(which I want to do, but I don't know a particularly appropriate poem. I was thinking "The Highwayman", "Death" (Dickinson), or "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" which has some creepy bits...but none of them seem quite right)

I wrote this over a year ago (before I learned of Twilight, I swear)- Chris, you've already read it, but I have made a few edits- but never posted it. So enjoy.

Fangs for the Memories

"So." Edward shoved his thick black retro-stylin'-on-somebody-else-but-never-"Edvard"-Burns glasses so far up his nose, his eyebrows, had they been so inclined, could have grabbed on and gone for the inevitable slow ride back down. "The St. Beatrice graveyard, 12 midnight sharp, Saturday night."

Faces filled with dead seriousness regarded him around the table, nodding solemnly.

I sighed. Everyone turned to me in indignation.

"What? I'm just observing." Their eyes muttered things about the unbeliever in their midst as they turned back to their chosen leader, Edward "Edvard" Burns, who told them which tombstone to watch for. Flora Lee Patterson was the name. Those indignant, sad eyes looked back at me when I snorted aloud.

I rolled my eyes. "Seriously, dudes, this may be my first time at the Placerville Vampire Hunting Society, but even I know no self-respecting vampire would use the name Flora Lee Patterson. It's just undignified! Vampires have dignity in spades!"

Edvard sneered at the plebe. (The plebe being, namely, me.) "You’re such a  n00b, Liz" he said, pronouncing the zeroes somehow, "we're meeting at her grave because it's safe- it’s just near the vampire graves! Catalina," he added, to the unfortunate namesake of a salad-dressing, "I cannot imagine why you have invited this...person...to our most elegant and exclusive of societies."

Poor Catalina Troy. Despite her parents' extraordinarily bad taste in names (or perhaps extraordinarily strong love of salad) she was actually a pretty cool person. I always saw her in the library, pouring through the yellow-paged supernatural romances with an intensity that rivaled my own absorption in other books. I finally got the nerve to interrupt her and introduce myself in grade 11. After a brief moment when I thought she was going to go for my throat for pulling her out of her vampire-littered world, I got her chatting about books, and when she found out about my ambitions, she insisted I come to her next meeting. I don't think she took Edvard as seriously as he did (how could anyone?) but I think she took her vampires more seriously. She wanted a chronicler, of all things.

Yes, I had begun to pen a book. It wound up being a shabby little pulpy thing with the horrid disease that results from trying to merge far too many fantasy worlds into one: insane derivativitis.

Edvard, on the other hand, had a maternal grandmother by the name of Van Helsing. He saw the movie in 10^th grade and after that there was no stopping him. It was, he claimed, in his blood. He had, self-reportedly, constructed his own suit of silver armour, fashioned a bow with silver-tipped arrows, stolen some holy water from St. Beatrice's, chopped a huge branch off the oak in his back yard to make his own stake, and bought himself a cross necklace. He certainly always smelled like garlic. But then, he had since sixth grade. Many of my classmates were convinced his deodorant was made of the stuff. I never found out whether they were right.

I went to the meeting for the heck of it, and, I admit with some shame, to do research for my "novel". But it had morphed into this: Edvard's self-inflation, Catalina's silent glaring, the whites of Leslie's eyes showing under her black emo bangs, and Howard Smith's mouth-breathing, big-eyed fascinated worship of Edvard. Poor Leslie. Poor Howard. Poor everyone - except Edvard. And even he was pitiable. If pricked with a sufficiently large pin, I knew he'd deflate, but I was afraid he‘d never reach a normal pressure again.

I stood up. "Well, thanks for letting me sit in. Enjoy your hunting...I've got to get to class now."

"Wait!" Catalina stopped me in my tracks. "You're coming, right?"

"Um, no, I'm pretty sure my parents won't go for that. Besides, the greatest thing about writing fantasy is that you get to make stuff up. I hope it's not real, and I'm not going looking for evidence to the contrary." And I walked away, feeling slightly sorry but more uncomfortable. Catalina's eyes were burning holes in the back of my skull.

Between periods C and D, however, I began to rethink my decision. This was due to a mysterious note that had been evidently shoved into my locker via the slots above it that I have always thought were designed for boys who used their lockers as gym sock storage.

The note read thus:

“Her name wasn’t Flora Lee Patterson.”

Period D was computer science, and most of us were ahead because our teacher expected us to be slower at figuring out HTML than we proved to be. We normally spent the class playing online games. I used the time to fill Colin the Librarian in on the situation. (Colin was not actually a librarian, but he loved to do research. About anything. And he was quite nice, and very geeky. I did not - and do not - share his opinions on Captain Sisko, but otherwise we tended to get along quite well.) He was, naturally, very interested, and I persuaded him to join me in going to the library immediately after school. I sent Dad a quick email to tell him we’d be home a bit later than usual.

