The Second Time Around
HUGH B. CAVE (1910-2004) was born in Chester, England, and emigrated with his family to America when he was five. From the late 1920s onwards his stories began appearing in such legendary pulp magazines as Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Ghost Stories, Black Book Detective Magazine, Spicy Mystery Stories and the “weird menace” pulps, Horror Stories and Terror Tales..
After leaving the horror field in the early 1940s for almost three decades, a volume of the author’s best horror tales, Murgunstrumm and Others, was published by Karl Edward Wagner in 1977. Cave subsequently returned to the genre with new stories and a string of modern horror novels: Legion of the Dead, The Nebulon Horror, The Evil, Shades of Evil, Disciples of Dread, The Lower Deep, Lucifer’s Eye, Isle of the Whisperers, The Dawning, The Evil Returns and The Restless Dead. His short stories were also collected in a number of volumes, including The Corpse Maker, Death Stalks the Night, The Dagger of Tsiang, Long Live the Dead: Tales from Black Mask, Come Into My Parlor, The Door Below and Bottled in Blonde. Milt Thomas’s biography, Cave of a Thousand Tales: The Life & Times of Hugh B. Cave, was published by Arkham House a week after the author’s death.
During his lifetime, Cave received Life Achievement Awards from The Horror Writers Association, The International Horror Guild and The World Fantasy Convention. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy gathering in London, where he was a Special Guest of Honour.
In a small New England town, a series of bizarre attacks are being blamed on vampires ...
~ * ~
9.00 P.M.
A LONELY ROAD in northern New England, barely two cars wide. Night and road both black as tar except for the area illuminated by the car’s headlights.
Suddenly the lightbeams pick out a plodding figure who stops, turns, and lifts a hand in supplication. A stooped old woman, grey-haired, the hand wavering before her eyes to shield them from the headlights’ glare.
The late-model Buick stops smoothly beside her and its driver leans across the emptiness beside him to open a door for her. He is years younger than she. A college professor from Boston, dark-haired and handsome, Jerome Howell is well dressed in brown slacks, a tan jacket, a white sport shirt. From a thin gold chain around his neck hangs a gold cross.
Professor Howell’s hobby—an all-consuming one—is the study of psychic phenomena, and with a whole summer vacation before him and an intriguing mystery to investigate, he is presently in high spirits. Since darkness blacked out the road he has been driving a steady forty miles an hour while thinking of what he will do on reaching his destination.
“Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”
“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” The old woman clambers in and pulls the door shut, then squirms on the seat until she has made herself comfortable. She wears an old-fashioned black dress, a grey sweater, black high-top shoes. “Are you going to Ellenton?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Good, good. I was visiting a friend and my husband was supposed to come back for me. I suppose he forgot. We’re old and he does that sometimes, poor man.” She turns her head to smile at him, but when her gaze touches the gold cross at his throat, she pulls back with a quick little jerk of her shoulders. “I don’t seem to remember seeing you before. Do you live around here?”
He shakes his head. Decides to tell her who he is and what he is here for, because she has probably lived in the area long enough to supply some information that will help him in his forthcoming research. But at that moment the lights of a following car flash in his rear-view mirror.
The car has come up behind him at a suspiciously fast speed and is apparently about to go roaring past without even a horn blast to warn him. Always a defensive driver, he jerks his wheel over, causing the Buick to veer to the extreme edge of the road in search of safety.
~ * ~
In the other car, which is an old but souped-up clunker, are two younger men. Monk Morrisey, driving, is eighteen. Dan Clay will be eighteen next month. Both are high-school students on summer vacation, jobless by choice but engaged in an ongoing enterprise that earns them more money than classmates who do have summer jobs. Both are of slight build, unshaven, with hair to their shoulders. Both wear boots and dirty jeans and even dirtier khaki shirts.
With its windows rolled up against the evening chill, the clunker reeks of marijuana. Dan has just finished a joint. Monk smokes one as he drives.
