Blood Kin

by Ronald Kelly

  Evangeline, she answered with a kiss.

  I then turned and, with a dramatic flourish—befitting an actor of the stage… or an evangelist—changed from man to foul. I flew skyward, toward the star-speckled night, gliding over the lofty pines and jagged cliffs of stone, leaving the towering pinnacle of Twilight Mountain behind. The term “as the crow flies” had new meaning to me now.

  As I soared along the dark peaks of the Appalachians, heading homeward for Tennessee, I knew that I could have stayed if I had so chosen. No longer saddled with the chains of morality and spiritual obligation, I could have usurped Evangeline from her throne and forged my unholy kingdom on Twilight Mountain. But that was not where my intentions lay. I had urgent business to attend to on Craven’s Mountain.

  I had kith and kin to bring into the fold.

  From the diary of Elizabeth Millstead Craven

  March 20th, 1898,

  My husband, Josiah, returned home tonight… but not as the man who had left us two weeks before.

  A knocking upon the door awakened me and, lighting a lamp, I went to answer it. “Who is there?” I asked, for the hour was late and I was frightened.

  “Josiah,” he said. “Let me in, woman.”

  I opened the door and stared at him. In the glow of the coal oil lamp I could tell that he was not the same. His countenance was as pale as a garden slug and his teeth were long, narrow, and uncommonly sharp. And his eyes—his eyes!—they glowed with a crimson brilliance, much like the hot embers of the potbelly stove in the kitchen corner.

  “Well?” he demanded. “Will you not invite me into my own house?”

  Instantly, the stories my grandmother had told me when I was a child—of haints and earthbound demons and vampires—came to mind. “No,” I said sharply. “Get thee away from this Christian home, fiend!”

  Then he looked at me with those eyes as luminescent as foxfire and I felt my head swim. “I await your invitation, Elizabeth,” he said sternly.

  Before my will could be taken from me, I pulled a silver crucifix from the concealment of my nightgown… another gift from my Granny Millstead. I extended the cross toward him and he refrained in horror. He withdrew into the night, his bloodless face full of hatred and contempt. His fangs were more evident now, long and sharp like those of a hungry beast.

  “You shall succumb!” he declared. “And, when you do, I shall deal with you harshly!”

  “Leave here and never return again!” I told him, then slammed and bolted the door. Outside, I heard a flutter and a beating of wings, like those of a bird, and he was gone.

  March 21st

  The following morning, I left the house and went to the barn. The sun had risen, spilling over the eastern ridge of the mountain and bathing the farmstead with golden light.

  I looked for evidence of Josiah’s whereabouts, although—if Granny’s tales were correct—he would have never been able to venture into direct sunlight. I spotted something as I came up the pathway and it stopped me dead in my tracks.

  The barn door was open a crack, where I knew it had been securely shut the evening before.

  I lifted the crucifix by its chain and laid it out upon the front of my dress. Then I took a pitchfork that leaned against the barn wall and slowly stepped inside. I looked to the right and the left. To one side was a pile of old hay and cow manure, while on the other stood a jumbled stack of bean poles. Josiah had made them last fall, cutting up an old ash wood tree that had been struck by lightning and fashioning it into long, slender stobs that vines could creep up. The inside of the barn was dark, but not too dark. Shadows lurked in the stalls along the walls and the rafters above the half-loft overhead, but slashes of light arched from the gaps in the wall boards at all angles. If the undead were as abhorrent of sunlight as Granny claimed, Josiah would have had a difficult time crossing the floor without being burnt to a cinder.

  I looked across that barn and finally saw what I was looking for. There was a feed bin at the far end with a hinged lid on top. We mostly stored corn for the chickens inside it and little else. Someone had removed the corn sacks and tossed them upon the ground.

  I crossed to the far end of the barn and paused beside the bin. Inside, there was only silence. I knew my husband well enough… knew that he snored like a freight train when he slept. But that didn’t mean that he wasn’t in there. I had no idea whether the vampires of legend breathed or even if their heart beat like a normal, living person. It was possible that they were as dead as dead could be, but that they walked around and did their evil deeds in spite of it.

