Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  She made her way to the dungeons, where legend had it the family crypt was located. Lightning seared the darkening sky, throwing everything into stark shadow as she headed down the winding stair, one hand holding aloft a kerosene lantern, the other gripping her bag.

  The dungeons were dark and smelled of mold and damp earth. She could hear the rats as they scurried away from her intrusion. Clusters of bats, hanging upside down from the stone arches, chittered and squeaked as she walked past.

  Finally she came to an imposing wrought-iron gate, locked and bound with heavy chain. Beyond it were the ancestral vaults, where the monster slumbered during the day and from which it traveled each night to sate its unnatural lusts and spread its loathsome contagion among the weak and the innocent.

  Setting aside her lamp, she opened the carpetbag and produced a mallet and chisel. She worked the chisel’s point into the lock and began to hammer. On the fifth stroke the lock broke and fell away, allowing the gates to swing inward on rusty hinges.

  There wasn’t much time left. The vampire killer had to hurry if she was going to catch the beast still asleep in its coffin. The burial vault was a huge subterranean room with numerous stone sarcophagi scattered throughout. Which one was the vampire’s resting place? And could she lift the heavy marble lid in time? She fought the panic blossoming inside her as she moved from tomb to tomb, lantern held high.

  There it was—the only sarcophagus missing its cover. The light from her lantern reflected off the dark, highly polished wood of the casket inside. There was an emblem, made of gold, fastened to the top of the coffin. It showed a large bat, wings unfurled and jaws agape, clutching a woman and a man in its clawed feet. The vampire killer was uncertain whether the tiny humans were supposed to be terrified or ecstatic.

  She shook herself free of the languor staring at the golden bat seemed to instill in her. Clutching a silver crucifix, a wooden stake and her trusty mallet, the vampire killer threw back the lid of the casket, steeling herself for the evil that lay within.

  “Surprissssse!” cried the vampire, popping up from its coffin like a grinning jack- in-the-box as it slammed a custard cream pie into the vampire killer’s face.

  The vampire killer stumbled backward, her vision obscured by pie crust and Boston crème filling. She clawed at the muck clogging her nostrils and eyes, sputtering in rage.

  “You must really think I’m stupid,” Sonja laughed as she climbed out of the casket. “Did you really think I’d be taken in with these third-rate illusions?” She dug her fingers into the side of the sarcophagus, which broke off in her hand with a dry cracking sound. She shoved the chunk of Styrofoam spray-painted to resemble marble under Wheele’s nose. “And look at this crap!” she exclaimed as she snatched a fistful of gauzy cobweb from a nearby corner. “It’s nothing but spun sugar!” Sonja snatched up the carpetbag, scattering its contents across the dungeon floor. “I can’t believe you were actually inside my head and didn’t learn a damned thing about vampires!” She pointed at the garlic, rosary, and flask of holy water, shaking her head in amazement. “Ghilardi’s ghost was right: you are a clueless fuck-up.”

  She grabbed Wheele by the collar of her Victorian dress, jerking her to her feet. “I’m going to make you pay, not just for what you’ve done to me, but for what you did to Claude and the Thornes,” she snarled.

  Suddenly there came the sound of a hundred voices shouting at once as the angry villagers burst into the crypt, holding aloft burning torches and waving pitchforks and scythes in a menacing manner.

  “Kill the vampire!”

  “Death to the monster!”

  Sonja dropped Wheele as she hissed at the intruders. She tried to escape, but the village priest moved to block her path, holding aloft the crucifix from the church. Sonja shrank back, lifting her arms to shield herself.

  “Catch it!”

  “Kill it!”

  Rough hands grabbed the snarling, impotent Sonja, pinning her to the wall. The ruddy- faced peasants suddenly parted to allow Wheele to come forward.

  “Permit me to rid you of this fiend,” she said as she held aloft a sword made of blue flame. The villagers gasped in awe at the sight of the miraculous blade, but did not loosen their hold on their captive.

  Sonja hissed, thrashing wildly in an attempt to free herself, but it was no use. Wheele placed the tip of the burning sword above the vampire’s heart and pushed the blade home. Sonja screamed, arching her back as the sword pierced her heart. Wheele wrapped both hands around the hilt of the sword and pushed it in deeper, until the vampire’s body was transfixed by the blade. Blood poured from under the glasses covering the vampire’s eyes.

