by Rich Hawkins
“Are you asleep?” Mason asked. He reached out to check the pulse on Calvin’s neck, but hesitated when he saw the opened mess of the man’s throat. The wound was blackened, drying out, and if Mason wasn’t mistaken it was already healing around the edges. He winced, staring in fascination, as rational thought began to ebb away on tides of fear and primal dread. He said the word he’d been thinking since entering the room. He considered the wounds in the victims’ throats. The teeth. The suggestion of an awful hunger.
“No, no, no,” he muttered, sweat beading on his face. And with all the effort he could muster he placed his forefinger on Calvin’s neck to feel the carotid artery. The old man’s skin was cold. No pulse, no beat, no ticking of the signal from the heart.
He checked again. And again, there was nothing.
Calvin opened his eyes.
Mason fell back onto his arse and let out a boyish yelp.
Calvin grinned. His eyes were blood-red, bulging from their sockets. He reached out with one claw-like hand and grabbed for Mason’s feet, but Mason scuttled backwards against the wall, keeping the torch upon him.
Making a low sound, Calvin rose slowly to his knees, holding his wrists to the sides of his head and swaying from side to side. In the thin blade of light, his mouth yawned open like that of an enraged primate, to show stained yellow teeth sharp enough to puncture aluminium tins. The light glinted in his cruel eyes.
Mason scrambled to his feet, holding the knife out before him. “What happened to you, Calvin? What’s going on?”
Calvin sniffed the air, closed his eyes, and then opened them again. His mouth formed a malicious smile, and the voice that came from it was different, somehow, wheezed out of his dead chest. There were only a few yards between them. Close enough for grabbing distance.
“You’ll find out, lad. Why don’t you stay for a while and we can talk? Our King has been in town for a few days and nights, spreading his gospel, sharing his flesh and blood. The ones he’s converted will convert others in turn. It’s beautiful, is it not? This isn’t the only nest, Mason. Our King was very busy last night; I suspect there have been many absences from work and school in the last few days. By the end of tonight, there’ll be hundreds of us.”
Mason caught the sulphuric gust of Calvin’s breath. He edged towards the doorway. “I have to leave. I have to go…”
Calvin shrugged like he didn’t care, like it was a small matter, and said nothing. Then he lunged for Mason to claim him with eager hands.
*
The clouds had retreated from parts of the sky when Mason stumbled outside, and he felt something like elation at the last light of the winter sun.
Mason fled from the terrible house and across the wasteland, fear steaming from his skin; desperate to reach the streets of people and traffic and get away from the horror that had nearly claimed him. Calvin had been on his heels all the way from the room and down the stairs to the hallway and the threshold of the doorway. Mason had barely escaped; a few times Calvin’s fingers had swiped close to the back of his head. And if the chase had lasted any longer he would have been caught, like terrified prey, to join the others in that dark room.
Once Mason had staggered clear of the doorway and away from the house, he had stopped with his rucksack over one shoulder and turned back to see Calvin hunched over in the doorway, staring out at him and hissing at the pale sunlight.
Mason emerged onto the streets, heading back to Ellie’s house as Charlie’s last words announced themselves in his mind.
“I’ll see you soon, lad.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
During his flight from the dead house he noticed several missing person flyers taped to walls and stapled to wooden posts and fences. He stopped only to glance at them, because he didn’t want to look at their faces any longer than he had to.
*
It was near dark when he returned to Ellie’s house. He was relieved to get inside while there was still some light in the sky. He locked the front door behind him and stood in the hallway with his hands worrying at each other. Coldness crawled over his skin. His heart pumped erratically and the contents of his stomach curdled.
Ellie’s voice startled him. “Why have you locked the door?”
She was waiting for him at the kitchen table, cradling a mug of coffee. He sat down across from her, took out a Rizla and opened his pouch of rolling tobacco to make a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Ellie watched him.
“You don’t know who’s out there.” He felt like laughing, but he knew it would only come out half-mad and hysterical, and there was nothing to laugh at, anyway.
“What’s going on, Mason?”
He looked at her then had to look away. “I thought you don’t care what happens to me?”
She took a mouthful of coffee then sighed deeply. “Don’t start that, okay?”
Mason snorted. “You were the one who said it.”
“Just talk to me. Where did you go? What’s happened?”
He gave up trying to roll the cigarette and dropped it on the table. He looked down at his lap. “I’m in trouble, I think.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Let me make a cup of tea and I’ll tell you.”
*
“Vampires?” she said, half-smiling.
“Yes.”
“Vampires?”
He nodded, swallowed, exhaled. “Yes.”
She scoffed. “Are you serious?”
“I told you what happened last night and today.”
“You also told me you weren’t on drugs.”
Mason sucked on the cigarette he’d finally managed to roll. Ellie had opened the kitchen window to let out the smoke.
“Of course I’m serious. I think the red-eyed thing attacked and turned them all.”
“And you expect me to believe you?”
He shook his head, felt his face crumple and redden. “They were dead. It was like a nest, all of them in the room. I checked Calvin’s pulse, but there was nothing. His throat had been torn out last night, but when I found him today it was already healing.”
