I gave it to him. “To the House of Kralitz! May it never fall!”
And with an exultant shout we drained the pungent dregs of the liquor.
Then a strange lassitude fell upon me. With the others I turned my back on the cavern and the shapes that pranced and bellowed and crawled there, and I went up through the carved stone portal. We filed up the stairs, up and up, endlessly, until at last we emerged through the gaping hole in the stone flags and proceeded, a dark, silent company, back through those interminable corridors. The surroundings began to grow strangely familiar, and suddenly I recognized them.
We were in the great burial vaults below the castle, where the Barons Kralitz were ceremoniously entombed. Each Baron had been placed in his stone casket in his separate chamber, and each chamber lay, like beads on a necklace, adjacent to the next, so that we proceeded from the farthermost tombs of the early Barons Kralitz toward the unoccupied vaults. By immemorial custom, each tomb lay bare, an empty mausoleum, until the time had come for its use, when the great stone coffin, with the memorial inscription carved upon it, would be carried to its place. It was fitting, indeed, for the secret of Kralitz to be hidden here.
Abruptly I realized that I was alone, save for the bearded man with the disfiguring scar. The others had vanished, and, deep in my thoughts, I had not missed them. My companion stretched out his black-swathed arm and halted my progress, and I turned to him questioningly. He said in his sonorous voice, “I must leave you now. I must go back to my own place.” And he pointed to the way whence we had come.
I nodded, for I had already recognized my companions for what they were. I knew that each Baron Kralitz had been laid in his tomb, only to arise as a monstrous thing neither dead nor alive, to descend into the cavern below and take part in the evil saturnalia. I realized, too, that with the approach of dawn they had returned to their stone coffins, to lie in a death-like trance until the setting sun should bring brief liberation. My own occult studies had enabled me to recognize these dreadful manifestations.
I bowed to my companion and would have proceeded on my way to the upper parts of the castle, but he barred my path. He shook his head slowly, his scar hideous in the phosphorescent gloom.
I said, “May I not go yet?”
He stared at me with tortured, smoldering eyes that had looked into hell itself, and he pointed to what lay beside me, and in a flash of nightmare realization I knew the secret of the curse of Kralitz. There came to me the knowledge that made my brain a frightful thing in which shapes of darkness would ever swirl and scream; the dreadful comprehension of when each Baron Kralitz was initiated into the brotherhood of blood. I knew—I knew—that no coffin had ever been placed unoccupied in the tombs, and I read upon the stone sarcophagus at my feet the inscription that made my doom known to me—my own name, “Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz.”
THE FOURTH HORSEMAN, by Peter Darbyshire
I was tossing tumbleweeds into the ravine at the town’s limits when I first saw the preacher gang. Shimmering black shapes far out in the killing heat of the badlands, like a mirage. They were following the old road in, which I thought the world had forgotten. It looked like I was wrong.
By the time I was done getting rid of the tumbleweeds they’d ridden close enough I could see there were three of them. I walked back into town and made myself some dinner in the general store. Canned beans and the last of the beef jerky. After that I played a hand of solitaire and watched the setting sun turn the sky red.
When I went out for another look, they’d come even closer. There was something in the air that said they weren’t just out for a Sunday ride.
I went back inside and set about cleaning my guns. I waited for everyone to wake up.
I was with Catherine at the rooming house when they rode into town just after nightfall. We’d started the evening like usual, with her reading to me from one of her books, a story about three women living together in an old house. I’d drifted off in one of the chairs. I dreamed that I was riding out of town on Apache, my horse that I’d shot outside of the chapel before he starved to death. He was alive again, bones covered with strong flesh once more, and pulling against the reins. He wanted to run. On the road out, we passed a slow-moving train carving a track through the hard dirt, toward the town. The whole thing was on fire, flames bursting out of the steel and iron. I knew it would set the dry wood of the town’s buildings alight like so much kindling, and so I tried to turn around, but Apache wouldn’t let me. He took us forward, across the iron rails and wooden ties left by the train, and out into the badlands.
I woke when Catherine suddenly shushed and looked to the window. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and then got up from the chair and pulled back the lace curtains. The street outside was empty except for the light and music spilling into it from the saloon, but I grabbed my gun belt from the chair anyway. Catherine’s senses were better than mine since she’d changed.
I had to wait only a minute before they came out of the darkness at the end of the street. Two men and a woman. She was as hard-looking as them. Pale faces and hands floating in the night, clothes all black except for white collars.
“We’ve got visitors,” I said, and I was shamed to notice my voice caught in my throat. I buckled on my guns.
Catherine came to the window and looked out. “Maybe they’re just passing through,” she said. “Let the others handle them.”
“What are the odds of anyone passing through here?” I said and put on my hat. Catherine looked at my badge, then turned her gaze to the window again.
Outside, the preachers stopped in front of the saloon and sat on their horses a while longer, looking around. Dead tired. It was a long ride to get here from anywhere. One of them noticed us in the window and said something to the others. All three looked at us for a second. Then they dismounted and talked for a bit.
