Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  When the liquid hit, Cooper stared down at himself for probably fifteen seconds before the gin bottle crashed to the floor…

  And then he screamed.

  It hadn’t hurt before…the wound. It hadn’t hurt when he’d gotten it, explored it, probed it, and disinfected it with straight alcohol out of the sheriff’s first-aid kit. It hadn’t hurt at all…until Conway dumped whatever was in that jar on it, and then it did hurt…Christ Almighty!

  It HURT!

  “What was that?” he cried, doubling over and clutching his arms over himself without actually touching his—Christ!—his steaming flesh. Sprayed out across his abdomen in a repulsive flower pattern were countless rivulets of burning skin, blackened and bubbling, sending tiny wisps of vapor up in nauseating, smelly tendrils until he thought just the stench alone would drive him mad. Where the liquid ran down his legs he could feel the flesh there burning. And on his crotch. Everywhere it touched burned like…

  “Acid!” he hissed.

  “Wolfsbane tea,” the sheriff corrected, turning back to the group and adding, “Did ya’ll see it?”

  “Wolfsbane?” Cooper’s mind pronounced giddily as in an act of remarkable self-control he forced himself to ignore the pain for a moment, looked at his body as objectively as possible, and noticed for the first time that, remarkably, his skin was the only thing reacting to the “tea” Conway had hurled his way. His pants, the floor, the bench, everything else it touched, all simply got wet. Only he was burned, only he was marked, only he screamed at the wolfsbane kiss.

  In amazement he looked up and felt suddenly low, base, repugnant. In his mind was an image of himself as he must have appeared at that instant, and it was ugly.

  “Better?” Conway asked.

  Cooper nodded, dumbly.

  “It’ll ache for a while, but not long. There’ll be some scars, but the holes’ll close so they won’t bleed no more. You ain’t outta the woods yet, but it’s the best we could do for now.”

  “Thank you,” Cooper whispered, returning his attention to his stomach and sitting down.

  As the sheriff had predicted, the splashed tea had created a star-shaped mass of scar tissue that glowed a livid and angry pink. But the holes, the teeth marks, were closed.

  “Why?” he mouthed, almost inaudibly.

  “You stepped out of the magic circle left foot first,” came the sheriff’s response.

  Cooper looked back at him, dumbfounded…

  Wolfsbane?

  Magic circle?

  Silently his lips moved, but for the life of him, he couldn’t decide what words he was trying to say.

  “It’s happened!” the sheriff suddenly proclaimed in a voice apparently intended for someone sleeping in a building across the street. He turned and confronted the men before him—who were all on their feet, leaning forward to study Cooper’s scars. “But you already knew that, or you wouldn’t have come when I called you. Now, listen…there’s a Norris in town.”

  It was as if the sheriff had announced the nuking of the White House. Every eye in the place looked at Cooper, then at the bloody sheet covering Emil’s body, and finally at the weirdly bent jail cell bars, twisted inward and broken by something that must have been incredibly strong.

  Before anyone could speak, the sheriff continued.

  “We all knew something was up soon’s we saw them Indian Diggers. Especially that Mr. Green.”

  “Green?” Cooper whispered, snapping his attention up to the sheriff’s face.

  Conway met his look with an expression of quiet sympathy.

  “We all knew something was up,” he continued. “But how were we supposed to guess what it was? If it wasn’t for Mr. Cooper, here, we probably still wouldn’t know. Even with the ‘witness.’ Mr. Cooper brought this”—he lifted a black notebook for everyone to see—“and it explains a lot about Woodie Norris. It seems that the boy went and got himself involved with a pretty unusual group up north…but that’s our Woodie; that’s the way he is. Turns out Mr. Cooper’s a friend of his, and as a favor, Woodie asked him to use his police connections to do a little studying on our Valley. What he found out is all in this notebook. To anybody else it’d probably just be a bunch of numbers: statistics showin’ how, in the year 1884, there was a sudden increase in the number of people attacked by wild animals ‘round the county. And how that number grew, year after year, ‘till folks started sayin’ how there was something wrong with Harpersville; that the woods down here were bad, and dangerous.

