The Mammoth Book of Dracula (31 page)

During his lifetime, Cave received Life Achievement Awards from The Horror Writers Association, The International Horror Guild and The World Fantasy Convention. He was also presented with the Special Convention Award at the 1997 World Fantasy gathering in London, where he was a Special Guest of Honour.

In a small New England town, a series of bizarre attacks are being blamed on vampires ...

~ * ~

9.00 P.M.

A LONELY ROAD in northern New England, barely two cars wide. Night and road both black as tar except for the area illuminated by the car’s headlights.

Suddenly the lightbeams pick out a plodding figure who stops, turns, and lifts a hand in supplication. A stooped old woman, grey-haired, the hand wavering before her eyes to shield them from the headlights’ glare.

The late-model Buick stops smoothly beside her and its driver leans across the emptiness beside him to open a door for her. He is years younger than she. A college professor from Boston, dark-haired and handsome, Jerome Howell is well dressed in brown slacks, a tan jacket, a white sport shirt. From a thin gold chain around his neck hangs a gold cross.

Professor Howell’s hobby—an all-consuming one—is the study of psychic phenomena, and with a whole summer vacation before him and an intriguing mystery to investigate, he is presently in high spirits. Since darkness blacked out the road he has been driving a steady forty miles an hour while thinking of what he will do on reaching his destination.

“Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”

“Thank you! Oh, thank you!” The old woman clambers in and pulls the door shut, then squirms on the seat until she has made herself comfortable. She wears an old-fashioned black dress, a grey sweater, black high-top shoes. “Are you going to Ellenton?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Good, good. I was visiting a friend and my husband was supposed to come back for me. I suppose he forgot. We’re old and he does that sometimes, poor man.” She turns her head to smile at him, but when her gaze touches the gold cross at his throat, she pulls back with a quick little jerk of her shoulders. “I don’t seem to remember seeing you before. Do you live around here?”

He shakes his head. Decides to tell her who he is and what he is here for, because she has probably lived in the area long enough to supply some information that will help him in his forthcoming research. But at that moment the lights of a following car flash in his rear-view mirror.

The car has come up behind him at a suspiciously fast speed and is apparently about to go roaring past without even a horn blast to warn him. Always a defensive driver, he jerks his wheel over, causing the Buick to veer to the extreme edge of the road in search of safety.

~ * ~

In the other car, which is an old but souped-up clunker, are two younger men. Monk Morrisey, driving, is eighteen. Dan Clay will be eighteen next month. Both are high-school students on summer vacation, jobless by choice but engaged in an ongoing enterprise that earns them more money than classmates who do have summer jobs. Both are of slight build, unshaven, with hair to their shoulders. Both wear boots and dirty jeans and even dirtier khaki shirts.

With its windows rolled up against the evening chill, the clunker reeks of marijuana. Dan has just finished a joint. Monk smokes one as he drives.

They close in on the Buick at sixty-odd miles an hour.

~ * ~

As the other car comes roaring up beside him, Jerome Howell tells himself that no one but a fool or a drunk would be driving that fast on this road in the dark. He swings his Buick even closer to the road’s edge to avoid being sideswiped. But despite his defensive manoeuvre, the clunker lurches at the last moment and thuds into the side of his machine, with a sound like that of a sledgehammer striking an empty oil drum.

Oddly, the little old lady seated beside him does not flinch or scream. Apparently unafraid, she only grabs at the dashboard.

The steering wheel spins in Howell’s hands as the sandy road-shoulder traps his car’s right front tyre. Out of control while he desperately struggles to brake it, the Buick lurches off the blacktop into a shallow, grassy ditch, climbs the far side, and hurtles into a grove of trees.

Howell is a deft enough driver to avoid the first few trees the car seems likely to crash into, but not the next. The Buick strikes that one a glancing blow with its right front fender, rears high on its left wheels, and tips onto its side.

~ * ~

After sideswiping the Buick, the jalopy slowed from sixty-plus so quickly that its tyres squealed on the blacktop and its wheels came close to locking. Bringing it to a halt with its right wheels off the pavement, Monk Morrisey leaned back with a grin.

“Got ‘im.”

He thrust out his right hand. Dan Clay slapped it with his right, grinned and said, “Them, you mean. There was two of ‘em. The driver and a little old lady.”

“All the better. Little old ladies wear jewellery sometimes. Let’s go.”

The two got out of the clunker and loped back along the road to where they could see the other car’s headlight-glow among the trees. Scrambling across the ditch, they approached the tipped machine with care.

“They must both be out cold. Or dead, even.” Monk’s tone said it made no difference to him. “I don’t see nothin’ movin’.”

“Yeah.”

Going to the front of the wrecked car, they peered in through the windshield. The driver was bent grotesquely against the door the car was resting on, with one arm limply draped over the steering wheel.

“Where’s the old woman?” Dan Clay said. “There was an old woman with him. I seen her.” He leaned closer, pressing his forehead against the cracked windshield glass. “She ain’t here. Where the hell’d she go to?”

Both backed away from the car and peered into the surrounding darkness for a moment. “Maybe there wasn’t no woman,” Monk said.

“I seen a little old lady, I tell you! Right there on the front seat, next to this guy!”

“So how’d she get out?”

“How do I know how she got out? She just did, for Chrissake. If she ain’t here now, she must’ve.”

