by Dan Padavona
The flames snapped toward Evan. If only exhaustion slowed him, he could have pushed himself beyond his perceived limits, but it was more: the icy terror which chilled his bones at the feel of the vampire lord, the feeling that the forest was alive with a million eyes, the memory of the boy with red eyes, the fear that his parents were burning.
All lies! My parents were never here!
He planted his feet into the soil and pushed, pushed, pushed against the monstrous beast.
“Run, Mary!”
That was when Mary screamed, a piercing cry in the inferno.
“No!”
As her voice reached him, the wounded monster faltered and Evan toppled the vampire lord into the blaze. The flames exploded around their bodies, lapping hungrily at their flesh.
Mary collapsed. She cried from deep within, her scream ripping through the haunted forest.
Flames raged over the two prone bodies, cracking whips against the roar. Boughs tore off the charred trees and crashed to earth, sending an explosion of sparks into the air.
As tears rolled off her cheeks, she realized that he had sacrificed himself for her. He had saved what remained of their town. Like old photographs fading, she tried to remember all who had given their lives since the coming of the darkness.
For a long time she wept on the forest floor, the sounds of the forest exterior exploding around her. Over time, the inferno decreased until it was little more than a slow burn. The charred remains of two bodies lay in reminder at the front of the circle.
When she found the strength to carry on, she noticed that the eastern sky had brightened. Hopeful oranges and reds pushed up from the center. The sun would rise again.
She stumbled out of the forest, vaguely aware of the first rays of sun which caressed her face with caring hands. The warm glow cascaded across Becks Pond, fish leaping from its depths in irregular parabolas as if to celebrate the new day. A welcome breeze drifted across the meadow, sending the tall grass into motion. As the flaxen rays touched the tree line, the breeze entered the hill forest, where it was no longer forbidden.
The police cruiser waited inside the cemetery, but it was of little use to her as the keys had been in Evan's pocket.
She sighed.
It was a long walk back to town.
Chapter Nine
On April 4, 1987, the North Carolina sky was a cerulean blue, and the earth was resplendent with fallen cherry blossoms. It was a glorious spring day, not too hot and not too cool.
Twin bicycles cleared the incline along route 43 and coasted into a suburban neighborhood. Nobody paid the bicyclists much attention, for it was a picture-perfect Saturday.
As garden hoses sprayed dirt off of vehicles, filling the air with the scent of wet blacktop, the cul-de-sac to the bicyclists’ right bustled with activity. Multiple garage sales competed for the attention of browsers looking to score a used microwave or an old Elvis LP for a few dollars.
An enterprising girl, probably no more than ten years old, had erected a lemonade stand at the corner of the cul-de-sac and route 43. Twenty cents for a cup, thirty cents for two. The girl's blonde hair was tied in pigtails which extended past her shoulders. She wore a yellow summer dress and had powder-blue eyes that spoke of innocence and optimism.
When the first bicyclist pulled to the curb in front of the lemonade stand, the girl's excitement to make not one but two sales was offset by her curiosity with the two strangers. They were teenagers, probably boyfriend and girlfriend, she reasoned. She didn't recognize them from the neighborhood, and Mom and Dad had always told her to be wary of strangers, but these two looked pretty friendly.
She wondered why the girl on the bicycle had tears in her eyes and a smile on her face. Her mom sometimes cried when she was happy, and that just seemed plain weird to the little girl.
“Thirty cents for two?” the boy asked.
“Yes, sir. It’s my own special recipe!”
The boy raised his eyebrows, seeing the yellow Country Time lemonade mix in the grass behind the stand.
“Well, if it's your own special recipe, then maybe two isn't enough?”
The girl stirred with excitement. A few more customers like these two, and she might be able to close shop early and go swimming with her friends.
“How about fifty cents for four cups?” he asked.
“Oh, come on, Tom. I'm so thirsty I could swallow the ocean,” Jen said. “Stop haggling with her.”
Jen’s tears had dried, leaving smudges of gray beneath her eyes. The girl correctly ascertained that they had spent a lot of time outside in recent days. Maybe they were campers riding into town.
“Fifty five cents for four cups,” she said.
“Deal!”
As Tom pulled two quarters and a nickel from the pocket of his shorts, the girl handed them each two cups of her special recipe lemonade.
