Elizabeth and the Vampire's Cabin (14 page)

When
Aaron entered at 8:00pm, she had the salad sitting on the table. But instead of
sitting down he said, "Put on your hiking clothes. We're going out to eat
tonight."
 
She saw that he had a
giant basket in his hand. She wasn't expecting a late night picnic, and she
felt excited about the idea of him making a romantic gesture towards her. She
immediately went to her room and changed into her hiking boots and outdoor
clothes. After fixing the salad, she had put on her little red dress that
showed off her waist so well. It would have to wait for another time.

"Grab
the flashlight, while you're in there," Aaron called.

Elizabeth
was even more intrigued. They didn't require flashlights to see in the dark
because they both had natural night vision (a necessary trait for nocturnal
vampires), but she grabbed it anyway. After she put the salad in the
refrigerator, they headed out. She wondered where they could be going, but
Aaron was silent. Is he surprising me? she thought hopefully to herself. Her
heart rate was rising with anticipation.

They
moved quickly until they came to a sea cave. She realized it must be the cave
Aaron normally slept in. Weirdly, though she knew of
 
the cave, it was the one place that she had
never explored with Arthur or even by herself.
 
She figured it was probably because she knew it was Aaron's, and it felt
too much like entering his home unannounced. He had never forbidden her from
entering, and she had no idea if he ever told Arthur not to go in there, but if
felt implied that the sea cave was off limits.

She
walked in and was as careful as she could be. It was slippery and falling
seemed inevitable. She shined the light. Bats could be heard inside the cave,
but Aaron urged her on. She went in and continued to walk into the cave,
flashlight pointed straight ahead, until Aaron asked her to stop. Then he
instructed her to point the flashlight to her left. What she saw took her
breath away. It was an entire wall of fossilized eggs. Hundreds of eggs
embedded in the cave wall, and they sparkled in the light of the flashlight.
Some were covered in moss and algae, others were like precious rocks. They were
all the colors of the rainbow. And what was even stranger was that Elizabeth
noticed they were in a pattern. They were in a giant ellipse. It couldn't have
been more perfect than if someone had come along and made it.
 

"What
are they," Elizabeth pressed.

"Fossilized
dinosaur eggs," Aaron answered. "They're beautiful aren't they?"

Elizabeth
nodded silently

"Let’s
eat," Aaron said. "I nabbed us some good stuff that I knew you would
like the second I saw it. Teenager food."

They
sat down on the cave floor and Aaron pulled out a couple of cheeseburgers,
french fries, cans of soda, and paper plates.

"How
did you get all of this?!" Elizabeth cried out in shock. He was right; she
did miss typical teenager fare. Cheese burgers, pizzas, and giant pretzels
galore had been dancing through her head at night.
 

"We're
not the only cabin on the island, remember? Kyla had a barbeque and invited the
other vampires on the island to eat. I said I wanted to take some to have
dinner with you and she said okay."

"Aaron,"
Elizabeth began slowly. "Why is it that you keep me separated from the
other vampires on the island? Just out of curiosity."

"It's
not safe for you," he explained. "Vampires can be very cruel people.
Very Neanderthal. I'm shocked there are any of us left in the world. I only
trust them not to harm you while you're on my side of the island. Neanderthals
have a pretty good sense of boundaries. We have a firm grasp of "his
turf" and "my turf." In fact, I really think the only reason
that Marnie and Lyle haven't been killed is because they own the island (it's
technically "their turf"), and they're responsible for all the
maintenance. They live with Kyla, and she instructs them not to come over to
anyone else's side unless they're fixing something. She trusts me, but we can't
take too many chances with humans roaming an island of vampires. "

"But
Marnie and Lyle only come over during daylight."

"It
doesn't matter. We can go out during the day and do damage. It's just that
we're photosensitive so we prefer being nocturnal. Daylight won't protect
anyone from a vampire. Don't take a risk. You don't want to get yourself killed
during your last week on this island."

