by Dan Padavona
“Where is he?”
“Hurry, Tom. He's almost halfway up the ladder.”
The sawdust piled up into a miniature dune. When the corner of the two-by-four snapped off, he turned the piece over and started to saw off the opposite corner.
The blade's teeth were dull from repeated use, tiny rust spots dotting the steel in red blotches. The worn edges cut slowly, and his shoulder was starting to burn from exertion. The blade slipped and caught his index finger, tearing through skin. Blood pooled out of the wound. He had cut his finger deeply.
He had no time to stop the bleeding, for the farmer was nearing the top of the ladder. Tom resumed sawing, and at last the second corner fell off. He regarded the weapon in his hand. There was no way to whittle the end down to a sharper point, but he had cut the corners steeply enough to provide the wood with a dangerous edge.
As he rushed to Jen's side and leaned over the landing edge, he saw the farmer several rungs down the ladder, his eyes burning like hurricane lanterns through the darkness of the barn interior.
He pulled her away from the edge, thinking that if he hadn't, she would remain transfixed by the farmer’s eyes. She snapped back to reality as though awakened from a dream, still holding the pitchfork. It took her a moment to remember where she was.
A cackle sent goosebumps across their flesh. A gnarled hand reached over the landing, then a second. The farmer’s head drifted wraith-like above the planks with a grin that displayed misshapen fangs. Fangs that could tear flesh and sever bone.
“Little boy and little girl.”
The farmer sprang upward onto the landing with shocking quickness, work boots thudding against the planks, shaking the loft. Jen was ready. She impaled the monster with the pitchfork and drove him toward the edge. But he was too strong. He stalked forward, the weapon protruding uselessly from his chest.
He swiped at her with unearthly strength, and she hurtled into the wall at the back of the loft. There was a sickening crunch as her body met the unwavering wall, and she fell limp to the planks with her legs dangling off the landing edge. She was going to fall.
“Jen!”
Now the farmer turned for him.
“I will tear you into little pieces, boy.”
He knelt beside her crumpled form as the farmer stalked forward, the pitchfork hanging out of his chest, shaft bouncing with each step forward.
Tom purposely cowered from the farmer, who wheezed in laughter. He waited patiently, not hiding the terror which welled out of his eyes.
He smelled the farmer’s rancid breath as the vampire closed in on him. Tom sensed his overconfidence.
When the farmer reached for him, he drove the stake upward into the thing’s soft underbelly. As the monster howled in shock, Tom pulled the stake back and again drove it up into the farmer's chest. The stake penetrated ribcage with a sickening crunch, like egg shells cracking.
Gore bubbled from an open belly wound, but the farmer was relentless. It snatched Tom by the neck and whipped him into the wall. Agony spread across Tom’s back, and he momentarily lost feeling in his lower body.
As he lay prone, the farmer stalking toward him with deliberation, Tom could see that the thing’s pace had slowed. The shallow puncture from the stake had caused a serious injury. He willed himself to his feet, pins and needles causing his legs to wobble, and when the farmer lunged forward, he drove the weapon back into his stomach. The point of the stake caught the open wound, meeting less resistance this time.
As the monster toppled backward, a look of fear flashed in the farmer’s eyes. Tom yanked the stake free, and blood spurted like a geyser across his face and arms. He turned the weapon around, swinging it like a baseball bat. The two-by-four cracked against the farmer’s head, the sound echoing off the barn walls, and the farmer fell to his back in a daze.
He jumped over the farmer’s body, feet to either side of his stomach, and drove the stake down into his chest. Vermillion eyes widened. Blood poured out of the farmer’s mouth. Tom reached behind him for the hammer and pounded the end of the two-by-four, and the point buried itself through a heart as black as pitch.
The farmer's body went into spasm, as Tom hammered the stake deeper. After another spurt of blood from his mouth, and the farmer finally went still.
Tom threw down the hammer and rushed to Jen. He pulled her by the shoulders away from the edge until her legs no longer hung off the landing, but she wasn't moving.
