Sunglasses After Dark

by Nancy A. Collins

  There wasn't much time left. The vampire killer had to hurry if she was going to catch the beast asleep in its coffin. The burial vault was a huge subterranean room with numerous stone sarcophagi scattered throughout. Which one was the vampire's resting place? And how could she lift the heavy marble lid in time? She fought the panic blossoming inside her as she moved from grave to grave, lantern held high.

  There! There it was! The only sarcophagus missing its sealing slab. The light from her lantern reflected off the dark, highly polished wood of the casket. There was an emblem, made of gold, fastened to the top of the coffin. It showed a large bat, wings unfurled and jaws agape, clutching a woman and a man in its taloned feet. The vampire killer was uncertain whether the tiny humans were terrified or ecstatic.

  She shook herself free of the languor the golden bat seemed to radiate. Clutching a silver crucifix, a wooden stake, and her trusty mallet, the vampire killer threw back the lid of the casket, steeling herself for the evil that lay within.

  "Sur-prissssse!" cried the vampire, popping up from its coffin like a grinning jack-in-the-box and slamming a pie into the vampire killer's face.

  The vampire killer stumbled backward, her vision obscured by pie crest and Boston crème filling. She clawed at the muck clogging her nostrils and eyes, sputtering her rage.

  "You must really think I'm stupid," laughed Sonja Blue as she climbed out of the casket. "Did you really think I'd be taken in with these third-rate illusions?" She dug her fingers into the surface of the sarcophagus. It broke off in her hand with a dry crackling sound and she shoved it under Wheele's nose. It was Styrofoam spray-painted to resemble marble. "And look at this." She waved a fistful of gauzy cobweb in her face. "Spun sugar!"

  Sonja snatched up Wheele's carpetbag, scattering its contents across the dungeon floor. "I can't believe you were actually inside my head and didn't learn a damned thing!" She pointed at the garlic, rosary, and flask of holy water, shaking her head in amazement. "Ghilardi was right: you are a fuck-up."

  She grabbed Wheele by the collar, jerking her to her feet. "You picked the wrong woman to fuck with, preacher. You let something out that should never have been free."

  Wheele stared at the sweat pouring from the vampire's brow. She looked like a woman in the grips of malarial fever, radiating heat like an old-fashioned stove.

  Let it go, the Other whispered. Set me free. It's the right thing to do. Can't you feel it?

  She could feel it; that was what worried her. The overload was affecting her dream self as well as her physical form. She was racked by alternating waves of freezing cold and boiling heat. She thought she could smell circuits burning, deep in her head.

  Set me free. Set me free or we both die.

  "No."

  There was a noise, like a hundred angry voices shouting, and the villagers burst into the crypt, holding aloft burning torches and waving pitchforks and scythes in a menacing manner.

  "Kill the vampire!"

  "Death to the monster!"

  The vampire dropped the vampire killer, hissing her anger at the intrusion. She made to escape, but the village priest moved to block her path, holding aloft the crucifix from the church. The vampire shrank from the upraised cross, lifting her arms to shield herself from its glory.

  "Catch it!"

  "Kill it!"

  "Murderer! Fiend!"

  Rough hands grabbed the snarling, impotent vampire, pinning her to the wall. The ruddy faces parted to allow the vampire killer access.

  "Permit me." The vampire killer held aloft a sword. As the peasants looked on, the sword's blade miraculously burst into blue flame. The villagers gasped in awe, but did not lessen their hold on the captive vampire.

  The vampire hissed, thrashing wildly in an attempt to free herself, but it was no use.

  Wheele placed the tip of the burning sword above the vampire's heart and pushed the blade home.

  The vampire screamed, arching her back as the sword pierced her heart. Wheele wrapped both hands around the hilt of the sword and pushed it in deeper, until the vampire's body was transfixed by the blade. Blood seeped from the corner of the vampire's eyes. The vampire was laughing.

  "Oh, puh-leeze, Miz Wheele, don't strike me with that terrible swift sword." The voice was and wasn't Sonja Blue's.

