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VALLEY OF THE NOSFERATU by Don Lee "Vampires, werewolves, fallen angels and fairies lurk in the shadows, their intentions far from honorable." ~ Jeaniene Frost Chapter One The scream tore through the darkness like a scalpel, jolting Molly Barrett out of sleep so hard she tumbled back in her chair and smacked the floor. She blinked a moment, looking up at the distant ceiling from flat on her back, before she remembered where she was and what was going on. She was the night nurse on duty in the Lazarus Cancer Institute of Miracle Springs, Arkansas, and the year was 1938. She was 27 years old and she was the only living relative she had left. She rose quickly and brushed off her white uniform, adjusted her nurse's cap, and headed down the corridor. It was Mrs. Emmanuel, who'd arrived there only a week before. The poor old thing had been declining fast when she had arrived, and of course it was probably too late for any of the treatments to do her any good. All they could do was give her something for the pain, and even that didn't seen to be helping a whole lot right now. Or maybe it did. Molly hoped so. Molly stepped into the room where the old woman lay. She was awake in the dark, and when she saw the glow of Molly's lamp her eyes widened. “Hell, dear,” she said. “I had that horrible dream again. Did you hear me?” “No worries,” Molly said. Bad dreams seemed to be a part of Dr. Burkheads' legendary patent pending treatments. Molly said, leaning closer. “Can I get anything for you, Mrs. Emmanuel?” The old woman smiled and nodded. Molly went to the pharmacy cabinet in the hall, then returned and leaned over and helped her sit up and sip from the paper cup the bitter medication they kept on hand to help with pain and sleep. Mrs. Emmanuelle leaned back with a sigh and looked up at Molly in the dim lamp glow. “You are very kind. How long do you think it takes before the treatments will start to work, dear?” she asked. Molly hated the question, but she smiled at the peering face and patted the wrinkled arm on the sheet. “Sometimes it takes a week or two to start. It takes a little time, usually.” She gave Mrs. Emmanuel's thin hand a squeeze and headed back to her station. Molly could hear the snores and murmurs of all the other sleepers as she approached her desk. The hospital was full to the brim with patients and had a waiting list. It had been that way ever since she'd started, three weeks earlier. Dr. Burkhead's famous radio broadcasts from station XHEL (“X-Heal!”), which originated just south of the Texas border and beamed his miracle radio shows at a million watts, were familiar to anybody who listened to the radio in the upper 48 states. Or Canada. Or even here in Arkansas, in the sleepy little city of Miracle Springs. She'd listened to them for years, and moreso that last year and a half, when her dad started getting so sick. When his coughing got worse and worse. Molly couldn't help but wonder what was actually in the treatments they administered to the patients here. The main staff, all the doctors and most of the nurses, were foreigners. They'd come here with Burkhead. Supposedly he had brought them back with him from Europe after his travels there, to help administer the miracle cures he advertised. She had read up on it all as much as she could during the weeks Dad had been making the rounds of the local doctors there in Iowa City, all giving him basically the same bad news. She'd seen newsreels of Dr. Burkhead's research laboratories long before her father had come here to die, And it all certainly seemed impressive – images of white-coated doctors mixing mysterious colored fluids in test tubes, and happy looking nurses injecting patients who also looked fairly comfortable considering they were all dying in pain and this was basically their last hope of a cure. And the big cancer ray machine. The Lazarus Ray, after which the whole institute was named. She'd never seen such a thing before, outside of Flash Gordon, and when she did manage to glimpse it one empty Sunday afternoon in the chamber where it was housed and usually locked up downstairs, she was impressed despite herself. It was big and shiny hung like an anvil over the little table that held the forms of the dying patients like bugs pinned to a board, there to receive its beneficial emanations. And yet in her three weeks here, Molly had come to suspect their real success rates was somewhat more complicated than what the public had been told. What she and her dad had heard over the radio back home, and what the locals heard during Burkhead's Sunday afternoon outdoor picnics, was all wonderful, but she had her doubts now. Burkhead held his big free picnics every Sunday afternoon between morning church and evening church services, which fits the schedules of most everybody in town. He'd picked up the idea from Father Divine up in New York, where the famous black evangelist regularly fed the homeless and hungry through his International Peace Movement. Whenever the weather was nice, after church services around town, they all spread out their blankets on the sprawling, manicured lawns that looked out over the town below. He would give his weekly talks to the picnicking audience while his staff went around with fresh lemonade. He would talk the wonders of his cure, and its many successes back before he'd left the Midwest to travel the world, then to settle back here in this much godlier town to open his hospital. Sometimes he would grow angry, speaking about his problems with the medical authorities, and how he'd been chased hither and yon till finally he'd found his Promised Land, the struggling town of Miracle Springs and the abandoned Century Hotel, which loomed like a Gothic castle on the skyline looking down on the town. She had only half believed it was possible that this place in the brightly colored brochures might actually do what nobody else had been able to. And at first he'd resisted, but as the spring came on, Dad had gotten worse and worse. It was of course the result of smoking those awful Morley cigarettes for thirty years. She could still smell the memory of them a little if she thought about it very hard. She sat down at her desk in the big dark empty lobby, cupping her chin in her palm in the little halo of light from her lamp, and she watched out through the black windows into the emptiness. It began to rain. Chapter Two Leonard Transom pounded the keyboard of his new typewriter like a demon with a up-rushing soul to claim, or in this case a hard deadline; Pete the printer would be in the shop before dawn, reading to start setting the pages. And Leonard was running late. The new model of Royal Portable had a lever that changed the sensitivity needed to hit the keys. It was very high-tech, in other words. After spending years pounding his fingers to a pulp getting the newspaper ready – times when he had to literally sit with his hands afterward in ice water to ease the pain – this was kind of a miracle. It was a dark and stormy night. Thunder rattled the windowpanes, making him jump despite himself. He kept typing. Leonard Transom was seventy years old and felt every minute of it. He had arrived in Miracle Springs during much better times and had fallen in love with the extravagance of its architecture and its strange topography. There were no right angles in Miracle Springs, and the streets ran up and down and cross-ways on both sides of the valley. He'd stayed on, then, for a brief marriage that had not worked out in the end, and here he was, still, as the town died around him, feeling a tad too old to start over again someplace else. Life over time becomes a portfolio of diminishing expectations, a wise man had once said, and though Transom had resented the concept at the time, he was starting to see the point of it, despite himself. Dr. Loomis Burkhead's Lazarus Institute had been a huge boon to the town, or seemed so. Burkhead himself was charismatic, a sort of mid-western William Powell, with the big eyes, the pomade hair slicked back, the pencil-thin mustache. And he dropped the names of his famous friends in conversation regularly. He'd been to Europe and hobnobbed with royalty here and there. He'd spent time in Paris alongside people with names like Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He hinted at having had a hand in some of the books whose titles everybody knew now. More importantly, he claimed to have met certain scientists, alchemists, medicine men whose ideas were well advance of their time, or incredibly ancient, and he'd gathered it all up with him as he went. But Transom had an inkling, a tingling in his journalism gland. Maybe it was his years covering the news, and finding out the all-too-human people behind it. Anyhow, Loomis Burkhead put him off. The guy was full of big talk and big plans, and of course he had the razzle-dazzle to back it up, but despite the thriving hospital and all the business its patients and their families brought to town, when they came to have their loved ones cured, Transom also knew that in the months since Burkhead had arrived, the number of funeral homes n the area had gone from one to five. There wasn't officially a lot medical science could do, at least not now, with cancer: surgery to remove the tumors was the main thing, and he'd heard about using radiation to burn the tissues so the cancer wouldn't spread. But in Burkhead's pamphlets and other literature, there wasn't mention of standard treatments. And his motto, after all, in bold letters on every piece of literature, in every radio broadcast, and on the big sign at the entrance to the hospital itself, was NO CUTTING, NO RADIATION, which … well, Transom wondered. Nobody liked it when you showed their heroes' feet of clay. On the other hand, he kept taped on the wall above his desk a piece of Irish wisdom he chose to live by: “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” He sighed and leaned back, stretching his shoulder muscles, and reached into the drawer for the pint bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey he kept there. It was late and the deadline was fixed in time and space, ahead of him like a brick wall, but perhaps a little usquebaugh would set free the edges of his mind enough to create some deathless prose before he was done. Either way they'd run the pages, of course. The press must roll, and on time, like gravity or true romance, but it was always good to come up with a little extra zinger when you could. The rain had begun to fall harder, beating against the tin roof. His home had been a farmhouse originally, but it was at the dead end of a narrow dirt lane surrounded by yet uncut trees, and a few small cottages going up the hill to the main thoroughfare. If not for the oaks that rose downhill from his house, you could look off his porch over the bluff straight downtown. All of that was dark at this hour. Anyone with any sense was long asleep. The pounding on his door caused him to drop the open bottle, and he grabbed it up, but not before he'd spilled half of it on his knee. Damn! He lurched upright and made his way to the back door, the side of the house closest to the street. Something terrible must be happening to cause such frantic pounding – and, as he neared the door, he could hear a sort of muffled, pleading voice. She could have been anywhere from sixteen to thirty. Her thin white shift clung to her soaked body like a second