by Ronald Kelly
Nailhead whimpered like a puppy, rolling his eyes and shuddering.
“Well, stick close, hoss,” said Caleb, “and we’ll take ourselves a look.” He clutched the maple stock of the rifle tightly and started toward a wall of thorny bramble.
The coonhound didn’t want him to go, however. He grabbed a fringe on the top of one of Caleb’s knee-high boots and held it in his teeth, trying to pull him away.
Caleb kicked at the dog. “Confound it, you mangy hound! Let go of me! I’ll be all right.”
When the dog let go and retreated a few feet, Caleb went on to the tangle of thicket. When he got there, he peered through a gap in the bramble. At first, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. Then he heard a laugh, like the bubbly giggle of a child, and his attention was drawn to a patch of moonlight in the center of a grassy clearing.
Caleb Vanleer felt as if he’d stepped smack dab into the middle of a nightmare. “Good God Almighty!” he whispered.
There, kneeling in the grassy patch, was a girl. A pretty blonde girl who couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years of age. She was naked except for a letterman jacket. It was burgundy and white, the school colors of Green Hollow High.
But that wasn’t what disturbed Caleb the most. It was what she was doing that made his blood run cold. She had a young deer laid across her lap, a doe, from the looks of it, and she was sucking at its neck. The deer kicked its rear leg once, but Caleb already knew it was dead. He could tell by the glassy look in its huge eyes.
The girl lifted her face from the animal’s neck and stared at him. She smiled and giggled softly. Caleb felt his head swim. Her teeth—complete with silver braces—were coated with blood. The girl’s eyes seemed to be just as red as the blood she fed upon, seemed almost to glow, in fact. She stared at the old man for a moment, then turned back to the deer.
Caleb felt as if he had stood there for a century, when the girl finally finished. She laid the emptied carcass of the doe gently aside and patted its head. Then she stood up. Moonlight played on her white body; a lean, small-breasted body as pale as raw lard. Caleb’s eyes roamed her form, from her neck to the golden triangle of her crotch. A network of ugly scars, puckered and blue, ran down the center of her throat, along her chest, and clear down to the mound of her pubic bone. There were also stitches running across her scalp line, just beneath her honey-blonde hair. Caleb recognized the marks. They were autopsy incisions. He had worked in a hospital before joining the service and knew those meticulous lines from memory.
The girl grinned at Caleb, her pretty eyes glowing. She licked her teeth with a blue tongue and it looked to Caleb as if some were longer than others, and much sharper. She let out a soft giggle, and then, stepping out of the moonlight, disappeared into the darkness of the forest.
Caleb made no move to enter the clearing and go after her. He backed away from the bramble and turned back the way he had come. Old Nailhead sat on his haunches several yards away, whining down deep in his throat.
“Yeah, I know what you mean, boy,” he said, feeling strangely lightheaded. “Let’s you and me get the hell outta here!”
A moment later, both man and dog were making their way back through the forest, heading toward the western face of the mountain. All desire for coon-hunting had left their minds. All they wanted to do was get back home, far away from that grassy clearing in the middle of the woods.
On their way, Caleb paused several times, feeling as though they were being followed. He peered off into the darkness, but saw nothing.
Once he looked down at his dog, confused. “Did I really see her, boy?” he asked. “Or was it just that ol’ liquor playing tricks with my head?”
Nailhead stared up at him and whimpered, tossing his head, wanting to get home. That was all the answer Caleb needed to hear.
As they neared the eastern face of Eagle Point and caught a glimpse of the log cabin in the moonlight, Caleb heard something echo off to the north. It sounded like a giggle, but it could have been the wind or the lonesome call of a night bird.
Whatever it was, natural or unnatural, Caleb wanted to hear it no more. He quickened his pace and passed Old Nailhead in the darkness, leaving that side of the mountain behind.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Boyd Andrews sat on the stool in his workshop, more interested in drinking than in finishing the work he had to do.
