The Traveling Vampire Show

“Right.”

“Probably has a whole crew.” She wiped her chest, her arms.

“And they might not be model citizens,” I said.

Laughing softly, she lowered her head and began to wipe the sweat off her belly and sides. I sneaked a glance at her breasts. The thin pouches of her bikini top were stretched smooth with them. Around the edges of the fabric, I glimpsed pale slopes of skin.

“We’ll have to be careful,” I said.

“Yeah. If they look really scurvy, we’d better forget the whole thing.”

Hearing footsteps, we both turned our heads and saw Rusty trudging toward us.

Slim continued to rub at herself with the balled shirt. I wanted her to put it back on, but I didn’t say anything.

“All set,” Rusty said. I saw him check her out. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Slim told him. “Just waiting for you.”

“We’re thinking we’ll have to be really careful,” I explained. “Valeria’s gonna have…”

“Casket keepers,” Slim threw in.

Rusty smiled and nodded.

“No telling how many people might be with the show,” I said.

“And it’s likely a scumrvy lot,” added Slim with a bit of Long John Silver in her voice.

“They go around with a traveling vampire show,” Rusty said, “they’ve gotta be at least a little strange.”

“And maybe dangerous,” I said.

Rusty suddenly frowned. “You guys aren’t gonna chicken out, are you?” Before either of us had a chance to answer, he said, “Cause I’m going irregardless.”

“Irregardless ain’t a word, Einstein,” Slim told him.

“Is too.”

She wasn’t one to argue. She just gave him a funny smile, then pulled her T-shirt on. “Let’s go.”

After that, none of us said anything. We weren’t that far from Janks Field, so I think we were starting to get more nervous.

Janks Field was the sort of place that made you nervous no matter what.

First off, nothing grows there. It’s a big patch of hard bare dirt surrounded by thick, green woods. But it’s not bare on purpose. Nobody clears the field. As far as anyone knows, Janks Field has always been that way.

I’ve heard people say the dirt there is poison. I think they’re wrong about that, though. Janks Field has more than its share of wildlife—the sort that lives in holes in the ground—ants, spiders, snakes, and so on.

Some people say aliens landed there, and that’s why nothing will grow.

Sure thing.

Others say the field is cursed. I might go along with that. You might, too, after you know more about it.

The reason they call the place Janks Field isn’t because it belongs to anyone named Janks. It doesn’t, and never did. It’s called that because of Tommy Janks and what he did there in 1954.

I was just a little kid at the time, so nobody told me much. But I do remember people acting funny the summer it all happened. Dad, being chief of police, wasn’t home very often. Mom, usually cheerful, seemed oddly nervous. And sometimes I overheard scattered talk about missing girls. This went on for most of the summer. Then something big happened and everyone went crazy. All the grown-ups were pale and whispering and I caught bits and pieces like, “Some kind of monster…” and “Dear God…” and “their poor parents…” and “always knew there was something off about him.”

As it turns out, some Boy Scouts had hiked into the field and found Tommy Janks sitting by a campfire. He was a deaf mute, so he never heard them coming. They caught him with a gob of meat on the end of a stick. He was roasting it over the fire. It turned out to be the heart of one of the missing girls.

Must’ve been awful, walking into a scene like that.

Those Boy Scouts became instant heroes. We envied them, hated them, and longed to be their friends. Not because they captured Tommy Janks (my dad did that), but because they got to see him cooking that heart over the fire. Those scouts were legends in their own time.

One of them, years later, ended up committing suicide and another…

That’s another story. I’ll stick to this one.

After my dad busted Tommy, he led a crew out to the field and they found the remains of twenty-three bodies buried there. Six belonged to the girls who’d disappeared that summer. The rest… they’d been there longer. Some, for maybe five years. Others, for more like twenty or thirty. I’ve heard that several of them might’ve been in the ground for a hundred years.

The field apparently hadn’t been a cemetery, though; nobody found signs of any grave markers or caskets. There were just a bunch of bodies—a lot of them in pieces—tossed into holes.

Tommy Janks got himself fried in the electric chair.

The clearing got itself called Janks Field.

Chapter Four

There hadn’t been a road to Janks Field, dirt or otherwise, at the time Tommy got caught cooking up the girl’s heart. But Dad managed to drive in with his Jeep. He made the first tire tracks into that awful place. By the time the bodies and bones had been removed and all the investigations were over, the tracks were worn in. And people have been driving out to Janks Field ever since.

First, it was to gawk at where all those bodies had been found.

Before long, though, teens from Grandville and other nearby towns realized that the field was perfect for making out. At least if you and your girl had the guts to drive in there at night.

Not only did people go there to park, but some pretty wild parties went on sometimes. A lot of booze and fights and sex. That’s what we heard, anyway.

We also heard rumors of witches and so on meeting at Janks Field to practice “black magic.” They supposedly had naked orgies and performed sacrifices.

I sometimes thought it’d be pretty cool if they were sacrificing humans out there. I imagined bonfires, drums, nude and beautiful and sweaty girls leaping wildly around, chanting and waving knives. And a lovely, naked virgin tied to an altar, her body shiny with sweat, terror in her eyes as she waited to be sliced open in a blood sacrifice to the forces of darkness.

The whole notion really turned me on.

Turned on Rusty, too.

We used to talk about that sort of thing in hushed, excited voices. Not in front of Slim, though. I couldn’t have said any of that stuff with Slim listening. But also we figured, being a girl herself, she might not want to hang out with us if she knew we had fantasies like that.

Whenever I imagined the Janks Field witch orgies, I always pictured Slim as the virgin tied to the altar. (I didn’t mention that part to Rusty or anyone else.) Slim never got sacrificed because I came to her rescue in the nick of time and cut her free.

I don’t know if any humans actually were sacrificed at Janks Field back in those days. It was fun to think about, though: sexy and romantic and exciting. Whereas the sacrifice of animals, which apparently was going on, just seemed plain disgusting to us.

The animal sacrifices disgusted and worried just about everyone. For one thing, pets were disappearing. For another, people going to Janks Field for make-out sessions or wild parties didn’t appreciate tripping over the dismembered remains of Rover or Kitty. Also, they must’ve been worried that they might be next.

Something had to be done about Janks Field. Since it was outside the city limits of Grandville, the county council chose to deal with it. They tried to solve the problem by installing a chain-link fence around the field.

The fence remained intact for about a week.