Vampires in Devil Town (19 page)

Thirty

Ilya followed Ernst up the narrow stairway leading from the lower level, the Low Church. His hand trailed out behind him and she clutched it delicately. Outside, the sun fell rapidly and they both knew what they were going to do. Her throat grew thick with the thought of it, as it did every night.
  Together, they entered the ground floor of the house that could not be seen from the outside. The only thing that could be seen from the sagging windows was the milky white fog. They crossed the rooms until they reached the staircase at the back of the house. There, they ascended that staircase as well, going to the bedroom on the top floor.
  This room was the same as it was two-hundred years ago. Maybe a bit more aged. The wallpaper was peeling in places. The bed sagged in its old wood frame. But the setup of the room was the same. And the feeling was the same. Ilya felt the same giddiness she had when Ernst had first taken her virginity in this room so very long ago, when they were both alive, when they were both human.
  It amazed her. The human body amazed her. Even though hers had not been technically alive in so many years, it still yearned for all those things that had made her feel most alive before she had experienced her unnatural death.
  A breeze blew in through the windows, bringing the sadness of late summer with it. The breeze always hinted of late summer. Even in the winter, it carried that scent, that dying heat. Ernst laid her down on the bed and her head was alive with the scent of old wood made fragrant by the humidity and the clean linen of the bed clothes.
  “This might be the last time we do this here,” Ernst said.
  “Tomorrow we might not even need to use our bodies,” she said. “Can you imagine what that will be like?”
  He leaned over the bed and kissed her. It was a deep, loving kiss, his tongue sliding in her mouth. Together, they generated their own kind of warmth. He untied the string holding her black dress up above her breasts, sliding it down, exposing her fully. Then he removed his clothes and climbed in the bed with her.
  Time became irrelevant as they moved against each other. They made heat out of coldness. They put moisture where there wasn’t any. No area of their bodies went unexplored. This was how it had always been. And while there had been nights filled with frivolities involving other men and women, those were just amusements, some exercise of the flesh that ended in death. But those were the nights and this was twilight, this was sunset, and that had always been their time. That was the time Ilya knew she had Ernst. And not just that she had him against her, filling her, but the time she knew she had his mind and something as close to love as he could come. As most people grew more tired, they grew stronger as the day birthed the night. Through everything, she often thought this was the most important time for her, Ernst holding her, inside of her. This was the time that meant everything and she didn’t really care if it took place in this house or if it took place beyond the Dark Fire, it meant the same thing. It meant that, wherever she went, she would have this other soul to look out for her and protect her.
  Each of them climaxed as the sun sank below the horizon.
  Ilya lay against Ernst, in the soft spot of his shoulder, smelling the same man she had smelled all these years. He absently played with her hair and stared at the ceiling.
  “We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
  “Doing what? We’ve done this every night.”
  “No. Not that. We shouldn’t be simply lying here, enjoying ourselves. There is too much that needs to be done.”
  “We can’t prepare any more than we already have.”
  “You know there are more people out there, don’t you? People who want us gone.”
  “One of them is the girl. I can sense that. My replacement. Rachel.”
  “And here she is, wanting to kill you.”
  “Is that irony?”
  “Not sure. You think Zack’s a good one?”
  “I think so.”
  “You know he has someone else in mind, don’t you?”
  “Yes. But I think he’ll warm to our choice.”
  Ernst took in a deep breath. “She is beautiful.”
  “Which one?”
  “All of them. Except that shit that fucked everything up last time.”
  “I thought we had him on the ropes.”
  “Thought he was going crazy, didn’t he? Voices. Depression. Sacrifices right there on the television. If I had another week, his brain would be jelly.”
  “We were focused on other things.”
  “We’ll be able to handle him. Getting the girl will be the important thing. Getting Zack away from the other girl will be something else. What’s her name?”
  “The blood on Zack’s tongue says ‘Charlotte.’”
  “Think she’s dangerous?”
  “Could be. But I also think she’s in love. We both know what that will do.”
  “Yes,” Ernst said. “Yes we do.”
  “Tonight, we will be drank to death.”
  “Drained completely.”
  “Maybe the boy... what’s his name?”
  “Jacob.”
  “Maybe he’ll come in handy when Zack tries to make Rachel drink your blood.”
  “Perhaps.”
  “Maybe Charlotte was meant to be the replacement.”
