The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance (The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection Book 1)

by Clark Hays

  The glaring noise of the light gave way to the rhythmic rise and fall of voices, the words echoing inside my dizzied mind. I could hear them, as if they were part of me, stretching from the past, and beyond into the future.

  We are glad, they said. We come to you through the light. Nothing is outside of you. The light is you. We mean no harm, we will protect you. Leave your body here, enter our world by the light of your fingers. Come with us now. Fly, fly through the stars, through the ether of human souls, taste their pains, their lusts, their sicknesses, insanities and love. Feel the futility of human life, understand its power. See dead souls struggling to leave and return, touch the fire of a new soul burning itself into the flesh of an infant. Understand all of humanity inside your flesh, not with your mind or heart.

  As suddenly as it began, it was over. With a lurch, I was violently sucked back into my body with a pain that was almost unbearable. I fell back to the floor, unsure how much time passed. Minutes, hours? A fire burned in my veins, raging and trapped by the constraints of my body, at that instant little more than an aching prison of flesh. Too much knowledge, too much pain. I was certain I was dying and nothing, no one, could help.

  Please go away, I begged the voices, make it stop. Mother, Tucker, God — make the pain go away. And the cold. I was shivering, my body felt boneless, the floor was so cold. Blood. The taste of blood will warm you.

  This is not real, a hallucination, I don’t want blood. It must be a hallucination, I wouldn’t let my mind do this. I told myself I wasn’t, but I must be crazy.

  Eat, or you will die.

  “Go away,” I screamed at myself, at the voices, “leave me in peace.”

  Eat or you will die.

  “The pain will kill me,” I shouted, pounding my head, “let me die here. Please, God, let me die here in the arms of sanctity.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw movement. It was a rat scurrying through the shadows. My hands lifted of their own will, pulsing with the light. The veins on the back of my hands had begun to recede into the flesh like parched streambeds and the skin was sallow, yellow, illuminated by the red and green kaleidoscope of moonlight streaming through the stained glass windows.

  Soft light mixed with the harsh primary colors of the Crucifixion of Christ, Mother Mary and the Magdalene cowering at the base of the wooden Cross.

  The tiny heartbeat of the animal filled my thoughts, I could feel it move. The will to survive eclipsed rational thought. In a flash, my now foreign hands seized the rat. Brutishly, I brought it to my mouth, unbelieving as it squirmed in panic. My teeth broke through the skin, crumbled the bone and I ripped its head off, sucking every last drop of blood from the tiny body.

  Good, the voices sang in harmony, you eat, and watch. Be inside the light, until you can bear the change.

  Again, I was pulled outside myself, witness to my own madness.

  The warm taste of copper flooded past my teeth, coating my mouth as I licked every last drop from my fingers. The blood melted into my flesh and my senses heightened to an unbearable pitch.

  Such an insignificant little vessel of flesh and blood, and yet such profound events. What had I done? The voices shouted in my head with joy and wild abandon.

  The pain was gone. The light was gone. My body was quiet. I felt warm for the first time since escaping. My mind was once again my own. “Oh, Lord, my God, help me,” I said out loud, falling prostrate on the marble, but there was nothing I could do except choke back a cry for Tucker.

  Again, the voices filled my mind. Beneath the church. Hide. Sleep. Be cautious and learn quickly. We will only be with you a short time.

  Like a zombie, I moved stiff-legged toward the door into the catacombs. As I descended the worn steps, fury began to consume me, fueled by the blood, anger at the God Julius described. Could that God be the same as mine, the same God whose house I was in? How could I have been so blind? How could I have trusted, believed in a God who would so casually create a world pitting good against evil for His amusement? What other reason could there be? And so much heartache due to it. This was too much for me. I never considered myself smart, or religious, just a woman trying her best to keep cat food on the table and dress well. “I am not special,” I screamed aloud inside my mind.

  “Mother,” I cried, “you must have known. Why didn’t you tell me?” If everything Julius said was true, she must have known everything. Then I remembered and my shoulders sagged.

