by Del Howison
“Please, Dieter, just shut the fuck up.”
But he didn’t. There was room to leave more of a message. “I don’t know what I did to kill the passion or desire in you. You turn your back on me in part because I tell you that you are the one, my one true love, and that I want to be with—”
The machine cut him off. That didn’t matter. He kept her number on speed dial.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring. “Hi, this is Chloe and I can’t answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone.”
Beeeep.
“Hey, it’s me again. Your machine cut me off, but don’t worry, this is the last time I’ll be calling tonight. I used to think being with you was my future, but being in love with you and wanting to be with you is an exercise in futility. I really won’t bother you anymore tonight. Enjoy our wine-tasting anniversary and the flowers. I thought it would always be like that, and it truly makes me depressed to think that it may not be…. I think the worst thing I could have done to try to be with you forever was tell you how much I wanted it and how happy you make me. How much I love you…. My life must really be meaningless if all I want to do is spend it with you. Enjoy your life and all your beautiful friends and dates. It must be so much more wonderful to be incomplete than it was when I thought we were happy together…. Um, why don’t you want to see me and talk to me and make me feel better? I don’t understand you! I would rather talk to you and hear your voice and look in your eyes instead of leaving all these stupid messages, but I suppose you feel so guilty and upset about turning your back on me that now I can’t even have that. You won’t even pick up your phone to tell me thanks for the flowers!”
“Damn you and the flowers!” she screamed, picking up the vase and hurling it as hard as she could. The flowers exploded in a violent burst of noise and color. The wet, white wall resembled a fresh wound, and shards of glass and strewn sunflowers littered the hardwood floor.
A grin formed on her pale face.
Destruction always brought about a sense of liberation. After she slashed a painting, her vibrant green eyes brimmed with joy. Ripping up exquisite garments proved to be yet another thrill. Petty perhaps, but satisfying. He tried suffocating her with his relentless pursuit, so she took revenge on the trinkets he bought for her.
As she stared at the mess on the floor, a mess that she would have to clean up, her thoughts drifted. How dare he claim to adore her? Love did not feel like this! Love had nothing in common with the way he made her feel. There was no malaise attached to passion. No dreadful enslavement with amour. His interpretation of what he thought defined love and the actual meaning bound very different books.
Ripping his pages out had never been her intention. A long, long time ago they had shared something special. She could respect those nights and honor their memory if only he would do the same. The past echoed in the past and should stay there. Yesterday offered nothing for tomorrow.
Regaining control over her emotions, Chloe silently acknowledged that this situation was no longer about love. Maybe at one point it had been. Maybe originally it had been an issue of the heart, but that issue had gotten lost in the mania. He didn’t truly love her; if he did, he wouldn’t behave in such a subjugating manner. This wasn’t love. This boiled down to getting in the final word. About his ego. About his hubris and not losing. Dieter wasn’t some forlorn romantic pining away over his one true love. He embodied a selfish egomaniac who refused to be refused. He had proven to be a relentless manipulator, a bloodsucking negotiator who would haunt her until the end of time.
Chloe couldn’t quite pinpoint when this had all begun. Seemed like forever and a day. No matter where she went or what she did to try to lose him, Dieter always lurked, trying to claw his way back into her heart. This had started way before the Internet replaced television and e-mail replaced letter writing. Before the cell phone replaced the rotary phone.
Before the telephone, actually.
Cursed by fate, their destinies had intertwined for as long as she could remember. Not just decades—those were a mere drop in the bucket. Fads and trends occurred during certain decades. What she had enjoyed most about the fifties were the fantastic American cars, while the sixties brought music of revolution. Fads were fun and fleeting, but only after the passing of several centuries could a person really gain perspective.
Change was a necessary part of evolution. Machine tools, neoclassicism, the steam engine, the cotton gin, famine, agriculture, photography, medical advancements, impressionism, gas lighting, perfume, the Great Depression, dental floss, Prohibition, world wars, the splitting of the atom, antibiotics, surrealism, the Civil Rights Movement, space travel, the Cuban missile crisis, women’s liberation, Les Paul guitars, oil, biohazards, microwaves, high-heel shoes, the fall of communism, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Chernobyl, high-definition TV, Tiananmen Square, Victoria’s Secret, laptop computers, the World Trade Center, and the iPhone had all helped shape the course of history. Helped alter the way the world operated. When she wasn’t trying to shake Dieter, Chloe had witnessed these marvels and countless others with her own two eyes.
Seeing the Spanish, Chinese, and Ottoman empires crumble, the dissolving of Holy Roman Empire, and the collapse of the Mughal Empire made the presidencies of Richard Nixon or either Bush seem brief thundershowers of greed and corruption. Litter upon the sands of time. The oppression once ranking women and blacks as inferior to men, a condition that most people today could not fathom, offered hope that maybe one day those same blinds would be removed from society’s perspective on homosexuals. The nature of sin and the Puritan conscience that once dominated these shores giving way to a black president and condoms being sold from vending machines in public bathrooms presented genuine change.