They close in on the Buick at sixty-odd miles an hour.
~ * ~
As the other car comes roaring up beside him, Jerome Howell tells himself that no one but a fool or a drunk would be driving that fast on this road in the dark. He swings his Buick even closer to the road’s edge to avoid being sideswiped. But despite his defensive manoeuvre, the clunker lurches at the last moment and thuds into the side of his machine, with a sound like that of a sledgehammer striking an empty oil drum.
Oddly, the little old lady seated beside him does not flinch or scream. Apparently unafraid, she only grabs at the dashboard.
The steering wheel spins in Howell’s hands as the sandy road-shoulder traps his car’s right front tyre. Out of control while he desperately struggles to brake it, the Buick lurches off the blacktop into a shallow, grassy ditch, climbs the far side, and hurtles into a grove of trees.
Howell is a deft enough driver to avoid the first few trees the car seems likely to crash into, but not the next. The Buick strikes that one a glancing blow with its right front fender, rears high on its left wheels, and tips onto its side.
~ * ~
After sideswiping the Buick, the jalopy slowed from sixty-plus so quickly that its tyres squealed on the blacktop and its wheels came close to locking. Bringing it to a halt with its right wheels off the pavement, Monk Morrisey leaned back with a grin.
“Got ‘im.”
He thrust out his right hand. Dan Clay slapped it with his right, grinned and said, “Them, you mean. There was two of ‘em. The driver and a little old lady.”
“All the better. Little old ladies wear jewellery sometimes. Let’s go.”
The two got out of the clunker and loped back along the road to where they could see the other car’s headlight-glow among the trees. Scrambling across the ditch, they approached the tipped machine with care.
“They must both be out cold. Or dead, even.” Monk’s tone said it made no difference to him. “I don’t see nothin’ movin’.”
“Yeah.”
Going to the front of the wrecked car, they peered in through the windshield. The driver was bent grotesquely against the door the car was resting on, with one arm limply draped over the steering wheel.
“Where’s the old woman?” Dan Clay said. “There was an old woman with him. I seen her.” He leaned closer, pressing his forehead against the cracked windshield glass. “She ain’t here. Where the hell’d she go to?”
Both backed away from the car and peered into the surrounding darkness for a moment. “Maybe there wasn’t no woman,” Monk said.
“I seen a little old lady, I tell you! Right there on the front seat, next to this guy!”
“So how’d she get out?”
“How do I know how she got out? She just did, for Chrissake. If she ain’t here now, she must’ve.”
“Okay, okay.” Monk spread his arms in surrender. “Let’s get what we come for.”
They peered into the Buick again. There was no way they could crawl under it to open the driver’s door. Climbing onto the machine, Dan worked on the high-side door instead. That one was deeply creased from its impact with the tree.
Less experienced predators might not have been able to get even that door open. But after working themselves into a heavy sweat, these two finally succeeded.
Leaning in and reaching down for the unconscious man’s right hand, Monk felt for a pulse at the wrist.
“Well?” Clay said.
“I ain’t sure. Whaddaya think? Should we—”
“No, no. Leave him be.”
“Be better if we—”
“No, damn it. He never seen us. Leave him be but put the mark on him, just in case. Here.” Clay took from a hip pocket of his dirty jeans a metal instrument shaped like an extra wide, two-pronged dinner fork with a stubby handle. He and his buddy had designed it themselves and liked to think of it as a miniature devil’s pitchfork with the centre prongs missing. He put the instrument in Monk’s upthrust hand.
Leaning down into the car again, Monk turned the driver’s head to expose his neck and for the first time noticed the gold chain the man was wearing. He broke it off with a quick jerk and thrust it into his pocket. Then with a practised hand he pressed the twin points of the devil’s pitchfork into the side of the man’s neck until blood oozed out around them.
Withdrawing the instrument, he handed it back up to Dan Clay without comment and went on with his work. This too was routine.
