by Dan Padavona
My roommate, Mitch, got roughed up one night outside of the One For The Road Tavern—a favorite among townies—when three unknown men yanked him out of the passenger seat of an idling vehicle. Mostly they just shoved Mitch among the three of them, like an old pinball machine where the obstacles light up and hurl the ball at a random diagonal, telling Mitch to spread the word that university pricks weren’t welcome downtown anymore.
Gina and I picked up Mitch, and as we drove back toward campus, a blur of streetlights and mostly darkened residences whirring past to either side of Harper Hill, he began to smirk over the assumption that a vampire was loose in Kane Grove.
“But if it really is a vampire,” he said, “it won’t be hard to figure out who he is.”
“How do you mean?” Gina asked, eyeing him in the rearview mirror as she drove.
“Well, he can’t come out in daylight. Who do we know who sleeps all day? I’m thinking it must be one of the townie night shift janitors.”
“You watch too many movies.”
“And you blame everything on townies,” I said.
Gina said, “Just because Dracula had to sleep in a coffin all day doesn’t mean a real vampire needs to avoid the sun.”
“She’s right,” I said. “You can never trust Hollywood. For all we know, he drinks holy water and listens to Gregorian chants while he builds up his vampire skills at the gym.”
Mitch laughed, and then he leaned forward from the back seat and said, “Well, I for one suggest we all keep a stake handy and line our windowpanes with garlic.”
**
My headaches continued to ebb and flow through October. Finally, whatever illness that had ailed me since the first day of autumn fled my body on the day before Halloween, when I vomited on the steps outside of the interfaith chapel. Gina was with me, and as the crowd backed away from us as though I could kill by touch, Gina wrestled me toward her car, demanding I return to the walk-in clinic. But no sooner had we reached the vehicle than the color returned to my cheeks.
“Don’t even start with that it must have been something I ate bullcrap,” she said.
“I’m okay now. Actually I feel pretty damn great,” I said.
And I did. Suddenly I felt as though I had had the best night of sleep of my life. I possessed an incredible sense of clarity, and I felt the muscles in my arms standing out like cords beneath my shirt. I’m not exaggerating when I say that calculus derivations swam through my mind, vibrant images from a photographic memory. I didn’t have any explanation as to why I had so much energy, but if Gina had dropped me off at the gym, I think I could have lifted twice my weight over my head.
Studying my face, perplexed, she said, “You do look better, I suppose.”
“You don’t look like such a slouch, yourself,” I said, and she punched me in the arm.
But as she drove us back toward Lee Hall above University Avenue between curbside mountains of raked leaves which caught the sun in varied shades of ocher, I warily eyed the dashboard clock.
11:58 a.m.
Less than six hours until sunset.
I walked Gina to her room on the girls’ floor, two levels below ours, and she kissed me long on the lips at her door.
That afternoon, despite feeling healthier than I had since summer, I fell asleep watching football in my dorm room. Devoid of dreams, my slumber was at once the sleep of the dead and strangely revitalizing. With Mitch away for the weekend, I might have slept clear through the night had I not awakened to shouts ringing through the dormitory hallway.
I bolted upright, unsure of where I was. The room was dark except for the television replaying highlights of the games I missed. My bedside alarm clock glowed 10:38 p.m.
When I poked my head into the hallway, the corridor started filling with students. They wore haunted expressions on their faces as I closed the door behind me, and when I started to ask the closest person what had happened, a cold dread pouring down my back, Gina pushed her way through the crowd to reach me.
“What the heck is going on?” I asked her. Gina’s eyes were wide and distant as though she were seeing an alternate reality through the wall behind me.
“They found another body, Dan. This time...it’s horrible.” Her lips began to quiver, and I pulled her against me. Her hands sought the folds in my sweatshirt, chest heaving as she sobbed. “They are going to have to close the school.”
“Nobody’s going to close the school,” I said, caressing her hair. “Do you know how much money the university and town would lose if Kane shut its doors?”
