Vampires Don't Sparkle!

by Michael West

  “They reached the crest of the hill where their meager cabins sat like Christ seated in judgment over our town. The people of Parsons labored beneath a feast of a moon. Between bolts of pine trees, oil lamps swayed in marched unison to the flop of their feet along the dusty road. Caught up in the urge that first made Cain splinter his brother’s skull with a stone.

  “The pull of blood. I recognized the quickening of the pulse. The metronome of the hunt. The taste of copper on the tongue. Blood drew them like a thirsty man to honeysuckle.

  “No, not them. Us.

  “The plaintive cackle of chickens first announced their presence as they neared the first farm. A shadow peered from behind the henhouse.

  “‘Evenin’ gen’lmen,’ Jim Archer said, his old shotgun, reminiscent of a Confederate provosts’ musket, cradled in his arms like a bouquet he’d come a-courtin’ with. He tanned hides down at the Pruitt Shoe Company. A good man. Never tried to cheat you. He should’ve been running a middle buster, plowing his field, not challenging them.

  “‘Where you going with that gun, nigger?’ Holten asked. I heard the voice as clear as day, yet it sounded as alien as anything I had heard. Angry, distorted, little more than a growl, not in control of his own faculties. Like a puddle of quicksilver, each of them was a drop that pooled together in one unseemly mass. One voice speaking for the whole.

  “‘Thought I might stick around. Use it iffen I have to,’ Jim said in that steady, unintimidated voice of his. By light of day, this might simply have been a man protecting his family’s farms, but that night, right then, he was only a nigger threatening white men with a gun. Part of me wanted to cry ‘Put the gun down and run, Jim. Don’t be so damned proud.’ But my silence, the conspiracy of silence which kept secrets long buried like cancer eating away from the inside continued to hold reign.

  “‘We takin’ you down, boy.’

  “The thing about quicksilver is that once you drop it, it scatters in little drops that you have to sweep up.

  “But you could never track all the drops.

  “Men pounced on Jim from the surrounding shadows. They jerked his gun high, with only a single shot fired off. Two men held him while others beat him. Others set his henhouse, and then his own house, ablaze. He must’ve sent his family to a neighbor’s house. I could almost hear his wife pleading with his stubborn mule self to join them. Now the only voice heard was an unsteady, terrified one that cried out to Jesus.

  “‘Southern niggers deserve a genuine lynchin’!’ Holten coaxed in mincing school mistress fashion, as if to school boys with their primers, all dirty grins and horrid chuckles. He danced about overturned chairs, climbing atop Jim’s hay-filled wagon for a better view. Holten against the flames, the very picture of the devil incarnate, his features, dark and twisted a wrathful shade of red.

  “Frenzied whoops of carousing, between their cheers, their howls, and their imprecations arose at his suggestion. Even as the smoke seared my nostrils, through the tumbling smoke, buried in the flames, Jim was no longer Jim. No longer human, but some vague threat wrapped in flesh. Clubs smashed his head open with brutal efficiency, the poor cuss. loody, unconscious, near death. Lofted into the air, they passed from man to man, a battered ragdoll no one wanted yet everyone wanted a piece of. ‘I got some rope,’ someone yelled. A noose slid around Jim’s blood-slickened neck. As he was hoisted into the air, the rope broke.

  “‘Get stronger rope,’ another voice bellowed. It sounded like one of my neighbors, but again, the voice was distorted. Ugly. Barely human. Jim, however, was none the wiser and long past caring. In order to put the rope about Jim’s neck, someone (I?) stuck his (my?) fingers inside the gaping scalp and lift his head by it. What monsters we had become, to think nothing of the fact that my hands were awash in the man’s blood. To drink deep of the violence to quench the thirst for blood.

  “‘Grab hold and pull! Pull for Parsons!’ Holten yelled. We pulled Jim about seven feet off the ground and left him hanging in a grove of mulberries and locusts, a blood-smeared, sambo scarecrow. I drew water from his well. Tepid water, tasting like beech trees and old bucket, but it was wet in my parched throat. Though my thirst remained unabated. The evening had barely begun.

