I stared at that card and thought of my mother and as that she-demon picked me up again by my throat I found the strength to speak.
"Vampire," I said, spitting the word like a swallow of bad mouthwash. "You mock me, you say my words are empty. Yet last week I slept with a gypsy girl whose p.i.s.s was warmer than what pa.s.ses for your pitiful blood. Her laugh was like a gift from heaven and her heart beat like a thunder of roses. You have nothing to match her."
She squeezed tighter, but I was inspired. Out of pure mule stubborn s.p.u.n.k I kept on taunting her.
What the h.e.l.l did I have to lose?
"You can take my life, and you still have nothing," I told her. "No children, no love, no happiness. I know, I"m a gypsy and I see it in your palm. You live in the grave, and no matter how far you walk by night you will always live in your grave, and that is no life at all."
I thought about dying. I wished I had time to make a will, but what the h.e.l.l, I had nothing worth bequeathing and no one to bequeath it to. My favorite chair was broken, and I was lying about the gypsy girl.
The truth was I hadn"t been laid in months and right about now my future prospects didn"t look so hot. I kept on talking, even though the words cut through my damaged throat like razors made of barbed wire.
"As dead as I am about to be I have more future than you. That gypsy girl will someday tell her children about the night I tripped over her father"s pig trying to sneak into her camp and was chased away by the hounds, and her children will laugh and I will be reborn in their laughter. Who have you made laugh, b.i.t.c.h? Who has smiled for you? Who will remember you and grin?"
She hissed like an angered snake, slamming my back against the wall and the last breath from my lungs. The room swam. Bright spots of good-bye polka danced about my eyes. I felt her teeth kiss my neck. I felt the weight of her nonexistent breath haunting my skin. Then she screamed, and the room turned over as she threw me to the floor.
I fell beside the wreckage of my broken card table. My arm felt broken, but I didn"t have time for pain. I tried to rise. If I were to greet death today, I would do it on my two good feet.
I was my mother"s son.
I was a gypsy.
She let me stand.
She stood there, staring at something far beyond me.
I kept waiting for her to finish me, but she did nothing.
I stared at her and she stared at something so unimaginably vast I couldn"t begin to tell you what it was.
She began to moan, and the building shook, and if the tattooist upstairs was tattooing an angel on a sailor"s back, he probably just gave the angel an extra t.i.t.
And the noise she made, such a noise, I had never heard in my entire lifetime. Just try to imagine the sound that the moon might make as she wailed for her long lost lover on a cold November night in the highest reaches of the Balkan Mountains. Just try to imagine the shrieking of Mary as the Roman centurions nailed her heart to a couple of two by fours.
Then multiply them both by one hundred and ten.
I covered my ears, for fear of going deaf.
Finally she stopped screaming.
The corner of her left eye began to bleed a single tear, blood that was cut with the smallest spectre of sorrow. We stood and stared at each other while I counted time by my heartbeat, until she found the courage to speak.
"Do you know," she asked, with a lopsided grin that was halfway to heart break. "Do you know that I have not seen a sunrise since your grandfather"s grandfather first drew breath?"
Her voice was strained, as if I had been strangling her and not the other way around. Her voice cracked and groaned like the door of a long unopened secret.
"What are you going to do about that?" I asked.
She smiled, the kind of smile that blessedly didn"t show her teeth.
"I think I will stand alone," she said. "Outside your door, and watch the sun rise one final time."
She walked to the door, opened it, and was gone.
I followed her outside.
I sat down on my front steps.
She stood beside the lamppost with that sign that spoke of redemption and d.a.m.nation, waiting through the long cold night.
The two of us waited for the sun to rise.
Once a car slowed down to wait beside her, thinking that perhaps that she was the woman who took in homeless sailors. The man in the car spoke. I couldn"t hear his line, but I heard her laugh, that once, bitter and sweet and lonely like a very old child.
The car slowly drove away.
We waited some more.
Once she looked at me, and I thought that maybe she was having second thoughts.
Perhaps she was.
She could have had me. I would not have fought. I had fallen in love with that last little laugh of hers, that oh so lonely laugh that sounded so much like a child who had been turned away by her father some thousand years ago.
Loneliness ached within my heart, and love like a moth that flutters beneath the moon was born.
She could have had me, but she didn"t.
I could see daylight breaking above the distant horizon, like a knife sliced over hot flesh. I could see the morning sun reaching like the flames of an oncoming forest fire searing the gray distant wait.
The sun rose like a reborn phoenix, roared into the heavens and without looking at me for even once she screamed a long red goodbye.
Farm Wife NANCY KILPATRICK.