Colin knew where the town archives were, and he also knew how to look through microfiches of birth, death, and marriage records. He found the burial records for Flora Lee Patterson. Cross-referencing with the newspaper’s death notices resulted in our concluding that my mystery informant had probably been right. And interestingly, the only woman in the death notices was named Katarina Von Troiken. I looked at Colin. Colin looked at me and snapped his gum, then started looking for more information. We learned quite a few things, particularly concerning how superstitious our town had once been. It was revealing.

“So?” he finally asked, swiping his sandy hair out of his eyes.

“Yeah. Let’s see if I can get Dad in on this one.”

When we got to my house, Dad was in the living room reading the paper. “Hey Liz. How was your day?”

“Mysteriouser and mysteriouser,” I said, flopping onto the couch and waving Colin to join me. “We’ve got vampire weirdness going on.”

“Vampires?” Dad looked over the tops of his reading glasses at me. “Really.” Dad was a journalist for the local paper. Though firmly grounded in reality, he was always hoping for an interesting scoop. In a small city of 22,000 people, they didn’t come along often enough, and it so happened that it had been a very slow news month. So when I had explained, his immediate response was, “I think we have to look into this, don’t you?”

“On one condition, Dad. I don’t want Edvard and Catalina knowing about this. So you can’t put it in the paper.”

“Oh, come on, Lizzie! I need this.”

Colin jumped in at this point. “Mr. Jacobson, why don’t we check it out first and then see if we can find a way to do it tactfully?”

Dad sighed. “It’ll have to do. Come on, let’s get going!”

“Where to?”

“St. Beatrice’s. We need to do some groundwork so before we go in the dark.”

The graveyard by daylight was uninteresting. It was April, and the grass hadn’t greened yet. All was brown and grey, and pretty muddy in places. “That may prove useful,” muttered Colin. “Some vampire legends say that they don’t leave footprints.”

“You’ve researched vampires?”

“Of course.” Colin looked at me as though my question was absurd. And then I realized it was.

We staked out a likely viewing spot, then parted ways with Colin for dinner. We returned to the graveyard at 11:30, with nightvision goggles, digital and film cameras, and the traditional garlic, cross necklaces, mirrors, and wooden stakes. If something did show up, it would have to be authenticated, Dad insisted, though I tried to tell him how ridiculous Edvard was.

We had settled down into our blankets and were thinking of pouring some hot chocolate when we all saw a figure stomp up to the aforementioned tombstone. “Edvard,” I hissed. The banging sound he made when he moved seemed to indicate he was wearing his “armour.” He wandered around, stomping and glancing often toward the only tombstones in the entire graveyard with potentially vampiric names on them. The grouping of stones marked “Von Trapp”. Like the Sound of Music. I was willing to bet that he’d never seen it, as willing as I was to bet that he hadn’t left the note in my locker.

Then, at 11:50, another figure joined him. It was tall, slim, and definitely wearing a Halloween vampire costume. After a minute or two, it crouched down among the Von Trapp stones.

12:03 came, and Howard Smith and Leslie Bundschen came puffing and slouching up to Edvard, respectively, and soon he began to speak so that even we could hear him, his hands and arms articulating every gesture.

Magic spells from Harry Potter, words in latin, and a few inappropriate uses of the words thee, thou, and thus later, and the Halloween vampire rose slowly from the graves, bringing screams from Howard. “Where’s Catalina?” whispered Colin.

“You’re sure that’s not her in the costume?”

“Positive. That’s Greg Stone. I’d know his walk anywhere. He’s got this sort of limp…”

The vampire “hunters” were having a sort of conversation with the “vampire”- I think they were telling it to leave, because Edvard was brandishing what looked like a wooden stake and talking at it rather loudly. Dad was sitting with his fists under his chin, looking disappointed.

Then the moon came out from behind a cloud, and Leslie looked at the now-sufficiently lit vampire and said, “Greg?” whereupon the latter took off running and Edvard screamed at him to stay. The moon vanished once again, and for a moment, all was silent. The Placerville Vampire Hunting Society was looking at its President rather intently.

Suddenly, a pale figure wrapped in white, wraithlike garments seemed to rise out of the ground behind Edvard, Dad pumped his fist once before diving for his night camera. “Who dares trespass upon my resting place?”

Edvard froze. The figure stalked around him. Its eyes seemed literally to blaze, and he made a desperate stab with his stake. It broke on contact and there was a hard “thump” sound. The lady in the underwired nightdress merely grinned- or perhaps bared her teeth- then advanced, red mouth open. Howard had taken off at the first sound of its voice, and then even Leslie had edged away as soon as the stake broke.