  “To a stranger, that’s all Mr. Cooper’s statistics would explain. But we ain’t strangers. And we already know ‘bout them killings. We already know what folks thought about ‘em, and what they think about ‘em now. We know that those who could, moved far away from here, while the others, who had relatives in Europe, spent all their money bringing those relatives over right before the First World War ‘cause they didn’t have no other choice but to do it that way. We know how, when those newcomers arrived, one of the first things they did was to start into tellin’ stories about the old country; stories full of werewolves, and weird little towns on the edge of the Black Forest with names like Vultenhallen and Bachrect—names that made certain, really old-timers go pale, and that they started associating with Harpersville almost soon’s they got here. With Harpersville and a certain immigrant family named Nurrenvelt that came over in 1884: a husband who made shoes, and a wife who made one baby before she died of infection from a wildcat bite.”

  He dropped the folder and it made a harsh pop as its plastic covers slapped his desk.

  “The Nurrenvelt family had a reputation in Europe,” he continued more softly, scanning the mute group with his eyes. “Maybe what’s why the old man Americanized his name to ‘Norris’ almost as soon as he got here. But as folks arrived fresh off the boat, they brought the family’s reputation with ‘em so that soon, Mr. Norris was known as Herr Nurrenvelt again, right up to the time he died, in 1921: a seventy-seven-year-old widower who most folks wouldn’t so much as speak to for fear of…well, of something awful that he had carried over the Atlantic with him like a disease. He left a son named Matthew, and because of who he was, that son had to move outta town for three years before he could find himself a wife.

  “‘Ya know what Mr. Cooper’s statistics show about the years 1927 to 1930, when Matthew Norris was out girl shoppin’?”

  The group’s answer was an uneasy stillness.

  “They say that nobody died in the woods during that entire time.”

  The group made no response.

  “Matthew Norris came back in 1931, his pregnant wife in tow, and the killin’s not far behind. The next year, 1932, he had a son, who some of us older folks knew as Robert. And two years after that, in 1934, he died. It was funny how it happened. Had something to do with moonshine liquor and a couple of boys from the hills. I’ve seen the sheriff’s report on that particular disappearance, and it don’t strike me that anybody tried very hard to find out how old Matthew met his end. For all we know, he just went up into the woods one day and never came back. His body weren’t never found.

  “But for the next fourteen years, till his son, Robert Norris, was sixteen years old, the woods slept again, and almost nobody died.”

  The sheriff pushed a lock of short blond hair from his forehead nervously, and pulled himself up to his fullest height, which wasn’t very imposing by itself, but that, right that second, with everyone’s attention focused on him as it was, seemed to make him about ten feet tall.

  “Ya see what I’m gettin’ at here?” he asked rhetorically, as he raised a finger for emphasis. “Every time there’s been an adult male Norris living in town, there’ve been killing in the woods. Every time they leave, or they ain’t grown to at least sixteen years, the killings stop.

  “Robert Norris had two boys, which is the other thing: looks like there ain’t been nothing but boys in that family for at least three generations, and for all we know, even more. Anyway, Robert Norris was killed
in a car accident in 1963, and I remember the night it happened ‘cause I was a deputy on the scene. Was a horrible thing, let me tell ya. Me and him was roughly the same age, so it was really hard. I knew his wife, I knew him a little too. Small town. He hit a truck head-on, and it was hard on me. Coulda been worse, though, I suppose, ‘cause his son was ridin’ in the passenger’s seat. Fuckin’ three o’clock in the morning and he had his kid with him, out ridin’ around, drunk as hell. Coulda been worse, but it was a miracle—least that’s what we said at the time. It was a miracle ‘cause the boy lived.

  After the accident, his mother, who was a real pretty thing, ended up marrying one of the doctors that took care of the boy while he was gettin’ over the crash. The whole family up and moved down to Mist County not long after that, and since then, the Valley’s been asleep again.”

