“It’s coming,” Al said. “Remember what I told you. Once it falls into the pit, strike fast and kill it quick. You won’t get a second chance.”
Before Dylan could say anything, Al moved several yards back from the pit. This was the younger vampire’s battle, and he had to fight it alone.
Dylan instinctively assumed the classic vampire defensive position. He crouched, knees bent, hands outstretched, fingernails lengthening into talons. And although his back was turned, Al knew his canines extended into sabers that hung past his chin, and his jaw unhinged so he could take the biggest bite possible out of his opponent.
Good lad, he thought.
Dylan’s Animus made no sound as it came for him. Al had always found their silence to be one of the eeriest things about Animi, but far worse was the expression on their faces when they attacked. They didn’t look angry or excited. They weren’t filled with rage or possessed by bloodlust. They appeared totally at peace, smiling, arms lifted as if they wanted to embrace their other selves instead of annihilate them. Seeing that expression was the only time Al regretted being a vampire, and even though this wasn’t his Animus, he experienced a split second wherein he wished he hadn’t vanquished his own soul. What would it be like to feel such peace? To be truly at rest? But he quickly shoved such thoughts aside. They were part of the Animus’ attack, a psychic assault designed to make their victims hesitate at the crucial moment. He hoped Dylan would be able to resist it.
Dylan’s stance relaxed somewhat as the Animus came toward him, and if it hadn’t been for the pit, Al feared the soul creature would’ve succeeded in claiming him. But true to its nature, the Animus ran straight toward Dylan without paying any attention to its surroundings, and when its foot came down on the branches covering the pit, it fell in face-first. It made no noise as the stakes pierced its flesh, other than letting out a slight outrush of air from its lungs.
“Now!” Al shouted.
Dylan hesitated a split second, and then leaped into the pit. An instant later, Al heard the sound of his saber teeth latching onto the Animus. This was followed by loud sucking noises, accompanied by ecstatic moans. Al waited a moment longer, and then strolled to the edge of the pit.
Dylan was hunched over his Animus, his mouth buried deep in his other’s self’s neck. He’d bitten into its flesh with such savagery that the Animus’ head had almost been severed, but what spilled out of the wound wasn’t blood. It was a thick golden liquid that looked something like luminescent honey. As Dylan drank, his body spasmed repeatedly, as if he were caught in the throes of an intense orgasm.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Al said. “If human blood is like wine to us, then the ichor that flows from the veins of an Animus is like a combination of every drug that ever existed. Ambrosia of the gods. There’s only one thing as good: when that ambrosia has been filtered through the body of another vampire.”
Al jumped into the pit, grabbed hold of his protégé by the shoulders, and sank his own saber teeth into his throat. Dylan couldn’t stop draining his Animus. Once the process had begun, it had to be finished. A tidbit of information that Al had failed to pass along to his student. So as Dylan filled his belly, Al in turn filled his. And when it was all over, the Animus was dead, and so was Dylan.
Al, sated, crawled forth from the pit. His limbs were heavy, and he felt so lethargic, he could barely move. He glanced at the sky and saw it was a shade lighter in the east. Dawn was near. He needed to bury Dylan and the Animus before he could rest, though. Good thing the pit doubled as a ready-made grave.
He picked up the shovel and got to it.
-----
He was inside the EMS vehicle—the barn door closed – before the first rays of sunlight pinked the horizon. He was so weary that it took a major effort of will to keep his eyes open as he climbed into the back of the van. He’d intended to lie down on the gurney, but he swore when he saw the body of the jogger was still strapped there. He’d forgotten all about her. He should’ve tossed her into the grave with Dylan and the Animus. Oh, well. Too late now. He’d take care of it after sundown.
He started to unbuckle the corpse, intending to dump it onto the floor so he could lie down, when it suddenly took in a gasping breath and opened its eyes.
“Where am I?” the woman said. “What happened?”
Al smiled when he saw her fangs.
“Don’t worry. Everything’s okay. I’ll explain later, but right now you have to sleep. All right?”
