Becky O'Keefe had been raised in Richmond, Virginia, and her parents had only moved to Colony, West Virginia, when she'd turned ten. After high school, her parents moved to California because her father felt there were more jobs out West. She had remained behind because she could not stand the idea of California, nor could she justify, at eighteen, still moving with two parents who could barely support each other, let alone an adult daughter. She had gone to work back then at the soda counter at the Five N Dime. Two years later, married to Homer Petersen, she went to work as a bookkeeper and receptionist for Dr. Cobb. Then, after Tad was born, she took two years at home. The bartender shift at the Angel Wing Pub hadn't come until six years back, when Dr. Cobb had severely cut back on his practice and his expenses. He was no longer able to maintain a full-time assistant because most of the medical business went to the medical center over the hills.
With the exception of her divorce, she had lived fairly peacefully until that particular day when her dog lay dead at the bottom of the stairs.
She awoke from a coma-like sleep at four in the afternoon and stared at the ceiling for a full fifteen minutes before she could find the strength to get out of bed. She had cried herself to sleep over the death of her son's beloved pet, and when she awoke, she raged at the impotence she felt at the hands of whoever had committed the atrocity. Becky O'Keefe believed that she could not depend on anyone else in this life (her marriage had proven that), so she had not been surprised when Jud Carey, the only available representative of the local police, arrived at her door before she'd fallen asleep, took one look at her dog, then at the muddy footprints, and pronounced the verdict: "Your dog's dead."
For a good ten seconds, Becky stared at him. She had never truly assessed how dumb Jud Carey was until that moment.
She shouted at him until he left the house.
The dog was dead.
A spike had been driven through its skull.
When she awoke in the afternoon, Becky stared at the ceiling and thought about that. She knew the Bonchance boys, from the other side of the river, might kill dogs—they'd been known to burglarize the houses and stores on Main Street, and they'd been caught drowning old Risa DeLaMare's cats for some kind of perverse lark. Becky wished she could take those Bonchance boys out and shoot 'em. But she didn't believe that those twisted kids had killed the dog. The muddy footprints were those of a young child. Maybe someone else killed the dog, and then some little kid found it and brought it inside. Now, that sounds suitably nuts. She was thinking how evil the world was, how awful human beings were to do that kind of thing to some innocent animal.
And what was she going to tell Tad? Some weirdo killed Whitney, Tad. Some lunatic who is so paranoid he thinks an eight-year-old mutt is going to tear him apart, so he takes a spike and jabs it against poor Whitney's skull, thinking it'll stop the voices in his head.
Why did I think that? Voices in his head. Only person that could be would be Joe Gardner, the radio of the beyond.
That thought gave her yet another headache, which was all the impetus she needed to go to the bathroom to down a few Extra-Strength Excedrins. Stupid police, stupid people. The world is nothing but stupid people. Stupid Homer Petersen, and his stupid obsession with those stupid stories that stupid Joe Gardner had fed him.
"Lady," she said to the bathroom mirror, "you are a mess."
She had never wanted a beer so badly. She saw the small lines in her face, the way her lips seemed dry. She hadn't been to her AA meetings in Stone Valley in nearly three months—she thought she didn't need them. But the thirst was still there. It had been there after the divorce, like a lion waiting in tall grass, hidden from her daytime self. But at night, when she'd put Tad to sleep and sat up, watching TV, it was there. It was there when she was in the bar, serving drinks. Watching the others down beer and wine and Irish coffees. The thirst never went away. But she had control of it; she could keep it somewhere safe, deep down in the pit of her soul. The meetings had helped for seven years; she had kept away from the demon rum. (Only once had she broken her vows and gone off the wagon, and that was when she had the miscarriage. Only then did she drink a whole bottle of wine all by herself. Only then, back when she and Homer were still married. She had believed in God before that, before she lost her little four-month-in-the-womb child, and then, for a while, she had believed her punishment for drinking away her youth had been to lose the baby.)
