But presently the thirst returned and burned raw in his throat. He forgot about Grace. It was still early as he edged toward the highway.
It was an unfrequented road at best. The Claxton road was better and held more traffic, but too much traffic would hamper Coleman. He stood by the side of the road and waited for a long time before a car came past. Its lights caught him full as it rounded a bend ahead and he reeled, falling into the ditch.
He heard the car braking and the door open. Someone ran up to him and he heard a voice call out but he couldn't understand the words. The voice called again and this time he heard: "Sam Coleman! Don't move!"
It occurred to Coleman that this might be the same person who placed the cross before the cave mouth but there was no sun-agony except from the car. Coleman picked himself up and jumped for the shadowy protection of the trees.
"Hold up Coleman or I'll shoot!"
He was safely in the trees, now. He moved away from the road until he was certain he had found a place where the shadows would hide him from normal sight. He heard heavy movements among the weeds and fallen leaves and pine needles as the man came into the woods after him. Coleman waited until his pursuer was quite close and then he stepped out from the shadows.
"I see you Coleman," the man said. "Stand still! I don't want to hurt you." Coleman knew the voice. It was someone he knew from before. It was Sheriff McDonald.
"McDonald," Coleman said perhaps too quietly to be heard.
"We've been looking for you Coleman," McDonald said. "I won't hurt you if you come along."
"Come… where?"
"We found a man this morning, Sam. A dead man. I've got to arrest you."
McDonald's left hand went to the leather pouch where he carried his handcuffs. Coleman said, "I killed the man," and stepped forward.
McDonald yelled something about not coming any closer. Coleman ignored him. McDonald fired.
The bullet ripped through Coleman's midsection and the impact threw him off his feet. But there was no pain, no lessening of strength. He picked himself up and moved toward the sheriff again. The sheriff fired again and the bullets tore through Goleman. This time he was braced for them. When he was close enough he lashed out and knocked the gun from McDonald's grasp with his fist.
Coleman grabbed the sheriff's neck with both hands and dug the fingernails in deep. The nails had grown since he was attacked and before Coleman knew what was happening, the jugular was opened and blood flowed freely. He knelt over his victim to drink. McDonald groaned and struggled weakly for a moment then stopped moving.
Coleman gorged himself but before he had quite satisfied himself he heard men running. Four or five of them. Someone shouted, "The shots came from over here!" It was a voice Goleman had heard before-at the crossroads.
Coleman lifted the sheriff and carried him toward the road. His idea was to hide the sheriff until he could return to finish what he had started. Greed was heavy in him and told him that there were five sources of blood in the woods tonight. But caution warned him that the five were sources of danger as well.
He suddenly realized he was no longer in the forest but on the shoulder of the road. He could hear the men coming closer. He could not run with the burden of the sheriff's weight and expect to escape the others. He dropped the sheriff's limp body and it rolled into the ditch. Someone burst out of the trees and Coleman whirled to face him, his foot slipping on the edge of the ditch. The ground gave way and Coleman sprawled. He scurried to his feet and tried to avoid the grasp of his attacker. But the man had both arms around Coleman's neck and was calling for help. Coleman managed to get his hands on the man's throat and he forced him down. But someone was suddenly on top of him then, pulling him from the first man.
Coleman was being overpowered. There were too many of them and though he fought like a demon, he could not escape. Suddenly a cross was being held in front of him. It was like the sun, hot and scorching. Coleman cried out and tried to escape the grasp that held him. But his strengtn was ebbing.
"Hurry," Isaac Smith said. "There's not much time left before midnight."
Coleman was forced through the woods, no longer strong enough to defend himself or escape. At the stroke of midnight he was lying in the crossroads and against his breast was the point of the stake. The hammer in the hands of Isaac Smith was raised and for one brief, vivid moment, Coleman could see it poised above him.
Then midnight came and Coleman knew the agony of the crossroads.
