Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (25 page)

“Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’ Clementine. You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.” I hum tunelessly, like Gram used to after her brain softened into mush. I’m reverting to childhood, to a time when Dad or Uncle Ned might burst through the door and save the day with a blast of double-aught buckshot.

It finally dawns upon me that I’m bleeding, am sitting in a puddle of blood. Where the blood is leaking from, I’ve not the foggiest notion. Silly me,
that’s
why I’m dead from the waist down. My immobility isn’t a function of terror, pheromones, or the occult powers of an evil spirit. I’ve been pricked and poisoned. Nature’s predators carry barbs and stings. Those stings deliver anesthetics and anticoagulants. Have venom, will travel. I chuckle. My lips are cold.

“Help me,” it whispers as it plucks my toes, testing my resistance. Even this close, it’s an indistinct blob of shadowy appendages.

“I have one question.” I enunciate carefully, the way I do after one too many shots of Jäger. “Did you take my dad on August fifteenth, 1977? Or did that bastard skip out? Me and my brother got a steak dinner riding on this.”

“Help me.” The pleading tone descends into a lower timbre. A satisfied purr.

One final trick up my sleeve, or in my pocket. Recently, while browsing a hardware store for a few odds and ends, I came across a relic of my youth—a black light. Cost a ten-spot, on special in the
clearance bin. First it made me smile as I recalled how all my childhood friends illuminated their Funkadelic posters, kids as gleeful as if we’d rediscovered alchemy. Later, in college, black light made a comeback on campus and at the parties we attended. It struck a chord, got me thinking, wondering . . .

Any creature adapted to distort common light sources might be susceptible to
uncommon
sources. Say, infrared or black light. I hazard a guess that my untutored intuition is on the money and that thousands of years of evolution haven’t accounted for a ten-dollar device used to find cat-piss stains in the carpet.

I raise the box with the black light filter in my left hand and thumb the toggle. For an instant, I behold the intruder in all its malevolent glory. It recoils from my black light, a segmented hunter of soft prey retreating into its burrow. A dresser crashes in the bedroom. The trailer rocks slightly, then is quiet. The moment has passed, except for the fresh hell slowly blooming in my head.

The black light surprised it and nothing more. Surprised and amused it. The creature’s impossibly broad grin imparted a universe of corrupt wisdom that will scar my mind for whatever time I have left. Mr. Help Me’s susurrant chuckle lingers like a psychic stain. Sometimes the spider cuts the fly from its web. Sometimes nature doesn’t sink in those red fangs; sometimes it chooses not to rend with its red claws. A reprieve isn’t necessarily the same weight as a pardon. Inscrutability isn’t mercy.

We Shaws are tough as shoe leather. Doubtless, I’ve enough juice left in me to crawl for the phone and signal the cavalry. A quart or two of type O and I’ll be fighting fit with a story to curl your toes. The conundrum is whether I really want to make that crawl or whether I should close my eyes and fall asleep.
Did you take my dad?
I’ve spent most of my life waiting to ask that question. Is Dad out there in the dark? What about those hunters and hikers and kids who walk through the door and onto the crime pages every year?

I don’t want to die, truly I don’t. I’m also afraid to go on living. I’ve seen the true, unspeakable face of the universe, a face that reflects my lowly place in its scheme. And the answer is yes. Yes, there are hells, and in some you are burned or boiled or digested in the belly of a monster for eternity. Yes, what’s left of Dad abides with a hideous mystery. He’s far from alone.

What would Clint Eastwood do? Well, he would’ve plugged the fucker with a .44 Magnum, for starters. I shake myself. Midfifties is too late to turn into a mope. I roll onto my belly, suck in a breath, and begin the agonizing journey toward the coffee table, where I left my purse and salvation. Hand over hand, I drag my scrawny self. It isn’t lost on me what I resemble as I slather a red trail across the floor.

Laughing hurts. Hard not to, though. I begin to sing the refrain from “Help!” Over and over and over.

N
o one had settled here for a long time, maybe forever, before us.