But the AA meetings never quenched the thirst. She desperately wanted a glass of wine. Just one glass. Just a few sips. Anything to take away this feeling.
She waited at the bathroom mirror until the feeling passed.
After showering, she checked her messages. One from work, mentioning the all-night poker game that was to go on that night after closing. Two messages from Tad just calling to say hi and that everything was cool at his dad's. The last one, from Dr. Cobb.
All he said on the machine was, "Rebecca," he was always so formal with her, "I've done something terrible here at the office. Something truly... psychotic... I need some help. I need something. Please come see me. Don't call. I won't answer the phone, and when they find out what I've done they'll lynch me."
"I'm on shift in an hour, Dr. Cobb," she said as she walked in the door to his office. It was brightly lit, not just the fluorescent bulbs, but every lamp in the place. When she saw the look in his face, as if his spirit had died, she wished that she hadn't sounded so harsh. "I'm sorry," she said.
Virgil Cobb sat in one of the waiting room chairs. "I told her parents that I had an ambulance take her over to Stone Valley. They were so exhausted from last night that they bought it. I made up some completely cockamamie story that if coma patients are disturbed in their first forty-eight hours that they might easily bleed to death. It was total fabrication, total, she's not in a coma, she wasn't even alive, not really."
Becky O'Keefe stared at him as he babbled on.
Finally she said, "What the hell is going on?"
Virgil Cobb looked at her sadly. "It's Patty Glass."
The name didn't register with Becky at first. Her mind sometimes worked like a computer, albeit an inefficient one. She could practically hear the ticka-ticka-tick of a machine as the two words, Patty and Glass, rolled around until she hit the jackpot. She remembered a little girl in third grade with long hair and owl eyes. "She's dead," Becky said without further hesitation.
"I know," Virgil said. "Of course she is. Of course she's dead. Of course." His words melted into a loud booming laugh. As Becky stood there, her coat still on, she wondered if the pressures of a failing practice had taken its toll on her former employer's mind. Maybe he should've retired before now.
She immediately went to feel his forehead. It was cool. He stopped laughing and, instead, looked at her with cool eyes, too. "You think I've lost it."
"Not totally. I just don't understand. Patty Glass died when I was ten. Unless you're talking about some other Patty Glass."
Without bothering to explain, Virgil Cobb stood up and wiped at his face as if it were dirty. He walked through the waiting room and into the examination area. She assumed he wanted her to follow. She had known Virgil as Dr. Cobb since she'd been able to speak, and had always had great respect for him. But everybody cracked every now and then.
Still, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.
She followed him into the room.
The room was dark. The blinds drawn. She could tell from the shapes that the room had remained as it was when she had worked for him: charts on the wall, a stainless steel counter and cabinets taking up an entire wall.
Something lay on the examining table, but it was too dark to see it.
"What is it you believe in, Rebecca?" Virgil asked.
"Electricity, Dr. Cobb. Could we have some light in here?"
"Not yet. You're not ready."
"Okay. I believe in the basics."
"You mean, God, country, and all that jazz? What about the not so basics. What about the things under the bed, or the strange light at the window? What about the other side?"
"Dr. Cobb, I don't know—"
"The other side, Rebecca, from where we are. Maybe the dead. Maybe the not so dead. Maybe some species that exists between dimensions."
"Look," she said, "I've had a bad morning, what the—" and then she reached over to the wall, found the light switch, and turned it on.
Things happened simultaneously for her then.
Dr. Cobb was shaking his head as if she were a foolish child jumping ahead of the lesson plan; she noticed that he had painted the examination room green from off-white.
She noticed the blood on one of the off-white walls; the blood in several large jars set on the stainless steel counter; and, on the examining table, held down by leather straps, the decapitated and eviscerated body of a little girl.
Becky O'Keefe had never fainted before in her life—fallen down drunk or passed out, yes, but never a genuine faint.
But she saw pinpoints and swirling curls across her vision and thought: am I seeing stars? I'm seeing stars for the first time in my life.