Edvard was alone. He no longer had anyone to impress. He had no time to find a flask of holy water or dig out his cross necklace. He turned on a dime, screamed like a little girl, and ran for his life.

The figure in white chuckled, and we saw it seem to lift and drag something into place on the ground, before jogging lightly away.

“Well,” Dad said, when we were alone again. “That was quite something.”

“She’s good,” said Colin, and I had to agree.

“Hot chocolate, anyone?”

***

I was in the school library again the next day, and I wandered over to where Catalina sat, her nose once again buried in a yellow-edged paperback. I tossed an envelope on the desk.

“Vampires wouldn’t like cameras, would they?” I asked.

She looked up at me, then frowned. “I have nothing to say to you. All I wanted was someone to write stuff down. Especially since I couldn’t go. I got grounded.”

Ignoring this, I continued, “Flashes aren’t their thing, and I bet you can even capture their image if the camera’s digital.”

“No, you can’t. It’s still in response to reflected light, and vampires don’t reflect any.” Catalina would allow no vampire misinformation to stand uncorrected.

“Well, the one I saw last night did,” I said, “…but Edvard doesn’t need to know.” I paused. “Enjoy the pictures. I think they’ll be great souvenirs.”

I had turned to walk away, but then I remembered one last thing. “I think your great-aunt would have been proud, Catalina.”

(c) 2008, Jill_Pole

My dear fellow Narniawebbers.

Today marks the 5th anniversary of a night when, lonely, bored, and trawling the waters of the internet, I happened upon a remarkable website. It took very little time for me to discern that here at last dwelt people I had been searching for my whole life, but had given up on ever finding- people who thought like me. Still wary of the internet and its dangers- stalkers, pervs, etc.- I created a new persona for myself- JillPole- and I've never looked back.

Ok, well, I have looked back. I got so wrapped up in this community in such a short time span- 100 posts my first night, diving into the ongoing Ditto Story shortly thereafter- that I eventually had to give it up for a time for my own good- twice.

How well I remember those long nights of delicious conversation- Cymru, Levibarjonas, Wyntre_Rose, Coraline, Shieldmaiden, Earel_Alquawen, starkat, stargazer, Gwendolen, Lysander, Fantasia_Kitty, Shawna, master oliver, Jints, alora-lindea, and so many others (let me know if I've missed you, if ever you pass this way) became my very dear friends very quickly. Many of them have moved on to more three-dimensional pastures, and I salute them for it, as much as I miss them terribly.

As another dear friend from Narniaweb, Ceppault, likes to say, "People come. People go. That's Ditto Town." And he is right. Times have changed on the forum. We've seen two Narnia movies come and go. I can no longer participate in some of the conversation. It has moved beyond me, into a realm I no longer relate to, nor have the time for. There are still a few souls- some old, some new- with whom mine hums in harmony, however, and I love them very much.

Thanks, Narniaweb, for five wonderful, tumultuous years. For the first October 13th, I can look at you with eyes that do not need to move on to a school assignment- eyes that are still somewhat lonely- and do you know? The thought of all we've shared still fills me with warmth from the inside out. The internet's not so scary after all.

So this weekend, I went home. It was delightful- the weather could not have been better, and I love having my family all together.

While home, I managed to go to the beach, clean my car, go canoeing, experiment with the WiiFIT Mom got for her birthday (conclusion: Best exercise tool EVAR), take familly pictures (what an exercise That is), and read a book.

Now, I know everyone and their mother has been reading The Shack by William P. Young. This makes it trendy.

But in this case, I find it's worth a trend.

When Jesus shows up in fiction, I instantly fall in love- if it actually looks like Him. Thus, the Passion of the Christ, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Glorious Appearing (book 12 of Left Behind) are all very dear to me. While it is more blessed to not have seen, yet to have believed, these books have been able to give me glimpses of what it would be like to see Him face to face- this, I desire more than anything else in the whole world. And The Shack was no exception. The love and amazing wonder of God- in all three persons, for once- shines through that book. I found myself sobbing quite a few times- with longing, and with joy, though the story itself will certainly invoke tears of sorrow from many too.

Needless to say it gets a high recommendation from me- to anyone who has experienced a loss, anyone who wants to know God better, and anyone at all who loves Jesus.

I only have two quibbles. One is that the book mentions nothing about spiritual warfare or praying for supernatural protection. The second is (potentially) more serious. When I read books like The Shack, I can see God as I desire to see Him- as the most incredible, loving Father Who has ever existed- and it is true that this is who He is. But I still struggle with the more serious side of God- because it's not the same feeling I have when I read the Bible. I cannot put my finger on any serious theological errors on Young's part, though. Would love to hear others' thoughts on the book.