La Vida Vampire

Biting the inside of my lip to keep from laughing at the Gomer-ism, I turned toward the Jag Queens and regrouped.

“Now, I mentioned this was called the Quarter. My parents were among those immigrants from Minorca, Italy, and Greece who came here as indentured servants to work the New Smyrna Colony. When the immigrants didn ’t get what they were promised, they fled to St. Augustine for asylum. My mother was Minorcan Spanish, my father an Italian mariner, and my family home was on the bay front. The house we lived in is long gone, but I’ll show you where it was when we get there.

“I was buried for two hundred and four years,” I continued as twelve pairs of eyes got rounder, “in a tiny basement of coquina that had a small trapdoor flush with the ground. The original house over the basement was coquina stone and wood. It ’s also long gone, and a late eighteen hundreds Victorian house is on the site now. My friend, Maggie, is restoring the house, so it’s a construction zone and not safe to visit.

“I love living in this time, ” I said to the goth gang, “and the GPS tracker I wear is in my arm. I don’t get headaches like Spike got in Buffy. I do watch a lot of TV and movies, and I read a lot. Classic TV, old movies, and mystery novels are some of my favorites. Oh, and I truly don’t bite people. I get artificial blood from the health food store, and it’s bottled just like cola, except they come in six and eight ounces instead of larger sizes.”

I paused for a breath, and Shalimar jumped in.

“Ms. Marinelli, Francesca, you just answered half the questions my group planned to ask. I’ve heard vampire senses are sharper than human ones, but this is ridiculous. Do you read minds?”

“Not exactly,” I fudged, “but I am a bit psychic when certain moon phases don’t fritz me out.”

“A bit psychic, my best pearls! Invite us along next time you play the lottery.”

The group laughed, and Skinny Goth Boy spoke up.

“Hey, the newspaper said you were a princess before you were, you know, in the basement. Were you really some kind of royalty, like from Spain?”

“No. The head vampire here called himself a king because he could get away with it. He declared me the princess because he sort of adopted me.”

“So you were heir to the bloodsucker’s throne?”

Stony asked the question, his voice grating like coquina on a chalkboard. Dressed in a black turtleneck, black Wranglers, and black sneakers, his hard eyes were a startling pale blue. I didn’t mind the other questions, but his annoyed me.

“I’d appreciate it, sir, if you’d use more tactful language in front of the young children,” I said polite as could be. The tour company and my mother would’ve been proud. “To answer you, in a sense I suppose I was being trained, but I was a most unwilling and uncooperative heir.”

“So, eh, Princess Vampire,” the loud wiseguy said, “you see dead people?”

Corny, but I could’ve kissed the man for asking the perfect question to get us on tour-track.

“I do see our ghosts when they want to be seen,” I said as I retrieved the battery-operated lantern from the substation’s small storage shelf. “Let’s get along with our tour and find out if they ’re active tonight. Now, please watch your step, watch the children, and stay together as I tell you of the ghosts of St. Augustine.”



An hour and thirty minutes later, the fog began to thicken, and the air was cooler, but the tour had been successful. Wildly successful, judging by the unusual number of sightings. I mean, the disturbed energy of storms can bring our ghosts out of the woodwork, but plain old fog?

Nevertheless, Wiseguy saw Judge John B. Stickney’s ghost in the Huguenot Cemetery, my little friend Robbie saw both a cat and dog ghost, and two teens swore they saw an angry woman in the window of Fay’s House on Cuna. Gomer must’ve seen her, too. I almost lost it when he uttered a shocked, drawling, “Shazam.” He sounded too Gomer-ish to be for real, but he did look shaken. The French couple actually took their eyes off each other long enough to exclaim over orbs of light zipping around the Catholic Tolomato Cemetery.

I saw my favorite spirit, the Bridal Ghost, in the Tolomato and told her story, the one I’d “seen” from my basement grave. It wasn’t a tour-sanctioned story, but the ghost nodded as if satisfied I had gotten the basics right. I hoped neither Janie nor Mick would turn me in for telling a tale not backed by specific historical data.

Then again, I could argue I was the historical data.

I wrapped up my last ghost story at the final stop and scanned the crowd. We’d covered less than a square mile on the tour, but the children were drooping or sleeping in their parents’ arms. Wiseguy and his friends were quiet, and even the teens were subdued.