“I don’t care if they shut Kane down forever. It could have been one of us this time. It could have been…”
The girl was Kelly Dillon. I realized with building horror that not only had she lived in Lee Hall three doors down from Gina, but that I once dated her for a short time last year. Too close to home.
I was not surprised to learn Kelly had been found in the thicket behind Jamison. A couple walking through the thicket, holding hands and watching the swaying trees uneasily, were surprised by what they thought were raindrops. But the droplets were too viscid and dark to be rain, and when they looked up through the trees toward the wind-torn sky and the screaming face of a full moon emerging from behind the clouds, they saw Kelly.
She was suspended a hundred feet off the ground, her arms outstretched and tied to two bordering limbs. Grotesquely lolled to the side, her neck oozed a steady leakage of ichor. The couple, thinking they had walked through a mud puddle, suddenly realized what they were standing in, and the girl began to scream uncontrollably.
The left side of Kelly Dillion’s neck was...missing, as though some beast had crashed through the thicket and ripped it away with razors for fangs.
The wind had become a shrill force. The girl saw the shadows move from over her boyfriend’s shoulder. She became inconsolable, trying to warn the boy that someone was in the thicket with them, but she was unable to form words. And all about the couple, as the skeletal silhouettes of trees swayed as though laughing, Kelly continued to drip...drip...drip…
It took half the night for police to retrieve the body from the tree tops. It must have been the oddest of crime scene investigations, and I could not help but muse with a wry humor that only seems attainable in the midst of absolute terror, how they would have solved this murder on one of those reality TV cop shows.
The next day—Halloween Day—the university president, Dr. Branson Horwith, waffled uneasily during a televised press conference, sweat beading and running in rivulets across his beet-red face. Most students didn’t wait for Horwith’s decision to keep the university open or close it down, choosing instead to depart Kane Grove as the sun reached its apex and began its inevitable descent toward the horizon.
Riots spread through Kane Grove that afternoon, though I am not convinced the remaining students or town citizens knew what they were fighting over. Gina wanted to leave but found her tires slashed in the dormitory parking lot. Her parents were coming to get her, but they would not arrive from Maryland until the following morning. Only five people remained in Lee Hall on our floor.
Gina fell asleep on my bed around 5:30. Already the shadows grew long on the walkways leading toward the quad. I watched with trepidation as the bloody orb of the dying sun was dragged toward the horizon, the rays washing the treetops in slashes of amber. I had a commanding view of the valley. Sweeping across the horizon, my eyes centered on an odd procession: a miniature parade of garish costumes, flashlights, and shades of orange. Trick-or-treaters, rushing to embrace the holiday before the unseen dangers of nightfall reached Kane Grove.
I gently shook Gina’s shoulder and said, “I need to eat. I’m starving.”
She muttered something about being careful and getting back before sunset.
“I’ll be back. I promise.”
I brushed her hair away and kissed her on the forehead. Glancing one last time out the window, I saw the sun appear to accelerate toward the earth as though dragged into
an open grave.
**
Jesus, it was cold. As I raced against time toward the thicket pathway, I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and yanked tight on the drawstrings. Save for three tightly-grouped students walking in the distance, the university sidewalks appeared deserted. Incandescent lighting shone through a wide scattering of windows, peering at me like cat’s eyes.
The wind seemed to moan a haunted dirge through the trees, and as the already blackened thicket pathway came into view behind Jamison, I knew the sun would surely set by the time I returned from the convenience store.
The trees seemed taller in the failing light, leering down at me as I strode into the heart of the thicket. Dead leaves crackled underfoot like brittle bones. All I heard was the unsettling song of the wind through the trees and the sound of footfalls. Were the footfalls mine, or were there others behind me? Sounds have a funny way of echoing off the trees in the thicket. I glanced behind uneasily. Shadows reached across the pathway, swimming with movement.
At the center of the thicket, just off the pathway, stood a rickety, wooden maintenance shed. I never liked passing the old shed during the daytime, and as I moved past it with nightfall rapidly invading, my eyes were drawn to it as Hansel’s and Gretel’s surely had been to the witch’s lair.