  Suddenly Wheele heard wild, wicked laughter echoing through the vault. She looked around, but could not find its source. The torch-bearing peasants wavered and then winked out like holograms.

  Oh, puh-leeze, Miz Wheele, don’t strike me with that terrible swift sword!

  “Now you’ve done it,” Sonja sighed as she wrenched the sword from her chest.

  Catherine Wheele opened her eyes to find herself once more in her own body. Since she could not remember disengaging from the Blue woman’s mind, she assumed the vampire must have been responsible for jettisoning her.

  She looked in the direction of her adversary, expecting to find her crumpled on the floor, but instead was shocked to see her not only on her feet, but encased by an energy field that wobbled and warped about her like a malignant soap bubble. The Blue woman’s arms were upraised, as if in ecstatic communion with the darkness that surrounded her.

  Catherine knew she should flee, but she couldn’t move. She watched in dumb fascination as the skein of energy expanded outwards like parade balloon. Blue-green sparks danced from the vampire’s fingertips, tracing alien designs in the ozone-heavy air.

  Suddenly the doors of Catherine Wheele’s perception were thrown open and Sally emerged from her hiding place. The part of Catherine that still thought of herself as human cringed at the sight of her childhood playmate. Sally was smooth-bodied, with skin the color of cinnamon and two pairs of breasts, one above the other, with tiny eyes, like those of mice, in place of nipples. The televangelist wrenched herself free of the vision as her gaze strayed to the tentacles writhing in the folds of Sally’s labia.

  Catherine staggered to her desk and yanked open one of the drawers. The gun was there, loaded and ready to fire. It had originally belonged to Zebulon back in the carny days. Later on, he had used it as proof of his stint in the army and his support of All-American values whenever the NRA came around. Catherine was glad she ignored Ezra’s pleas to dispose of it.

  The Blue woman still stood in the middle of the ever-expanding bubble, sweat pouring her brow as if she was in the grips of malarial fever, radiating heat like a stove, her eyes rolled back and a beatific smile on her face.

  Catherine flicked off the safety and aimed at the Blue woman’s head. She wasn’t sure what killed vampires, but she was pretty certain nothing could survive having its brains splattered across the room.

  The gun kicked in her hand and the bullet emerged from the barrel of the gun as if she’d fired it underwater. She saw the nose of the bullet touch the skin of the bubble She saw it dimple, then bend slowly inward. Just as the bullet finally broke the surface of the bubble, time sped back up again, and Catherine had a vision of herself lighting a match while sticking her head inside a gas oven.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Wexler knew it was time to abandon ship when he heard the machine guns on the front lawn. He didn’t have to look out the window to know who they were firing at.

  His body ached and his head felt like it was full of bar-room sawdust. He passed Catherine’s vanity table as he got dressed, trying not to look at what she’d done to him. The grimace had disappeared after the first hour, but the facial tics that skewed his features into a death’s-head grin were still occurring every twenty minutes or so.

  As if on cue, Wexler’s face twisted itself into a grot
esque parody of a leer. The effect was devastating, transforming one of the country’s leading psychiatrists into the stereotypical dirty old man—wink-wink, nudge- nudge. He’d have to lay low, anyway, until the spasms went away. He doubted he’d sell many books looking like a refugee from an old Batman comic, even if he had made an appearance on Oprah.

  Raw scratches from Catherine’s nails crisscrossed his back, shoulders and the flat of his belly. His dick was swollen and red, but not from sexual arousal. In fact, if he never had an erection again it would be too soon. How long had she been in control of him? Hours? Days? She had used him like a puppet, servicing her for hours on end until he collapsed from exhaustion. She had used her bizarre mind powers to get his prick was hard—as rigid as it’d ever been—but with no pleasure involved. She had turned him into a living dildo. He nearly retched on the shame flooding him.

  He struggled into his pants, relieved to find his keys still in the pockets. His BMW was parked on the turnaround in front of the house. If he were lucky, he might escape while the two horrors fought it out downstairs, just like in the old monster movies he used to watch on Shock Theater.

