The news was all over town by noon. Perhaps that — the numb feeling the community still had from learning the news — accounted for the somehow lessened impact of the discovery, on Sunday, of the Fellows family, all dead in their house of asphyxiation. At first it seemed a terrible accident, until the fire department ascertained that every gas jet in the house (including the stove and six free-standing room heaters) had been turned on full blast, every pilot light extinguished. By Sunday afternoon, the neighbors had begun to feel how close they had come to tragedy themselves; one stray spark, and the whole house and probably all those close to it would have gone up in a fireball.
There were others, but the others went solo. They kept turning up through Monday: a mechanic who worked at the Texaco station, a clerk in the five-and-dime, the engineer for WXWV, the local radio station. There was a middle-aged divorced man who worked as a butcher at the Big Apple supermarket and an old man who used to be a conductor with the Southern Railroad before he retired. There was a housewife from out on the Cumming Highway who killed herself before breakfast Monday, to be discovered by her two children and her husband. The final toll was fourteen dead. That had happened once before in Gaither — fourteen dead in one weekend, not from an act of God — but the last time was more understandable in human terms. It had been over the Fourth of July holiday in ‘52, when a car jam-packed with two families had collided head-on, at sixty miles an hour, with a pickup truck carrying a farm family in the cab and bed. Fourteen had died then, too, nine in the car and five in the truck.
But that had been an accident.
Attendance was up a little at school on Monday, but the students were subdued in the extreme. Most of them had known Johnny Williams or Cindy, Philip, and Doug Fellows. The intimations of mortality, even for a first- or second-grader, were overwhelming.
And yet they got through the day. In Alan’s class, Miss Ulrich led them through a lugubrious prayer for the dead and “those left behind” right after the Pledge to the Flag. For the rest of the morning Miss Ulrich was not the martinet they had come to expect. So lax was she that she failed to spot the note Diane England passed over to Alan: “I sure am looking forward to the movie.”
Just before lunch Miss Ulrich killed some spare time by reading to them. For reasons of her own, she chose a piece called “On a Dead Child,” which compared the deceased infant to “a little rose among the roses.” She began to weep before she finished the piece, and to the shock and astonishment of the whole class, Reese Donalds the incorrigible sprang up from his desk, helped her back to her seat, and stood patting her hand and saying, “It’s all right, Miz Ulrich. It wasn’t a good poem anyhow.”
At lunch Alan sat beside Jack Harwell, whose eyes seemed a little sick behind his spectacles. “It’s scary,” he said in response to nothing, and Alan knew exactly what Jack meant. “Kids in Johnny’s class say he had these horrible dreams all last week, and now this happens.”
Alan was opening his milk — it came in a tiny glass bottle, and it always tasted somehow of the wax on the round paper seal — but he nodded agreement. “I’ve felt bad about stuff for days and days now.”
“I wonder,” Jack said in a voice like Boris Karloff’s, “if there’s anything to dreams?”
“Cut it out, fart-face,” Alan growled under his breath. “The last thing I need’s a spook at the table with me.”
“Sorry,” Jack said. “Hey, really. You think that people can see into the future and all when they dream, or what?”
Alan shook his head. “Nah. Dreams are just dreams. It’s like you go kinda crazy when you’re asleep. In your case, it’s when you’re awake, too.”
“Eat it, Kirby.”
“Stick it where the sun don’t shine, Harwell.”
They grinned at each other, food on their teeth. “Awful damn lot of kids have been havin’ bad dreams,” Jack said. “Seriously.”
“Yeah, but Johnny Williams didn’t kill his mom and dad. They say his daddy went crazy and wiped out the whole family.”
“Maybe,” Jack said in a Bela Lugosi voice, “it was a vampire, come to suck their blood.”
“Cut it out, Harwell.”