He picked up a bottle of Jim Beam he had bought from a liquor store—the last of Caleb’s white lightning was long gone—and took a long swig of the amber liquor. It wasn’t nearly as smooth as the moonshine. It burnt all the way down his throat and kept right on burning once it hit his stomach. A wave of nausea washed through him and he felt as if he might puke it up. He managed to fight off the sick sensation, however, and set the bottle back on the workbench, where it belonged.
Boyd stared at the half-finished coffin that stretched between two sawhorses. He had promised Dud Craven it would be ready tomorrow, but there was no way he could keep his word. The framework was done, but the lid and hinges hadn’t been screwed into place, and he hadn’t finished applying the linseed oil or waterproofing. Boyd had intended to do most of the work that day, but as it turned out, he’d ended up with more important things on his mind.
There was a framed photograph sitting on a shelf above the workbench, its glass speckled with sawdust. He wiped the film away and stared at it. It was a picture of Joan, Paul, and Bessie, during happier times. They had attended Green Hollow’s annual Fourth of July picnic at the fairgrounds outside of town and he had snapped a picture of them next to a redwood table covered with plates of fried chicken and heaping bowls of potato salad. They were smiling and laughing. Bessie was sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes. He remembered his daughter had hated the picture after it was developed. But it had been one of his favorites.
Boyd ached inside when he looked at the photograph. He laid it facedown on the workbench, but the pain refused to go away. He felt scared, more scared than he had ever felt in his life. He thought he had experienced fear when Joan had mentioned filing for divorce, but that was nothing compared to the dread that filled him now. He tried picturing them in his mind, perhaps where they might be at that moment. His thoughts weren’t kind to him, though. All he kept coming up with were images of bodies lying in the weeds of a ditch; bodies wearing familiar clothing, with every drop of blood siphoned from them.
He shuddered and took another drink from the bottle. After Chief Watts had driven off, Boyd had left the house on Stantonview Road and combed the length and breadth of Sevier County, cruising every backroad he could think of, as well as most of Highway 321. He had returned to the trailer on Maple Creek Road a little after eleven, exhausted and depressed. He had seen nothing on any of the roads that gave a clue as to where Joan and the kids were.
Boyd glanced at his watch. It was after three o’clock in the morning. He looked past the open door of the workshop. Crickets sang in the darkness. Somewhere a barn owl hooted. It was chilly, but he continued to sit there in his undershirt and jeans, oblivious to the cool air.
He considered going to the trailer and trying to get some sleep, but he knew it would be a waste of time. He would only toss and turn and sweat up the sheets of his bed. If he did sleep, he would have nightmares. Those bodies in the ditch again.
He was tipping the bottle up for another drink when something strange struck him. He listened. The crickets had stopped their noise. It was completely silent outside.
Boyd stared into the darkness beyond the garage door. He heard footsteps in the driveway—shuffling, unsteady footsteps. The carpenter set down the liquor bottle and stood up. He took a step forward, trying to see better.
A form in an emerald-green pant suit paused just beyond the doorway. The light of the workshop revealed the woman’s petite body, but darkness obscured her facial features. There was a gold bracelet on the woman’s left wrist. Boyd recognized it at once. It had been a gift from Paul and Bessie last Christmas.
“Blanche?” he asked, feeling his heart beat faster.
The woman weaved as if disoriented. “Boyd?” she replied feebly. “Boyd… could you help me, please?”
He wasted no time. He was out the door at once. He placed his arm around his mother-in-law’s waist and helped her inside. Blanche’s head hung downward and he couldn’t see her face. He noticed that her clothes were soiled, as if she had been lying in raw earth for a while.
“Just take it easy and we’ll sit you on this stool over here,” he said softly.
Once she was on the stool, her head still staring down at her feet, Boyd stood there nervously, watching her. The old woman was terribly cold. He had felt it as he’d helped her inside the workshop. And she was as pale as a ghost. Her hands and wrists, her ankles above her tan loafers—they were stark white.
“What happened, Blanche?” he asked. “Where are Joan and the kids?”
Blanche shook her gray head. “It was horrible, Boyd,” she uttered. “Just horrible!”
