by John Everson
The kitchen counters were empty of food or spell, and Ribaud stepped through the dining room and into the dark shadows of the hall. Even in the full light of day, the sun never found a hold inside Eleanor’s house.
Hers was a citadel of night. A church of the moon.
Grit cracked under his shoes as he stepped into the arch of her bedroom. A yellowed shade covered most of the one window in the room, but there was enough light to see the dark stain across the unmade bed.
“She’s gone,” a tired voice said from his left. It came from a shadowed form sitting in a small wooden chair just beyond the window.
“Who’re you?” Ribaud asked, startled.
“It doesn’t matter,” the low voice sighed. “I loved her. And now they’ve taken her.”
Ribaud looked from the shadow in the chair to the stain on the bed. In all his visits with her, Eleanor had never mentioned a man in her life. Let alone men.
“She came home late last night,” the man said. “And this morning she was gone. Was she with you?”
The chair creaked as the man slowly levered himself upright. He was a big man, a man of iron power, but Ribaud wasn’t afraid. He could see the light in those dark eyes was gone.
“No,” Ribaud said. “Not with me. I came to see if she had gotten closer to curing this curse.” He paused, but the man didn’t react. “It took my wife, too,” he added.
The man laughed then, a low, tortured gasp.
“There is no cure for love,” the man said, and sank back in his chair. He turned his head to stare out the thin slit of glass not covered by the shade.
“And there is no cure for lust, either.”
Ribaud stepped back out of the room and into the hall. The house still sheltered the fetid smell of them. The hall and bedroom were ripe with the stink of rotting detritus, the scum that slimed the banks of a swamp.
It stank of the shallow water stirred by the bubbles of decay at high noon in summer. The smell was anchored in the footsteps leading to and away from the bed. Already drying to a mottled grey, the swamp mud from the feet of Eleanor’s killer led through the living room and out the front door. A black-green smear coated the doorknob and the wood surrounding it.
A tear bled to his chin as Ribaud retraced his steps and left the house of Eleanor Trevail, the most powerful Voodoo priestess in all of New Orleans.
There would be no stopping Marie Laveau’s misbegotten curse.
There would be no stopping the growing army of the moon.
There would be no stopping the fickle human heart.
They had come and gone again, and there would be no cure.
Ribaud would continue to clean up the blood in their wake, until there were no hearts left to break. In twenty-nine more days, they would be back.
The Vigilantes of Love.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Everson has published dozens of short stories over the past 20 years, in anthologies like Best New Zombie Tales, Vol. II, Decadence II, Tourniquet Heart, TransVersions, The Dead Inn, Dark Testament, Nasty Snips and Freaks, Geeks & Sideshow Floozies. His fiction has also appeared in a variety of magazines, including Dark Discoveries, Grue, Delirium, Bloodsongs, Dead of Night, Terminal Fright and Sirius Visions.
In October of 2000, many of his horror tales were collected and published in hardcover by Delirium Books as Cage of Bones and Other Deadly Obsessions. Vigilantes of Love followed three years later. His more recent fiction collections include Needles & Sins, Creeptych and Deadly Nightlusts.
Since the original publication of Vigilantes of Love, Everson has published four novels through mass market paperback publisher Leisure Books – Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th and Siren. His first novel, Covenant, won a Bram Stoker Award upon its original limited edition release through Delirium Books in 2004.
Everson is the co-founder of Dark Arts Books (www.darkartsbooks.com), a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA), a past participant and publications director for the Twilight Tales Reading Series and the assistant editor for the Necro Publications book line. From 1999-2002, he served as a fiction editor for Dark Regions magazine. He moonlighted as the pop music critic for a suburban Chicago paper from 1988-2008, which led him to also pen “dark music” review columns for genre magazines like Wetbones, Midnight Hour and Talebones. Though it has been a decade since he last appeared on stage with a band, he remains a closet composer and recorder of pop songs. His instrumental compositions for Lone Wolf Publications can be heard on the Bloodtype and Carnival CD-ROMs. His music also appeared in the 2003 Chicago production of Martin Mundt’s play The Jackie Sexknife Show.
Despite an omnipresent nagging dream of relocating to warmer climes, John still lives in the west ‘burbs of Chicago with his wife Geri, his son Shaun, and an assortment of birds, fish and a petulant iguana. Find out more about his fiction, art and music at www.johneverson.com.
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