But the game’s almost over. Though the three most recent victims had no physical connection to one another, I uncovered a cyber one. Each belonged to an online community, a messageboard upon which they poured out their longings for a romantic tryst with their undead paramour. All I needed was someone to use as bait for the cruor geminus, a lovely young girl to which the beast could not resist. Unfortunately for it, I have just the girl in mind for the job.
III
Magick has its advantages. Case in point, I am standing in the corner of a fifteen year old girl’s bedroom, completely invisible to any who might look my way. No scent to detect, no heat signature to register, not even the sound of my breathing can be heard. On the bed, Sarah Jones, lies suggestively draped across the top of her pink and mauve comforter, dressed in a black tank top and skirt that makes her pale flesh seem like alabaster. As she clicks away on her laptop computer, I make the mental calculations necessary to ensure that she does not become victim number four.
I know what you’re thinking. No, I’m not some kind of pervert, though I might be scolded for placing such a young and vibrant child in mortal danger. Thing is, Sarah Jones is not your average fifteen year old. Imagine Nancy Drew, if you will, but with a bit more piss and vinegar. As Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes had his Baker Street Irregulars, I too have allies that fall somewhat south of the legal drinking age. Sarah is a paranormal investigator, being an integral cog in the so-called Ghostwriters Society that are comprised of author Steven Parker’s sons Dale and Allen, and Sarah’s cousin Cassidy Martin. They have been tested by fire on more than one occasion. Still, I feel somewhat guilty for using the fiery-haired teen as my proverbial hare in a snare. She was, of course, willing enough. Quite eager even. But as a rock gently raps against her bedroom window, I pray that my confidence in hers and my ability is not found wanting.
Sarah rolls off the bed and approaches the window. She steals a glance toward me and I grind my teeth in anticipation. It must be unnerving for her, trusting that, though she cannot see me, I am in fact there ready to spring into action. She grips the window and opens it cautiously, the bitter cold of winter racing into the room.
“Hello, Bella,” I hear the cruor geminus say. Softly. Seductively. “May I come inside?”
Does her skin crawl? No. I see her sway, sense her body’s relaxing shift from heightened awareness to that of wanton desire. Can the creature’s powers be so overwhelming? She backs away from the window and calls to him.
“Come to me, my love.”
She is entranced. There is no mistake. My plan is unraveling before me. I prepare a counter spell, but already it’s too late. The creature is inside the room in an instant. She and I see it as it wishes to be seen, as a handsome young man with powder white flesh and full, pouting lips. It’s hair in a mock pompadour, flashing pearly white teeth behind golden eyes. The illusion is intoxicating, even for me. It leans in toward Sarah, its lips parted, moist and hungry.
Leaping forward from my concealing spell, the head of my cane flares to life, bright and as radiant as the sun. It is enough to give the beast pause. What I didn’t expect was for Sarah to turn on me, grabbing a pair of scissors from her nightstand, and charging at me like a thing possessed. Yes, possessed — enthralled — and filled with lustful desire for her faux-Edward.
I raise my cane too late as the scissors find the back of my hand. As I push her aside, I am met by the creature’s full force as it barrels into me, knocking me into the girl’s closet, splintering the bi-fold doors. I collapse to the floor, clothes falling from the rack overhead, blinding me as a rain of furious blows connect with my ribs, arm, and face. Its fangs find bare flesh. It burns like fire. The smell and taste of my blood has the beast in a ravenous frenzy. It is by sheer willpower that I am able to conjure a magical counter to its devastating assault.
A blast of eldritch energy explodes from my left hand hurling the cruor geminus into the far wall. I struggle to my feet, telekinetically call my cane back into my bleeding right hand, and approach the foul creature wearing a heartthrob’s face. Bearing its fangs, I grimace as I meet its aggression by swinging the cane like a bat, striking the beast full in the face. The cruor geminus falls back and through the window amidst a crash of broken glass. I approach cautiously, but am caught unprepared as Sarah buries the scissors into my right shoulder. I scream in agony, then turn and grab the girl by her face.
