Echoes of Parrish: A Vampire's Quest

Eden Price, club owner extraordinaire, sat at her battered mahogany desk nursing a Band-Aid on her wrist, the faint copper tang of blood lingering in the air. The distant thump of the dance floor pressed against the thick walls, muffled but ceaseless, reverberating through the soles of her boots. Opposite her, perched lightly on the blood-red armchair used for her more eccentric clientele, was a woman who looked out of time—or from beneath it. The vampire.

Her name, as far as Eden had gotten it, was Carmilla. She exuded a sorcerous calm now, fingers laced, lips stained red where minutes before they had been pressed to Eden’s skin. Eden thought she looked—if not human, then at least unthreatening for the moment.

Carmilla took in her surroundings as if newly aware—eyeing the cheap tin fan whirring noisily on the bookshelf and the collection of framed, fading club flyers on the wall.

“Thank you, Miss Price,” she said softly, her voice less ragged with hunger now, her accent elegantly misplaced in modern Boston. “You don’t know what you’ve just done for me.”

Eden could still feel a faint ache in her veins, but she managed a wan smile. “Just don’t make it a habit. I run a night club, not a blood bank.”

Carmilla gave her a ghost of a grin. “I try my very best not to be a burden. But…there is something else I must ask of you.” She hesitated, eyes suddenly bright with an emotion Eden couldn’t place. “When I came here, I was told by certain knowledgeable persons that the owner resembled someone I once knew. Someone I have been searching for a very long time. Her name was Mirabel Parrish. Are you related to her, perhaps? I’m told she haunts this part of the city, or did, decades ago.”

Eden stilled, brow creasing. “I’ve never heard that name before. Parrish? I don’t know any Parrishes. My mother’s family has always been Price. Why do you think I’d know her?”

The vampire’s gaze turned distant, unfocused. “You have her smile. Her eyes. They said you were her niece, perhaps a granddaughter. Did your family ever speak of her?” Carmilla probed, almost pleading.

Eden’s mind leaped to the only possible suspects—she mentally cursed the old gossips from the Public Library, those knitwork witches with their sharp noses forever buried in genealogy and scandal. If it wasn’t Miss Ainsley with her cryptic footnotes, it was Mrs. Long bragging about knowledge of “all the spectral goings-on of this neighborhood.”

Trust them to fling a hungry vampire at her head in the middle of club rush hour.

“Those women at the library sent you, didn’t they?” Eden muttered. “Yeah, of course they did. Half the time I’m sure they’re running the city from the back of the periodicals section.”

Carmilla nodded, a touch embarrassed. “They were most insistent you could help.”

Eden rolled her eyes skyward, ticking off a silent list of expletives for every chatty librarian between here and the Charles River. Nevertheless, her curiosity had twined itself through her irritation. “So what do you want from Mirabel Parrish—assuming she ever existed?”

Carmilla hesitated. “She saved my life. Or what passes for it. Long ago. They took her from me. I never found out what happened. I’ve looked for her since the War—your Great War. She would be gone now, but I had to see. I had to know.”

Eden sighed, glancing at her computer and the pile of receipts that needed her attention. Then she considered the hidden, haunted look in Carmilla’s eyes and made a snap decision. “Look, I have no idea who Mirabel is…but you bought something dear from the library crypt-keepers, and I’ve got a reputation for odd favors. Maybe we can work together. I know all the city’s archives and where the living and dead hide from each other. I’ll help you look, best I can.”

Carmilla’s relief was almost palpable. Eden caught a glimpse of something fragile—hope, maybe—rise up in the vampire like dusk behind cathedral glass.

“Thank you, Miss Price,” she whispered.

*

They started at dawn, when the last dancers had gone and the city’s ordinary citizens were waking. Eden had a stash of seltzer and some strong club coffee; Carmilla, wrapped in a scarf and a floppy hat, declared herself immune to most sunlight except “on the worst, cloudless noon, which is rarely a concern in Boston.”

They pored over digital archives, old phone books, even the library’s microfiche—a task Eden detested and Carmilla pronounced “quaint.” There were brief flashes—mentions of a Mirabel, “an unusually determined woman in the women’s suffrage club,” a teacher in the West End, a brief police notice after a string of disappearances.

Carmilla supplied a handful of details. Mirabel had a birthmark on her left wrist. She played the violin. She was “dangerously modern” for her time.

Eden, working methodically, soon realized that Mirabel Parrish had existed, had lived down Tremont Street, had left a trace only the most obsessed would find or care about. She caught herself asking, “Why are you really looking for her, Carmilla? What happened to her?”

The vampire replied with an intensity that reminded Eden of the hunger that had first brought her to the club office. “Where I’m concerned, happy endings are rare. Mirabel…she helped me escape. They came for us both. I fled; she was taken. All I have left is a debt.”

Eden tried not to shiver. “Who came for you?”

Carmilla gave a sad, knowing smile. “There is always someone, isn’t there?”

*

One night, in the club’s quiet hours, Eden found an old folded note—addressed to Price, but from decades prior, tucked in the ledger of club ownership:

Dearest,
Should a woman come for me, dark as the river and pale as lilies, tell her I never forgot. She can find me where the bell no longer tolls.

—M.P.

Eden’s mind raced. The bell? Churches? She dragged Carmilla into the city’s shadowed heart, to the crumbling St. Matthew’s, where the bell tower had been silent since the sixties. Carmilla grew increasingly tense as they descended the stone steps to the unlit crypt below, all the while Eden grumbling about “this whole damned city being more mystery than club by night.”

In the oldest vault, Carmilla knelt by a faded stone: Mirabel Parrish, 1895–1965. “Beloved friend and protector.”

“She’s gone,” Eden said softly.

Carmilla rested icy fingers on the inscription, shoulders shaking. “She kept her promise, even until the end. She would have protected me here, had I not delayed so long. Thank you, Eden Price, for helping me find her.”

Eden found herself gripping Carmilla’s arm, oddly unwilling to let the vampire’s sorrow go unanswered. “Maybe she still protects you. Maybe she sent you to the only stubborn club owner in Boston willing to help a vampire on a wild goose chase. Maybe the librarians weren’t such gossips after all.”

Carmilla laughed, abrupt and hoarse and small in the stone-dark chamber. “Perhaps not. Or perhaps you’re all more alike than you think.”

*

If you sat in the back office of Eden’s club now and listened hard, you’d sometimes catch the whine of a mock-violin in Carmilla’s voice, soft as memory, as the vampire and the club owner traced stories in the afterhours. Eden no longer cursed the library gossips—at least, not every night.

Some debts, after all, are paid in blood. Others, in the company of unlikely friends, and mysteries solved in the city’s deepest dark.

This story was generated by user vivi.lex with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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