Thirteen: “All Rising To Great Place…”
***
“So what’s the plan?” she asked as Marty made a right turn from the hospital parking lot. She wanted to stop thinking about Chloe for awhile, even if that meant discussing monsters and how one might kill you. Their route led south out of town, where a mass of dark clouds had built up over black trees in the distance.
“Howling is in Amish country,” Marty told her, “off route 83. It’ll take…oh, maybe forty-five minutes to get there.”
“And then?”
“Then we drive to the residence of one Victor Unsichtbar.”
“Wow. Now there’s a name I wouldn’t want to write in a greeting card.”
“Well that’s good, because according to Vera, he is not a man who moves one to poetry. Unless you like poems about raw meat and cannibalism.”
Keltie’s hands tightened on her knees. “I can’t say either one of those are real turn-ons for me.” Oh, come off it, girl! You had a blast pounding that stake through Vera’s heart! “Shut up,” she told herself.
Marty heard it. “I didn’t say anything.”
“I know. I was just thinking out loud. So this Victor guy eats people? Just like that thing me and Penny found at the Showboat?”
“So Vera says,” Marty replied. “Or said. Once. He hunts mainly in Columbus and Youngstown. Large cities.”
“Like Bolt.”
“That’s right. I suppose if he dined exclusively on Amish people he’d develop a fetish for wood crafting and lemonade.”
“You’re sick, man,” Keltie said, cupping a hand over her smile. “Real sick.”
“Victor’s sick,” the other came back with, in a tone that seemed to forbid all laughter. “And he’ll make us sick, too, if he gets the chance. Or just flat out eat us both.”
“How strong will he be in the sunlight?”
Marty indicated the clouds in the south. There was traffic coming the other way, but not much. Ice cold February mornings in Ohio were seldom fun to drive through. “What sunlight? We’ll probably find this guy on his front porch, sipping blood from a sixteenth century goblet.”
“So what the fuck are we doing this for, darling?” Keltie demanded to know.
And the reply that came from the other seat did nothing to alleviate her sudden incredulity. “He has information we need,” Marty said.
“Oooh. You sounded like Ernst Blofeld just now. Except he normally worked with a plan.”
“Don’t worry. We’re not just going to walk up and ring the doorbell.”
“What then?”
“We need to take him by surprise. Then subdue him.”
Keltie opened her mouth, shut it. Raised her finger, put it down. Marty’s intentions were so stupidly optimistic she could not find the words to rebuke them. She tried again, this time with open mouth and raised finger together, when the first flakes of snow began to fall on the windshield. That sent her thoughts down a whole new track, at least for the time being.
“Does your radio work?” she asked, clicking it on before the other could reply.
“Oooooooh-ooooooh-ooooooooh!” Smokey Robinson sang. “Bayyybee, bayyybee!”
She changed the channel.
“Ice ice baby! Vanilla Ice ice baby!”
Click! She changed it again.
“Baby you can drive my car! Yes I’m gonna be a star!”
“Goddammit,” Keltie said, “where the hell’s the weatherman when you need him?”
She switched over to the AM band and dialed around some more, but still had to wait until the top of the hour to get some news from one of the Cleveland stations. As was typical for that city, a veritable boatload of sports headlines came through first. Then came the national news, followed by politics. A dash of local fluff arrived next. Some silly old bitch’s cat had gotten stuck in a tree in Shaker Heights; the silly old bitch climbed up the tree to get the cat and wound up stuck herself. With wearing patience, Keltie silently wished for the report to end with both woman and cat dead on the ground. But no joy.
“You’ll be happy to know,” the reporter chimed, “that it all ended well. The Shaker Heights Fire Department rescued the woman with no injuries reported. And now let’s kick things over to Holly for the weather! Holly?”
“HEY!” a cheerful female voice exploded from the speakers.
“Jesus,” Keltie plumed out, clutching her chest.
“GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE! I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A WONDERFUL DAY SO FAR! IF YOU LOOK TO THE SOUTH YOU MAY BE WORRIED ABOUT SOME CLOUDS THERE, BUT DON’T BE. UNLESS, THAT IS, YOU PLAN ON TRAVELING THAT WAY…”
“Fuck,” Keltie and Marty said together.