Aided by the light from the dashboard, which like the car’s headlamps was still on, Monk squirmed even farther into the wrecked machine and emptied the driver’s pockets, pausing only to pass the contents of each up to his companion. Then he emptied the glove compartment. Lots of stupid people kept valuable stuff in glove compartments, he knew from the dozens of cars he and Dan had plundered. Finally he snatched the ignition key, which was one of several on a ring.
“Okay. I got everything.”
“You sure?”
“Course I’m sure, for Chrissake. Gimme a hand up.”
With Dan’s help Monk wriggled back out of the car like a worm from its hole in the ground. Then the two turned to the car’s trunk. One of the keys on the ring opened it.
There was a small leather suitcase in the trunk. Dan lifted it out and slammed the trunk lid shut. Both young men then hurried back through the trees and across the ditch to the road. On reaching their clunker, they flung themselves and their loot into it.
Again Monk Morrisey drove. Tonight was his night. While the old car roared down the road, Dan Clay pulled the assorted loot from his pockets and examined it.
“One big, thick billfold.” Counting the bills in it, he became so excited he performed a kind of breakdance on the car seat, even with the suitcase across his knees. “Jeez, Monk! More’n five hundred bucks in cash! And a Visa card, two gas company credit cards, a driver’s licence, car registration…The guy’s name is Jerome Howell and he’s from Boston, Mass.” Tossing the billfold onto the back seat, he eagerly turned his attention to the rest of what they had stolen.
That was mostly disappointing. There was a small notebook containing names and notes. The names were unfamiliar and some of the notes were just plain weird, such as “Aleta B, 64, was visited at state inst by Dr. Keller in Aug. Told W she actually saw her brother attacked. Described attacker as tall and handsome, sort of foreign-looking. W says he believes her, but no one fitting that description lives in area.” Never much interested in the written word, Dan had no patience for such enigmatic scribblings and tossed the notebook after the billfold.
The rest of the loot from Howell’s pockets consisted of cigarettes, some coins, a handkerchief, and a silver lighter that might be worth a few bucks if they could find some dude who wasn’t turned off by the initials JDH on it.
The glove-compartment treasures were even more disappointing. This driver, it seemed, kept only road maps and a car-owner’s instruction manual there.
As Monk drove on down the road, Dan tackled the suitcase.
It was not locked. He flipped the lid up and took out a book that lay on top of some clothes. A thin book with hard grey covers on which the title was printed in black letters.
“How to Protect Yourself Against Vampires” he read aloud. “By Jerome Howell. Hey, that’s the name on his driver’s licence: Jerome Howell.”
Monk stopped scowling at the road long enough to glance at him. “How to protect yourself against vampires?”
“Yeah.”
“Jesus. I forgot.” Removing his right hand from the wheel, Monk twisted his hips so he could reach into a pants pocket. He pulled out the broken gold chain with the cross on it. “Looka this.”
Dan examined it.
“He was wearin’ it ‘round his neck,” Monk said. “I yanked it off to put the mark on him.”
“He’s that guy those people sent for!” Dan said in a hoarse whisper. “Yeah. He has to be.”
“Jeez. Maybe we should go back and finish him off. If he comes to and ain’t hurt bad—if he can really do what he come here for—he could put us outa business and ruin our whole summer!”
Monk steered the clunker to the side of the road and they sat for a while to discuss their problem.
They talked about the previous summer. Of how the word “vampire” had become part of the town’s vocabulary when the first two townspeople were found with marks on their necks. Of how Dan Clay and Monk Morrisey, even while laughing their heads off at the crazy idea some foreigner named Count Dracula had moved into town, had doped out a way to use the scare as a sure-fire cover for the game they were already playing with out-of-state cars. In the beginning, for God’s sake, when the vampire talk started, Monk hadn’t even known what a vampire was.
“You must’ve seen vampire movies on TV,” Dan had said in disgust. “Everybody has.”
“Maybe, I dunno. If I did, I must’ve forgot.”