skin, and though he allowed himself only a glance, it was a nice skin. Her long blonde hair hung limp around her face and onto her shoulders, water running down her like a fountain. She would have been attractive under any circumstances – heart shaped face, delicate nose, large blue eyes. But those eyes were circled dark, and rain ran down her face like endless tears, and he simply froze there a long moment staring at her, and she him. “Help me,” she whispered. “Come in,” he said, and she fell into his arms. He carried her to the sofa nearest the stove and laid her down. She weighed all of a hundred pounds, soaking wet, literally. He wrapped her in a heavy quilt and tried to see if she was breathing. She did seem to be, though slowly. She was unconscious, but after awhile he touched her shoulder to see if she would respond. When he did she sat straight up like she was spring loaded, eyes sightless, wide open now, and she cried out, “No! No! It hurts! Don't do it! No!” He grasped her damp shoulders. “It's okay!” he said. “Listen to me. You're safe. Everything is okay. You're safe.” The girl looked at him expressionlessly, then hissed at him like a cat. He let go and she sank back into the cushions. She seemed then to fall immediately back asleep, as if uninterrupted. Good Christ, Transom thought. It was too late and the weather too foul to go out looking for help for her now, and she didn't seem to be physically injured, though he was hesitant to investigate too closely. So Transom put an extra stick of wood in the cast iron stove. Retrieving his bottle, he turned down the lamp till its dim glow cast the room, and the sleeping girl, half into shadow. He took another blanket from the shelf, wrapped himself in it, sank into his armchair, and sipped and watched her sleep until he too dozed away. When he awoke the next morning, stiff in his chair, Leonard Transom saw that the girl was still asleep on the sofa. Sometime during the night, however, she'd removed her sodden gown – it lay in a damp puddle on the floor – and though she'd wrapped back up in the quilt, one small, pink-tipped breast was exposed in the morning light. He considered trying to wake her, but knew Pete was pacing the floor down at the newspaper office, eager to start setting type for the new edition, so instead her scrawled her a note: “SORRY TO LEAVE YOU HERE BUT DUTY CALLS. COFFEE HOT ON STOVE.” He folded the note, tucked it under the blanket next to her exposed bosom, and headed out. CHAPTER NEXT On the street he passed the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Jubb, out walking her pug dog Firestorm. As usual, the bow-legged little bastard snarled at him then ignored his existence. He nodded and hurried on by. The Miracle Springs Boomerang was a two-man deal. The other half was Pete Digby, a sort of newspaper homunculus who seemed to live for setting type and telling stories about girls he'd known back in New Orleans. They were always the same stories, of course, though that's how it was when you knew someone long enough. So once he'd turned over his pages to old Pete and made sure he knew of any special instructions, Transom would leave his typesetter and step across the way. He stepped out of the newspaper office – he was standing on one of the several stairways alleys that ran and up and down between Main Street Below and Spring Street Above. Across the way, six feet from his office door, the Dented Mug was open for business as usual, his favorite bartender Nate polishing beer glasses behind the weatherbeaten bar. “Hey Boss,” said Nate. He called everybody “Boss.” He'd owned half the bar and run the rest since the passing of its founder, Blind Mary, who'd roamed up and down behind that bar for decades pouring and mixing drinks and counting change without ever laying an eye on a drink, a customer, or a coin. Nobody but a fool or a tourist ever tried to test her on that. “What do you know about vampires, Leonard?” Nate asked him as soon as he walked in the door. Transom shrugged. “Not much. Beats me. I saw 'Dracula' up in Joplin a couple years back. Not a fan of the leading man. Lugashi? Something. Kinda slow for my taste. Why?” “This bird comes through here yesterday asking questions and passing around his business card. I thought he was goofy as hell, but maybe you could get a story out of him for the paper, long as he's around. Here's the card he left.” Transom examined the pasteboard: Professor Incubus Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes Occultist/Exterminator/Advisory Ref. Avail. “Well, he sounds nutty as a son of a bitch,” Transom said, handing back the card. “He say where he was staying?” “The Joywood, I think,” said Nate. The Joywood Motor Court was up along the main road, a dozen cabins circling the Joywood Fried Chicken Restaurant and the Joywood Mystery Spot. The first place Transom had stayed the night he rolled in town, his old model T running on fumes and half starved, was the Joywood. Cabin #4 – and there were only the four of them back then. The owners had changed over time, but he didn't mind an excuse to catch the trolley up to the highway and see if Professor Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes was home at the moment. Transom finished his beer and his shot of “Buffalo Sweat” – half whiskey, half tobasco – and stood to go. “I still don't know why you drink that stuff,” Nate said, gesturing to the shot glass. “It must taste like hell.” Transom nodded. “Yup. But it gets my gears grinding.” And out he went. This guy was probably a lunatic, but the entire town was built around the concept of such, and a feature on a traveling ghost hunter or rainmaker or escape artist filled the empty gaps in all those pages of newsprint just like anything else. Chapter Three Kyle Turner was about to be in trouble. He was twelve years old, plenty old enough to hold up his end of business at his grandmother's boardinghouse, but somehow or other he kept getting sidetracked and that usually didn't end up so hot. Take for example today. He'd gotten up at the first beam of sunlight through his bedroom window. He knew his chore list by heart: First, haul the laundry cart down town to Mrs. Sloat, the washerwoman. Then he'd have to take care of the list of groceries Gram had written out for him the night before and left pinned the apron hanging on its hook by the ice box, to go pick up from Mr. Spuzner's mercantile, in the emptied laundry cart. A full morning. The one thing that derailed him more often than not was the railroad station. Miracle Springs had literally been built around that railroad. The old Indian legends about the healing powers of the local springs had led, back before the turn of the century, to wealthy speculators building both the railroad through down from Joplin, and the hotel with its spas as its destination. He figured those must have been some days! Gram said there were 5,000 people here back then! It was hard to imagine. He pulled the heavy two-wheeled laundry cart around the hill to the shack where the old black woman Mrs. Sloat took in wash. Her little house was next to Laundry Spring, which had a natural stone basin handy for scrubbing. As usual she was up and already hard at work, a bandanna covering her head and a corncob pipe in her mouth. “And good morning to you, young sir!” she said with a toothless smile. “How you doin' this beautiful day?” He reckoned he was fine, unloaded the dirty sheets and the rest into the boiling cauldron of water she had going, bubbling white froth from the lye soap she used. From there, though, he had one personal stop to make before he went to the grocer. If he hurried, he'd be just in time for the arrival of the morning train from Joplin, to see who or what had come to town that day. As he headed to the train station, Kyle passed by the sawmill. It had been one of the first enterprises to spring up, even before the city proper had come into existence. It was noisy and dusty, with sawdust and wood chips flying through the air and the constant roar of machinery. The owner, Ephraim Salt, was about as friendly as a hornet in a grand piano, and he rarely paused to chat. The locomotive engine was hissing into the station when he arrived, jetting clouds of steam as it screeched slowly to a halt. It only pulled four or maybe five cars anymore, There was usually one car for passenger, and the rest were freight. There weren't too many passengers that morning – people didn't use the railroads like they used to. Gram said it was he big shiny black automobiles that cut into their business. “You mark me, “ she said. “By the time you're grown, you won't see a horse anywhere around here!” Kyle thought of that big flashy hand-hammered, coach-built Cord that Loomis Burkhead drove around town, custom-painted in electric lavender with a horn that played “Nearer My God To Thee,” but he said nothing. So it was that Kyle was the first person to see the Mysterious Stranger when he came to town. Kyle perched on the bench near the station entrance so he could get a clear view of the arrivals. You could always tell the tourists. Some of them still came for the day spas, some just to gawk and point. Every place you looked from that vantage point was uphill one way or another, and the view was startling if you weren't used to it your whole life like he was. The city had burned down twice before they eventually began rebuilding with local stone, primarily limestone, and it was all certainly impressive to a new arrival. There were supposedly 56 miles of stone walls in Miracle Springs. Kyle noticed the stranger right away. The man was tall, really tall, like Randolph Scott, and dressed all in black. His hair and mustache were streaked with gray, and he paused at the entrance to survey his surroundings as if wary of what he might find there. He looked a little cruel, but wise, as if he had seen a lot. Kyle wondered if he was an undertaker. He sure dressed like one, and in the last couple years that was big business because of all the sick patients who came to the hospital but didn't make it out. He was certain of his guess when he saw the porters struggling with the man's luggage. There were the normal trunks and bags, but one large crate, big enough to hold almost anything. Even a coffin. Then the stranger turned his eyes to Kyle, and the boy felt his gaze. “You,” said the man, stepping closer. “You live here?” He had a strange accent, and close up Kyle could see a thin white scar running up his left cheek almost to his eye. “Sure.” Kyle nodded. “Yes sir.” “Where do travelers lodge when they are passing through? What is the best place, do you think?” “My gram runs a great place,” Kyle piped up. He pointed up through the trees, where you could just make out the black slate roof of the boardinghouse, sticking up above the foliage. “And there are rooms available?” “Sure! That crazy hat maker was here, but he left yesterday. Just five dollars a week plus breakfast and lunch, and Gram's a great cook!” The tall man nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. He removed a money clip that made Kyle's eyes bug out at the big roll of green. Holy Moley. The stranger peeled off a fiver and handed it over. “Take this to your grandmother,” he said, “and tell her a stranger badly in need of safe haven has arrived in town.” He added a dime to the paper money. “For your trouble,” he said. Kyle's eyes did pop out this time. “I'll go right now,” he said. The porters were gathering the