And then her legs gave out and at about that point she felt a sudden, precipitous drop in energy or perhaps even blood sugar.
She hoped she wouldn't hit the floor too hard.
She awoke sitting up in a chair in the outer office. The plush, leather chair that she used to sink into in the late afternoons when she had been Dr. Cobb's office administrator.
Becky rubbed the back of her head; no bumps here.
Virgil Cobb knew enough about her not to offer her a brandy. Instead, he made some Celestial Seasonings peppermint tea. "Good for settling the stomach," he said, his voice cracked a bit, as if taken over by exhaustion.
"I'm glad I didn't split my head open," was all she could think to say.
"Me, too. I saw your skin go white. I knew you were going to faint. I managed to get over to you in time to catch you. I'm not as nimble as I used to be. Practically threw my back out."
A few moments of silence hung in the air. The tension was enormous. Her head was throbbing, but not from the faint. The room seemed suffocating.
"You did that in there? To that girl?" she asked, wanting to understand. She didn't believe Dr. Cobb was capable of murder, nor did she think he was capable of lying. Madness, however, was another issue.
"She was already dead, I promise you. I just had to do a little outpatient surgery."
He was trying to make a feeble and sick joke, which was unlike him. Her warning buzzer, the one that went off in her head whenever trust and some man entered her life in one fell swoop, seemed to remain dormant.
The weird thing was, she was briefly worried about work, as ridiculous as that seemed at a time like this. She knew that she should be calling into the pub to say she wouldn't be in. "Oh, just because I saw a little girl slaughtered on a doctor's table and I think maybe the doctor's taken a touch too much of his own medicine on this particular night."
She watched Virgil's face for some sign of insanity, but there was something so damned sane about the guy, it was as impossible to believe that he had murdered this girl as it was to believe that the body had really been Patty Glass's at all. The whole world outside of the office seemed to fade away. "How is this possible?" she managed, after a sip of scalding tea.
"Thank God," he said. "Thank God you came. I thought I was a madman."
She said nothing. She watched him and sipped. She was moderately surprised that she didn't fear for her own life. She couldn't get past a certain intuition she had that Dr. Cobb was not crazy at all, no matter how much her logical sense told her that he very well might be.
"She was one of them," he said. "She's the first one I've seen in years. I thought maybe we'd stopped it. Looks like I was wrong."
Neither of them spoke. She noticed that it was completely dark outside. She thought of Tad's dog and of Joe Gardner. Somehow her mind connected all of these things. She said, "You've been like a father to me, Dr. Cobb."
He drummed his fingers on the edge of the coffee table, covered as it was with magazines. "I'm going to stop you right there. You're already talking like I'm crazy. I'm going to tell you about Patty Glass. She disappeared at the Feely farm over twenty years ago. Both you and I know that. The children with her told the authorities that she might've fallen down an old cistern in the barn, but no body was found in it. Yesterday, she was discovered. She was at her parents' house. She was mute and didn't seem to be able to focus on anyone. But I recognized her, Rebecca, I knew what was making her run. I've seen it before. When I took her blood, she had several pints of blood more than the human body is meant to hold. Her heart had been eaten away at, as if by rats. She had not fed completely, though, so she did this." Virgil Cobb stood and took his tweed jacket off, laying it neatly on the arm of his chair. Becky realized that he had begun shivering. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeve and extended his arm beneath a desk lamp for her to inspect.
She got up and went over to him. She took his arm in her hands and turned it gently.
A large black-and-blue diamond pattern just below the biceps. His forearm was swollen. She pressed lightly on it, and he winced. A small clear liquid leaked out from several marks on his forearm.
"I'd like to tell you that it's from a dog," Virgil said. "Or from an enormous mosquito off the river. But it's not. It was Patty Glass. Not that she put her face against my arm and bit down. Nothing that easily vampiric. It was very fast, how she did it. It was in a fold of her skin, near her neck. You see, that must've been her own entry wound. When she fell down the well at John Feely's, whatever was down there waiting for her, it must've gotten to her neck first. But any major artery will do, I suppose."