“They’re dead people who come out at night lookin’ for blood. They have to have blood to keep goin’. And when they kill people that way, those people turn into vampires too. Some do, anyway.”
Talking about it again now, they looked at and tried to read the book by Jerome Howell, whom certain frightened townspeople had sent for to come and investigate. Many of the words were beyond their understanding, but after flipping through the pages Dan said at last, “The guy is really sold on this junk, y’ know. He thinks vampires are for real.”
“He’s crazy,” Monk said.
“Or smart. I bet he gets big money when people hire him.”
That settled, Dan tossed the book aside and the two continued their investigation of the suitcase. But there was nothing in it they could sell or use. Disgusted, Dan slammed it shut and threw it on the back seat. “C’mon. Let’s go.”
“That’s it?” Monk groaned as he tooled the clunker down the road again, putting distance between them and the Buick they had wrecked. “Five hundred bucks is all we get tonight?”
“Well, more’n five hundred, like I told you. And the credit cards. Don’t forget the credit cards.” Dan shrugged. “Hey, it may not be the best night we ever had, but it’s okay. We done all right.”
“Well, yeah, I guess so.”
“And this.” Dan held up the cross ripped from Jerome Howell’s neck. “Don’t forget this.”
“He wore that to protect himself, huh?”
“I guess. But it could be worth somethin’ for the gold in it. If it’s gold.”
~ * ~
A little more than an hour after the departure of the two predators, Jerome Howell opened his eyes and asked himself what had happened.
He did not remember.
His head throbbed. He put his left hand to his forehead and discovered there a lump the size of a hen’s egg. Just touching it caused a stab of pain as bright as a bolt of lightning. He looked at his fingers. There was no blood on them. He touched his neck, where he felt an odd prickling sensation. His fingertips discovered a pair of punctures in the skin and came away red.
He felt the punctures again, and for some reason the word “vampire” came to mind. Vampire fangs had not actually made the marks, though; he somehow was sure of that without knowing how he could be so positive. Had he been attacked by someone who wanted others to think he was the victim of a night creature?
Why was he here? What car was this, and why was it resting on its side in the dark with its headlights on and dashboard glowing? The headlight beams revealed a number of pine trees grouped around the machine like giant spiders about to pounce on a crippled insect.
He looked up at the car door above him. Could he boost himself up to it and open it? He must try. Failing in that, he would have to get the window open. Perhaps that would be best anyway. The car had automatic window controls, he noted. He reached for the ignition key.
There was no key in the ignition.
What now?
He was finding it hard to think straight, even to think at all. When he struggled to concentrate, the throbbing in his forehead became all but unendurable. But the struggle finally paid off. Go back to opening the door, his mind instructed. You can pull yourself up to it.
Squirming out from under the wheel, he reached up for the door and found he could not work the release. There was a weakness in his fingers. But with beads of moisture forming on his face and salting his lips, he persisted. The door finally opened an inch.
Now he had to boost or pull himself higher to push it farther open, which meant forcing it up. This took time and increased the pounding in his head, causing him to fight for breath. Then a tree beside the car, apparently the one the machine had sideswiped, was so close that the door would open only partway. He had to stretch his aching body to the limit and crawl out like a damaged caterpillar.
At last, though, he stood outside the machine on ground covered with pine needles and was able to explore his body with his hands.
There seemed to be no major injuries except the lump on his forehead. None that caused any sharp pain when touched, at any rate. Nor could he discover any rips in his clothing. But again, why was he here in this strange place? Whose car was this? Most important, who was he?
He was wearing a tan jacket and had a feeling there should be a billfold in its inside pocket. But the pocket was empty, as were all others in both the jacket and his slacks. Perhaps the plates on the car would tell him something.
He went to look, but learned nothing except that the car was from Massachusetts. Was he in Massachusetts now? Did he live near here, close enough to walk home if he could remember where home was?