  I laid my hand on the clasp of that bin lid, getting ready to lift it up and look inside. The iron was as cold as ice. I knew then that I’d found him. But, God forgive me, I did nothing. I am a strong woman by nature and steady of nerve, but I confess, I was scared clean out of my wits. So I backed away from that feed bin and left the barn as quietly as possible. Finding a length of logging chain and a heavy padlock in the tool shed, I secured the barn doors, locking that place up tight.

  Familiar of the ways of nosferatu (Granny was of German descent before marrying Elmer Millstead), I knew that such an action was pointless. If Josiah wanted to get out, he would, by dissolving into a mist or altering his form into a small critter like a field mouse or a spider. No, the lock and chain was to keep things out… namely my two daughters and my son.

  March 28th

  A week has passed and I now realize that I have made a horrible mistake.

  During the past seven days, terror has washed across this mountain and the valley beyond like a cold, winter rain. Fear has gripped the folks who dwell here on the mountain, as well as those who live in the town of Green Hollow down in the bottomland. Doors are locked and sleep fails to come easily. Ears are primed for footfalls upon midnight floors… or the sound of screams in the night.

  It began the night following Josiah’s arrival. One of the Trelawney girls—a blonde beauty by the name of Mae and scarcely fourteen years of age—was discovered dead in her bed. Doc Taylor claimed that she had been bled dry. Ben and Martha Trelawney gave the finest wake in the county for their deceased daughter and laid her out in pink calico and white lace in their downstairs parlor. The following morning when they awoke, she was gone. Her casket was empty, as though she had simply gotten up and walked out. The following night, while hunting coon along Briar Creek, Tim Anderson and Jacob Spaulding claimed to have seen her crouched beside the stream, suckling at the throat of a speckled fawn. She had grinned at them, her teeth as sharp and jagged as a possum’s and her eyes glowing like that of a cat. Frightened, they had run away, but neither of their two redbone coonhounds had made it home that night and hasn’t been seen since.

  On Wednesday night, someone stole Michael, Matthew, and Mitchell Chalmers from their nursery cribs. George Chalmers, who is the president of the Green Hollow Savings & Loan, offered a hefty award for his three sons and got the sheriff and a number of state police officers hard at work on the kidnapping, but as of yet there has been no ransom note or any indication of where the one-year-old triplets have been taken or what has become of them. I fear in my heart that I may hold the answer to that mystery. Through a knothole in the barn door I have spied two mounds of turned earth, as though something has been unceremoniously buried there. Also, in the dead of night, I swear to the good Lord that I have heard the playful giggling of a young boy echo from the thicket just beyond the farm and the frantic scratching of tiny fingernails on the wood of the back door, trying to get in.

  And even my own children are not immune to potential danger! Several times in the night, I have heard voices whispering in the night, emanating from the bedroom of my youngest daughter, Bethany. Upon the third night, I entered with a lamp in one hand and a King James in the other. Bethany sat erect in bed, her eyes dazed. On the other side of her bedroom window I spied the horrid visage of Josiah, his voice beckoning to her through the glass. Before she could rise and open the sash, I read loudly from Psalm 23. My husband�
�or what now passed for him—reacted as though he had been scalded with boiling water. He shrieked and faded into the darkness. But I know he will return for her. Bethany had always been Josiah’s favorite of our young’uns and he will not rest until he initiates her into his unholy brood.

  March 29th

  Tonight, the horror that Josiah Craven has wrought across the countryside has come to an end.

  I awoke at two o’clock in the morning, an overbearing sense of dread upon me and my heart thundering wildly in my chest. Barefoot, I went to Bethany’s room, but she was not there.

  Frightened, I left the house without benefit of lamplight. I found the double doors of the barn open. The heavy iron chain had been torn in half as though it were nothing more substantial than wet paper. Silently, I crept inside. At the far end of the building, I saw my daughter, standing naked, her nightgown pooled about her ankles. Josiah was facing her—tall and imposing with his iron-gray hair and the black vestments of his chosen profession. His back was to me and he was oblivious to my presence.

