by David Reed
That brings me to the case of the Douglas twins, from St. Cloud, Minnesota. Rufus and I were called in by a friend of his who saw an odd photo in a family album. The picture was of twin boys who were indistinguishable from each other, except for the odd eyes that one of ’em had in the photo. Rufus’s friend, who he’d saved from a wendigo several years prior, knew enough about the “real” world to know that the odd appearance of the boy’s eyes wasn’t just red eye. The boy was a shifter.
When we got to the address where the twins lived, Rufus and I were confused. It was a gated retirement community. Enthusiastic old fellas were hauling out their golf clubs to play eighteen holes when we came through the door and they pointed us in the direction of the Douglas twins’ rooms. When we found them, they were in the middle of a heated game of bingo. Not knowing what else to do, Rufus and I waited for the game to end before cornering them. This is the photo Rufus was sent:
The Douglas twins were now eighty-one years old. That picture was taken God knows how long ago, and there’d been no reports of strange disappearances or unexplained murders around where the brothers had lived their entire lives. One of the twins was a shifter, but as far as we could tell, he’d never hurt a soul.
I bet you’re expecting this story to take a crazy turn, but you’re wrong. After questioning them for a few hours, spending a day at the city records office and the library looking through old newspapers, we didn’t have any evidence that Charles Douglas, the shifter, had ever done anything wrong.
He’d been raised by humans, and turned out alright. When we asked the brothers flat-out, they admitted that he was different from most folks, but that he’d never used his abilities to harm anyone. He was a good monster.
We let him live. He was eighty-one, what was the worst that could happen?
You know what? That actually was a good memory.
The Rules
RIDING WITH RUFUS IN THE EIGHTIES, I learned one thing—the man liked rules. He had a set of them for every occasion, and a day didn’t go by without me breaking one and getting a lecture about it. It got especially annoying a few years in, when I wasn’t just an apprentice anymore—I was more than capable of handling a hunt by myself, but still, without fail, the lectures . . .
RULE #1: IT IS WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE.
When we first started riding together, there were still a few vampire nests around the country. By the time we went our separate ways, they were thought to be extinct. But in between there was a gray period, when other hunters were constantly claiming to have killed the very last vamp on earth.
Outside of Salt Lake City, we were following up on reports of several teens being killed, their throats ripped to shreds, most of their blood drained. My first instinct was wendigo, even though the bloodletting wasn’t usually their bag. There were some other clues that pointed towards a Native American connection, but my head’s getting a little fuzzy on that part. All you need to know is that conventional wisdom at the time said that vampires had died out, but Rufus refused to believe it. “It is what it looks like,” he said. Always was, always will be. The simplest answer is the most likely one, and in that particular case, that meant vamp.
Vampires have been part of human mythology for thousands of years—they’re one of those elemental evil forces that we’ve feared since we knew how to be afraid.
However, most of that lore is wrong.
• Vamps aren’t afraid of crosses. That’s demons. Same with the Lord’s name.
• Scratch garlic off your list, too.
• They have reflections, just like everybody else.
• They don’t have two tiny little namby-pamby teeth on top to bite with. They have shark teeth. Really, really nasty and sharp shark teeth that can tear your throat out just as easily as you chew a grape. They retract, so as not to draw attention when the vampire is trying to be incognito.
• They won’t burn up in the sun, but it does hurt them. It’s more like a bad sunburn than anything. That means they’re active at night, unless they’re being really bold. If you do hear of a vampire hunting during the day, it may be one of their cousins instead.
• They don’t need to be welcomed into your house to come in. They’ll just break down the door. What kind of overly polite monsters did people think they were?
• They can’t be killed with a stake to the heart. This is the biggie. Everybody and their uncle carries around wooden stakes to take down vamps, but it won’t even hurt ’em. You’ve got to . . .
• Decapitate them. It’s the only way to kill a vampire. Take their head clean off. Now, the way you go about that is up to you, and I encourage you to be creative, as always.
• They do need human blood to live. Meaning they often have to move from town to town to avoid detection and keep up their blood supply, often—
• Traveling in packs. One human can feed several vamps, and they wouldn’t want to waste their precious food supply, so they work together. They’re one of the more communal monsters in the menagerie, and seem to have a strong social bond between members of the pack. They’re even said to mate for life, which, when you’re more or less immortal, is quite a commitment.
• They aren’t always all bad. Sam and Dean ran into a vamp named Lenore who was able to control her blood lust, and she fed off cattle instead.
• They’re vulnerable to “dead man’s blood,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Since fresh human blood is what gives them life (or whatever you wanna call their undead state), the blood from a dead human nullifies that effect, causing them to be weakened and slowed, but it won’t kill them.
• Vampires are turned, not born. As far as we know anyway, the only way to make a new vampire is by feeding a human a vampire’s blood.
• Vampirism is curable. It’s not pretty, but as long as the newly turned vamp hasn’t had a sip of human blood yet, they can be turned back into a human. Samuel Campbell has the exact recipe, so I guess that means it’s now in my library somewhere. What I know is that the cocktail requires the blood of the vamp who turned you, which might be harder to retrieve than it seems.