Noma stationed herself at the back porch and propped the screen door open with her left foot. The sun hadn"t set but one hour ago and already the Napanee sky was the color of ashes from the woodburner. Out past the pale tripod fencing and across the dying rye fields she saw Bert shuffling, Dog by his side. The sickness drained him. And left him hungry. Hungry all the time. Lord knows she fed that man a baker"s dozen meals a day, but it was never enough. The more he ate, the thinner he got. Wasted. Just this morning she noticed he barely cast a shadow.
A mosquito trying to sneak into the house paused on her meaty upper arm. Yard was swarming with the last of "em. She watched the bloodsucker poke its snout into a pore. "Want blood you"ll get blood," she promised. Her skin began to itch bad but she made herself wait. Easy now. Ball the fist and knot the shoulder like her daddy had showed her. Noma"s work developed muscles tensed. She believed she could feel the strong blood forced up that chute.
The sucker went rigid.
Swelled to triple size.
Probably didn"t even think about getting away.
She flicked the b.l.o.o.d.y corpse into the coming night and scratched her wound.
Noma shut the screen door but continued watching Bert make his way slowly toward the house. Sure is a stubborn man, she thought. Had been the forty-odd years she"d known him. Her daddy"d warned her, said it ran in Bert"s family, but she wouldn"t listen. When Bert first come down with the sickness she tried getting him over to the hospital, but he didn"t trust city-trained doctors, didn"t trust doctors at all, especially since his sister. Noma couldn"t blame him, though. Seeing Ruby lying like milkweed fluff on those crisp sheets the color of white flour and brittle as dead leaves, eyes shot with blood and sunk back into her head, breath rank, gums shrunk up from the teeth like that ... G.o.d, what a waste.
The doctors claimed it was some fancy kind of anemia. Gave her stuff but it didn"t make the slightest bit of difference that Noma could see. Bert did the right thing in bringing her home. Ruby stayed upstairs in the room next to them, fading day by day, withering to less than nothings, just like Bert was now, until one morning when Noma took up eggs and bacon and found that Ruby had departed. "Best that way," Bert said. Noma had to agree.
And now it"s him, she thought. As he reached the vegetable garden, even in the poor light she could see his bones pressuring the skin to set them free. His face wasn"t more than a skull, with hardly any flesh for that pale hide to stretch across, and just a tuft of red on top. He lifted an arm and waved; she knew how hard that was for him.
As Bert reached the porch, Noma stepped out, ready to give him a hand up the steps, but he shrugged her off. You old curmudgeon, she thought. Even now, when he can use it most, he won"t take no help. Well, that"s just like a farmer, isn"t it?
By the time she"d latched the screen door and closed and locked the inside one, he was at the refrigerator, dragging out the apple pie she"d baked this afternoon. He got a dessert plate from the cupboard and placed a hearty slice on it. That slice went right back into the refrigerator. Out came the cheddar, and pure cream she"d whipped. He plunked himself down in front of the bulk of the pie, helped himself to a wedge of cheese the size of Idaho and scooped seven or eight kitchen spoons of milk fat onto the whole mess. She figured by eating so much he fooled himself he wasn"t sick.
"Cuppa coffee?" she asked.
He grunted and nodded but didn"t pause.
Noma plugged in the kettle, but before the water got a chance to boil, the pie-tin was empty and he was back for that abandoned slice.
She measured freeze-dried coffee into two mugs, one twice the size of the other, and glanced out the window while she poured water over it. Gonna be cool tonight. October tended to be like that. Leaves on the willow been gone over a week; branches swayed in the breeze like a woman"s hair. Might be a harvest moon come up, if the sky stayed clear. Low on tile horizon. And full. She checked the calendar. Nope. Full moon tomorrow night. Be plenty to do come sunrise.
When Bert finished the pie be leaned his skinny self back in the chair and belched loud, then patted his stomach, or what used to be a stomach but had become so bloated he looked like he swallowed a whole watermelon. "Waste not want not," he said, and she agreed. She handed him his coffee and he took it to the living room. She heard the television; sounded like a sports show.
About eleven, Noma put Dog out and they went upstairs. Bert tossed and turned, keeping her awake for a time, but she must have dozed off because she woke when she heard the stairs creak as he stumbled down. The refrigerator door opened and closed. Opened and closed again. Then the back door. The screen door slammed. She turned onto her side and pulled the feather pillow over her ear and went back to sleep.
Noma got up with the sun. Down in the kitchen she cleared the mess Bert had left. She opened the back door to let Dog in and fed him the sc.r.a.ps. The sky was packed with clouds the color of cow"s brains, the air snappy. Farmer"s Almanac promised frost tonight.
When breakfast was out of the way and she"d fed the chickens and pigs and milked the cows and turned them out to pasture, Noma harvested as much of the Swiss chard from the garden as she could, two and a half bushel baskets worth. She washed and blanched the iron-rich greens then stuffed them in airtight plastic bags that she sealed for the freezer. Bert hated chard, hated vegetables on principle, he said, but Noma couldn"t get enough.
