waited outside the room at the head of the line, running his fingers over a patch of bumps on the plaque, mouthing the word library as though he could read the braille. As though he could read much of anything—he was only six and the mere first letter of his name, he found, was complicated.
People may say that boys in general have a lot of energy, but Julio was one of those children with a gratuitous amount of boy energy. His voice was always lagging behind his thoughts, and his words, when he was particularly thrilled about something, revved up before he could let them loose into questions or statements. It was trying to the adults in his world, whose time was very intended. Not to mention, when he was finally revved-up, it was difficult to get him to stop, or pause, or change direction. As a result, the boy was easily frustrated, ignored or dismissed as he often was. Except for the librarian Ms. Feliz, his favorite teacher.
Ms. Feliz had been at the school her entire career, over twenty-five years, but she was not always the librarian. And to her pupils’ astonishment, she was also a former student.
“Miss,” the children would say, “you’ve been here forever.”
“Do I look that old?”
“Oh no, miss,” they would reply, not out of embarrassment, but with genuine sincerity, “you look eighteen.”
She laughed, because the younger grades thought twenty was old.
Ms. Feliz did look younger than she was. She tried her best to maintain her youth, despite the waxing struggle she felt in her body, and sometimes in her mind.
Julio hoped Ms. Feliz had some new monster books in. He hated that spring was coming and not fall, when all the new Halloween books arrived.
Situated in what was originally an oversized storage space, the library was converted in the late 70s with a grant from the state for underserved schools. This coincided with the city’s new integrated schools policy. There were no windows in the room, but the brightness of the outdated wood shelving and fluorescent lights was soft enough to give the cavernous space its cozy mood. Across the hall was a closet that stored all the bygone media the district refused to collect: rolls of projection filmstrip, boxes of audio cassettes and reels of 16mm film, with no equipment to play them.
The line of 1st graders was getting wriggly—wrigglier—and then Ms. Feliz opened the door and welcomed the class in, greeting each child by name.
To say the librarian’s face was enchanting was an understatement. It was arresting and possessing. Large, bright, brown eyes and a full smile that was as kind as it was mirthful, framed by glossy black hair.
The children would jokingly ask her, “Miss, why are your eyes so big?”
“Oh, you know. The better to read with.”
“Hey, miss, why are your teeth so big?”
“The better to eat a doughnut!”
Ms. Feliz’s level of commandment allowed the teachers to actually return to their classrooms and do some planning, or simply even recuperate for a passing moment. Obediently, the class sat quietly on the floor at the reading area.
Ms. Feliz began each session reading a story, engaging them to focus.
“Who here likes sharks?” Ms. Feliz asked, raising her hand, indicating the class to do the same.
Julio’s hand shot into the air. He did his best not to wave it wildly. Every boy raised his hand and all but a handful of the girls.
“This is about a very special kind of shark: a hammerhead.”
Julio’s eyes darted around his peers with delight. This was his favorite type of shark—even more than the great white.
Disappointingly, the book was not about the hammerhead shark, but a silly hammerhead shark ostracized by regularly-headed sharks until he befriends a sawfish; which he knew was not a shark but a type of ray. Stories were fine, but Julio preferred reference books.
Julio was uninspired, as he had checked out all the shark books a couple times already, but when Ms. Feliz dismissed the group to the shelves, noting that she had set aside some books surrounding the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day holiday and its folklore and traditions, he had a thought.
Julio scanned the selection of green covers. The only one that slightly stood out had a picture of a man followed by snakes on it. “Miss, are…are…are there any leprechaun books?”
“Leprechauns, eh? I don’t have a book specifically about leprechauns. Not the kind of book you’re looking for, but there is one about fairies.”
Julio frowned, his lips in a zig-zag.
“Fairies aren’t all like Tinkerbell. Most of them are pretty scary.”
“Really?”
“Well, a leprechaun is a type of fairy.”
“No!”
Ms. Feliz tapped away on her keyboard, searching. “Let’s find that book and you’ll see.”
The book, Fairies and Their Kynde, was too advanced for an early reader, but the pictures inside were good and that was all that mattered to Julio. A great discovery was made. He flipped through the pages, stalled on a picture of a moss-covered horse in a bog. He turned a few more pages to a picture of an ugly goblin wearing a red hat.
“What do you think?”
Julio held the book up like it was a trophy. “This…this is the best.”
From that moment, the thirty-minute period sprinted along until it was time to officially check books out. Julio wanted to get as much time with his book as possible, so he was last at the counter. He went around to Ms. Feliz’s side to watch her process the book.
“Hey, Ms. Feliz? Did you…did you know you can kill a leprechaun with a four-leaf clover?”
“Mm, I did not know that. Did you learn that in your book?”
“Nah. I learned…I learned about it in the movie.”
“I see.”
“Miss, do…do you know how to kill a vampire?”
“Oh, yeah,” she answered, as if the boy asked her if she knew what she had for breakfast that morning. “I know. Do you?”
“Yes! There…there’s the sun!”
“That’s one way.”
“What else? Holy water! Spray them with that and send those devils back to Hell.”
“That’s right, holy water. And crosses.”
“Crosses,” Julio repeated. He brushed his neck, although he did not wear a crucifix. He knew there were more. He wished there was a book on the subject.
“I know! Cut their head off.”
Ms. Feliz nodded. “You’re missing a big one.”
The light in his eyes flashed like a literal lightbulb turning on above his head. “A stake right through that devil’s heart!”
“You got it.”
The boy balled his hand into a fist, put it to his chin. “What else? What else?”
“Don’t forget silver. It doesn’t only kill werewolves.”
“Werewolves? Silver? Silver…silver. What is that?”
“You know, it’s a metal. Like gold, but it’s white, not yellow.”
“Oh! Like…like my teeth?” Julio opened his mouth wide in a half smile, half grimace. He tapped one of his silver caps.
“That’s right,” Ms. Feliz answered.
At that moment, the boy sprung at the librarian’s neck, snapping at her throat as though it was an ear of freshly buttered corn.
Was there some intuition that drove him, or desire for malice? Or was it just an energetic, excited little boy getting carried away by his imagination? The outcome was the same. There was a pop, a leathery concussion like pricking a skin balloon with a pushpin. As for Ms. Feliz herself, she vanished in a puff of vapory smoke.
Julio’s lips were wet and oily, like kissing a dirty snowball. “Wha…where…?” He was as much alarmed by the sudden disappearance of the librarian as he was the action that caused it. Did he really kill Ms. Feliz, his very favorite person in the entire school, and more so, was she a…?
None of his classmates appeared to notice, nor his teacher who arrived to pick them up and take them back to their classroom. He didn’t know if he should cry or cheer. More than anything, he had to use the bathroom.
His teacher could see the distress on his face and allowed him to leave the group, hoping he would not wander and return without sending the aid to retrieve him.
Teeth chattering, Julio wanted to run to the bathroom, but he didn’t want to get yelled at. He couldn’t handle that right now. So he left the library as calm as he could be, glancing at the library storage door as he stepped out.
The door opened just a crack and from the shadows Julio heard Ms. Feliz say, “That was a close one, wasn’t it? I’m going to have to be more careful. And so are you.”
Tom Mavroudis’s debut collection, Rabbit Face and Other Awful Encounters, is forthcoming from JournalStone. His short stories have appeared on Creepy A Horror Podcast, The NoSleep Podcast, in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Carpe Noctem, Frontiers of Fright and the anthology Mooncalves.
