Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (12 page)

K
risten was halfway back to the tent when she heard the scream. The sound was so horrific that she matched it without even understanding its source, though she feared she did.

“Jim! Jim!”

She ran back along the streambed, the basin here still bathed in warm sunlight, but on the high slopes where he had been, there was nothing but darkness. She could hear noises up there, sounds of struggle, sounds of pain.

A bear
, she thought with sickening certainty. He’d been caught by a grizzly, probably one returning for the elk in the stream.

She ran to the tent and fumbled out the bear-spray canister she’d purchased upon arrival in Wyoming, cursing herself for not carrying it this whole time, what good was it supposed to do her in the tent? There were no other weapons except for a small camp ax that Jim used for splitting firewood. She grabbed that, too, her bloody hand throbbing with pain, and then clicked one of the headlamps on and set off up the hill, screaming, trying to make enough noise to scare the grizzly away, hoping that it was not too late, that she would not be scaring it away from a corpse.

When the man skittered into view, she came to a stop so fast that her feet tangled and she fell to her knees in the rocks.

He was tall, maybe six-six, maybe more, and incredibly thin, wearing worn, tattered clothes. In the beam of the headlamp, his face appeared so pale that she thought she could see the outline of the bones beneath, like an X-ray. Except for the wet, dark splotches on his cheeks and chin. They looked black in the light, patches of fresh tar.

“Hello, dear,” he said, and when he spoke she saw his teeth and the blood in his mouth, and the scream that came from her then was far beyond what she’d been able to offer before, far beyond any she knew could exist.

She stumbled backward and fell again, and this time the beam from the headlamp found Jim. He was sprawled in the rocks near the shadow line, his head resting at an odd angle, allowed to flop that far sideways only because most of the ligaments and muscle had been severed.

No scream came then. She stared at him in horror and when she spoke again her voice was soft, a child’s whisper: “Jim.” There was no question to it this time, no urgency, because his time of hearing her voice or responding to his own name was done forever.

Kristen didn’t understand why the tall man hadn’t come down after her. She was within killing range easily enough.

When she swiveled her head and found him again, he was pacing the rocks, his footwork effortless. Every now and then he’d make a bounding leap, covering ten feet as if it were as easy as hopping from stone to stone in a creek.

“You’re still bleeding,” he said, his back to her. “It hasn’t dried yet. I can smell that. That’s dangerous in these parts, darling. I’m unique, certainly, but there are animals who can smell it, too. Grizzlies, wolves. It was a foolish mistake to get a cut like that out here. Though I do appreciate the taste!”

He laughed, and the sound washed over her like a cold wind.

“Who are you?” she said. Her voice was trembling and choked with tears. He didn’t seem to like the beam, shifting away from it and making a face of distaste, but he answered the question.

“Any matter of identity is really irrelevant in our current circumstance, don’t you think?”

Again she could see the flashing teeth, and a word slid into her brain that didn’t belong there:
vampire
. It should have been a foolish thought, laughable, and yet she accepted it with certainty in that moment. Out here the rules of the world had just changed; fiction had become fact with horrible speed.

“I’d be quite happy to speak with you,” he continued. “More than you realize. Have you ever considered the prospect of living alone? Well, I suppose with the recent developments”—he waved dismissively at Jim’s corpse—“you surely have to. But it is a lonesome part of the world at any rate, and in a lonesome lifestyle? The isolation is profound.”

He paced as he spoke, making nervous, jittery movements with his head, glancing back over his shoulder as if expecting pursuit. He came no closer to her, though.

I’m still in the light,
she thought. The low portion of the slope where she had fallen was still bright with sunlight, and the shadow line didn’t begin for another ten feet.

This is real. He needs the darkness. That’s not a myth, it’s the truth.

The sunlight was why he was pacing with such impatience. He was bound to the slope.

But not for long. No, it won’t be long now.

Kristen turned and looked at the angular cut in the mountains that filled the basin with light. She couldn’t see the sun any longer, but the cut filtered through radiant, golden light, the odd trick of the basin that had given it its name. The legend, according to what Jim had told her, involved a pair of old prospectors lost in a dark fog when they’d ventured out into a valley where the angled cuts of the mountains made a perfect path for sunlight.

