HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Applying the lipstick and hoping it would brighten her entire look, Dell paused when she saw the lesion on the back of her right forearm reflected in the mirror. She sat at her dressing table, stunned, her mother calling from the hall, warning that her primping would make her late for the school bus. Again.

  Dell didn't answer her mother. She couldn't. Her arm was frozen, Cover Girl Burnt Sienna poised just a whisper from the mid-curve of her top lip. She blinked, slowly lowered her arm, and let the lipstick roll from her fingers. That's how her mother found her, staring like Narcissus at her own image.

  "Dell, honey, what's the matter?"

  In place of words, Dell raised her right arm until the mirror caught the pink festering oval of flesh. Her mother approached slowly and stared down into the mirrored reflection.

  "Mom?"

  Her mother reached out one hand as if she would touch the lesion, but her fingers danced in the air before disappearing from sight. "It's … it's just …"

  "Mom? Will you look me over? Are there more? Are they everywhere?" Suddenly, Dell pushed back from the dressing table. In no time, she had her blue sweatshirt pulled high above and then over her head. As she lowered her arms to rip the shirt off, her mother caught and held her tightly. She was imprisoned by the sleeves, held in a position that afforded no movement.

  "Don't, honey."

  "Does it mean … ? Am I … ? Will I be like you now? Mom?" She felt tears well, and the room blurred. Over her mother's shoulder she could see her own face in the mirror. It was as if she had never really looked at herself before, as if who she saw reflected was a stranger. She was not just sallow. She was sick.

  She could feel an irritation on her left shoulder. Now that she was concentrating on her body, she felt what might be another lesion on the back of her right knee. They were all over her, evidence of disease at work.

  "Let me go, Mom."

  Her mother released her, and she threw off the shirt and began turning and twisting to look over her body.

  It was not as if she thought this day might never come. Of her immediate family, she was the last to contract the disease. They had all pretended it had skipped her. She might be spared. Others were. Her Aunt Celia hadn't ever gotten sick. Sometimes a few escaped their destiny. But very few.

  The lesions indicated the beginning of a mutated form of a rare blood disease the medical community called porphyria. Next would come the terrible sensitivity to sunlight. Then her lips would feel paralyzed and betray her, so that she could not even smile. It would all pass swiftly. What took the real disease of porphyria decades to do to an afflicted human, the mutated virus would do to her within days.

  The horror of it was enough to bear, more than enough to make her raving mad. But even worse was not knowing if she would turn into a Predator, a Craven, or a Natural, like those in her family. No one could predict the outcome of the process until the disease had run its course.

  Once her mother let her go, Dell sagged onto the edge of her bed. She felt panic ruling her, causing her mind to race out of control. She hardly knew what to do. How was she to control an event that was rushing toward chaos, she asked herself. "There's no point in checking anymore," she said in a resigned voice. "I feel one on my shoulder and another behind my knee. I can sense things. If I can tell where they are without looking, then I'm sick, and that's all there is to it." She lay down on the unmade bed, pulling her legs up and hugging them. She still had on jeans and shoes, but she didn't care. She heard the school bus outside, heard it brake with a hiss, and after a minute, move on without her. She would miss a trig test and have to make it up. She wouldn't see Ryan today. Or all week. If she fell ill, how could she let her interest in him continue anyway? How could she have imagined she ever had a chance at a normal life?

  "I'll call Mentor," her mother said, leaning down to pat her cheek the way she used to do when Dell was little and ran a fever.

  Dell nodded, closing her eyes, trying not to think about it. Mentor came on house calls when summoned in a crisis. He had to be there for the young ones who were so devastated by the change. So it was true. Her mother knew it too. There could be no mistake if Mentor was sent for. This wasn't chicken pox or some other innocuous illness. It was not melanoma or another skin disease. It was the thing that stopped the human heart from beating. It was the monster that defied death and lived on within you, hungering and unholy.