  “No,” Ernst said. “We cannot trick the Dark Fire. It was very clear about that. It has to be Zack and Rachel. We can’t lose her again. She’s the challenge. Not everyone comes to us as easy as Zack. Everyone else has to die. They can’t know anything about what goes on here.”
  Outside, the milky fog lifted, replaced with the purple of the sky. Already, even as the sound of the insects was dying off, the singing of the dead began. A sad lament that sank into the bones. Both Ilya and Ernst knew that if they looked outside, they would be able to see the dead, emerging from the ground, emerging from trees, emerging from animals—thin spirits, blue-white, nearly transparent, that almost no one else would be able to see. If needed, he knew, he could draw them to him. He could bring them to do his bidding. Those that wanted to help him would come and those that did not would stay away. Those that did not want to help him were the dead who had not yet seized upon this unique power he had to offer them—the power of a parasite. It was really only common sense. If a dead person wants to feel more alive, they must feed from the living. To be dead was to be beyond morality, beyond good and evil.
  He drew Ilya closer to him, bracing himself for the night ahead and waiting for the end because he, of all people, knew that every end heralded some wild and mysterious beginning.

Thirty-one

While Jacob and Rachel were not gathered around the house to see it emerge, it did. More than emerge, it became a substantial thing, carved out of the air. Like watching a Polaroid develop from the slate gray background, the images became more colorful and clearer. It took only a matter of minutes once the sun disappeared from the sky. Once, where there was nothing, there now stood a house, looming over the wild grass of the valley.
  
  “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Jacob shouted. “She’s fucking nowhere. Just... gone. I don’t even... what the hell are we doing here, anyway?”
  They had reached a clearing in the woods. Darkness loomed above the canopy of the trees. Already, they had looked for Rain longer than they had agreed upon.
  Jacob continued. “Why does everything have to be so fucked up? You know, everything was going along okay until last night when everything was just shot to hell. Blown to pieces. We need to go back. Why don’t we just go back home? Why can’t we just go back home?”
  Rachel placed a hand on his arm. “Let me take you back about twenty-four hours, Jacob. I was sleeping peacefully when somebody came through my closet to kidnap me with every intention of bringing me here because someone that lives here told him to do it. You were at your house when you saw something on the TV that caused you to smash it into little pieces and the last time we were at your ‘home’ there was a gutted dog on the floor and a rather ominous slogan written in blood on the wall. Of course, now that I think about what was written there, it seems to be more prophecy than slogan. Do you still wonder why we can’t go home?”
  “No. As usual, you have placed things into a very cheery perspective.”
  “Glad I could be of service.”
  “We need to go back to the van. We need to see if that fucking house is there.”
  “I thought you were the one who didn’t want to leave her.”
  “Do we have any fucking choice? I mean, really, do we have any
fucking choice
when it comes to any of this?”
  “If she was meant to be found then we would have found her.”
  “What’s that supposed to mean?”
  “Look, there’s no sense in us standing here and arguing. We can either continue to look for Rain or we can go back to the house. It’s up to you.”
  “I don’t want it to be up to me. Then whatever happens becomes my fault.”
  “Oh, you want it to be
my
fault?”
  “Have I ever blamed you for any of this?”
  “You just did.”
  “What the hell do you mean?”
  “Just that, if it wasn’t for me, you would have never come face to face with this.”
  “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be dead.”
  “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be one of them.”
  They looked at each other, reaching that silent understanding that had become inevitable.
  “None of that matters now, anyway,” he said.
  “Don’t you realize what we did last time? We did something very important. We stopped them from whatever it was they were trying to do. I did it and you did it. And that made them scared. Scared of me and scared of you. They came for me just as much as they came for you. So stop wallowing in your self-loathing and face the facts that we are in this together. That I couldn’t walk away from it, could never have walked away from it, no matter how much I might have wanted to. And I don’t know about you but I haven’t been the same person since the last time we dealt with these things.”
  Jacob stopped. His last bit of argument was gone. He guessed there were a lot of things they hadn’t talked about over the past couple of years. Now was not the time to drag all of that out in the open but it was there, left in the back of his mind for him to meditate on.
