Authors: Tim Curran
It was crazy…exhilarating, disturbing.
I was numb from the cold, but at that moment I did not feel it. In fact, what I
did
feel was my entire body waking up, every nerve ending standing taut. From head to toe, I was tingling inside and out like a foot that had fallen asleep and was coming alive again with a million-billion pinpricks. I think I achieved, in my terror, something quite near to complete consciousness. Not only was my mind fully active for the first time in my life, but my body. And I swear in that heightened, dynamic, near mystical state, I could hear the panicked thoughts of my brother and his best friend. And I could smell the bitter, sour stink of their fear…and worse, I could smell what was outside the mill. Maybe
they
made no sound and their hearts did not beat as such, but I could smell them and it was a dark, revolting stench that I figured an exhumed casket must smell like. It was blown, it seemed, right into my face, pungent and thick like a green gas of putrescence.
That’s when I heard a scratching, scraping sort of noise and knew it was coming from beneath us. In my mind it was the sound of coffin-worms chewing their way into a moldering oblong box. But the reality was something quite different, you see. Andy heard it, too, and edged over near the pit, shining his light down there. I didn’t join him; I didn’t have to. I saw in my mind what he was seeing in his: a countless number of undead children climbing up out of the stygian darkness. I could see the great black depths below that the flashlight beam could barely reach…the crumbling walls of masonry, the great rusted gears and mangled cogs and millstones cracking open…and the vampires, white-faced and grinning, lips swollen like red worms, eyes huge and empty and shining with a fathomless blackness.
They were coming for us.
And maybe they would have had us but something intervened.
The worst sort of thing.
An old hag came through the door at us…she did not open it, she
flowed
through every crack, seam, and nail hole like a river of ghostly plasma. When she was inside, these ribbons of teleplasm came together and formed the hag: she was a floating chalk-white ghost with a sunken face, a puckered oval mouth, and huge glassy, reptilian eyes like those of a stuffed python. Her stringy gray hair blew about her like reeds, her arms held out before her breasts like the limbs of a preying mantis. Her hands were white corpse-orchids, fingernails black and glossy and at least seven or eight inches long curling back towards the palms. A rustling, propulsive wind came with her that stank of the charnel. It blew the shroud she was wearing into ribbons and streamers as she herself seemed to fragment, breaking apart into motes of phosphorescent dust that were carried along in her wake. That wind blew not only her shroud, but her flesh…it got up underneath her skin and made it flap on the bones beneath with a rubbery sort of sound.
That’s what I saw as Bugs screamed and she took him.
It either happened very fast or very slowly; either way, we didn’t have the strength to fight her. She chose Bugs and took him, bearing him off into dark channels of night as he continued to shriek at the top of his lungs. She took him down into the pit and as his mind emptied itself, I heard the sound of her blubbery lips fasten to his throat and begin to suck. His screams echoed from great depths below.
That’s when Andy took hold of me and kicked the door open. There was no time for anything a
pproaching a good-bye. He simply said: “GET ON THOSE TRACKS AND RUN! DON’T STOP RUNNING UNTIL YOU’RE HOME! GO!
GO!”
I think he might have said other things. At least in my mind I can still hear his voice telling me not to talk to anyone, not to look at anyone, to keep my eyes looking straight ahead and never look back. And you know what? I didn’t. I ran with Andy behind me somewhere and I didn’t see any vampires besides that girl who was still waiting on the bridge. She called to me but I ignored her. I ran and ran and ran. By the time I reached the bridge, I realized that Andy was no longer behind me, but I kept running anyway. I didn’t realize it then, but I know now, that he sacrificed himself so that I could be free. Andy’s luck finally ran out. I think…I think a wolf followed me for a time. I heard its padding in the snow and smelled its foul breath, but Andy told me not to look back.
And I didn’t.
I never saw this place again until I signed on as caretaker. The idea of coming here made me sick to my stomach, but I came back because I
had
to come back to this awful place where my childhood ended with a terrible screech. None of you may be able to understand that and I’m not sure I do completely myself, but I’ve been waiting here for things to start up again because I knew they would. Eventually, Griska and his cult would get thirsty. And now they have. And it’s only now that I understand why I had to come back…once, before I die, I want to see my brother again…even if he is only a mocking shell.
22
By the time Rule was done telli
ng his story, Morris was curled up by the fire again like somebody’s faithful retriever…except, of course, Wenda knew there was nothing faithful about him. If he were a dog, then he was a slinking hyena that needed to be watched very, very closely.
“But you have to understand something,” Wenda said. “Your brother, if he’s still here, will kill you. He’ll kill us. He won’t be your brother or the brother to anything living.”
Rule nodded. “Yes, I know. But I ran last time and I’ve been guilty ever since.”
“There’s nothing to be guilty about. Andy sacrificed his life—and maybe even his soul—so that you could be free, that you could live. Coming back here and putting yourself at risk doesn’t give his death the meaning it should have.”
Wenda said that and was immediately struck by the incongruity of her lecturing her old lecturer. It seemed absurd. But a lot of things that used to seem absurd were no longer absurd, and a lot of things she never would have said before had wings now and they flew out of her mouth unfettered. There was something quite liberating about that and who she now was.
Megga, who’d sat uncharacteristically silent during
Rule’s yarning, said, “If your brother comes, he’ll be a monster. He’ll get in your mind. He’ll make you do things. He’ll twist your thoughts and turn your own mind against you.” She said this like she had personal experience in the matter. “He could make you pick up a knife and slit my throat. You wouldn’t have a choice.”
Rule nodded. “I think it depends on the discipline of the mind in question.”
“You’re fucking stupid if you think that. If you think you’re smart enough to outwit them or hold out against what they can do.”
