One of these mills was closed after a big fire. There weren’t enough exits, and fourteen women were trapped upstairs and burned to death. The rumor is that on some nights you can see them still, those fourteen women, shrieking as they work at flaming looms, producing strange garments for an inhuman overseer. It’s a desolate place.
Suddenly I hear something.
Footsteps.
Who would be here at this abandoned place at this hour of the morning?
I look up at the empty angles of the brick walls against the sky. I look the other way, across the broken pavement.
Someone is walking slowly, surely, toward me.
I don’t know why, but this figure outlined against the sky frightens me. It is obviously staring at me. It is obviously coming right toward me. It walks mechanically, relentlessly.
That is when I start running.
I scamper up some concrete steps. I pivot on the rusty handrail and run off to the left between broken factory buildings. I throw myself down the alley. Only a few more turns and I’ll be back out on a main street.
From around the corner, I can hear that the figure is gaining at an inhuman pace. It couldn’t have gone up the steps with feet.
I burst out onto the street. Cars are whipping past. Birds are shooting through hedges. A motorcycle revs.
I move away from the alley and up the road, glancing backward. I wait to see who’s coming after me.
I stand there.
No one comes.
The unglassed windows of the factory are blackened with ancient soot, dark carbon licks of women who sewed petticoats. The walls face blankly on the street.
No one comes.
There is no sign that anyone was with me in the factory at all.
I continue cautiously on my way to school. I walk up the hill past the town green. Up a steep lane past the house of a man who owns sixteen old cars, all of them without wheels. By the time I reach the first of the streets in my school’s neighborhood, I can tell that I’m being followed again.
The strange thing is that the man (for at first I assume it’s a man) is not subtle at all. I have read about a billion spy novels, and when you are following someone, you hide behind newspapers, or pretend to paint the house next door, or hide a camera inside a spacious poodle.
You don’t just walk calmly after your prey and stand across the street from him, right on the sidewalk, staring.
He is wearing a cheap baggy suit and a blue polyester tie with raised paisleys. His face is wide and stern. His hair is in one piece, all pulled back and oiled into waves. That is how I first know that he is not of this earth. No human would willingly have that hair.
His eyes do not blink or move. He does not look like he is comfortable in his body.
He follows me to school. He waits on the circle at the base of the American flag, and every class I’m in he turns like the shadow on a sundial to face the windows.
He follows me home. I am petrified. In my house, I cling to rooms where people are sitting. My family starts looking at me strangely. I can see him through windows, standing across the street, staring.
He stands there through the afternoon. No one else has noticed him.
He stands there as night falls.
During dinner, he treads right up to the window, peering. I scream and back away from the table. His face is inches from the glass. His eyes are dead. He is staring at me.
Everyone else looks around the kitchen and asks me what’s wrong.
When I look out, he is back across the street, staring at us.
I ask Paul if I can sleep in his room. He says not until I fix my little bed-wetting problem, ha ha ha.
It must be some kind of supernatural servant of Tch’muchgar. That is all I can think. It must be a spirit like Chet, but working for evil instead of good. It is watching to see whether I will respond to the vampires’ letters, or whether I will just be a danger to them. It wants to see whether I go out at night, and range through the town, and find my gory prey. It stands there, just biding its time.
That night, when I can’t sleep, I can feel the Thing with the One-Piece Hair staring in at me. I can feel its line of sight shooting through the window, ricocheting off the lamp, and striking me.
I get up at about three and peek out the window.
There are a few streetlights. It is standing near one of them. Its arms are at its sides.
Its dead eyes stare at me still.
They are staring, and it waits.
Paul and I are watching the double funeral for the two teenage lovers killed in Northborough by vampires.
The national tabloids have made the story into a big morality issue as a warning to teens and hysterical parents. Their headlines are things like “NO NECKING!” WARNS NORTHBOROUGH’S NAPE-NIBBLING NOSFERATU. The funeral is on the Catholic channel during prime time.
Paul says, “I can’t believe these media buttscoops. You know, who are the real vampires here?”
I am crouched down to watch the show because the Thing with the One-Piece Hair is standing with its face pressed to the window. Its nose leaves no grease on the pane.
I am terrified, curled up into a ball so it can’t see me behind the plaid sofa. But I know it is still standing there. My parents are out, and I don’t want to be in a room without my brother.
“Are you okay?” Paul asks.
“I have a stomachache,” I say.
“You’ve been sick a lot lately,” he says.
After the commercial break, the show moves on to the psalms.
“I can’t believe they’re doing this close camera work on these people. The mother and sisters are, like, bawling their eyes out and the camera’s loving it,” says Paul.
On the screen, the father of the girl, voice cracking like a kid’s, is intoning one of the Bible readings. “In the mountains, there is a voice of mourning, crying, and wailing; it is Rachel, who weeps for her children, and will not be comforted, for they are no more.”
His voice floats through the dark forests, past the blinking radio towers on lonely hills; it floats past the empty squares and pizza joints with buzzing signs, and into the neat white houses by the green, into the shacks down near the old factories.