“Quiesco,” I say, softly, and Sarah Jones crumbles to the ground.
The pain is exquisite. It sets my mind afire and it’s all I can do to jerk the instrument free. I stumble forward, to the window, and climb out, bleeding profusely from hand and shoulder. I can feel my ribs grinding in my chest and I’m all but certain that I’ve a fractured forearm.
This is not how I’d planned tonight’s operation.
IV
I stagger through the thick snow, following the vampire’s trail into the woods that run alongside Pipe Creek. My vision is blurred and I’m losing too much blood. I cast a quick spell, but it’s a mere band-aid. My whole world is pain, but. I press on. The cruor geminus will not go far. It can’t. The smell of my blood will be too much for it to ignore. It will come for me and most likely finish me off, but not without a fight.
My head is swimming now. I’m in someone’s backyard. I can hear the creek behind me, smell the pine of the woods. I don’t know how I got here. Everything’s coming and going in flashes. The bite on my arm isn’t deep, but it’s poisonous. The vampire’s foul venom is working its way through my system. I have to find it. Have to end this. A shadow ahead. I see a manger scene, the baby Jesus surrounded by its mother and father, by animals and wisemen. The shadow is framed by a Christmas Angel hovering above the manger, its lights blinking in an eclectic rhythm. My heart thunders in time with those angel wings.
“Landon.”
The voice is coming from the angel.
I stagger toward it, lumbering, limping against the pain in my ravaged knee, cane dragging along through the snow loosely, carving a snaking trail through the fresh powder. The shadow comes forward revealing a different angel.
“Sarah,” I choke. I taste blood on my lips. “You shouldn’t … be here. Run … Be safe.” I lose my footing and descend to the ground onto my hands and knees. “Run, damn it.”
“No, Landon,” she says. She lowers herself to me, cups my face in her hands. “I’ll not abandon you, my dear sweet Doctor.” I’m lost in her eyes. In her youth … her beauty. She leans in toward me, lips parting, coming dangerously close to mine.
This is how it ends for the occult detective? With a kiss from a fiery-haired angel, bled out in the snow with the failed dream of winter on my lips? I rise up on my knees as she lays my head to the side. Her lips brush mine on her way to my neck. I feel her hot breath on my cold flesh. Then she’s gone … an explosion erupts across the lawn and I see two Sarahs — one struggling up from the ground, a spray of blood across the virgin snow — the other holding a smoking Ruger .357.
“Get away from him, you monster!”
The beast transforms before my eyes. Sarah no more as it assumes the shape of Edward and marches toward her. Sarah fires again, and once more, but the fiend shrugs them off. I reach deep down inside me and rise, raising my cane and swinging it with all my might. It connects with the back of the cruor geminus’ head. The beast spins about and I charge.
With the cane before me like a knight’s lance, I drive the shaft home, straight through the vampire’s chest, piercing the foul thing’s heart and driving it back into the manger. The angel overhead comes crashing down and the cruor geminus becomes entangled in the wire frame and blinking lights. As the sun rises, the fiend dies before our eyes, its body bound by the twinkling lights of a Christmas Angel.
“Huh,” Sarah says, “I guess sometimes vampires do sparkle.”
DRACULA’S WINKEE: BLOODSUCKER BLUES
Gregory L. Hall
Gregory L Hall has a long history in comedy, improv and theatre. He??
?s a national Telly Award winner and produced the annual Baltimore Comedy Fest to support autism awareness. His dark fiction can be found in oodles of publications and anthologies as well as his novel At the End of Church Street and short story collection Werepig Fever. Nowadays Gregory is perhaps best known as the host of the internet radio talk show The Funky Werepig. However, he prefers to brag about the time he was hugged by Pat Morita — Mr. Miyagi — because wouldn’t you?
Although he loves vampire classics from Nosferatu to 30 Days of Night, his biggest influence has been The Count from Sesame Street.
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Love. It’s more than just a three letter word. It is perhaps the greatest gift bestowed upon humanity and without a doubt the hardest to define. But who is worthy of love? There are many who say the one place love cannot exist is in the hearts of those who are truly evil. Like proctologists and Wal- Mart greeters. But true love can grow anywhere, even in the darkest of souls. And it lasts an eternity.