The trunk lid was open—perhaps had sprung open when the car hit the tree—but the trunk itself was empty except for a jack and spare tire. Well, maybe something in the glove compartment would help him. Climbing back up on the car with the greatest of care, he leaned in through the partly open door and reached down to the dash.
But, like the trunk, the glove compartment yielded nothing.
Who was he? Where was he? How long would the pounding in his head, apparently caused by the egg-sized bruise on his forehead, keep him from remembering?
Whatever the answers, he had to walk out of here. There was no way he could use the car. So where was the road?
The car ought to tell him that, at least. It must have run off a road into this grove of trees. Assuming it had done so in a reasonably straight line, the road should be over there behind the red glow of its taillights. Not too far away, either. With so many trees around, a machine out of control could not have travelled any great distance.
Had he simply blacked out while driving? Or had some other car forced him off the road and gone on without stopping? And what time was it? He had a feeling there ought to be a watch on his left wrist, but there wasn’t. Had he been robbed?
Start walking, he told himself. Just hope to God there’s a house not too far away where you can phone for a doctor and a wrecker.
With both arms outthrust like the antennae of a night-prowling insect, he struggled on through the dark and came to a two-lane blacktop road. A pale moon feebly shone through cloud-gaps above it, providing light enough for him to see by. After flipping a mental coin to reach a decision, he turned blindly to his right. Behind him the lights of the car were still visible among the trees.
He must have walked a long two miles before seeing lamplit windows in a house on his left. No car had passed him in either direction. Wherever this road was, it appeared to be little used.
The windows were three in number and well back from the blacktop. One hundred fifty feet, at least. There was an old wooden mailbox on a post at the end of an unpaved drive. He had to lean close to make out the weathered black letters on it.
CARLETON HODE.
He stood there for a moment gratefully resting, because he had not stopped walking since leaving the car. Had he heard the name Carleton Hode before? He didn’t think so. But then, he didn’t know his own name, did he? Or where he was from. Or whose car he had been driving. He might even be Carleton Hode. Or a neighbour. Perhaps on coming face to face with the people who lived here, he would remember.
Straightening from his slouch against the mailbox, he went plodding down the driveway to the house.
One of its lamplit windows looked out on a long veranda, and the pale shaft of yellow light from it showed him the steps. He climbed them. Approaching the door, he wondered whether he should be honest about not knowing who he was. What would his reaction be if some hurt stranger appeared out of the dark and said, “Please help me, I’ve been in an accident, I don’t know who I am or where I’m from or where I was going when it happened”? Would he let such a person in or slam and lock the door and phone the police?
I could give myself a name, he thought, but shrugged the thought aside and looked for a bell button. Failing to find one, he knocked. Knocked again. Presently he heard slow footsteps approaching over a bare wooden floor.
How should he respond if the person coming to the door asked, “What do you want?”
The door opened with a slight jerk and he found himself face to face with a small, grey-haired woman in a black dress. She stood there peering up at him, waiting for him to speak. “Good evening,” he said. Recalling the name on the mailbox, he added, “Mrs Hode?”
Her expression became a frown. “Who are you?”
Better be honest, he thought. “To be truthful, I don’t know who I am at the moment.” Feeling weak again, as he had at the mailbox, he put a hand against the doorframe to steady himself. “I’ve had an accident with my car. Please—may I use your telephone to call for help?”
She leaned forward to peer at him more closely, and he half remembered something. Had he picked up a hitchhiker sometime before his accident? An old, grey-haired woman in a black dress? This very woman, perhaps?
No, no. If anything like that had happened, the person he picked up would never have walked away and left him unconscious, perhaps dying, in a wrecked car. His mind was playing tricks on him.
“Accident?” the woman echoed. “You’ve had an accident?”
“About two miles down the road. I don’t know what happened. When I came to, the car was on its side in a grove of trees and I had this lump on my head.”
He pointed to the bruise and she leaned closer to examine it. “M’m. It does look nasty,” she said in a thin voice. “Come with me, please.”