She looked at him for a moment, but the daylight torpor was already taking hold of her. She nodded once, closed her eyes, relaxed and fell still.
Al let her keep the gurney. The floor would be fine today. As full as he was, he would sleep well, regardless, and tonight, once the two of them had awakened, he would begin training his new protégé, the latest of many he’d had over the long years. He settled onto the floor and closed his eyes.
Life was good.
THE DARKTON CIRCUS MYSTERY
Elizabeth Massie
Elizabeth Massie is a Bram Stoker Award — and Scribe Award — winning author of horror novels, short horror fiction, media tie-ins, and mainstream fiction. More recent works include Desper Hollow (horror novel) and Naked, On the Edge (collection of horror short fiction.) She is the creator of the Skeeryvilletown slew of cartoon zombies, monsters, and other bizarre misfits. In her spare time she manages Hand to Hand Vision, a Facebook-based fundraising project she founded to help others during these tough economic times. Massie lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with the talented illustrator/artist Cortney Skinner.
The vampire that left the most lasting and disturbing impression on Beth was Count Orlock from Nosferatu. The eyes. The hands. The cold, insatiable hunger.
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Peter Darkton’s Traveling Circus of Wonders was a sad little spectacle, hardly a circus and not even enough to qualify as a modern mid-list carnival, composed of a 22-year-old Chevy Suburban with large rust spots and a 1975 30-foot travel trailer with bad shocks and a long gouge down its side where Peter had backed it too close to a row of pines in a Kentucky campground. Peter traveled throughout the year, deep South in winter, North in summer, and as far west as Illinois whenever he could afford the gas and the weather held. He was fifty-eight now, well-worn himself with spots and gouges from an occasional fight with locals who came to his exhibit drunk or who just wanted to test their manliness again a stranger who was, more often than not, shorter and less muscular than themselves.
But the traveling circus was a living. A living handed down from Peter’s father, who’d inherited it from his own, and so on back into the shadows of the long, forgotten past. And just as they had when his ancestors parked their horse-drawn wagons in weedy-choked pastures or beside muddy river banks, when Peter parked his Suburban and trailer in a campground or in the trees along a graveled country roadside, they came. They came with crumpled dollars and twitching noses, drawn in by the garish paintings on the side of the trailer showing costumed monkeys playing cards, a vanishing pig, chickens dancing in a spotlight, and most curious of all, the big, fire-red letters promoting “The Darkton Circus Mystery! See It to Believe It! Feed It! Prove Your Courage! Then Speak Of It To No One on Pain of Certain Death!”
On this particular September day, Peter had the circus rattling up the western slope of a Virginia mountain, seeking a lonely place where people hungered for an entertainment beyond the everyday, hoping the vehicle’s slipping transmission would hold. In his lap was a bag of corn chips, in the drink holder a beer he’d wrapped in tin foil. In the passenger’s seat was his daughter, Kelly, all of nineteen, who’d joined him when he’d swung through her hometown of Dillyville in northeastern Tennessee and told him she wanted to ride with him for a month or so.
“This is exciting!” she said, her feet crossed and wriggling, her eyes trained out the windshield. “Mama said I’d never get away from home, said I might as well get used to working at the Hilltop M
otel like she does. But look at me! Heading out to see the country with you.”
Peter grunted, then glanced at the rearview to make sure the trailer would make it around a particularly sharp mountain curve.
“Where will we stop?” Kelly asked. “Where do you plan on setting up today?”
“I know places when I see them. It just happens.”
“Oh, that’s fun.” She nodded happily, and then picked up some of the fast food trash on the floor at her feet, balled it up, and stuck it into a half-empty bag. She was a tidy one, Peter’s daughter. “I’m glad you agreed to let me come along. We can get to know each other like real family. Great, huh? Thanks. Dad!”
“Don’t call me Dad.”
She frowned, looking a little hurt. “What, then?”
“Just Peter.”
“All right. Peter.”
“Shush now. I have to pay attention to the road.”