Becky looked from his arm to his face. He was pale; sweat beaded the elderly man's forehead. She felt a chill run through her. "I don't understand," she said. Her brain seemed to be shutting its computer works down. She felt as if she had stepped off the neat plane of reality into the dimension of nonsense. The weird part was that it was beginning to make a kind of sense to her.
Virgil Cobb looked at her as if he were a child with his mother, telling the truth, and not being believed. He spoke slowly and deliberately. "I was bending over her at the table, checking her vision. Her eyes were dilated even with extreme light on them, and I wanted to see if I could detect any further abnormality there. I had already restrained her. To be honest, I already planned to... well, you saw for yourself in there. As I leaned closer to her face, her eyes seemed to retract back into her skull almost, like a snail going into its shell, threatened. My gut instinct was that something was wrong, so I drew back. But I was too late."
Becky watched the purple bruises on his arm. They were growing darker.
He gasped when he observed this. "I shouldn't be afraid of death. Not at my age. But I am."
"You're not going to die," Becky said, comfortingly.
"Not in the traditional sense, but Rebecca," he said, looking straight through her as if she had no physical body, as if he were not in a room with her, but alone in a dark universe with nothing to comfort him but the echo of his own voice. "I think I may already be dead. I think this entire town may be dead, too."
Becky O'Keefe put her arms around Virgil Cobb and hugged him tightly. She closed her eyes. All she saw was the idiocy of darkness, yet it was oddly comforting to hold this man and to see nothing. His own arms were slack at his side, as if he didn't know how to hug another human being.
When she finally broke away from him, she said, "I don't know what any of this really means, Virgil," saying his first name for the first time in her life. "I know that there is a mutilated body in that other room. I know that you have always been kind to me. I consider you a very good friend. So I am willing to listen to anything you have to say. So please try and explain this to me in a way that I can get it. Because I'm not getting it right now. I can't even figure out what you're trying to tell me."
Virgil Cobb began another story, not about Patty Glass, but about something that happened years before Patty or Rebecca O'Keefe had even come into existence.
Back in the olden days of Colony, when summer seemed to last forever and was always green, when the river was not only swimmable but drinkable, when the world was smaller and Colony was bigger, back when an old man named Virgil Cobb was sixteen and dared his younger brother to run up to a certain porch of a certain house.
Virgil's Story
My brother was always so active, always running and jumping, doing cartwheels. I thought he'd never stop. He was a terrific little brother, Eugene was, with his Irish mop of red hair, inherited from our mother, and his grin, like the devil himself on holiday. It was 1937, and in many ways the Great Depression had never hit us here in Colony, for we were all as poor then as we are now. My father was possibly the most well-to-do of all the locals, for he was also a doctor and ran his practice at an office in town, where my niece's shop is now. So we had material goods and food on the table at all times, that was true. And my friend Winston and I would get in trouble, usually with Eugene, the most adoring brother a boy could have. Once, I remember we three carried huge rocks from the quarry all the way across town and piled them up in the middle of Queen Anne Street. It was late summer. We covered the rocks with corn, still in its husk, and then we went upstairs in Winston's house and waited to see if anyone would drive through the corn. Most folks had sense, and they drove around the pile of corn as soon as they came upon it. But the preacher, an idiot named Lee from over the hills, in his big shiny black Cadillac, drove right down the center of the road. He must've been thinking that he'd hit the corn and it would go flying; instead, he hit the rocks, and the engine dropped out of his car. Oh, we laughed about that one, and then hid because we knew somebody was going to come after us to tan our hides.
But Eugene told. Not on us, but just on himself. That preacher was angry as the dickens, and when Eugene volunteered himself as the culprit, my baby brother got whupped right there on the road. I felt guilty about that for months to come.
I just wanted you to know what Eugene was like. Even though he was my baby brother, he would take all the responsibility. He would let himself get punished instead of me.