7
When Isaac Smith returned home the sheriff was there waiting for him.
"We looked for you," Smith said. "You must've come to and moved on. We couldn't find you."
"You saved my life," McDonald said. "I'm grateful. But I got to know what you saved it from."
"Let's go over there," Smith said, pointing toward the hen-coop. McDonald followed him and stood morosely watching as Smith seated himself on a box. "I don't want to wake up my family," Smith said. "I'd as soon they didn't know about all this. Sheriff-you believe in devils?"
"What do you mean, devils?"
"Plain old blood-drinking devils," Smith said. "That's what Sam Coleman was. A blood-drinking demon. He needed it to keep alive."
"You mean he was a vampire?"
"That's the other word for it. But devil or vampire, that's what Coleman was."
"I can't swallow a Frankenstein movie story," McDonald said. "Now I know Coleman wasn't… right, like you and me. But why should he suddenly become a vampire?"
"I got a story you better know first," said Smith. "We had us a man die in one of the shanties off yonder about two-three weeks back. Nobody from here knows who he is. He's just a coloured tramp man passing through this part of the country looking for work, I reckon and he died. Well, we didn't know his kin so we got him a coffin and arranged a funeral for him and found a place to bury him. My guess is somebody's old cat got in the house with the coffin before it was put in the ground and that cat jumped over him. A cat jumping over a corpse will make it rise up at night to find blood to drink."
"Did a cat jump over Sam Coleman?"
"No. This other one-the one that was the stranger-he must have jumped Sam and that's how Sam got his neck tore. It's like sickness that you can catch. When a man's killed by one of these blood-drinking devils and he gets buried without something being done, he comes out of the grave at night and looks for somebody to be his own victim. What you can do if you know a man's been killed like that is pin him in his grave with an oak stake or bury him with a cross. There's some kinds of plants you can put in his coffin with him to keep him dead but I don't know what they is."
"Then Sam Coleman needed blood to stay alive?"
"Sort of," Smith said. "Maybe he needed it to stay un-dead. Course, it ain't easy for them. They can't come around silver or iron and a lot of other metals seem to make them nervous. The cross is a thing they don't like. And running water. Once we lost that first devil in the swamp so it seems if the water is still or stagnant it's no trouble to them. Running water they can't cross. You can pin one on an island if you can find a way to get him there."
"That doesn't sound easy."
"It ain't. To kill a vampire you really should find its grave. It's got to come back to that grave. You can pin him up there until midnight when he can be killed. You got to kill him at the stroke of twelve. You got to drive a stake through his heart and it's got to be done at a crossroad. The head has to be cut off and put between the feet and you got to burn the whole thing."
"I saw the fire," McDonald said. "I guess that means Coleman is dead."
"He's dead," Smith said. "You taking me to jail?"
"No," McDonald said. "The Coleman case is closed. Forever."
Smith nodded gravely. "Telling about it won't do no one no good, anyway."
He turned and started for his house and as he turned, McDonald bent and picked up a rock. With a quick, powerful movement he smashed the rock against Smith's head. Smith let out a faint surprised sound
, then slumped to the ground. McDonald rolled Kim over and his hands trembled as he reached for the throat and his nails dug for the artery.
Afterward, he returned to the ditch on the Savannah Road. It was almost light. He had to be back in that ditch, covered with the dirt that had fallen on him when Coleman had slipped. Even as he pulled the dirt down on him, he realized he would be found: it was not a good place to be buried. Already he knew that he would awake that night at the morgue.
And sooner or later-
Sooner or later he would know as Coleman had known and as the tramp had known before him, the agony of the crossroads at midnight.
2: Brian Lumley - David's Worm
Professor Lees, chief radio-biologist at the Kendall nuclear research- and power-station-was showing his son some slides he had prepared weeks earlier from pond- and sea-water in irradiated test-tubes. David was only seven, but already he could understand much of what his famous father said.
