Seize the Night

by Christopher Golden

  Once the bandages were on, she remained on the rock in the gathering dusk and kept her hand still and waited for the wound to clot as best as possible, not wanting to carry the scent of fresh blood into her sleeping bag later. Taking deep breaths and letting the tears dry, she tried to calm herself so that when Jim returned he wouldn’t have any indication of the meltdown she’d had out here.

  Take in the beauty, she instructed herself. Not the danger, just the beauty.

  And it was a beautiful spot. The mountains rising on all sides were majestic, but the valley in the center was truly special, lush and green and painted with golden light that made the stream twinkle and glitter. She listened to the water and felt her breathing slow and some level of peace return. The stream was absolutely gorgeous. Sure, it seemed to be begging for a few bears in the evening light, but other than that it was . . .

  She leaned forward on the rock and strained her eyes, trying to simultaneously see clearer and deny the image her eyes had found.

  There was an elk carcass in the water, resting high, propped up on a submerged boulder. She’d spotted the antlers first, but now she could make out the side of its head and part of the gutted body. Whatever had killed the elk was sure to return for it, and when it did, filled with hunger and bloodlust and territorial aggression, it would discover the place where Jim and Kristen had helpfully pitched their tent not even fifty yards away, her wilderness-photographer boyfriend so focused on the damn mountain behind them that he’d missed the elk kill entirely.

  “Jim!” she shouted, but her echo died swiftly and she knew there was no way he could hear her. She got to her feet, stumbling and swearing, and started back for him, her bloody hand now the least of her concerns. They needed to get the hell away from this campsite, and do it before dusk.

  Far away and halfway up the slope, the mountain was turning itself over to blackness and she could see Jim working right on the shadow line, still visible but almost lost. She had to squint to find him. The fading light played tricks on her eyes; at times she could swear there were two silhouettes instead of one—Jim’s and a much taller, thinner version.

  There were four mine shafts on the slope, and Jim shot all of them in the fading light, moving as fast as possible, feeling the sort of electric thrill you got when you knew you were getting both quality photographs and special ones because the conditions might never be the same. That was the point, the whole goal—capture the world as it was once but would not be again tomorrow. The mines had stood here for decades, and the sun rose and set every day, but you could sit here for twenty years and not get the same unique play of the dwindling beams of light on those ancient doors.

  He’d gone up the slope and circled back down as the light forced him lower, and by the time he got back to the original adit, it was three-quarters in darkness. He decided to take one last series and then head down the mountain. He lifted the camera to his eye, moved his hand toward the lens, and then dropped the camera into the rocks and shouted.

  There was a man inside the mine.

  “Sorry!” the stranger said. “My goodness, you startle easily.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Jim said, reaching down for the camera with trembling hands. “I startle easily? What in the hell are you doing in there?”

  “I’d expect we have similar interests. Are you not here for the mines?”

  “I’m here to take pictures of them, not stand in them in the dark.”

  The man smiled—maybe. It was damn hard to tell, because his face was obscured by darkness, the only remaining sunlight playing over his feet and lower legs. His boots were old and worn. He was a tall man, and a thin one, but even in the dark, Jim had a sense that he was strong. It was a strange feeling, a certainty without any evidence to back it up.

  “How in the hell did you even get in there?” Jim said.

  “Oh, these gates aren’t as secure as they look.”

  “Well, they’re damn dangerous, I can tell you that. My girlfriend cut her hand pretty bad right where you’re standing.”

  He thought of the blood then, of the last series of photos he’d taken in this place. The blood that had been there and then gone. He took a few steps away, making a show of looking at the camera to inspect it for damage. Really, he just wanted to clear some space between him and the tall man. The camera looked to be fine, some nicks and dirt on the body, but the lens intact.

  “You’d better have a good flashlight,” Jim said. “It’s not going to be easy walking down that slope in the dark.”

  “Oh, I’m familiar with the terrain.”

