by Anthology
Oh how his father would sneer.
Van Helsing snapped the reins, eager to be rid of these thoughts and on with the work at hand.
Shadows were long by the time Van Helsing got a grip on the she-demon’s hair and dragged her out of the stinking, muddy culvert. She was just beginning to wake, her clothes ripped and threadbare, her breasts jiggling loose from their scrap of fabric. Van Helsing wished she were still asleep, so he could bathe her—clean her into the beautiful young woman she used to be. He remembered her; she had waited on him at the pub not more than six months ago.
But she could not be cleansed. She had the evil, and was perpetuating it like a cancer throughout the countryside. She had to be stopped.
She moved groggily in his arms as he struggled to put her clothes right. It wouldn’t do to be looking at her private places the way his traitorous eyes were drawn. He knew from a previous shameful experience that even though the lair of the vampire had a fetid stench, the thing itself had no personal odor. Even in that private place between her legs—so sweet on most women, fragrant and delicious—she was cold, sterile and lifeless. Her youth and beauty continued to attract the man in him, but the truth of her sacrilege could not be denied.
“Who’s your maker?” he whispered in her ear as he pulled what was left of her dress down to cover. She groaned in response, flailing weakly. He laid her on the ground, then opened his sack and removed the sharpened stake and a hammer. The thing was regaining consciousness quickly as the sun disappeared over the western hills, and he had no time to waste. “Who’s your maker?” he demanded.
Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she whispered a name. Against his better judgment, Van Helsing leaned closer to hear her, and when he did so, she grabbed his ear in her teeth and bit straight through it.
He yelled and pulled back, her teeth tearing through the flesh and cartilage of his ear. He pinned her to the ground with the stake at her breast. She growled. He put a knee on her belly, then took a firm grip on the hammer with his gloved hand and swung it.
The stake plunged deep. The thing screamed like a wildcat in heat, and then fainted.
Van Helsing, blood dripping down his neck from his torn ear, chided himself for being so careless. He finished pounding the stake, removed the head and stuffed the mouth with garlic. He left the corpse where it lay. He’d notify the constable who would find the girl’s kin and see that she had a proper Christian burial.
When finished, he sat back and tended to his ear with a cloth damp from the muddy moisture of the stream. He looked at the poor woman before him and thought about her answer to his question. He thought for certain she’d said “Pater.”
She must have said “Peter.” It was a common enough name. There must be a dozen Peters in the county, but only one Pater. Pater Van Helsing, Abraham’s father. Pater died of brain fever two years ago and had been safely buried in the churchyard with full Christian regalia. The bishop had seen to it. It had been Abraham’s worst nightmare that his father fall victim to the relentless plague of vampirism that scourged the English countryside.
It was unthinkable that Pater was a vampire, a vampire who controlled the young thing in the ditch under the bridge. Inconceivable. From the study window, Abraham viewed his father’s grave every day of his life, and it remained undisturbed.
He groaned to his feet, repacked his valise, and one hand to his injured ear, he mounted the gelding and made for town. First to see the constable, and second to the doctor for some stitches. Since he had killed the monster who bit him, he would not be infected with vampirism. He had other things to worry about. He replayed her whispered response to his question over and over again, and mentally reviewed the symptoms of his father’s fatal fever, and by the time he reached town, Van Helsing had become convinced that he had heard the woman correctly: his father remained undead.
The next day, Abraham and the parish bishop watched the two Craybourne boys lift Pater Van Helsing’s casket from its grave. Abraham held his breath as the eldest Craybourne pried opened the coffin.
Empty.
Darknesss swirled in the periphery of Abraham’s vision, and his knees weakened. The bishop helped him to the ground where he took deep breaths and tried to imagine the ramifications of this discovery. Then he tried to imagine where his father might lie during the day. He had to be found. Abraham had to put an end to the scourge. He had to find his father and stake him, cut off his head and fill the mouth with garlic. And then he had to find the vampire who had infected Pater and do the same to it.
Abraham felt old, tired, and ill-equipped for the task that lay ahead. He closed his eyes and rested his forehead on his knees. He thought he had been finished with his father forever once that coffin had been lowered into the graveyard and dirt thrown atop it. And now this.
And now this.
That night, he dreamed his father appeared at his bedside. Pater seemed to materialize out of stardust, and the years that had ravaged his ancient body had fallen away, leaving a young Pater Van Helsing—handsome and stylish, but with a new intensity foreign to Abraham. “My son,” he said. “My son, why do you waste your life? All your education, all your gifts and talents, all the good work you’ve done in the world. Rest now, and enjoy your retirement. Leave the distasteful jobs for the young and energetic. Go home to Amsterdam and leave these ridiculous English to themselves. Rest now. Rest.” Then as he had materialized, he swirled away into the moonlight, leaving Abraham to wonder if it was a dream or the evil of Dracula whose wretched spawn still thrived.
Abraham tried to imagine the act of staking his own father, and he couldn’t. The hot ball of emotion in his chest pushed tears out his eyes.
There would be no rest for him this night.
There may never be rest for him again.