The drinks were most welcome, for they had run out of water a day prior. It would have made sense to ride farther up the road to find a free drinking fountain in a park, but then they would not have met the enterprising girl with the lemonade stand.
The family who owned the big red barn on Winchester Road had found Tom and Jen sleeping in a bed of hay after sunrise, not long after Evan Moran and the monstrosity had perished inside the hill forest inferno. At first the family had feared that the teenagers were more of them. The father had aimed a gun, but his children had protested that the two teenagers were just resting, and fortunately the mother had agreed with her children.
After giving Tom and Jen a day of hot meals, the family nursed their wounds and allowed the teenagers to sleep in the barn at night. They were sad to see the teenagers leave the next morning and warned them of the dangers after sunset. The father had given them two canteens and enough money to make it through the week, while the mother insisted on making a full day's worth of sandwiches for their trip.
Tom and Jen later discovered bicycles outside of an abandoned home near the end of Winchester Road. From there they had biked along the back roads of Virginia and North Carolina, heading toward Rocky Mount for no better reason than to reach the destination Renee once promised they would reach.
The shadows never descended upon them after dark as they had in Storberry. Tom wondered if the others had destroyed the vampire in the attic crawlspace and if that had been enough to bring the nightmare to an end as he had theorized. Of this, he prayed.
As they put distance between themselves and Storberry, they had begun to see more people. Hope grew inside of them, like crocuses emerging from the soil at winter's end. But it wasn't until they reached the neighborhood with the lemonade stand that they were certain the world still existed outside of Storberry's borders.
Relief poured through them, complete with the happy tears that so confused the young girl. They had made it.
Two blocks south of the cul-de-sac at the edge of Rocky Mount proper, they cut right and followed a patchwork quilt of side streets into a nearby park that the lemonade girl had told them of.
Maples, oaks, and spruce bordered the roadway around the park, casting cool shadows across the pavement. Inside, they found a drinking fountain to refill their canteens with.
As laughter and cheers drew them toward a baseball field lined with parents and siblings, they discovered a bittersweet Norman Rockwell little league painting come to life. It was a painful reminder of what Saturdays in Storberry had once been like but would be never be like again.
The ping of the aluminum bat against the ball was followed by more cheering. She put her hand on his back and bent to kiss him on the cheek.
“Thank you for keeping your promises, Tom Kingsley.”
Two
As Tom and Jen quenched their thirst with the not-so-secret lemonade recipe, Mary Giovanni flipped the Closed sign over to Open on the front door to the Sweet Nothings Café.
What remained of the town had begun to emerge after sunrise on the morning Evan had destroyed the vampire lord. Appearing a few at a time
, the residents had peeked out of windows and through doors, like meerkats upon hearing of the lion's departure.
The population had not been whittled to nothing as Mary had feared. She estimated the new population of Storberry was somewhere around 2000, enough to rebuild around. Maybe even enough to support a little café with the best cheesecake in southern Virginia.
The prior days had been spent saying goodbye to old friends in her own way, all the while praying that she could one night close her eyes without seeing the crimson face of the vampire lord.
She thought often of the others. Especially Evan. Had it not been for his final sacrifice, Storberry would have vanished. While she wondered about Renee and the two teenagers and if they had made it out of town, mostly she vacillated between tears of loss and a steadfast determination to carry on.
Her darkest hour since the hill forest would come on the following morning.
Her curiosity had drawn her to the Moran farm, and so it was that she made her way to the northeastern corner of Storberry and the vacant farmhouse.
Under a slate-gray sky of low stratus that promised rain, the red barn, an iconic piece of Storberry's culture, gazed back at her with hollow eyes.
She entered through unlocked doors to find the first layer of dust forming on the stairway bannister. Dappled morning sunlight beamed through open curtains. The farmhouse carried a greater sense of emptiness, as though the home awaited Evan's return like a loyal dog waiting by the door for its lost master.
Dust motes sparkled through the illumination, rising and falling with the only air movement the room had seen in days. Quiet engulfed the empty corridors, as though the starved interior swallowed whole the new sounds of activity.
The memories of those lost crashed down upon her. It seemed like just minutes ago, and in some ways like an entire lifetime ago, they had been seated together around the kitchen table. A single tear ran down her cheek. The town may never know how much they had sacrificed.
As she listened to the low hum of electricity, strangely deafening within the silent interior, it seemed preposterous to her that the home was still powered, appliances at the ready for no one. A heavy stillness suffocated the interior.
