Bad Intentions

by Norman Partridge

  The outlaw turned, eyes dancing wildly in his head. Saw the gunfighter, bats circling his oxblood Stetson hat, a couple of the creatures latched to his black neck as if they were drinking his blood...

  ...or feeding him the blood of O'Reilly and Pueblo Jack....

  Windy couldn't move. Neither could he bear to watch the dark man come. He closed his eyes. But even in the darkness, he couldn't escape the sound of the bats cutting circles through the blistering air, and the dark man's strange tread... boot crunching gravel, then the tread of his naked foot, then boot crunching gravel...

  Windy started to laugh. Remembered that snatch of nonsense his Mama used to sing, Diddle diddle dumpling my son John, one shoe off and one shoe on....

  But this wasn't no time for nonsense. Windy's guts lurched again. A fat bullfrog bellied across his lips and bolted for freedom. He opened his eyes and watched the frog go, wishing he could join it.

  All he had to do was get up his nerve. His horse was up there on that little rise, just fifty or sixty feet away, but he couldn't take a single step —

  Crunch. Tread. Crunch. Tread.

  The dark man's steps were even and slow. He closed on Windy.

  Didn't blink. Didn't smile.

  Windy's lips trembled. He stared at the bullfrog, marveling at the way the critter didn't stop for nothing. It just hopped and hopped and hopped.

  But the amphibian had nowhere to go. Not a sliver of shade in which to hide. No water to cool its backside. Only a barren mountaintop where it would eventually die in the unrelenting sunshine, shriveled guts baking on a white granite skillet.

  That didn't stop the little sucker moving, though.

  The dark man's right hand closed around Windy's neck.

  "Let me live," the outlaw begged.

  "Until I find a rope," the dark man said. "And a branch strong enough to hold you."

  And then the gunfighter grabbed Windy's shoulder and sent him walking toward the horse.

  Frogs bounded at the outlaw's heels, traveling his shadow—leaping over hot rocks, croaking merrily—taking to the notion of freedom.

  So great was their reverie that they hopped past the outlaw lickety-split, crossing hot rocks on their way to nowhere.

  Windy Jim teared up and started to cry.

  The little bastards didn't know what lay ahead of them.

  They just didn't know at all.

  PART FIVE

  THE HAND OF GLORY

  Estrellita had broken the mirror days ago.

  She'd had no other choice—her cat-eyes were constantly drawn to her reflection, as if the looking glass were a magnet.

  But even with the mirror broken, the bruja could not stop looking at herself—her burned skin, her hairless head, her beautiful green cat-eyes.

  A hundred shards of glass blanketed the cabin floor.

  A hundred horrible reflections.

  A hundred places to look.

  She snatched up a shard of broken glass. Plucked one cat eye from her head, and then the other. She placed them on the bare table which had once been home to her potions and powders, along with the book that held the secrets of her mother and grandfather and his father before him.

  She held the broken glass in one hand, careful not to cut herself. Cupped her other hand around the eyes so they could not roll away.

  The blind cat bolted through the open door.

  Estrellita chopped and chopped and chopped.

  The sound filled the cabin and the woods beyond. Even when Estrellita stopped her chopping, it seemed she still heard the sound, an echo traveling the dark pine forest.

  An echo searching for another pair of ears.

  So the mirror no longer mattered. For days Estrellita reveled in her blindness, happy to be spared the sight of her charred skin and the mirthless leer of white teeth glimpsed through a lipless mouth.

  But she was not spared the smell of her seared flesh. Soon her nose burned with her own stench, and she began to imagine that the stink filled her belly.

  She could almost taste herself. What was worse, she could almost taste the stink of Buck Barlowe, as well. His corpse still lay in their bed. And there it would stay, for Estrellita would not enter the bedroom. The floor was littered with broken glass. Her feet were already badly blistered. She could barely walk.

  As if a few cuts could really make things worse than they already were.

  But she would not take the risk. She would move away from these things. She would go outside, into the air. She would fill her lungs with the clean fragrance of a cool pine forest, and she would forget about Buck Barlowe, forget the things she had seen in the mirror.