  That was the one true thing about the supernatural life she was about to enter—how unholy it truly was. It wasn't true, for example, that a vampire produced no reflected image. Her mother was proof enough to dispel that old myth. She looked in mirrors to apply makeup so that she would not appear to be so pale. It wasn't true that crosses or holy water affected them. In fact, most of the old myths about vampires were wrong—all made up, fictional, and totally inaccurate. Soon Dell would know from inside the reality of the vampire's life, what it was like to be the same as her parents and her brother.

  Dell choked back a sob and turned her head into the pillow.

  "I'll be right back," her mother said. "Don't worry. Don't cry. Please don't cry."

  Dell heard her rush from the room like a draft of wind from an open window. When she wanted to, her mother could do miraculous things. True and real things. Move like shadow. Sleep standing up. Know her daughter's pain as her own. But she couldn't keep her from death. And she couldn't keep her from crying.

  Not today.

  ~*~

  While waiting for help, Dell's mother sat on her bedside and smoothed her brow. Dell kept her eyes tightly shut, trembling in increasing waves that shook her body. She felt faint and thought she was going to pass out. "Mom, I'm going to faint."

  Her mother shushed her and leaned in close to kiss her cheek. "The family's coining," she said.

  Dell teetered on the brink of consciousness, moving in and out, feeling first her mother's cool hand on her face and then not experiencing anything but a sense of loss. She wanted to ask for Aunt Celia, but she couldn't seem to speak. She was moving inexorably toward unconsciousness, but fought against it, afraid of what lay ahead. She never knew when her mother moved from her side or when Aunt Celia and her daughter, Carolyn, entered the room. She never knew when Mentor arrived. Her first realization that he was there was when he spoke, reaching her through the veil of unconsciousness that kept her wrapped solidly in its arms.

  “What are you dreaming?" Mentor asked.

  She could not see him, so he must be apart from it, helping her awaken. That's what Mentor did. That was his job. Helping.

  She spun away from his voice and fell through dark space until she found herself in a strange surrounding. She was dreaming, she assumed. She saw something she had to tell Mentor about.

  "I'm in a dark wood. And there's a red moon rising."

  "Does it frighten you?"

  "Yes!" She peered through leafless trees, tripped over exposed roots, moving always toward the red moon. Though she feared what it meant to her life, she was drawn against her will. She could sense there was something waiting out there, just beyond her field of vision. If she kept moving toward it, she would learn all she ever wanted to know about the world and how it worked.

  "You can speak with the moon another time, Dell. Will you open your eyes now and visit with me? We have lessons and preparations."

  She feared the moon, so luminous with blood, so majestic that it seemed to fill the sky with rays that turned the landscape scarlet. What did it mean for her? Yet waking to the reality of what she would become and how to move into that becoming was even more frightening. "No, I'll just stay here," she said, more careful now as she picked her way over brown tangled roots and through thick vines that shimmered and shivered as if malevolently alive. A limb with rough bark reached out and scraped her cheek, leaving a burning trail. She flung her arms at it, skipping aside and beginning to run now.

  "Dell, it's time for you to return to us."

  Time. Mentor knew everything. Mentor was as old as the
hills in the hill country of Texas, he was older than any vampire she knew. He was older than dirt, as her grandfather would say. "Do I have to?" she asked. She took one more step through the barren forest, looked up at the startling sky, at the moon with a face like Death … and opened her eyes.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't think it was healthy for you to stay in that place alone."

  He had forced her out and awake. She found a blanket covering her bare arms. She was hot, suffocating, a sudden sheen of sweat popping from her brow. "How long did I sleep?"

  "Not long. Less than an hour. Can I see the sores?" She stretched out her arm and bent it at the elbow so that the lesion faced him.

  "Are there more?"

  "Two so far." She mentally searched her body and added, "No, there's a new one since Mom called you. Three more then, besides this one."

  "How do you feel?" he asked.

