by Cullen Bunn
“Make sure you come back alive,” she said.
* * *
Hardly a word passed between Jack and me as we made our way through the hills, this time heading to the Whatley place to kill a master vampire.
“If I turn,” Jack said, “you kill me.”
“That ain’t gonna happen.”
“If it does, though, you kill me. I’d sure as hell do the same to you.”
“All right, but it ain’t happening, because we’re gonna kill the master.”
An uncomfortable notion nagged at the back of my mind. “Those people back in town,” I said. “Maybe we didn’t do right by them.”
“How do you figure?”
“If we kill the Master, they wouldn’t turn, at least that’s what we’re hoping, but we drove stakes into every one we found. We—”
“They were already dead. If we kill the Master—and that’s a pretty big if—all we’ve done is drive a few wooden posts into corpses. There’s no coming back from the dead, unless it’s as one of those things.”
Jack shielded his eyes from the glare of the rising sun.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I think so. Just burns is all. We need to hurry.”
I looked at him.
He wiggled the fingers of his broken hand at me.
* * *
A collection of sagging, rotting shacks, barns, and chicken coops made up the Whately farm. The chicken coop doors stood open, some hanging loose on the hinges, and tufts of feathers littered the rocky path. The feathers danced in a light breeze that carried the stink of chicken shit. Looked like a coyote had a heyday in the coop. A whole pack of coyotes. I spotted the ripped remains of chickens in the weeds. The carcasses looked like they might have been there for thirty years. They were withered. Dry. Drained of blood. The hogs, too, were withered husks, grey and brittle, eyes sunken, sprawled in the pig pen. Not a drop of blood pooled in the stinking mud and shit.
The farm reeked of the all too familiar rotted meat stink, but there was another smell, too, something like sulphur, lingering in the air.
Under the protection of the sunlight, we tromped through the grounds without fear of a vampire attack. We knew, though, as soon as we entered one of the shuttered houses, we’d be in danger, possibly from every vampire in the county, and there was no telling how many that might be.
We rounded a corner and heard a furtive movement, a weak moaning.
Curled up like a dying spider, an old man squatted next to a weed-choked woodpile. With his arms wrapped around his knees, he shivered, rocked back and forth slightly, and sobbed, his head hung low. He flinched, but did not look up, as we approached.
“Who’s there?” he asked, his voice low as if he both wanted an answer and was afraid someone might hear. “Who’s there?”
I recognized his grizzled, raspy voice.
Ezekiel Whately.
“It’s R.F. Coven and Jack Sutherland, Mr. Whately,” I answered.
“What are you boys doing here?” he asked. His head quivered from side to side, but he did not look up. “You shouldn’t be here. Bad things are about.”
“We know, sir.”
“You seen them?” He moaned—a defeated sound.
“Are you all right, Mr. Whately? Are you hurt?”
I smelled the stink of burning coal and brimstone.
Now I noticed dried blood upon his hands, tracing the outline of his wrinkled skin, staining his fingers brownish red.
“Mr. Whately?”
He raised his head.
Where his eyes should have been, only gaping holes remained. Blackened tissue puffed along the interior of the sockets, and oozing blisters clustered upon the surrounding skin. Tears of dirt, blood, and puss snaked down Ezekiel’s cheeks.
Someone had taken a hot poker to his eyes, I thought.
“Who did this?” I asked.
“He was so bright.” His voice hitched. “So terrible to look upon. But I couldn’t turn my eyes away.”
His fingertips lightly touched the seared flesh, and he flinched and snapped his hand away. The corners of his mouth spasmed, but instead of sobbing again, he told us how his family sought to bring their long feud with the Stubbs to an end, and how they damned themselves in the process.
“We shouldn’t have called up what could not be put down,” he said. “We conjured the devil. Called him up to help us end our feud once and for all.”
I thought about the bluejays Cecil mentioned. If the devil had been called up in Spider Creek, they would have had no reason to make their Friday trip to Hell. Dead frogs coming back to life, the blood moon—all side effects of whatever witchcraft had been used to summon the devil.
“We asked him to give us a weapon,” the old man said, “something we could use against them. He … he promised to give us a weapon. He gave us—”
The Master, I thought.
“A thing straight out of hell,” the old man whispered. “One of his brood crawled up from a festering hole in the ground.”
A dracula.
“What did you do?” Jack asked.
“We should have known better, because his words were soaked in just enough honey to cover the taste of the poison. I never wanted them to take my own family, to make them like—”
“You old bastard!” Jack reached down with both hands and hoisted Ezekiel off the ground like a rag doll. “You know what you’ve done? You know how many people died?”
The old man trembled. He brought his gnarled hands to the ruins of his eyes.
“The whole town!” Jack spat, shaking the wizened sorcerer. I heard the old man’s bones snapping with each shake. “All of them dead, because of you!”
I grabbed Jack’s shoulder. “Let him go. He’s done for already. No use in killing him now.”
Big Jack looked to be on the verge of tears, his eyes ringed with red as he stared into the eyeless face of the man who had called a vampire into our world. The large man’s hands flexed at the sorcerer’s scrawny neck, and if he wanted to, he could have ripped him in half. Instead, he dropped him into a squirming, sobbing pile in the dirt.