Anguish surged through him. They had come so far together. He couldn't lose her now.
“C'mon, Jen. You've gotta wake up. We're gonna make it.”
Her face was pallid in the silver moonlight. He put his head close to her mouth. Was she breathing? Breathe, Jen, please!
As he held her in his arms, seated against the wall high above the barn floor, sawdust floated in motes through the gray, like fireflies descending through a meadow sunset. The barn was silent, save for the boy's sobs.
“We're safe now. All you have to do is wake up. Open your eyes, and you'll see.”
Her neck lolled in his arms. He put a supporting hand under her head, his tears falling onto her face like raindrops.
Outside, the fog receded from the window, its chill breath slinking toward the morass of the surrounding fields. The stars and moon had returned to the sky, and twin silver beams poured through the two windows, creating sharp delineations of light and shadow within. A hush fell over the night, as though it wept for the lifeless body he held to his chest.
“Please come back to me. I love you.”
He bent his head and cried into her shoulder, the sobs rushing out of him like a waterfall. He had lost everyone. In the end, he had failed her.
But as the stars flickered above the red barn, and the first sliver of gray appeared on the eastern horizon, her eyes opened.
Eleven
The center of Storberry was a ghost town. While the digital clock outside The Storberry Savings Bank displayed 4:00 a.m., traffic lights directed empty streets, their reflections animate along the blacktop. The Red Lion Tavern, where Chuck Kingsley had once held court, echoed inside with the forgotten voices of those who had once found solace in its gatherings. Already a thin layer of dust covered the counter, like the first killing frost of autumn.
The crimson malevolence, the atrocity of the haunted forest, the lord of all vampires found Mary and Evan.
The shadowed monster had seemingly materialized out of nowhere in the center of Main Street, following the police cruiser Evan and Mary had commandeered. There was no escaping the vampire. No matter where they went, it would find them. But they were no longer running.
Evan pressed the gas pedal to the floor, and the tires screeched against the blacktop. The cruiser hit 40 mph as the car turned right from Main onto Jensen, putting distance between the vampire and the cruiser. The monstrosity disappeared from the rearview mirror when they reached 60 mph on the straightaway. The engine roared with power, drowning out the steady drone of static from the communications radio.
After he turned right on the first side street and worked his way through a small neighborhood, he snaked his way up the rising terrain along a twisted dirt path and came out near Liberty Cemetery. The cruiser pulled into the cemetery, winding upward through the tree-lined roadway before coming to a stop at the western edge. The dashboard clock read 4:17 a.m. In the next twenty to thirty minutes, the vampire would find them.
He popped the trunk, and they stepped from the vehicle. The trunk held two guns, originally belonging to officers Kendricks and Stults. Two stakes remained, along with a can of gasoline courtesy of The Last Stop (nobody had turned off the pumps before the madness started), and a lighter.
“Are you sure about this?” Mary asked.
He set the gasoline can on the ground and pulled a flashlight from the cruiser's glove compartment.
The headstones stretched down the slope, like fossils bathed in silver light. As dense fog receded off the hill toward Maple Street, leaving behind
thin tendrils which wormed between the headstones, the still waters of Becks Pond shimmered like a dragon's eye.
The trees of the hill forest loomed over the cemetery. He could feel the forest watching him. His mouth was dry, and his legs felt as though they were sandbags.
“I'm killing two birds with one stone.”
As he stood at the tree line, shining the flashlight against the interior sentries, he realized that this was as close as he had ever willingly come to the forest. But he would have to enter. The vampire would find them soon, as it had repeatedly through the night. He would have one chance to entrap the monster.
Just as he had anticipated, the upper branches and leaves of the forest had caught most of the rain. The interior ground was damp, but the trunks were dry. There was no question in his mind that the trees would burn. But he couldn't shake the sensation that the forest had eyes.
Jesus, it knows what I am planning to do!
“Evan?”