“Listen to them. The children of the night. What music they make,” Jack said in a ripe Hungarian accent. “And then they become vampires, too — ”
Alan suddenly sat up straighter in his chair. “That’s right,” he said. “They do, don’t they?”
Jack looked at him for a minute and shrugged. “That’s what happens in the movies, anyhow.”
“It’s like Dracula, I don’t know, controls them somehow. They do what he wants them to do. Like in the Abbott and Costello movie about Frankenstein.”
“Quiet,” Jack hissed. He looked around, but they were at the end of a table and no one else seemed to be paying any attention to them in the casual chatter and uproar of lunch period. “Don’t talk so crazy, man.”
Alan blinked at him. “But that’s the way I’ve been feeling about people around town,” he said. “Like they’re not really themselves, like they’re sorta listening to something nobody else can hear. What if — hey, you know if the library has any books on vampires and stuff?”
“Shit, how would I know?”
“See ya,” Alan said, grabbing his tray. He put the bottle back in the carton of empties and dumped the scraps of sandwich he had left. Miss Ulrich was at the teachers’ table. He walked over and stood respectfully at her elbow.
She put out a hand and touched him to show she knew he was there, and after a moment she stopped talking to the teachers and looked at him. “What is it, Alan?” Her eyes, behind her harlequin glasses, still looked teary.
“I’ve finished, ma’am. May I go see Miss Lewis? I was helping her with something last week.”
“Go ahead. Listen for the eighth-grade bell. It’s hard to hear on the second floor.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Miss Lewis was at her desk, her lunch half eaten, a stack of work sheets in front of her. The kids in grades one through five had a half-hour recess break after lunch — it sometimes seemed to Alan that he had never known how easy life had been in grades one through five until now, when it was too late — and her kids were in the gymnasium, under the supervision of the fourth-grade teachers. Outside her windows the day was gray and stormy, but she had a bright smile for him. “Hello, Alan. How are you?”
“I think it’s happening,” he said. “The people dying and all.”
She nodded. “I think that must be part of it.”
“Miss Lewis — I know it sounds crazy, but do you know any books on vampires?”
“Vampires, Alan? They’re not real.”
“Well, I know, but in the movies people who’ve been bitten by a vampire act sort of, you know, possessed or something. Like they can’t control themselves. I thought — ”
“I see,” Ann Lewis said, her face thoughtful. “I’ll look around, Alan, but I don’t know any books right offhand. Of course, there’s Dracula, but that’s a novel.”
“Who wrote it?”
“A man named Bram Stoker.”
Alan repeated the name to himself. “Bram Stoker must have based the book on something, don’t you think?” he asked.
“He may have. I’m sure there are folktales and legends — ”
“I’m gonna see what I can find,” Alan said. “Maybe that’s what’s happening. Maybe something, not a vampire, but like a vampire, is causing people to behave in crazy ways, causing them to kill other people. Maybe that’s what we ought to be hunting.”
Miss Lewis pulled at a strand of her blond hair. “All right, Alan. I’ll see what I can find in books of folklore. You visit the library and learn what you can about vampires — ”
“I’ll look in my dad’s store, too,” Alan said. “There’s a section of occult books and stuff.”
“Well, let’s see what we can find. Are you going to talk to Mr. Tate about this?”
Alan hadn’t considered that. “I don’t k
now. Should we?”
“Why don’t we wait to see what we can find? It may be nothing at all.”
“All right. But it’s something, not nothing. Something is causing people to die.”
Miss Lewis smiled at him and reached to touch his cheek, fleetingly. “Alan, you’re very young. When you grow older, you’ll know that people don’t need evil from outside to make them do evil things. They carry their own store of it around with them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“There’s the upper-grade bell. Better scoot.”
Alan went back to class, but his mind was not really on the science and history lessons. After school he spoke to Diane England for a few minutes — she repeated her anticipation of seeing the movie with him — and then set off for the library. He had worn his rain gear, a rubberized yellow slicker, and he needed it: rain lashed him before he’d gotten half a mile from school, and he parked outside the courthouse in a downpour that crackled against his hood and leaped back off the pavement in sudden silver spikes.