“Okay, okay.” Monk spread his arms in surrender. “Let’s get what we come for.”

They peered into the Buick again. There was no way they could crawl under it to open the driver’s door. Climbing onto the machine, Dan worked on the high-side door instead. That one was deeply creased from its impact with the tree.

Less experienced predators might not have been able to get even that door open. But after working themselves into a heavy sweat, these two finally succeeded.

Leaning in and reaching down for the unconscious man’s right hand, Monk felt for a pulse at the wrist.

“Well?” Clay said.

“I ain’t sure. Whaddaya think? Should we—”

“No, no. Leave him be.”

“Be better if we—”

“No, damn it. He never seen us. Leave him be but put the mark on him, just in case. Here.” Clay took from a hip pocket of his dirty jeans a metal instrument shaped like an extra wide, two-pronged dinner fork with a stubby handle. He and his buddy had designed it themselves and liked to think of it as a miniature devil’s pitchfork with the centre prongs missing. He put the instrument in Monk’s upthrust hand.

Leaning down into the car again, Monk turned the driver’s head to expose his neck and for the first time noticed the gold chain the man was wearing. He broke it off with a quick jerk and thrust it into his pocket. Then with a practised hand he pressed the twin points of the devil’s pitchfork into the side of the man’s neck until blood oozed out around them.

Withdrawing the instrument, he handed it back up to Dan Clay without comment and went on with his work. This too was routine.

Aided by the light from the dashboard, which like the car’s headlamps was still on, Monk squirmed even farther into the wrecked machine and emptied the driver’s pockets, pausing only to pass the contents of each up to his companion. Then he emptied the glove compartment. Lots of stupid people kept valuable stuff in glove compartments, he knew from the dozens of cars he and Dan had plundered. Finally he snatched the ignition key, which was one of several on a ring.

“Okay. I got everything.”

“You sure?”

“Course I’m sure, for Chrissake. Gimme a hand up.”

With Dan’s help Monk wriggled back out of the car like a worm from its hole in the ground. Then the two turned to the car’s trunk. One of the keys on the ring opened it.

There was a small leather suitcase in the trunk. Dan lifted it out and slammed the trunk lid shut. Both young men then hurried back through the trees and across the ditch to the road. On reaching their clunker, they flung themselves and their loot into it.

Again Monk Morrisey drove. Tonight was his night. While the old car roared down the road, Dan Clay pulled the assorted loot from his pockets and examined it.

“One big, thick billfold.” Counting the bills in it, he became so excited he performed a kind of breakdance on the car seat, even with the suitcase across his knees. “Jeez, Monk! More’n five hundred bucks in cash! And a Visa card, two gas company credit cards, a driver’s licence, car registration…The guy’s name is Jerome Howell and he’s from Boston, Mass.” Tossing the billfold onto the back seat, he eagerly turned his attention to the rest of what they had stolen.

That was mostly disappointing. There was a small notebook containing names and notes. The names were unfamiliar and some of the notes were just plain weird, such as “Aleta B, 64, was visited at state inst by Dr. Keller in Aug. Told W she actually saw her brother attacked. Described attacker as tall and handsome, sort of foreign-looking. W says he believes her, but no one fitting that description lives in area.” Never much interested in the written word, Dan had no patience for such enigmatic scribblings and tossed the notebook after the billfold.

The rest of the loot from Howell’s pockets consisted of cigarettes, some coins, a handkerchief, and a silver lighter that might be worth a few bucks if they could find some dude who wasn’t turned off by the initials JDH on it.

The glove-compartment treasures were even more disappointing. This driver, it seemed, kept only road maps and a car-owner’s instruction manual there.

As Monk drove on down the road, Dan tackled the suitcase.

It was not locked. He flipped the lid up and took out a book that lay on top of some clothes. A thin book with hard grey covers on which the title was printed in black letters.

“How to Protect Yourself Against Vampires”
he read aloud. “By Jerome Howell. Hey, that’s the name on his driver’s licence: Jerome Howell.”

Monk stopped scowling at the road long enough to glance at him. “How to protect yourself against vampires?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus. I forgot.” Removing his right hand from the wheel, Monk twisted his hips so he could reach into a pants pocket. He pulled out the broken gold chain with the cross on it. “Looka this.”

Dan examined it.

“He was wearin’ it ‘round his neck,” Monk said. “I yanked it off to put the mark on him.”

“He’s that guy those people sent for!” Dan said in a hoarse whisper. “Yeah. He has to be.”

“Jeez. Maybe we should go back and finish him off. If he comes to and ain’t hurt bad—if he can really do what he come here for—he could put us outa business and ruin our whole summer!”

Monk steered the clunker to the side of the road and they sat for a while to discuss their problem.

They talked about the previous summer. Of how the word “vampire” had become part of the town’s vocabulary when the first two townspeople were found with marks on their necks. Of how Dan Clay and Monk Morrisey, even while laughing their heads off at the crazy idea some foreigner named Count Dracula had moved into town, had doped out a way to use the scare as a sure-fire cover for the game they were already playing with out-of-state cars. In the beginning, for God’s sake, when the vampire talk started, Monk hadn’t even known what a vampire was.

“You must’ve seen vampire movies on TV,” Dan had said in disgust. “Everybody has.”