Movement in the shed’s window caught my eye. A face. Something. It could have been my reflection...it could have…
Overcome by blood rushing into my head, I collapsed to the earth. My head throbbed, pounded, feeling as though it might burst. I vaguely recall wishing the Gable-Einstein doctor had been a bit more thorough before I drifted into unconsciousness.
**
Someone screamed. A woman...I think...yes it had been…
I awoke in the thicket to pitch dark, the maintenance shed no longer in front of me. Echoing through the trees, the scream jolted me back to clarity, but the shrill echo drifted on the periphery of the howling wind, and I wasn’t certain if the scream emanated from the thicket interior or from dream.
All about me wafted the rich smell of decaying leaves and the sweet scent of a wood stove from somewhere in town. I felt a rock stabbing into my back, and as I rolled onto my side, a tree root dug into my ribs.
The leaves glistened a peculiar black, shiny and sticky. Something else was in the leaves at the edge of the gloom…
maybe a rock…
no…
a shoe?
Heart thudding, I pushed myself onto hands and knees, trying to get my bearings. Behind me, I saw the faraway lights of the Jamison Sciences tower.
As the moonlight slanted through the trees, I raised my wristwatch toward my face and squinted my eyes. 11:49. My God...Gina...I had been asleep for…
The rustling of tree limbs in the inky darkness got me scrambling to my feet, and I raced diagonally down a leaf-strewn slope until I reached the pathway again.
I ran for the lamplights of the parking lot, running to rid myself of the thicket, running from a building horror which slammed against my body and chilled me to the bone. I crashed out of the thicket, hearing a woman yelp in surprise as she threw the tower’s back door shut. The tower lights raced past me in indistinct blurs.
When I burst into the quad, my sneakers echoing hollow off the pavement, I saw Lee Hall above University Avenue. Something drove me forward: the boundless energy I had felt the prior morning and an unrelenting terror which I knew I could not outrun.
Passing the glass entranceway to the Freeman Social Sciences building, I heard the crackle of a radio as a figure darted toward me out of the shadows dressed in a suit which marked him as some sort of federal agent. His eyes widened when he saw my face. His reaction was not surprise but utter horror. I saw only his reflection in the glass as I raced past him.
Frantic voices rang out from somewhere behind me as the lights to Lee Hall loomed closer.
Gina...please, no…
After I cut through a maze of smaller dormitories, the yelling faded into the night. Now I only heard the blood thrum inside my ears, my footfalls strangely silent on the pavement as though I were dreaming.
And then Lee Hall was before me, the cold October night pouring off its concrete walls.
I stared at the cutout Halloween decorations in the entranceway, and as my eyes drifted up the dormitory’s exterior, I froze. A scattering of lit windows shone orange into the gloom.
And in four of those windows were faces.
Kari Morton’s hateful eyes from the fourth floor.
My flesh crawled. Maryann Neville glared accusingly from the second floor, just above me.
Her eyes burning bloody red, Laila Jennings peered out from the third floor.
And from the first floor, Kelly Dillon’s mouth gaped open to reveal wicked fangs.
Overcome by fear, I blinked, and then the faces were gone. Left behind was a bottomless sorrow which threatened to pull me through the earth and into its abyss. I sank to my knees, shoulders heaving as I wept in the lonesome moonlight.
“I’m sorry,” I cried. “I never meant to—”
As the Halloween wind shrieked up the hill and tree limbs rustled like skittering spiders, my eyes caught movement.
Raising my head, I saw Gina, within my top floor dormitory room, slumped over and sobbing into her hands. I wanted to call out to her...to let her know she need not worry. As promised, I had returned to her. For nothing could harm me in the October moonlight.
My legs seemed to move on their own accord, carrying me toward the entranceway. Hinges squealed like vermin as I pressed the door open. I crossed the glass without casting reflection or shadow, my steps reverberating through the vacated halls.