“Okay. Will do.”
She was so damned agreeable.
As it was, Peter hated the idea of Kelly tagging along. And he hadn’t planned on stopping in Dillyville but he knew that Carol, Kelly’s mother, still had the hots for him after all this time, and he was in need of a little something warm and wet besides his own spit-slicked hand. Carol had obliged – and she did have a most comfortable bed – then was pissed, as he expected, when he refused to take her out to breakfast the next morning.
But Kelly, who hadn’t seen Peter since she was ten, had followed him out of the apartment to the Suburban, asking sweetly to come along, offering to cook and telling him she had nearly $700 she could get out of the bank on their way out of town. So, of course, he couldn’t exactly turn her down. And now, not quite a day’s travel with her, he’d already spent her down to $587. Gas. Chips. A case of beer. Motor oil. A new-for-him coat and pair of boots from a Salvation Army store in Big Stone Gap. Kelly didn’t seem to mind.
In fact, she didn’t seem to mind any of Peter’s requirements and restrictions.
“When I got the radio on, no talking,” he’d ordered when she first climbed into the vehicle with her sleeping bag and pillow. “I want to listen to a game or a preacher or music or weather, you be quiet, you hear me?”
Kelly had nodded.
“And I sleep in the middle seat where it got more room. There’s no room in the back-back ‘cause of the cookin’ gear.”
“No motel?”
“Of course not. I ain’t made of money,”
“Okay.”
“So you get the front seat. You’re short and small but you’ll fit. Just adjust the steering wheel up as far as it’ll go. And don’t ever get out in the middle of the night ‘cause it’ll disturb me. I need my sleep.”
“Okay.”
He’d started the engine and pulled away from the apartment complex as Carol, on the walkway in her terry robe and dog-chewed slippers, had shaken her middle finger and shouted “Asshole!”
A few miles out of town, he’d said, “There’s one part of the circus you are to stay away from, never open up, never even try to get a peek.”
Kelly had glanced at him. “What’s that?”
Peter continued. “I know you’re scared of snakes, Kelly. Always were. I don’t know much about you now, but I do know that.”
“Yeah.”
“The last display in the trailer, the Darkton Circus Mystery, is a snake. A big snake, largest one you’d ever see. Under no circumstances are you to mess with that display. You are never to try to get in there to have a look at it. I don’t need you having nightmares or begging me to take you home before I’m ready to go back through Tennessee. You understand?”
She’d nodded solemnly. “Okay.”
And so they continued on into the wilds of mountainous southwest Virginia, seeking a venue both isolated and peculiar, talking rarely, Peter trying his best not to fart in the Suburban but unable to alter his habits, and Kelly, when talking was allowed, telling him about her life since he’d missed most of it.
She was a plain girl, thoughtful, and sensitive. She was used to being poor, she told him, used to being ignored, used to working as a companion for an old woman with dementia in the evenings and a maid at the motel during the day, and used to giving most of her money to her Mama to help pay the bills. She knew Peter was disappointed that Kelly had not been a boy, because he’d wanted a son to give the circus to when Peter was too old to travel. She didn’t think he’d pass it on to her because she was a girl and that wasn’t how the family did things, but said she hoped he’d reconsider.
“I could do good with a circus,” she said as they rumbled along a narrow valley between two mountains awash with October red. “You could teach me how it works, how I can be part of it, you think?”
“Huh.”
“Maybe?”
“Shush now.”
They rode in silence another few miles. Then Kelly said, “Mama doesn’t like you much. But I think she just doesn’t understand why you are like you are. I kept telling her she must have loved you once, and she that she still should even if you aren’t together. And you’re my father, so of course I love you.”
This hit him like a pocketknife to the neck. “Don’t say that again.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just wrong, is all.”
So she didn’t say that again.
Peter found the spot he’d watched for, a flat, thistle- and vine-covered acre off the road three miles from the nearest town, nestled between a creek and a sheer rise covered in kudzu and granite outcroppings. Peter could stay here until someone came and kicked him off. He figured he’d get at least two good nights’ worth of ticket sales.