“How was it healing if he was dead?”
“I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. Maybe they heal quicker than people.”
“This is madness,” Ellie said. “They? The vampires? Jesus Christ, Mason, do you hear what you’re saying? These are the ravings of someone delusional.”
He shook his head. “I’m not mental.”
“Well, you’re either mental or vampires exist,” she said. “I know which one I believe.”
Mason scratched at his face. “Calvin came after me, Ellie. He tried to grab me. I was lucky to get out of there. His teeth. Christ. His eyes were red like the thing that killed him, for fuck’s sake…”
Ellie didn’t look convinced. “This sounds ridiculous, Mason. This is horror movie stuff. Maybe your friend Calvin is fucking around, playing a joke. Contact lenses and Halloween make-up. You don’t know him. You don’t know anything about him. This could be some prank he and this Zeke bloke play on newcomers.”
“It’s real, Ellie. I swear.”
“You need help.”
“I agree, but not for the same reasons. Calvin said he’d see me soon.”
“Calvin the vampire?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed. “Of course.” Then she eyed him, tapping one finger on the table. “Did you take one of my bread knives?”
The question caught him off guard, and he just sat there and avoided her gaze. He took the knife from his pocket and placed it on the table.
“Oh my god, Mason. This is getting worse and worse. If the police found that on you…”
“I know. But it’s a risk I had to take, so I could defend myself.”
“You didn’t…hurt anyone, did you?”
“I didn’t. I was too scared.”
“This is madness.”
He tapped ash into the dregs of his tea. Ellie glared at him. “I know it sounds mental. I’
m aware of that. But you weren’t there. You weren’t there last night or today. You don’t know what happened.”
“You’re scaring me, Mason.”
“You’re scared?” he said, staring at the floor. “You have no idea.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Darkness had fallen by the time they’d finished talking.
Ellie remained unconvinced by his talk of vampires. When she looked at him, it was with distrust and pity in her eyes, and it made his heart sink into his stomach.
Now he stood on the upstairs landing and watched the deserted street outside the front of the house. His insides jittered and broiled. The streetlights flickered on, but they gave him no comfort. Beery light filled windows in the houses across the road. He glimpsed people preparing dinner; families gathering and talking. The glow of televisions past net curtains. Domestic contentment and warmth. Something he longed for and craved. But it was a pipedream, a forlorn hope, something to be nurtured inside his mind and never exposed to cold reality.
For a while he just sat on the top step, lowered his head, and whispered the name of the girl he’d killed on that remembered summer’s night. His punishments for destroying a family were to never be allowed a family of his own and to always remember the face and name of the girl in the car. The Dead Girl. He understood and accepted the penalties; he even considered them lenient. If his mother were alive, she would have told him about the hellish afterlife that awaited him. And if that were true, then his only hope was that the bitch would be already down there burning when he arrived.
Glass shattered downstairs. A stifled shout from Ellie. Mason stumbled down the stairs. When he entered the kitchen, panicked and twitchy, he found Ellie crouching on the floor, sweeping broken glass into a dustpan. She rose and walked over to the bin in the corner and tipped the glass inside.
“I thought something had happened,” said Mason. “I thought…” He saw Ellie shake her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
She put the dustpan and brush in the cupboard under the sink. “I dropped a wine glass. Nothing to worry about. No bloodsuckers tried to seduce me with their brooding good looks.”
“Don’t joke about it.”
“I’m not, believe me. I wish I could joke about it. You’re lucky I’m letting you stay tonight after stealing that knife and telling me a load of crazy shit.”
“Fair enough,” said Mason, too tired to start an argument or try to convince her.
He turned to walk away, but froze in place when the lights in the house went out.
*
Ellie clicked on the torch she’d taken from the cupboard under the sink and then lit two candles in the living room while Mason stood and watched. He made sure to stay away from the doors and windows.
Immediately after the lights had gone out, he’d gone around the inside of the house and checked each light switch and electrical socket without success. After that he had peered from between the curtains over the living room window and saw that the streetlights were out. Darkness out there except for the moon’s faint illumination and the soft glow of candles in the neighbours’ windows. When he thought of the entire town without power and shrouded in the dark, he felt his insides rear and judder with anxiety.
He listened for screams out in the night and placed one hand to his churning and gas-bloated stomach. The back of his arms prickled as if covered by needle-limbed insects. The back of his mouth watered with nausea. He imagined Calvin, Zeke and the others rising from the floor of that room in the abandoned house, trembling with hunger and awful cravings. He imagined them going out into the night, in the blackout, to hunt.
He thought he could hear a distant ambulance siren somewhere within the town. Ellie heard it, too, because she looked at Mason with something like a concerned frown creasing her brow. She was putting on her coat.
“What are you doing?” he asked her.
“I’m going to check on Agnes, the old lady who lives down the road.”
“You shouldn’t go outside.”
“Agnes will need help. She gets confused.”
“Please stay here, Ellie.”
She zipped up her coat and looked at him. “Stay here if you like. You don’t have to come.”