The wild savages who were living nearby when we arrived never came within eyesight of the rocky mound and ruin of an oak, and wouldn’t talk about it, neither. And the first ones of us who came after them, well, it was either war, or disease, or the curse of the place that kept the area around the mound from being settled right away.

Our kind came from a seagoing people, and that natural harbor a few miles from the mound—sheltered, wide, and deep—was too good to leave unused. When there were too many people near the harbor and not enough room, a deal was struck: take the land close to the mound, farm it free of taxes, but the men stay there, in perpetuity. It was, easy enough to see, Stone Harbor’s way of keeping a barrier between itself and the mound, but with the hunger for land being what it was, Farmington soon became a going concern. The folks who lived here were the kind who weren’t welcomed elsewhere and didn’t have the money to look for a better living than that rocky inhospitable land. But it could be farmed, and it was. Every year, Stone Harbor sent a priest to say the rituals that kept the evil of the
mound at bay. Farmington wasn’t a prison colony, but it might as well have been, the folks it attracted.

The mound was spit up out of the ground at the edge of the fields like the earth itself couldn’t bear to keep it inside anymore, a rocky outcropping with a wide, flat stone perched on top. The dead oak that marked the outcrop stood bare against the sky, a little humped, like a miser cackling over his hoard. Its back had been braced against the wind and the salt for two hundred years, some said; it had been a mature tree when Gammer Avon was small, and she could remember back then better than she could remember last week. Maybe there had been other trees on the hill then, but the oak—or maybe the demon—had smothered them all, leaving bare branches thrown against the sky, defying decay, denying defeat.

There was a rusty iron pike fence around the base of the rocky mound, like at the burying ground behind the church, to keep the animals from rooting about where they shouldn’t. The tumbledown stone wall marking our plot’s boundary was just before that. Repairing the stone line would have required getting nearer the mound than anyone was brave enough to do. No reason to go there anyway, as nothing grew out of the soil along that boundary.

One day, my little sister, Jenn, who is the light in my life, found her way out there, peering through the iron pickets. Da caught her, and thrashed her within an inch of her life. I didn’t interfere, didn’t protest, even though it meant I’d catch a beating too, for not keeping an eye on her. She had to learn. Better a beating than death and damnation.

No one had ever seen the demon, so maybe there wasn’t one living in that dead, blasted spot between the last of the fields and the untamed woods, as some, almost always kin from outside, claimed. But the men who lived in Farmington, tough enough to endure a monthlong sea crossing and eke out a life from that unforgiving soil, avoided the mound like it was the plague; they grew more fractious
and violent as the blessing time drew near, and were downright dangerous until the priest arrived and the ritual was completed according to book and verse. The animal was marked with the warding glyphs in indigo dye on its shaved skin and left bleating by the flat rock perched on lower boulders in the afternoon. The next morning, nothing more than broken bones and matted hair would be found. I knew it wasn’t bears. Bears, like the savages and anyone else with sense, didn’t go near the place.

The
priest being late
was one of the favorite stories at harvest time, when the days were still long enough and bright enough to celebrate and there was plenty of food and the endless winter nights were still months away. Tales about the demon itself, to warn the children and scare them into obedience, were told only in summer, when there were hours of evening light. Some said it was a serpent, or a great worm, and others said it was a beast more like a lion or a giant boar, but
teeth
figured in all the stories, and everyone agreed that the demon craved live flesh, live blood. It didn’t take anyone as old as Gammer Avon to remember the winter when the blessing time was delayed a day or two. The screams of the slaughtered goats and pigs could be heard through shuttered windows during a gale.

It was only in the summer, too, that the men would show their tattoos, parts of the glyph patterns and wards put on the sacrificial animal, a kind of drunken taunt, a fractional gesture of defiance against a safely contained evil. It was never the entire glyph they made, in indigo and ash, but more than enough to prove their defiance of the large needle and mallet, and their parents, if not of the demon itself.