The biggest of the men seemed to be giving directions. The smaller man went inside the saloon. The others split up and went down opposite ends of the street. As if they were scouting the town. Which was exactly what they were doing.
“Stay here,” I said to Catherine as I headed for the door.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
The street was empty again by the time I walked outside. Just old Lester, the town drunk, already half passed out in the doorway of the barber shop, empty bottle in his hand. He was humming an old hymn, which was unusual, because he hardly ever made a noise.
And then there were the horses. They rolled their eyes a little when I walked up to the hitching post, and we looked at each other for a moment. They were scrawny, with ribs showing, and bent in the middle. Old pack horses which should have been put to pasture years ago. A rifle and near-empty saddlebag on each.
I thought about Apache again. Then I forced the thought out of my mind and stepped into the saloon.
Nothing inside moved except the keys on the player piano. The stranger leaned against the bar, a bottle and a shot glass in front of him. He stared into the mirror. Our two reflections were the only ones there. His expression said he knew there was something not right about that.
The crowd of vamps that filled the rest of the room watched him closely from their tables and booths, drinks and poker cards forgotten in their hands. Like they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
His eyes met mine, settled on my badge for a second, and then he turned around. He couldn’t have been any older than twenty, but his face and hands were all pocked with the marks of some disease. He wore the black shirt of a priest, but his duster was pulled back to reveal the gun on his hip.
“Well,” he said in a rustling voice, “I’m most thankful to see you, sheriff.” He waved his hand at the rest of the room. “I see that your town is suffering from an infestation of that which has no place in God’s world. Perhaps you could help me attend to the problem.”
I walked up to the bar and Kitty came over to pour me a bourbon.
“If I were you,” I said, “I’d be
careful about how I talked about the residents of this town. I don’t want anybody starting any trouble.”
Up close, I could see the beads of sweat on his lips. But he didn’t back down.
He glanced past Kitty at my reflection, as if checking to see it was still there, then turned to the room again and said in a flat voice, “Perhaps you ain’t noticed yet, sheriff, but these here residents are God-damned vampires.”
“You’ve got nothing to fear if you keep to yourself,” I said. “They drink each other’s blood, not ours.”
His eyes darted to the bottle beside him, then back to me.
“There ain’t no point in tempting fate, though,” I told him. “I suggest you and your friends leave now, while you still can.”
Keeping his eyes fixed on me, he leaned close until I could smell the whiskey on his breath and the sweat in his clothes. Because the vamps don’t sweat, it had been years since I smelled that from another person, and it hit me like some sort of rare spice.
“We’ve been riding close to a week now,” he said. “Ever since we talked to the owner of a general store in Dead Gulch. You might know him. He said he runs supplies in here a couple times a year. Always in the day.”
I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say to that.
“He said he’d sooner spend a season in Hell than stay here for a night, let alone live here,” he went on. “That made us curious, so we looked at some maps. And guess what?”
“You only get one warning around here,” I said. “And you’ve had yours.”
He poured himself another drink and smiled at me. “This here town shows up on the old maps, but not the new ones,” he said. “Like it just faded away with time. We figured maybe we’d be riding into some sort of ghost town.”
“Why’d you come here then?” I asked.
Slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, he reached into a pocket of his duster and pulled out a worn bible.
“Where there’s a dead town,” he said, licking his cracked lips, “there are always souls to be saved.”
He stepped away from the bar then, into the middle of the room, and held the bible over his head.
“Friends and abominations,” he said, his voice rising into a wheezing groan, “allow me to introduce myself. I am your salvation.”
Nobody said anything. The vamps’ eyes were all on the bible. No one smiled now. The piano ran down into silence.
“God has given me the name of Pestilence,” the stranger went on, “because I too have been diseased. Not like you, but diseased nonetheless. And it was only the good book here that saved me. When I held it in my hands for the first time, and read its pages, I felt the angry hand of the Lord move through me and force me into the path I now ride. He has led me here today, which can only mean that he’s decided the time has come for you.”
He turned in a circle so everyone could see the bible. “Which of you will let me be your saviour?” he said. “Which of you will accept everlasting salvation and live forever in God’s good grace?”
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, mister,” Kitty said, “but we’re already living forever in your god’s grace, for whatever good it’s done us. And we’ve managed to get along fine without you so far. Besides which, what you’re holding there is our destruction, not our salvation.” There were more than a few murmurs of agreement from the others.
Pestilence turned to her. His lips curled up a little, maybe into a smile. “Well,” he said, “the good book does preach that destiny is a matter of personal choice.”
He came back to the bar and helped himself to another shot. Then, with a little shrug at me, he went for his gun.
He was quick, or I was slower with age, and he managed to get off a shot before I pulled my own trigger. The mirror behind the counter came crashing down and Kitty swore. Metal noise and smoke filled the air. My bullet blew through his bible and into his chest. Knocked a dust cloud out of him. He jerked back a couple of feet. I could see him through the hole in his book. One of the pages slipped out and fluttered to the floor. He just stared at me and refused to fall, despite the spreading stain in his shirt.
