I. Conjuring Spirits to Repair Automobiles

“She’s a real peach, toots!” the salesman had said, tipping his cap with a wink. “Most reliable car on the lot. One turn of the key and all your worries’ll be yesterday’s news.”

A peach, indeed – if peaches were prone to spontaneous combustion. Yet the radiator sputters for no reason, the motor flat-out refuses to start, and every so often, a hollow, eerie scraping noise comes from somewhere beneath the car, like something trying to claw its way into the world. It’s not simply a matter of mechanical failure – sometimes this car seems determined to fall apart all on its own.

Alas, there are no repair manuals for haunted cars.

The engine lets out a sudden, violent cough and, before Penelope can react, a jet of oil shoots out, splattering across her glasses and leaving a greasy streak on one lens. She jerks upright as the hood slams shut and clenches her teeth in frustration. When she runs her fingers through her golden hair, a streak of oil remains in their wake. “Can you hand me a wrench?” she sighs.

After neither a reply nor a wrench appears before her, she scowls and turns to our brother. He’s lounging below a nearby tree with his face in a dime novel, a towel under him to protect his bespoke grey Italian suit, one leg draped over the other.

“Dorian, I asked you a question.”

“It’s the battery,” he says without looking at her.

“You always say it’s the battery. It has never been the battery.”

He turns a page. “I’ll be right one day.”

Penelope slams her fist on the hood and it springs back open. She marches over to our brother with her hands on her hips. “What are you reading?”

“Research.” He licks the tip of his finger but, before he can turn the page, she plucks the book from his hands and reads aloud:

“Petra knew that the Count was not only a man, but a vampire, and a life that spanned centuries had left him quite the wealthy noble. Now she was his prisoner, his prize kept safe within a gilded cage of opulence and sin. Wicked though the Count was, she still felt drawn to him. And though she yearned for her old life, for her freedom, what she desired… more than anything… to feel… the Count’s…” Penelope’s voice trails off and her eyes bulge out. “Ew, this isn’t research – this is more of your smut!”

“’The Wallachian Waif’ is not smut,” Dorian insists, snatching his book back. “It’s about vampires. We are currently hunting vampires. Ergo, this is research.”

“Alleged vampires,” Penelope says. “You and Doctor Arthwitte think these are vampires. I’m not as gullible.”

“If you don’t think the vampires are real then why are you in such a hurry to fix the car?”

“Doctor Arthwitte,” she sighs. “Will you talk some sense into hi–,” she abruptly stops, blinks three times in rapid succession, then asks with slumped shoulders, “Why do you need ostrich feathers?”

Doctor Edward M. Arthwitte, Penelope’s mentor and Dorian’s reluctant employer, stands at the side of their car with a gigantic ostrich feather in each hand. Balancing his substantial girth on one foot with the other planted to the side of his knee, he fans the air like an emu performing a mating dance. Smoke billows up from a lit censer before him, filling the air with frankincense, wild sage, and nard root.

“The answer to your hypothesis is simple, young Penelope: I am attempting to render our vehicle vehicular.”

Penelope pinches her nose in frustration, her eyes puckered shut. “And how will this fix the car?”

Doctor Arthwitte flares his nostrils, wriggling his walrus mustache. “My dear, you have spent the past two hours working on the Black Beetle, attempting every avenue of repair short of dismantling it piece by piece then reconstructing it anew. There is but one logical conclusion left before us: this is the work of–”

“Don’t–”

“Malevolent spirits, and of all the known ceremonies for evoking and purging the elemental forces, the Romani Fan Dance is the second most potent.”

“Why not use the best method?”

“Well, I would have used my Namibian Spirit Drum but someone left it in Cairo!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Dorian snaps. “Next time I won’t knock out the mummy wizard and let him kill both of you.”

“It wasn’t a mummy or a wizard,” Penelope interjects with a stomp. “It was obviously the tour guide in disguise, how am I the only one who saw that?!”

