She ignored it and headed for the large tree.
Carol snuck up to one of the first floor windows. Inside, a large ballroom sat empty save for frames of artwork. She recognized one piece right away, a portrait of Slave with a young girl. He wore black with white ruffles from his shirt. The girl wore a high collared, yellow dress with long armings. Her hair was brushed upwards, giving a sense of regality. It was Beth.
At that moment the couple entered. Carol gripped her hand on the ledge as the man in the purple cloak approached her daughter. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but her daughter smiled at him. Her eye focused on the vampire’s face and her heart began to beat fast. Memories flooded back from that night.
Carol quickly ducked down, as she caught a glimpse of the man walking over to the window. She balled up below the ledge.
“Hey!” a voice called out to her.
One of the grounds keepers had spotted her. She reached down to grab the Bowie and then arched it out towards his own left eye. Carol dispatched him quickly, but she heard others coming from the commotion she had caused. She looked back through the window, but Slave and Beth were gone. She pressed against the glass and the window opened. Hearing the voices get closer, she dove into the mansion and locked the window behind her. Turning back was no longer an option.
Carol heard laughter. A crack through the doors gave her a full view of the dining hall. A crystal chandelier hung above a large table. Food decorated the length of it, but Slave and Beth were the only ones there. There were two other places set, but empty.
“Why don’t you come in Carol? We’ve been expecting you,” Slave called out.
Her eye locked on to him as she gripped the Bowie handle tighter. She pushed the door open with her free hand and entered.
“Mom!” Beth yelled and ran to her.
Carol embraced her little girl now grown; however, she kept her eye fixed on Slave, who continued sitting and sipping from his wine glass. The thick murky substance in it coated his lips. Her body screamed for vengeance, but the warmth from her daughter’s embrace kept it down.
Carol touched Beth’s face, examining her closely. Her eyes were clear and under her own volition. Her skin was pink and full of life. There was no spell on her this time. She was still human.
“I see you took advantage of the window I opened for you. I must say that I was surprised and excited that you were still alive after that night.” Slave said.
She started to unsheathe her knife.
“How rude. We have such an intimate history! There is no need for violence here…” The vampire snapped his fingers and two of his lackeys escorted Dave to one of the empty seats. “Please sit down. I will not ask again.”
Carol looked to her husband and returned the blade to its sheath. He was beaten, bruised, and bound. She knew he could take a great deal of punishment, but seeing him like this tore at her heart. She walked, trying not to shake, to the empty seat beside him.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He tried to talk, but only slurred sounds came out. Carol touched his cheeks, feeling his fractured jaw in pieces.
Slave cleared his throat. “Your daughter has something important to tell both of you.”
Beth extended her hand next to her face. A golden wedding band wrapped around her ring finger with a diamond set facing toward them.
Carol’s eye widened at the glittering stone and felt her stomach spasm.
Slave extended his glass. “We are to be family!”
“Monster!” She felt her control slipping. “What did you do to her?”
“Beth knows everything,” Slave said. “What I did to you was wrong, and I am truly stricken with remorse, but this should make up for it.”
“Fuck you!” Carol popped to her feet. She began to hurry toward him when she felt Beth’s hand clench her arm.
“I love him…”
Carol’s hands moved on their own accord. The light of the chandelier reflected the flash of polished silver, the edge found its mark, and her own daughter lay suddenly at her feet. The Bowie knife had struck deep, delivering her daughter away from this horrible world. Carol yanked it out.
“What have I done?” Tears welled up in her eye and dripped down to her daughter’s cheek. Carol held her as she felt the last breath leave.
“Such a shame.” Slave rose from his seat and nodded to his lackeys. “I would have turned her at the peak of her ripeness, but you had to do that.”
His lackeys took Dave away, leaving Slave and Carol alone.
“You took everything from me that night,” she sobbed.
“And I will again this one,” he said, moving at incredible speed.