luggage onto a wagon so the horse could pull it up the hill. “Hey mister,” Kyle said as an afterthought, as the stranger was turning away. “What's your name, anyway?” “I am Anton Varno, of Prague,” said the man, clicking his heels in military fashion. “And yourself? “Kyle Heyduke.” Anton Varno, of Prague, nodded to the boy. “We shall speak again, Kyle Turner,” he said. Chapter Four Molly was tired. Tired all the way through. As she left the hospital that morning, she was grateful the rain had stopped. You could see little patches of blue sky punching through the overcast as the weather moved on to the north. She was glad that home was downhill, even if it was six blocks downhill. The boardinghouse where she rented her room, Mother Rood's, was three-story wooden structure, plain and unpretentious. Its rectangular frame was weathered, but otherwise it had all the amenities – even inside plumbing. A grassy lawn and a few old oaks surrounded the house on three sides, and a path led immediately down to Main Street. The windows on the first and second floor had simple panes; the third floor was covered with a black slate roof. On the steps leading up to the front door stand two fluted pillars, oddly out of place against the building's austerity, each topped with the bust of a man with leaves and ivy for hair and beard. It was the only strange thing about the place. All in all, this 1930s boarding house was austere, yet comforting with its looming presence. Most of the regulars were up and about by the time she got there, as usual. Mother Rood – a stout, determinate woman, succinct and apparently not a victim to emotional whims, nonetheless greeted her with a smile when she walked in to the lobby. The parlor was elegant in that way, with lace doilies and chairs you weren't sure if you should sit on, but off in the dining area, Mrs. Rood – “Mother,” as she preferred – was busily setting up the big table for breakfast. “Just in time,” said the stout old woman. “Any later and you'd have missed everything!” “Everything” was a splendid feast: eggs friend and boiled and poached, fresh from the hen, rashers of smokehouse bacon, a skillet of steam-fried chicken so tender it leapt off the bone – and today, a pot of fresh squirrel and dumplings. “Squirrel and dumplings,” said Mother Rood, “probably not something you get back in Iowa City.” Probably not. The old lady was a keen shot, and from time, as the mood struck, she would take her .20 gage out and walk the property until she saw a particularly toothsome gray squirrel or two (she would not shoot a fox squirrel.) And from there to the pot. “Just mind the birdshot,” she cautioned. “It's good, but not worth losing a tooth over.” The other boarders were already in place, forks in hand, napkins tucked. There was Mr. Harry Hitt, of Camden, NJ. He was a drummer, traveling the back ways selling a new sort of orthopedic support for the shoe of the “everyman” and, he would add with a wink, “every woman too.” He was one of those people who wait for you to stop talking so they can launch into some counter-argument or better story than the one you just told. Next to him sat Oscar Z. Diggs, a rotund and balding old gent with a celluloid collar and a perpetual daisy in his lapel. Diggs was a lecturer of the famed Chautauqua lecture circuit, bring culture and enlightenment to those rural communities yet mostly still beyond the reach of radio or the motion picture houses. Ask Diggs anything at all about his pets topics, for example “Moral Hygiene” or “Wealth Mentality,” or his friendships with the great New Thought pioneers, people like William Walker Atkinson or Theron Q. Dumont or Yogi Ramacharaka, and he was a never-ending font of information. Like drinking out of a firehose. Mrs. Abigail LeFay had taught in the local one-room schoolhouse for forty years before retiring. She was largely deaf but refused to acknowledge it, relying on lip reading and luck to hold up her end of conversations. She was also in the habit of correcting others' grammar – a nervous tic from her years behind the desk – and since she was half-deaf, conversations with her tended to go off the rails quickly. The young painter Rockland Norwell sat with an empty chair between himself and the others and ate quickly, making little eye contact or conversation despite their early attempts to draw him out. He'd been there a month. He invariably wore a beard and dungarees and an old patched flannel shirt. Didn't have a coat anybody could see. He also never wore a hat and secretly smoked a pipe in his room at night, with the window cracked, strictly against House Rule #3, but Mother Rood felt sympathy for him and bent the rules just a little. “Excuse me,” Molly said. She took the empty chair next to him. He glanced at her and nodded and returned to his squirrel and dumplings. He seemed to spend most of his time walking up and down the hills of Miracle Springs with a portable easel and painting gear on his back. One was as likely to see him up on Lover's Leap on East Mountain, painting the panorama of trees and buildings, with the hospital rising above all of it, or out at the cemetery on the edge of town, painting among the tombstones, or even downtown, where he sometimes did quick charcoal sketches for the tourists for a small sum. His work was wonderful, if a bit dark, they all thought. But he blushed and shrank away from their praise, so after awhile they just let him be. It was at that moment Kyle burst in at the door, waving the $5 in one hand and babbling in one long, nonstop sentence everything that had just happened, the foreign gentleman, his big money roll, his coffin crate. Mother Rood took the bill from his sweaty palm. She held it up to the light, examined it on both sides, and even gave it a sniff. “So this stranger just hands over the money, and expects us to let him walk right in, without a by your leave?” Kyle slumped. “Sorry, Gram,” he said. “I told him the preacher had gone and we had the room.” Mother Rood sighed. “Good enough,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “This money looks green enough to me, and if it's a gent, he'll do fine. As long as he obeys the rules.” She nodded to the sign on the wall: 1. All rents paid in advance 2. No guests of the opposite sex in the rooms 3. No smoking or spitting inside 4. No politics in the parlor 5. All meals served on time: You be likewise 6. No carousing or hi-jinks 7. No card playing in the parlor 8. No profanity in English or otherwise 9. No loose women of any sort 10. Absolutely no table rapping or other stirring up the spirits Molly stifled another yawn, pushed back her plate – she'd done good work on the squirrel and dumplings – nodded to the others, and headed for the stairs that led up to her room on the second floor. Mr. Hitt, the drummer with the magic sole inserts, caught up with her at the foot of the stairs. Molly did not like the man. He'd given her the once over one time too many, eyes trying to bore through her clothing, apparently not overly concerned at her reaction, for her to consider him anything other than a bounder and a rat. “Excuse me,” she said pointedly, attempting to sidestep him. He stood between her and sleep and she wasn't in the mood. “I was just thinking,” he casually began, a small smirk on his lips. “This burg ain't too much hopping, but I thought you and me might step one night when you're off work with the – you know...” He gestured in the general direction of the hospital. “I'm sorry,” she cut him off, “but I'm so busy with my job and all that --.” Hitt wasn't dissuaded. “Here's the thing,” he said. “When you're on the road like I am, always in some new place, a fellow gets lonesome for some company. I could show you a good time. You like to dance?” “Not with you,” she said, frown set. His opening, pitch, and close had all failed him, which was a slap in the face to a salesman, and finally he got mad. “Listen, sister!” he said, reaching out to grasp her arm. “I could find a lay in this town easy. I know about the place uptown. But I wanted to spend some time with a nice regular gal, like you. You savvy?” Molly moved closer and stepped hard onto his left foot. Apparently his miracle shoe inserts didn't work so well under stress. He cursed and stepped back. “You'll be sorry you did that, you bitch!” he snarled. Molly stared him down. “I grew up with six brothers,” she lied. “So you go ahead and try.” Then she pushed past him and hurried up to her room, locking the door behind her. She sank with a weary sigh onto bed. O God, what else could go wrong? Chapter Five Loomis Burkhead gazed at his reflection in the mirror as he adjusted his lavender tie. He turned his face from one side to the other to examine his jawline. Getting a bit jowly. He no longer had quite the square cut line that had landed him roles during his brief career in silent films. But it had continued to serve him since then, despite the passage of years, in vaudeville as the Great Marvello, and then of course later in his brief foray into politics. That jawline had meant nothing once he discovered radio, of course, for his golden baritone was a natural voice to reach across the invisible airwaves to the silent masses listening. His radio station across the border in Nuevo Laredo, XHEL, broadcasting at 150 kilowatts, could be heard everywhere that counted, and he'd quickly discovered the many money-making possibilities using that enormous platform. There was a tap at the door. It was his wife, Mabel. She was small and olive-skinned, with enormous brown eyes and a fading beauty he enjoyed still, though she was a keen advocate of his Real Work for that reason. The fading. “Loom, the deliveries are here,” she said. Mabel had been with him almost from the beginning. He had a wife and two kids back in Louisville, but his work kept him away, and of course a man has needs. She'd been his magician's assistant on the stage, allowing her small form to be sawn in half, spun on a rotating target while he flung knives at her, and of course she'd come to share his bed, knowing as she did all he cared to reveal to her. And doubtless more. What's here?” he asked, giving up on his reflection. She ticked off the items on the manifest in her hand. “There's the reels for tonight's movie,” she said. “A musical, like you wanted.” “They eat that stuff up down here. And?” “Some equipment from Germany for the machine.” She paused. “I haven't opened any of it yet to see what came.” “I'll have the boys downstairs go through it,” he said. “What else?” She paused. “Well, yes, one thing.” He from her tone she'd been holding it off for last. He could guess what it was. “Legal?” he asked. She nodded glumly. “From Illinois. It's that same bunch. Wanting to sue.” “They'll have to send someone to get me if they want me,” he said. He glanced at the shelf by his elaborate three-piece orchid-colored desk, shipped at great expense and effort from their time before setting up the radio station in Mexico. It'd been in storage those years, but he'd brought it along here to the new hospital. On that shelf was a fully loaded and fully functional Thompson sub-machine gun. He'd made sure it was pointedly visible in the background (unremarked) in several publicity stills of him diligent at work, that he'd included in his brochures the last couple years. Times were tough. He was tougher. “I'll go see to the new equipment,” he said. “If there's any trouble, as usual, use the call tube.” He'd installed a completely