There was bed-making, washing to do, some mending, lunch to get ready and eat, vacuuming, and a call to the feed store to see if that new corn and soya mix for the pigs was in yet. It wasn"t.
Around four Noma began supper. Hadn"t seen Bert all day. Didn"t expect to. Still, she cooked up a mess of chard, and a ton of beef stew, the way she"d made a big lunch and breakfast, just in case.
Around six the cows came back. She locked them up in the barn and on her way to the house looked across the rye. The fields had faded to the color of dry bone. No sign of Bert. Not surprising. Still.
Noma watched reruns of that show with the fat woman but it wasn"t very funny this week. She crawled into bed early, not quite ten-thirty. She"d done all she could, all anybody could, but sleep wasn"t about to help her out tonight.
The eaves creaked. The wind picked up and howled the way it can. The house her daddy left her was old but solid. Noma grew up here, married here, had her kids, buried her folks. Through every season, lean and plenty, she was used to the sounds.
But when Dog howled at the moon, well; Bert always looked after Dog. She went to the window at the back and was about to warn the mutt to settle himself or else, but stopped. Dog wasn"t making a peep now. He stood quivering, scruffy tail between his legs, ears back, about to bolt. And staring at Bert.
A cloud lifted from the bloated moon and Bert turned his face up. The sickness was all over him. Eyes flecked with red like the blood that spurts from a leghorn when you chop the head off. He"d turned into a skeleton and what flesh he had left, the moon showed as a kind of whitewashed blue. "Noma," was all he said. He grinned at her and she saw his gums had receded; his teeth reminded her of the sharp teeth on the combine. But the worst of all was his shadow. It was gone.
"Ain"t letting you in," she told him firmly.
His eyes got hard and fiery red like sumac fruit. He stepped up onto the porch, out of her sight. She heard him rattling the back door. "Noma," he called again, so pathetic it got to her.
Despite her better judgment, she went down to the kitchen and opened just the inside, keeping the screen door between them.
"Best you be off," she told him. He c.o.c.ked his head to one side; that always softened her up. The yellow kitchen light gave him some color. "Noma," he whispered, like they were in bed together.
She shook her head but opened the screen door.
He was on her in a second, pitchfork teeth tearing into her throat. Noma"d always been a big strong woman, but he was stronger, she"d discovered that early in their marriage. This was more so. He stank like the compost heap and his skin rivaled the frosty air. It was plain enough, he was starving, she was supper.
He held her against the kitchen table. She felt the iron blood being drawn from her like milk from a cow. Wasn"t but one thing to be done, what her daddy had taught her.
Noma worked slow, tensing the muscles up from her legs, through her privates and stomach, her arms, chest and back. When that was done, she eased up a second. One final overall squeeze did the trick.
Bert looked like he"d been slammed by a bale of hay. Blood gushed from his mouth, nose, and ears. His eyes popped wide. He swelled fast, the way the skin does when you"re frying up chicken. A funny sound, kind of a cross between her name and a goose hissing, started to rise out of him but didn"t get much of a chance.
Noma shook for a while but figured there wasn"t any point to that. The clock over the stove read two thirty. She glanced out the window. Frost had taken the Last of the chard. The waste of it troubled her.
The walls and ceiling were splattered, the floor slime. She cleaned up what she could of the gory mess, then opened the door. Dog bounded in, happy to gobble the sc.r.a.ps.
Noma dabbed alcohol on her neck and checked the clock again. Time to get herself to bed. Sunrise wasn"t far off. Tomorrow there"d be plenty to do. Always is for a farm wife.
MORE GREAT BOOKS FROM.
BOOKS OF THE DEAD.
NOVELS.
Matt Hults - Husk James Roy Daley - Terror Town ANTHOLOGIES.
Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 1) Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 2) Cla.s.sic Vampire Tales (Vol.1) COLLECTIONS.
James Roy Daley -13 Drops of Blood a*a About The AUTHORS.
JAMES ROY DALEY ~ is a writer, editor, and a professional musician. He studied film at the Toronto Film School, music at Humber College, and English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of the hardcore horror novel, Terror Town. In 2007 his first novel, The Dead Parade, was released in 1,100 bookstores across America. In 2009 he founded a book company called Books of the Dead Press, where he enjoyed immediate success working with many of the biggest names in horror. His first two anthologies, Best New Zombie Tales Volume One, and Best New Zombie Tales Volume Two, far exceeded sales predictions, leading many of the top horror writers in the world to view his little company as one worth watching.
MATT HULTS ~ lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and two children. His first novel is called Husk, and it was released in 2011 by Books of the Dead Press.