“IN WHICH CASE YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF IN SOME STORMY CONDITIONS. THOSE OF YOU FROM COLUMBUS ON DOWN TO THE BORDER CAN EXPECT THREE TO SIX INCHES OF SNOW TODAY. EWW, RIGHT?”
Keltie had heard enough; she snapped the radio off. “She sure is bubbly about bringing the bad news.”
The snow remained light as Marty drove. Once they left Norwalk, open fields sprawled on either side of the car. A few familiar scenes swept past on Keltie’s side, but not for long. Nor did it matter, for it all looked basically the same: silos, farmhouses, wheat fields. An old man climbed into a pick-up truck and slammed the door. A large sign—DUNHAM ORCHARDS—floated by. On the spot, Keltie began to daydream about what it might be like to be a farmer’s wife. The countryside looked appealing, but she wasn’t sure how good her apple pies would taste, or if she could get up at five o’clock every morning to feed the chickens.
Twenty minutes later they hit Wooster, a town that looked—to Keltie, at least—exactly like Norwalk. Business blocks from the mid 1800s stood along freshly tarred streets. Empty sidewalks led to shops whose signs were all but begging for business. Huge trees, creepy old houses.
Marty spied a McDonald’s and suggested they get a drive-thru breakfast. He hadn’t eaten, he said, since before dawn, and Keltie’s own stomach had been grumbling since her curiosity about apple pies. They picked up a quick meal and left town via route 83. Here the trees—many of them large as the ones in Wooster—began to edge closer to Keltie’s window. The snow kept falling, but not hard. It cupped inside the fallen leaves like sugar in corn-flakes.
“I was wondering when we’d see this,” Marty suddenly said.
Snapped from her reverie, Keltie looked to see the back of an Amish buggy bouncing on the road. Marty pulled carefully around it, giving her a view of the buggy from the side. An old man held a pair of reigns, not looking in her direction. A handsome chestnut Morgan, its eyes downcast, clopped grimly through the snow.
“I didn’t see anyone in the back,” Marty said, while Keltie watched both man and horse recede behind them. “Maybe he’s out buying parts for farm equipment. Or delivering wood.”
“What are the women doing, I wonder?”
To her surprise, he had an answer. “At this time of year? Catching up on the laundry or sewing. Or reading The Budget.”
“What’s that?”
“Amish newspaper.”
Keltie looked back at the buggy, which was now little more than a dot in the rear window. It was an ice cold day. How were they staying warm back there?
“Wool coats and hot water bottles,” Marty said, reading her mind.
“You sure know a lot about the Amish,” she allowed.
“Not really. But it’s easy to find articles about them in Ohio. If you look, that is,” he added, as if Keltie were allergic to libraries.
“I read,” she told him in a ruffled voice.
“I know,” he said. “I can tell by the way you talk. Do you ever read about vampires?”
She shook her head. “No. But then I don’t need to anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’ve had a lot of on-the-job training of late.”
***
The town of Howling looked haunted as hell.
There was no other way Keltie could think of to describe it. Near the outskirts of town the car began to jolt over a number of poorly done patches on the road. Dark, abandoned houses with broken windows leered across yellow lawns. Through Marty’s window she could see a set of railroad tracks running parallel to a dirt lane cluttered with rusty box-cars.
WELCOME TO HOWLING, a slanted, shot up sign read, STAY AWHILE.
“Stayyyyy foreverrrrr,” Marty intoned.
An instant later they were overtaken by a black pick-up truck full of pimply teens. One of the teens scowled at Marty through the passenger window.
“Oh yeah,” Keltie said, “I’d just love to stay awhile.”
Five minutes later they arrived at a dreary, unkempt town square. A broken fountain looked down over weeds sprouting from cracked sidewalks. Nearby was a gas station, a city hall, and a dentist’s office. Morbidly, Keltie wondered what it might be like to get a tooth pulled here. The idea made her think of medieval torture chambers in dank dungeons.