  Estrellita stepped onto the porch. The mountain air did smell good. Cool, and heavy with moisture, as if it carried the breath of the waterfall which hid this valley from the rest of the world.

  The witch's skin crackled like old parchment as she sat down on the cabin steps. Slow, even breaths whistled through her lipless teeth, and soon the taste of dead flesh was washed from her mouth.

  The horrible smells were gone.

  Only to be replaced by a sound.

  A persistent creaking, not too distant. Like branches worried by a heavy wind, but there was no wind at all.

  Estrellita rose and moved toward the sound, hands held before her.

  Careful steps. One after another.

  The creaking sound seemed nearer now.

  Her hands reached out...

  And up...

  Blistered fingers brushed something soft. Something that gave, then pushed back against her fingertips...

  ...and the creaking sound was louder now, just above Estrellita's head.

  A branch creaking... and a rope twisting...

  ...and Estrellita almost laughed, because another sound solved the final mystery as she pushed against the soft thing with all her might.

  Frogs sang in the lynched man's belly.

  She reached for Windy Jim's left hand, found only a severed stump.

  A final drop of blood dripped from the dead outlaw's wrist and buried itself in the pine needles at Estrellita's feet.

  A wind rose from nowhere, lashing her face.

  No. Not a wind. Cold air stirred by bat wings. Estrellita listened as the animals shrieked overhead, felt the tattoo of their leathery wings against her blistered forehead.

  She turned, stumbling through her dark world. Tripped on the stairs. Crossed the porch. Stumbled inside the cabin and barred the door behind her.

  The windows were already shuttered. The cabin only had one door. Estrellita stood behind it, completely silent, listening for anything that moved.

  She heard only the soft insistent drumming of impatient fingers, for the black gunfighter's severed hand was still pinned to the cabin floor with Buck Barlowe's knife.

  Estrellita stepped toward it, charred fingers groping before her. If she could find the gunfighter's hand, why then she could bargain... she could —

  The gunfighter laughed, his icy breath washing her roasted cheek.

  He had been there, all along....

  Something scraped across Estrellita's ribs.

  A brittle, hissing sound.

  A single match flaring alive.

  The mirror was broken, but there was plenty of glass, more than enough to make a circle of jagged shards on the little table.

  The witch sat in a chair, not moving at all, staring down at the table with eyeless sockets.

  Stack could fix that. He unwrapped the torn swatch of satin he'd found in Windy Jim's saddlebags, revealing a pair of whiskey colored eyes.

  With some effort, he fit them into the witch's charred head. Not as gently as he might have liked. But the witch didn't complain any.

  The gunfighter turned away. "It ain't really stealing," he said. "I'll just be taking what's mine."

  He yanked the bewitched knife from the floor, freeing his severed hand. To tell the truth, it didn't look too much the worse for wear. But the gunfighter wasn't a judge of such matters. H
e slipped the hand into his saddlebags, hoping that the Chinaman was.

  Stack took one last look at the witch, at those unblinking whiskey eyes locked in that shriveled black skull of hers, eyes staring down at a table covered with eight or ten slivers from a busted mirror.

  The gunfighter said, "Maybe this'll help you to remember something I learned a long time ago."

  The witch didn't say a word.

  Stack kept quiet. He figured it wouldn't do any good to tell her, anyway. After all, he'd told the apple grower, and it hadn't done that fool one bit of good.

  Stack opened the cabin door.

  A cold breeze blew past him, tearing at his ankles, and his duster crackled like a mainsail in a storm.

  The wind whipped through the room as if searching for something. It fanned the witch's naked brow, glided through chinks in the floorboards. Finally it did a little dance around the Hand of Glory the gunfighter had placed on the mantle above the fireplace, worrying the flame that rose from the candle born of Windy Jim's fat.

  The flame guttered low and threatened to die.

  The spell weakened, began to break.

  The witch nearly screamed.

  Nearly closed her eyes.

  But the gunfighter cut the heart from that breeze, stepping outside and closing the cabin door behind him.