Carol felt herself suddenly against him, happening just as before. She pushed against his face, trying to break free, again to no avail. The dread of a repeat of five years ago sent her to clawing and biting at him like a madwoman. She felt her ribs crack from the strain, forcing her to scream out.
“I’ll take you with me!” Carol hissed.
“I wanted us to be one happy family. Since I can’t turn your daughter, I’ll keep you instead.” He sniffed her hair. “Dave won’t suffer long.”
Carol shook her head.
Slave gripped her cheeks. “I won’t turn you right away. I’ll let you get older, more broken.” He tore her leather jacket exposing her scarred body.
Carol decked him with her head, freeing herself from his grasp.
“Your blood, your very being exhilarates me. You will make a fine vampire.”
In an instant, Carol heard the twang and something fast pierce the air. Slave cringed in pain in front of her and she saw Dave in the doorway, bleeding from his neck. He smiled to her as he dropped to the floor. Slave’s coven filtered inside the dining room.
Carol clenched the silver Bowie knife one last time for the final hunt, thanking her husband. Slave moved too slowly, and his lackeys were still too far away. She jammed the knife into the left side of his chest, pushing the tip through the back of his ribs. It penetrated deep into his heart and out the other side. He gargled and pleaded and she savored them all in the blink of a moment before his ashes coated her face. Just as the others drew close, she turned the blade’s tip toward her own heart. Carol pressed it in quickly, finishing the vileness that she had come to cleanse.
Under a pen name, Jon Callot was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. He writes short story horror and children’s non-fiction. He has published horror work in Ghostlight magazine and Pill Hill Press’s Big Book of New Short Horror. Any comments or suggestions are welcomed at [email protected].
The Predators of Winter
E. Dagforth
When the sun is a broken promise of warmth, winter can be an undying monster; especially when your farmlands stretch out like an uncrossable white sea. It can be worse yet inside your farmhouse, and heat from your pot-bellied stove and food from your hens are little comfort against grim hours born hard as days. The coldness can strain your nerves, pervert your will. Dishes in the sink may be clean; the baby may be fed and bedded down. The attic may be organized, ready for another spring—if spring will come—but these are only distractions from a wrathful, omnipotent winter. Matthew and Sara tried to make the best of those freezing times.
With egg-basket in hand she crunched through the lacquered snow and tried to imagine an enchanted wonderland of the desolation. Wisps of breath curled through an imaginary smile as she clambered over slippery planks to the hen-house. Poor creatures, she thought, as the coop greeted her with scamper and cluck, and the must of dirty straw. Lazy slivers of sunlight swam with dust as they filtered through seams in the rude flat timber walls. As her eyes adjusted to the fading glare, a tangle of red and white ribbons strew like ghastly confetti at her feet. The drizzle of blood and mangled feathers brought a sickening swell into her throat. Not again was a belated prayer for mercy on her tongue. She dreaded to tell Matthew. When he became angry, she became nervous, but that was inevitable now. She steppe
d gingerly around the mauled carcass; her teeth dented against her lip, and tucked a meager harvest of brown eggs into the basket’s yellow cloth.
Matthew was a hard-working man to everyone who knew him, and like most everyone he knew, had been poor all his life. His ax parted birch blocks behind their two-story farm house, and the smell of the timber made him long for summer hayfields. He saw the approach of Sara’s shadow from around the house, and listened to the crumple of her boots pick through footprints in the snow. He knocked the bit into a knotted mass of defiant hickory, then stretched his back and watched the sun in her eyes like a fallen halo. He saw the basket in her arm and the expression on her face and then looked away, demanding an explanation from a deaf-dumb heaven.
In a frozen huff he asked, “Another one?” A look of disgust creased his face and coaxed from her an attempt at consolation.
“It was only the skinny one with the bald piece on her back,” she said as he muttered oaths under icy breaths.
He forced a smile at her, wishing he could at least pretend to share her optimism, but it was the third casualty in two weeks.