I leaned next to him, and he coughed up a glob of blood and spit.
“Ezekiel,” I said, “we come to kill that thing. Where is it?”
His crooked finger wavered in the direction of a pair of bulkhead storm cellar doors.
“That’s it then,” I told Jack. “That’s where we’ll find him.”
“Time’s a wasting.”
As we turned away, Ezekiel said, “It’ll take more to kill it than it does the others.” He collapsed into a wet hacking fit, then rasped, “Drive a stake through his heart, but you’ll have to take off his head, too.”
He started coughing again, each whoop racking his spindly body more forcefully than even Jack’s manhandling. We walked towards the storm cellar and threw open the doors. A smell like roadkill rotting in the sun rose from below. Just then, I realized the old man had stopped coughing. I looked back, and saw him laying on his side, dead like the rest of his family, but staring after us with those hollow eyes.
We set fire to each and every one of the houses. The desiccated wood went up like paper. Screams came from inside. When the barn went up, a pair of figures broke out, and as soon as the sunlight touched them, they exploded in a cloud of green smoke.
Took less than a half hour, but we were covered in sweat, and Jack looked as pale as could be.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Don’t feel good, but I’ll be fine as soon as we finish this.”
All that remained was the Master.
Throwing open the storm cellar doors, we leaned down and peered into the shadows.
“How do you reckon we’re gonna get him out of there?” Jack asked.
“Think he’d come out if we asked nicely?”
“Why don’t you stick your hand down there and wiggle your fingers?”
“Not hardly.” I knew some old boys who fished for catfish by sti
cking their hands beneath rocks and using their fingers for bait. When a catfish nipped them, they grabbed a hold and yanked the fish out of the water. I thought they were about crazy as Hell for trying something like that with a fish, let alone a vampire. “Guess we’ll have to go down and get him.”
“You go first,” Jack said.
We descended into the cellar.
* * *
The storm cellar was damp and dark. A single, catawampus wooden support beam kept the whole place from collapsing. Like stored food reserves, several people lay in the dirt—people I recognized, even—
“Cordelia!” Jack cried.
The pretty young woman and her mother lay in the dirt. They must not have made it out of town after all. Cordelia at least didn’t seem to be injured. Despite the surroundings, she appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
“She looks all right,” I said. “Leave her be and lets find the Master.”
Spiders by the hundreds crawled around the chamber. They scurried around our feet, but did not approach.
“Why aren’t they attacking us?” I asked, but Jack didn’t say a word.
The spindly, desiccated thing came into view. It nested in a tangle of roots along one of the dirt walls. His face was vaguely human, but sunken and twisted into something demonic. A couple of bodies, dry as termite-eaten wood, lay at his feet.
So this is the bastard who’s been causing all the trouble, I thought. Doesn’t look like much to me.
The master raised his head, bared his wickedly curved fangs, and hissed. In the darkness, his bulging eyes gleamed like miniature blood-colored moons. Flecks of rusty brown freckled his face, and a curdled beard of thick gore clung to his lower lip and chin, dribbling down to his breastbone and chest.
My fingers tightened around the stake. My nails dug half-moon gashes in my palms.
A fine rain of dust trickled from the ceiling and stirred in the air between me and the monster in a ghost-like veil.
My muscles coiled like wire. Tension rushed up from my toes, through my legs, my stomach, and my arms. My jaw clenched so tight I thought my teeth might snap at the gumline.
“Hold him down, Jack,” I said.
Jack—
A dry cackle from the master set the hairs at the nap of my neck on end. I was suddenly aware that Jack no longer stood by my side. Stepping back as my confidence drizzled away, I looked for my friend.
I somehow knew where I’d find him.
Big Jack—my best friend since childhood, the strongest and toughest man in the county, the man who had knocked Old Samson flat with a single punch—crouched over Coredelia’s unconscious form. He scooped her into his arms and held her close. His fingers flexed, kneading at her like the paws of kitten nursing at the teat.
The slurping noises were the worst.
Cordelia’s body sagged, her head lolling back to reveal the ragged wound at her throat, blood still pumping in slowing spurts. Jack’s baleful eyes met my own as he dropped his victim and rose to his full height. His head almost brushed the ceiling, and I reckoned he could have brought the whole place down around us if he set his mind to it.
“Aw, shit.”
Jack slammed into me with the full force of a runaway locomotive. My feet left the ground and the wind blasted out of my lungs in a grunt. My back smashed into the single support beam, and I heard either the wood or my spine give way with a splintering crack. I hit the ground with Jack pressing down on top of me.
The large man let out a long, weary groan, and his muscles went slack. A rotten egg smell assaulted my senses.
When he charged, my friend impaled himself on the stake I had intented to drive into the heart of the master. The wooden point ruptured his heart, and Big Jack was no more.
I like to think he threw himself on the stake on purpose.
Pain overwhelmed me then, and I slipped into unconsciousness.