  She liked his eyes. Many of the Predators had shiny brown irises so dark they looked as black as the bottom of an oil drum. And since Mentor was technically a Predator—or had been at one time—she thought he would have eyes like that. Instead, his eyes were as warm and brown as coffee and kind, patient, knowing. There was no furtive agenda of harm hidden behind his eyes. He had come to help her.

  She sat up, throwing off the blanket, uncaring that she sat before this old vampire in her bra. "Hot," she said, "burning up."

  "It's fever. You'll be chilled in a few minutes and will need that blanket again."

  Behind Mentor, she could see her family. Her father had his arm around her mother's shoulder. Her brother Eddie leaned against the wall, chewing on a fingernail. Then she saw Celia, her mother's sister, and her cousin Carolyn.

  She reached out her arms and instantly Celia came to her side, leaning over the bed and hugging her. "Oh, I'm so sorry, baby. We're all here for you. Grandma and Grandpa are on the way."

  Carolyn came around the other side of the bed and took one of Dell's hands and squeezed it. She was only a year younger than Dell, and all her life she'd faced this same event happening to her. So far, like her mother, she had not been infected.

  Dell saw tears in her eyes. "Don't cry for me," she said, trying not to cry again herself. "I'm going to be all right. Won't I be all right, Mentor?"

  He nodded at her, but he said nothing.

  There was a rustle in the room and from behind her parents Dell saw her grandparents enter the room. The bedroom was crowded now with people, all of them watching her. Soon Dell's other aunts, uncles, and cousins would all file into the house, keeping vigil. Unable to fit into the bedroom, they would stand around the living room, walk in the yard, whisper her name to Heaven, and pray for her.

  Her grandmother came to the bed. Celia moved aside, first kissing Dell on the cheek.

  "Darling, we'll be waiting for you," Grandma said.

  "I don't want to die!" Dell heard the panic in her own voice and saw the scared, startled look in her grandmother's eyes.

  "You'll come back to us," Grandma said. She was in her eighties and vampire, a Natural, like all of Dell's family. "We'll wait here until that happens. When you open your eyes again, I'll be here."

  The warmth of her grandmother's embrace gave Dell strength, but a trembling came over her nevertheless. She shivered uncontrollably. She heard Mentor ask everyone to stand back, and her grandmother let her go. Mentor scooted his chair closer to the bed.

  "What does the moon dream mean?" Dell asked, feeling the outlines of the room shimmer and move in and out as if they were no more substantial than flimsy cloth.

  He waved off the question of the dream. "Not important. We can talk about it later."

  "What is important, then?"

  "Your soul."

  As the human girl she had been for nearly eighteen years, she might have scoffed at him. But as a changeling, she understood perfectly how serious it was to preserve the soul. If, in the midst of the change from death to life again, she lost all vestige of her mortal self, she might be condemned to wander the Earth like a fiendish nightmare bent on the annihilation of the human race.

  "Help me, Mentor," she said, beginning to shake harder, holding her arms close to her body to warm her ribs.

  He lifted the blanket and placed it gently around her shoulders. "That's what I'm here to do, Dell."

  "I'm sick. I want to . . . die." She would die. Oh, yes, she would. But it would not be real dying, not a death of rest or peace, with her soul sleeping in the loving arms of her Creator. But die she would.

  Mentor went down onto his knees and took both her trembling hands into his own. "In a few hours it will be dark, and you'll feel a little better. Until then we'll talk."

  He looked so sad, she almost wanted to comfort him—except she had no emotional strength left to comfort even herself. "So cold," she said, teeth chattering. She felt as brittle as one of her mother's old china plates, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. Her eyes felt dry, and she couldn't keep her knees from knocking together like nervous tambourines. The bed shook with her trembling. In a minute she might be fevered again. She would get sick and empty her stomach. She would pace the floor and stop to frantically feel for her heartbeat. Her little brother, Eddie, the only one she'd seen transform, had done that and it had broken her heart.

  She would curse heaven and beg for hell, just as he had. She would claw the mattress and try to bury her face in the springs so that no one could see her private agony.