JOHN F.D. TAFF ~ is an author with more than 25 years experience in all sorts of writing...public relations, marketing, sales, journalism and creative. He"s a published author with more than 50 short stories and seven novels in print. His latest sales have been to Schrodinger"s Mouse, Morpheus Tales, Black Ink Horror, Short-Story.me, PseudoPod and Jack O"Spec. Over the years, four of his short stories have been awarded honorable mentions in Datlow & Windling"s Year"s Best Fantasy & Horror.
RYCKE FOREMAN ~ received the acceptance letter for his first published short story in 1992--on his 21st birthday. He has continued to publish short stories and poetry periodically to date, primarily in the horror/fantasy/slipstream genres. His work has appeared in Marion Zimmer Bradley"s Fantasy Magazine, Arkham Tales, The Writer"s Eye, Niteblade, Tales from the Moon-Lit Path, Dark Planet, Crossroads...Where Evil Dwells, Gaslight: Tales of the Unsane, Journal of the Dark and many other others. He is an award winning editor and part-time publicist, and currently co-edits 69 Flavors of Paranoia with Miranda. He"s written and directed three short films to date, and co-wrote/-directed/-produced one full length feature with longtime friends and a.s.sociates, Thomas La Rue, Jeremy Orr and George Thomas. In January of 2009, he optioned a script to a small Hollywood production company, and is currently working on an independent horror film t.i.tled Slash.
FREDRICK OBERMEYER ~ lives in Cooperstown, NY. He enjoys writing science-fiction, horror, crime and fantasy and has had stories published in the Dead Inn, Alternate Realities, Planet Relish, Fedora, SDO Fantasy, the Fifth Di and Forgotten Worlds.
DAVID NIALL WILSON ~ David has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. An ordained minister, once President of the Horror Writer"s a.s.sociation and recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for poetry and short fiction, as well as being nominated for long fiction and non-fiction, his novels include Maelstrom, The Mote in Andrea"s Eye, Deep Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, Star Trek Voyager: Chrysalis, Except You Go Through Shadow, This is My Blood, Ancient Eyes and the upcoming supernatural mystery novel Vintage Soul: Volume I of the DeChance Chronicles. The Stargate Atlantis novel Brimstone, written with Patricia Lee Macomber was published in 2010. He has over 150 short stories published in anthologies, magazines, and five collections, the most recent of which were Defining Moments, published in 2007 by WFC Award winning Sarob Press, and the currently available Ennui & Other States of Madness, from Dark Regions Press. His work has appeared in various anthologies and magazines. David lives and loves with Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC with their children, Billy, Stephanie, and Katie, David"s mother Jean, and occasionally his boys Zach and Zane.
WILLIAM MEIKLE ~ is a Scottish writer with ten novels published in the genre press and over 200 short story credits in thirteen countries, and the author of the ongoing Midnight Eye series among others. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies.
JOHN EVERSON ~ John is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant, Sacrifice, The 13th and Siren, and the short story collections Creeptych, Needles & Sins, Vigilantes of Love and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. He shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a c.o.c.katoo and c.o.c.katiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark ill.u.s.trations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There"s also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can"t really play but that his son Shaun likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife Geri is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it"s usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he holds down a regular job at a medical a.s.sociation, records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs photo collage art book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual heads.p.a.ce of "70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall gla.s.s of Newcastle. For information on his fiction, art and music, visit John Everson: Dark Arts at www.JohnEverson.com.
JAMES NEWMAN ~ James lives in North Carolina with his wife, Glenda, and their two sons, Jamie and Jacob. James has several published novels to his name, including Animosity, The Wicked, and the coming-of-age fan favorite Midnight Rain.
MICHAEL LAIMO ~ Michael"s novels include Atmosphere (nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in the category of first novel), Deep In The Darkness (nominated in the novel category) The Demonologist, Dead Souls and Fires Rising, all of which were published by Leisure Books. He is the author of the dark S/F-Suspense novel, Sleepwalker, which came out in Limited Edition hardcover from Delirium Books. His short fiction has found its way into the pages of In Delirium, A Walk On The Darkside, Lost On The Darkside, Hot Blood XII: Strange Bedfellows, Surreal Magazine, Inhuman Magazine, The Best Of Epitaphs, The Best Of All Flesh, Li Pulse Magazine, plus many more anthologies and magazines, many of which have been collected in Demons, Freaks, And Other Abnormalities, Dregs of Society, and Dark Ride. He can be contacted at [email protected]
JAY CASELBERG ~ is an Australian science fiction/mystery author. As of September 2007, he has published four novels and multiple short stories under his own name. He has also written under the pseudonym James A. Hartley. All of the books published under his own name feature "psychic investigator" Jack Stein, a man whose slight psychic talent (which manifests in dreams and gut feelings) led him from a job in the military to a stint in Intelligence, and later to a job as a private investigator.