Boyd’s heart leapt into his throat. He prepared himself for the worst. “What was horrible? Tell me, Blanche, please.”
Suddenly, the despair in his mother-in-law’s voice turned into amusement. She began to laugh, softly at first, then louder. “You’re a damned fool, Boyd Andrews,” she told him. “A bigger fool than I thought.”
Boyd didn’t understand. “What—?”
Blanche lifted her head. The woman’s face was a mess. The left side looked normal—heavily lined, with too much makeup, the familiar gleam of cruel contempt in her eye. But the right side was in ruins. Something had ripped long furrows of flesh from her cheeks and the side of her neck, and her ear was nearly torn in half, hanging on by a thread of cartilage. But it was her right eye that was the worst. It looked as if it had been brutally punctured. The limp remnants of the organ sat within Blanche’s empty eye socket like a blister that had been popped.
Boyd stumbled backward, staring at the woman. Even through his horror, he noticed that something was odd about her wounds. Then he realized what it was. There was no blood. The tissue was blue and clammy, but bloodless.
Blanche rocked back on the stool, laughing and slapping her knees with her thin white hands. “You ought to see your face, Boyd!” she howled.
“What… what’s wrong with you, Blanche?” he stammered. The whiskey churned in his belly, ready to come up.
The woman’s good eye glittered. “I’m dead, Boyd.”
Boyd swallowed the sick feeling. He didn’t know why, but he believed her. He had to believe her. She was sitting there right in front of him. She shouldn’t have been, given her grisly condition, but she was.
“Do you know why I came here tonight, Boyd?” she asked, stepping off the stool.
Boyd didn’t answer. He just stood there and stared at her.
“I came here to kill you,” she said with half a smile. “I came here to do what I haven’t had the guts to do for the past ten years.”
The carpenter backed up a couple of steps. “Joan and the kids—where the hell are they?”
Blanche continued toward him. “Does it really matter? You’ll be dead before long.”
“Tell me, damn it!” he demanded, unable to take his eyes off her mutilated face.
“They’re probably up on Craven’s Mountain by now,” she told him, moving closer. Stalking.
“Why would they go there?”
“To see Grandpappy Craven, that’s why,” sneered Blanche. “The bastard took my daughter and left me to fend for myself.” She spread her arms. “Left me like this!”
“What do you mean?” asked Boyd. “I don’t understand what—”
Blanche stared at him as if he were a retarded child. “Let me put it like this,” she said. “Do you believe in vampires?”
Boyd swallowed dryly. He watched as his mother-in-law’s one good eye turned blood red and fangs began to sprout from the corners of her mouth.
“If you don’t, you will soon,” she told him. “Very soon.”
Boyd lost his nerve. He turned and ran for the open door. But before he got three steps, Blanche was upon him. He felt her tiny hands grab the back of his sweaty undershirt. He tried to pull away, but there was no escaping her.
Abruptly, he felt himself being lifted off his feet and thrown through the air. Boyd sailed across the workshop and landed on top of his workbench with a crash. He groaned as tools bore into his back, sending jolts of pain from his neck to his tailbone. He rolled off the bench and landed on his belly on the workshop’s concrete floor.
He looked up and saw Blanche coming for him again. He couldn’t believe what she had done. Boyd was two hundred and thirty pounds, and Blanche couldn’t have been more than a hundred and twenty. Yet she had picked him up like a feather pillow and thrown him twelve feet across the room.
Boyd saw the claw hammer lying on the floor no more than five feet away. He grabbed it and staggered to his feet, his back throbbing. He raised the hammer over his head. “Stay back, Blanche,” he warned.
She laughed at him and kept on coming. “I hate you, Boyd. I’ve always hated you, and do you know why? Because you’re stupid. So damned ignorant!”
Blanche’s mouth yawned hungrily, fangs exposed, as she launched herself at him. Boyd reacted, bringing the hammer down as hard as he could. The blunt end smacked her across the forehead, leaving a deep indentation there, just beneath the pale skin.
The old woman reached up and felt her head. “You can do better than that,” she said.