Closing the door behind him, he trailed her down a lamplit hall to an archway on the right, and through that into a lamplit living room. Or perhaps, in this part of New England in a house as old as this, it was referred to as a parlour. To his surprise, two of its three ancient, overstuffed chairs were occupied by a man and a woman. The man, wearing a dark suit complete with jacket, was tall, swarthy, even handsome in a foreign sort of way. The woman, definitely of old New England stock, was at least as old as his guide and as old-fashioned in her dress. The only other pieces of furniture in the room were two small tables on which stood kerosene lamps with ornate, cut-glass bases and tall glass chimneys.
Mrs Hode—if his guide was Mrs Hode—said to the other two, “This man has been hurt in a car accident and doesn’t know who he is.”
The pair gazed at him with such intensity that Howell was tempted to turn and run.
“Haven’t you a driver’s licence?” asked the man, speaking with an accent.
“No, I don’t. Or anything else with a name on it. Someone must have emptied my pockets while I was unconscious.”
“It would seem you have a problem, then.”
“If I might use your phone-—”
“To call whom?”
“Nine-one-one, I suppose.”
“There is no Nine-one-one here.”
“A doctor, then? One who lives within reach?”
“None would be willing to come here at this hour.” The swarthy man extended a long, bony finger to point at a brass clock on the wall. “It is past midnight.”
Howell was startled. Past midnight? How long had he been unconscious there in the car?
“You had better forget about a doctor tonight.” The man’s gaze flicked darkly to the woman who had opened the door, then to the other one. “Ladies, I believe what this man needs most is a good night’s rest. Don’t you agree? I don’t know why we can’t let him have the spare room for tonight. Then if he is no better in the morning we can call Doctor—ah—Jones.” He waited while the two women exchanged questioning looks, then added impatiently, “Well?”
“All right,” said the one who had opened the door.
“Yes, I think so,” the other echoed.
With bits and pieces of memory struggling to sort themselves out in his mind, Jerome Howell sat silently staring. The two women were sisters, he decided. The man could be the husband of one of them, or just someone living here. Was this the entire household? And were they the Hodes whose name was on the mailbox?
Why did he have such a strong feeling that the Hodes had died long ago, the house had long since been abandoned as old and worthless, and these three had simply moved in recently and taken it over?
The man with the foreign accent was gazing at him. “Well, sir? Do you agree that what you most need is a good night’s sleep?”
“With all due respect, sir, I’d prefer to see a doctor,” Howell said experimentally. “Is there a cab I could call to take me to one?”
“There are no taxicabs in this small town.”
“What town is this?”
“Ellenton.”
Another jog to his memory. He knew the name Ellenton. But Ellenton what? New Hampshire? He thought so but was afraid to ask. Whoever they were, these people must already suspect him of being unstable. “Well ... if I can’t get to a doctor, perhaps you’re right in saying a night’s sleep ...”
“Good.” The swarthy man pushed himself out of his chair and took up one of the lamps. He was even taller than he had appeared to be when seated, Howell noted. Even more handsome. Were his clothes a bit newer, less seedy, he might well have attracted attention even in a place like New York City.
“Come with me, please.”
Jerome Howell trailed his host up a wide flight of uncarpeted stairs and along a bare upper hall to the rear of the ancient house, where the fellow stopped before the last of several doors and produced a ring of keys. He inserted one into an old-fashioned lock. Strange, Howell thought with a touch of apprehension. How many people kept bedroom doors locked?
Entering the room, the fellow placed the lamp on a bedside table, and by its light Howell saw that the room was a large one. It had four windows. The bed was a massive old four-poster of pine. Completing the furnishings were two ancient chests-of-drawers and a bedroom chair with faded rosebuds on its skirt of chintz.
“The bed is ready,” the tall man said in his mellow voice, with just a trace of a smile. “Perhaps you should retire at once, no? You appear to be very tired, sir.”
“Are you sure this won’t inconvenience you, Mr Hode?”