The next day, the exhaustive search began. Every spare person gathered at the town square: the women, the unemployed, the retired, the aged. The bars and schools were closed. Abraham beseeched them to seek, find and report the vampire’s lair. He encouraged them to bejewel themselves with crucifixes and to store holy water in their homes. But most importantly, to look everywhere a body might lie in darkness. In the attics, under the houses, in the crypts, in the woodsheds, the factories, barns, everywhere, everywhere.
As he spoke, Abraham knew he was panicking the simple folk, but there was nothing to be done about that. They would have to come to terms with their own fears eventually, and the sooner they found the beast, the quicker the panic would be over. “The stench of a vampire’s lair is unmistakable,” he said to them. “Fetid guano. Ammoniac. Follow your noses.”
Immediately, of course, the fearful peasants began describing an unceasing stream of stinking spaces. Each had to be investigated, and nowhere was found the undead corpse of his father. As the search passed from weeks into months, Abraham’s energy failed along with his will, and despite all his efforts and those of the townspeople, the occasional young, raven-haired woman still disappeared. Each one bore a heart-wrenching resemblance to Abraham’s long-dead mother.
The only solace for Abraham’s torture was the company of the bishop, now retired, whose council Van Helsing cherished. The bishop visited for a glass of sherry every evening to keep abreast of the search, doing his best to tsk-tsk and shake his head at the apparent wily nature of Van Helsing’s cunning, elusive prey. Van Helsing thought the bishop would be more involved, the evil being what it was, right under his own nose, in his own parish, but the bishop seemed to be interested only in the progress of the hunt and emotional and mental state of Van Helsing himself. As they talked of an evening, the bishop showed an undue interest in the spiders who came in from the cold to nest quietly in the corners of Van Helsing’s den. They seemed drawn to him, and he let them crawl about on his hands and arms while Abraham talked of the hunt.
Then early one morning, after a sleepless night, as Van Helsing considered booking passage back to Amsterdam and leaving England and all it had failed to offer him, the bishop b
arged into his house. He grabbed Abraham’s wrist, and with urgency and a madness in his eyes, said, “Leave, Abraham, I beg of you. Immediately! You are not safe! None of us are safe! I can resist him no longer!” And with that, the man suffered a terrible seizure, and collapsed on the foyer floor.
Van Helsing called for Barnaby to fetch the doctor, but by the time that order had been delivered, the bishop had been delivered of his soul.
Van Helsing fell into his chair in front of the fire, emotionally overwrought. His health was not pampered by the foggy dampness of the English winter. He was not a young man, and the search for the creature his father had become was taking what could be a mortal toll. So it had been on the bishop.
Vampires were sly. Van Helsing remembered Renfield, the mental patient who had been Count Dracula’s lackey, and the similarities to the bishop were no longer to be ignored.
Neither was that stink that permeated his house as it leaked up through the floorboards.
My God, he thought. The devil resides beneath my very own home. He was incensed that the creature had been privy to all their searching through the conduit of the bishop, a supposed holy man. Van Helsing had felt safe and confident in his own home and had enjoyed the bishop’s company. The double deception sliced him deeply.
He finished his tea, in no hurry to decapitate his own father, and then assembled his kit. When Barnaby came back with the doctor, they helped him rip the boards off the north side of the house. All three nearly retched at the stench that poured forth. Van Helsing steeled himself and crawled into the darkness, dragging his will power along with his valise of tools.
There Pater lay under the floorboards, a handsome young man, his lips red and engorged and a trickle of some young woman’s blood still at the corner of his mouth. He looked very much like Abraham had in his youth. The demon virus had at least restored Pater’s looks if not his health and vitality. Abraham tugged at the old blanket the monster slept on, hoping to drag it into the burning sunlight before he plunged the stake, but the space was too cramped, the body too heavy, and Abraham too weak of will. He took the freshly sharpened stake from his bag and placed it carefully on the thing’s chest. He put a knee on its bloated stomach and raised the hammer.
Pater Van Helsing opened his eyes just as the hammer struck home and the stake plunged into his heart. Abraham searched those eyes for a brief glimpse of humanity, hoping to find some. Hoping to find none. Hoping to find forgiveness and hating himself for needing it. This one did not scream and writhe like most of the other vampires Abraham had staked. It just stared at him with a faint flicker of recognition.
He quickly retrieved the machete from his bag and severed the head of Pater Van Helsing, then sat back, viewing his wretched work, loathing himself and the unnamed force that drove him to this life, this vocation.
Abraham lifted his hands in front of his face. He’d forgotten his gloves and his father’s blood dripped from his fingers and ran down his wrists to his elbows.
His father’s hands had never seen such work. Such filth.
Such pride.
“These are my hands,” he said softly. At that moment, he knew that what he had become was nothing to be ashamed of in the face of what his father had ultimately become. Then louder, as if to convince the sightless corpse that lay in front of him: “Behold!” he said to it. “These are my hands!”
If you enjoyed Liz’s story of the supernatural then be sure to check out her dual horror novella WHEN DARKNESS LOVES US.