Doctor Arthwitte snorts. “Hemon, Architect of the Great Pyramid, Grand Vizier to Emperor Khufu, and the biggest disappointment of my career. I’ve seen worse curses from a carnival gypsy.”

“I was retching up frogs for a month,” Dorian shouts.

“Only because you refused my cure. Now stand back, the both of you.” Doctor Arthwitte clears his throat, re-assumes his tantric pose, then hops towards the Black Beetle on one foot. “Stuart Meadows of Derbyshire, I conjure and bind thee!”

The Black Beetle is a solid black 1937 Morgan 4/4 with a hint of a green shimmer when observed from the proper angle. At least, it was ‘solid black with a hint of green shimmer when observed from the proper angle’ when he purchased it for an ominously good bargain. The driver’s side door, since replaced by one from a peacock blue 1937 Plymouth Coupe, unlocks; perhaps by itself, perhaps by the hand of a vengeful Welshman who tragically died in an ill-timed collision examination.

“Well, what do you say to that?” Doctor Arthwitte boasts. However, as mysteriously as the door had unlocked by itself, it locks again. He kicks the tire, “I knew I should have had this damned thing exorcised in Rome.”

“You’re the reason we can never go back to Rome,” Dorian protests.

“Patent vultures,” Doctor Arthwitte spits. “I’ll relinquish my secrets to distilling divinity when they pry the technique from my Stygian corpse!”

“None of this will fix the car,” Penelope says.

“Do keep an open mind. You mustn’t let yourself become too attached to this material world.” Doctor Arthwitte nods towards Dorian, “Angels do not speak to accountants and demons do not dance with dentists. If exorcism does not work then there is only one avenue left for us to explore–”

“The engine–”

“The Salamanders! We shall consult the elemental servitors of civilization and industry. They alone may be all that stands betwixt us and these sanguinivorous beasts of the night!”

What he does not realize is that it is me, my power, which stands between them and all the wickedness and strife that is coming.

Doctor Arthwitte unlatches the trunk and all manner of artifacts from their journeys spill out: a three-foot-long brass ankh, Al Capone’s formerly lucky umbrella dotted with tommy gun fire, a gas mask attached to an empty canister of nitrous oxide, a preserved monkey’s paw with all the fingers curled in, several empty bottles of brandy, and a briefcase covered in tattered grey cloth with the Eye of Horus singed onto one side.

Doctor Arthwitte thrusts himself deep within and emerges with his alchemical station in hand. “Clean this up, will you, boy.”

Dorian salutes, turns the page, and remains seated. “Can do.”

“I’ll need the prayer mat you’re laying on,” Doctor Arthwitte adds, one hand cupped around his lighter as he strikes the flint.

“I’m using this one,” Dorian says. “There’s another one in the pile over there.” He points to a colorful towel patterned after the Union Jack.

“I shall do no such thing; what you are sitting upon is a Diwali celebration cloth and an appropriate correspondence for engaging the elementals. Using an ordinary towel would be like praying to Mecca on a dog’s bed. Now drop the smut and bring it over here. Penelope, fetch me the scorpion spagyric.”

My sister picks up the briefcase, scrutinizing the Eye of Horus burnt onto one side. “Shouldn’t we do something about this curse?” she asks. “Can Hemon see us? Can he hear us?”

“Do you see an ear?” Doctor Arthwitte gasps, “The brew is bubbling, child. Bubbling! The Salamanders are beckoning our haste!”

Penelope suppresses the urge to point out that the doctor’s brew is bubbling because of the flame underneath it – not invisible fire ghosts whom only Doctor Arthwitte can see and hear when he is completely gassed on brandy. She lays the briefcase on the ground and flips the clasp open. The lid springs back and, like twin accordions ascending opposite flights of stairs, velvet lined cases fan out from inside, each one holding rows of tiny colorful glass vials with makeshift dropper lids secured to their tops by rubber bands.

“Quickly, dear, the spagyric.”

“Which one,” she asks, holding up two vials filled with alchemical potions: one orange, the other a pale yellowish green. “Ebony or Bark?”