Mason turned his face towards the curtained window, shook his head as he sighed. Then he reached for his jacket.
*
The thin beam of Mason’s torch was feeble against the darkness below the sky of stars. They walked down the road, past darkened houses and windows of meagre candlelight. A face peered out at them from an upstairs window.
There was the occasional glimpse of car headlights flashing past buildings. A horn sounded from somewhere in the next street.
Mason shivered in the cold, glancing around, as he walked behind Ellie. She directed her torch straight ahead, her breath misting the air before her face.
Inhaling through his nose, Mason tried to calm his jangling nerves and rapid pulse. When a hoarse voice shouted something indistinct from behind a row of houses, he flinched. His eyes scanned the dark.
They reached Agnes’ house. Ellie nodded at a blue Ford Fiesta parked by the kerb. “That’s the nurse’s car.”
Mason stopped beside her. “Then Agnes is being looked after. Nothing to worry about. Let’s go back.”
“The nurse is only a young girl,” said Ellie. “She’s just started the job. I want to make sure.”
Mason’s heart sank as he followed Ellie up the garden path that cleaved a lawn of patchy grass and flattened molehills. The house was dark inside, with no light beyond the windows. The curtains had been pulled back.
Ellie knocked three times on the door and waited. Mason cleared his throat then glanced back at the street, shining his torch about. He listened to the suggestion of distant voices carried on the night breeze. They sounded distorted, as if spoken underwater. And then a loud metallic bang from out of the town centre startled him.
Ellie looked back at him, but said nothing. She knocked again on the door, and when there was no answer she tried the handle, but it didn’t give, and she stepped back from the front step to direct her torch at the ground floor windows and those upstairs.
No one appeared. The house looked empty.
“Maybe she’s gone out somewhere,” said Mason, eager to return inside.
Ellie took a key from her pocket. “Agnes never leaves the house.” She unlocked and opened the door, hesitated at the threshold, then stepped inside and called out to the old woman. Mason followed her into the dark interior of the house, through a cramped hallway to the living room. The air was redolent with the smell of musty furniture, hints of old lavender and varnish. His torch beam chased shadows around the walls and over the ceiling. He looked reluctantly into the corners of the room, expecting to find the old lady cold and dead in threadbare garments.
Magazines were scattered around a clay bowl of polished pebbles on a coffee table in the centre of the room. Glass ornaments on a shelf caught the torchlight. A vase of dried flowers. On one of the dour walls hung a woodcut that depicted men working in a wheat field. An empty tea cup was left on the carpet, next to the armchair in front of the television. The armchair was patterned with a design once fashionable in the Seventies.
Ellie swept the floor with her torch. “Last month Agnes collapsed and twisted her ankle. The nurse found her the next morning, still lying on the bathroom floor. I hope she hasn’t hurt herself again.”
They checked the kitchen but found it empty, and were about to go upstairs when Mason noticed a draught coming from the back of the house.
*
The back door was ajar. Ellie pushed it open and stepped out to the garden, aiming the torch about her feet then straight ahead. Mason followed.
“Agnes?” Ellie said. “Are you out here?” Her voice slipped into the darkness.
They moved further into the garden and soon their torchlights revealed the body of the young nurse sprawled upon the lawn.
“Christ,” said Mason. He wiped his m
outh and stepped back to escape the metallic reek of recently-spilled blood. Ellie didn’t take her eyes from the body exposed in the trembling beam of the torch.
The nurse’s pinafore was speckled with arterial spray, as was her face. Her mouth gaping open. Deep lacerations at her throat and both wrists, as if she’d been attacked by a wild animal. Wounds made by small sharp teeth. Blood dampened the ground around her broken body. Her eyes were glazed and dull in death.
“Did a dog do this?” Ellie said. “A feral dog?”
Mason said nothing.
A low sound, like a throaty whine, came from the foot of the garden. Mason fought the urge to turn away and return to the house and leave whatever waited for them in the far shadows.
They walked to the end of the garden, halted on the sodden grass and pointed their torches into the dark.
They found Agnes crouching by the wooden fence separating the garden from the lane beyond. A tattered housecoat like a shroud over her thin shoulders. Her skin pale to the point of translucence. Little grunting sounds spilled from behind the hands held to her mouth. She raised her face to the torchlight. Eyes liquid-red and crazed with hunger. Fresh blood smeared around her mouth and down her chin. A small puddle of blood formed underneath her from the dripping of her face.
Mason’s knees locked rigid. “Do you believe me now, Ellie?”
She didn’t answer him. Her face was slack and pallid. She put one hand to her mouth, where her bottom lip trembled. “Oh, Agnes, what have you done?” Ellie’s weak voice, barely a whisper, distracted the old woman from licking her own bloody fingers. Agnes glared at them through the few damp strands of white hair over her face. She opened her jaws slowly, letting them see the deformed sharpness of her teeth and grey gums stained pinkish red.
Mason stared at her black tongue, reptilian and moist at the back of her mouth. He watched it slither forward until it was past her teeth and licking at her lips.