“Why are dentists allowed to chastise their patients?” she said aloud, reading a sign that did nothing to squelch her fear of extractions. DR. MANGLES, DDS.
Marty’s reply sounded as if he were barely listening. “Dunno,” he said.
“I mean, when a doctor at a hospital finds out you have cancer, he doesn’t go: Shame on you for having cancer; it’s your own fault.”
“Uh…no, I would hope not. I guess if you have bad teeth, a dentist assumes you haven’t been taking care of them.”
“But it’s not professional,” Keltie insisted. “What if a person who didn’t take care of his teeth when he was young wants to get himself fixed today? But he can’t because the town dentist keeps being a dick?”
“Then he needs to go to another dentist,” Marty said.
He still didn’t sound fully attentive, so Keltie let the subject drop. They were away from the square by then, traveling down a narrow street of dilapidated houses. Keltie watched a stray cat pounce on something in high grass. She waved at a little kid on a Big Wheel; the little kid gave her the finger.
“Great town,” she murmered.
“Oh, I could live here.”
“You’d better not mean that.”
They turned off the narrow street, rounded a few more corners, and were then presented with what Keltie could only assume was Howling’s upper-class district. The street was much wider here, the houses larger and far more old. White pillars and decorative eaves were set back everywhere amongst mighty trees that resembled the ones back home.
“This is the street where he lives,” Marty informed her.
She wasn’t sure whether to be pleased about that or not. The houses outside her window were all well-kept. Their lawns stretched widely from hedgerow to hedgerow. Someone looking down from a second floor would have no trouble spotting two out-of-towner teens skulking around back stairs.
On a sudden thought, Keltie asked: “Did you happen to bring any garlic or wooden crosses?”
“A cross,” the other answered with a nod. “And a stake and hammer are in the trunk.”
She blinked. “So we’re going to kill this guy?”
“Not before he tells us about Bolt.”
“I still don’t know what your plan is, Marty. When are you going to tell me?”
He might have answered her then, but for one thing: They had arrived.
Marty stopped in front of a house that shared many features with the others around it. It was large; it was old. Keltie knew very little about architecture, but guessed that this one fell into the Queen Ann category. Blank windows glared down from an uneven facade made up of towers and terra-cotta roofing. A dark, shadowy porch, all unwelcoming, snoozed over an unmowed lawn.
“This is not the house we want, is it?” she asked, sickened by the very idea of having to enter the place.
“I’m afraid so,” came Marty’s inexorable reply.
“Why does it look so much more damned scary than the rest?”
He looked at her like she was stupid. “Because a vampire lives here, darling.”
“Darling.” She smiled. “I like that. You have my permission to keep using it. But Marty”—her gaze went back to the house—“I don’t think anyone lives here.”
Evidence lay everywhere to support the idea. The porch sagged, and even from this distance Keltie could make out peels of paint curling from the door, the window sills. Blades of dead grass swayed under a breeze that grew more steady by the minute.
“The driveway’s empty,” she pointed out, “and I don’t see any curtains in the windows.”
Yet Marty would not be moved. “This is the house,” he said. “Vera described it perfectly.”
Keltie opened her door. The crisp breeze, snow laden, swept up her legs, ruffling the hem of her skirt. It felt good to breathe, however, especially after sitting next to the car’s stuffy heater for so long. She inhaled greedily, stretching the small yet sturdy lungs she owned, until Marty got out and approached the house’s front gate.
“Don’t do that,” she called. “If the guy is in there, there’s a good chance he’ll see you.” In fact, what the hell were you thinking when you pulled right up in front of his house, knucklehead?
“We’ll go around the back,” a now sheepish-looking Marty decided.
“Good idea.”
Pretending to be confident, he set off down the walk, snow swirling around his feet. Keltie remained put. She let him get about twenty yards from the car, then called out to him again, this time to ask if he might be forgetting something. Marty stopped, turned around. His head tilted in a way that reminded her of a dog trying to understand its master.
Grinning, she told him: “Stake. Hammer.”
His hand slapped his forehead. “Okay, I’m not off to a good start here.”