  To hell with Elysian Fields! He’d welcome having his license to practice medicine revoked if it meant he’d be safe from that painted harridan. Once he escaped, he was going to empty his bank account and take the first flight out of the country: Rangoon, Mexico City, Dusseldorf—it didn’t matter where he went. Even a poverty-ridden pesthole like Somalia would be preferable to another night in Catherine Wheele’s arms.

  He eased down the heavily carpeted stairway, his Prada shoes in one hand and the keys to his car in the other. As he reached the ground floor, he heard the murmur of a woman’s voice coming from the study, although he didn’t recognize the speaker. He hurried through the foyer and out the front door as if he was running for the finish line.

  The grass was wet with dew and other things, but he couldn’t afford to be squeamish. He sprinted toward his car, amazed that his luck had held out. He wanted to laugh, but was afraid it’d set off another round of facial tics. He had made it. He was home free.

  The shock wave slammed into him like a fist, and suddenly Wexler found himself in the middle of a firestorm whose flames did not burn flesh and bone but seared the mind. He felt something reach into him with knitting-needle fingers, exposing the soft, wiggling things at the bottom of his soul. The something had vermilion eyes and a gaping mouth outlined in blood. There was a brief spasm of pain in his chest that mirrored that in his head. A second later he dropped to the ground, scant inches from his car, felled by an exploding ventricle.

  Coroners and emergency-room personnel claim that the hours between two and five in the morning are when most humans enter or depart this world.

  After a hard day shuffling papers and wending their way through the barbed wire of office politics, these people go to bed, and during deepest sleep, where the dreams are never recalled, their hearts malfunction. Some wake up long enough to know what’s happening to them, but most don’t. It’s a perfectly natural phenomenon. In fact, most humans consider dying in their sleep ‘not a bad way to go’.

  Later, when the authorities got together in an attempt to discern a pattern to what happened on that night, they would discover that their data resembled the concentric circles that mark an atomic bomb blast

  Two Miles Out: Dogs howled like lost things while neighborhood cats cried like abused babies. Children awoke in tears, screaming that a ‘red-eyed woman’ hovered over their beds.

  One Mile Out: Four known epileptics and one previously undiagnosed case suffered grand-mal seizures. Mrs. Darren McClintock, a widow and chronic insomniac, claimed she saw a woman, doused in blood, standing on her back patio.

  One Half-Mile Out: Nine cardiac arrests are reported to 911, four of which proved instantly fatal. Three of the attacks involved individuals without a history of heart disease. The surviving patients, when interviewed, complained of vivid nightmares involving ‘a woman with red glass eyes’.

  Three Blocks Out: Two suicides are reported, both involving victims with no history of depression or mental illness. Mr. Jack Martin, age thirty-eight, got out of bed without waking his wife, then retired to his study, where he blew his head off with a handgun he kept in case of burglars. Cynthia Anne “Cissy” Fife, age eighteen, was last seen watching the Late Late Show in her room. Her exact time of death is uncertain. She was found by her parents early the next morning. She used her manicuring kit to open her veins while in the bath tub.

  One Block Out: Noel Landry, age thirty-four, was watching late night television in the downstairs den. His wife and two children (ages six and four) had already gone upstairs to go to bed. Sometime after midnight, Landry took the shotgun from the downstairs hall closet and shot his family as they slept, then put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe.

  Ground Zero...

  Catherine Wheele stood with her arms held stiffly outward, like a small child playing Frankenstein. A greenish material seeped from the televangelist’s nostrils, mouth, eyes, and fingertips. The muck possessed a faint luminescence, like a cheap glow-in-the- dark Halloween mask.

  Sonja stared at Wheele in amazement. She had been unsure what would happen when the negative charge she was carrying was finally purged from her system, but she certainly never expected this. She recognized the viscous glop being exuded from the transfixed faith healer as ectoplasm, although in quantities unprecedented in the annals of paranormal history. Wheele literally dripped the stuff like one of those grotesque toy monsters that squirt slime from every possible orifice when squeezed.