As Dracula looked through the bedroom window at his latest prey, he had trouble believing any of this. Yes, she was attractive in a 1990’s Katie Couric kind of way. But there was no emotion left in his world outside of anger and depression. And sex had faded into a cruel joke.
It was Frederich Nietzsche who said ‘Facts are like really rigid truths.’ And it was Jack Nicholson who said ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ For the Lord of the Undead, the ugly truth was in order for a man to achieve an erection, he must first have blood flow. That was something a vampire did not have. Blood was food. It was for energy and for maintaining a life force. Anything else was a cruel tease.
Sure, in younger days he always drank more than enough to saturate his own veins and arteries. Every day was a Happy Penis Day. But as the centuries flew past him, and his victims polluted their blood with drive-thru meals and Zima, Dracula had to severely cut his intake of crimson nourishment.
The first to fall was his once mighty winkee.
Intercourse went the way of traffic cops, typewriters and face-to-face communication. There was nothing worse than young naked women wanting the ultimate taboo - hot vampire boinkings - and offering them nothing but the flaccid junk of a three-thousand-year-old Romeo. To make matters worse, he was always room temperature. Tiny, old and cold. Not an attractive package. And by package, we mean package.
So he had to use his darkly erotic reputation and his European charm to drive women to orgasm. Being woozy from massive blood loss helped his ladies believe the fantasy. But heavy petting and dry humping was all their mysterious lover could offer.
Dracula’s frustration was thicker than ego on a Donald Trump-Oprah Winfrey sandwich. After a half dozen or more centuries of simply grinding against women and relying on hypnosis to drive them wild, how long had it been since he had ejaculatory satisfaction of his own?
Well, the answer would be a dozen or more centuries. It’s written right there.
Hovering outside his potential victim’s window, the Prince of Darkness wondered if it was worth it any more. Would she be the one he had been seeking for too long now? Could she provide the spark deep within his loinal area to make him a man again? Would tonight be the night he would drive a stake into her?
He chuckled. It was vampire humor. You probably wouldn’t get it.
As he watched her pop out the Twilight DVD and wash off her Ben Wa balls, he figured he had nothing to lose, except his lunch.
-----
The village girl knew it was a mistake to leave her bedroom window open after dark. There was sudden silence as all noise stopped — the crickets, the wind chimes, the screaming of the patrons at her Momma’s all night community shower as they realized there was no hot water left. It made her feel uneasy, which was indeed strange. If there was ever one word to describe her, it was ‘easy.’
Her partially blue eyes spied the Darkness as it swirled outside on the tiny balcony. Slowly, it took shape. The stranger glided into the room, and without hesitation, unbuttoned his already partially unbuttoned frilly girly shirt to show off his chiseled alabaster tan body. Although there was no wind, it blew through his long dark hair. It made her hot and she was willing to admit it.
“You’re making me hot,” she said. “You’re like a very dangerous stranger whom I want to give my body to without question. Geez, I hope you’re not undead or something.”
He pointed a finger at her. She yelped like a school girl, because it would be all paranormal and no romance if she didn’t.
“I am Dracula. And your blood belongs to me.”
She stared into his dark eyes like Paris Hilton at Fermat’s Last Theorem. “Well, as long as it doesn’t hurt.”
The vampire moved quicker than she could imagine and she prayed his sexual endurance didn’t match that speed. He clutched her bare shoulders and she moaned. They kissed deeply as his hand caressed her fashion model-flat chest nub.
“Try the other boob. I could only afford one breast implant. But Christmas is coming…”
“Hee hee. Coming.” Dracula said in his exotic thick foreign accent “Insert joke here.”
“Okay but let me take my underwear off first.”
He stole another hungry kiss. She felt her knees give out as she tasted the vampire’s tongue again. “Wow. You kiss better than a waffle iron. I don’t know if you’re into this kind of thing, but sometimes I like when guys give me hickies on my neck. You want to try that?”