So, how did that case outside of Salt Lake City turn out? Rufus was right, and we were looking for a vamp—but only one. The rest of his nest had been wiped out by Daniel Elkins, a hunter who specialized in tracking and killing vampires. When we caught up with the remaining vamp, he practically begged us to off him—his vampire bride was one of the first to be killed by Elkins, and he couldn’t bear going on without her. I knew the feeling, and obliged him. Seeing the smile on his face as his head was cut off . . . that was messed up.
RULE #2: KNOW THEM BETTER THAN THEY KNOW YOU.
I learned this gem in Topeka, Kansas, when we visited the Arthur Mansion, a notoriously haunted estate that had provided fodder for an entire generation of daring children. Each year, on the tenth of August, kids would dare each other to go inside the house and stay for an entire hour.
We jumped on the case when some of those kids came out of the place covered in blood. It wasn’t their own, but it sure as hell was somebody’s, and nobody had a rational explanation for it. The children claimed that a spirit had hovered over them and threatened to pull their souls straight out of their chests if they didn’t leave the house. They did exactly what I woulda done—they ran. Right through what they described as a “tunnel of blood and guts.” Sounded like a poltergeist to me.
The lore:
• Spirits and ghosts are the remnant of a human soul that hasn’t crossed over to heaven or hell. They have unfinished business that they have to attend to before they can move on, and that traps them on earth.
• They’re already dead, so don’t bother trying to kill them.
• You can, however, make them cross over. Some ghosts are tied to this plane because some piece of them remains here—physical remains, some object that held special significance to them, anything that can be a symbol of that person.
• Salting and burning a person’s remains will ban
ish their spirit. Make sure you get all of them, though, or the spirit will remain. If the person was an organ donor, even their donated kidney can come back to (literally) haunt its new owner.
• Ghosts can’t travel, except under special circumstances. Generally, they’re tied to the place where they died or the place where their remains are located. Certain ghosts, however, have learned to “ride” humans away from the spot where they’re trapped, letting them move around the outside world. In the case of the haunted kidney, wherever the kidney went, so too went the ghost.
• You can also help the spirit resolve whatever it is that’s keeping them here. That’s usually easier said than done, especially since it often involves vengeance on the person who killed them or a person who tormented them as a human.
• Ghosts can’t cross a salt line.
• They can also be temporarily dissipated by blasting ’em with rock salt. Keep a few shells loaded at all times, you never know when you’ll need them.
• EMF (electromagnetic field) meters can detect the presence of a ghost or spirit.
• Iron also keeps spirits at bay. An iron crowbar is a good thing to keep in your trunk for a couple reasons, but that tops the list. One swing with it will dissipate a ghost for a couple of minutes.
At the Arthur Mansion, we were dealing with a spirit more powerful than your garden-variety ghost, so we planned accordingly. We brought enough salt to kill a horse, our EMF meters, shotguns, iron bars, and all the local lore on the house. Once inside, we discovered things were more complicated than they seemed.
Forty years prior, there had been a mass suicide at the house. At least, that’s what the papers claimed. As we searched the house, we found evidence that the people had actually been murdered. In one room, scratch marks covered the door—scratch marks from human fingernails. Someone had carved the words “It’s coming for us” into the wall. In another room, a pile of gnawed-on bones was hidden in an oak chest. Chewing on a bone was beyond the abilities of a spirit or poltergeist, so what were we facing? Let’s skip ahead a second to—
RULE #3: IT CAN BE BOTH.
As in, if something leaves all the telltale signs of a werewolf, but one of the victims has a hole from a wraith spike on her forehead, maybe you’re dealing with both. I know, crazy to think, but there are towns that have multiple infestations at once. You could be hunting a wendigo while a rougarou’s setting up his campsite right next to you.
In this case, we were dealing with something really strange. We pieced together what had happened forty years ago—a monster of unknown origin had trapped a group of friends in the house during a dinner party. It killed them, one by one, making each death look like a suicide. When the local media got word, there was a frenzy. People from all over the country came to the house to look through the windows (the house itself had been boarded up after the police ruled the deaths suicides), and that led a man by the name of Gareth McIntosh to the mansion. Gareth wasn’t just any tourist, he was a hunter. He felt that the events at the Arthur Mansion were highly suspicious, and he broke in to investigate. What happened next is a mystery, but the end result is clear—Gareth failed. He was killed by whatever monster haunted the halls, but his unfinished business, finding and killing the creature, forced his spirit to remain in the house. Now, the monster and Gareth’s ghost were locked in a decades-long battle for control of the mansion, and we’d just stepped into the middle of it.
That brings us back around to Rule #2: Know them better than they know you. You always want to know more about the monster you’re hunting than they know about you, or they have the advantage. In this case, we were playing catch-up as we searched the house, while Gareth knew every one of our tricks. He was, after all, a hunter himself. If he didn’t want us there, he would be able to counter any move we used against him.