  The ectoplasm writhed and bubbled, as if being sculpted by invisible hands. After a few seconds humanoid shapes began to take form. Sonja stepped back, wary of the phantoms emerging from the otherworldly goo.

  She was able to spot a ragged, hawk-faced man in overalls and a woman with hollows where her eyes should have been. The woman held a half-formed infant to her breast. An amorphous clump of slack-faced, empty- eyed children—joined like paper dolls— drifted in the phantom mother’s wake. She saw ghostly senior citizens, walkers growing out of their hands, and cancer victims that could almost pass for living, save for the luster of their skin.

  The spectral entourage was dominated by a tall, well-groomed man with the manners of a fox. His three-piece suit merged with his flesh and his hands sprouted growths that resembled a bible and a microphone. With a start, Sonja recognized the figure as Zebulon Wheele, Catherine’s late husband.

  There was a weird quiet, like the hush in the eye of a hurricane. The room was bathed in the strange greenish light given off by the assembled ghosts. Their odor was a cloying mixture of wood smoke, burned pork, and decaying roses.

  Wheele blinked as if she’d emerged from a deep sleep. She seemed baffled by the eerie light permeating the room. But upon seeing the blurred faces of the figures surrounding her, she cried out in a mixture of horror and recognition.

  A couple of the figures grabbed her, pinning her arms to her sides. Catherine struggled fiercely to free herself, but all she succeeded in doing was unseat her wig. A weird noise like the sound of high-speed helicopter blades emerged from the mouths of the dead. It took Sonja a second to realize they were laughing.

  Zebulon Wheele separated himself from the others crowding around his widow. The dead evangelist gestured broadly as he pointed to his wife. His lips moved, voicing a warped imitation of human speech that sounded like a badly out-of-synch foreign film. Sonja wasn’t adept enough—or dead enough—to understand what he was saying, but she got the drift. So did Wheele, judging from the look on her face.

  As if to drive his point home, the shade of Zebulon Wheele thrust his bible hand into Catherine’s face and disappeared, as if absorbed through the pores in her skin.

  The faith healer’s body abruptly convulsed then went limp. The phantoms that were holding her arms stepped away as she lifted her head and grinned at the assembled dead. It was Catherine’
s mouth, but not her smile. The faith healer’s gaze fell on Sonja, but she could tell it was not Catherine looking at her.

  Catherine Wheele stepped forward and nearly lost her balance, suddenly unfamiliar with high heels. She moved like a drunkard, her eyes and lips twitching like a poorly operated ventriloquist’s dummy. Zebulon had not been dead very long, as ghosts estimate time, but it was long enough to him to have forgotten the complexities of flesh.

  The other phantoms pressed against the possessed televangelist, their faces expectant. The eagerness in their expressions made Sonja’s crawl. Catherine Wheele’s mouth opened and from her ruined larynx came a sound that might have been a word.

  “Take.”

  She gestured with a perfectly manicured hand, the fingers writhing as if fighting an unseen force.

  “This.”

  The fingers abruptly hooked themselves into a claw.

  ‘Take this,” gargled the almost voice as her claw disappeared into her abdomen to re-emerge, a second later, slick with blood and clutching a length of pink intestine.

  “For this is my body,” growled Zebulon Wheele.

  Pale hands closed on the proffered intestine as if it was a ghastly party streamer. The warped corpse laughter swelled as the Skaggs children grabbed their sister’s entrails and began to twirl around her as in a perverse May Pole dance.

  Wheele’s hands dug deep into the wonders of her flesh, offering up the choicest morsels to the wraiths clustered around her. Papa Skaggs snatched at his daughter’s liver, his radiant fingers probing the cirrhosis scars. Mama Skaggs, having received her child’s kidneys, unleashed a pungent shower of blood and renal fluid on the Persian carpet.

  George Bellwether was made a present of her uterus, while Mrs. Barker, who had thrown away her insulin at Catherine’s behest, was presented with a lung. Mr. Winkler, who’d poured his nitroglycerine tablets down the drain as a show of faith, ended up with her gall bladder. And still they thronged about her, eager to participate in the communion of the dead as the possessed televangelist dispensed chunks of her body like an indulgent grandmother handing out Halloween candy.