Unfortunately, Dieter would never change unless Chloe did something drastic. She had tried and tried and tried to get through to him. She had tried going her own way and giving him his space, but no matter where she traveled, he followed. It didn’t matter if she hid in Berlin, Helsinki, Paris, Calcutta, London, or the City of Lost Angels, somehow he eventually located her.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring. “Hi, this is Chloe and I can’t answer the phone right now. Please leave a message after the tone.”
“Hey, you know after everything I’ve done for you, the least you could do is show me a little bit of respect and answer the damn phone when I call. It wouldn’t kill you to be considerate of someone other than yourself. I’m just trying to be civil here. I’m reaching out. I’ve reached out across the world in hopes that you’ll take my hand. Please, I never wanted anyone other than you. Never will, but we are back to you saying no to everything I try to do. I miss the girl you used to be. I miss the taste of … I miss that look in your eyes. I miss the divine sound of your voice. Baby, please, please, please just talk to me. I’m asking you to talk to me. If not tonight, then soon. I can wait. I will wait forever. Chloe, just talk to me…. I love you.”
A long sigh, not of frustration but inevitability, fluttered through her lips. Then there was silence. Then footsteps.
She tread softly into the kitchen. No matter how long she’d existed in the shadows of civilization, whenever she took residence inside a condominium or an apartment, Chloe always reserved one drawer in the kitchen to store her tools. Measuring tape, vise grips, screws, adjustable wrench.
Searching for another implement, her fingers pushed aside a hammer and screwdriver.
Spiking was so customary. Romantic even. The penetration and unification. The spurting of crimson that signifies the end for a vampire. The looking into one another’s eyes one last time. There was no way she would allow Dieter’s final moment to be something so intimate. After everything she’d endured, spiking came across as too kind an act.
No matter how many centuries had passed since Dieter transformed her from a
n unsuspecting victim into an immortal, he never gave any consideration to what she might be experiencing. Regardless of how many times she screamed that he could not come in, and no matter how firm she stood in her position of unavailability, he never listened. All her pursuer cared about was wearing her down, winning his quest to have her, and claiming the prize. As far back as she could recall she had tried explaining how she felt, but that didn’t matter to an intrusive bastard who refused to listen to reason. And now, thanks to a batch of unwanted sunflowers, Chloe had attained the clarity she so desperately sought.
Her fingertips gently rubbing back and forth against a sharp edge, she wondered how much resistance his soft flesh would offer. If spiking could be viewed as traditional and romantic, then maybe a slow decapitation with a serrated blade might finally drive home the fact that she did not love him. And even if Dieter didn’t die with that understanding, at least now he would finally stop calling.
She removed a hacksaw from the drawer.
It was well balanced and lethal, and the metal handle rested comfortably in her grip. Holding on tightly, she felt a reassuring rush of power travel from the deadly implement into her hand and then up into her body. Whether that sensation was real or purely symbolic did not matter. A slight grin formed on her lips as she began preparing for what she was about to do next.
Chloe needed to thank Dieter for the flowers.
THE WANDERING UNHOLY
VICTOR SALVA
STENECKER WATCHED THE falling snow out the window of his sedan and thought of something his mother had told him long ago when he was a child. “It is the dust of the angels,” she had once said, and he could never look at a snowfall without thinking of this. And as his caravan jostled down the shallow ravine that passed for a road, Stenecker dozed off and drifted back to the small house he had grown up in, with the snow on the windowsill and the warmth of the kitchen where his mother was always baking bread….
The sedan hit a sharp crag that jolted him back to reality.
“Forgive me, Herr Field Marshal.” His driver stared at him from the rearview mirror. “I think this road was meant for something other than automobiles.” Stenecker looked at the boy’s face and remembered back when he, too, had looked like Hans: young, handsome, blue-eyed, and vital. The picture of Hitler’s ideal soldier.
The sedan rolled to a stop, and Stenecker looked ahead at the large covered truck and its platoon of soldiers. Major Grunwald hopped from the cab and strode through the snow toward him. Stenecker rolled down a window as Grunwald’s oddly square head leaned in. Mist blossomed at his lips with each word. “We might be getting close, Herr Field Marshal.”
“We’re looking for a cross,” Stenecker told him, “a large one. Take two men and make certain the pass is clear.”
Grunwald waved two fingers in the air and Gunnery Sergeant Kimmel climbed out the back of the truck with two of the soldiers. “Clear the pass,” Grunwald told them. “And remember, the white of the snow makes you easy targets.”
Kimmel and his men had rounded two bends of banked snow- and ice-capped trees when one of the soldiers whispered through chattering teeth, “What exactly are we looking for out here, Sergeant?”
“For soldiers who use their eyes and not their mouths,” Kimmel snapped back. “Stay quiet!”
A sound to the left of them.
They hit the ground hard, rifles leveled at a bank of snow some yards away. When the sound came again, it was with the strange sight of the snow shifting and churning as if something were under it. Something large and working its way toward the surface.