"Look," the professor explained as the boy peered eagerly into the microscope. "That's an amoeba, quite dead, killed off by radiation. Just like a little jelly-fish, isn't it? And this…" he swapped slides, "… is a tiny-wee plant called a diatom. It's dead too-they all are-that's what hard radiation does to living things…"
"What's this one?" David asked, changing the slides himself.
"That's a young flatworm, David. It's a tiny fresh-water animal. Lives in pools and streams. Funny little thing. That one's a type with very strange abilities. D'you know, when one planarian (that's what they're called) eats another-"
David looked up sharply at his father who smiled at the boy's expression. "Oh, no! They're not cannibals-at least I don't think so-but if a dead worm is chopped up and fed to another, why! The live worm 'inherits' the knowledge of the one it's eaten!"
"Knowledge?" David looked puzzled. "Are they clever, then?"
"Noooo, not strictly clever, but they can be taught simple things: like how a drop in temperature means it's feeding time; stuff like that, as I've said, when one of them is dead and chopped up, whatever he knew before he died is passed on to the planarian who eats him."
"And they're not cannibals?" David still looked puzzled.
"Why, no," the professor patiently explained. "I don't suppose for one minute they'd eat each other if they knew what they were eating-we do chop them up first!" He frowned. "I'm not absolutely sure though… you could, I suppose, call them unwilling cannibals if you wished. Is it important?"
But David was not listening. Suddenly his attention seemed riveted on the tiny creature beneath the microscope.
"He moved-!"
"No he didn't, David-that's just your imagination. He couldn't move, he's dead." Nonetheless the scientist pulled his son gently to one side to have a look himself. It wasn't possible-no, of course not. He had been studying the specimens for three weeks, since the experiment, watching them all die off; and since then there had not been a sign of returning life in any of them. Certainly there could be none now. Even if the sustained blast of hard radiation had not killed them off proper (which of course it had), then colouring them and fixing them to the slides certainly must have. No, they were dead, all of them, merely tiny lumps of useless gelatin…
* * *
The next day was Saturday and David was not at school. He quit the house early saying he was going fishing at the pool. Shortly after he left, his father cleaned off his many slides, hardly missing the one with the tiny planarian worm -the one in David's pocket!
David knew he had seen the worm move under the microscope; a stiff, jerky movement, rather like the slug he had pinned to the garden with a twig through its middle one evening a few weeks earlier…
David's pool was his own. It lay in the grounds of the house, set far back from the road, in the copse that marked the boundary of his father's land. In fact it was a run-off from the river, filled nine months of the year by high waters flooding the creek running to it. There were fish, but David had never caught any of the big ones, not with his bent pin. He had seen them often enough in the reeds-even a great pike-but his catches were never any bigger than the occasional newt or minnow. That Saturday it was not even his intention to fish; that had only been an excuse to his mother to allow him to get down to the pool.
The truth was that David was a very humane boy really and the idea that the flatworm had been alive on that slide, no matter how, was abhorrent to him. His father had said the creature was a fresh-water dweller: well, if it was alive, David believed it should be given another chance. Immersion in water, its natural habitat, might just do the trick!
He put the slide down on a stone in a part of the pool not quite so shaded by the surrounding trees, so that the creature upon it might benefit from what was left of the late summer sun. There he could see it just beneath the surface of the water. He kept up a watch on the tiny speck on the slide for almost an hour before growing tired of the game. Then he went home to spend the rest of the day in the library- boning up on planarian worms…
* * *
In defiance of everything the books said, "Planny," (as David christened the creature the day after he saw it detach itself from the slide and swim almost aimlessly away), grew up very strangely indeed. Instead of adopting a worm-shape as it developed, with a lobey, spade-shaped head, it took on more like an amoeba. It was simply a shapeless blob-or, at best, a roundish blob.