Her frail smile belied a fearful heart as she followed her tracks back to the house, ax strokes of frustration chiming and smacking against the obstinate hickory.
Inside, she watched from the window over the kitchen sink as he vented his anger on the woodpile. She wrenched a dishcloth in small white fists with his every futile stroke.
They had contended with predators before. The last had been in the autumn; ages before hell masqueraded as winter, when a wily fox had made off with three good laying hens before Matthew had succeeded in trapping the vixen. Twelve hens and a geriatric rooster had provided much of their sustenance since, but a meaner predator vexed them now, and this morning the count became nine.
The weasel responsible, Matthew knew, was a diminutive murderer who killed for pleasure as much as need. For Sara’s sake, he refrained from shouting at phantoms, he knew how nervous she could get, but the veins in his temples bulged and for awhile he cherished the anger for its warmth.
She heard the peal of his ax stop, and looked from the frost-scrolled window to see an abandoned woodpile.
Around suppertime, baby Gwen kept her mother company. Sara sang lullabies to her blonde year-old moppet, and Gwen sang back in the adorable babble a mother loves to hear. She had dressed the murdered hen as best she could and boiled some of the last beans from a poor harvest; who could have known the winter would be so callous, or last so long? Matthew hadn’t come in all day, and with the sun nearly gone she feared him frozen to the soul.
The front door opened abruptly at five o’clock. His face was ruddy and swollen, and his hands trembled as though palsied as he unlaced his boots.
“I expected you to come in and warm up hours ago,” she said sympathetically.
He hung a threadbare coat on the pegboard in their foyer and peeled woolen socks from his numbed feet.
“Too much to do,” he said, excusing his tardiness with a shake of his head.
He didn’t have to explain. He smelled of trap-lure and wood smoke, and his fingers were stained with walnut resin from boiling and blackening his traps.
Sara poured the last of their milk as Gwen cooed at her father; it lifted his spirits only a little. He gently tugged her from her highchair and swept her over his head, “There’s my angel girl.”
The baby giggled as he brought her down with a whoosh. The cold and scratch of his beard widened her eyes as he kissed her neck, but she didn’t cry.
They took their humble meal in silence; just like the icy solitude that lie beyond their hearth. Occasionally, the baby’s sing-song provided a brief respite from the mute tension, and on one of these occasions Sara put her napkin on the table and summoned her courage.
“Did you fix the wagon’s wheel?” she asked, just above a whisper.
Matthew shook his head again. “Old Joe’s skin and bones as it is. He couldn’t handle the strain and neither could the wagon. Not in this ice.”
Sara nodded, but desperation gave her the voice to answer back.
“It’s been four months, Matthew.”
He looked up from his last thin bite of poultry. “Have I forgotten that?” His reply was heady with frustration, and the tone salted with spite.
“We need things,” she said, more afraid of not saying it than his response. “The pantry is almost empty and we can’t live off the chickens much longer.”
“No,” he agreed, looking into his empty plate. “Not if that goddamn weasel has anything to say about it.”
Everyday he’d become more intimate with their plight, and it haunted him. He’d wrestled with his options, but even a trip to town on foot would be perilous; temperatures and snow drifts what they were. Besides, to leave his family alone frightened him; what might become of them if he didn’t make it back? But, choices had become an unaffordable luxury.
“I’ll set out in a day or two,” he promised. “I’ve just been hoping the weather would break.”
The sweet bouquet of Matthew’s pipe, which usually brightened the room, was just so much smoke as he bounced Gwen on his knee.
Come again tonight, you thieving son-of-a-bitch, he thought with a grin, satisfied with the traps he’d set. I’ll tack your rotten hide to the barn door.
Sara stoked the fire while she watched her husband and daughter play. She drew a shawl around her shoulders, and shivered.