  Quietly, I stooped and took up one of the wood stobs. As I crept closer, I could hear him speaking to her in low, seductive tones, alluring her, priming her for the right moment. Bethany smiled dreamily, then lifted her head and exposed the swan-like column of her neck.

  Before he could act, I spoke up. “Turn around, Josiah Craven.”

  With a snarl, he whirled. I prayed that my aim would be true and that I would not strike the flat of his breastbone. God granted me that prayer. Holding the stake in both hands, I drove it through his starched white shirt, between his ribs, and directly through his poisonous heart.

  He unleashed a deafening shriek unlike any I have ever heard… or ever will. A horrid scream like the cries of a dozen different creatures—both human and animal—erupted from his gullet. Agonized, he sank to his knees, jittering and grasping, battling his demise. I failed to relax my grip, though. I bore downward, driving the stob deeper. He reached out and grabbed my leg. I felt his fingers fade through the skin of my thigh. They burrowed through muscle and vein, reaching blindly for the length of my femur. I cried out in pain, but still I would not be dissuaded. I bore down upon him with all my weight until his bloodless heart was fully impaled.

  The scream died in his throat and he slowly pitched to the side. His hand slipped from inside me and my agony ceased. Josiah gave one final gasp and his eyes blazed as fiery red as a horseshoe on a smithy’s forge. Then they whitened and rolled up into his head and he collapsed. I released the end of the bean pole, letting it remain inside him.

  I simply stood and stared at him for a long moment. He lay there curled up, knees to chest, like a fetus in the womb. When I was certain that he was truly dead, I walked over to Bethany. She had remained where she was the entire time, immersed in the trance, oblivious to what had taken place.

  I reached down and pulled her gown up around her, then led her through the barn doors. The chill of the night air cleared her head and her eyes sharpened. “Mama… where am I?” she asked. “What am I doing out here?”

  “You were walking in your sleep, dear,” I said and what I told wasn’t far from the truth. “Now go inside and return to bed.”

  She did as I instructed. I remained outside for a long while, standing in the doorway of the barn, considering how to proceed. It would be an accident, of course. Josiah had fallen from the half-loft and was run through by a bean pole. In a rural farming area such as this, stranger deaths had occurred and I hoped that this one wouldn’t be questioned.

  Before I headed back to the house, I took an ashwood stob from the pile and carried it with me. Although Josiah was gone, there were still those of his kind about… the Trelawney girl and one of the infant triplets.

  And, sooner or later, they would have to be dealt with.

  March 30th

  Today, my husband, the Reverend Josiah Craven—husband, father, man of God, and spawn of Satan—was laid to earth. It was a grave of my choosing; not in the cemetery of his beloved church, but in the center of a vast meadow atop Craven’s Mountain. No stone shall be set, bearing his name and date of death, for I wish its whereabouts to become unknown during the passage of time.

  I feel that there is some suspicion concerning the peculiar circumstances of Josiah’s death and of the calloused way in which I reacted afterward: the refusal to remove the stake, the swift interment without benefit of a wake, and the isolation of the grave itself. But his friends and the members of his congregation knew him only as a devout man of God and a pillar of the community, and not as a distrustful philanderer and a fiend of the most horrid and dangerous kind. Also, they have not read his journal, which I discovered lying at the bottom of the feed bin. I have and I know of his journey and of the Wanderer and the place called Twilight Mountain. That journal was placed inside his casket and now lies in the grave with his remains, its awful secrets sealed away forever.

  This incident has changed me also. My children worry about their mother and how she roams the hills and hollows at night, armed with only a Bible, a silver cross, a mallet, and a sack of ashwood stakes slung across her shoulder. But I can not rest until my work is done and the mountains are cleared of menace and evil. More have died… have disappeared and then reappeared in the dead of night. The folks hereabouts are unaware of what they are dealing with. I am keenly aware and so I act accordingly. It has becoming my calling and my duty.

  May God sustain and protect me in the dark nights to come.