Something drew her deeper into the farmhouse. She followed the hallway out of the kitchen toward the back of the ground floor and found a closed door to her left.
The basement.
The black knob stood out from the white paint, cold and hard in a home which had been built on the warmth of family and togetherness. She reached for the knob and then pulled her hand back, as though the metal was a coiled snake. She was aware of her heartbeat, which pounded like thunder, drowning out the white noise from the kitchen.
Mary took a deep breath and pulled the door open.
The smell of rot hit her like a wall at the top of the stairs. She turned her head away in disgust, subconsciously feeling for the wooden cross that she had long since removed from her pocket. A smaller version hung around her neck, draped inside her shirt against her heart. She couldn't see the cross, but she thought she felt it stir like an animal awakening from hibernation.
She wondered. If she were to pull the chain from about her neck and examine the symbol, would it pulse with an unearthly glow? Would the cross light her way down the darkened staircase, guiding her into the gloom below? What atrocity waited below the Moran home?
Impossible! she thought. The vampires had been destroyed.
Yet when her imagination drifted spectral down the staircase without her, it encountered the towering monstrosity—skin as red as a foreboding sunrise, fangs of razor blades, eyes aglow in the endless night.
The odor was probably just a dead animal, or more likely, food which had spoiled in the last week. But the familiar goosebumps along her flesh warned her of something more.
She reached for the pull string above her head, and the basement flooded with light. Wooden stairs stretched downward for an impossible distance. How big was this farmhouse? She pressed her hand against her heart, feeling for the reassuring holy symbol. An almost imperceptible tremble followed, but the smaller version did not respond to her with the strength of the wooden cross from her bedroom. Will it protect me?
As Mary started down the long staircase, she took extra care, aware that a fall within the abandoned house would doom her. When she passed through shadow halfway between the unshielded incandescent fixtures at the top and bottom of the staircase, a sudden gloom chilled her, like swimming through a warm lake and drifting into a cold pool leftover from winter. The open stair steps increased her sense of insecurity, as though she expected a gnarled hand might reach through the steps from below and grasp her by the ankle.
At the base of the stairs was a concrete floor which stretched left into a room lined with shelves of canning jars. The vile odor of death was stronger here, overpowering the hint of must from deeper within.
The basement was more of a root cellar or storage facility than a living area. There was no washer or dryer. No finished room with a dart board, pool table, and cable television. It was not a place Evan likely spent any time visiting, as evidenced by the thick layer of dust that tickled at her nose and the cobwebs which hung off the shelves like garish Halloween decorations.
She moved between the shelves, the smell of decay increasing. Her heart pounded through her chest. And for one horrifying moment, a disturbing thought gripped her. What if Evan lurks beyond? What if the one who kills the vampire lord becomes the vampire lord?
Ridiculous.
And yet she shivered anew at the possibility.
The shelving ended with an open space at the back of the basement. The light bulb from the center of the ceiling did not reach the far walls, and she had to wait a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the dim shapes.
Several wooden crates were piled haphazardly in the corner, next to a broken bed frame and a mold-coated antique dresser.
And something else, crumpled on the floor between the bed frame and the dresser.
Her mouth went dry, pulse racing to the point where she began to feel lightheaded. She strained her eyes until she discerned the crumpled form to actually be two separate forms.
Two bodies.
They were vastly different in size. One appeared to be the size of an average adult. The other was much smaller—a child's body.
She stepped back, expecting the forms to spring to their feet. The cross stirred against her heart.
She watched their forms for what seemed an eternity, the seconds feeling like hours. Yet the forms did not reanimate. They lay upon the cold concrete as she had found them, oblivious to her presence.
She pushed past her trepidation and knelt closer.
What she saw made her teeter between madness and sanity.
The flesh had rotted off their bodies, leaving behind skeletal forms. She recognized their clothing, and had known who they were the moment that she knelt next to them. How long had they been down here, waiting for Evan or one of them to venture into the dark confines of the basement? Anticipating the coming nightfall to stalk them within the cavernous farmhouse...
Randy and Benny Marks had come home.
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Dan Padavona is the son of the late heavy metal icon, Ronnie James Dio. Padavona’s parents separated when he was four, and he was raised by his mother, Loretta.
Dan reads and writes for several hours each day and has a particular affinity for fantasy and horror. He makes his online home at www.danpadavona.com.
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