  Tomorrow would be no better.

  "You're wrong," Mentor said, brushing the hair from her eyes. "Tomorrow will be a little easier."

  Dell was used to her family reading her mind, but they only did it when she said they could, respecting her privacy. "Don't do that," she said, breathless now, pushing at the blanket to get it away from contact with her burning skin. Don't listen to my thoughts.

  "All right," he said. "If that's what you want."

  Dell looked for her mother in the darkened room. Mom, I need you! Dell called to her silently.

  Before Dell could blink, her mother was at her side, blowing on her skin, waving her hands around like windmills to cool her escalating temperature. "My baby," she crooned. "It's coming along, baby. Don't fight."

  Mentor retreated to the dressing table chair he had pulled over to the bed. It was too small for his bulk, giving him the appearance of a creature on a perch. He sat in the shadows, his aging, craggy face hidden in darkness. Dell began to fear him until she caught the thought he projected to her. It was the very first time she had read anyone's thought at all, and she was glad it had come from Mentor. We love you, he said simply. We're here for you. Don't be afraid. This is not the end.

  ~*~

  What Mentor had promised Dell was the truth. Dying this way was not the end. Becoming vampire was not the end. The end might never come for her, and there lay the problem for all of them, even himself. Especially himself. Though he had earned his respectful nickname more than a thousand years in the past, and though it had been his job to mentor, to help, and to guide new and desperate fledglings for as long as the memory of his race could remember, sometimes Mentor questioned not only his advice and the relevance of his role, but the very meaning of vampiric existence.

  The wise men who had trained him in human psychology during the time of the ancients when there were so few of his kind could never have envisioned their teaching would have to sustain him throughout not one lifetime, but dozens of lifetimes. Certainly he had kept up with psychology and both the human and vampire spirits. He had augmented his education over progressive generations until finally, one day near the beginning of the new millennium in the year 2000, he turned away from scholarship and said to himself, "Enough. I can learn no more.”

  Yet even that was a lie he told to himself. He learned something new about spirit every time he was called upon to minister to someone as sick and miserable and dying as the girl now lying on her bed in a comalile trance. It was this challenge that kept him going, the task that drove away his
own misery long enough so that he could reach out to vampire children such as Dell. What he had learned already from the girl was that teens today were just as earnest, needful, and as full of pure light as their predecessors had been.

  Some parents had tried to tell him the young people were subversive, rebellious, uncontrollable, and sometimes conscienceless, as if born with deformed hearts. Mentor knew that was wrongheaded at the outset. But Dell Cambian was further proof. He could sense her true essence, and it was as uncontaminated by fraud, evil, and envy as a newborn babe's. Dell Cambian was worth saving, worth bringing into the Natural life. He would fight for her soul and show her how to fight for it. He would guide her to the other side and bring her back whole again.

  Changed, of course, yes, changed. But whole and saved from the baser life of a Predator. Or, God forbid, the nonlife of a Craven.

  Most of his kind believed that what one became—Natural, Predator, or Craven—had to do with the progression and mutation of the disease. For many years it was what he thought, too, but he came to realize it just was not so. Many of the Naturals had entered medical research trying to find an end to the disease. The first discovery they made was about the nature of the actual human death.

  Mentor had been trying to spread the truth of the matter. The disease that made vampires, the mutation that killed and made men live again, did not determine a man's state of moral being. All it did was turn human into vampire. What sort of vampire one became had to do with the state of the soul. And how hard that soul fought for freedom from the prevailing darkness.

  If the patient brought back too much of the darkness, he was Predator—vile, often depraved, without empathy, and truly heartless. A wicked creature. If the darkness brought back was less, the vampire suffered physical weaknesses, a faint hold on the world, and a depression that never relented. They were called the Craven. They were the cowardly and weak, useless to themselves and society. The Naturals brought back the least darkness from their encounter with death, and they were never as human as they once had been, but they longed to be, and that made all the difference.