  "Now you've done it," sighed the vampire, wrenching the sword from her chest. The torch-bearing peasants wavered, then winked out like holograms. "Now you've really done it."

  Catherine Wheele was once more in her own body, although she couldn't remember disengaging. Blue must have been responsible for jettisoning her. She hadn't expected the vampire to be so strong. She'd planned to spear Blue's unprotected psyche as easily as she would gig a frog. For the first time in her life, Wheele was facing an adversary as powerful as herself.

  Blue was the center of an energy field that wobbled and warped about her like a malignant soap bubble.

  Catherine's eyes were focused on Blue—her arms now upraised, as if in ecstatic communion with the darkness she generated.

  She knew she should try to flee, but she couldn't move. She watched in dumb fascination as Sonja Blue's head expanded until it assumed the proportions of a Macy's Parade balloon. The sunglasses that shielded her mutated eyes dissolved, revealing bottomless pits and the purplish-black nebulae that swirled in their depths. Blue-green sparks danced from the vampire's fingertips, tracing alien designs in the ozone-heavy air.

  Catherine Wheele experienced a response to the vampire's evil that went beyond the sex urge. For one brief moment, the doors of Catherine Wheele's perception were thrown open. The Pretender in her emerged from its hiding place. The part of herself that considered itself Catherine Wheele cringed at the sight of its demonic counterpart. The Pretender was smooth-bodied, its skin the color of cinnamon. It had two pairs of breasts, one above the other, with tiny eyes, like those of mice, in place of nipples. Despite its monstrous otherness, the Pretender exuded a horrible familiarity, and she felt an urge to name the beast, but her larynx could no longer form words.

  Catherine wrenched herself free of the vision before she could see the thing writhing in the folds of the succubus's labia. Blue still stood in the middle of the bubble, her eyes rolled back and a beatific smile on her face.

  (To hell with this. I'm going to blow her fucking head off.)

  Catherine opened the top drawer of her desk, careful not to brush against Claude's cold flesh. The Luger was there, primed and ready. The gun had originally belonged to Zebulon. While working the carny it had become something of a necessity. Later on, he used it as proof of his stint in the army ("Took it off a dead Kraut") and his support of All-American values whenever the NRA came around.

  Catherine was glad she'd ignored Ezra's pleas for her to dispose of it.

  She flicked off the safety and aimed at Sonja's head. She wasn't sure what killed vampires, but nothing could survive having its brains splattered across the room.

  The pistol kicked in her hand and she saw the bullet emerging from the barrel of the gun. Everything seemed to be going much too slow; it was as if she'd fired while underwater.

  She saw the nose of the bullet touch the skin of the bubble surrounding her enemy. She saw the skin dimple slightly, then bend slowly inward. She had a vision of herself lighting a match while sticking her head inside a gas oven.

  Wexler knew it was time to abandon ship when he heard the machine guns on the front lawn. He didn't have to look out the window to know the score..

  His body ached and his head felt like it was full of barroom sawdust. He passed and repassed the vanity table's mirror as he got dressed, each time trying not to look at what she'd done to him.

  The grimace disappeared after the first hour, but the facial tics that skewed his features into a death's-head grin occurred every ten minutes. He glimpsed the raw scratches left by her nails crisscrossing his back, shoulders, and the flat of his belly. His dick was swollen and red, but sexual arousal had nothing to do with it. His pe
nis hadn't felt so maltreated since the day, back in sixth grade, he'd jerked off twelve times in a row.

  How long had she been in control? Hours? Days? The fact that she'd used him for her puppeteer experiment was reason enough to chuck it all. To hell with Elysian Fields! He'd welcome being shunned by his peers if it meant he'd be safe from that painted thing.

  He found himself experiencing a delayed memory, mercifully blurred and missing its soundtrack. He watched himself service Wheele as if he was a spectator at a cheesy live-sex show, only there was no sense of excitement. His prick was hard—as rigid as it'd ever been—but there was no pleasure involved.

  Wexler nearly retched on the shame flooding him. He'd been turned into a living dildo. He struggled into his pants, relieved to find his keys still in the pockets. His BMW was parked on the turnaround in front of the house. If he was lucky, he might escape while the two horrors fought it out downstairs, just like in the old monster movies he'd watched as a child.