  “‘Till now,” a voice from near the back of the group cut in.

  And the sheriff nodded glumly.

  “‘Till now,” he concurred. “They say the Nurrenvelt family’s been a line of bad blood forever. They say they’re Vyrmin…”

  He paused, as if expecting some outcry at the mention of the word. When none came, he nodded.

  “They say they’re Vyrmin of the worst kind…and have been since the beginning. They say that of all the original Vyrmin families with bloodlines stretchin’ back to the very start of time, or so it goes, the Nurrenvelt clan, from the heart of the Black Forest, was always the worst—always the most loved by the Man in the Woods. Just havin’ a Nurrenvelt around is supposed to make the magic work and bring the evil out in others. That’s why the old man came to this country in the first place: he was runnin’ for his life. He had to find a place where nobody knew what he was and what he could do. When he came, his presence brought the wilderness out in the animals around where he lived, and in the people around him too.

  “And now they’re back! Woodie Norris brought it back! Emil said so. He was the witness, and he said, ‘The Blood Prince comes, and tomorrow the moon is full!’”

  It was at the instant of this proclamation that the jailhouse door burst open, and a snow-covered man stumbled in, eyebrows frosted to twice their normal size, and face flushed a deep vibrant red.

  “Gone!” he half shouted, hanging on the door as snow whipped around him in wicked licks of frigid wind. “The whole bunch! Gone! Their rooms…oh God! Straw on the floor, and shit smeared on the walls and…oh God! Like animals. And the smell…”

  Cooper had had enough: the story, the legends, the twisting of his statistics, the meaningless mumbo jumbo that these hicks had been reading into what he thought of as his case—it was enough. It was too much!

  “Who?” he demanded, rising unsteadily to his feet and feeling the thick layers of new scar tighten on his stomach as he straightened his spine. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  Conway turned, looked him in the eye, and said, “Mr. Green’s Indian Diggers have left the house they’ve been renting. It looks like now that Woodie’s here they’re gonna do whatever they came to do. God help us.”

  Cooper blinked.

  The group tensed as one, studying the sheriff’s face.

  The telephone rang.

  And events slipped inexorably out of control.

  11.

  “I’m not even supposed to be here this late, that’s the real bitch of it,” Luther thought as he crouched beneath the window and inched just the very top of his head over the sill. In his right hand he held a hammer, and in his left, the telephone receiver. He’d just called the sheriff because, Goddamn! and Jesus Christ! there were fucking, honest-and-for-true, in-the-flesh grave robbers running around his cemetery. And that shit was too much!

  The phone rang twice before Sheriff Conway picked it up. When he did, Luther Van Dussen whispered out a hoarse and indignant call for help, describing how, from where he was kneeling, he could see the forms of what had to be ten or fifteen people gliding between the tombstones behind his caretaker’s shack. They were carrying lanterns that seemed to be muted with some kind of shading arrangement so that their light was thrown directly down at the ground. They were all carrying shovels. And they were obviously looking for one particular grave.

  “Indian Diggers!” he barked, his mouth close to the receiver. “There’s strangers in my graveyard!”

  And I’m not even supposed to be here this late, that’s the bitch of it! he added mentally.

  He’d been home when the snow started falling, and strangely, a terrible premonition of something being amiss with his cemetery had compelled him to take a walk back and have a look around. Luther lived about a mile down the road from the “Holy Ghost Garden of Peace.” And he thought of the cemetery as his own, personal possession, even though he was only the sexton—a job that paid about nine thousand dollars a year, and that mostly required him to cut a little grass, dig a hole with the sputtering old backhoe every once in a while, and just generally hang around.

  Good duty, if you could get it.

  His wife worked at the Laundromat, so—at least by his modest standards—there was always plenty of money. And Luther, who wasn’t known as a powder keg of ambition, didn’t have anybody looking over his shoulder all day—a situation he’d found particularly disturbing when he had tried his hand as a clerk at the hardware store out of high school. He was just twenty years old, and already a father, twice. He didn’t like most people, and most people didn’t like him. They thought he was spooky because he liked his cemetery—and everybody in it—so much. But since he took over as sexton two years before, the place had never looked so good.