The sound of the rain was muted in the dim warrens of the library. With the help of the crowded card catalog, Alan found three books, one on Bram Stoker, one on monsters both legendary and actual, and Dracula itself. He waited in the stairwell for the rain to die down, and when it was only a patter again he went out, got his bike, and drove over to the bookshop.
His father was doing a good business, or at least it looked that way: the shop was crowded, and John Kirby had little time for anything other than a quick nod at his son. Alan went through the building and put his school and library books in the Studebaker. Then he came back into the shop and tidied the comics rack before a couple of young women left the occult area clear. He sauntered down the aisle and quickly collected a double handful of lurid-covered paperbacks: one entitled Werewolves, Vampires, and Ghouls, another called Monsters in Fact and Legend, yet another called The Folklore of Terror: Monsters of Many Lands, and three more with similarly promising titles.
The total purchase for all six books — he figured quickly — would be three dollars and fifty cents, plus tax. Say three sixty-one. He had no money on him at all, but there was some in his bank account, and probably enough change in the penny bank in his room to cover it. When the crowd had thinned. Alan took the books over to the counter. “Dad, would you buy these for me? I’ll pay you back.” Alan knew better than to ask for free books. He couldn’t even get free comics from his dad’s shop, not even the dumber ones, like Fearless Fosdick.
“Let’s see.” His father took the books, rang up the total (just as Alan had estimated: $3.61), and bagged them. “This is bizarre reading,” he said, handing over the paper bag. “What’s up?”
“Well, Halloween’s comin’ up at the end of next month,” Alan said. “The eighth grade’s usually in charge of the haunted house, and I thought I’d kinda get some ideas.”
“You’ll probably end up with nightmares,” John Kirby said. “But I’d rather know you’re reading trash than not know it, and I suppose you’d read it in any case. You keep these out of Aunt Betty’s sight, now.”
“Yes, sir. I’m gonna ride my bike on home. I left my schoolbooks in your car, if that’s all right.”
“Homework?”
“Math and science, and some English reading.”
“I don’t mind bringing the books home, but you hit them right after supper.”
“Yes, sir. What do you want me to fix for supper?”
“There’s some hamburger in the refrigerator, and some buns in the bread box. I suppose you can open a can of green beans and fry some potatoes. Be careful around the stove.”
“I will. Will you be home by six?”
“Probably a little before. Take care.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alan rode home, let the bike crash beside the porch, and hurried to his room to dip into his paperback trove of information. He scanned through the books one by one, but something in one of them — it was the folklore one — caught his eye:
A curious belief in some of the countries bordering northern India is that of the devil-man. This creature assumes the form of a human being to accomplish its bloody tasks, while in fact it is nothing of the sort, but a vengeful and evil spirit.
In Afghan legend, such a spirit, angered by a real or fancied slight it receives from a village, never rests until the village is punished. Punishment is effected by the subtle magic the spirit can command. First it inhabits the recently deceased and unburied body of one of the villagers. Then it recruits an army from among them by stealing the souls of the villagers one by one. Those so treated lose their own power to distinguish between right and wrong and become merely the devil-man’s puppets, willingly doing any acts of vengeance or violence the spirit may command.
The villagers are constantly alert for any sign of a devil-man’s presence. These are obvious to the vigilant, for his depredations occur only subsequent to sustained and horrifying plagues of nightmares. Other signs, too, indicate his presence.
Alan turned the page, only to find that the discussion quickly moved to the kang-mi and the yeti, “man-apes from the lands above the snow line.” He went to the living room, looked up Miss Lewis’s number, and dialed it. As soon as she answered, he told her what he had found and read the passage aloud to her. To his considerable relief, she took it all seriously and even wrote down the title of the book and a quick description of the Afghan “devil-men.”