“Bark,” Doctor Arthwitte chuckles. “One drop of Ebony and I’ll be sailing the Astral Sea for a month.” He adds the tincture to his concoction, tosses the empty vial over his shoulder, and then retrieves his ankle flask.

“Should you be drinking right now, Doctor Arthwitte?” Penelope asks.

“I am merely bringing myself towards a liminal state of consciousness. One must be mentally lubricated before opening the hinges of the two-fold universe.”

“How convenient,” Dorian mutters. “You need to get sopping drunk to horn the other side.”

Doctor Arthwitte closes his eyes. “I am already receiving contact from the spirits. I cannot hear your petulance over the reverent choir of the beyond… Preponderous! I am passing through the mandala at this very moment – this truly is the most scientific approach to automobile repair, children.”

“We should worry less about Salamanders and more about vampires,” Dorian says, returning to his book.

“There aren’t any vampires,” Penelope says. “The old legends about vampirism were made up by people who didn’t understand decomposition. As the body dehydrates, the skin shrinks and peels back. Ordinary people thought that the hair and nails kept growing but the skin was just receding. It’s just a local psychopath using superstitions to cover their trail.”

“That is one potentiality,” Doctor Arthwitte says, one arm bent with the forearm hanging at his side, the other stuck outwards in salute, with one leg raised to imitate a radio antenna. “But what about the corpses with swollen guts?”

“That’s part of decomposition,” Penelope says. “The body fills up with gas as it rots. They aren’t gorging on blood then crawling back into the dirt – they’re dead. Dead and rotting. End of myth.”

Doctor Arthwitte frowns, “What about the visions and nightmares?”

“A lot of it sounds like sleep paralysis, but ergot poisoning would explain the shared hallucinations and dreams the townsfolk reported. Furthermore, I have some detailed notes on–”

“What about the fog?”

“What fog?” Penelope asks.

“Can’t recall the specifics,” Doctor Arthwitte replies, sticking his tongue out then rolling it. “Either the vampires summoned a fog or they turned into a fog.”

“Dracula,” Dorian adds. “That’s Dracula. He turns into a fog cloud.”

“I thought Dracula turned into a bat,” Penelope says.

“He can do both.”

“That’s stupid,” Penelope says. “You can’t just make up a list of random powers and say that’s what vampires can do. Then vampires can do anything.”

Doctor Arthwitte clicks his heels together. “The Salamanders have manifested! Can’t you see them all around us?” He thumps the hood of the Black Beetle as if testing a melon for ripeness. With his ear to the chassis, he walks along the side of the car while he mumbles to an invisible ‘someone.’

“Yes, yes. Of course – Gremlins, you say? But they’re the gadflies of the aviators, terrestrial matters are governed… An alliance with the Gnomes?! The sheer cunning!”

He rises from the hood and turns to his student. “I’ve located the source of our problem. Observe!” Doctor Arthwitte gestures towards the range of mountains which loom in the distance past the high reaching conifer forest surrounding them. “The mountains, home to the Gnomes –least likely of the elementals to interfere in human affairs, but under a treaty with the Gremlins of old Romania, they have infiltrated–”

“He’s a lunatic,” Dorian whispers to our sister.

“You’re both lunatics. Is that why you wore a suit all the way out here? To impress your brooding vampire before he murders you?”

“Or she,” Dorian muses, with a sly grin. “Since when have I cared about that? –but what if I’m not the one he wants? What are you going to do if he’s interested in you?”

“You’re a lunatic,” she replies after a beat.

“Though the International Alchemical Alliance mocked me, I have clung dearly to my proposal that the Salamanders remained by our sides as the Promethean stewards of ingenuity: creation, inspiration, transfiguration! As the elemental servitors nearest the divine, they are privy to insights about our technological marvels which confound and elude the–”

“At least one of us looks professional,” Dorian mutters. “The doctor’s lab coat is more burn holes than fabric. And you…,” He tugs at our sister’s matching white coat, slathered with oil and dirt from hours of engine repair. “You could wear something besides overalls for a change. Maybe do something with your hair too; it’s like an old broom.”