  “We set afire the shacks of poorer Negroes who lived in the surrounding area. The flaming wood skeletons painted the night in amber hues. We stoned and clubbed Negro men, women, and children, whoever we came across. We were a mess of people tramping about in the mud; muddy despite the fact that it hadn’t rained in quite a spell, but you stomp enough people, your boots’ll get wet just the same.

  “I don’t know if you knew or not, but I was a gunner in the war. Worked as swift as we could. Focused, we were. The labor was meticulous or so it seemed to the other calvary men. We was always asked ‘how do you remember what all you have to do in that confusion?’ I became numb to it, if I were ever truly conscious to it to begin with.

  “The key was to concentrate on the work. Experience which came in handy that night. We destroyed any saloon or business that catered to Negroes. We overturned the tables, drank the liquor, broke the windows, then torched the place in view of hundreds of spectators.

  “As the night wore on, the creature we had become had to find new ways to amuse itself. Make no mistake, on the fringes of the chaos, I fed. Blood smeared my lips and dappled my neck. But the blood on me was out of thirst. Primal necessity. No one glanced a second time in my direction. In the shadows of night, however, neighbor reveled with neighbor, spurred on by their own blood sport. We was all a-whoopin’ an’ a-hollerin’; having a gay ole time of things. We were heady on the intoxication of that night’s pursuits, emboldened by the fine liqueur of fear. I was blood drunk. Fear — ours and theirs — swept us along. Fever infected our brains, and we were a brigade of possessed madmen; grinnin’ devils, teeth looming large and yellow in the amber glow of the torches, going about the business of hell.

  “The frightful din of windows breaking. The clutter and clang of fences being knocked over. The screaming. The caterwauling. Babies crying, mewling, like they were past scared tears and simply awaited what they knew was coming. Or worse. Eyes wide open taking in everything that they saw, they were just too young for their brains to know what to do with the information. Not crying a bit, just staring, with dead eyes, eyes no child should have.

  “Shooting residents as they ran through smoke and flames became a game, monstrous fun, if one were to judge by the laughter, hollering and clapping. One Negro in particular, gave us quite the sport of a chase. That crazed fool dashed from his burning home. We fired by the score, not to hit him, only to scare him into running. I kept waiting for a fox hunting bugle to be blown. He zig-zagged between the few buildings that remained untorched. The men fanned out, more amused than perturbed, between the shacks and sheds, eyeing the crawl spaces and nooks that our quarry had to know far better than we. Some men had been foolish enough to follow him directly and were soon tangled up in trash.

  “Unfortunately, for him, his panic at our proximity took him down an alleyway. The nearest three men or so followed him in. He regained his senses long enough to use his head. He smacked the first man on him, knocking him clean out, which gave the rest of them pause, pause enough for him to scamper past them.

  “I found myself rooting, even praying, for him, but only the way you cheer for the hopeless horse in a race. God heard my prayer as well as any made for myself the night I was cornered trying to fight past just as ancient a hate on that fated battle field so long ago. Only the Negro’s fate was more merciful. All it took was one well-aimed shot. The Negro leapt into the air, his sprawl met with our shouts of approval. As the flames crept toward his body, he writhed, attempted to get up. A few warning shots kept him low. The flames marched on. He looked up at me with his yellow eyes desperately searching out hope. His veiny hands pulled him away from the flames’ grasp, faster than the flames moved to catch him.

  “Someone shouted that his arms should be broken,
see how fast he’d crawl then. A man stepped forward and brought his heavy boot down upon the Negro’s arms. He stomped until a bone poked through the flesh. The terrible snap it made.”

  The scrape of his boots as he paced along his wood floors drew him out of his revelry. The old rocking bed creaked as she rolled over in her sleep. It neared dawn now. Soon she would wake, full of hope and promise. So often he’d visited those of his line from when he was human. Not to watch over them, but to see what he’d missed. To touch, to rekindle, whatever remained of his humanity.

  The story was almost done now.