* * *
Sometime later, I awoke, thinking Big Jack could damnsure hit hard when he wanted to. A shame he passed on his wrestling career. I lay with my eyes closed, half dreaming of being in my bed, sleeping off a Cold Creek hangover and mentally counting my winnings from the poker game. In another hour or so, I’d drag my sorry butt out of bed and slog through the day. Maybe later I’d ask Sue to go out to a honky-tonk with me and light up the dance floor and—
I remembered where exactly I was. My senses sharpened, focused on the smell of dirt and blood; the ache of my bruised ribs and back; and the angry pain at my throat.
My throat.
I almost brought my hand up to check the wound I knew must surely be there. I scrambled to my feet, trying to calculate how long I’d been out, looking around for any sign of the master.
I felt his will pushing into my mind, digging in like a tick. For several horrifying seconds, I wanted what he wanted. My thoughts weren’t my own, and I longed for endless darkness, endless suffering, and endless rivers of blood.
He was in my head!
Hammering in my chest, my heart sounded like a tribal drum. My blood thundered like whitewater rapids.
I was still alive. I was not a—
A dracula.
My eyes strayed to Jack’s body.
I might have a chance, but only if I killed the master before I changed.
I grinned, but it more likely looked like a snarl.
I spotted the master, nesting again in the roots and runners and dirt of the cellar wall. His sunken eyes were closed. His arms were crossed over his chest, protecting his heart.
Weak daylight still trickled in from the bulkhead doors. The ceiling seemed to sag and creak, and the rain of dust was steady. Pieces of the support beam lay scattered about the floor.
I stepped over Big Jack’s body and grabbed a two-foot shard of the beam.
I approached the master, and he did not stir.
His thoughts invaded my mind.
I raised the stake, and he did not stir.
The psychic seed tick of his will suckled at the core of my being, and I fought with all my might to remain in control. I was not a vampire, not yet, and if I killed this bastard I could be myself again.
I rammed the weapon into his chest, cutting through his crossed wrists, pinning them in place, into his heart, and out of his back and into the dirt wall behind him.
He woke, screeching.
He threw himself at me, but the stake held him in place. He kicked, and his arms trembled, but he could not free himself to scratch at me.
I pulled out my pocket knife and flicked out the blade.
Mental commands battered at my brain, but I blocked them out. I thought of the look on Cecil’s face as he died. I thought of Jack drinking the blood of the woman he loved. The master insinuated his will upon me, but all I felt was rage.
Grabbing him by the hair, I pushed his head back against the wall.
He screeched “Rhee! Rhee! Rhee!” but no one was left to listen, except me, and I honestly didn’t give a shit.
Suddenly, a tarantula jumped onto my hand and sunk its hangs into the meat between my thumb and forefinger. Another jumped onto me. A third. Another landed on the back of my neck and scurried under my sweaty shirt collar. I ignored the pain from the bites.
I stabbed the knife into the side of his neck and started to cut. The vampire thrashed his head left to right, his eyes filled with anger and terror, his teeth snapping fruitlessly as I sawed. My knuckles brushed against dead, flaking skin. The blade rasped against bone, and I leaned into the cut, tearing through his neck.
He sensed his fate and stopped struggling. His face fell slack, and he said, “But you belong to me,” or some such shit.
“Ifs and buts, asshole. Ifs and buts.”
I ripped his head from his body. I felt his soul, like an ice-cold wind racing through the chambers of my heart, as his soul fell back to Hell. I touched Hell, I think, in that moment, and it was one of the most chilling things I have ever experienced, because I felt something greater, more terrible than even the Maste
r, watching me. Instantly, the Master started turning to dust. His skin shriveled down to his bones, his bones deteriorating like termite-eaten wood. Green vapor billowed from the cancerous holes opening in his flesh.
I watched, then drew in a deep breath, despite the rancid decay clinging to the air.
Over.
But I felt no different.
I hung my head and laughed. Movies can’t be right about everything, I reckon.
The spiders, free of his control, scurried away.
The ceiling groaned. I looked up and saw the timber start to come apart, the stress of the missing support post finally too much for the sagging floor to bear.
I didn’t even have time for an “oh, shit,” before the ceiling crashed down upon me like fifteen tons of pain.
* * *
So that’s my story, true as I know how to tell it.
I feel right awful about what happened to Cecil and Jack. They deserved better. They were my best friends, and I’m proud to have been there with them when the fires of Hell roasted the backs of our necks. Of course, it goes without saying I’m glad Sue made it out alive. I only hope she’s able to go on with her life and achieve her dreams … if she can forget the nightmares she saw in Spider Creek.
Ifs and buts, my friend, ifs and buts.
As for me, my job wasn’t finished when the building collapsed in a flaming heap upon me and the Master. As the darkness and the dust and the smoke plumed around me and the ceiling crashed down in a wash of heat and pain, I thought for sure my life had come to its end. But even the crushing weight of the timber did not kill me. I awoke sometime later, waves of pain lapping at me as if I lay with my feet submerged in an ocean of agony. My legs and lower back were shattered and twisted, but I still drew breath, and my heart still beat.