At the Twilight's Last Gleaming.

by David Bischoff.

Dear Reader, Vampires! Zombies!

What with all the hoopla lately about such supposedly supernatural entities, it's as though they were invented in the 21st century.

Nope.

They were around. Oh yes, they were around!

I mean, Stephanie Meyer didn't invent fangs anymore than she invented puberty, adolescence or hickeys on teenage necks. And to listen to Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris, you'd think all the vampire action was in New Orleans and the South.

But they get it all wrong.

Now that vampires and their ilk are out of the closet, so to speak, and under girls' bed sheets along with pop stars, Grandma can spill her truth.

I can tell my story.

Oh, and in case you might be interested at first, let me tell you there's plenty of teenage hanky panky, bloodsucking, weird love and much, much more.

And come to think of it...my story does happen in the South.

South of Washington D.C. in 1968.

1968 - the year they say changed the world.

My name?

Why it's Rebecca.

Rebecca, like the famous Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name that kind of started off the whole gothic craze in the 20th Century.

This is my vampire love story.

So turn off your cell phone, drape the garlic on the windows and listen up.

It's not quite the kind of story you might think!

PROLOGUE.

I DREAMED I went to Manderlay High School again last night. I knew that Death waited for me there.

The school was dark, its square windows staring out like the empty eyes of a zombie. Across the grass, wet with sprinkler dew, I walked like one possessed.

My heart thumped in my chest. I knew that my killer would be waiting for me there, but I could not turn back.

The moon was bright. It was just coming up over the trees, full as the wind-blown sails of a ship. The American flag in the front courtyard snapped in the breeze.

I pushed the bar on the front door. It whispered open.

I smelled new floor wax but, as always, I could see no custodian.

No, I thought. Go no further. Turn. Run. Run as hard as you can, girl. Run for your life.

The moon cast shadows in the foyer, but beyond them was darkness. I stepped forward, unable to control my steps. My shoes clicked against the linoleum as I walked into the huge expanse of the multi-purpose room.

A candle in the distance flickered meagerly. It has been set on a table, on the proscenium of the high school stage. Beside the dripping candle was a small black vase. From that vase grew a single rose, red as blood, rising up from shadow.

I walked toward the table, striding up the stairs to the stage, then along the proscenium. The stage curtains billowed in some ghostly breeze.

I went to the candle, and stared into it.

I picked up the rose from its vase. As I did so a thorn pierced my thumb. In the candlelight I watched a bead of blood blossom slowly on my skin, then drip with a hiss into the candle flame.

"Rebecca."

I turned.

He was there. I felt the strength of the night again, the promise.

He came to me, but I did not run.

I knew that he was Death but I yearned for this Death.

I ached for it.

CHAPTER ONE.

I LOVE THE night.

I hate to go to sleep and I hate to wake up. This is true even now, decades later.

But today was The Day, and when my alarm rang, I didn't bash at the thing with horror, nor did I burrow under my blankets in denial.

No, today was The Day.

I sprang out of bed. The bathroom tile was cold on my feet, but Dad had fixed the water heater so that my shower was scalding. I scrubbed myself hard with Ivory soap and washed my hair in Head and Shoulders shampoo. Washed, rinsed, washed again. The hot water sluiced across my scalp and long black hair. Every speck of dandruff had to be banished.

Today was the day.

Black was my color today.

Black felt right.

Not that I hadn't been wearing black every day for a while.

Mourning? No.

Attitude? A statement? Well, maybe. Goodness knows, Joan Baez wore black in those days. All those other mournful *60s "Michael Row the Boat ashore" folk singers who had come out from the gloom of coffee shops and into the glare of concert halls and TV studios wore black.

And while every other suburban American household in 1968 had a color TV, the Williams home of early 1968 still had an old RCA vacuum tube black-and-white dinosaur chained in the basement.

So maybe it was kind of like a protest.

I still wear black.

I don't know. Sure, black clothing hides some of the lumpiness of my figure, which is good.

But as I think back, back all those years, maybe it would best to be there.

To be Rebecca Williams of 1968 again.

Rebecca Williams then - but I should remain Rebecca of now when I think I should explain something.

How do I do that? How do I journey back all those decades to when I was young.

First I shall dress in black.

Okay. Now I close my eyes. Click my emerald - oops! - black slippers.

And here I am again, looking into that 1968 mirror.

Mostly, when I looked in the mirror back then, with my long black hair and my black eyelashes and my big nose and my big mouth, I didn't see Rebecca Williams when I wore stylish black. I saw Jane Eyre or Victoria Winters or some other heroine.

But still, somehow, black mostly made me feel like me.

That day, The Day, I combed my hair out quickly and grabbed up my schoolbooks. Then I put the small package in my book bag, the package with the thing that Harold and I had bought at the store in the new shopping mall in Marlow Heights. I thought, Today is the day.

I examined the ensemble in the mirror. Designer duds. Turtleneck sweater. Black skirt. Black stockings. Black shoes.

Then I thumped down to breakfast.

"Good morning, Morticia," said my father, peering up from the Washington Post.

"Good morning, Gomez," I said.

I grabbed the box of shredded wheat, pulled out a single brick of frosted cereal and placed it gingerly into the bowl. I stared at all the sugar. I cringed and put the brick back in the box.

"Mom, can I just have a single soft-boiled egg and dry toast?" I asked.

"What's wrong with cereal?" said my Dad, his brow wrinkling beneath his balding dome.

"Oh, Peter, don't worry. I was just going to make one for myself," said my mother, wrapping her bathrobe around her midsection and going to the stove.

The newspaper crinkled over the eggs and bacon as my father leaned over to my brother, "Oh, these annoying diets, eh, Donald? Can't these women see that they're beautiful just the way they are?"

Donald just shrugged and stared morosely into his Captain Crunch cereal. Donald was in ninth grade and was learning bad sleeping habits too.

"Don't torture yourself, Gomez," I said. "That's my job."

Dad chuckled wryly as he always did when I used that line. He always set himself up for it. Dad's heroes weren't comics, they were straight men. Bud Abbott, Dean Martin, and the king of them all, George Burns. Sometimes Dad calls mom Gracie.

"The Addams Family again," said Donald. "I hate that show."

With a single black and white cyclops chained in the basement, TV had lately been a bone of contention in the Williams household. My father called the basement the battle dungeon.

As my mother bustled over the stuff, and my brother munched his cereal, I pulled out the comics section from the paper to check out today's Peanuts.

I glimpsed a headline.

"More nasty stuff in Vietnam," I said pointedly.

"It will be handled," my father said stiffly. "It's a ticklish situation, but it will be handled."

My father was a colonel in the United States Air Force. He was stationed down the road at Andrews Air Force Base. I've always been proud of my father. He served in the Korean War, and had been a career officer ever since. But I read the paper and watched the news and listened to the radio, and I was starting to agree with all the people who weren't happy about this undeclared war.

I held my tongue. I turned to the comics and read Peanuts. Lucy was psychoanalyzing Charlie Brown for five cents. I wondered what Lucy would say to me about what I was going to do later this afternoon. Unquestionably she'd charge me more than five cents.

"Mom," I said. "What time is dinner tonight? I'm going to stay after school a bit."

"I can make it seven, I guess," she said. "What, no Dark Shadows, Bec?"

Dark Shadows, I should explain, was a half-hour weekday afternoon soap opera with ghosts and witches and a heart-throbby vampire named Barnabas Collins.

"I can get the plot details from friends," I said. "Or you could tell me, brother."

"I don't watch soap operas," said Donald.

"I keep on telling you, you'd like it. You like sci fi..."

"Science fiction."