modern intercom system in the building when he moved in. He'd also installed a private access via ladder from his office closet to all floors above and the basement below, so that he could drop in unannounced at any point to make sure things were running shipshape. And there was the escape tunnel. Mabel paused at the door, “Oh, and Loom,” she added, “your special guest is hungry, according to the schedule.” Burkhead frowned. “Very well,” he said. “Send someone to feed him, would you?” “Anyone in particular?” “Your call,” he said. “Thanks for reminding me.” He watched her leave the room. He wouldn't trade her for two women half her age, though if the science continued to improve, he wouldn't have to. The carrot-topped German twins were already unpacking the crate of new scientific equipment from its wooden crate in the basement laboratory. They'd scattered the packing straw everywhere in their eagerness to get at the contents, like children at Christmas, but he chose to ignore the mess. They'd clean it up later. Klaus and Ernst Hauser had come along with him from his European travels, before things had become difficult there. They were both in their mid-thirties, both tall and awkward, with twin thatches of red hair and twin degrees in bio-mechanics and medicine from Berlin. They were pawing through the crate's contents and laying them out carefully on a row on their long zinc work table. Burkhead preferred to keep his foreign staff – the two doctors, along with a pair of nurses who'd worked with them beforehand, and his orderlies – separate from the local employees and townspeople. Their poor grasp of English made that easier. People talked, and idle talk was never a help. So he treated them as best money could afford, sending them every month or two to relax and shop in Cauldron Springs, a twin spa town at the other end of the state, where they'd be less likely to encounter familiar faces or hear gossip about his enterprises. “The new lenses look promising,” Klaus said brightly. “Very promising!” Ernst chimed. “What about the new experiments with the serum?” Burkhead asked. He was not in a mood to be a cheerleader. “We continue to believe it is the blood type that matters,” Klaus began. “But the results are so slow to determine,” added Ernst. “And we continue to struggle with the dosage,” they both added. Burkhead swore. “Von Horst would know,” he said. “He could solve this with a word.” “You should ask him again.” Burkhead didn't know which one said that. He grunted. “Install the new lenses and tubes,” he told them. “Let me know when you are ready to try them out. Mach schnell.” He left without a further word. There was a side room just off the basement with a heavy iron-banded oaken door locked and chained. In previous times it had been the zinc-lined walk-in cooler used for restaurant storage when the hospital was in its heyday as a tourist mecca. Now it served a darker purpose. He flipped on the light, although to his eyes the bulb cast little illumination. It was tuned to wavelengths more comfortable to the prisoner. “Von Horst,” Burkhead said, closing and locking the door behind him. “Wake up. We must talk.” “I am always awake,” said the voice. “Do not mock me, my brother.” Burkhead dragged a three-legged stool closer to the bars that separated the cell into two halves. But not too close. The bars could be withdrawn by flipping a switch on the wall, but he had never used it when he was in the room. Inside the shadows a deeper shadow stirred, a sort of dark mound. It stirred and grew a bit. Two sparks of red peered from within it. “Speak,” it said. “We cannot make the serum work by itself,” said Burkhead. “And we still cannot repair the Lazarus Ray.” He grimaced, admitting it. He'd let on for months they were within inches of completion. “I have ordered new parts, different lenses. But obviously without your participation...” The mound exploded forward and smashed against the bars. Burkhead tumbled backwards off the stool in astonishment and fear. The face pressed now an inch from the bars was the face of Death, of Plague, of Insanity. The quick impression was of the white skull, the enormous, grotesque pointed ears, the enormous blazing red eyes, like the pilot lights of Hell. And the rows of snapping, crooked, razor fangs. “Those days are gone!” hissed Von Horst, or the voice of the creature who'd once gone by that name. “Gone! But come closer and I will tell you more!” “I can relieve your situation if you will help me,” Burkhead said. His voice shook just a little despite having gone through this a dozen times. The bars of the cage rattled with the fury of the forces pounding against them. “Monster! Fool!” Von Horst's accent had probably been German, at some distant point, but the changes of his life, or his un-life, his progressing condition, gave his words a kind of sibilance that came not from his origins but from a mouthful of needle-sharp tusks. “I would strangle you before I would help you!” he hissed. A long white arm ending with blood-red talons reached through the bars, striving and stretching to reach Burkhead, who sprawled well out of reach. “Stop it!” Burkhead cried out. “Stop it or I'll --” “Or you'll what?” The talons were withdrawn. The white skull and red eyes retreated back into the shadowy mound, piled there by the bars. Red sparks still watched. “I am hungry,” hissed the creature. “It is time I feed. Feed me and I will tell you one thing to help you.” “I would let you have access to the machine and the serums, if I could trust you,” Burkhead said. He seemed to pull himself together. He got back to his feet, straightened his tie. “Convince me of that, and I will set you free. We have gone down this road once before.” The creature spat heroically, and its sputum, when it struck the stone floor an inch from Burkhead's feet, hissed and ate at the marble. “Bon chance,” it hissed, “my amie. Adieu.” Burkhead swore and dragged the bar and chain back into place and snapped the enormous padlock shut with a clang and, sliding the key back into his pocket, stormed back upstairs to deal with his goddamned son of a bitch of a day. PART II "Do you really laugh at dreams, black magic, miracles, nocturnal vampires and Thessalian prophecy?" ~ Horace, Epistularum II, ii, 209-210 Chapter Six It only took Kyle till that first night to figure out that the new boarder with the crate in his room was a vampire. Truth was, this was not his first encounter with a vampire. His Aunt Shirley had taken him all the way to Fayetteville a couple years earlier on his birthday to a real talking picture show, back when he was 10. The movie was “Dracula.” She was his favorite aunt and although not really even his blood relative, she'd been best friends growing up with his ma before she got the flu and all that. Anyway the whole thing turned out kind of a flop. The film started out slow, but the novelty of hearing the people up on the screen actually talking was pretty amazing. But as the story unfolded, and the tensions grew and grew – the real estate agent going into the wilds of Transylvania, the driver of the carriage and the wolves, and all the rest – it began to get to him. By the time the movie got to the part where the agent had gotten into Castle Dracula and encountered the three vampire women, Kyle lost his nerve completely and ran from the theater screaming. He was mortified. Aunt Shirley was apologetic to the point of tears but had reassured him it was all okay, nobody had to know he'd gotten scared – it really was a pretty scary movie, she agreed! – and that it would just be their secret. But a month later when he'd gotten his first library card at the Carnegie Library up the hill, and gone wandering through the stacks – it seemed like a really solemn occasion to him; kids didn't get to check out books till they were mature enough to handle them carefully and not lose them, and so on, as the librarian had explained. And the first book he checked out, guiltily, was Dracula, by Bram Stoker. That first night he was still up at ten, which was absolutely the outer limits of his bedtime, sitting in his bedroom upstairs with the window open. The weather had been pleasant all day, and he liked to watch the stars when it was clear out. Kyle wasn't a stranger to staying up past bedtime, of course. Sometimes his pal Cone Turner slipped back issues of Weird Tales that his uncle in Chicago sent him, and he'd discovered he enjoyed reading them even more by candlelight when he wasn't supposed to be up at all. As he leaned on that same sill, this night after the stranger arrived, he noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye and looked down. That side of the house was dark, except for a couple oblongs of dim light coming from the parlor, but it was light enough he could see it was Anton Varno moving slowly across the grass. Varno seemed almost to be gliding, not walking. He wore a long dark overcoat – it was still chilly, for April. He paused at the low stone wall that separated their property from the neighbors and stood staring at the eastern horizon. Kyle noticed it was getting lighter. The moon was rising Then it happened. The stranger lifted his arms, spreading his coat wide as he did so. Then there was a kind of fluttering of motion and Varno was gone. No, not gone. Where he'd stood, an especially large bat was hovering, in a way Kyle had never seen a bat hover. It seemed to orient itself, and then flapped away quickly into the darkness, big as a pileated woodpecker and leaving the smell of sulfer in its wake. Kyle spent the rest of the night with his long-overdue copy of Dracula, window locked, shades drawn, candlelight under the bed covers, poring over the pages, looking for clues. Obviously nobody was going to believe him, so he didn't even try. But the next afternoon, when everybody was out on their business – Gram had gone to visit a sick friend -- he stole the skeleton key from the hook behind the kitchen door and went upstairs to the vampire's room to have a look. He took Gram's crucifix off the wall – it was a gift from her cousins in Mexico, so it was about a foot tall, with a super-realistic Jesus writhing in hand-painted agony, but it was the only one he could find, so he took it along. Just in case. There was no sound through the door. He'd watched and watched for Varno to return, either as a bat (before sunup) or in through the front door like the mailman or anyone else. No sign of him. But what if he was in there anyhow, in his coffin? What then? Kyle turned the key with a click and opened the door. The room was empty. The blinds were drawn, giving the place a gloomy air, except for a few odd beams of sunlight that fell across the floorboards, showing the dust motes that stirred in the air. Oddly, the crate containing the vampire's coffin was still sitting in the corner upended. There was no way to get much use out of it that way, unless he'd moved the coffin someplace else! Otherwise the room seemed completely unchanged from earlier, when he'd watched the porters haul all the luggage up the stairs. He looked around. Best to do his detective work quickly, before Gram or one of the other boarders discovered him prowling around upstairs in the middle of the day. “Hello, Kyle.” The boy literally fell to the floor in fear. Anton Varno had returned, or had never left, somehow, for he stood almost casually now in the corner. There was a small smile on his lips but none at all in his eyes. Kyle began to stammer. “I-I-I-.” Varno held up a hand. He stepped closer – Kyle shrank back, though there wasn't much room to shrink without jumping out the second-story window – but the tall stranger abruptly turned and sank into the armchair provided in every room. He took a cigarette case from his pocket and lit a brown cigarette with a fancy lighter that made a spark like electricity when you clicked it. He gestured for Kyle to sit on the edge of the bed. “Join me for a moment,” he said. “We need to talk.” Chapter Seven Mr. Singh was smiling as always behind the counter in the office at the Jaywood Motor Court. “And hello to you this fine day, Mr. Transom!” he said, popping up from beneath the counter. “Surely you have not chosen to bless us today by renting a cabin in our humble lodgings here?” Transom smiled. “Hi, Singh. I'm looking for a guest of yours, a Professor Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes?” Singh's face fell. “Ah, yes. Him.” “Is he here now?” Mr. Singh nodded. “He came in this morning for breakfast. But he was not pleased by my wife's cooking, for some reason.” The local wisdom was that while all the services provided at the Joywood had if nothing else improved in the years since the Singhs had taken ownership, the quality of its famous fried chicken dinners had...changed. And not to everyone's taste. It was the curry. Transom knew it was the curry because his ex-wife Lorraine had had a heavy hand with the spices, and he'd discovered the intricacies of curry within a month of their wedding. And as a good newlywed husband he had praised it ten ways from Saturday night. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I've always admired Mrs. Singh's efforts.” “But speaking of which, there stands the object of your inquiry.” Mr. Singh gestured out the big plate glass window. Out in the parking lot, a small man with a mass of silver hair and an enormous mustache was struggling to start his automobile, an old Model A jalopy that had seen wildly better days. The man cranked away on the hand crank up front, cursing vaguely – the plate glass window muffled the details. Finally he gave up, delivered a swift kick to the front bumper, and stomped away out of sight. “Cabin #7,” said Mr. Singh. “Have a nice day.” He disappeared then in the direction of the kitchen, perhaps to check on the day's menu. Transom strolled over to Cabin #7. It was neatly kept, like the others, with a graveled walkway and begonias growing in the window boxes on either side of the door. He tapped lightly. The door was flung open and the little man shouted “What!” at him with a glare that would have singed the hair off a fully grown lumberjack, if one had been handy. “Professor Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes?” Transom said. “I'm Leonard Transom, editor of the Miracle Springs Boomerang, our local newspaper. I wondered if I could borrow a minute of your time.” Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes looked suspicious. “About what?” “I understand you are interested in vampires,” Transom replied. “I'd like to find out more about them myself.” The effect on the professor was electric. He seemed to visibly swell. “Indeed!” he said, his automotive troubles apparently forgotten. He opened the door wider and beckoned Transom in. “Enter freely and of your own will,” he said, then chuckled to himself. The small room looked untouched except for Chetwynd-Hayes' single suitcase, which was lying open on the bed next to a big Gladstone bag. “I see you admiring my Gladstone,” said the professor. “I'll show you the contents later. But what is your interest in vampires?” “We don't get too many vampire hunters through here,” Transom said. “A ghost hunter, occasionally, and rumor is there are a few witches back in the hills and hollows, but I didn't want to miss the chance to talk to someone in your specialized line of work.” The professor had begun to pack a pipe full of what Transom suspected was Latakia – the foulest tobacco known to humanity – and began talking as he puffed it alight with a match. “You perhaps wonder at a man like myself, well educated, here in the midst of the enlightened 1930s, engaged in such an endeavor as hunting vampires, unquote.” “Yes, I do.” “It's a long story,” began Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes, then proceeded to unroll it. Hunting vampires was a family tradition, as the little man explained. His father had done it, and his grandfather before that, going back to the 1700s, when they also burned witches and cast out demons vocationally, as needed. “And of course there's our organization,” said the professor proudly. The World Vampire Hunter Roundup. They produced a regular newsletter; in fact, as it turned out, Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes was its editor. He produced a copy for Transom's admiration. Transom glanced over the two-sided sheet in his hand. It was called the Fang Forum, and the masthead showed a woodcut that seemed to be a man driving a stake into the heart of a vampire in a coffin, but it could also have been, say, a beekeeper smoking out his bees or two guys throwing dice on an overturned rowboat. It was a little rough. As someone who proofread for a living, Transom noticed four typos on the first page and winced at the font style. “Very nice,” he said, offering it back. “I'd like to look it over more carefully when I can give it my full attention.” “Oh, keep it, keep it,” said Chetwynd-Hayes, waving it away. “I always carry copies. I can supply you with a full set.” As the professor explained, their network was constantly extending its threads, using all the modern methods – radio, telegraph, and of course the printed word, to expand their mission. “We are on the cutting edge of vampire hunting,” he added. “Of course, there are some things that cannot be improved. Let me show you my kit.” He opened the big Gladstone bag then and began laying out its contents on the bed. There were three sharpened wooden stakes and a rubber mallet; a stoppered glass bottle labeled “H. Water”; a hand mirror; a tightly sealed jar labeled “Garlic, Minced”; four crucifixes, ranging from an elaborate Mexican version very like the one in Kyle's grams's boardinghouse; there was a sort of Celtic version, and one made from two crossed pieces of what might be pieces of the True Cross but looked to Transom like old barn wood. And finally a small silver cross that could fit in the palm of your hand, like an Ace of Spades or a roll of nickels. There was a thick black leather-bound volume like an old family Bible. The gold lettering on the cover said Malleus Inquieti Mortui. Transon's Latin was a little rusty. “The Hammer...” he began. “...of the Restless Dead,” Chetwynd-Hayes finished. “Indeed. And a rare edition, I might add.” He went on. “These are the tools of our trade. Here you see the making of the sausage --” “-- of exterminating vampires.” Chetwynd-Hayes nodded vigorously. “Let me ask you a question,” Transom said. “What if you kill the wrong vampire? A civilian? That's murder, still, or am I missing something?” The professor frowned and shook his head. “You have hit upon the Achilles' Heel of our entire raison d'etre,” said twisting the French an extra inch. “So you nail the wrong guy sometimes?” Chetwynd-Hayes shrugged sadly. “In truth, yes. Please do not print that. Off the record, as you journalists say. But only four times in the entire history of the Vampire Hunters Roundup. That's well over a century of fighting the forces of Satan upon the earth.” “So what happens if you throw holy water in the wrong guy's face, drive a stake through his heart and stuff his mouth full of garlic and bury him upside down at the crossroads, or whatever the protocol is?” Transom asked. Chetwynd-Hayes drew himself up stiffly. “I will have you know, good sir, that three of the four cases in question were extremely equivocal. Insane persons, in short, caught in the midst of heinous acts that were indistinguishable from the work of real vampires.” “Real vampires.” Transom paused. “What about the fourth?” “Sabine La Tour, the silent film star,” said the professor. Transom frowned. “I thought she died in a plane crash.” “Yes, the studios are very careful about their stars,” Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes continued. “She was famous, as you'll recall, for her notorious string of lovers, ahem, and as we discovered, she practiced several peculiar fetishes of a sacriligeous nature, pertaining to the boudoir and elsewhere. Very unpleasant. To be frank, I was involved in that case myself.” Transom let that sink in. He'd always had an enormous crush on Sabine La Tour and had been saddened to read she'd perished in flight to a movie locale in Mexico. “And what has brought you here to our little town?” he asked, changing the subject. “We don't get a lot of vampires through here, far as I know.” The vampire hunter puffed his pipe for a moment in silence. “This part is also very much off the record,” he began. “Fine.” “There are several vampires whose names are legendary among us who hunt them,” said the professor. “Dracula, of course. Also Count Ruthwen, Orlok, de Lioncourt, Latos, Armand Tesla, and notably Santanico Pandemonium, the Mexican Queen of Hell. But there are others. One such is Lord Anton Varno, Seneschal of the Bloodless Court. He serves the ones who rule the vampire world from their secret council in Eastern Europe.” “Varno,” Transom repeated. “What, is he here?” “Our people attempt to keep track of the vampires we know of, even if they are beyond our ability to destroy them completely,” said Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes. “One of our best hunters, Kismet Thorne, was in pursuit of Lord Varno until very recently. He rarely travels, so we put her on his trail immediately. She had pursued him to New Orleans, which is a hotbed of these fiends. Then we lost contact with her. But in her rooms there, when we searched, we found this.” He handed Transom a colorful brochure. Transom's heart sank because he recognized it, having seen copies of it for months upon months. THE LAZARUS INSTITUTE, it advertised: “Cancer Cures Guaranteed! No Surgery! No radiation!” And there was the pen & ink drawing of the hotel, hovering like a bad dream. “Let me suggest this,” said Chetwynd-Hayes. “You and I should go for a stroll downtown later today – say, just at dusk. The weather is fair and people should be out and about. It will allow me to show you the latest tool in the scientific task of vampire eradication.” He reached inside his Gladstone – it seemed almost bigger on the inside than the outside, and Transom half-expected him to emerge with a crossbow or a guillotine. But instead the professor held up a lamp. More specifically, it was an old-fashioned bull's-eye lantern, made of tin, with a metal loop handle and the glass lens on the front that allowed you to focus its light in a particular direction., “This is the very cutting edge in Vampirofluoroscopy,” the little man said proudly. “This is the Birdlip UV Nosferatu Illuminator.” “UV?” “Ultimo-Vampiric.” Chetwynd-Hayes nodded. “I can see you are impressed. It was designed by Cornelius Birdlip, the noted inventor of automata and airships. And this.” “And it does what exactly?” This lantern does not emit normal light,” said the vampire hunter. “Its special tubes, powered by only nine electric dry cells, project a band of light that causes any object with certain chemicals in the