  She had told me. Just not all of it. The safe deposit box. The letters. She made me promise not to read them until night became day. If I had only known, if I had only understood those words, I would have broken that promise in an instant. At the time, I thought she was going senile, but she must have known that if this day arrived, I would figure it out.

  That thought filled me with despair. Was her whole life then a lie? Had she made a deal with the devil, with Julius, to save herself by sacrificing me? Surely not. There had to be more to it, things I didn’t yet understand. That thought was strangely calming, ludicrous as it sounded. Something unknown I could believe in, have faith in, unlike the God I now despised.

  No, none of this was real.

  I had been walking, blindly, in the dark and had no idea where I was or how far I had come. I decided to rest there a moment or two. The sun did not frighten me. I would rest a few minutes, before the dawn. I was not afraid. I could walk into the light and it would mean nothing to me. I had been brainwashed or drugged.

  Vampires were not real. The rat was madness. Madness was better than believing. Tomorrow, by the light of day, I would get the answers.

  Tomorrow I would get to the safe deposit box.

  But even as this confidence grew, a darkness was gathering in the coils of my mind — a darkness that deepened and embraced all but a pinpoint of light. In this light was the thought of Tucker. It was a pure thought of love and empathy. I felt a dread and horror as to what kind of death he might have experienced.

  “Please, make him be alive, make him come back to me. I need him,” I prayed to a God I no longer trusted as I crawled into an ancient corner. God responded with a holy darkness and all was lost as death overtook me.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Funny how by daylight, the madness of night seems so far away. I woke up after noon, pretty well rested, tumbled Rex off the bed and stood up, stretching and groaning. The pain in my ribs wasn’t so bad anymore so I left the horse pills in my bag.

  I was growing accustomed to the weight of the pistol under my arm and studied it under my jacket to see if it was noticeable. It wasn’t, so I moseyed downstairs, pausing along the way to admire the various swords, guns and vases encased behind glass along the way and paintings hanging on the walls — and not the velvet kind either.

  I looked out the window at the end of the hall and saw the park I’d walked through the night before, a few acres of good grass with some tall, old trees drooping around. A stone wall circled the grounds, blocking it from the outside world. Just beyond it, reassuring in an odd way, skyscrapers poked up like jagged mountains.

  I happened upon the old man from the night before and he smiled painfully at the sight of Rex trailing along beside me. “We was wondering if there was any breakfast to be had?”

  “Of course, right this way, sir,” he said, turning to walk slowly down the hall. “I trust you slept well?”

  “Yeah, except for the rodents.”

  “Rodents, sir?”

  “Place is crawling with rats.”

  There was a table set next to the kitchen and a little placemat for Rex on the floor with a handsome silver bowl full of some sort of dog food. We both put away some grub, including a couple of croissants I slipped down to him, and then I figured it was time to look around town.

  The old man, whose name I found out to be Jenkins, led me through the front door and down the winding pathway to the stone wall.

  “You’re not planning on putting me up against the wall and shooting me?”

 
“Nothing quite that drastic, sir. Simply turning you loose on the city, may God help you both.” He reached toward an otherwise blank section of the weathered marble and with a press, a door swung open into the apartment from the night before. “This way.”

  He led us into living room where a large man watched us silently from behind a row of video monitors, a particularly nasty-looking assault rifle in his lap. Jenkins acknowledged him with a nod.

  “This is Mr. Tucker,” Jenkins said. “He has immunity. Allow him egress at his word.” The man nodded and returned to his monitors.

  “And my dog as well,” I added.

  Jenkins pointed at the front door. “On the other side of this door is Bay Street at 126 East 2nd Avenue. Enter through apartment 4E. Will you be back for the evening meal?” he asked.

  “Not sure. But I’ll be back by sundown, count on that.”

  “Sir, I am to remind you of your obligation to bring Miss Vaughan back to us. Julius believes she requires our assistance.”