And then, there was that dare. I don't know what month of summer it was, all I know is, it was hot as Hades. We both went around without our shirts, which my mother called uncouth and my father called unhealthy—the mosquitoes were positively rabid then, and I ended up with welts all over my back and shoulders. Winston got us to go over to the Feely place. Even then John Feely was called Old Man, and he probably wasn't much older than eighteen. But his father had died two years before, and his mother was something of an invalid, and there were three sisters of his to feed, too, so John became the head of the household. But the thing was, he used to run around with us, some, too. But as soon as he was running the farm pretty much by himself, he got reclusive and shouted Bible phrases at us whenever we came out to see him. He called us sinners and such, and then when we got tired of it, Winston and I went and threw eggs at his house. And John Feely, damn him, didn't ever wash those blessed eggs off—they stayed there for weeks, drawing flies. People in town talked funny about John, how he would go out to Watch Hill and hammer crosses in the ground, even where there weren't any graves. They said he walked around at night, when no one else was in town. He was the town freak. So, Winston and I decided we'd break into his house one night while he was out. We didn't mean any real harm—you know, back then, folks left their doors unlocked all the time. Sometimes they didn't even close them.
So we drag Eugene with us, and he keeps telling us it's wrong, it's wrong, shaking his head, acting like a skunk. But we tell him about John Feely's stolen goods. Winston started that. He was always a better talker than me, and had read a lot of science fiction like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Winston convinced my brother that John Feely had stolen the old stone angel from Watch Hill, the one that used to be at the entrance. How that was sacrilegious and how it was only right that we go steal it back.
I didn't know that Winston was telling the truth.
Turns out, Winston had watched John Feely steal it one morning at five a.m. when Winston looked out his bedroom window and saw John walking down the street with it, plain as day.
So, it's maybe ten minutes to midnight, and we're all three staring at that old farmhouse. Our folks'll all skin us alive if they know we're out so late.
And then Winston looks at me and Eugene both and says something like, "I bet you're both too chicken to go in there."
To tell you the God's honest truth, I was too scared. I don't know what it was, but there was something about the Feely place at night that unnerved me. They say that there are some places where it can look perfectly beautiful and peaceful, but the eye detects something's wrong. Even though our minds can't notice what it is, our eye sees something without completely recognizing it. It's called the sublime. That's what I think it was, back then, that I felt. Call it a heightened awareness, but I was convinced when I looked at that dark old farmhouse that it was somehow alive, somehow it had some energy to it.
And it chilled my blood on one of the hottest nights of summer.
But Eugene was not attuned to that, I suppose. He accepted the dare from Winston. He barely waited a minute before he bounded up to the front porch and tried the door.
Unusual for us, the door was locked. Eugene went around to the windows and looked through each one. One window, a small one, was almost too bright with the lights on. I was about to call to him to come back, to forget it. But he saw something through that window. I don't know what.
When I saw him again, a few minutes later, and when we had gotten inside our house in the light, I gasped at the sight of him. He asked me what was wrong. All I could say was, "Your hair."
His hair, the bright red of fire, had turned completely white.
"It's because of what I saw," he said, and I felt it then. I felt that somehow my brother Eugene had become a ghost even though he hadn't died.
Now, I didn't believe him then. You won't believe me now when I tell you. He said that he saw something that looked very much like John Feely's old mother standing at the window on the inside, surrounded by candles. She was looking right at Eugene, although he was sure she couldn't see him because he was, after all, in the dark.
And then she reached up, placing her thumbs on either side of her eyes, and began to draw the flesh off her bones just as if it were our mother pulling skin from a chicken.
I didn't sleep that night, and I told him that we would never go back to the Feely place. But apparently, you can't see them without wanting to go to them. It's part of the power they have. They're like some kind of Gorgon. You are turned to stone before them, powerless. You offer yourself up to them without even realizing it.
For the next morning, my brother Eugene had vanished.