The jaws of the steel traps were clenched, but still hungry. A trail of ruffled, splattered chicken plumes smeared across the floor and, as though in retaliation to his futile ambush, the eggs had been looted as well. Pallid strands of egg-film and frozen yolk clung from the roosts as fragments of chocolate shell told a tale of plunder. Even if the weasel moved on, Matthew reasoned, eight hens wouldn’t do them another three weeks. The winter had become a stygian netherworld, and a villainous weasel its Great Fiend. He decided to make his push for town after he’d killed the weasel the old-fashioned way.
Sara knew her husband’s tenacity better than she would have liked, but for him to brave such a merciless night distressed her. She rocked the baby and rubbed the soreness from her breast, consoling herself that Gwen wouldn’t go hungry as long as she didn’t.
Everything on the planet was dead; nothing left to make a sound but the drone of silence in his ears. Now and then, Matthew slowly twisted in the dark hen-house just to feel the rustling of his trousers. The old shotgun was cemented to his stiff, tattered gloves, but the single finger that stretched through them was numb to the trigger. The night slashed him with knives and brushed his beard with frost, while cramps knotted in his thighs and his belly pinched against his spine with hunger. A small stalactite formed at the tip of his nose, parched eyes ached with cold sear and clocks ticked elsewhere, beyond the vanishing point of the pitiless cold. Only when morning turned his head, did he rise; with all the grace of a rusted machine.
As Sara chased the chill from Matthew’s feet with her small, strong fingers, she saw a man at odds with more than a weasel.
Matthew had come from a poorer family than most, and despite his efforts, poor he remained. At times, she could read the fear and frustration in his eyes, reflective of more than the discontent of poverty. Within him dwelt another man, as cunning and remorseless as the creature that tormented him. He had been that man when they’d first met, still in uniform and world-weary. Not without a shudder did she remember how cold and cruel he could be. She had tried to forget the night, years ago, in Des Moines when he’d unleashed his anger on a tramp seeking a handout. Of course, she told herself, he wasn’t that man anymore. He’d changed before they were married, even more after Gwen was born. But his relentless spirit, the one that had drawn her to him in the first place, had never died. He’d always been evasive about his life as a soldier, but she’d heard stories she didn’t want to know were true. As she watched him sleep, she wondered what he might still be capable of, if he were pushed. A chill hissed up her back,
cold as the wind howling against the panes.
The report couldn’t bear the telling, so she let him dream of spring. She made a point to be occupied when he lashed on his suspenders and patchwork trousers, and hurried for the hen-house without a word to her.
With the brittle ice under his feet, he surveyed the previous night’s battlefield in the half-light of the chicken coop. The old hen lay still and maimed under her roost. Her head cocked to watch him come in, but she had no strength to do more. A second bird was a grisly mesh of blood, straw, and feathers; the old rooster’s throat had been slit right where Matthew had staged his fruitless ambush.
In an instant he forgot it was freezing. Hatred rose to a froth of bile in his throat until spittle dripped through teeth clenched in rage.
Are you punishing me? He questioned God. Or is this creature infernal? Both ideas conjured images of a bedeviled past. He had seen the Hand of God at work on San Juan Hill, and had felt the Devil’s breath in the foxholes of Cuba. The more the thought stormed his mind, the more certain he became that the weasel was more than pelt and fang, but a harbinger of death from what his grandmother had called “the other side.” And it had trained a baleful eye on his family.
Matthew surrendered himself to a fury that collected like molten dross in the pit of his stomach and hardened to intractable resolve. He had long sought to be rid of the darker man he’d been; tried to replace the warrior with a farmer. But he was at war again; he needed the soldier, his best and last weapon to save the three of them not only from hunger but from the wrath of a vindictive God or a demon’s scheme; they were both the same to him. Violent resolution throttled the farmer, the husband, the father in him as the man who’d thrust bayonets into enemy soldiers was re-born. The old, bitter taste of death became a palpable flavor in his mouth, and faces of the men he’d killed flashed in his eyes.
“You’re going to town?” Sara asked, both encouraged and anxious at the prospect.
Use Enough Gun (Legends of the Monster Hunter Book 3) Page 5