  The man hadn’t moved, was still just standing there on the other side of the bars, but there was an odd quality of bridling energy to him, like a racehorse waiting for the gate to go up. Jim couldn’t see how he’d possibly gotten in there to begin with—the bars had seemed solid to him, and the lock was still in place—but he didn’t want to linger to find out, either. There was something off about the guy, and for the first time, Jim was thinking that a motel sounded pretty nice tonight. Hell, they could leave the tent where it was. The hike back to the car would be a dark one, but they had flashlights and headlamps and it was not a long stretch. The cut on Kristen’s hand would require attention anyhow. He was certain she wouldn’t object to the idea of a night in a bed instead of a sleeping bag.

  “Well, take care,” Jim said. “Don’t spook too many more tourists—you’re going to give someone a heart attack eventually.”

  The tall man laughed. It was a strange, keening sound and drove Jim farther away. He glanced back once, and all he could see now were the tops of the man’s boots, those torn leather flaps, covered with dust. Other than the boots, his silhouette was framed in blackness behind the bars. The image froze Jim.

  That’s pretty damn good, he thought. That is, in fact, some supremely spooky shit.

  He decided he’d take just a few more pictures.

  Leaning against the slope, braced on one knee, he lifted the camera, adjusted the zoom, and began to shoot. If the tall man disliked having his picture taken, or wanted to know the reason for it, he didn’t give voice to the concerns. He didn’t speak at all. Behind them the sun dropped that last fraction, and the frayed leather of the boots fell to darkness.

  The man moved then, and Jim straightened, prepared to apologize and explain why he’d paused to take the pictures, but by the time he looked up, the tall man was already halfway through the gate. He hadn’t opened it from the inside somehow, as Jim had expected—he simply slammed his torso between the bars and, astonishingly, managed to get his upper body through. He was snagged at the waist; it looked like he was caught in a trap, and Jim had a momentary, if unsettled, thought that perhaps he should offer to help when the man turned his face back to Jim’s and smiled in the darkness.

  His mouth would have been the envy of any grizzly or wolf in the valley. Long canines and twin rows of razor-sharp incisors. He braced both hands on the bars, the same bars that had lacerated Kristen’s flesh, and then slammed forward again, and this time he drove his hips through the impossibly narrow gap and then he was free and facing Jim on the dark mountainside with no more than ten feet between them.

  Jim screamed then, a scream that he didn’t know he was capable of making, but it ended fast. The man covered the distance in a single, staggeringly fast bound and then his hands were on Jim’s shoulders, his fingers strong as steel bands, and then they were both down and rolling on the loose scree and it was maybe another fifteen feet of terrifying, chaotic slide, the dark world spinning around them, before his teeth found Jim’s throat.

  Kristen was halfway back to the tent when she heard the scream. The sound was so horrific that she matched it without even understanding its source, though she feared she did.

  “Jim! Jim!”

  She ran back along the streambed, the basin here still bathed in warm sunlight, but on the high slopes where he had been, there was nothing but darkness. She could hear noises up there, sounds of struggle, sounds of
pain.

  A bear, she thought with sickening certainty. He’d been caught by a grizzly, probably one returning for the elk in the stream.

  She ran to the tent and fumbled out the bear-spray canister she’d purchased upon arrival in Wyoming, cursing herself for not carrying it this whole time, what good was it supposed to do her in the tent? There were no other weapons except for a small camp ax that Jim used for splitting firewood. She grabbed that, too, her bloody hand throbbing with pain, and then clicked one of the headlamps on and set off up the hill, screaming, trying to make enough noise to scare the grizzly away, hoping that it was not too late, that she would not be scaring it away from a corpse.

  When the man skittered into view, she came to a stop so fast that her feet tangled and she fell to her knees in the rocks.

  He was tall, maybe six-six, maybe more, and incredibly thin, wearing worn, tattered clothes. In the beam of the headlamp, his face appeared so pale that she thought she could see the outline of the bones beneath, like an X-ray. Except for the wet, dark splotches on his cheeks and chin. They looked black in the light, patches of fresh tar.