“Damn,” he breathed. “I thought you were one of us.”
“I ain’t nothing but the law,” I said. “And nobody comes into my town shooting. Not as long as my fiancee is one of these God-damned vampires.”
His gun hand twitched at that, so I shot him again. He went down this time, into an empty chair.
“God,” he croaked and looked real puzzled. Then his head fell back until he was facing the empty ceiling. You could have mistaken him for a drunk.
I turned back to the bar. The mirror lay in shards on the floor, and Kitty was examining a cut on her arm.
“He wing you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Glass,” she said. She licked up the blood that oozed out.
“I could use some coffee,” I said as I reloaded my revolver. “I think it’s going to be a long night.”
I went to the door and had look up and down the street. The horses had caught the scent of blood and were stamping their feet a little. I didn’t blame them for acting up. Pestilence’s fellow riders were nowhere to be seen. But I knew it’d only be a matter of time before the boy’s friends came to investigate the shots.
Behind me came the sounds of chairs being pushed away from tables, and then boots walking across the floor.
“That boy is plagued,” I said by way of warning, but didn’t look back.
“It’s all right, sheriff,” Kitty said. “That ain’t one of the things that can kill us.”
I waited until they’d dragged the body into the back room and closed the door before I turned around. I was the only person left in the saloon. There was a coffee waiting for me on the counter. I tried to ignore the sounds from the other room as I went over to it.
Catherine came in just as I was finishing the last of the cup. I’d moved to one of the tables against the wall, where I could see the horses and part of the street. A couple of the vamps had wandered back out from the other room and were standing there, swaying, with glazed eyes. Catherine looked at them, at the blood on the floor, at the gun on my table. She sat down across from me.
“Preacher men,” I said. “Come here to save us.”
“There weren’t many shots,” she said.
I nodded. “I only got the first. The others are still out there.”
She looked to the door, and her lips slowly pulled back until her fangs showed. I didn’t think she knew she was doing it.
“Let us take care of them,” she said.
I put my hand over hers. The engagement ring was warm on her finger, like she’d been toying with it.
“Do you want to be like them?” I asked.
She looked at me again, lips settling back into place, and I could tell she knew what I meant. Those first vampires who had started it all. A couple just like any other, taking a stopover on their way to Dead Gulch. Him dressed up as a businessman, her as his wife. I never would have caught on to what they were doing if I hadn’t paid Catherine a visit after she missed Sunday service. The middle of the day and there she was still lying in bed. Two little marks on her wrist. Snake bite, I’d thought, until she sat up that night and said, “Don’t let them take me.”
By the time I shot them down in the street, those vampires had infected half the town and the rest of the townsfolk had cleared out into the badlands and who knows where. I was the only one who stayed. I was the only one who kept this town hanging on to the human world.
“I’d better have a look around,” I told Catherine and stood up. Just then the face of the big man from the preacher gang appeared over the doors, his eyes like black rocks. He took in the vamps, the blood on the floor, and then me.
We unloaded our guns at the same time. Smoke filled the air between us. Glass broke all around. He vanished to the side and I put a couple bullets through the wall, then ducked behind a table. The other vamps were still swaying. Cath
erine was on her feet, snarling. Nobody’d been hit. Maybe the preachers had brought some miracles with them.
“Pestilence?” a deep voice called from outside.
“Your friend is dead,” I said. “An act of lawful self-defense. If I were you, I’d be leaving before you meet the same fate.”
“We can’t do that, sheriff,” the man said. “We’re on a mission here.”
“What kind of mission?” I asked.
“We’re scouring the land, making it clean for the Lord,” he said. His voice kept moving, so I couldn’t get a fix on it.
“I think this land has been scoured enough,” I said.
“We’re living in Judgement Day,” he went on. “Haven’t you seen the signs? Metal ships floating on water, men flying like birds just a week’s ride from here. Medicine to cure all our ailments. And trains crossing this land everywhere, bringing the good word of the Bible and peace to all. We’re already living in this earthly paradise. All we need to do now is purge it of the unholy and immoral.”
“You sure do talk a lot,” I said.
“You can ride with us in this righteous mission, sheriff,” he said. “Just say the word and we’ll cleanse this town together.”
Earthly paradise. I’d been out there in that paradise for two years after the town changed, and it had almost killed me. Nobody wanted to hire a sheriff from a forgotten town, and all the horse jobs had died off, so the only work I could find had been laying railroad track. No home but the railway camp, barely enough money to buy food, and my thoughts dwelling on Catherine back here, lying alone and unprotected during the day. It had been enough to drive me to drink for the better part of a year. I’d only snapped out of it when somebody offered to trade me a bottle of whiskey for Apache, and I’d found myself seriously considering it. After that, I pinned my badge back on and rode home, sobering up on the way. The townsfolk had accepted me back without a word and handed over all their money so I could keep the supply wagon coming.
“I’ve seen your paradise,” I said. “There ain’t no place in it for me.”
The Vampire Megapack Page 26