He jumped at her voice. As the sound of crickets carried up the slope and through the meadow, the hill forest lay silent.
“I'm okay. Let's get started.”
He handed her the flashlight, and they walked side-by-side into the depthless black of the hill forest. The beam cut through the thin outer wall and came to rest on the monstrous trunks deeper within. As the light panned the horizon, seeming to die against the gloom, he remembered the ruby eyes of Brian Nedson burning through the blackness. But something far more terrifying than the undead boy lay waiting in the trees on this night. He shivered.
Two minutes into the forest, the sentries towered above them until their tops disappeared into the void. The monster would come for them now. The forest knew they were here, and so too would the vampire. Evan’s skin crept with gooseflesh.
As comforting warmth built along Mary's right thigh, she pushed her hand into her pocket and found the wooden cross pulsating with a faint glow. Evan saw the cross and looked into Mary's face. Her skin was ashen in the unnatural glow, her eyes wide as though she sensed the forest’s corruption pressing inward from all sides.
The presence of the forest was palpable here. The vile stench of its floor, reminiscent of animal carcasses and evil, alerted him that they had gone far enough.
The forest was drier within, the precipitation shunted by the tangle of gnarled limbs above. It was here that he doused a fallen deadwood, its shriveled skeleton laid across the forest floor. The odor of gasoline smelled overpowering in the stagnant air.
While they covered their noses to stave off dizziness, he poured a trail of fuel along a mass of dead leaves which ran up against a huge oak. He splashed the massive trunk, gasoline sparkling like fireflies within the flashlight beam. They swept through the trees in a wide arc, circling back to within a few feet of the starting point at the skeletal deadwood.
Now it was 4:45 a.m. A sliver of gray perched along the eastern horizon, the first sign of the coming dawn. Sunrise was a little over two hours away.
An owl hooted from the copse north of Becks Pond. As the distant song of peepers carried out of the meadow, silence crept through the hill forest with murderous intent.
Ten minutes passed. They waited within the fuel arc, Mary grasping the strangely-glowing cross like a lifeline. Her teeth chattered, not from the cold. The air within the trees was neither cold nor warm, feeling as utterly lifeless as the breeze that perished at the forest's outer edge.
Yet the vampire did not come.
Why hasn’t the vampire come for us?
As they sat silently upon the deadwood, two guns and the sharpened wood stakes at their feet, Evan listened for the thing’s footfalls, expecting them to carry through the graveyard grass before amplifying upon the debris of the forest floor. He anticipated that there would be time to react to the vampire’s coming.
By 5:15 a.m. the pall had become unbearable.
He started to see things among the trees, prowling deep within the forest at the edge of his vision. As the shapes crept nearer, his eyes grew heavy, not from exhaustion but from the shapes’ hypnotic movements. As the glowing shapes darted from tree to tree, they billowed like afternoon cumulus clouds. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, his instinct rising up to alert him to the danger. But the lights urged him to sleep, comforting him.
When he reached the edge of sleep, his mother came to him, her face parched and drawn as it had been when cancer had taken her. She drifted above the dead leaves, a ghost gliding out of the trees. A tear formed at his eye, as she reached a hand toward him, promising him reunion with his father, who waited at the forest’s center. They would be a family again, if only he would take her hand.
Evan stood up from the deadwood and took a step forward. Mary, watching the forest entrance, hadn't noticed Evan until he was several steps from her.
“Evan!”
He walked with a greater urgency. She darted off the fallen tree in a state of confusion. She grasped his arm, and he swung around with madness in his eyes. He threw her to the forest floor, the stench of death wafting out of the soil in escaping fumes.
As she landed on her side, the wind momentarily knocked out of her, the rasp of her breathing knocked him out of his stupor. He blinked and the ethereal lights were gone. He rushed to help her.
“My God, what have I done? What's happening to me?”
A branch snapped.