He was gone for five weeks before I confronted John Feely. I was certain that Eugene had fallen prey to some strange glamour of what he'd seen in the window. I had to shout at John just to get a small response from him. When he acknowledged me, he nodded, as if answering a question in his head.
John Feely looked at me sadly, and took pity on me.
He told me to meet him at his house before dawn, and I would see my brother.
My fear of John's house was overcome by my desire to see my brother as well as my insane curiosity. I awoke before the sun was up and rode my bicycle out to that accursed house. John greeted me soberly. He led me to the room where my brother had seen his terrifying vision.
There was a closet in the room, a closet that rose strangely from the floor, at an angle. This was surrounded with votive candles and every manner of religious symbol available, crosses of gold and brass and cornhusk, even a Star of David drawn on the wall in chalk; the Eastern yin-yang symbol, I think, also, and the Egyptian ankh. I was surprised a man of John Feely's limited education and interests would even know these, but he proved to be a self-educated man. His library was enormous and exotic. He told me a story about one of God's angels sent to this spot and chained by John's own great-great grandfather, a radical Mennonite preacher. The devil, John told me, still lived down in its tomb and had ravaged Colony more than once in the town's short history.
I was impatient. I wanted to know about my brother.
John Feely told me, "Something has happened to your brother, and I'm afraid it is my fault."
It seems his mother, out of curiosity, had removed the crosses and had stepped down into that cavern the very night that Eugene saw her through the window.
The devil had emerged in his mother's form and had seduced Eugene with what powers it had. Eugene had returned that night before John could make right the balance.
And you want to know something? I believed every word as we stood there. I bought it all. I could tell John Feely believed it, and I could hear, in his words, his own suffering and regret at the loss of his mother.
"How, if the creature is chained, could it escape?"
Before John Feely could answer, I heard my brother on the other side of that locked closet door. I fought John to get to that door, remove the lock and throw off the crosses that hung from it, but something in me held me back. For as my brother shouted to me to open the door, I realized it could not be my brother Eugene at all.
That my brother would not use language such as this creature did, nor could he make the sound that I heard.
The sound was not human.
John Feely told me that if I listened too long to the devil that I would become his vessel.
Then he showed me what he had done to himself to keep from hearing the devil below.
He had punctured both of his eardrums.
I realized he had not heard anything I was saying.
I could stay there no longer. I ran out into the dawn, home to my safe bed, and never told anyone this story except for Winston Alden.
And now, you.
Virgil Cobb looked into Becky's eyes for signs of belief.
She could not look at him. She sat on the floor, totally caught up in the world of that story.
"And what was beneath the Feely house, what took over my brother's body also took over Patty Glass," he said. "For some reason, it is able to get out now. That means only one thing."
"Old Man Feely's dead." Becky was totally drawn into the story he'd woven.
"That's right."
"But I don't see what it is. Is it a devil?"
"Of a sort. It is what they called in the olden days, unspeakable."
"Nothing's unspeakable."
"You haven't seen its face."
She caught her breath. "You did?"
Virgil's Story
It was nearly a month later; the moon was full. I had watched my parents mourn the loss of their youngest, while I grew more guilty each day. Yet I had sworn to John Feely that I would not tell anyone. He told me that my brother was lost as soon as he gazed upon that creature, and I believed him.
Then, one night, I heard a rapping at my bedroom window. My room was on the third floor of my folks' house. I figured Winston was down below throwing pebbles up.
But instead, I looked out and saw something that looked exactly like my brother, in the big old oak tree just beyond my window, dressed in the overalls I'd last seen him in.
He was sitting among its branches, I thought. But as I watched him in my frozen terror, I saw that he wasn't sitting at all. Eugene was standing on nothing. I thought that he was floating in air.
And then I saw them, in the moonlight that cast its beam between the shadows of leaves and branches: something coming out of his spine, holding him to the tree. They were like the thin, curved legs of horseshoe crabs, that was the closest I could come to determining what they were. Or feelers. Some kind of antennae sprouted from his spinal cord.
I bit the inside of my cheek to make sure I wasn't dreaming.