  Instantly, the air in the cabin grew still.

  The candle flared alive, continued to burn.

  The witch did not scream.

  Did not close her eyes.

  She stared down at her reflection in that broken-glass pie, a human statue helpless before the power of the Hand of Glory.

  A single drop of Windy Jim's fat drizzled down the side of the candle and hardened in the dead man's palm.

  The flame lengthened, narrowed, riding the wick.

  The candle burned.

  It burned for a long, long time.

  APOTROPAICS

  I WAS HEADING FOR THE CREEK, whistling "Heartbreak Hotel" and minding my own business, when Ross caught up to me and told me about the vampire at Todd Palmer's house.

  "Jason," he gasped, almost doubling over. "Man, we thought you'd never get home from vacation. Todd and Dave and me, we didn't know what to do. But now that you're back...."

  He left the sentence unfinished. Suddenly, he wore the relieved look of a tired pitcher who'd just been pulled from a tough game. He straightened, still a head shorter than me even though we were both eleven, and shot the look my way one more time, just to be sure that I hadn't missed it.

  I flicked his Brooklyn Dodgers cap off his head. "Pull the other one, Ross. You guys have probably been planning this for two weeks." I shook my head. "C'mon—Bela Lugosi in corn country? Is that the best you can do? Isn't it bad enough that my folks dragged me through twenty-two states in fourteen days? And, man, all I've got to show for it is this chintzy knife from Yosemite."

  I pulled the knife fast enough to make Ross jump (he's a hopeless coward). It wasn't really chintzy, but it wasn't the one I had wanted, either. That one cost ten bucks and had an authentic ivory handle. My old man wouldn't go for it though, so I had to settle for the two buck special that had a genuine plastic handle featuring a hand-painted view of Half Dome.

  Hand-painted in Taiwan, that is.

  Ross stared at the knife. No, he did more than stare—his gaze was riveted on the shiny blade. "Oh, man," he said. "This is scary. I mean, you buying a knife. It's like you're psychic or something. I swear to God it is!"

  "What're you talking about?"

  "C'mon and I'll show you."

  Ross scooped up his cap and we walked the short distance to Palmer's cornfield. We hopped the fence and blazed a trail between two rows of dead cornstalks. I was surprised that Mr. Palmer hadn't plowed the field and planted another crop. Todd's dad was usually real quick about that kind of stuff. My dad always said that Mr. Palmer was a hard man, a man who didn't brook nonsense. That was the way Todd's dad managed his farm, pushing its crop potential to the limit, and my dad seemed to think that was the way Mr. Palmer handled his kids, too.

  But something had slowed Mr. Palmer's clockwork pace. Maybe for once he hadn't had enough time, or maybe he'd wanted a vacation of his own, or maybe...

  Maybe anything. Who knows why things happen? I mean, really? People say things. They do things. But who ever knows? Really?

  Ross pushed between two tall stalks that crackled like ancient parchment. I followed. We cut through a couple more rows and came to the center of the field.

  And there it was.

  A naked mound of dirt, dark clods dried gray and hard in the hot sun.

  A grave, I thought, shivering. It wasn't an ordinary grave, either, and not just because it was in the middle of a cornfield. Imbedded in this grave, punched into it like it was some weird pin cushion, were dozens of stakes and knives, their hilts barely visible. Tent stakes, survey stakes. Boy Scout knives, ordinary silverware, putty knives, and fancy stuff that must have been pure silver.

  Ross was talking again. "We had to steal some of 'em. Christ, my mom'll kill me if she finds out I took Aunt Alma's silver. But we had to, 'cause we can't let him come back. Oh, man, he'll be pissed if he comes back, and I don't want to think about what he'd do to Todd, and to me and Dave because we helped Todd." He bent low, touching knives and stakes, making sure that they were firmly planted in the hard ground. "So we stuck this stuff into the grave, and he can't get out without killing himself again. That makes sense, don't it, Jase? I mean, you know how this stuff works...."

  Ross kept talking, the way he always does, but I wasn't listening.