And everywhere at once, he lowers his head; and everywhere at once, his voice falls silent.
One night, Tom and Jerk decide to go on a vampire hunt.
I do not think it is a very good idea. I say I don’t generally seek the company of anything with fangs. There are three of us, however, which always means that it’s one against two. I end up protesting uselessly. Tom has not quite forgiven me for trying to beat him up, so I have to play along.
I really don’t want to go at all. The Thing has been following me off and on for three days, and I don’t want to go out of the house more than is absolutely necessary. But I have to. Tom has started watching me at school. He can see that I have not been sleeping well. He notices at lunch that I am not eating well. I am worried that he might have guessed what is wrong. Maybe it is nothing; but maybe he knows.
He is judging me carefully. There’s a suspicion in the way he looks at me. I can tell that this vampire hunt idea of his is a test. He has something up his sleeve.
I am terrified that he might know. And once he knows for sure, he will blow the whistle.
I do not have much homework, and I do it all before dinner. I have to translate a dialogue between two French people buying greeting cards. After dinner, I lie to my mother.
“I’m going over to play video games with Tom and Jerk,” I say.
“Video games?”
“At Tom’s house,” I say. “His mother said it was okay.”
“Get your father to drive you. I don’t want you walking after dark.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“It’s only about five minutes to Tom’s house.”
“I don’t want you walking after dark.”
“At all?” I say. “Can I crawl?”
>
“Don’t get sarcastic with me, Chris. I said I don’t want — ,” and so on. We have this sort of conversation for a while. In the end, my father drives me.
While we drive over to Tom’s, which is about a minute’s drive, my father listens to the oldies station and hums along. Occasionally he’ll remember three words and sing them. The blossoms are coming out on some of the trees. The telephone lines are drooping over the street.
It’s about half an hour later that we set out for the forest. Tom’s parents know we are going, but they are lax and not very bright. “Have a good time!” they say. “Be careful!”
We pick up Jerk on the way. The two of them insist on bringing Jerk’s dog, Bongo.
Bongo runs around the three of us, huffing. He bounces on me for a while. Then he bounces on Tom.
“We are not taking that dog,” I say.
“Why?” says Jerk. “If he’d like to he can come.”
“Who says?” I ask.
“Let him bring the dog,” says Tom, who is being bounced on. Tom bumps his palms against Bongo’s chest to fend the animal off. “It’ll protect us,” he says.
“That stupid dog will no more protect us —”
“He is not stupid,” says Jerk hotly.
“He is stupid.”
“He is not stupid.”
“Jerk,” I say, “that dog is stupider than a thing made out of wood.”
But Tom is being indulgent with Jerk, so he says that Jerk can bring the dog if he wants and what is my problem. We head off for the town forest.
It is dark by now. The stars are only out sometimes, as clouds keep sliding in front of them. The trees are scratching in the breeze.
We go through a few streets of houses. Most of the town is old, tall houses, or at least the memorable part is. The part where Jerk lives is all short and squat, and it’s looking a little rundown. A few windows are lit badly and dimly, like aquarium lights.
We kick a stone back and forth, and I lose it in a drain.
“How long do we have to hunt for vampires?” I ask Tom. “When do we give up?”
“You don’t have to come,” says Tom sourly. He perches his eyebrows carefully, as if he’s studying me, speculating.
I shrug. “I just want to know when we’re going to turn around.”
“What’s your problem tonight?” he says.
We go under the metal railroad bridge. On the brown iron panels, someone has spray painted “Goat legs.”
The road winds up the hillside, and for the moment we stick to it, as it is very dark out.
Tom and Jerk are now walking side by side in front of me.
My thoughts are wandering, and Tom and Jerk are heading off into the woods. We step over branches.
Jerk has finally caught up to the debate of twenty minutes ago. He suddenly adds, “And plus, Bongo will be able to detect vampires.”
“Come on,” I say.
“When dogs see something supernatural their hackles go up.”
“What? What is a hackle?” I demand. “I don’t know if I want to see your dog with its hackles going up.”
Tom has brought along a flashlight, and now he takes it out of his coat pocket. He starts shining it around the trees.
“Did you see last year when they were in Montana?” he asks.
“The vampires?” says Jerk.
“Yes, in Montana,” Tom affirms. “They had on the news —”
“I remember that,” says Jerk. He wheels his arm to push aside a springy branch. I am still behind them, so I catch it as it snaps back.
“Did you see the footage?” asks Tom. “There were farmers — they showed pictures — farmers who were caught by vampires. They showed these pictures of these farm machines with these corpses sitting in them, and their heads were all just blood and this pulpy substance, and their clothes were all stained.”
“Then,” I suggest, “it is somewhat curious that I find myself looking for vampires.”
“Chris is complaining again,” Tom says to Jerk.
Jerk says that Tom could cut me some slack.
“I’m not complaining,” I say. “I’m just —” But I can’t think of what to say, so I squint up between the boughs and I don’t say anything.
