by John Skipp
“Besides,” he added brightly, “you can’t hunt a proper vampire without the proper tools. And you are woefully unprepared. So, voilà . . .”
He opened the satchel, revealing an arsenal of paraphernalia: several ornate crosses, a bandolier of short crystal vials, and a healthy supply of stout hardwood stakes and mallets.
Charley looked at him earnestly for a moment, then reached and pulled out a cross big enough to play racquetball with, as well as several stakes. He tucked them in his belt. He felt like the Frito Bandito.
“What about Billy?” he asked. “He’s human. What do we use on him?”
Peter smiled like the neighborhood fence and withdrew a thirty-eight-caliber revolver. Nickel-plated. Charley remained skeptical as Peter held the gun aloft. “Dumdum bullets, Charley. They’ll put a hole in him the size of a grapefruit. If they don’t stop him, he isn’t human.”
Charley smiled ruefully, shaking his head. “You thought of everything, didn’t you?”
“Let’s hope so.” Peter turned to the house, showing Charley his good side. “Shall we?”
They did.
The portico greeted them, silent as a tomb, the relentless ticking of the clocks underscoring the deep silence. It was familiar without being the least bit inviting. They crossed the vaulted space carefully, determined not to blow it.
They were halfway up the stairs when the voice assailed them.
“Welcome,” it said. “My, my, back so soon? I just love having people over for dinner!”
Dandrige emerged from the darkness at the top of the stairs, his night-veil completely lifted: eyes, hands, teeth, all horrible.
Beautiful, Peter thought. Like some dark god, putting in an appearance before its court.
Dandrige smiled appreciatively, as if reading his mind. “Yes, indeed,” he said. “Welcome to the real Fright Night. You, Mr. Vincent, are tonight’s guest host. And our pesky young friend here,” gesturing at Charley, “gets to watch.”
Something in the vampire’s tone made Peter’s bowels turn to jelly. He gulped, his confidence blown out of the water. With a trembling hand, he reached into his satchel and pulled out a crucifix, brandishing it with all the conviction of a plate of soft-boiled eggs.
“Back, O cursed spawn of Satan!” he cried. His voice was a garbled squeak.
And Dandrige burst out laughing.
Charley and Peter were too stunned to be frightened, at first; but the mirth that Dandrige expressed was hardly one they could share. He laughed on and on, until it seemed he might split a seam somewhere.
Then he stopped. Leveled a mock serious gaze at them. And spoke.
“Really, now,” he said, stifling a laugh. “May I see?”
He reached down, with no hesitation at all, and plucked the cross from Peter’s hand.
“Hmmmmm,” he said, fingering it derisively. “Shoddy workmanship. Not built to last.”
Then he tightened his grip, crushing the cross into tiny pieces, and flung the remains back in Peter’s face. “I do believe,” he said earnestly, “that you’re missing the critical element, Mr. Vincent.
“Faith.”
Peter stared as if he had blown a circuit. He backed away from Dandrige instinctively, his feet locked on cruise control. Charley wheeled in horror as he made his retreat, thinking no, you bastard, you can’t give up this easy! Then the boy pulled his own cross out and thrust it forward, an inch from Dandrige’s face.
“Back,” Charley said.
Dandrige stumbled backward up the steps, eyes slitting like a cat’s.
“Back!” Charley repeated, amazed at how the power flowed out of him. The vampire continued to retreat, unable to stare at the cross in his hand. “We got him, Peter!” he cried.
No response.
“Peter?”
He turned to find Peter Vincent almost out the door, his satchel on the stairs where he had dropped it in his haste.
“PETER!” he shouted one last time, turning to face the vampire, betrayal sapping his resolve . . .
. . . as a huge hand caught him right in the face.
The last thing he saw was Billy Cole, smiling grimly as he completed the backhand. Charley spun, the darkness rushing up to meet him.
And the nightmare closed in.