skin, such as porphyrins, to fluoresce when exposed to its rays. And as it happens, a vampire's entire system is permeated with porphyrins. We call it the 'Bloodsucker Glow.' They light up like Christmas tree ornaments!” “Fair enough,” said Transom. “I sort of want to see how this works. Meet me at the Dented Mug half an hour before sunset and we'll strategize. I need to go for now, however.” He gave directions. Chetwynd-Hayes gave him a little half bow. “Very well, Editor. Tonight will be a night to remember! There is a vampire here, and we shall find him!” Chapter Eight As Molly was heading out for her shift that evening, she met Rockland Norwell the artist coming in. He wore his usual paint-spattered clothing and carried his easel and all the rest on his back. She paused. He looked tired but happy, an expression she'd not seen at the dinner table. “How was your day?” she asked. “Did your painting go well?” He flashed her a broad grin. It was like the sun coming out from behind a bank of thunderheads. “I was accepted in the new show at the Ulthar Street Gallery,” he said. “They took six of my paintings.” “Why, that's simply wonderful!” Molly said. “I knew if you kept working you'd have some luck finally!” He paused, cutting his eyes away, then looked back at her in complete earnest. “You should come see the exhibit,” he said. “I mean – it opens tomorrow afternoon. As my guest. There will be wine and cheese and grapes and...” He seemed to run out of anything else to say. Molly made a quick decision. “Of course I'll come see your show,” she said. “Tomorrow I'm off anyway, and it beats sitting around here listening to the local gossip.” Rockland nodded vigorously. “I have to go there a little early, but when you get there find me and I'll introduce you to the owners.” The Ulthar Gallery had opened the spring before. It was run by a husband wife team of artists, Webb and Gladys Ffriend. He was a muralist like Thomas Hart Benton – huge paintings of muscular men driving railroad spikes and aproned women before log cabins with children peering through her skirts. Gladys was a sculptor and pot thrower. They both taught classes out of their house, which had formerly belonged to Molly Hatchet, the notorious bordello queen who'd retired in Miracle Springs at the end of her life. “I'll look forward to it, then,” Molly the nurse said. “See you same time tomorrow.” As she tramped up the hill toward the Lazarus Institute, Molly wondered at her own daring. I mean, he seemed like a nice enough guy, right? Just shy. That's why he was a painter. You worked alone. She wondered what his work was like. Tomorrow she'd find out. CHAPTER NINE Kyle sat there on the floor in a daze for what seemed like a long, long time. The mysterious stranger sat in the chair opposite him, puffing on his cigarettte, waiting for a response. “I know you're a vampire!” Kyle said at last. “I saw you turn into a bat and fly away last night, out the window.” “I thought so. Please get up off the floor.” Kyle eased up off the floor and sat on the tiniest possible edge of the bed behind him. “By the way,” said Varno, “you forgot to show me your crucifix.” Kyle grabbed the big Mexican cross from where it'd fallen under the bed and menaced the vampire with it. Varno sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Even if that were a threat to me, which as it happens it is not, do you not think I would have reacted when I first saw it there? Also, it is extremely rude.” Kyle was starting to get over the worst of his panic. His thudding heart and gasping breath were slowing. He set the cross on the bedspread. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you going to bite me?” The vampire stubbed out his cigarette and put the remainder of it back into the cigarette case. “The first question has a long answer,” he said. “As to the second, the answer is No. With an asterisk. I am a total stranger to this part of the world. I have been sent here to complete a task – a mission – by my superiors,” said Varno. “It is incredibly important that I complete my task within only a few days. As a result, I need help from a local. If you are, once you have heard me out, willing to aid me, I guarantee your safety.” “What about Gram?” “Nor your grandmother.” “How do I know you're telling the truth?” “'A vampire cannot knowingly tell a lie,'” Varno quoted. “It is against the Vampire Code.” “Okay, wait,” said Kyle. “What is your mission, then? Who sent you? Varno nodded in satisfaction. “I represent a group of ... people of my tribe -- “ “Vampires.” “-- I represent the Bloodless Court, the ruling body of vampires in the Western world.” Kyle nodded. “Wow. There's no vampires around here I ever heard of. Werewolves, neither.” “You might be wrong on that count,” continued the vampire. “But ask me specific questions and I'll endeavor to nswer them.” “Okay, so how old are you?” Kyle asked. “Seven hundred and thirty-two years, come this March.” “What's something that happened the year you were born?” “There was a blight that wiped way most of the sheep in our part of Latveria,” Varno replied. “They ate a lot of cabbage that winter.” He paused. “You seem quite open minded about this whole situation.” “I've read Dracula twelve times,” Kyle replied. “I know the basics.” “Fair enough,” Varno sighed. “When drawing a circle, begin anywhere, Even Dracula.” “So I'd be like your sidekick!” Kyle said. “I will interpret for you.” Varno rose and strode to the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could see out between the narrowest gap between the venetians. “I want you to understand something,” he said, his back to the boy. “What I have come here for, it is all a matter well beyond life and death. Vast events hang in the balance. I am placing a large responsibility on your shoulders, and you do not yet understand how large. If you decide you cannot continue, you must tell me at once, without hesitation. Do not fear, for I must know. Otherwise there will be disaster. Do you understand?” Kyle nodded, “I think so. If I want to quit, I have to tell you.” “Yes. You will come to no harm if you do so. None.” “Okay,” Kyle said, thinking about some of the stories in the latest Weird Tales. “Count me in.” “I do have one question,” the boy added. “What's in that crate? Is it your coffin?” The vampire strode over to the crate, which still sat upended in the corner. He wrenched the heavy plank lid away with a groan of broken metal as the screws gave out. He set the lid aside and stepped back to reveal the contents of the mystery crate. It looked like a blue phone booth. Kyle had seen a picture of one in a magazine. “This is a Vril Accumulator,” said the vampire. “What?” “Doctor John Dee, the Elizabethan wizard – whom I met twice, incidentally – had worked out something like this, but he mixed up the science with the angels far too much, and so his never quite worked.” “I have no idea what anything you just said means,” said Kyle. Varno nodded. “Of co Kyle went upstairs at 5:30 and tapped on the door to room 23. It opened immediately, as if Varno had been standing on the other side waiting, and the 700-year-old vampire lord almost smiled seeing it was him. “I've got an idea,” said Kyle. Varno raised an eyebrow. “Such as?” “Since I'm your assistant, I thought you ought to familiarize yourself with the neighborhood.” Kyle had rehearsed his lines. “We should go walk around town while everybody's out going around and that way if the vampire you're looking or is here, maybe you'll see him. Her. It can't hurt. And I can explain everything you don't understand.” Varno nodded. “I am grateful for your suggestions. When shall we go?” “I gotta do a couple quick chores for Gram,” Kyle said. “How about one hour?” Varno deliberately consulted his pocket watch. “One hour it is,” he said. Kyle went away elated at his success. Varno stood awhile in silence behind the closed door, pondering the the wisdom of his choice. Some things were in the laps of the gods. So be it. CHAPTER NEXT Loomis Burkhead had known men like Big Tony Saccetta before. He remained seated behind his big desk as they entered – the mobster, fanned by four of his men. They were all oversized and spread out along the back of the office near the door, hands clasped in front, waiting. Just waiting. Sacetta was cut from the same side of beef, but smart. A little scar tissue breeds a lot of savvy, if you're lucky, and Burkhead could see it in his eyes – small, sharp eyes, like a terrier, eyes that had seen plenty and never blinked. The criminal stepped forward. “As you know, I am Anthony Saccetta,” he said. He was wearing a $100 suit, which might as well have been made of gold, at that price, and he had a bright red handkerchief in his breast pocket. “I have heard you spoken of often,” Burkhead said politely. He knew their eyes were on the Thompson submachine gun he had displayed behind him, wonding if it was loaded, if it was in working order. It was. “Please take a seat.” “If you know my reputation, you know I am a businessman,” Saccetta began. “I do.” “And so you will also appreciate that I am always on the lookout for, shall we say, prospective busines sventues.” “Gambling, for instance,” Burkhead said. “And other alternative adult entertainments,” Saccetta went on. “We live in different times, and the average man needs what diversions he can find.” Burkheaded nodded. “I understand completely But what can we possibly have here at the Lazarus Institute that would be of interest to you? This is a place of healing. There is little enough profit in it, as it is, trust me.” Saccetta smiled as if they were at least past the banter. “You'll forgive my curiosity, but I have taken the opportunity of doing substantial research on your excellent hospital, as well as the cutting-edge technologies you have developed in the cures you provide here,” said Saccetta. Burkhead continued to smile, but his eyes were empty. “Go on,” he said. “Here is the situation as I see it,” said the gangster from St. Louis, leaning forward in his chair as if eager to share some secret wisdom. “I believe that there are many other applications for your technology,” he said, with his heavy Bayonne, NJ, accent. “Money to be made.” “Other than curing cancer.” “Other than that one narrow avenue, yes,” Saccetta replied. “What do you know about 'life continuation through alternative metholodogy,' Mr. Burkhead?” Burkhead looked for a long moment into the eyes of the mobster seated opssite him, as if torn by indecision. Finally, he mopped his brow with his handkerchief and stood. “Very well,” he said. “I can see you are a practical man. Prhaps you would like to see personally the labortory where our real work takes place. I will ask for your descretion, of coure.” “No problem,” said Caccetta, standing. “Follow us, boys,” he said over his shoulder as they left the room. The twins were busy at work in the basement, installing the new lenses and tubes fresh in from Europe, when the visitors arrived. “Boys!” Burkhead called out. “Are you anywhere near showing off our new equipment? These gentlemen are interested in investing in our little venture here!” To the scientists, “investing” meant newer and better equipment, and so they were both nodding wildly as they scurried down the ladder pell-mell. Chapter Ten Kyle's walking tour with Varno of Miracle Srings was oddly interesting. He would point out, say, Mr. Spunzar's mercantile down on Main Street, and Varo's response would refer to the unhappy checkout girl, or the fact the local greengrocer was shorting the store on fresh produce because he knew Mr. Spunzar was't much of a reader and would sign off on deliveries on trust to cover his own lack of book learning. “So you seem to see a lot of bad stuff about people,” Kyle finally said, right before they reached the park. 