“I assure you, it is no trouble. Let me get you something to sleep in.” Striding to a chest, the man dropped on one knee to open its bottom drawer. “Here now. These will fit you, I believe.” He placed a pair of grey flannel pyjamas on the bed and turned to lift a long-fingered hand in farewell. “Goodnight, sir. Rest well.”
He went out. Howell heard the key turn in the lock and realized he was a prisoner. A prisoner in a town called Ellenton, in the state of New Hampshire. And suddenly, with the shock of that frightening realization, all the rest of it flooded back into his memory.
He knew his name. He knew he was a vacationing professor of philosophy whose hobby was the investigation of psychic phenomena. He knew he had received a letter from the town of Ellenton, signed by twenty-two of its citizens, imploring him to come to their town and investigate reports of vampirism—especially the rumour that the most renowned vampire of them all, Count Dracula, had chosen to pay the town of Ellenton a visit and was now in residence here.
More and more came back. He remembered he had planned to arrive in Ellenton about three in the afternoon but had been delayed in Portsmouth by car trouble. He recalled that hours later, when it was dark, he had picked up an old woman—one of the two old women now in the almost bare parlour downstairs. Then an old clunker of a car had run him off the road—perhaps deliberately—and when he regained consciousness in his wrecked car, his passenger was no longer there. She could hardly have escaped injury, but still she had vanished.
And now this house. And this tall, thin, handsome man who could easily be the Count Dracula of history, written about so vividly in Bram Stoker’s famous novel, and described in the letter the Ellenton group had sent him when soliciting his services. And the locked door. Shaking with fear, he hurried to the door and tried to open it.
It would not budge.
A scratching sound at his back caused him to lurch about in panic and look at the windows. All along, he had been telling himself he did not trust this house or these people, and should not risk going to sleep here. Now he knew he should not have ignored those instincts!
Dark shapes had appeared at all three windows, blocking out the faint wash of moonlight. Were they birds or bats? Bats, of course! Huge ones with monstrous wings and ugly, mouth-agape heads. In each of the three mouths gleamed a pair of dagger-like fangs.
Simultaneously the three hurled themselves at the bubbly old window panes.
Despite his years of research, he half expected an implosion of shattered glass but there was none. The winged things passed through the panes without breaking them. The only sound accompanying their rush was the wet-towel flapping of their wings.
With an ear-splitting cry of terror Howell hurled himself at the locked door. It shuddered under the impact but would not yield. Flung back, he fell to his knees, and as he jerked about to face the intruders, a last lingering memory returned to him.
In wild desperation he clawed at his throat, where a golden cross should have been dangling from a golden chain.
The cross was not there.
But seconds later the fangs were. Three gleaming pairs of them, driving deep into his neck.
~ * ~
When he awoke, he was lying on the bed and the tall, handsome foreigner sat there beside him, smiling down at him. “There are some things you should know before you go on with your life here,” the fellow said calmly. “Things about life itself, if I may. Do you recall being run off the road by two young men on your way here?”
“Yes,” Howell heard himself saying.
“You were not their first victim, of course. For quite some time now they have been robbing strangers who passed through here—frequently killing them in the process, as they so nearly killed you. And we, my two aged ladies downstairs and I, have been blamed for these atrocities because the two young men make it seem that those attacked are the victims of vampires. You yourself have their false vampire mark on your neck, in case you haven’t noticed.”
He paused, shrugged, then leaned a bit closer. “Sadly, these two young criminals are not remarkable in this day and age, friend. Just listen to the news any evening on television or read it in the daily papers. A fifteen-year-old youth rapes and kills his grandmother, and who cares? A girl in Texas, only twelve years old, beats to death an infant barely able to walk. Mere children burn down a house because they decide they don’t like the man who owns it. All over this sad country, all over the world, insane violence increases while those who should be trying to stop it shrug their shoulders and look the other way.”
Howell lay there staring up at him.