  “The soft glow of the burning moon showered the Negro shanties; a mournful luminescence over the ashen countryside. The low murmur of wind whispered through the tree branches. We had cut a bloody swathe from one side of the Scott Settlement to the other. I don’t know how much was left, I only knew the one cabin that stood in front of me. Mocking as all of the Scott Settlement had mocked Parsons, and what we stood for.

  “The single log cabin room was built of logs split open and pegged together. From my window-side vantage point, one window, two doors. The wind whistled through the black cracks of the wall boards. The black earth along the floorboards crunched beneath soft footfalls. A woman hummed as she tended the black iron kettle that swung above the fire. She pressed her delicate hand against the small of her back to ease whatever back strain she may have had. The backdrop of the fire against her robe revealed how full with child she was. She slumped wearily into a chair, the sole furnishing in the room except for the pallet in one corner and a spinnin’ wheel and loom in the other.

  “She had a wheel an’ loom in one corner of the cabin. Her son scrambled into her lap, enthusiastically clutching a tattered hand-me-down children’s story book. An oil lamp burned unsteadily above them as they stole a moment to read.

  “Their brown eyes strained against the fine print. Her pointed nose, straight and long, set against her high cheekbones. Her skin, the color of leaves in the fall, she kissed her son with the loving affection I’d seen your mother so often show you.

  “That was when we heard the scraping sound.

  “They looked up, out the window, I scrambled out of view as I heard the sound. I wondered why I chose to get out of sight, though I had no reason to hide. I knew the all too familiar sound, but maybe she didn’t. So far away from everyone else, she may have been too far removed from ‘the trouble.’ Or maybe her husband had left her there while he went out to protect them. Maybe that’s who she thought she heard approach as she excitedly scanned the surrounding woods. But I knew. The woods were deathly still. A throbbing silence. A womb song. Interrupted only occasionally by the rustling of leaves caught up in the night’s breeze. And the scraping sound.

  “The scraping sound drew nearer.

  “Apprehension must have fanned the embers of dread in her soul, with the dawning realization of the scraping sound. The sound of men on a mad march, like papal warriors on yet another unholy crusade. The scrape of gun barrels against tree branches, the early dawn of nearing torches from all sides.

  “‘Manna?’ I heard the little boy ask. He clutched her desperately, perhaps sensing her own fright. Fear-dilated eyes frantically scanned the room.

  “Holten was the first to enter probably because he knew her folk was away. ‘What have we got here?’ he said with a devil’s drawl.

  “‘Nothin’, suh,’ she said. I truly feared for her in that moment. My soul filled with an unspeakable dread. The loose pile of bedding shifted behind her.

  “‘You lyin’ ta me girl?’ he said. His shotgun issued a single report.

  “Executed for her crime of hiding her child. I felt her deep-set eyes poring over me, accusing me, as her limp and lifeless body collapsed into a heap on her floor. Her blood mixed with the dirt, making it look like she bled mud.

  “The wee boy was torn in two by the second report of the shotgun. Blood sprayed the cabin walls. Shot just because … The room filled quickly with the odor of blood. Blood smells. The hovel smelled of a butcher’s shop, at the time of an animal’s butchering. The thick, musky, biting aroma of blood and the earthy odor of slaughtered meat, that was what I smelled that night.

  “‘Look what we got here, boys,’ Holten said, spying the risin’ in her belly.

  “‘What you reckon we ought’n do with it?’ someone asked.

  “‘Someone here needs a doctor,’ Holten said, pulling out his hunting knife, ‘and looks like I’m the nearest surgeon.’ The flesh made a horrific sound as it was torn, not unlike the gutting of a hog. Her open eyes were long past caring. Her insides ripped open as she lay in a pool of her blood. He paused for a moment then found my gaze. And he smiled the same terrible grin he gave me when he spied me hovering over Samuel Demory’s body, my mouth buried in the open rictus of the man’s throat. No revulsion, no horror, only the light of damnable opportunity in his eyes. He resumed his carving until a small purple fleshy mass was pulled from her, sputtering mewls as it gasped for breath. Holten carried it outside with the casual disdain of a man carrying one of his dog’s newborn pups. ‘It’s over, boys,’ Holten jabbed his knife through the infant into a willow tree, letting it hang. And he stared at me with knowing eyes. Leaving it for me, scraps for a dog from his master’s table. ‘Let’s end things.’