  “Hello, dear,” he said, and when he spoke she saw his teeth and the blood in his mouth, and the scream that came from her then was far beyond what she’d been able to offer before, far beyond any she knew could exist.

  She stumbled backward and fell again, and this time the beam from the headlamp found Jim. He was sprawled in the rocks near the shadow line, his head resting at an odd angle, allowed to flop that far sideways only because most of the ligaments and muscle had been severed.

  No scream came then. She stared at him in horror and when she spoke again her voice was soft, a child’s whisper: “Jim.” There was no question to it this time, no urgency, because his time of hearing her voice or responding to his own name was done forever.

  Kristen didn’t understand why the tall man hadn’t come down after her. She was within killing range easily enough.

  When she swiveled her head and found him again, he was pacing the rocks, his footwork effortless. Every now and then he’d make a bounding leap, covering ten feet as if it were as easy as hopping from stone to stone in a creek.

  “You’re still bleeding,” he said, his back to her. “It hasn’t dried yet. I can smell that. That’s dangerous in these parts, darling. I’m unique, certainly, but there are animals who can smell it, too. Grizzlies, wolves. It was a foolish mistake to get a cut like that out here. Though I do appreciate the taste!”

  He laughed, and the sound washed over her like a cold wind.

  “Who are you?” she said. Her voice was trembling and choked with tears. He didn’t seem to like the beam, shifting away from it and making a face of distaste, but he answered the question.

  “Any matter of identity is really irrelevant in our current circumstance, don’t you think?”

  Again she could see the flashing teeth, and a word slid into her brain that didn’t belong there: vampire. It should have been a foolish thought, laughable, and yet she accepted it with certainty in that moment. Out here the rules of the world had just changed; fiction had become fact with horrible speed.

  “I’d be quite happy to speak with you,” he continued. “More than you realize. Have you ever considered the prospect of living alone? Well, I suppose with the recent developments”—he waved dismissively at Jim’s corpse—“you surely have to. But it is a lonesome part of the world at any rate, and in a lonesome lifestyle? The isolation is profound.”

  He paced as he spoke, making nervous, jittery movements with his head, glancing back over his shoulder as if expecting pursuit. He came no closer to her, though.

  I’m still in the light, she thought. The low portion of the slope where she had fallen was still bright with sunlight, and the shadow line didn’t begin for another ten feet.

  This is real. He needs the darkness. That’s not a myth, it’s the truth.

  The sunlight was why he was pacing with such impatience. He was bound to the slope.

  But not for long. No, it won’t be long now.

  Kristen turned and looked at the angular cut in the mountains that filled the basin with light. She couldn’t see the sun any longer, but the cut filtered through radiant, golden light, the odd trick of the basin that had given it its name. The legend, according to what Jim had told her, involved a pair of old prospectors lost in a dark fog when they’d ventured out into a valley where the angled cuts of the mountains made a perfect path for sunlight.

  In the basin. Not up above.

  She took another look at the tall man—No, not a man, he is not a man and you know this—and then began to descend the rocks and retreat farther into the light. If there had been any doubt at all left in her mind, it was erased with the howl of rage that came from above.

  “It won’t take long! Go on and run. But it’s a little late in the day for that!”

  When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that he’d begun to run. His speed and balance were astonishing, allowing him to caper across the steep slope and loose rocks without pause, but all of his movements were lateral. He couldn’t descend any farther or close the gap between them. It was like watching a furious dog on an electric fence, penned in by something invisible.

  An electric fence stayed in place, though. The shadow line of deepening dusk would not.

  She made it off the slope and retreated as far as the tent, then looked in all directions at the empty basin around her. There was no point in screaming for help; she was alone here, alone in a way she had never been before in her life. The valley was filled with golden light and the mountaintops were dark. She looked at her watch, saw that it was just past eight, and knew that sunset wasn’t far off, maybe twenty minutes at best. Twenty minutes to figure out how to hold off the inevitable.