She
stayed silent for a moment. The thought of herself leaving saddened her. So she
changed the subject.

"How
do you know those are dinosaur eggs?" she asked.

"I
guess I don't really. It's not like I've looked inside for fossilized embryos.
But when I was growing up, there were dinosaur eggs all over the place. During
the Paleolithic, there were a lot more fossils lying around in general for us
to look at and put together the pieces of the world's evolution. Personally, I
like to think they're dinosaur eggs. There's something magical about them isn't
there? I've never seen so many at once. And they all ended up in that perfect
ellipse. It's like God had a hand in it."

"Are
dinosaur eggs always so colorful?" she asked.

"No.
That part of this little miracle is not so miraculous. Joe saw them, and being
a very visual person, decided to paint them. I didn't have any cave drawings,
so he wanted to do some decorating inside my cave. I should probably draw a
picture or two for the sake of preserving this piece of time in my history.
Before there were diaries there were cave drawings."

"I
love it," she said. "It's like an entire wall of giant Easter
eggs."

"You
know, I think Joe might have actually painted them with the same dyes used on
Easter eggs."

"Tell
me something about the Paleolithic that I don't know. Even better. Something
nobody knows unless they were there."

"Okay.
There is actually something that I've been meaning to tell you, but I didn't
want to say anything. It sounds too unbelievable, and I wasn't sure what your
reaction would be. However, since Arthur was abducted, I could tell its been
bothering you so...

"Yes?"
Elizabeth questioned.

"Well,
my hope is that what I'm about to tell you will help you. During the Upper
Paleolithic, when vampirism began to take hold, it was actually brought to us
by ancient aliens......"

"Shut
up!" Elizabeth yelled.

"YES!
Honest to God, there were aliens that came down from the sky, abducted a lot of
Neanderthals, and turned them into vampires."

"I
can't believe it. I've heard these wild theories about aliens building the
pyramids. But I thought it was all bunk."

"Oh
no. I kid you not; ancient aliens came to my old island and regularly made
contact. They had a giant spaceship, shaped just like the one you saw, and they
would beam us up."

"Start
from the beginning," she begged. "I love it when you go into
storytelling mode."

"Alright.
I don't know how old I was, but the first abduction I was actually involved in
was when I was a young child.
 
I think I
was around the age of six at the time. It was night and my mother was walking
me to the beach. I had no clue what was happening, but she told me not to be
afraid. There was a whole group of people already there. I would say there were
about ten other people. I was the only child. I remember a woman scolding my
mother for being late. She told her it had taken her a long time to get me
ready.

That
night, my mother had made me a special dinner. It was just the two of us. I
don't remember why, but my father wasn't around at the time. I remember the
meal, because she prepared my favorite meal. She had started a fire in her
hearth and the stones surrounding it were blazing hot. She handed me hunks of
raw animal meat and told me to scrape off the skin and fat. I had my scraper
always with me in a little bag tied around my neck. It was a small sharp piece
of rock. Because I wasn't old enough to go on hunts, my job in the tribe was
scraping meat and gathering food, so the scraper was always with me. Once I had
scraped them, she grabbed the hot stones with our version of an oven mitt, and
put them in a large bowl of water made from bone. The water began to boil, and
I was excited because I knew what this meant. We were making soup. My mouth was
watering at the carved up, raw meat that was about to be boiled. She put them
all in small pieces of leather that had holes punched into them with sharp,
bone awls. Small twigs were inserted into these holes, and that sealed the meat
in. Then we tied these little meat packages with a long string of twine
attached to a branch. We used these like fishing lines. We dunked the meat
packages into the water, still attached to the twine and branch, and let them
boil in there. Once we finished boiling the meat, she added some more hot
stones and made a soup. She threw in some nettle leaves for the broth and
brought a special treat from her neck pouch: quail eggs. She knew they were my
favorite and had somehow obtained them for me. She cracked the eggs over the
broth and I had quail egg soup awaiting me. We shared the soup in small clay
bowls and divided up the meat packages. My mother gave me most of the packages,
and I opened them up like they were Christmas presents. I broke the twigs when
I was pulling them out of the leather. I held each little opened package of
leather in my hand and stared at the cooked meat with glee. My mother watched
me lovingly. One of the things she enjoyed about making food for me was
watching the look on my face when it was time to eat it.