He went back to his room. Only once more did he really sit up with the sudden feeling that he had found something significant. He had been reading a book on Jack the Ripper (Alan knew the name, the way he knew the name of Jesse James or that of Robin Hood: through the peculiar American brand of legend compounded of folktales passed along by kids, puzzling references in newspapers or magazines, and movies).
The story of the harlot killer quickly absorbed him. What disturbed him, however, was the writer’s seeming assertion that Jack the Ripper had not died because he was not in fact a man, was rather something very like what an Afghan might call a devil-man or a spirit. In support, the author offered a long, multipaged list of murders that seemed to resemble more or less exactly Jack the Ripper’s crimes — and some of those had taken place in Atlanta, hardly sixty miles from Gaither.
And that wasn’t all. The publisher had considerately included eight pages of illustrations, line drawings that were only “based on actual photographs of the Ripper’s environment and victims” but were nonetheless horrific.
Everyone in town knew what had happened to Mollie Avery, knew how her body had been slashed and cut. The drawings of Jack’s victims merely put into graphic form what Alan, what everyone in town, had already seen in imagination: the ravaged body of their own local victim, missing breast, torn abdomen, and all.
For the first time in his life Alan was afraid to be alone in his own house. Heart thumping and breath coming faster than normal, he slid out of bed. The sun was going down, and the room was dim. He decided he’d sit on the porch until his father came home.
He opened the door of his room.
Somebody grabbed him.
Alan jerked and yelled, stumbling backward.
“Hey,” his father said. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh. It’s you.”
“Who did you expect? I thought you were going to have supper ready.”
“I was. I will. I — sorry, Dad. I was reading.”
“Trash, I take it,” his father said dryly. “Well, let’s hustle. I’m hungry, and you have homework to do.”
“Yes, sir. Dad? I — I’m sure glad you’re home.”
His father gave him a long look. “Thank you. I think. Come on. You peel the potatoes and I’ll cook the burgers.”
“Could you peel?” Alan asked. “I’d rather not fool around with a knife right now.”
“I had KP enough in the Army.” Kirby ruffled his son’s hair. “But, okay. You do the burgers.”
“Do I have to touch the meat with my hands? I m
ean, it’s got blood and everything — ”
John Kirby slapped him across the butt. “Get in there, boy. Next week you’re reading nothing but Fannie Farmer’s Cookbook, I swear to God.”
2
Sam Quarles was exhausted Monday evening. “I hope to God it’s all over,” he told his wife over supper. “Fourteen people since Saturday. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’m not going away,” Ilona said. She had prepared salmon croquettes according to a new recipe, but neither she nor Sam really ate them. Both just picked the fish patties apart. In the kitchen and dining room, as in all the rooms of the house, the window shades were pulled down to the sills, and over them the drapes were drawn shut. “I won’t leave you. I’m not going.”
“Yes, you are.”
Ilona laid down her fork. “Then you come with me.”
The sheriff sighed. “Ilona, honey, you know I can’t. Now, your sister will be glad to see you — ”
“Patrick won’t.” Patrick was her sister’s husband, a man who owned his own well-drilling company up in the mountain city of Blairsville, almost out of Georgia altogether. “He’ll be ready to move out the day after I get there.”
“You’ll get along with Patrick,” Quarles said. “Because you’ll make the effort. It’s only for a week or two, hon, just until I can find out who’s been trying to scare us away from this house.”
“It was him, Sam. I know Harmon Presley’s face.”
After an involuntary look at the muffled window, Quarles shook his head. “I do, too. But it was real dark out on the porch, and there was no way to see clearly just who it was. Anybody Harm’s size and build dressed up in a uniform would’ve looked like Harm to you — or to me. Damn it, Ilona, Harmon’s dead and in the ground. I don’t know who it was, but it wasn’t Harmon Presley’s ghost, that’s for sure.”
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