  He had never told her why he hated to leave his apartment or how, if he stared too long into a person’s eyes, he saw things. It overwhelmed him. Even people he had always thought were good were capable of some of the worst things imaginable. And he didn’t know if these things were true or if he saw these things as a result of the Devils trying to somehow trick him. Like maybe they wanted him to see the evil in people so when they came back for him he would be easier to take, easier to convert. And she had never really told him everything either. Even though he knew it was there. He saw it every time he looked into her eyes. He saw it. He saw her giving her first blowjob to a neighbor boy when she was thirteen. He saw her contemplating a bottle of her mother’s pills. But none of this had made him hate her. It only made him love her more. It made him fear for her. It made him want to keep her close to him so that nothing could ever happen to her again, so she would never have to look at a bottle of pills and think swallowing them would be better than waking up to the humiliation of another day.
  He drew her close to him and hooked her hair behind her ear, bending down and giving her a slow kiss.
  She pulled away from him, wanting more, desperately wanting there to be nothing more to do than stand there in the middle of the woods and kiss forever.
  “So we’re leaving Rain to fend for herself?” he asked.
  “Come on. No one dies in Lynchville. You know that. Sure, maybe a big bad wolf came along and ate her but we’ll probably see her walking down the block tomorrow. Or at least tomorrow night. I hear the dead are rather fond of the night.”
  “I just feel so...”
  “Mean? Cruel? Heartless?”
  “Yeah. Something like that.”
  “If we were to continue looking for her, you do realize we would just be looking for a corpse, right? I mean, there isn’t a chance in hell she’s still alive.”
  “Yeah. I’ll tell myself that.”
  “And this is what she would have wanted.”
  “No. She would have wanted to live. That’s what she would have wanted.”
  “Well, at least if we do this, then she can have a proper death with a heaven and a god and all of that stuff rather than coming back as a werewolf or a zombie or a vampire or whatever the fuck these things are.”
  “A heaven and a god and all that stuff? Are you delusional?”
  “No. Just hopeful.”
  “Okay. Now is not the time to talk religion, I guess.”
  They left the clearing, going back toward the hollow, Jacob wondering what part religion played in all of this. He had always thought of himself as an agnostic. He could see how a person who had a firm religion would be adamant about stopping the Devils, why the legends abounded in quite the way they did around Lynchville, spread, as they were, by its mostly Christian citizenship who thought the concept of earthly life after death was unholy. Jacob didn’t really know what he thought about holiness. Personally, he found the concept of life after death appealing. He didn’t really have any desire to leave the earth. Heaven was a gamble, he had always assumed. He wasn’t so ready to leave the world behind and head off to a promised land that might not be all it was promised to be. The thing that bothered him about the Devils was the evil they seemed to bring with them. But maybe he couldn’t think of them as being evil. Maybe they were just doing what they had to do. Like what he told Rain about them being parasites. Maybe he was closer to the truth than he thought.
  Did they have religion? he wondered. And, if so, what kind of promises did that religion contain? Most of the Christianity he had been exposed to had centered around death—you lead the “cleanest” life possible in hopes that you will be accepted by God upon death so your soul can gain admittance to Heaven. But what would the religion of the dead be like?
  He hoped he would have time to think about this later. Shifting the tire iron to his left hand, he grabbed Rachel’s hand with his right.
  “Do you think it’s going to be there?” he asked her.
  “The house?”
  “Yeah.”
  “I don’t know. I guess we’ll know when we get there.”
  “Good answer.”
  They walked through the woods that now seemed very dark, each of them wondering exactly how far into the woods they had wandered, when they reached the edge and stared down into the hollow and the house that had miraculously appeared there while they were away.
  “Holy shit,” Jacob said.
  “That’s right,” Rachel said. “I’m so happy we have something to burn.”
  “I say we run for the van.”
  “You okay to run?”
  “I think so.”
  “Go,” Rachel said and took off running toward the van.
  He now realized things were happening faster than he wanted them to. He had wanted to douse the perimeter of the house in gasoline and then back the van into it so that, hopefully, the van exploded and the fire spread around the house but now that the house was actually there, he found that he wasn’t in the greatest of hurries to get very close to it.
  But he knew he had to. They couldn’t come all this way to do an even more half-ass job than they already were.
  Their quick sprint to the van left them both panting, out of breath.
  “We need to make sure it isn’t going to turn off the path,” he said.