  He hadn’t been wrong about the impotence of running. The tent was three miles from the car, three miles over rugged terrain. Even at a dead sprint she wouldn’t be able to cover that distance before darkness fell, and based upon the horrific display of agility and speed he was putting on up there on the rocks, it wouldn’t take him long to overtake her.

  What in the hell was left, then? The light was her protector, but the light was going to disappear. She thought numbly of every myth she remembered from movies and books and campfire stories. Wooden stakes, crosses, silver bullets. She could fashion a cross, but even in the movies that didn’t seem to be reliable, and out here it seemed ludicrous. Didn’t you need a priest, anyhow? She had no gun, no bullets of any sort, and she couldn’t imagine there was anything made of silver in the tent. Even if there was, you had to do something with it. You couldn’t just hold it in your hand and enjoy safety. As for stakes, the tent was pinned down with plenty of them, but they were made of aluminum. With the ax and a piece of firewood, she might be able to cut something, but she’d never be able to use it against him. That brief display of strength and agility he’d already offered was more than enough to remove any notion of contending with him physically.

  What was left, then? Only the setting sun. She sat down beside the tent and began to cry softly, and up above her the vampire let out a high laugh that seemed to be more of an animal’s sound than a human’s. He could see her helplessness and her defeat and he was enjoying himself as the shadows lengthened and drew him closer. She had a vision of Jim’s head again, that ungodly angle, and she began to shake as she cried. The laughter on the slope grew louder and more delighted.

  It was that sound, the delight he was taking in her impotence, that brought her tears to a stop. If she was going to die, she didn’t want to die helpless, sniveling with tears while waiting for the sun to set and for him to have his way with her. She tightened her hand around the handle of the ax and felt the pulse of warm blood in her palm. She could get him with the ax, at least. Make him hurt, if nothing else.

  But don’t they heal so fast? A little pain probably means nothing to him.

  She thought again of the silver, and of the crosses and the woo
den stakes. What about fire? She could build a fire. Was that of any use? She couldn’t remember. She wasn’t a fan of vampire stories, had always found them trite and silly, which was a terrible irony when you were about to be killed by one. She’d watched bad movies with teenage friends around Halloween, that was all. And she’d had to read Dracula for a college lit seminar, which she’d actually enjoyed. Stoker was talented, and there were some vivid scenes, certainly. The arrival of the ship, the Demeter, that one had stuck with her. She’d had nightmares of the captain lashed to the helm, in fact. At one point in her life, nightmares had seemed awful. Kristen had never really paused to appreciate the ability to wake from one before.

  “I thought we were going to run!”

  The gleeful shout came from the slope, and when she turned back to look at him again she saw that the lengthening shadows had allowed him to come almost all the way down into the basin and that he was in an odd crouch, like a catcher in a baseball game. No. Different from that. Like a wolf.

  “Come on, dear!” he shouted. “Give me a run. These old legs could use the exercise!”

  Kristen wondered what they would say about her and Jim when this was done. Would they take a look at the terrible wounds and announce a grizzly attack, go out looking to trap or poison or shoot a bear to settle the score for humanity? Would their bodies even be found, or would he take them away, up into those dark, ancient mines? The only thing she was sure of was that no one would know how it had happened.

  She retreated from the tent as the sun faded, holding the camp ax and walking backward into a narrowing beam of light. Behind her the sound of the stream was soft and reassuring, the proverbial babbling brook, but the area just beyond it was already dark. The only portion of the basin remaining in full sunlight was the deep water in the center where the elk corpse rested.

  No, no, no, she thought, but then behind her came a flapping and popping sound like a flag in a stiff breeze, and when she turned she saw that he’d crushed their tent, had leaped directly onto the center of the roof. He sat crouched amid the billowing orange fabric, laughing.