  He'd empty his bank account and take the first plane out of the country—it didn't matter where: Rangoon, Mexico City, Dusseldorf, even a malaria-ridden pesthole would be preferable to another night in Catherine Wheele's arms.

  He eased down the heavily carpeted stairway, his Gucci shoes in one hand and the keys to his car in the other. Everything was so quiet. No, wait! He thought he heard the murmur of a woman's voice coming from the study, although he didn't recognize the speaker.

  Wexler's testicles tried to crawl up into his belly, and his face twisted itself into a grotesque parody of a leer. The effect was devastating, transforming one of the country's leading popular psychologists into the stereotypical dirty old man—wink-wink, nudge-nudge. He'd have to lay low, anyway, until the facial tics went away. He doubted he'd sell many books looking like a refugee from an old Batman comic, even on Donahue.

  The grass was wet with dew and other things, but he couldn't afford to be squeamish. He hurried toward his car. His luck had held out, after all. He wanted to laugh, but was afraid it'd set off another spasm.

  Made it. I made it. Home free.

  The shock wave slammed into him like a fist, knocking him to the ground.

  He was in the middle of a fire storm whose flames did not burn flesh and bone but seared the mind. He felt something reach into him with knitting-needle fingers, exposing the soft, wiggling things at the bottom of his soul. The something had vermilion eyes and a gaping mouth outlined in blood.

  There was a brief spasm of pain in his chest that mirrored that in his head. Wexler dropped alongside his BMW, felled by an exploding ventricle.

  Wexler was the first, but not the only, victim of the blast to die of acute cardiac arrest that morning.

  Coroners and emergency-room personnel claim that the hours between two and five in the morning is when most humans decide to enter or depart this world.

  After a hard day shuffling papers and wending their way through the barbed wire of office politics, the victims go to bed, and during deepest sleep, where the dreams are never recalled, their hearts malfunction. Some wake up long enough to know what's happening to them; others don't. It's a perfectly natural phenomenon.

  When the authorities got together with their files and maps in an attempt to discern a pattern in the madness and death that marked that night, their data resembled the concentric circles that mark an atomic-bomb blast.

  Two miles out: Dogs howled like lost things while neighborhood cats cried like abused babies. Children awoke in tears, screaming that a "red-eyed woman" hovered over their beds.

  One mile out: Four epileptics suffered grand-mal seizures, including one previously undiagnosed case. Mrs. Darren McClintock, a widow and chronic insomniac, claimed she saw the outline of a woman, doused in blood, standing on her back patio.

  Half-mile out: Nine recorded cardiac arrests were phoned in, four of them instantly fatal. Three of the attacks involved individuals not known to be suffering heart ailments. The surviving patients, when interviewed, complained of a vivid nightmare involving a "woman with red-glass eyes."

  Three blocks out: Two suicides reported, both involving victims described as "perfectly normal" by family and friends. Mr. Jackson Marx, age thirty-eight, got out of bed without waking his wife, then retired to his study, where he blew the top of his head off with a handgun he'd purchased the year before as a precaution against burglars. Cynthia Anne "Cissy" Fife, age eighteen, was last seen watching the Late Late Show in her room. Her exact time of death is uncertain. She was found by her parents at eight the next morning. She used her manicuring kit to open her veins while in the tub.

  One block out: Noel Landry, age thirty-four, fell asleep in front of the television at eleven p.m. His wife, Elizabeth, knowing he'd wake up on his own accord once the station went off the air, retired for the night. Landry woke as expected but took the shotgun from the hall closet with him when he went upstairs. He shot his wife and their two children (ages six and four) before placing the barrel in his mouth.

  Ground zero…

  She'd been unsure as to what would happen when the charge was purged, but Sonja never expected this.

  Catherine Wheele stood with her arms splayed outward, like a small child playing Frankenstein. A greenish material seeped from the televangelist's nostrils, mouth, eyes, and fingertips. The muck possessed a faint luminescence, like a cheap glow-in-the-dark Halloween mask. Sonja recognized the viscous glop as ectoplasm, although in quantities unprecedented in the annals of paranormal history.