“Good, you can be the pretty one, let the vampire come for you.” Penelope reaches into her inner coat pocket and retrieves her comb, a solid brass triangle which bears an amethyst moth as an ornament, part of my final gift to her. My gift that protects her to this day. After a few rough strokes she manages to create something between a tumbleweed and a bob, then pins the comb onto one side.

“–with the dawn of the twentieth century, we experts in the mystical arts believed that the elementals had disappeared. But were they simply biding their time? And if so, for what? In this three-part transcribed oral series in direct conjunction with my thesis on the mystical sciences, I, Doctor Edward Mountebanc Arthwitte shall expound upon– boy, are you taking any of this down?”

Dorian shakes his head ‘no.’ Penelope is distracted by an itch on the bridge of her nose. A large bird of prey screeches in the distance.

Doctor Arthwitte wipes his brow and sighs. “Very well, then I shall skip to the demonstration.”

“That would be for the best.”

Doctor Arthwitte presses his ear to the hood. “Try and start the car again, dear. I’ll need to perform my feat to expel these fiends after the ignition is struck.”

Penelope circles around the back of the Black Beetle and climbs into the driver’s seat. She sticks her head out the window. “Ready?”

“One moment.” Doctor Arthwitte taps the hood in various places as if triangulating some unseen signal. “There it is. I’ve located the nest. Now!”

She turns the key and the Black Beetle sputters out a horrid chorus of screeching and clanging. Doctor Arthwitte takes a step back, whips himself about in a cyclone of kicks and elbows like a whirling dervish, then brings one fist down on the hood. “Chala gaya, gremalin!”

The engine roars to life, shaking the body of the car with a steady pug-pug-pug.

Penelope leaves it running and steps out. “It worked,” she says. “But how?!”

“Rudimentary,” Doctor Arthwitte says. “The Salamanders informed me of many matters since our last encounter, including one lesser-known method of dispelling Gremlin infestations. Ah, the deserts of the Mojave, 1894. A marvelous year to meet the Guru.” He snaps his fingers, “Now, boy, see to the dictation.”

“I’d rather get on the road before the sun sets,” Dorian says. “Considering our current vampire case.”

“Vampire ‘case’?” Doctor Arthwitte asks.

“He thinks we solve mysteries now,” Penelope says. “We’re not detectives, we’re scientists.”

“Oh really?” Dorian says. “What about… ‘The King of Spain and the Case of the Haunted Royal Palace?’ Or ‘The–”

“He can call himself the King of Spain all he wants,” Doctor Arthwitte grumbles. “A coup is a coup; Franscisco is no king in my eyes.”

“And it wasn’t haunted,” Penelope says. “It was a nearly starved badger living inside the old trunk he bought off a wandering merchant.”

Dorian clears his throat. “Okay, what about ‘The Crying Woman of Tijuana and the Castillo Estate’?”

“Julia Castillo, the estranged cousin of Antonio Castillo, dressed as a ghost in order to scare the family off so she could inherit through forfeiture,” Penelope counters.

“Utter hog wallop,” Doctor Arthwitte huffs. “All of that work… and for what? Property taxes?”

“The Great Pyramid of Giza and the Mummy’s curse,” Dorian says, counting on one hand. “The woman Da Vinci trapped in a painting so he could live for another five hundred years, the Appalachian Sasquatch and how he saved the coal miners from a cave-in, the–”

“The point, Dorian,” Penelope groans. “Before the vampires kill us all.”

“You mean the vampires that don’t exist?” Dorian asks, leaning forward with a satisfied grin. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that all these books about the supernatural have already been written? Or is it possible the authors lived through their own experiences and wrote about them?”

Doctor Arthwitte snatches the book from Dorian’s clutches and inspects the cover. A beautiful, dark-haired woman in a luxuriant emerald and gold trimmed gown feints back into the arms of a dashing, long haired nobleman with a weltering hunger in his eyes. A dark stone castle sits atop a mountain in the far distance with the title in flowing filigree above: “The Wallachian Waif.”