TWENTY-THREE
Running, running, the Dandrige house and its aura of horror receding behind him, the Brewster house bright-lit and welcome as a lighthouse beacon. Peter’s thoughts were chaotic, a tangled web of psychobabble that simultaneously wept, pleaded, called the police and burbled in a style usually associated with mouthfuls of Gerber’s Strained Beets.
He reached the front steps of the Brewster house and threw open the door. All was silent inside. “MRS. BREWSTER! MRS. BREWSTER!” he bellowed, slamming the door behind him.
No response.
He bolted the door and raced up the stairs, still shouting her name. An open doorway yawned before him at the end of the hallway, dimly lit from the inside. He made for it, breath rasping sharply, footsteps hammering holes in the night.
Judy Brewster was in bed, the back of her head to him, her blond hair lying across the pillow. It looked permed out of all perspective, more like a mop than a head of human hair. Peter rushed toward her, relief sweeping over his features.
“Thank God, Mrs. Brewster!” he began. “Your son is in terrible danger . . .”
“I know,” said the figure on the bed. The voice sounded vaguely familiar. It didn’t sound anything like the voice he expected to hear. Peter stopped in mid-stride, his heart almost doing the same.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” the voice continued.
Then the figure sat up.
And Peter Vincent started to scream.
It was Evil Ed, and not Evil Ed. The shape of the face was the same, but there the resemblance ended. The sign of the cross was still etched in gore across his forehead; it was the prettiest thing about him. His features had sunken, gone grayish-white. His eyes were glossed over with what looked like red neon cataracts; they pulsed with a rheumy incandescence that made Peter want to curl up and die.
Four teeth jutted out over Eddie’s lower lip: two fangs, misshapen and deadly, flanking a pair of buck-teeth that made him look like a nightmare Mortimer Snerd. He leered, and the wig began to slide off his head: a ghastly striptease, rife with capering nihilist glee.
“Charley’s mom had to work tonight,” the vampire drawled. He held up a crumpled note, the type designed for tiny magnets on refrigerator doors. “She says that his dinner is in the oven. Isn’t that sweet!”
Peter started to back away, mewling.
“Couldn’t you just die!” concluded Evil Ed, and then he leapt from the bed.
Peter Vincent started running, nearly breathless and blind. He whipped through the doorway and on down the hallway, not even seeing the stairway until he passed it, his bleary eyes catching it far too late . . .
. . . and then he slammed into a table cluttered with the kind of worthless bric-a-brac that the Judy Brewsters of the world are known to collect. Wide-eyed ceramic clowns and kittens cascaded to the floor, shattering into a million bright and jagged pieces. The table collapsed, two of its legs snapping off. Peter Vincent followed suit, careening to the carpet with the rest of the refuse, pain shrieking from his right hip.
He had only a second to get his bearings.
And then the monster stepped out of the doorway.
It was a wolf, red-eyed and gigantic, with ghost-gray fur and slavering jaws. It advanced rapidly, grinning as it came, supremely confident of the slaughter to come.
Peter looked away. His gaze fastened on a shattered table leg, its summit tapering off into a deadly uneven point. His right hand clasped it firmly, held it out in front of him . . .
. . . as the lupine monster leapt for him, springing on its haunches and launching through the air, Peter screamed and closed his eyes, the table leg upright before him, a last-ditch survival impetus that he invested with no hope at all . . .
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. . . until something caught on the end of the table leg, sinking meatily onto it. An impulse faster and truer than thought made Peter thrust upward with all his might, his eyes snapping open . . .
. . . as the wolf-thing howled and flew into the shattering banister, the table leg skewered through its chest, slipping out of Peter’s hands and out into the thin air as the beast went plummeting down with all the force of gravity behind it.
There was a sickening thud on the floor one story below.
Peter allowed himself ten seconds to recover from the terror. Then he leaned over the broken balustrade, staring down at the nightmare beneath him.
The wolf writhed on the carpet, surrounded by broken bits of banister, bleeding slightly.
It doesn’t have very much blood in it, he mused insanely. That’s why it wanted mine . . .