'It is hard to filter out what you receive,” Varno replied. “You wish you could pick and choose what you hear, but it is very hard. But if you live long enough, those filters fall away, and you see what you see.” “Have you lived long enough?” Kyle asked. “No one in 400 years has asked me that question,” Varno replied. “ And I do not know the answer.” “My Uncle Freddy killed himself,” Kyle said. “ He was in the war. I guess it made him crazy.” They walked forward. “Responding to war with madness is a totally human reaction,” Varno said. “That is the nature of war. But I am not human.” By the time they reached the park, most of the farmers had packed up their leftover produce and either headed home, or else moved their vehicles to the big empty lot downtown, to make room for the entertainment. Small groups of musicians had begun to arrive and bring out their instruments – fiddles, banjos, guitars, mandolins, an upright bass or two, and plenty of harmonicas and juice harps still tucked away in bib overall pockets. “If you're here next weekend, it'll be even better,” Kyle said. “How so?” “It's the Feast of St. Joyleg. It's the biggest holiday here, except for christmas.” “What is its nature?” “It started back when the original pioneers settled in around here. They were from some religion and had to move here. I guess they had different holidays.” “What else do you remember about them?” “There were four different groups and they lived all around,” Kyle said. He recited the local rhyme from memory he'd heard his Gram recite so many times: “Miracle Springs, Bles't By Wings; Toad Hollow, Bad to Follow; Druid's Folly, Worships Holly; Moonhaven Under Lake, Soon Will Awake.” They arrived. “Have you been to stuff like this before?” Kyle asked. Varno nodded. “No doubt. But every hamlet like this one its own renditions of the old songs, passed down among all of them. The differences are Hitt the effort to seek them out, as we are doing.” Kyle felt ratified. PART III “The World is a vampire, Sent to drain...” ~ Billy Corrigan, “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” chapter Eleven PART IV “To create a vampire is an art!” ~ Heather Graham PART IV “Our blood will be swayed by sunken moons.” ~ Clark Ashton Smith “I could see: Bodies laid out like aroused corpses.” ~ John Rechy CHAPTER NEXT Despite his obvious erudition and man-of-the-world je nais se quois, Oscar Z. Diggs found himself caught almost off guard when, upon entering the smoky, vibrant taproom of the Dented Mug, which could be approached only through a narrow alley, he found himself almost nose to nose with one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen in his life. “Pardon,” he said. “Not necessary.” She backed away from the entry so he could squeeze inside. The place was packed. She wore a sort of rain slicker or cape, with a hood thrown back. She had enormous black eyes and her raven tresses were pulled back behind her neck. CHAPTER NEXT A young couple with a child were standing at the stairs leading up to the band shell. The man had broken a string on his fiddle and was attempting to restring it without much luck. Varno restrung the fiddle and tweaked it for a bit. He struck notes across the frets with their bow, listening with one ear cocked, until it sounded right. He prepared to hand it back. “Play something,” Kyle said. Varno glanced sharply at him and then at the couple, and then his features relaxed. “What do you suggest?” he asked. “Kyle looked around at all the other musicians. “Play something old-timey, from where you grew up,” he said. Varno tucked the violin beneath his chin and bean to play. As it went on the gathering crowd grew silent and began to form a semi circle around him, close enough to hear but not too close. It was a little like “Barbara Allen” and a little like “Lamkin,” with a little “Knoxville Girl” thrown in at the end, someway. But mostly it was not like anything anybody there had heard since their mythological childhoods, if then. Kyle watched the faces of the people gathering close. Most he knew, or recognized, and as he watched their expressions grow soft, reflective, and all the other street noises seemed almost to fade away as well, until all that remained were those aching chords, not heard in maybe 200 years, maybe longer. And it was right about then that trouble hit. CHAPTER NEXT As Transom and Chetwynd-Hayes arrived at the park, to look for vampires, Transom – who was seriously reconsidering spending any more time with this very odd fellow – he was startled to see Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes hauling out his vampire lantern, but also a separate bulky packet with wires running to the lamp itself “Batteries?” he ventured. Chetwynd-Hayes nodded. “Exactly. I'm disappointed we've lost our prey. He had vampire written all over him. But perhaps hell show up here for the concert. We'll be ready.” “So what happens if we actually encounter a vampire?” Transom asked. Chetwynd-Hayes gestured to his backpack. “I have the authorized Roundup emergency kit with me at all times,” he said. “If we see one, we an tackle it mano a mano, as the Spaniards say, without concern.” Transom thought of the half a dozen locals he knew would beat them down just for being weird. He could think of six different ways to run like hell when the time came. “Sounds good,” he said. The Saturday Night Hootenanny had become the center of a lot of people's lies, especially since most of them lacked most or all sources of entertainment otherwise. Most people could buy or borrow a copy of the Boomerang, but not everybody had a radio yet, so entertainment was a top notch deal in Miracle Springs. Amongst the circle pushing closer to listen, Kyle noticed someone he knew, the newspaperman. He had once interviewed Gram about her life story xxx and she kept the article framed on her bedroom wall above the night stand. Beside Mr. Transom as a smaller man with wild white hair who was fiddling with a lantern, though it really wasn't dark enough yet to merit one. Then the lantern came on and everything went crazy all at once. Anton Varno, tall and somber, had mesmerized most of the listeners with the wild jumps and trills of the song he was now playing. But then all of a sudden he lit up like the 4th of July down at Lake Leatherwood. It was weird beyond words. Every line of Varno's features were luminescent, even bright – he seemed to glow and sparkle. The crowd gasped and drew back. The music stopped. Then the lantern went out and everything plunged into darkness. Transom was staggered, and when the incandescent figure of the tall violinist suddenly vanished, he grasped Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes by the shoulder. “What the hell's going on?” he demanded. “It's the battery connection,”Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayesfaltered, fumbling with the wires that ran from his backpack to the lifeless lantern in his other hand. It buzzed and came back on. The young man who owned the fiddle stood dazed, looking at it like had had just given birth or spoken to plainly to him in some exotic tongue. The stranger was gone. Utterly gone. No departure, no sudden moves. Just gone. The pale light cast by the Birdlip Nosferatu Illuminator showed nothing but a knot of people trying to decide whether or not this had somehow all been part of the evening's entertainment, unexpected though it was. But Transom caught Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes' arm and gestured. “Look up,” he said. “There was a pathway up from the park above and across the hillside beyond the band shell. In fact, the “historic site of the original Miracle Springs spring” was there, with a little plaque donated by the daughters of the Confederacy 1905 etc. In the glare of Chetwynd-Hayes-Hayes' lantern, a the extremest extent of its radiation, they could just make out a row of figures standing above looking down at the crowed, six pairs of glowing red eyes studying them all. “As a professional journalist, I suggest we take this meeting elsewhere,” Transom said. “But wait, look!”Chetwynd-Hayes cried. “Wait. They're gone.” Fortunately, the hosts of the Saturday Night Hootenanny, Mom and Dad Slocum, had been pros for a long time, and in the immediate confusion and applause that followed, they launched into a spirited version of “No Depression,” and within seconds almost everybody present had a forgotten or at least dismissed the momentary peculiarity of the abrupt disappearance and were singing and clapping along with the song. CHAPTER NEXT The next evening, when they arrived back at the laboratory, Von Horst awaited them gleefully. He was practically wringing his hands with delight. “You are just in time!” he said. “Now I can show you how my machine does its work!” The subject was a dead child – a small boy, struck and crushed by a cart in the street, left for dead. Doubtless an urchin, and therefore probably no family, one one to miss him. Except for those paid to do so. The child's body had been rent and torn by the wagon wheels. Ragged clothing remained, twisted limbs. Only the face remained untouched. He had been stretched out on a zinc examination table. Above him was the Lazarus Ray. Burkhead thought it looked like an enormous chrome egg beater. A mass of wires ran from it pell-mell before coalescing at a control panel, covered with knobs and dials and switches. It was Jules Verne on a budget. Von Horst fiddled frantically now with the dials, adjusting this and that. After a moment the machine began to hum. Then it sputtered to silence. He cursed volubly in Bavarian and scurried to ray projector and began pulling at the wires, looking for a loose connection. He seemed on the verge of apoplexy, so Burkhead stepped forward. “Herr Von Horst,” he lied, using those golden tonsils that had paid off so well again and again, “All is well. You must take your time and relax. We believe in you. You are the Paracelsus of the New Age. Show us how.” That seemed to do the trick. Von Horst nodded and returned to the wiring with vigor, and after a few seconds the Ray began to hum again. Von Horst flipped more switches, cranked handles, and paused once to pump an enormous bellows. The hum rose in pitch until it was a shrill whine that made them wince. Then a strange purple glow began to pour down on the body. The light grew in intensity until finally it was so bright it was hard to look at. Bathed in the strange radiations of the machine, the small twisted form on the table began to twitch. At first the movement was barely discernible. Possibly one's imagination. But within the minute, its limbs had moved, and it began to shift and stretch. At the end of a long five minutes, the light snapped off, leaving them blinking. On the table, the urchin sat upright and looked around him in wonder. “Was bin ich?” he asked in a perfectly normal if plaintive tone. “Seid ihr engel? Wo is meine Mutter?” Von Horst replied in German. “Your mother is nearby. You were hurt but now you are well. You may run home now.” The boy was perfect, restored, broken flesh mended, torn limbs reknitted Seeing the half open doors to the