That
night, she took a lot of care on my grooming. She gave me a bath near a
waterfall. And though we didn't have soap, she brought a piece of animal hide
to scrub me with. I was dried with a blanket of mammoth fur that she wrapped
around me. I remember her next taking a leaf and telling me to scrub my teeth
with it (no one ever brushed their teeth back then), and I started to feel
nervous as I realized that something very significant would soon be happening
to me. I wasn't psychologically prepared when she had me get dressed.
 
She had made clothes especially for me that
night. I was presented with chest armor made out of the bones of a boar that my
mother had tied with wool from the wild sheep we had on the island.
 
I wonder now if she hoped it would protect
me. She had also made me a new pair of trousers, made from wool, which went
just above my knees. And then she gave me a wool sweater that I pulled over my
head. I was in shock. New clothes were a rarity back then.

Not
long after reaching the beach, my mother told me that she would have to leave
me there. I cried and begged her to stay, but she slapped me across the face
and told me to be good. Some creatures were going to take me up to the sky
tonight and I should do all that they asked. She would come by tomorrow to pick
me up. And with that, my mother turned on her heels and walked away from me.

I
wasn't on the beach long before I saw a giant shape appear in the sky. It was
the same one you saw when Arthur was abducted. We called it "The Great
Mammoth," though you would probably say it looked like an elephant. I
started to run away, but an old man (and when I say old, I mean he was probably
around thirty five to forty years old) grabbed me and held me still. And then a
giant blue light engulfed us and I was paralyzed. I was being sucked up with
the rest of the people. I was terrified, but I was also confident that my
mother would never let anything bad happen to me so I took comfort in that. I
felt like I was traveling up that light and into the sky for a good fifteen
minutes. And then suddenly everything went dark. A split second later, I was
all alone in a little exam room. It was empty except for a small bed bolted to
the floor.
 
Before I could even think
what to do, a little purple person walked in with a large cart. She looked like
a modern human, only she was purple and about my height (and I was maybe four
feet at the time). I thought she was cute. She smiled at me and told me to take
my clothes off. I obeyed. It felt normal to be without clothes at that stage of
my life. Cave men and women were more comfortable with nudity than people
today. She then asked me to lie down on the table, which I did, and she said
that I would feel a tiny poke and then I would go to sleep. She then said that
I would be going home soon, and she would see me in another ten years. I had no
problems with this. I liked seeing a little purple person talk to me. I got a
kick out of it. The last thing I remember her saying was that she was happy to have
me on her spaceship, because I was half Neanderthal and that made me a very
special boy. No one ever told me I was special for being half Neanderthal and
this made me like her even more. She then gave me a kiss on the forehead right
before she stuck a needle in my arm. I have no memory after that. I was
asleep.
 
The next morning, I woke up on
the beach with everyone else from the night before. My mother was already there
to collect me. She asked if I was okay. I told her I was great and couldn't
wait to do it again in another ten years.

Well,
ten years passed and it was my turn to go up again. They came annually and
grabbed a different group once a year. That same group made a return trip in
ten years’ time. We typically knew it was time, because we would see The Great
Mammoth the night before. Then, everyone would say goodbye to loved ones and
head off the next night with the aliens. But then something happened. For a
couple of nights, we saw the spacecraft over the Black Island. A few days
later, the aliens were briefly over our island.
 
I went with a group of people, some of them from the last trip and some
new, and we were abducted. I was sixteen--"