  It was my turn to stare.

  My turn for riveted gazes.

  The churned, dry dirt of the grave. The stakes, brown and hard and smooth, like weird roots. The silver knives, hilts glistening in the morning sunlight. The clumps of earth, like dead fists.

  Not dead. Undead.

  Because this was a vampire's grave.

  Standing there surrounded by oak trees that were a good hundred years old, Todd's big house looked small. The Palmers had lived on the outskirts of Fiddler for three generations, and the house had stood the test of time. A couple coats of white paint every two years helped, and so did old man Palmer's skill as a carpenter, but I always thought that there was something about the way the house rested under those big trees that helped protect it.

  Today it didn't look protected. It looked trapped, ensnared by a hundred gnarled arms, all twisting toward it and holding it down.

  Todd answered our knock. He didn't look right. There was a deep green bruise on his jaw, and his eyes were red, and it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that he'd been crying.

  Ross opened his trap and started to whisper too loudly, and Todd held a finger to his lips. "My folks are gone," Todd said. "They headed down to see Grandma in Earlimart. They don't think she's gonna make it this time, and she won't go back to the hospital. Sis is upstairs, sleeping again. That's all she does lately." He opened the screen door. "Come in, but be quiet."

  We followed Todd through the living room. It was stark, like a room where no one lived at all. No television, no hi-fi, no coffee table, certainly no magazines or flowers. Just a worn rocker, a few chairs so stiff that even the doilies on their arms seemed out of place, and a big wrought iron cross hanging over the fireplace.

  A cross that a hard man would appreciate, I thought, and then I felt kind of weird, because it was a thought my dad would have.

  Anyway, Todd moved down the hallway, his right shoulder rubbing the flowery wallpaper. He came to a little table by the staircase and picked up the telephone.

  He didn't have to dial. It was a party line, and Dave's mom was in the middle of a call. "I hate to interrupt, Mrs. Sanchez," Todd said, his voice quiet but firm. "Can I talk to Dave? It's kind of important."

  Mrs. Sanchez must have agreed, because Todd didn't say anything else. In a town like Fiddler, where everybody thinks they know everybody else's business, a kid with a dying
grandma can get away with anything.

  We stood in the quiet hallway, waiting for Dave to come to the phone. I stepped to the foot of the staircase. A doorway stood open on the landing above. I saw a bed, and someone's arm dangling over the side. The person in the bed rolled over just as I started up the stairs, and I saw long blond hair and a white nightgown dipping low over a white shoulder.

  Janet Palmer, Todd's sister.

  Her eyes caught mine, but it was like they weren't quite focused. "Dave?" she whispered. "Is that you? I'm sorry, Dave. I'm so sorry."

  I backed down the staircase, embarrassed, and didn't say a word.

  Todd said a couple words to Dave, because that was all it took. Then he grabbed my shirttail, and I turned and saw those red eyes of his.

  I couldn't read them at all.

  Upstairs, Janet was crying.

  "C'mon," Todd said. "Meeting time."

  We sat under Todd's front porch. The air was still and cool. There was enough room for kids to sit comfortably, but not enough room for adults, so it was the perfect place to go when we didn't want to be bothered.

  "Tell us what to do, Jase," Ross said. "Tell us if we done right. I mean, you know about this stuff. You read all those monster magazines and see all those movies."

  "Yeah," I said. "You've said that about a jillion times today."

  Dave laughed, twirled his drumsticks, and did a little drum roll on the rubber pad the band teacher had given him so he could practice over the summer. His folks weren't too well off and he couldn't afford a snare drum, let alone the fancy set he wanted.

  Dave carried the practice pad everywhere. He put up with band, but he really wanted to rock 'n' roll. He said he was going to get out of Fiddler and tour with Ritchie Valens or somebody like that. Dave was the coolest kid I knew, the leader of our group, and I felt like he was about five years ahead of us in almost everything. Girls liked him, and he didn't put on a show with them or pretend that he minded their attention.

  "So who's going to tell me what's going on?" I asked.