We are climbing up the hill now. Down on the road I can hear someone honking a horn. They honk it twice. Maybe they saw someone they knew, or maybe once just wasn’t enough.
The dead trees are all around us, and the slope is increasing. The circle from Tom’s flashlight wobbles ahead of the two of them. Their silhouettes block the light. Bongo skitters between them. They are talking quietly. I feel very alone in back of them, in the darkness, while they walk together with their secret jokes. I keep picturing white fingers closing on my shoulders.
In a few minutes, the hill gets steeper. The trees on the summit are low and barren. The water tower hangs above us on its daddy longlegs.
Through the twisted trees we can see down into the valley. We can see the lights of the town center and the black waters of the reservoir. On three distant hills, three radio towers wink, gently soaking the valley in silent soft rock.
I turn from the view and see that Tom and Jerk are looking expectantly around, as if they actually thought they’d see a vampire on the bare hilltop. It is not the worst place to catch a vampire. The trees are so low and brittle and the sky so close that it looks like a devil’s orchard.
“Here we are,” I say. “I guess we just came on the wrong night. Can we go?”
Tom narrows his eyes and says carefully, “What’s the matter? Why are you so down on this?”
“Because it is stupid,” I say. “What would you do if you met a vampire?” The wind picks up all around us. “You know, vampires have the strength of ten men.”
“Ten?” says Tom.
I shrug. “It was an estimate.”
“Which ten?”
“I said it was an estimate.”
The pale trees are shivering.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Tom,” I say. “This is just stupid.”
“If this is so stupid,” says Tom pointedly, “why are you out here?”
I scramble for an answer. Tom is staring at me, shining the light in my eyes. I raise my hand to block the light out of my face. I wonder if he’s looking at my mouth.
“Hm?” Tom prompts.
I gabble lamely, “I’m — I’m a victim of peer pressure.”
“What?” says Jerk.
“Shut up,” says Tom. He has turned and is walking away through the squat trees. He says, “We’re sick of your complaining.”
Now the wind is very violent on the hilltop. The dead branches are clacking together.
Tom and Jerk are running away from me. They are leaving me alone in the night.
I run to catch up with them, but I am too slow. They are hopping by strides through the trees.
I dash as quickly as I can through the creaking branches. The branches tear at me and I can’t see well — my night vision has been blotted out by Tom’s flashlight. I can hear them ahead of me, and Bongo I see a couple of times, flying one way or another.
I am completely alone now. That is what I realize. Tom and Jerk must hate me. Even if Tom is just playing a stupid joke and does not realize how close he has come to the truth, to my secret, this trick, this dumb trick, shows he can’t be trusted. Whatever happens to me, I can’t tell them now.
I catch glimpses of light in front of me. I can’t tell if it’s the flashlight or the headlights of some car, prowling on the dark road below.
I stop and listen.
Everything is silent, except the wind in the trees. It rocks them gently.
Something scurries through the woods above me, back toward the hilltop. I think it is a falling branch or some other piece of forest detritus.
Now I can see the trunks of trees. My vision has improved. I can see the tree trunks standing.
I stand there in that groping wood. I try to get my bearings.
Pushing
at the bracken, I head down toward the base of the hill.
There is someone behind me, stalking through the woods.
“Tom,” I call. “Jerk.”
But there is only one person, one pair of footsteps, and it has sped up now that it has heard my voice. There is no answer. Just a quick walking.
I turn; I run. I’m lost in a choking nest of firs. I keep brushing them out of the way. There are more.
The Thing with the One-Piece Hair. It must be the Thing.
I look behind me and see it pacing down the hill, chasing me. Branches rake across its dead flesh, but it doesn’t push them out of the way. Some of them snap off against its face. It has its eyes locked on me and does not blink.
I am scrambling through underbrush, and sticks jam against my arms, and I am all alone in the echoing forest with the Thing.
It keeps walking toward me, with its arms hanging at its sides. I can hear it, and while I am hopping through the bracken and the broken trees, its steps are perfectly rhythmic.
“Help!” I am screaming as loud as I can. “God, will you help! Help! Help! Help! No!”
The ghastly emptiness of the forest, the miles and miles of hikeable trail, the lonely roads, no relief I can think of —
And then I hear its voice. It speaks not in one voice, but in the voice of a congregation, with the voices of women and men together, calling as one, “Stop. Do not run. That will mean more pain for you. Running will mean more pain. Stop.”
I look back, and it is not far behind me, just the length of a bus, except that buses don’t go through the woods; and it is stretching out its sluggish arm toward me — and it calls a strange word —
And as if in a dream, I cannot move except in slow motion. My foot rebounds against the ground — I push myself off and creep forward through the strangling air.
The Thing is walking closer.
I grab on to trees and try to pull myself along. “God!” I try to scream, but the air is as thick as Jell-O in my lungs. I feel it purging outward, slow and thick as phlegm. I am mute. I am trapped in an arc, both my feet off the ground.