Now one might ask: "Just how did David manage, in such a large pool, to follow the comings and goings of such a small animal?" And the answer would be that Planny did not stay small for very long. Indeed no, for even on that morning when he got loose from the slide he trebled his size: that is, he converted many times his own weight in less wily, even smaller denizens of David's pool. In just a day or two he was as big as a ping-pong ball; and David had taken to getting up very early, before school, so that he could go down to die copse to check the creature's rate of growth.
Two weeks later there was not a single minnow left in the pool, nor a stickleback, and even the numbers of the youngest of the larger fish were on a rapid decline.
David never discovered just how Planny swam. He could see that there were no fins or anything, no legs, yet somehow the animal managed quite nimbly in the water without such extensions-and especially after dining on the first of the larger fish. It had been noticeable, certainly, how much the freakish flatworm "learned" from the minnows: how to hunt and hide in the reeds, how to sink slowly to the bottom if ever anything big came near, things like that. Not that Planny really needed to hide, but he was not aware of that yet; he only had the experience ("inherited" of course) of the minnows and other fish he had eaten. Minnows, being small, have got to be careful… so David's worm was careful too! Nor did he get much from the bigger fish; though they did help his self-assurance somewhat and his speed in the water; for naturally, they had the bustling attitude of most aquatic adults.
Then, when Planny was quite a bit bigger, something truly memorable happened!
He was all of five weeks reborn when he took the pike. David was lucky enough to see the whole bit. That old pike had been stalking Planny for a week, but the radiation-transformed worm had successfully managed to avoid him, right until the best possible moment: that is, until their sizes were more or less equal… in mass if not in shape.
David was standing at the pool-side, admiring Planny as he gently undulated through the water, when the ugly fish came sliding out of the reed-patch; its wicked eyes fixed firmly on the vaguely globular, greyish-white thing in the water. David's worm had eyes too, two of them, and they were fixed equally firmly on the pike.
The boy gawked at the way it happened. The fish circled once, making a tight turn about his revolving "prey," then flashed in to the attack at a speed which left David breathless. The boy knew all about this vicious species of fish, especially about the powerful jaws and great teeth; but the pike in question might never have had any teeth at all- might well have been a caviar sandwich-for all Planny worried! He simply open
ed up, seeming to split down the middle and around his circumference until David, still watching from the pool-side, thought he must tear himself in two. But he did not. David saw a flash of rapidly sawing rows of rasp-like teeth marching in columns along Planny's insides-and then the creature's two almost-halves ground shut on the amazed pike.
Planny seemed to go mad then, almost lifting himself, (or being lifted) out of the water as the fish inside him thrashed about. But not for long. In a few seconds his now somewhat elongated shape became very still, then wobbled tiredly out of sight into deeper water to sleep it off…
* * *
For a full four days after this awesome display David's worm was absent from its rebirth-place. There had been some rain and the creek was again swollen; which was as well for the oddly mutated flatworm, for there were no fish left in the pool. In fact, there was not much of anything left in the pool-at least, not until the afternoon of the pike's vanquishment, when heavy rain brought the river waters to restock the Planny-depleted place. For that ugly, sadly vulnerable fish had been the pool's last natural inhabitant, and until the rain came it would have been perfectly true to say of David's pool that it was the most sterile stretch of open water in the whole world!
Now it is probably just as well that the majority of tales told by fishermen are usually recognized for what they usually are, for certainly a few strange stories wafted up from the riverside during that four day period, and not all of them from rod-and-liners. Who can say what the result might have been had anyone really tried to check those stories out?
For Planny was coming along nicely, thank you, and in no time at all he had accumulated all the nastiness of quite a large number of easily devoured pike of all sizes. He had developed a taste for them. Also, he had picked up something of the unreasonable antagonism of a particularly unfriendly, yappy little dog whose master called for him in vain from the river bank until late into the fourth night.
Richard Davis (ed) - [Year's Best Horror Stories 02] Page 5