Slowly he staggered to his feet, leaning heavily on the wall. He forced himself to approach the stairs, then descend them, a part of his mind searching out twists that might leave him still in deadly circumstance. They can turn into wolves, his mind chattered. And bats, and rats, and all kinds of horrible things.
But a stake through the heart ought to do it, he concluded. If it doesn’t, I’m dead, and that’s all there is to it.
He reached the bottom of the stairs and forced himself to turn. It was not easy. He felt very much like a weary old man, sick to death of the endless struggle. He felt very much like what he was.
Then he turned, and his heart dropped into his shoes.
The monster was gone.
Omigod, he mouthed, no wind behind it. He took a tentative step forward, then another. “No, please,” he whined.
There was a thin, viscous smear that stretched across the carpet. It led from the spot where the wolf had landed to the shadows beneath the stairs. Tiny, high-pitched whimpering sounds were coming from there. They were not human.
But they were most definitely dying.
Peter moved forward more quickly now: afraid of what he might see, yes, but no longer afraid for his life. There was an alcove, deep as the stairs were wide. He traversed the distance.
Stopped dead in his tracks.
And stared, more in awe than in horror.
The thing in the alcove was neither wolf nor Evil Ed, but something fantastically between. It still had the enormous jaws, the elongated snout, the pointed ears and black nose, but the hair was rapidly receding. It looked mangy, in the popular sense of the word: like a monstrous junkyard dog, the many bald patches in its matted fur testifying to a lifetime of endless combat. Its eyes were squeezed shut—it didn’t seem to know that Peter was watching—and fat, slimy tears coursed down its contorted cheeks.
But its hands were what really got him. They were trying very hard to be human hands, but they hadn’t quite gotten the knack. The fingers were gnarled and far too long, with huge bony knuckles that protruded like knots on a tree branch.
They were wrapped around the table leg, which extended a good foot and a half from the center of its chest.
They were trying to pull it out.
“Dear God,” Peter said.
And then the monster opened its eyes.
The monster blinked, through tears of pain, at the man who was standing before it. Concentration came hard—the agony was so intense—but something inside it still hungered for him. Pictures of wide-open bellies and steaming intestines kept dancing and swirling through its mind.
It wrenched at the stake that impaled it, yowling. Everything hurt. The universe was one vast howling continuum of pain, with the thing that had once been Edward Thompson nailed directly to its center.
And the stake was not going to come out. The monster knew that now. It was too weak, too surely dead. There would be no blood. No meat. No nothing. Just agony, and more agony, until the bitter bitter end.
That was when the last remains of Evil Ed, the teenage kid who just liked to watch monster movies, came burbling like blood to the surface.
It was trying to tell him something. He was sure of it. Something unmistakably human had flickered across its eyes, then come to rest there; and its mouth was laboring hard to shape nonanimalistic sounds.
And that was the horrible thing. Like the misshapen hands, its mouth was woefully ill equipped for the niceties of human speech. What came out was a pathetic, inarticulate wheezing, death’s breath rasping out in a pattern that refused to coalesce.
Peter dropped to his knees in front of the thing, coming closer. It seemed glad that he was doing it. The thought occurred, not so far from left field, that maybe Evil Ed just wanted one last shot at his jugular vein. He kept it in mind, but didn’t let it stop him.
There was no malice left in the creature. He believed it with all his heart. The feeling that overwhelmed him now was neither awe nor horror, but a deep and intoxicating sadness. Somewhere, under all that nightmare flesh, a boy who had barely begun to live was trying to tell him something before he died. It was not too much to ask.
“What is it?” Peter whispered. He didn’t know how else to approach it. He was close now, very close; the thing’s foul breath weighed heavy in his nostrils. “Talk to me, please. I want to know.”
The monster reached out its hand.
There was a second’s hesitation, the automatic rearing of caution’s head. Then he reached out as well, leaning closer, his fingertips an inch from the dying monster’s own.
Pausing there, as it made one last attempt at speech.
This time, Peter understood what it was trying to say.
I’m sorry . . .
He mouthed the words, and the wolf-thing nodded. There was a long, electric moment in which Peter just stared into the waning light of its eyes.