  And now someone was going to dig up one of his graves, and he was furious. He didn’t know how he had known there was something wrong, but duringWheel of Fortune, he’d just gotten a feeling, so here he was: crouched on the floor and grunting for the sheriff to, “Come in one goddamn big hurry ‘fore I kill some son of a bitch with my hammer!” while trembling in his boots.

  Really trembling.

  He sounded pissed, but in truth he was scared half out of his skin because what was happening outside his window looked like something in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead, two movies he had seen once apiece, and the likes of which he would never subject himself to again.

  “We’re on our way,” the sheriff said, reassuringly, and Luther hung up.

  Click.

  Silence.

  Alone.

  The cemetery was located about six miles from town, but with the new-fallen snow drifting across the roads it could be twenty minutes or more before the sheriff would arrive. In the meantime, he was determined to stay put. He wasn’t going near anybody goofy enough to go tramping around a cemetery, toting lanterns and shovels, in full dark, on the night after Emil Lockner had slipped his gears and scared everybody in town half to hell and back with stories of werewolves and Vyrmin and the Man in the Woods and…

  Holy shit!

  He dry-swallowed a lump in his throat and dug his fingertips into the windowsill on either side of his chin.

  “Hey!” he whispered, his eyes gone wide. “What the hell?!”

  The cemetery was flat before him, just a smooth patch of ground, neatly tended before the inevitable dip in the Retreat and the bristling wild of the Valley trees below. Though the sky was heavily clouded, the moon illuminated the horizon, backlighting it a moody silver-grey that seemed to be peeling into eddying white snowflakes. Tombstones, some as high as twelve feet, leaned at every odd angle, blackly jutting up from the featureless ground and briefly swallowing the silhouetted shapes of moving people, only to spit them out again for another stone to consume. Within that maze of shadows, one figure caught his attention and held it…

  It looked smaller than the rest.

  And it was struggling.

  One particularly large figure was practically dragging it along, holding it from behind with a hand on each of its wrists. The smaller shape was fighting like the devil, kicking up dark puffs of snow and squirming
its arms around and around when…

  Every form in the cemetery suddenly froze as someone to Luther’s left waved for attention. Like robots, the group began converging on that spot, some actually skipping with enthusiasm, while the captive figure began its struggles again, with renewed energy and…

  “It’s a girl,” Luther whispered, fingering the handle on his hammer. “She’s just a kid.”

  There were more shapes coming up from the woods now, rising blackly from the ground as if emerging from beneath it.

  Shovels were moving and dark clumps of earth began to fly.

  When Luther opened the door on his tiny shack and stepped outside, the first thing he heard was a weird, whooshing sound, like a train approaching from a very long way off, emanating from the Valley to rise and fall in time to the wind whipping the snow around his face. The second was a stifled scream, muffled by distance and cut off, as if by a hand over a mouth. That scream, and the way it simply stopped, overruled his better judgment and compelled him into his graveyard, even though he had promised himself he wouldn’t move from the window. It brought out the hero in him…Christ, he really had the makings of a hero inside him somewhere. How about that? And it made him move despite the movie scenes he was seeing on the mental screen in his head: the Leatherface chainsaw carnage and the bloody knife attacks that were Hollywood’s shock stock-in-trade.

  He headed out just as a car pulled up at the shack.

  Something in his head told him to hide. He knew by the sound of the tires that this car was smaller than the sheriff’s Ford, so he jumped behind a nearby stone and watched as a Pinto stopped and two people got out—a man and woman from what he saw in the brief flash of interior light, which died when the doors slammed.

  Two more nuts.

  And these were a couple of beauts!

  The man had long hair and was skinny as a rail. The way he moved, so ineptly that he looked as if he’d keel over any minute, made Luther think that he was drugged. The woman, on the other hand, was different, and it was she that held his notice as the couple moved to join the rest at the digging.