  “Will I be followed?” I asked as Rex and I walked down the stairs and into the gloom and noise and endless motion of a New York day.

  “I imagine so. One more thing, sir,” Jenkins called, “there is a leash law.” He pulled a leash and matching collar out of his pocket and tossed it down to me.

  “Thanks, Jenkins. I appreciate that, I really do.” We sat down on the curb so I could snuggle the collar around Rex who looked at me like I was committing a cardinal sin. Club Vampire was completely gone. Down the block both ways was nothing but apartments and the mansion was now completely hidden from sight. Neat trick. How many years, I wondered, had this compound existed? Probably since New York was just a little pissant town wishing it was London.

  Despite many mutterings to the contrary, I don’t have anything against big cities. Of course, I don’t have much use for them either. In my limited experience, and that based on Louis L’Amour novels, news reports about violent crime and big city tourists turning Jackson into one big art gallery, New York City is about as big as a city can get before it turns into its own country.

  Sometimes to amuse myself on winter nights, I try to think about what all those people living cheek to cheek think about and what their lives are like. I’ve yet to come up with a clear picture in my head.

  I have a theory that America became the greatest country in the world just by being so damn empty.

  When my ancestors sailed over from England, which must’ve seemed pretty full at the time, and stepped off the boat, they must have said I’ll be damned, look at how many folks ain’t here. Things progressed and cities grew up and some folks decided to keep on moving west looking for open space to stay ahead of civilization. The Native Americans, in the worst case of there goes the neighborhood, ended up on little graveyard-sized pieces of land, while the settlers eventually ran out of room at the west coast. My kinfolks decided to stay in Wyoming where brutal winters and intolerable summers kept out most civilized folks, so having plenty of space was never a problem.

  That’s probably why it never made sense to me how people live all cramped up in tiny apartments looking out at more tiny apartments and breathing in smog while they hurry up and get in a traffic jam on their way to a job they don’t like anyway. Give me sagebrush and clear skies any day of the week. But I guess if everybody thought that way, they’d all move to LonePine and things would be no better off.

  My first order of business was getting coffee and losing the skinny fellow in the cheap suit Julius stuck on to me. I watched him trying hard not to look at me and detoured into a little coffee shop, Rex in tow, and then left out the back door, circled around front and went right back in the front door.

  That seemed to do the trick. I could see him running down the alley looking this way and that.

  There was a big old chalkboard behind the counter with strange names I couldn’t pronounce and prices ranging from too expensive to intolerable. The girl at the cash register had a shaved head and a ring in her nose like the kind we use on headstrong bulls. She smiled and asked what I’d like.

  I said a cup of coffee, black, which seemed pretty straightforward, but she gave me about sixteen different choices, all of which sounded nothing at all like what I normally buy at the supermarket.

  “Just coffee,” I said again. “Whatever tastes like it’s been sitting around the longest.”

  She poured me up a cupful and I reluctantly gave her the two dollars she asked for and I’ll be damned if that coffee didn’t taste exactly like Hazel’s. And they had to fly theirs all the way from Ethiopia.

  Coffee in hand, we walked out onto the sidewalk and were immediately swept up by a crowd of people all mumbling and shoving and walking with their heads down. I just stood in the middle of this human river and wondered how in the hell I was going to find Lizzie.

  Across the way, church bells chimed on the hour, ringing out deep and clear above the crowd, the traffic, the cursing and struggling. I watched a flock of pigeons on wing as if borne up by the message of the bells and the commotion around me dissolved away. It seemed as if a shaft of sunlight touched those birds, lighting up the soft grays and whites, and time stopped for a heartbeat.

  Church bells. The church where her father’s funeral was held. Her sanctuary. Now what the hell was the name of that church she told me about? It was a long shot, but I didn’t have much else to go on.