I climbed the stairs, footfalls echoing off the barren walls like thunder.
“I’m coming, Gina.”
Dark Vanishings
Read on for an excerpt
From
Dark Vanishings: Episode One
“[Dark Vanishings] will be leaving its serialized footprint all over the subgenre, making Padavona a well-known name in post-apocalyptic horror.” - Horror Novel Reviews
In the gold-and-flaxen late afternoon sun, cumulus clouds threw cottony shadows against the land, and the park unwound in a lord’s ransom of jade and ruby.
Where am I?
Tori awakened to the thick scent of cut grass. Bleary-eyed, she raised herself up onto her elbows and examined her surroundings. Her mountain bike dozed on its side like a sleeping lion. Fifty yards ahead was a blacktop parking lot dotted by three cars. Behind her bicycle, the grass tunneled down between bordering elm rows and sprawling blackberry bushes embellished with white flowers.
She remembered biking to the park after lunch. But had she stopped to rest? She didn’t recall.
She did remember promising her mother to be home by three so she could shower and make it to the hairdresser by five. Ted Harrison was picking her up at seven for dinner before the high school prom, which gave her just enough time after her hair appointment to slip into her dress and—
I am so freaking late. Mom is going to kill me.
Her red, shoulder-length locks, ablaze in the late day sunshine, were littered with bits of grass and leaves. She thought of Rip Van Winkle and a beard which grew for years and years while life passed him by. How could she have slept for four hours in the town park? Hadn’t the park been crowded with picnickers and fishing boats when she had biked in after lunch?
Within the desolation of the park, she felt strangely exposed.
What if Jacob had come for me while I was asleep?
Jacob Mann, the boy from third period study hall who stared at her daily with a twisted grin that never touched his slate-gray eyes. Jacob Mann, who she had seen last summer, standing among bed sheets hung to dry in her backyard, watching her through her bedroom window. Jacob Mann, who was permanently expelled for threatening Mr. Gilder, the school guidance counselor, with a switchblade.
Last December she had volunteered to distribute food at the Red Oak h
omeless shelter, and he had been there, standing across the street among leafless deciduous trees, winter cloak billowing like a vampire’s cape, his dead stare burning holes in her.
And last month, when the ground had thawed and the community garden had become ready for planting, she had looked up from her trowel, over the rows of leafy greens, to see him watching her from the sidewalk. Crow-black hair matted to his forehead. Those lifeless eyes. That grin: at-once, vacant and baleful.
Feeling eyes upon her, she sprang to her feet. The copse of elms bordering the decline swayed to the lake breeze, and as dappled light danced amid the branches, she thought she saw a pallid face watching her from the trees.
Jacob?
Her heart thundering, she turned her head toward the bike. If Jacob burst from the trees, would she be able to pedal her way to the parking lot before he cut her off?
When she turned back, the face was gone. Shadows ran deep within the copse, as though night was pooled within, waiting for the sun to depart. But there was no deranged stalker watching her, and she began to feel a little embarrassed for letting her imagination get the best of her.
Feeling along the back pocket of her cutoff jean shorts, she pulled out her phone and checked the time.
4:51 p.m.
She still had time to make the hair appointment.
As she ran to her bike, her shadow followed her, stretching as though it was reflected in a fun house mirror. Clutching the phone, she double-clicked her mother’s smiling face. After a burst of dial tones, the phone began to ring. And ring. No answer. Stuffing the phone back into her pocket, she pedaled across the bumpy grass and hopped the bike onto the blacktop, picking up speed.
She whipped past a black Volvo—unoccupied—and accelerated across the lot, catching a glimpse of an empty red Honda Civic. The lot branched out to a winding, tree-lined park access road. She leaned to the left, taking a blind turn without checking first for traffic. Her heart pounded, and she expected to hear a car horn blare before the metal grille crushed her from the side. But the road was empty of traffic, and there was only the leafy-green smell of summer’s approach on the air as she rushed toward the town center.