“So the two ladies downstairs sent for me, and I came,” continued the man with the accent. “Not to stay here long, you understand, but to help if I could. Because someone must step in to put a stop to these horrors. Don’t you agree, Mr Howell?”
To Howell’s surprise his mind was functioning normally again, but he still needed a moment to absorb and evaluate what he had just heard. He frowned then. “But if you do to these people what you always did—what, apparently, you have just done to me—they will become one of you, won’t they? One of us? Isn’t that how it works? The victim becomes a vampire too?”
The other shook his head. “Only when such is desired. Students of the occult—like you, sir—have been making that mistake for years. We need you; therefore you are now one of us. But if we had not needed you, you and I would not now be having this conversation.”
“But what—what do you need me for?” Howell asked.
The other reached out to touch him on the shoulder and said with a smile, “You will soon see, friend. Rest, now, to prepare yourself.” And suddenly he was no longer sitting there on the bed. Howell, the new Jerome Howell, was alone.
~ * ~
Seven days have passed since Monk Morrisey and Dan Clay ran Jerome Howell’s Buick off the road. The two have spent the money they took from the unconscious Howell and are on the prowl again. Seriously, too, because they are out of pot, out of cocaine, out of everything. They spent their last few dollars half an hour ago on beers at a late-night bar.
Dan Clay is behind the wheel this time. Turning his head, he scowls at his companion. “Damn it, Monk, we shouldn’a done it. I shouldn’a let you talk me into it.”
“Done what? Wha’ you talkin’ ‘bout?”
“We shouldn’a stopped for beers. Look.” Dan thrusts his right arm out so Monk can see the watch on his wrist—the watch they took from Jerome Howell a week ago. “It’s almost midnight, for the luvva god. We ain’t gonna find nobody on the road this late.”
It is a sparkly bright New England night. No clouds. A round, near-full moon transforms the road into a shining black ribbon. On the left, just ahead, is an old wooden mailbox on a post.
Looking up from the watch in front of his face, Monk Morrisey sees something step into view from the driveway there. It is a man wearing dark trousers and a white, long-sleeved shirt.
One of the white sleeves flaps up as the man steps into the road to beg a lift.
Monk’s voice gurgles with glee. “Hey, hey! Looka what we got us, Dan! A volunteer!” He makes fists of his hands and pounds his knees. “Ease up, man! Ease up!”
Dan takes his foot off the gas pedal and the clunker slows to a jerky stop. As the man at the mailbox walks toward them, Monk leans forward to peer at him through the windshield.
“Wait, Dan. Jeez. It’s the writer guy.”
“Who?”
“The guy with the book. The Buick we ran off the road the last time we were out. Don’t you remember?”
Dan Clay remembers. The book about vampires. They had thrown it away. And just tonight, when out of money, they had swapped the man’s gold cross for their last two beers in that late-night bar.
“We won’t get nothin’ outa him,” Monk says with a groan.
“We already cleaned him.”
The beers have made Dan argumentative. “Who says we won’t? He could‘ve got paid by now for comin’ here, couldn’ he? He’s been here a week.”
“But he just walked outa the old Hode place, dummy. Nobody in his right mind would be stayin’ in a creepy abandoned house if he had money for a motel room.”
“It’s a roof, ain’t it? And if he believes in vampires, he coulda shacked up there ‘cause he likes old houses. He just needs a ride to town ‘cause we wrecked his wheels, that’s all.”
“Well, all right,” Monk grudgingly concedes. “If you say so.”
They wait then in silence while the author of How to Protect Yourself Against Vampires continues his approach. By the time the man leans against the door on Monk’s side, the two in the clunker have even begun to grin a little. But their grins freeze into grotesque expressions of terror when the door is violently jerked open and they see Jerome Howell’s face up close ...
... and are trapped in their seats by the hypnotic stare of his sunken, glowing eyes ...
... and see the long, gleaming fangs at the sides of his opening mouth.
~ * ~