It started with our EMF meters. They started acting wonky as soon as we walked in the door, but the readings were guiding us in a very clear direction—the basement. If not for my paranoia, Gareth’s plan would have worked. He’d used his own EMF signature to lead us right into a booby trap, a room with a door that only opened from the outside. I caught the door as it swung shut, barely saving us from a few very unpleasant days together ending in some awkward conversations about whether we were allowed to eat each other once the other died.
Next, he burst the pipes in the bathroom as we were searching it, soaking us and our salt supplies. Since salt dissolves so easily in water, all of our reserves washed down the drain.
It was like that for three hours—a cat and mouse game that ended with Rufus and me in the attic, facing a very old and very cranky monster that I swear was a Minotaur. Rufus says it was just a funky-looking wendigo, but I know what I saw. The thing came at us, but it moved slowly. We were able to outrun it, finding our way to a bedroom on the upper level. Inside of it, we found Gareth’s skeleton. What was left of it, anyway. If only we still had our salt, we could have salted and burned his remains then and there. Life’s like that, I guess.
Instead, Rufus had a brilliant idea. We didn’t need to get rid of the ghost, we needed to kill the Minotaur (or wendigo, or whatever). If we did that, Gareth’s unfinished business would be resolved, and we could go on our way. The only problem was killing something that we couldn’t really identify.
That’s where my brilliant idea came into play. We knew someone with decades of hunting expertise under his belt, and he was right here in the house. If we could just ask him, maybe he could tell us how to kill the creature. After all, he must have spent the last forty years thinking about it. As a poltergeist, he could only do so much to manipulate the world around him; clearly he wasn’t able to do whatever was required to take out the monster.
Cut to—a séance. We were taking an awful risk, since summoning Gareth’s spirit could just make him angrier, but it was the only way. Rufus led the ceremony, while I kept an iron crowbar in hand, ready to start swinging if things went south.
As Rufus droned on in Latin, the room got colder. A spirit was coming. When Gareth appeared, it was in his human form. He didn’t seem nearly as intimidating that way. Make no mistake, though, any spirit who’s been trapped in an incorporeal state that long by himself is going to be more than a little nuts. Gareth was no exception. When he spoke, it was like hearing a throaty growl mixed with his words. He gave us the usual ghost spiel, “Get out of the house,” “This place will be your tomb,” “You have stepped on unholy ground,” blah blah blah. Things got interesting when I asked him about the critter in the attic. He hissed at me, like he was a cat thrown in a bathtub, but pulled himself together. Said that the thing was his alone to kill.
That was no help, I thought, and got ready to swing the iron bar through Gareth and end our fiesta. Rufus spoke up. Asked if we could at least help Gareth fight the creature. To my great surprise, Gareth nodded. Said there was something we could do.
There are Latin incantations that can break a demon’s bond to its host body. In the same way, there was an incantation that could forge a bond between a spirit and a host, allowing the spirit to ride a human like a surfboard, controlling their actions and seeing through the human’s eyes. If we would do that for Gareth, he could fight and kill the creature, and then his spirit would be free to pass on to the other side.
Rufus was all for it, said he’d volunteer to be the host. I warned him that there were several pretty gaping holes in the logic. First off, what’s to keep Gareth from holding on to Rufus’s body after he’s done? Also, the last time Gareth tried to kill that creature, it murdered him to death. His track record was not great.
But Rufus was a better talker than listener. He agreed, and we did the Latin ritual, and suddenly my friend Rufus was talking with an Irish accent and really enjoying his newfound ability to breathe air.
I’d love to tell you exactly how the rest of the hunt went, but I spent the whole time locked in a broom closet. Gareth spent forty years wanting to avenge his own murder, he wasn’t taking any ch
ance that I’d kill the thing for him.
When he finally let me out, Rufus’s accent had returned to normal, and he told me that the beast was dead. Gareth’s unfinished business was complete, so he’d passed on to the other side of the veil.
For a solid month, I was sure he was faking it, and that Gareth was still in there somewhere. I even tried tempting him with Guinness and bangers ’n mash, until Rufus got annoyed and made me stop. It was for his own good.
RULE #4: NEVER HIT THE SAME TOWN TWICE.
This one’s simple. We followed a succubus to Lincoln, Nebraska, and ended up getting chased out of town by a cadre of furious husbands—a year prior, Rufus had been in Lincoln cleaning up a coven of witches when a spell went haywire. He was supposed to be making a hex bag to shield him from the magic of the coven, but instead made a hex bag that caused every nearby woman to fall deeply in love with him. Rufus being Rufus, he didn’t notice for a few days, and assumed that the women of Lincoln were simply more open with their sexuality than in other cities. Rufus’s girlfriend had broken up with him for the tenth time earlier that month, and he did a lot of rebounding. The man got more action in a week than he had in his entire life, and didn’t for a second think that something unnatural was afoot.
It wasn’t until two furious husbands knocked on his motel door that Rufus realized he had a problem. He was out of town within fifteen minutes and vowed never to return. That is, until our case took us there. It’s really hard to work a case when you have guys following you around with brass knuckles. We ended up having to call Martin Creaser to go after the succubus instead—and Rufus never went back to Lincoln.