Eugene spoke to me through the open window. He said, "Why did you leave me there? Why didn't you protect me, Virg? Why did you let it get me?"
And then, it dropped out of sight, into darkness.
Only later did I find out about two children of the neighborhood, a boy and a girl, taken from their home. They were found down near the river, their bodies torn, drained of blood.
I went to John Feely, and he took me up to Watch Hill and showed me how it could come up from some of the graves, how the ones without crosses on them could be used as doorways for it.
I had snuck the Bram Stoker book, Dracula, from my uncle's house. It had been banned from the local library for twenty years. I knew about creatures that drained blood. I wrote down in the dirt in front of him, "Vampires?"
And he crossed that word out.
John Feely had never heard this term before. He looked at me and said, "No. Angel of the Pit. Abaddon."
We went through Watch Hill that day, looking for where the creature may have come through.
When we found a newly dug, but empty grave, John Feely dropped several crosses down into it and covered them with a thin layer of dirt.
It wasn't until the winter, when another grave was dug up there, that I saw my brother again and pursued him at dawn across the snowy ground to try to catch him. Winston was with me, and he had gone ahead (believing it all, because he believed everything) and had drawn several crosses in the ground around the grave.
I chased my brother, swinging a crucifix I'd been keeping under my bed—borrowed from St. Andrews'—as we ran.
When my brother arrived at the grave, he saw the crosses and stopped dead in his tracks.
He seemed to freeze. He stared at the crosses as the sun slowly rose to the east. Only a purple light. Faint light.
Winston and I were able to walk up to him, then.
We had our equipment ready. We knew now that this was a vampire we were up against.
It was easy. He continued to stare at the crosses in the ground, like a bird hypnotized by a cobra. It was the strangest thing I've ever seen.
Eugene continued to watch the ground as I brought the stake I'd carved up to his chest.
And then, I couldn't do it. I began bawling like a baby. Suddenly, with the light coming up, I didn't believe that my brother would be a monster. I didn't believe.
I started erasing the crosses with my feet. Something compelled me to it, and I remembered how much I loved my brother, how I protected him, how I was never going to hurt him in any way.
And when I turned around, Winston was screaming.
Eugene held my friend with one hand, clutching him as if Winston were a chicken whose neck was about to be wrung.
Something was rippling beneath my brother's face, and remembering Eugene's own vision of Mrs. Feely tearing her face off, I watched something begin to emerge from Eugene's left eye.
I didn't wait to see what Eugene would transform into.
I took the stake and jumped him, jabbing him over and over in the vicinity of his heart until I was sure that it had stopped.
I sat on top of his body in the bloody snow. Winston, rescued, helped me with the rest of the procedure.
When we were done, when we had finished what we knew had to be done to vampires, we took him to the frozen river and broke the ice. We dumped his body into it. We waited for weeks for someone to come across it; the river ran low the following summer, but his body was never recovered.
I never spoke to John Feely again, and I tell you it has been fifty-some years since that day, and it is as fresh in my memory as yesterday. You may wonder how I stayed sane after that.
I will tell you.
I kept watch for them. Winston and I both. We had a hunch they came back at least once, but somehow John Feely kept it contained.
But whenever a child goes missing, I get a chill, knowing that it might be that thing that has it. That thing that's living beneath the very ground we walk upon, trying to find a way out of its prison. I think it uses children mostly because it requires some belief. As we get older, we lose that, even, sometimes in God. But children believe in things, and this creature feeds on their beliefs as much as it does their bodies and souls.