But the stories became fewer with fall, and were gone entirely long before winter drew down, and feasting was over, and supplies got thin. In those last dark months, until the priest arrived, the men stayed up later, drank more. Drinking led to fights, and offers to
finish the mark
and
leave you at the stone
were counted as bad as
a threat of death. Drinking led to rash proposals to storm the rocky hill and confront the demon there with fire and tar. But there was not enough whiskey in Farmington or Stone Harbor or even the whole of the world to get the men to take on what they feared in the first place. So they redoubled their drinking and tried to put the shadows behind them. Because they were scared, because they didn’t have the courage to kill the thing and wanted to crawl under the blankets. There was always too much whiskey and never enough light.

Trudging through the snow and frozen mud, we gathered in the church on Sabbath, to hear when the priest would arrive. The ship had never been so late as this year, and while annually it seemed to be a closer thing than any of us liked, with the weather and the tides against us, talk started to get ugly, blossoming into tauter nerves and sharper tempers than usual. No fewer than three black eyes in the church, and more than a dozen bandaged fists. I liked the church. No fights here, at least for an hour during sermon, and the big space was filled with light. Whitewashed walls reflected the one stained glass window over the altar—salvaged from another church that burned in Stone Harbor—which was about the only colors we’d see until spring. Blue and red and green and gold—I wished I could curl up inside those colors. The cross in the center of it was pretty, too, if a little stark in its silver and black and a little crooked from the botched repairs.

Da, his friend Mr. Minter, and Mr. Daggett escorted the stranger to the steps just in front of the big stone altar. They didn’t look happy, and he didn’t look like no priest. The man was dressed oddly, even odder than the folk in Stone Harbor, with bold colors—bright red and rich blue—that seemed ridiculous compared to our gray wool and brown homespun, and a little irreverent, as if he were trying to compete with the stained glass.

“I’m Captain Thrupp,” the man announced to the congregation.
“And I’ll tell you right off, I have bad news. The priest died during the passage from Southport.”

A stifled scream from the back, followed by sobbing. Jenn’s hand pinched mine, she held on so tight. I looked at Aunt Lize; she’d gone pale, but she held up a finger. The captain wasn’t done yet.

Captain Thrupp held up his hands. “I’m going to make a quick run down the coast to Port Providence.”

“That’s two days away!” Miss Minter shouted. “That’s not fast enough.”

“It’s close, but not impossible,” the captain said. “We’ll get him back in time.”

Da nudged him. Captain Thrupp looked abashed. “We can’t leave for another day, though. Weather’s against us and we’ve a spar needs repairing. But we can get the work done and be back in time. No worries; Stone Harbor is paying me well for the extra trips and the repairs, as well as a bonus if—when—I return with the priest.”

There was muttering in the church, and it took the lay deacon, Mr. Turner, a good five minutes to get everyone quiet and reciting a prayer.

I watched as Da and his friends hustled Captain Thrupp out of the church. Aunt Lize nudged me, hard, so I’d bend my head and pray.

We’d need something more than prayers,
I thought.

That night, I finished collecting the bowls from dinner. The whiskey jug had gone around once again, and Da and them were getting raucous.

Aunt Lize hissed at me. “Get over here, girl!”

She grabbed my arm and yanked me to the other side of the kitchen’s curtain door. “What are you doing, loitering out there! It’s not safe, not with them in this state.” She relented, though, and took the bowls from me, scraping the scraps—scant as they were—into the bucket for our last remaining pig. “You were just doing as you ought, and a good little housekeeper you’ll make someday. But you don’t want to be in the way of them, when they’re like this. You look in on Jenn, and I’ll take these out to the sow.”

I nodded thanks; the wind was howling, whipping snow under the doors and piling it up against the windows. I shivered; I didn’t like to think what else might be out there, for the Minters had lost a horse just the night before. No one was sure if it was the demon or just the madness of people cooped up and living with fear and hunger.

If she was right about the men, Aunt Lize was wrong on another score; I was already a good housekeeper. It was no sin to say so if it was true. It was our secret conspiracy, me and Aunt Lize; she would have run to Stone Harbor and found a place there, if my mother hadn’t died. As I was so small, and Jenn just a baby, she put that thought aside and came to help Da, much as she hated him and Farmington. She couldn’t leave us, her sister’s children, not when she could do something about it.