If there was a camera nearby, Dracula would have deadpanned into it.
He sank his fangs into her jugular vein and her life liquid exploded into his mouth in one gooey burst. His victim grabbed her neck.
“Owie. I think you pinched a nerve or something. I hope you didn’t break the skin. Hey, you have something red on your chin there. Geez, I should have told you I’m a bleeder. That’s why I had to switch from being a cutter to licking wall sockets. All the cool kids are doing that now anyway. Cutting is so 2002. Oh poopies. Now I’m feeling kind of dizzy. I mean more than just from being blonde. Blonde is like the yellow hair, right? That’s the kind I have. Wow, this night is getting weirder than paying a homeless guy to lap dance your Grandmother on her 70th birthday.”
Dracula shot her a glance. “How would you know?”
“Oh boy. Control alt delete!” the girl giggled and found a chair to lean against.
“I grow tired of this encounter. My hunger has turned into more of a sexual nature. Let us spelunk the furry fissure, slave!”
His mental powers grabbed the girl’s brain. There was no road block. Not even a speed bump.
“That tickles.” she said as her eyes went glassy. “Hey, am I the only one hearing an echo?”
He mentally pushed her to the floor and made her legs fly open. Her nightgown violently yanked up and her underwear ripped off of her hips.
She gasped. “Excuse moi. Looks like no more Taco Bell for me!”
“I did that, woman-child. Not you. For my powers are limitless.” He gazed at her nude nakedness. Morning was just on the other side of the horizon. Minutes were disappearing like job opportunities for David Hasselhoff. The vampire knew if he was going to plunge his flesh gherkin into her lady-loge, it would have to be now.
He pulled down his pants and stood proudly before her. She gasped.
“Well say hello to my little friend!” she said. “Seriously though, Mr. Dark Prince fellow, size doesn’t matter to me. I’m a big fan of ‘motion of the ocean’ and all that. Some girls only want to be bludgeoned with a fifty pound Abe Froman sausage. But I’m fine with being jabbed with a toothpick. You just have to do it like a million times real fast. You know the toothpick thing, it could be an issue of blood flow, you know? By toothpick I mean your penis. I’m just saying. Toothpicks are thin and tiny too. But unlike your penis, they’re hard.”
“Silence!” he cried out. His voice echoed through the large chamber — and we’re not talking about the room. There once was a day when he could have overwhelmed this trollop wit
h his uvula hammer, but now, now it would be like riding a Moped into the Grand Canyon. The night ran out of options. The vampire’s eyes turned hellfire red with rage. The girl scurried backwards, knowing her fate.
“But I’m Team Edward…”
He snatched her off the floor and with lightning speed sank his fangs deep into her neck. All he could taste was corn syrup and regret. He hurled her out the window, hearing the patrons at Momma’s all night community shower scream again.
She was not the one. Not the one to kick-start his crippled mini-me. Not the one to fill his empty black heart with love. Not the one to share coupons with at Denny’s. He should have known. The writer hadn’t even given her a name.
Gazing out towards nearby woods, he spied a werewolf sneaking up on an innocent deer. Detecting danger, the chase began. Was this the way it would always be? Predator? Prey? The lycanthrope pounced on the deer, but instead of tearing her throat out, the werewolf mounted her. The deer rolled over on her back and they made-out like horny teenagers while their lovemaking exploded across what little was left of the night.
Another completely wasted evening. Dracula could only sigh. Disappointment was his body wash. He looked up at his exhausted face in the mirror, but realized he didn’t cast a reflection.
Some brothers just can’t catch a break.
-----
Juan was perhaps Dracula’s best, if not only, friend. He had lived at the castle for over a century, an extremely long life for an armadillo. Yet with the exception of a slight cameo in Universal’s classic movie version of Dracula, Juan had been forgotten or ignored as a major player in the Master’s folklore. Many were the nights the armadillo would play and rewind his appearance in the film as a naïve Renfield entered the castle and waited for Bela Lugosi to come down the stone staircase. He was agitated that the actor playing him had zero lines, but he thought overall the stand-in gave a fine performance.