While Kelly set up the Coleman stove and got a stew cooking, Peter prepared for the evening show.
One side of the travel trailer was covered with the colorful headlines and artwork. This is the side that Peter always parked facing the road, facing traffic. The other side, which Peter always situated facing away from where customers would park their cars and trucks, was divided into sections with 3’ x 4’ doors that unlatched and folded down, revealing the displays inside each compartment. The first section had two little capuchin monkeys that, on command, dealt a deck of cards on the floor then picked them up and put them down as if in a game. The monkeys were getting up there in age, bought from a pet store in Maryland, and Peter just hoped they could make it through another season. The second section held three chickens that, when Peter turned on his CD player, would scratch on a brightly colored spot on the floor while a little silver, faceted ball spun overhead, mimicking a disco. In the third section, mirrors and lights made it seem as if a pig (a taxidermied pig that had died a number of years ago) disappeared except for his floating snout. All this was ordinary carnival fare.
But the last section of the trailer was different. It did not have a pull-down panel to reveal what was inside the compartment but rather an actual door, a door with a lock opened by one of the keys Peter on a string tied around his neck. The windowless room inside was big enough to hold four to six customers, and two cages, one small, one large, one covered in a towel, the other in a large, blue velvet curtain. In the little cage were stray pets Peter collected along country roads or stole out of farmhouse yards when it was clear the owners were not home. He taped their mouths shut to keep them quiet. It wasn’t as if they would starve to death like that; they never lived that long.
In the big cage was the Darkton Circus Mystery, Peter’s joy, his terror, and his inheritance. While chickens, monkeys, and pigs died and were replaced or stuffed, this display lived on. It brought Peter respect. It caused others to fear him. The money was minimal but that was because to keep the show to himself he had to maintain a low profile. If he went to a big city with this treasure, it would be broadcast, highlighted, and then swept out from under him like everything else of value was when people with big money caught wind of something they wanted.
Peter hauled the canvas tent out from the rear of the Suburban, unrolled it, and hoi
sted it up into place against the back side of the trailer where the displays were located. It was hard work but he was used to doing it alone. In fact, he enjoyed the sweat and burn the work created. It reminded him that he wasn’t dead yet, in spite of the years that had been piling up. And so when Kelly offered her help, he declined and told her to just stick with the cooking and if she got bored, she could listen to the radio.
When the tent was propped and pegged and roped nearly all around, Kelly peeked around the edge of the trailer to tell him dinner was ready.
She stared at the tent as Peter wiped his hands on his coat.
“Why a tent?”
“People come to see the shows,” Peter said. “With the tent, only those who pay can see the displays as I reveal them one at a time.”
Kelly nodded, then shivered. “I suppose that snake in the last display scares them mighty bad, doesn’t it?”
Peter nodded.
“It must be a mighty big snake. Is it ten feet long? Fifteen?”
“No talking about it, Kelly.”
“Twenty feet long?”
“Leave it be.”
“The sign says nobody can talk about it once they see it or they’ll die. Is that true?”
Peter glared at her. “I said enough. We’ll eat now.”
“Okay, sorry.” As they moved on to dinner, he noted Kelly glancing over her shoulder, fear flickering across her features. He would have to make sure things stayed that way. No way in hell could he let her know the truth.
-----
Kelly agreed to serve as the ticket taker; she was happy to do it. As quiet as she most often was, she knew how to deflect the advances of drunkards and slicks. Her mother had had her share of such boyfriends, all puffed up and oiled down, and Kelly had long ago devised a way to make them shudder and turn away. She would loll her head and slobber a little, and the men would jump back a good three feet and move on.
So there she sat at a little card table outside the tent with a roll of tickets and a metal cash box, smiling at the customers who seemed harmless and letting her head wobble and the spittle drool a bit for those who had ill-intent brewing at the corners of their eyes. And so they all left her alone, giving her their dollars, taking their tickets, and moving out of the night-shadows and into the tent-shadows.