Free Moonlight Becomes You: a short story by Linda Winstead Jones

 
     
     

     
    Claire pressed her back to the wall and listened to the footsteps. When she was certain her prey was moving away from her, not toward her, she leaned forward to peek around the corner and watch him walk down the dimly lit hallway. Watching her neighbor walk away was not exactly a chore. Not in those jeans.
    Too bad he was a vampire.
    When he turned the corner and was out of sight, she stepped into the hallway proper and silently followed in his footsteps. It sounded crazy, she knew that, but there were too many coincidences to ignore. He never went out in the daytime. He was much too pale, as if he had never seen the sun. He always wore black. Even those jeans he seemed to favor were a faded shade of black. She never saw him bring home groceries of any kind. Yes, he was lean, but the man had to eat something . He was definitely mysterious, and the one time he'd caught her eye she'd been sure he was hypnotizing her, even though the glance had lasted only a few seconds. Or maybe one full second.
    Just last week she'd found an inexplicable dusting of dirt in the hallway outside his door. Dirt! This apartment building was surrounded on all sides by concrete, and the amount of dirt she'd seen had been small but more than what would've been brought in on someone's shoe, anyway. Maybe it was some of the dirt that lined his coffin, or –gross—the remains of a dusted enemy vamp. When she'd gone back to check the dirt more closely to see if it looked more like potting soil or bone dust, it had been gone. Someone had disposed of the evidence. Not that vacuuming was a crime, but still...
    One night not so long ago she'd been awakened by an absolutely unearthly howl that had sent chills down her spine. She wasn't sure if it had been a victim's plea or a monster's cry of victory, but the sound had been memorable and unnatural.
    There was yet another telling clue that all was not as it should be. Marlie James from the second floor had a new cat. The feline Houdini was tough to contain and very often ended up wandering throughout the building. As adventurous as he was, Fluffy wouldn't come to the third floor. Marlie had walked up once with the cat in her arms, but before she'd reached her destination Fluffy had screeched and escaped her owner's hold and run down the stairs. Animals knew. Animals sensed danger when humans did not, and Fluffy obviously sensed danger on the third floor.
    Claire's apartment shared a common wall with the newest resident of the complex, here on the third floor of this less-than-magnificent but relatively trendy apartment building in downtown Atlanta. He played music often. Apparently he didn't care for popular tunes, but was stuck in the forties. Claire recognized some of the songs he played as those her grandparents had favored. Obviously her neighbor had been turned into a vampire in the forties, and he was still drawn to the music of the era in which he'd been human. What other explanation made sense?
    Claire didn't jump to conclusions without checking as many facts as possible. She'd done an extensive search on the Internet and found almost nothing about her neighbor. Simon Darrow, that was his name, had lived in four places in the past three years. Before that, nothing—that she could find, at least. That in itself was odd. The man hadn't popped out of thin air! True, she wasn't a detective and she didn't have access to every useful Internet site, but still, she should've been able to find more.
    He wasn't even on Facebook! Who wasn't on Facebook?
    It didn't help Darrow's case that he'd moved into the building right before people from the neighborhood had started to disappear. Charlie on the first floor, who everyone knew hit his wife when he drank too much. The often-obscene panhandler who'd been a regular on the southeast corner for as long as Claire could remember. That punk who'd robbed old Mrs. Bernard and gotten off with a slap on the wrist. All of them gone in a mere six weeks. Just