  He opened the driver’s side door of the van and crept inside. The claustrophobic interior of the vehicle, coupled with the fact that he knew this was where Rachel was held captive, greatly disturbed Jacob. He wished he would have seen Bones. He wished he could have been there to help Rachel. He didn’t think Bones would still be alive if that were the case. Jacob would have done whatever he could have to destroy him. Being able to destroy the guy’s van was only a small consolation.
  Between the two seats, he found a length of white rope that looked like the kind used for clotheslines. This was probably what they had tied Rachel up with. He created a tight knot around the bottom of the steering wheel, in the middle. He took the other end of the rope and wrapped it around one of the mechanisms below the seat. He thought it was probably the lever that was used to slide the seat backward and forward. Tightening the slack, he wrapped the rope between the steering wheel and this device. Hopefully, this would keep the wheel from turning during the van’s descent. It was already on a hill so Jacob didn’t think he would need anything to hold the accelerator down like he had seen done in movies so many times. All he would have to do was put the van in neutral and hope it gained enough speed before it smacked into the house.
  “Can you get the gas can?”
  Rachel, who had been silently observing him, nodded her head and started for the Saab.
  By the time he got the rope as tight as he wanted it, she had returned with the gas can.
  “Okay, great,” he said. “Now, here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to run down there and do a quick lap of the house with the gas can. Then I’m going to try and catch the gas on fire. When you see that it has caught fire you need to put this puppy into neutral and let it go. Is that simple enough?”
  “You’re going down to the house?”
  “I have to. I think it’s important that it burn as quickly as possible.”
  “‘Kay,” she mumbled.
  “I love you,” he said, leaning into her, putting his hand under her chin and angling her face toward his for a kiss.
  “I love you too. Be careful. If you see anything strange come back up here. Okay?”
  “I will. But I think we’ve already seen some pretty strange things so I’m not exactly sure what you’re classifying as strange these days.”
  “You know what I mean.”
  “Yes. If I sense danger, I will tuck my tail between my legs and come running back to you.”
  “Good.”
  “Let’s get this done.”
  He took the gas can from her and started at a light trot down toward the house, dread creeping into his bones. He just wanted this to all be over.
  Approaching the house, he looked in the windows.
  He didn’t see how it was possible anything unsavory could be going on in there. It just looked empty and abandoned. With the pale moonlight shining down on it, it was a little creepy looking, but it didn’t seem to be dangerous.
  He flipped open the air hole at the back of the can, took the cap off the spout and started a steady stream. It came out with just enough force so he was able to douse the actual boards of the house rather than the ground around it. Hopefully, this would ensure the structure itself actually caught fire and if the van exploded upon impact, that would be even better. Especially if those things were inside. He didn’t know if it would kill them or not but it would at least have to give them one hell of a shock.
  He quickly scampered to his right, encircling the house with the gasoline.
  The house wasn’t especially large and it took maybe a minute at most to get back around to the front of it. He decided to use the remainder of the gasoline on the porch. He bounded up the steps, emptying the can in front of the door. This would make sure the exit was blocked too. That was an idea he liked. Trapping those fuckers in there with nowhere to run.
  He pulled his lighter out of his pocket and turned toward the hill to see if he could see Rachel. The night was relatively clear and the moon afforded a good amount of light. He could see all the way up to the road. Rachel’s pale face wavered in the darkness beside the black splotch of the van.
  He struck the lighter and reached down, touching it to the damp gasoline, knowing this wasn’t the best idea in the world. He heard it sizzle and swoosh.
  From the top of the hill, Rachel put the van into neutral, backing away from it as it began its descent.
  He lingered on the porch for just a moment, making sure the gas had caught.
  
  Adrenaline rushed through Rachel. It seemed like Jacob stood on the porch too long. What if he got hit by the van?
  He probably hadn’t stood there that long. The van wasn’t even halfway down the hill yet.
  Then she saw the door to the house open quickly, cutting through the fire, and a strange-looking something that wasn’t wearing much clothes grabbed Jacob and pulled him into the house, slamming the door behind him.
  Rachel’s mouth dropped open. The van slammed into the house and everything else went according to the plan. It exploded on impact, partly due to the nearly rusted-through gas tank. And the house, so much old wood, burned at an alarming rate.
  Alone, Rachel ran down the hill toward the house, half-thinking she could go in and pull Jacob back, but by the time she was anywhere close to the house, it was already completely engulfed in flames. Slowly, she backed away from the intense heat, wondering what she was going to do next.