In the basin. Not up above.

She took another look at the tall man—
No, not a man, he is not a man and you know this—
and then began to descend the rocks and retreat farther into the light. If there had been any doubt at all left in her mind, it was erased with the howl of rage that came from above.

“It won’t take long! Go on and run. But it’s a little late in the day for that!”

When she glanced over her shoulder, she saw that he’d begun to run. His speed and balance were astonishing, allowing him to caper across the steep slope and loose rocks without pause, but all of his movements were lateral. He couldn’t descend any farther or close the gap between them. It was like watching a furious dog on an electric fence, penned in by something invisible.

An electric fence stayed in place, though. The shadow line of deepening dusk would not.

She made it off the slope and retreated as far as the tent, then looked in all directions at the empty basin around her. There was no point in screaming for help; she was alone here, alone in a way she had never been before in her life. The valley was filled with golden light and the mountaintops were dark. She looked at her watch, saw that it was just past eight, and knew that sunset wasn’t far off, maybe
twenty minutes at best. Twenty minutes to figure out how to hold off the inevitable.

He hadn’t been wrong about the impotence of running. The tent was three miles from the car, three miles over rugged terrain. Even at a dead sprint she wouldn’t be able to cover that distance before darkness fell, and based upon the horrific display of agility and speed he was putting on up there on the rocks, it wouldn’t take him long to overtake her.

What in the hell was left, then? The light was her protector, but the light was going to disappear. She thought numbly of every myth she remembered from movies and books and campfire stories. Wooden stakes, crosses, silver bullets. She could fashion a cross, but even in the movies that didn’t seem to be reliable, and out here it seemed ludicrous. Didn’t you need a priest, anyhow? She had no gun, no bullets of any sort, and she couldn’t imagine there was anything made of silver in the tent. Even if there was, you had to
do
something with it. You couldn’t just hold it in your hand and enjoy safety. As for stakes, the tent was pinned down with plenty of them, but they were made of aluminum. With the ax and a piece of firewood, she might be able to cut something, but she’d never be able to use it against him. That brief display of strength and agility he’d already offered was more than enough to remove any notion of contending with him physically.

What was left, then? Only the setting sun. She sat down beside the tent and began to cry softly, and up above her the vampire let out a high laugh that seemed to be more of an animal’s sound than a human’s. He could see her helplessness and her defeat and he was enjoying himself as the shadows lengthened and drew him closer. She had a vision of Jim’s head again, that ungodly angle, and she began to shake as she cried. The laughter on the slope grew louder and more delighted.

It was that sound, the delight he was taking in her impotence,
that brought her tears to a stop. If she was going to die, she didn’t want to die helpless, sniveling with tears while waiting for the sun to set and for him to have his way with her. She tightened her hand around the handle of the ax and felt the pulse of warm blood in her palm. She could get him with the ax, at least. Make him hurt, if nothing else.

But don’t they heal so fast? A little pain probably means nothing to him.

She thought again of the silver, and of the crosses and the wooden stakes. What about fire? She could build a fire. Was that of any use? She couldn’t remember. She wasn’t a fan of vampire stories, had always found them trite and silly, which was a terrible irony when you were about to be killed by one. She’d watched bad movies with teenage friends around Halloween, that was all. And she’d had to read
Dracula
for a college lit seminar, which she’d actually enjoyed. Stoker was talented, and there were some vivid scenes, certainly. The arrival of the ship, the
Demeter
, that one had stuck with her. She’d had nightmares of the captain lashed to the helm, in fact. At one point in her life, nightmares had seemed awful. Kristen had never really paused to appreciate the ability to wake from one before.

“I thought we were going to run!”

The gleeful shout came from the slope, and when she turned back to look at him again she saw that the lengthening shadows had allowed him to come almost all the way down into the basin and that he was in an odd crouch, like a catcher in a baseball game. No. Different from that. Like a wolf.

