After she graduated from high school and from the business course at Boston University, she was living in a squalid tenement and working as a stenographer in downtown Boston. Meanwhile, her parents were bugging her to take care of them and generally be a stay-at-home nurturer instead of a working girl. For all that Materyllis didn’t want to become like her mom, working as a mom with 4 kids and worn out early in life, her parents’ insistence did carry some weight because Materyllis liked her economic independence, but hated her apartment, her bigoted landlord and her job in general. She much preferred taking care of either her plants [no room for a garden] or her cat, and she was very good at raising the kids; she just didn’t want to be a housemother. She thought about going into nursing.

Then she got sick. She got really, really sick with mono. She was behind one day in rent payment. Her landlord seized the opportunity to boot her out. Her parents believed that she had caught the kissing disease from being immodest with young men, so they strenuously disapproved of her. They did, however, let her move back into to their cramped house in Cambridge on Yerxa Road.

Materyllis pushed herself to go to work, but the longer commute wore her out. The leader of the steno pool very nicely said that she would always have a job there, but now she needed to go home and get well. Materyllis left her job and went to the bank to withdraw almost all of her savings. Her former landlord was demanding exorbitant fees for things like maid service, keys and damage that she hadn’t committed. He threatened her with court action, so she wanted to pay him off to get him to shut up. As she approached her landlord’s house, she was mugged. Her purse was stolen, along with the money for the landlord. Materyllis ended up walking home from downtown Boston to North Cambridge. Once there, she passed out, sick and tired.

Materyllis entered the lowest period of her life. She felt incompetent because she couldn’t keep her job. She felt like a pushover for paying off the landlord instead of fighting him. She felt like she was stupid and clueless because she had gotten mugged. She said to herself that she was asking for it, carrying a purse full of money to a bad part of town. She doubted her ability to be an independent, successful woman who could support herself. She considered becoming her parents’ caretaker since it was safe and easy. This thought, however, was unutterably depressing, so, compounding the weakness of mono, she lay in bed, literally paralyzed with self-doubt and indecision.

Seeing that she was not only sick in the body, but sick at heart, Materyllis’ parents quickly stopped reviling her supposed immodest conduct. Having little money for offficial medical care, they sought the services of Joe Coldstone. Now Joe Coldstone had a reputation among the blacks of North Cambridge because, as the tales went, his mother had been a healer, a “witch woman,” in Africa, and she had brought those skills across the ocean in the 1780s and taught them to her son Jacob so that he could cure the black people of maladies when the white people wouldn’t touch them. Some people thought this story was full of shit, and it wasn’t his mom, but his great-great-grandma. Others pointed out that Joe’s memory seemed to go way back into the early 1800s, so maybe he did have special healing powers that led to him being so well-preserved.

Whatever the case was, there was no debate on one fact: Joe was pathologically interested in Materyllis. When she dated [boys] in high school and occasionally in college [before giving up to concentrate on her job], she saw him occasionally at the theaters or ice cream parlor or behind her on the street, always at night, always seeming to be casual, but too close for coincidence. Materyllis clocked him with her purse once, but this only seemed to increase his stalking. 

Anyway, Joe’s sicko little mind knew a good opportunity when he saw it. And here is where I run out of details, but I will fill them in later after research. He told Materyllis’ parents that he needed to tend to her in privacy. He actually raped her in privacy and turned her into a vampire. I’m undecided whether it’s human blood, animal blood or psychic energy vampirism. It is also possible that he transmitted some sort of werebestial nature. Time for some research.