A hand jutted from the ice, and they almost fired. It clutched at the cold air as if it might scoop up oxygen, and Kimmel and his men bellied toward it. A head emerged then—white and frosted over like the rocks and trees around them.
* * *
Kimmel’s mouth dropped open at the sight. The eyes looked frozen shut, and as a shoulder broke through the ice, the coat it wore bore stripes. “This man is a German officer!” Kimmel launched to his feet and barreled toward him. And halted abruptly when the frozen man’s head dropped back and his eyes popped open. You could hear the sound they made, the lids were so brittle, and the eyeballs themselves had a nightmare aspect, as they had frosted over completely.
Kimmel’s throat tightened, and he could barely get out words. “… What in the name of the Führer?”
And the snow beneath that frozen head erupted with gunfire.
The officer was shooting! Lurching up, waist deep in the snow, his semiautomatic cut down Kimmel’s soldiers as the gunnery sergeant flailed back and returned fire. The truck’s soldiers spilled out as Kimmel’s own rifle obliterated the snowbound officer. But there was more snow moving now, all around him.
To his left, another bank erupted, and two more on the bank opposite, all with frozen hands, fingers splaying in the icy air. Beyond those, the snow exploded again as another soldier erupted from the powdered earth, firing in all directions.
Using the truck as cover, the Nazi ranks fired back and Kimmel spun around, crashing to the snow to find his own cover as the ice soldiers held their position and their guns blazed.
Soldiers at the truck split off and charged down the ravine, ripping off shots as they moved. Anchored in the ice, their element of surprise gone, the snowbound assassins were easy targets, and they finally dropped and buckled under the barrage of return fire.
Kimmel pulled himself to his feet. In the new stillness, neither he nor any other approaching soldier could fathom what had happened. A young soldier met Kimmel’s eyes. “Where did they come from?”
But something was already springing out of the snow behind him. The boy’s breath was cut short by a terrible slicing sound, and his eyes went wide. Their gaze dropped to the frozen bayonet sticking out of his sternum. His last breath visibly drifted into the air as he slid off the blade to reveal his icy executioner.
Sergeant Kimmel swung his pistol up and picked him off with a single shot to the head. He dropped to the snow with the sound of ringing metal as the fatal shot punctured the soldier’s helmet.
Now Field Marshal Stenecker strode toward them from the sedan. His look betrayed nothing as he took silent inventory of the frozen carnage all around them.
“They look like they’re blind!” Major Grunwald sputtered. “How could they fire a rifle?”
“Not blind, their eyes are frozen over.” Kimmel could barely find his voice.
“This man has an Iron Cross! He was decorated!” Grunwald jabbed a finger at a frozen corpse. “These are all German soldiers—why in the fires of Hell would they be shooting at us?!”
Kimmel called out and they rushed to the frozen soldier with the bayonet. “I took him down with a single shot to the head.” He pointed to the hole between the soldier’s frosted eyes.
“Not a drop of blood,” Grunwald whispered. “These men are iced to the bone….”
“Not just that, Major, look! He’s already been shot!” Kimmel became more unglued as he pointed to an iced-over wound in the soldier’s neck. “And more than once!” Kimmel brushed snow off an old chest wound that had ripped the soldier’s frosty uniform.
“What are you saying?” Stenecker asked calmly.
Then Kimmel saw something across the ravine that paled him even further. He scrambled to the officer who had first clawed out of the ice. The man was still waist deep in a snowbank, and Kimmel reached down and yanked him out by the arm.
The officer was only half a man. He ended just below his frozen waist.
“These men were not only buried in the snow.” Kimmel dropped him back into the ice. “They were dead when they attacked us.”
The wind whistled as the snow fell and the men surveyed the countryside.
Only Stenecker showed no horror. “Moving forward with eyes sharp, gentlemen,” he said at last without emotion. “We have come to the right place.”
* * *
Greystone Abbey had the aspect of a gigantic stone box carved in
to the rocky mountainside. A massive granite cross centered the battlements over the mammoth gates, collecting snow as the caravan pulled up and Major Grunwald and Sergeant Kimmel moved out into the bracing cold.
“This is a convent?” Kimmel asked, staring up at the ugly stone cross. “It looks more like a fortress.” He reached out to an oversized bell at one of the hefty rusted hinges on the fortress’s high walls.
“Do not ring that bell, Sergeant.” Stenecker’s voice cut through the wind. He stood at the front of his sedan, young Hans at his side. “Do nothing they would expect.”
Kimmel lifted a large megaphone he had brought and took a breath, but before a word could be uttered, the ground began to rumble, and so deeply that they could feel it through the soles of their boots.
The great gates to the abbey were parting. Opening to reveal a vast courtyard covered in snow. Grunwald’s command brought the platoon off the truck, and they raced past the field marshal and dropped to one knee, aiming at the hulking stone palace the courtyard presented.
The falling snow disguised the abbey’s lower dimensions, including a long granite staircase that rose to a high outer balcony: one that was already filling with a strange procession of thick black shawls and strings of heavy rosary beads that rattled and rolled across large oval collars of starched white.