“Come on, dear!” he shouted. “Give me a run. These old legs could use the exercise!”

Kristen wondered what they would say about her and Jim when this was done. Would they take a look at the terrible wounds and announce a grizzly attack, go out looking to trap or poison or shoot a
bear to settle the score for humanity? Would their bodies even be found, or would he take them away, up into those dark, ancient mines? The only thing she was sure of was that no one would know how it had happened.

She retreated from the tent as the sun faded, holding the camp ax and walking backward into a narrowing beam of light. Behind her the sound of the stream was soft and reassuring, the proverbial babbling brook, but the area just beyond it was already dark. The only portion of the basin remaining in full sunlight was the deep water in the center where the elk corpse rested.

No, no, no,
she thought, but then behind her came a flapping and popping sound like a flag in a stiff breeze, and when she turned she saw that he’d crushed their tent, had leaped directly onto the center of the roof. He sat crouched amid the billowing orange fabric, laughing.

“Time is not your friend,” he called to her, advancing with a casual, loping pace.

She stepped into the water, gasping at the temperature—it had been a warm day, but this stream was fed by snowmelt high on the mountains and could hold on to the cold even in the sun. On her second step, her foot found a slick rock and she nearly lost her balance and fell in the water. Behind her, the vampire howled with delighted laughter. She pushed forward, the water waist-deep now and the current strong. The sunlight had contracted to one final beam, allowing her a clear view of the elk’s dead eye staring up at her. His throat was torn open, so much like Jim’s, but the damage was even worse here. She could see that the chest cavity had been pulled apart, white bones protruding into the water, and that his insides had been devoured methodically, almost tidily. Maybe he hadn’t fallen victim to a bear, after all. Maybe it had been wolves.

Another howl came from behind her, but this time the pleasure was gone, and the sound was pure rage. When she chanced a look
back, she couldn’t see the vampire where he belonged, at the farthest part of the shadow line. She located his silhouette some thirty feet behind the extended dark, saw that he was engaged in whirling, frantic pacing, the dog on the electric fence routine again. But this time the fence was down. He could come so much farther. Why wasn’t he?

The water,
she realized as she watched him.
He won’t enter the water.

He was streaking up and down the streambed with appalling speed, and here and there he would splash into the shallows and then retreat as if the water had nipped his heels. She thought again of
Dracula
, those scenes on the
Demeter
, the captain lashed to the wheel.
The Count, even if he takes the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition, and so he cannot leave the ship
, Van Helsing had explained.

But that was a story. Nothing more.

Story or not, the rules seemed to hold. As full dark settled in the Sunlight Basin and all of Kristen’s protection vanished, the tall man remained on the shore. He could cross from one side to the other, but only far upstream, in a place where high boulders met and whatever water there was flowed trapped beneath them. Out here in the middle of the depths, though, she was apparently safe. Eventually he stopped running along the streambed, either having given up on finding a way to cross or having burned off his frustration, and called to her again.

“Very good, dear. But you’ll be cold soon. You’ll be freezing soon enough if you don’t get out of that water.”

Soon enough
was an understatement—she was already shivering, her skin covered in gooseflesh, her teeth chattering.

“Ask yourself if that’s really better,” he continued, his tone sympathetic now, almost soothing. “Is a slow, agonizing death really a victory for you? I wouldn’t want that. Not if I could have a swift end.”

He wasn’t wrong—she would die here before sunrise. She’d succeeded in keeping him at bay but only by trapping herself in the icy water. It was a warm-enough night by mountain standards, and if she got out now, she knew she would survive. Even if she stayed in longer, she knew where Jim had stowed emergency heat blankets and fire starters. She could endure the cold for a while and still survive, but there was a time limit to that. Just as her nemesis had been forced to wait on the sunset, she would be forced to wait on the sunrise, and that was far too long in the frigid water. Any attempt to move out of the stream would be an immediate sacrifice to him, though. With that unbelievable speed, he’d go upstream and cross the rocks and catch her on either side without difficulty. Her options, then, were as he said: the slow death or the swift.