Sally Ann is a bright and bubbling farm girl, still caught in the thrill of a brand-new husband and a shining future ahead. When a careless exploration leaves her trapped underground, she learns to live again in the absence of everything she once knew. Even driven by love and light, Sally Ann finds the deepest darkness within herself in When Darkness Loves Us.
Old Martha Mannes has been a part of Morgan, Illinois since her birth. The whole town knows her as the dim-witted woman who was born without a nose, but Martha’s mind wasn’t always a blank slate. Unlocking the monster buried deep in her memories may bring back the sparkling child she once was…or it may send those around her crashing down into the nightmares of a little girl gone wrong.
A reprinting of Elizabeth Engstrom’s first book, this two-novella collection twists together the beauty and horror underlying the seeming simplicity of small town life.
Available today from Apex Publications
http://www.apexbookcompany.com
THE JUNKYARD GOD
M. Zak Anwar and O.M.R. Anwar
Copper and iron. Rust and rot. Salt and flesh and death and fear. It knew these scents. Better than all, it knew these scents. They fired its mind, drove it into rage. Carnal, maddening, addictive, unstoppable.
The silent ones were trapped. It had walked them down into the gully, herding them. These were metal-skinned, some carrying claws. They were not of bowing pack. They were meat. It tore into them, uncaring of the tiny cuts they inflicted, heedless of their pitiful cries. Its teeth rent through flesh, crunched through bone. Its claws tore them in half. One broke clear and tried to flee. The Dog closed the distance in two great bounds and leapt upon his back, crushing the life from him instantly. The Dog raised its great head and turned its mad gaze upon the survivors.
It had already eaten today—two younglings from another pack of silent ones. They tasted better, softer. These few were not hunted for their meat. It hungered for blood and death. They smelled of fear.
The remaining five herded together.
It licked at the blood on its teeth and lips. Ecstasy flowed through its veins, making it pant. Its lips curled back in a devilish grin. It wanted more.
It barked at them and they shuffled back, leaning into each other. They lacked the courage to roar back. The Dog stalked forward, towering above them. It pounced. The silent ones scattered, but one was caught by a forepaw and was batted into a junk-pile, a large wound in his belly pumping gallons of heady blood into the rust.
It grinned. Now there were only three.
The Junkyardies were a cold, dejected lot.
Wandering in fear and rot and a billion discarded things, forced to move forever, never stopping. Hands sifting through life looking for things to survive on, eyes always watching the horizon, heads turning back over slumped shoulders, children flinching at every tumbling thing that fell from junk dunes, and always, always wondering those wretched questions. Is this the end? Must I live on? Dare I die? Where is the Dog?
Always the Dog.
Some gave up and simply stopped moving, falling to the rusty floor with empty eyes and hanging heads, others lost their minds in fear and wandered into the discarded wastes. These the Dog found.
There was only one sure way to evade the Dog’s gaze, and every Junkyardy walked this path. They walked in the wake of the Depositors. The Junkyardies moved in tribes, each following one of the gigantic automatons on its unending journey through the Junkyard as it deposited infinite unwanted things in its wake. The yardies followed and the yardies scavenged. None dared to ask where the junk itself came from, lest it suddenly stop. To walk outside of the rumbling, metal-crunching, caterpillar-tracked Depositors’ protection was to die. No one moved from tribe to tribe. That was why all talk stopped when the stranger came to the people of Enannco Disposal Unit 39.
“My name is Lirk Ironspear,” he said, “and I’ve come to put down your Dog.”
Some wept, some gaped. Most just went on with their scavenging.
The wastelands stretched out all around him.
Behind him, the scavengers followed. They would find him, or they would not. It did not matter. He would deal with them when they came.
As ever in Dirge, there were no days or nights, just a deadpan grey sky, ever in starless twilight. All was lost in a timeless limbo of misery. The Junkyard was part scrapheap and part rubbish tip. Everywhere junk and scrap. Lirk shuddered. The Junkyard was no worse than anywhere else in Dirge, but it was the worst place possible for all
who dwelt there.
Lirk checked his guns and moved on, vast dunes of lost and discarded property rising up precariously to either side of him, forming a valley of forgotten steel. Somewhere in these wastes a monster walked, and Lirk Ironspear was going to be the man to kill it and bring it home—hide, skull and all. For his was a family of slayers, father teaching son from generation to generation. Some men were anglers. Some were hunters. The Ironspears were monster slayers. And there were many that needed slaying in this world of Dirge.
It was a name to live up to, Ironspear. Men still talked in hushed whispers of the feats of Matt Tannerby, called the Rotten Knight, the first of the Ironspears. Now it was Lirk’s turn to take up the mantle, to carry the torch forward one generation. He would make his ancestors proud.
Seeing a clearing to his left, he padded towards it, one fist curled around the haft of the large-bladed hunting knife at his side, the other around the pistol grip of the scattergun in the scabbard on his back. Every sense remained alert for danger as he ducked beneath a car door that hung open at head height and entered a small clearing. Empty. Lirk did not allow himself to relax. Death was ever a heartbeat away.