  Wheele literally dripped the stuff, like one of those grotesque toy monsters that squirt slime from every possible orifice when squeezed.

  The ectoplasm writhed and bubbled, sculpted by invisible hands into humanoid shape. Sonja stepped back, wary of the phantoms emerging from the goo.

  There was a ragged, hawk-faced man in overalls and a woman with hollows where her eyes should have been. The woman held a half-formed infant to her breast. An amorphous clump of slack-faced, empty-eyed children—joined like paper dolls—drifted in the phantom mother's wake.

  There were ghostly senior citizens, walkers growing out of their hands, and cancer victims that could almost pass for living, save for the luster of their skin.

  The entourage was dominated by the spectral image of a tall, well-groomed man with the manners of a fox. His three-piece suit merged with his flesh and his hands sprouted growths that resembled a bible and a microphone. Sonja recognized the man as being Zebulon Wheele, Catherine's late husband.

  The final figure to emerge from the! supernatural plasma was massive. She belatedly recognized Claude's blurred features. Sonja moved deeper into shadow, uncomfortable with the idea of brushing against the dead man.

  There was a weird quiet, like the hush in the eye of a hurricane. The room was bathed in the strange greenish light given off by the assembled ghosts. Their odor was a cloying mixture of woodsmoke, burned pork, white lightning, and decaying roses.

  Wheele blinked as if she'd emerged from a deep sleep. She seemed baffled by the witch light permeating the room. When she saw the blurred faces of those surrounding her, her sanity disintegrated.

  The Claude-thing grabbed her, pinning her arms. She emerged from her state of shock, struggling fiercely to free herself, but it was no good. All she did was unseat her wig.

  A weird chuttering—like the sound of high-speed helicopter blades—emerged from the mouths of the dead. They were laughing.

  Zebulon Wheele separated himself from the others crowding around his widow. The dead evangelist gestured broadly, pointing to his wife. His lips moved, voicing a warped imitation of human speech. He sounded like a badly out-of-synch foreign film.

  Sonja wasn't adept enough—or dead enough—to understand what he was saying, but she got the drift. So did Wheele, judging from the look on her face.

  As if to drive his point home, the shade of Zebulon Wheele thrust his bible hand into Catherine's face and disappeared, absorbed through the pores in her skin.

  The faith healer'
s body convulsed, then went limp. The Claude-thing let her drop. The other ghosts crowded around the fallen televangelist, watching as she twitched and shuddered on the floor.

  Catherine Wheele lifted her head and grinned at the dead. It was Catherine's mouth, but not her smile. Her gaze fell on Sonja, but it was not Catherine looking at her. Wheele was wobbly on her feet, suddenly unfamiliar with high heels. She moved like a drunkard, her eyes and lips twitching like a poorly operated ventriloquist's dummy. Zebulon had been dead little over a year. That's not very long, as the dead estimate time, but it was enough time to forget the complexities of flesh.

  His fellow dead pressed against Catherine Wheele, their faces expectant. The eagerness in their expressions made her skin crawl.

  Catherine Wheele's mouth opened and from her ruined larynx came a sound that might have been a word.

  "Tak."

  She gestured with a perfectly manicured hand, the fingers writhing.

  "Taik."

  The hand became a claw.

  "Take," gargled the almost voice. The claw disappeared into Catherine Wheele's abdomen.

  The hand reemerged a second later, slick with blood and clutching a length of pink intestine.

  "Take," growled Zebulon. "This is my body."

  Pale hands closed on the proffered intestine, stringing like a ghastly party streamer. The warped corpse laughter swelled as the Skaggs children grabbed their sister's entrails and began to twirl around her as if in a perverse May dance.

  Wheele's hands dug deep into the wonders of her flesh, offering up the choicest morsels to the wraiths clustered around her.

  Papa Skaggs snatched at his daughter's liver, his radiant fingers probing the cirrhosis scars. Mama Skaggs, having received her child's kidneys, unleashed a pungent shower of blood and renal fluid on the Persian carpet.