fading afternoon outside, the child leapt from the table and fled the dark chamber. “You shouldn't have let him go!” Burkhead cried. “You have just performed a miracle!” Von Horst smiled. “I have done so before, and I shall do so again. With your help, of course, Herr American.” Burkhead's head was spinning. “Yes,” he said, “I think we can work together on this.” The German transatlantic liner Europa took just over a week to carry the three of them, with Von Horst's disassembled machinery crated up in the hold, from Europe to New York City. Their second-class accommodation was comfortable enough, but Burkhead knew Mabel was unhappy with the lack of first-class luxury. Loomis Burkhead did not travel second class, yet here he was. He promised himself it would be the last time. The ship was modern and boasted amenities like a swimming pool, a gym, and even a movie theater. Unfortunately, they encountered rough weather the third day, and Mabel spent the rest of the trip in their cabin, throwing up. Burkhead spent a lot of time sitting in the As they approached New York Harbor, excitement mounted among the passengers. But upon arrival, they were met with an unpleasant surprise: Lon Chaney was dead. Burkhead was shocked. He had met Chaney in 19xx and had ended up working with him in three films – “A Night of Thrills,” “Her Escape,” and “The Sins of Olga Brandt” – all minor roles, but they'd been his introduction to the movie industry and had inspired the rest of his career since then. People didn't want the truth. They wanted the fantasy. So he would give them the fantasy. Or sell it, rather, at the highest rate possible. CHAPTER NEXT "The evil I do not wish to do, that I do... who will deliver me from this body of death?" ~ St. Paul The building's exterior was painted a cheerful shade of yellow, with white trim around the windows and door. The shutters on the windows were painted a bold shade of blue, adding a playful touch to the overall design. The front door was a warm, rich brown, with a brass doorknob that gleamed in the sunlight. The main entrance opened onto a spacious room that had once been the living room, with high ceilings and large windows that flooded the space with natural light. A large, intricately carved bookcase lined one wall, filled with art books and catalogs. The kitchen was located in the center of the gallery, and had been cleverly designed to blend seamlessly with the rest of the space. The cabinets and countertops were made of the same rich wood as the bookcase in the sitting area, and the appliances were sleek and modern. “Good afternoon, Rockland.” CHAPTER NEXT As Molly made her way up the street from downtown, she could see the Ulthar Gallery was already bustling with activity. The door was propped open, and a cluster of elegantly dressed guests stood outside, sipping cocktails and chatting animatedly. The gallery sat perched like a vulture on the side of the gully that ran from the main road up to the Little Miracle Lake, then around the other side in a horseshoe shape, creating a natural amphitheater. The houses on both sides of the gully were close together, as if huddling together for warmth. The other houses were painted in muted colors, with small, neat gardens that spilled over the sidewalks. Not so the gallery. The building's exterior was painted a cheerful shade of yellow, with white trim around the windows and door. The shutters on the windows were painted a bold shade of blue, adding a playful touch to the overall design. The front door was a warm, rich brown, with a brass doorknob that gleamed in the sunlight. Molly's heart fluttered with nervous excitement as she approached the entrance. She smiled quickly at the group and slipped inside, eager to see what awaited her within. Gladys Ffriend stood by a large sign-in book on a podium by the door. She was a large woman with fierce red hair pulled back. 'Welcome to the Ulthar Gallery,” she said. “Sign our book, if you would, and enjoy some snacks before you go through to see the show. Webb is around here someplace.” Molly didn't recognize a single name in the registry, except one. Rockland had signed in at the very top. He had gotten here early. The hors d'oeuvres table was resplendent. She saw smoked salmon and cream cheese canapes, stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, cucumber tea sandwiches, and a cheese tray that included cheddar, brie, and a couple she didn't recognize at all. And there were two gallon jugs of wine, white and red, alongside. She was just sampling the canapes when Rockland popped up at her elbow suddenly, looking like it was his birthday. He had dressed up for the opening. Instead of his usual paint-stained trousers and all-weather red-checked flannel shirt, he wore a hounds-tooth suit the color of chocolate, about a size too large, but handsome enough. He had obviously been tapping the wine already, for his face was flushed. “This is quite a turn out,” Molly said. “How many artists are in this show?” “Six.” He gestured around. “Come with me and I'll show you everything.” The show was a crazy quilt of styles and subjects. Throughout the gallery, paintings and sculptures were displayed in every available space. The walls were covered with artwork, arranged in careful groupings that drew the eye and highlighted the beauty and complexity of each piece. As Rockland led her around the rooms, Molly could tell he liked some better than others by the look on his face, but he simply pointed out details she would not have caught without praising or condemning. FIX, GIVE HIM OPINIONS To the rear of the gallery was a bedroom that overlooked the ravine. The walls were painted a deep, moody shade of blue. The view from the open french doors out onto the deck was breathtaking, with the ravine stretching out below like a vast, untamed wilderness. The room had been given off completely to Rockland's works, and she could see why. Where most all the other artworks were bright, his were dark. Where they almost all focused on traditional styles and subjects – Rockland pointed out attempts at Impressionism (“Maiden Reclining on Chaise Lounge”), Expressionism ("The Red City” was a vibrant, red-hued cityscape, with tall spires and winding streets, that looked an awful lot like Miracle Springs, except on Mars), Art Nouveau, ("The Sea Maiden" a portrait of a mermaid, sitting on a rock and looking wistfully out to sea) – Rockland's works were of a different sort altogether. Many were landscapes, dark and eerie, with twisted trees and gnarled roots and strange occupants. In the center of a ruined churchyard was a large, ominous plant with tentacle-like branches that appear to be reaching out to grab the viewer. Off to the side crouched a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things, all looking over their shoulders at the viewer. Another showed a grotesque, demonic figure with multiple horns and glowing eyes. It held a tray with a human heart on it, as if offering it to whomever was watching. A third was of a mysterious, otherworldly cave filled with strange shapes and shadows. There is a sense of movement and activity in the image, but in the dead center stood a motionless figure, human but all in shadow except for two blazing red eyes. His paintings were like a bad dream. Rockland turned to her, his eyes eager. "Do you like them?" he asked. Molly nodded, still looking at the paintings. “They're...intense,” she said. “Good afternoon, Rockland," said a soft voice behind them. They turned to see a woman standing there, her black attire giving her an ethereal appearance in the bright gallery space. She was almost regal in her mourning attire, with a hooded cape draped over her shoulders. Her raven hair fell onto her shoulders. Her eyes, a piercing green that glittered in the dim light, fixed on Molly with an intensity that made her uneasy. Rockland's eyes darted between Molly and the woman in black. “Molly,” he said, “this is Gloria Devereaux. She helped fund the show.” “Mr. Norwell's work is quite exotic and – how do you say – outré?” said the woman. Molly nodded. “Yes, I've never seen anything like them.” "Gloria has been modeling for me," Rockland said. “I really haven't met too many people here who are interested in sitting still for hours at a time.” Devereaux' full lips twisted into a small smile. "Yes, it's been a pleasure to work with you, Rockland. You have a gift for capturing the essence of your subjects." Molly couldn't quite put her finger on it, but there was something vaguely hard-edged in the woman's voice. She shifted her weight nervously and cleared her throat. "Well, it's nice to meet you, Mrs. Devereaux," she said, trying to break the tension. "I'm sure you'll enjoy the show." Gloria Devereaux smile widened, but there was no warmth in it. She glanced again at Rockland. "I'm sure I will," she said, her gaze lingering on Molly for a moment longer before turning and sweeping out of the gallery. Molly and Rockland watched her go. As the woman reached the door, the lights flickered and went out. They could hear murmurs from the people up front. “She sure knows how to make an exit,” Molly said. Rockland snorted. “I'm not sure she'd disagree,” he replied. Molly paused. “Does she really model for you?” “She has,” he said. “It's hard to find someone who can sit still for hours at a time. Plus she donates to my 'artistic fund,' as she calls it. I told her the cash is supposed to flow the other way, and she laughed. Works for me. I think she just likes the attention. I don't suppose you've ever modeled, being from a small town and all?” “I'll have you know I'm from Muscatine, Iowa,” Molly replied, “population 18, 286! And no, I've never modeled. But I might want to, sometime. How much does it pay?” At that moment the lights came back on. They stood blinking for a moment, and then Webb Ffriend came into the room with another man in tow Moly left Rockland aglow in their brief conversation and heeaded back down town in the general directioni of home. She thought again of Gloria Devereaux. She knew the woman hadn't liked her. Because of Rockland. She might as well have been carrying a sign. Of course the woman had zero reason to be jealous. Molly just enjoyed little gathrings like this – the more interesting people came to them, and it was far superior to listening to the radio or reading a magzine in her room. And Rockland did seem like a nice enough guy =-- polite, at least. Nothing like the horrid Mr. Hitt, whom she'd seen only once since3 their encounter at t the stairs. Pig. She hoped he caught some horrible disease when he went catting around for the local congregation of soiled doves. That;'s unkind, she thought, but he certainly had it coming if anybody did As Molly walked wont he darkened lane from Ulthar Gallery to the better-lit downtown, she marvelled at how clear it was tonight. The sky was as full of stars as a jar full of fireflies, and just risen above the treeline to the rear came the biggest firefly of all, still two days from full but bright as xxxx. Then she heard a noise above and stopped, mouth open in surprise. It was as if an enormous herd of cattle were being driven somewhere just behind her left elbow, or better yet, as she'd always imagine4d a fox hunt – the thunder of hooves and, yes, the sound of a horn blowing far away, al ost an echo – --But what she saw caused her to sink to the ground in astonishment. Figures raced across the face of the moon. From her angle, they all seemed to be