Once the tools were out of the trunk—and safely stashed inside Keltie’s leather jacket—they walked to the back of the house, keeping their gait casual but their eyes and ears sharp. The backyard treated them to a scene every bit as derelict as the front. Dead grass, dead trees, broken steps. A gnarly, ratted noose swayed from one of the trees, making Keltie’s skin crawl. Beneath another lay the body of a doll, its eyes scratched out, its hair matted.
“All right,” she whispered to Marty, “I’m convinced. This is the right house. Now what?”
“Porch,” he said, putting an arm around her waist.
They went up the broken steps. One of them gave under Keltie’s boot. Marty caught her before she could fall.
On the porch they saw an empty socket where the button for a doorbell had once been. Marty pulled back a screen, then turned a rusty knob. To Keltie’s surprise, the door creaked open. Marty stepped inside first, holding his cross out like Roddy McDowell in an old vampire movie Keltie had watched as a girl. She stuck close to his back. Now that they were actually inside the house, she found she was pretty much afraid of everything her eyes happened to land on.
They were in a living room—or what had once been a living room in maybe the 1890s. Its two key features, wood and dust, assaulted Keltie, the latter almost caustic in its harshness. In front of them yawned a flight of stairs with a majestic banister; on the right, a rolled up carpet lay against a stained wall; to the left was an archway that let on another room.
“I vote we go up,” Marty whispered.
“Fine. Any particular reason?”
“’All rising to great place is by a winding stair.’”
“Those steps don’t wind, Francis.”
“Nah,” he agreed, “but they do bend.”
“Kind of like me at the moment, dear. I’m beginning to bend like hell.”
They went up. The musty odor continued to attack, growing stronger with every step. Keltie began to wish she’d taken a nice, deep breath outside and held it in. She coughed, shook her head, coughed again.
The walls on the second floor were pale yellow, and stained with graffiti. Several open doors invited them down the hallway, though Keltie felt no real wish to take them up. Faint shadows lay dead on rotten floorboards. Marty’s shoe kicked an empty bottle, sending it twirling over a minefield of mouse poop.
The first door let on a bathroom too disgusting to linger in. Across the hall was a bedroom with a bare mattress (sans bed frame), and a hotchpotch pile of old girly magazines.
“Ech,” Marty groaned. “Look.”
He was pointing down at one of the magazines. A nude blonde girl smiled back, her legs spread wide.
“Too easy for you?” Keltie asked, amused by his distaste.
“Too hairy. She’s got a national forest growing down there.”
“Yeah. Well, times change.”
“Thank God. Let’s check the other rooms.”
But they only got to one more before all hell broke loose. It was decorated much like the previous: a bare mattress, some reading material. On one of the walls, however, there was horror. Seeing it forced a gasp from Keltie (followed immediately by more coughing). Marty’s whole frame went rigid. “Wow,” he breathed. “Just…wow.”
“What is it, Marty?”
“A gorgon. I think.”
Rarely had she seen anything painted with such disturbing intricacy. Done mainly in shades of red and brown, it took up the entire wall: an enormous, demon-like face that scowled on the neck of what appeared to be a dog’s body. Its forehead, nested over with thick, black brows, jutted over yellow eyes almost too deep to escape. Painted near the hairline was the stump of a broken horn, where Keltie could actually see, by love of the artist’s hand, individual granules of mineral where the horn had snapped loose.
“It’s too much,” she said, looking at the dog’s body now, its heavy black fur so detailed it might have been painted one strand at a time. “Too much.”
“It’s only a picture.”
GET ME OUT OF YOUR HEAD, a line next to the gorgon commanded.
With pleasure, Keltie thought, just as Marty read the words aloud and explained that the artist, driven by whatever lunatic ideal in command of his thoughts at the time, more than likely meant for the beast to be set free from imagination.
“And released upon…what?” she asked. “The real world?”
“Correct.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Not in here,” a third voice spoke from behind, and Keltie shrieked.
If the wall gorgon left any lingering doubts as to whether or not this house was crazy, then the figure who now stood in the doorway obliterated them with chilling ease. It was slender, and looked to stand just