“Maybe, maybe.” He shrugged. “Understand…I did not come here to get bitten in the neck. I have no self-destructive or morbid urges. Perhaps I’m speaking metaphorically. Perhaps what I wanted all along was just to come back here and face my fears. Maybe that’s really what it was all about.”
“If your brother comes,” Wenda said, still clutching her stake and wanting to use it, “I’ll destroy him. I’ll have to.”
“Unless
he gets you first,” Megga pointed out.
“And you’d hate that wouldn’t you?” Wenda said to her and she looked away. “Megga wants to be a vampire. She thinks it’s cool to be one of them.”
“Shut up,” Megga told her.
Rule sighed and looked into the fire. “The attraction is an old one and one of their greatest strengths. They can make you believe they’re something other than what they truly are. I know that, Megga, and I think you know it, too.
What we’re dealing with here is more than parasites, more than just bloodsuckers,” he said, a funny sort of steely glare in his eyes. “They’re ghosts essentially, hungry ghosts. And there is nothing more dangerous than a hungry ghost. They exist by not only drawing off the life’s blood of their prey, but the life energy, I think. When they sink their teeth in your throat it’s more than a particularly gruesome and ritualistic mode of feeding, it’s penetration, a defilement and violation of your life force. It kills the good things in you and leaves behind a shell powered by basal urges and primitive drives of hunger satiation. You become an appetite, more or less, a cunning, obscene appetite that exists to drain, destroy, and multiply its malignance. That is the core of vampirism, I believe: the hunger, the defilement, the destruction.”
“And knowing that gets us where exactly?” Megga said.
He laughed. “Nowhere. You’ll excuse an old academic for flights of philosophic fancy.”
Wenda nodded. “W
e’ve got nearly four more hours until sunrise. If we can make it that long, if we can hold out…”
“They’re not going to let us,” Megga said.
“She’s right,” Rule said. “So we can either sit here and wait for it or we can take action of a sort.”
Wenda was interested in this. “What sort of action?”
“First, let me espouse another local legend which you might find interesting.”
He told them that, according to local folklore, the reason that Griska and his familiars were not located and staked by the sheriff and his raiding party in the spring of 1829 was because they were hidden in a secret vault or catacombs. The location of which was thought to be beneath the old burying ground. Legend also had it that there was a tunnel or tunnels connecting it to Cobton.
“Now, the high sheriff and his men looked for a tunnel that day but couldn’t find any,” Rule told them. “When I took up as caretaker here I looked, too, and found nothing. I spoke with one of the contractors that rebuilt Cobton. He had heard the stories of the tunnels as well—being from New Hampshire, he referred to them as ‘smugglers’ tunnels’—but found nothing of the sort.”
“What’s the point?” Megga asked.
“The point, my dear, is that there
is
a tunnel and I found it tonight. You see, after I saw that thing dragging off Bill, I ran into a house down the way to hide. I went down into the cellar. There’s a tunnel down there and it appears that the opening is recent…as if maybe it had been closed a great many years and I imagine it was. That house is two doors down from here.” He described the house to them briefly. “It maybe our way out.”
“But that’s the house where Doc and Bailey and Reg are,” Megga said.
Wenda shook her head. “You want us to run over there, risk getting slaughtered, just so we can go into some tunnel that leads to a catacomb? Leads to the very lair of the vampires?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Better than sitting here and waiting for it,” Megga said.
But she was too anxious and Wenda did not like that. Maybe on the surface she was pretending to be with them and maybe she even believed it, but underneath there was still that fascination with the undead and this made her weak and vu
lnerable.
“Wait now,” Rule said. “Hear me out. First off, if we get to that other house and join up with your friends there’ll be more of us. Numbers are important. The vampires like to pick their victims off one by one. It’ll give us strength. Secondly, my car isn’t parked too far from that house. We could jog over there in five minutes. And thirdly, the legend also says that not only is this vault or catacomb connected to the town, but there’s a passage that leads up into one of the old VanderHoofen tombs. If we could make it through the catacomb and up into the tomb and out into the burial ground…we might have a chance.”
“In a cemetery?” Wenda said.
“If we make it down to the road,” Rule explained, “there’s a County Road Commission garage less than a mile through the woods on the other side. It’s manned day and night.”
“It’s suicide.”
“Suicide is better than what awaits us here, my dear Vultura,” he said.
“Well?” Megga said.
“I’ll think it over.”
Nobody had really put Wenda in charge, she just took the reigns because they were lying limp. But now that she had, she knew the decision was up to her. As far as she was concerned, she was responsible for their lives. Was she willing to throw them away so easily? The car was one thing…but a tunnel leading God knows where? Maybe into the very lair of the undead? That was insane.
Hide in plain sight,
a voice in her head kept saying, but she didn’t care much for the idea of hiding in a secret burial crypt. Sooner or later, Griska and the others would return to it and when that happened, things would get very ugly. She had a pretty good feeling he wanted to kill her in the worst possible way. She had seen him through the window, she had felt the hatred directed at her. He would make her suffer for killing the wolf-woman.
So maybe the catacomb is the best idea if you want to destroy him. Think of the ages of suffering he has brought forth. Think of the joy of plunging your stake into his chest. He hasn’t been human in many centuries. He was probably ancient in 1828. Do what Rule wants and kill that sonofabitch. What do you got to lose?
But that’s what stayed her.
She wasn’t sure whether she believed in the human soul or not, but whatever was inside her that made her Wenda Keegan, Griska would tear it out by the roots.
23
Rabbits and rodents,
Doc thought as the delirium tried to eclipse his thoughts once again.
In the end that’s all we are and maybe in the beginning not much more.
Scurrying, frightened creatures fearing death that circled high above on wings of midnight plumage, each revolution bringing it closer and closer until its claws were in your back or tearing into your throat. That’s what death was. That’s what it felt like, he decided.