Then their fingers touched.
And for Evil Ed, the lights went out forever.
The transformation back to human flesh, and beyond, took only a minute. Peter didn’t stick around to watch. He was already moving toward the door.
There were a couple of young people who desperately needed his help.
He hoped he didn’t have to kill them, too.
TWENTY-FOUR
Dandrige walked into his bedroom with Charley’s inert form draped blithely over his shoulder. He threw him to the floor with an unceremonious thud. The force of landing shocked Charley out of his stupor, horror blooming in his eyes several seconds before he regained motor control. Dandrige smiled reassuringly.
“You recognize this room, don’t you, Charley? Sure you do. It’s my bedroom. I have lots of fun in here . . . but I don’t need to tell you that, do I?
“Of course, I’ve done some renovating,” he said, gesturing to the windows, which were stoutly boarded up.
Something moved to Charley’s left. He turned to find Amy, curled in a fetal position and shivering. Her jacket was gone, her blouse torn and bloody. She looked feverish. Charley whined low in his throat and crawled toward her.
“You want her, you got her,” Dandrige shrugged. Charley threw him a hateful glance.
Dandrige winked and grinned. “Anything for you, babes.”
Charley cradled her gently in his arms. “Amy . . .” he whispered.
The words died on his lips. Amy was comatose, deep in the midst of a supernatural transformation. Her body shook with tiny, fitful tremors. Her eyelids fluttered, revealing shiny black orbs. Her mouth worked spastically, an infant’s urge to suckle, and her hands clawed reflexively.
“You bastard,” Charley whispered, eyes clamped shut in revulsion and pain. Then his temper flared up like a furnace explosion, and he screamed, “YOU BASTARD! WHY? WHY HER?”
Dandrige rolled his eyes. “Well, you’ve been such a relentless pain in the ass that I thought you deserved a special punishment. So, you get to watch her change, and then,” smiling impishly, “you can either kill her yourself, or you can be her first victim. Isn’t freedom of choice a wonderful thing?”
Charley jumped up and charged him like a pro linebacker, all blind animal rage. Dandr
ige swatted him out of the air as one might a fly. Charley smacked into the bureau and slid to the floor, defeated.
“Okay, kill me,” he said, looking up with finality. “Just go ahead and kill me. But, please, let her go.”
Dandrige smiled. “How touching,” he said. “Tell you what. I’ll take you up on that: I’ll kill you first, and then I’ll let her go.”
He paused dramatically at the door.
“Right. Over. The edge.”
Then he leaned over and plucked something from the bedside table, tossing it to Charley like he might toss a biscuit to Rover.
“You may need this,” he said. “Just before dawn.”
It hit the floor and rolled to Charley’s feet: two feet long, utterly lethal.
A wooden stake.
“Noooo . . .” Charley moaned as Dandrige let himself out and locked the door securely behind him. Charley skittered over to Amy, then held her close to his chest, rocking her like a sick baby. The bare skin of his forearm brushed her lips, and she gummed it insistently, tongue rough as sandpaper.
“NOOOO!”
Halfway down the hall, Dandrige smiled. It was music, pure and sweet, to his ears.
Outside, Peter Vincent regarded the Dandrige house with a curious combination of grim resolve, exhilaration and raw terror. The house itself grew more squat and malevolent with every passing moment. The virtual certainty of what fate lay inside left him curiously calm.
As if he had waited his whole life for this, his finest moment.
After all, not every artist gets to face his fear, and his lifelong fantasy, and prevail. But Herbert McHoolihee would.
If he had to die in the process.
He entered the house quietly, not exactly sure where to begin. At the end of the hall, the door to the basement steps stood ajar. Muffled voices came from below. Turning, he ascended the stairs, his footsteps muffled by the thick oriental runner.
He paused at the landing, staring at the enormous stained-glass portal that dominated the stairway. It was darkened now, its colors muted. But soon—he glanced at his watch, four o’clock—the sun would filter through, showering the room with color.