  “It didn’t take long for the fire to consume the cabin. The tongues of flames wagged, swollen with the gossip of hate, serenaded by the morning song of whippoorwills. The crackling and spitting of logs, like mocking laughter; they tossed the woman into the fire. Blood splattered their shirt sleeves as if they labored at an abattoir. It was then that I realized that in the light of morning, with time to reflect on what they’d done, they would be able to meet one another’s eyes without care or remorse. Unashamed. Plastered with mud, shivering in the pre-dawn air, my time drew near, an empty sort of fear all over, so I ran to beat all.

  “Holten blamed the whole affair on ‘Negro agitators.’ The conspiracy of silence consumed everyone. From the town leadership down, no one wanted to press the matter. No copy of the newspaper that riled so many of us could be found, not even in the archives. It was as if the paper skipped a day in its publishing history. The state attorney in Jefferson County claimed that he couldn’t prosecute anyone because he was unable to find a single person who witnessed any citizen committing violence that night. No one had that look, that tainted, guilty look of barely held, barely hidden secrets.

  “I’m tired of the hate. I’m tired of the unceasing thirst, that soul ache, which can drive someone to depths they’d never imagine. Even those that prey in the night trembled before the malice of the human heart unchecked.

  “It is almost morning. I had it in my mind to drain you. Prevent you from growing up in this cesspool. But who am I to judge.

  “I’m so tired. And the sun will be up soon. It will be a beautiful view.”

  RATTENKÖNIG

  Douglas F. Warrick

  Douglas F. Warrick’s short stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, The Drabblecast, DailyScienceFiction.com, the Dark Faith anthologies, and elsewhere. His collection, Plow the Bones, is available from Apex Book Company. Douglas splits his time between the United States and East Asia, where he alternates between teaching English and singing in punk rock bands.

  When asked about vampires, he says, “I’ve spent time with a great many pop-cultural vampires. That’s the prerogative and the imperative of anybody who ever engaged in a serious adolescent goth kid phase. And boy did I ever. I dutifully pencilled in the bubbles on my Vampire: The Masquerade character sheet, searched high and low for a fedora to accurately emulate the one worn by David Bowie’s character in The Hunger, harbored actual crushes on a number of the characters from Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls, and memorized the lyrics to Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” and Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting.” Still, of those earlier obsessions, very little interest in things vampiric really remains. Those vampires that have endured in my affection tend to
be ugly, anemic, asexual, even pathetic. The brood of sociopathic social engineers in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Klaus Kinski’s repulsive manipulator in Herzog’s Nosferatu. DeFoe’s skittering, spastic Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire. These are my dudes. These are the guys who, to me, represent the best possible semiotics that the vampire myth can shoulder. Reminders that death isn’t sexy. It’s nasty and unfair and inconvenient and no fun to look at. And it lasts forever.”

  –––––––––––

  She sat Indian-style before them in the Sudden Room. Her face ached. She’d been sitting there with her shoulders slumped and her neck craned, chewing on the insides of her cheeks. She could feel the rough nasty texture of the unsanded, unpainted planks in the floor through her jeans. It smelled like age and dampness in here, and with each breath, some paranoid part of her brain screamed out that she was probably inhaling a floating miasma of old wallpaper and crumbling plaster and prehistoric mold, a chemical buffet. She didn’t want to be here, but she knew that if she left, she would just want to come back. Nothing in the Sudden Room was comfortable.

  The Sudden Room. Oh, the bastard Sudden Room, the nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up and from which some part of her, the self-pitying masochist recently awoke, never wanted to. It had existed in the corner of her eye, a cancer of the periphery, a door at the end of a hallway that didn’t exist. For years, she passed it and never saw it. For years, she stumbled like a sleepwalker from her bed to the bathroom, tracing the wall of the second-floor corridor with her fingers, and still she never noticed the branching hallway, or the door at the end. But once she saw it, like an optical illusion, like a filmic continuity error, she couldn’t unsee it. It was always there, the door to the Sudden Room. As were the things that lived inside.