When she came at him again, Boyd had turned the hammer in his hand. This time the twin tines of the claw end split the top of her scalp, punching through her skull and embedding itself in her brain. Boyd tried to yank it free for another blow, but she stepped back, taking the hammer with her.
“Do you know what I’m going to do now, Boyd?” she asked. “I’m going to bleed you. Bleed you bone dry. But I’m not going to make you like me. Hell, you ain’t fitting to be one of us! No, after I drink my fill, I’m going to rip your sorry ass apart. Tear you into so many pieces you’ll just lie there and hunger, with no place to go.”
Like the strike of a snake, Blanche lashed out, backhanding him across the jaw. The blow hit him like the kick of a mule. He flailed backward, landing against the lumber that stood against the far wall. He landed amid the boards so hard that several of them broke and splintered beneath his weight. He slid to his butt on the concrete floor, shards of oak and pine raining down on him. His back hurt so badly that he thought he would pass out.
“You should never have married my daughter, you son-of-a-bitch,” she rasped, closing in for the kill. “You were damned the moment you laid eyes on her!”
Boyd saw her tense like a cat about to pounce. Frantically, he reached out, his hands searching the floor around him. His right fist closed around a jagged shard of splintered two-by-four. Boyd brought it up at the same time Blanche leaped at him.
The point of the wood burrowed through the woman’s chest. It slipped cleanly between her ribs and lanced through her heart. Blanche hung there suspended for a long moment, eyes wide, fanged mouth even wider. She tried to speak but couldn’t. A mixture of terror and agony blazed in her good eye.
Then something within her gave with a fleshy pop and the point of the wood continued to travel, sprouting from between her shoulder blades. Boyd let go of the board and rolled to the side. Blanche fell to her side in the sawdust, gasping, her mouth working like that of a fish. Her bloodless hands attempted to pull the length of wood free, but they had lost their strength.
Boyd stood up and watched as Blanche Craven writhed on the workshop floor. It wasn’t long before her struggling began to weaken. He saw the red glow leave her left eye and heard a long, rattling sigh escape her throat. Then she grew still.
He stared at her for a moment, then turned and vomited. When he was through, he wiped his mouth and looked at her again. She twitched once, then began to curl up like the dried husk of a dead s
pider.
Boyd stood for a long time staring down at the thing that had been skewered by the long sliver of wood. Then something Blanche had said came to mind, something about Joan and the kids going to Craven’s Mountain.
Suddenly, Boyd knew he had no time to waste. He dug his keys out of his pocket and ran outside. He closed the garage door, leaving the shriveled body of Blanche locked inside. Then he jumped into his truck.
Boyd started the Ford and backed into the road. Before he headed out, though, he reached beneath the seat and felt around. He found the gun a second later—a Colt .45 semiautomatic he had put there for his long drives to Kentucky and back. He jacked the slide, putting a round into the chamber. Then he stuck the pistol back under the seat and headed for the mountains.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Paul Andrews ran his fingers along the sill of the room’s only window. In the pitch darkness he could feel the nail heads in the wood. There were eight of them in all, and judging from their size, the nails were long ones, the kind that would dig in deep and hold firm. Even if Paul had a crowbar or a screwdriver to work with, it would have taken a lot of muscle to pry the bottom of the window sash from the sill it was secured to. And even then, he would have made enough noise to wake the dead.
Funny, he thought to himself. That was really hilarious. But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile. The dead did awaken in that old house, every evening around six-thirty.
The boy turned and looked across the room. It was pitch dark, but he could barely make out the iron bed and the tiny form of his little sister lying on the mattress. Bessie had slept a lot since their mother had brought them to the house on top of Craven’s Mountain. His sister did one of three things. She either slept, cried, or sat there on the edge of the bed in silence. Paul could take her sleeping. He could even manage her crying fits, offering a little comfort and encouragement. But it was those bouts of inactive silence that troubled him the most. It was like she hid somewhere inside herself then, leaving only an empty shell of a little girl. Paul couldn’t stand seeing her like that. He was scared that she might go away and not be able to find her way back.