“By the metals,” Doctor Arthwitte exclaims. “You’ve morally slumped further than I’d feared.”

“You seriously think this is real?” Penelope asks. “You’re sixteen. Why would a four-hundred-year-old vampire even want to… what’s the word for it? Date? You want a vampire to date you?”

“I… no,” Dorian says, looking up and to the left. “I just… think that it would be… open minded of us… if we… considered… how the vampire feels.”

“Considered how the vampire feels,” Penelope sardonically replies.

They’re so distracted by their argument that only I can see the man slowly approaching them, one hand pressed to his side while the other hangs limp. Blood soaks his thin tunic, oozes between his fingers, and falls in little droplets in a trail behind him. His footing is unsteady but quickens when he notices them. Delirious from blood loss or a futile hope for survival he attempts to call out to them but chokes on the bullet in his chest.

Doctor Arthwitte leans in towards Penelope with a hand cupped over his mouth. “My dear, I fear that my neglect of the Black Beetle’s undead resident has left your brother vulnerable to otherworldly suggestion. Luckily, I have prepared for such an eventuality. In the briefcase is a bottle of my patented Unconsecrated Holy Water. Fetch it and–”

“Absolutely not,” Penelope says. “He’s not possessed, he’s horny.”

“Do you really believe there is a difference? More than half of all erotic fixations are otherworldly in origin. Consider the poltergeist–”

“Not everything is evil spirits!”

“The spirits are all around and within us, we’ve only need to be steadfast listeners. If you open yourself to the unknown, life has a way of thrusting its mysteries right into your–”

“He–help… me.” The bleeding man stumbles into their midst and trips, taking in a mouthful of dirt when his face meets the road. His breathing is rough and shallow. A thick bubble of red oozes out onto the ground with each cough.

“He’s been shot,” Penelope gasps. “Do we have iodine and tweezers?”

“He’s going to need more than that at this point,” Dorian mutters.

“Are you alright?” Penelope gently rolls the man over, but his wound is flowing freely. A spare cloth from one of her pockets makes for an improvised compress, but the wet gurgle in his throat confirms where the bullet struck. “Keep pressure on it, you’ll breathe easier.”

Doctor Arthwitte bends over him, hands on his knees. An amulet bearing the philosopher’s stone slips out of his partially unbuttoned shirt and swings over the man’s head. “Are you from Rukriz? Did the vampires shoot you?”

The man stares at Doctor Arthwitte’s pendant and fear runs down his face as quickly as his sweat. “Get it away,” he screams, pawing at the necklace. “The vampires, they’re everywhere!”

“Everywhere?” Penelope asks. “You mean Rukriz was overrun?”

“No, no,” the man says, his teeth clenching each time his body seizes. “Quarantine… in the mansion. Everyone else… locked in our houses… trapped… for them to feed.” His head falls limp and he gazes up at the sky. “I can see them. They’re all here. Laughing.”

The precipice of death lends an otherworldly sight, visions of another angle to our world. What he sees in the sky is me, my litany of seers and servants as we gaze back at him from the stars above and the worlds below. But he does not see the vampires. The Fallen hold no place in my Court.

“He’s going into shock,” Penelope says.

“Is that a scientific way to say he’s dying?” Dorian asks.

The man grabs Penelope by the collar and pulls her close. The smell of gunpowder lingers on his breath. “They… they don’t drink blood. Not… from this world. They’re everywhere.”

Doctor Arthwitte sighs. “He sounds delirious.”

“He sounds like you,” Dorian mutters.

“What vampires?” Penelope asks. “Where are they?”

Blood dribbles out of the side of his slacked mouth when he pulls my sister in close. “The shadows… the ones… just out of sight.” He wrenches in pain from the effort to whisper in her ear, “They live behind your eyes.”

A bubbling mess pours out with his death rattle and he goes limp in her lap.