As he pulled her to her feet, Mary's eyes were wide with fright. The trees seemed to close in about them, their great branches reaching through the gloom like misshapen claws. They turned in a circle, backs to one another. The snapping had come from deep within the forest, not from the entrance.
He felt his back bleeding through his shirt, but the laceration did not slow him. He pulled the lighter from his pocket. Just burn the whole damn thing to the ground and be done with it! He knew the fire wouldn't spread well. The wind was nonexistent and the ground still moist.
Another branch snapped, about twenty yards away.
They turned toward the sound. Mary's cross radiated between silver and white. Evan swept the flashlight beam across the trees.
Nothing.
The hairs stood on the back of his neck.
The vampire is here. It has to be here!
The shadows shifted at the edge of the gloom—the vampire had been here all along.
As the vampire swept out of the trees, a hulking silhouette moving at an alarming speed, Evan picked up one of the guns, momentarily forgetting the lighter. He fired two shots, which struck the vampire in its chest. The force of the blasts knocked the shadowed form back a step, but it kept coming. Evan hear raspy laughter.
“The lighter!”
Mary's voice cut through the forest interior, shrill and frantic. He flicked the lighter on and swept it across the deadwood. Flames leaped into the air, driving them backward before the heat could catch them. The blaze swept around the arc, through the natural kindling along the forest floor, to the great trunks of the monstrous trees.
The lord of all vampires swung in a circle, alarm spreading across its face as the fire built into an inferno. While the thing was caught up in the confusion, Evan grabbed Mary by the hand. He raced through the open part of the arc near the deadwood, sweeping the gasoline across the opening to close off the circle behind them.
The fire burst into a mushroom cloud when doused by the fuel. The force of the blast knocked them to the ground, as flames licked at the underside of overhanging boughs and caught gnarled branches. As escaped their limbs, Evan thought he heard the trees screaming. The inferno engulfed the trees, and the circle of fire raged higher. The weapons lay unreachable within the blaze.
The vampire’s vile scream carried through the deafening roar of the fire. The flames had caught the monster as it tried to break through the circle, and now it whipped about in a frenzy, causing the fire to spread more rapidly across its torso.
Mary pulled Evan off the ground.
“Let's go!”
“No! Not until w
e're sure it's dead!”
His face was awash in the orange reflection. The heat of the blaze radiated at them in waves as the inferno grew higher still. The flames surged with frantic need up tree trunks. Massive chunks of bark broke off and fell into the circle, feeding the vampire’s funeral pyre.
As Mary turned toward the forest edge, the eastern horizon had turned to silver, with a faint stripe of orange at the center as though the fire wrapped around the earth. It was not long until sunrise. For the first time, she began to think that time was on their side.
The towering monster crashed through the wall of fire.
Mary saw to her horror that the fire was smoldering across the monster’s body. She choked on the rancid smoke that drifted off its limbs. A wicked grin spread across the vampire’s face, its fangs dripping with blood. The monster stumbled toward them, injured but seemingly unstoppable.
As Mary raised the holy symbol before her, the cross radiated with a brilliance that rivaled the blaze. The monstrosity shielded its eyes from the glow.
The vampire lowered its arm and regarded her. It appeared to remember her—she was the only one it had not taken. The monster would take her now.
“Foolish whore.”
The monster staggered forward, unhindered by the cross. Mary looked back and forth between the cross and the approaching ghoul, unbelieving that it still came. The cross’s glow faded. The ghoul laughed.
Evan jumped in front of her, his shoulder smashing into the vampire lord's stomach and catching it off balance in its weakened state. He drove his legs against its resistance, pushing the monster toward the inferno. He felt the heat of the approaching blaze growing against his body.
Still he pushed against the ghoul, willing his body to overcome his exhaustion for just a few more seconds.
In the hissing inferno of the forest, boughs cracked and smashed to the earth, exploding like fireworks. In Liberty Cemetery, the insurgent saplings came to life and tried to pull themselves out of the soil. The blaze reflected off the surface of Becks Pond in wicked reds and oranges.