  There was a phone booth nearby and Rex and me fought our way over to it, but there was no phone book. Nor at the next one nor the next after that. Finally I went back into the coffee shop and asked the girl with no hair if she had a phone book. She pulled out this monstrous old thing the size of a small car but not before she asked me why I didn’t just use the internet or a cell phone.

  “Never had much use for them,” I said, feeling like maybe I had just stepped out of the Paleozoic. She shrugged, and said something about cowboy Luddites.

  I sat down at the window and Rex crawled under the chair, wondering whether maybe alpacas weren’t so bad compared to vampires and New York City. I found churches in the back; there must’ve been ten thousand of them so I got a refill and something called a biscotti, which I think is Italian for really hard, old bread with chocolate on it.

  I dragged my finger down the list hoping to find something familiar: Synagogues, Zen Buddhists, Catholics, Jehovah’s and churches I had never heard of such as Dr. Dingle’s Church of the Blue Light. Toward the bottom of the first page, my finger stopped and my heart skipped a beat. The Church of the Holy Trinity.

  I run back up to the counter and the girl must have thought I was crazy. “How do you get to this church?” I asked, pointing.

  “The cross street up the block is thirteenth so you got to go up to it and take a left and it’s over from there.”

  “Thank you very much,” I said. “By the way, I like that earring in your nose,” I said.

  “Thanks. My girlfriend likes the one in my nipple.” She smiled sweetly and I could feel a blush creeping over me. “Are you a real cowboy?”

  “No,” I said, backing out with Rex. “But I play one on TV.”

  It was quite a walk, but I figured we could use the exercise. Lord Almighty, the characters I seen. There were ratty old women pushing shopping carts full of useless junk talking to themselves, old men sucking bottles of wine in the alleys, nervous-looking young toughs in baggy jeans, and all kinds of handsome women and men in suits, walking real fast, carrying briefcases and talking into their phones, along with some of the tiniest little dogs I’d every seen. And that was just in the first ten minutes.

  An hour later, we arrived at the Church of the Holy Trinity. It was tall and gray and forbidding, with a dozen pointy spires all tipped with crosses and arching windows looking down onto the street.

  The inside was quiet and mostly empty and we took a seat in the back pew. Sunlight was streaming in through the stained glass and in each corner was a bunch of candles. Directly I got up, bidding Rex to stay, and lit one, saying a few
words in my head directed at God concerning Lizzie’s state of health.

  When I got back, Rex had found a tattered piece of something to chew on which turned out to be the remains of a rat.

  I gave him a disappointed look and kicked it under the pew in front of us.

  I sat down and watched people come and go, hoping one of them might be Lizzie, but they weren’t. Like when I was a kid, eventually my ass got tired of sitting on them hard old pews and Rex got kind of fidgety and had to pee, so we went outside. While he was looking for the perfect bush, I stewed in my own disappointment. As he was sniffing around, his butt started twitching like it wished there was a tail to wag and he come dashing over to me, then back to the bush and back to me. He had her scent, I was sure of it.

  There was a sign that read “Catacombs,” and an arrow pointing down. The door was old and rusty, braced over with iron ribs and once padlocked, but the lock hung open. The door opened with a squeak and a groan and musty air rushed out mixed with a familiar scent, all but lost in the mildew. Almost without thought, the Casull was in my hand and cocked. Steeling myself for the worst, I called Rex close and started down the slick stone steps leading away into the darkness below.

  Rex was snuffling loudly, his uncanny canine senses working overtime, and I let him race on ahead and tried to keep up. We got deeper and deeper. Whoever built these tunnels did not believe in electricity because try as I might, I couldn’t find a light, so we just groped and stumbled and cursed our way deeper into the bowels of the church. There was a book of matches in my jacket, probably left over from having Lizzie out, and it filled me with sadness to pull one out and light it up.

  It filled me with even more sadness that my match failed to light up much of anything at all. We stood there, me looking at the feeble circle of light and Rex looking at me. I sighed and petted him. “Think she’s here, boy?” I asked. He sat down and sniffed the air with gentle motions of indecision. The match burned out.