Virgil Cobb finished his story. He no longer seemed to be a doctor to Becky, but a very weary, very old man who had come a long way in his life to end up here, frightened of ghosts and goblins. She had begun to believe parts of Virgil's story, at least insofar as he himself believed it, but she knew that this was not sane. What he was talking had no basis in the world. Becky was not a major believer in anything, although she held to her Protestant upbringing a bit—the part of it that didn't directly involve God. She held to the morals and codes and attitudes engendered by the church of her childhood; the supernatural element she didn't buy into at all. She firmly believed that man made his own errors, and that perhaps there was a karmic debt built up, but it had a swift and effective collection agency: you cheat on your husband, you end up divorced, you lie to a friend, you lose your friend. She sat there, understanding that Virgil Cobb was, perhaps, talking in metaphor about the loss of his brother. She thought that he truly believed that his brother had been turned into some kind of vampire. A more disturbing thought struck her as she sat there: if he isn't telling the truth, if he is experiencing delusions, then the little girl in the examination room isn't Patty Glass, of course you gullible idiot, she's some poor girl that Virgil dug up from some grave and mutilated. Or worse, she was alive when he performed his surgery.
She wanted to believe him, because he had never broken trust with her. He had helped her as a teenager when her father had become too abusive in his drinking, and again when he was her employer. Finally, when the divorce came, he got her inexpensive counseling over in Stone Valley. She wanted to believe him. But she could not. Something within her rebelled.
The desolate thought that remained was that she was listening to, at best, a ghoul; at worst, a murderer and sociopath.
She still felt for him. She took his hand in hers. His hand was cold.
It was just beginning to rain outside. She heard a wind come up, and then the clicking of the rain as it hit the shingles of the house.
"You must be tired," she said. "Let's get you into bed first thing. We can figure the rest of this out in the morning."
"I am very tired," Virgil replied. "More tired than you can imagine. Thank you for believing me."
She could not look him in the eye.
At least, not until they both heard the cry from the next room.
The examining room.
The cry of a young child, which, as the rain picked up, became a wail.
Virgil said, "Whatever you do, you mustn't go back into that room. It is night now. It must hear its master, like its own heart, beating beneath the house, in the very ground upon which we live."
He rolled his shirtsleeve down to cover the bite on his forearm. "I suppose I'm what it needs to harvest, Rebecca."
As if it were the most important thing in the world (and knowing at the same time that it was totally ridiculous), she said, "Call me Becky, Virgil."
"Becky"—his voice softening as the child's wailing ceased for a moment—"I called you because you're the only person smart enough and trustworthy enough to help me. I'm afraid my friend Winston was already taken. I'm afraid others, too. I don't know who. I just know it is loose in this town. You can run away from it if you want. It's too late for me. I imagine that before the sun is up tomorrow I'll be dead and then it will take me over. I want you to run, actually. I want you to be safe."
"I still don't want to believe this," she said, her words carefully measured. "Why would this be happening now? Why right now?"
Virgil shook his head. "I don't know. When I was young, it was as if it leaked out. It was as if just by looking at it, we gave it some kind of power. Maybe someone else has given it power, too, whatever it is."
"I just want things to be the way they were before you called me." She said these words as if she were already removed from the immediate problem which involved Virgil and the girl in the next room.
"I understand. You go get your son and anyone you love, and you run, Becky. I understand completely." He nodded.
"No"—she shook her head—"I can't, though. Someone killed my son's dog this morning. I don't know who. They pushed a spike right into the dog's skull. I thought then that it must've been some monstrous juvenile delinquent. But the footprints. Muddy footprints, so tiny, delicate. Like a little girl's. Do you think there are other children?"
"I don't know. If John Feely was somehow stopped last night, there could be any number of people who have been taken by this thing."
"Then I can't leave. I have to go get Tad, and then there's Homer—I won't leave him here. How can I leave any of them to this?" She brought her hands up to her face, covering her eyes. "I feel like we're already lost."
The rain came faster and harder.
Don't think of the body of that girl in the room. Don't think of what he had to do to her.
Minutes passed.
Becky felt rooted to the spot.
Then, the door to the examination room creaked open, behind her, and before Becky could turn around, she saw it in Virgil Cobb's eyes as he watched what came through the door—it was not so much terror, as an expression of such absolute emptiness that for a second she thought Virgil was no longer in his body, but had already died and left a shell which continued to twitch.
Becky turned towards the open door.