pantry. Mandy Jane will string me some.'
So Sukey took the baby and Bubba off to the Greenoughs' house, that seeming the right thing to do, and I stayed the rest of the afternoon with Papa, stringing garlic and pressing more into the windows. But the strand over the door he took down.
'I have to let her in somewhere,' he said. 'And this is where I'll make my stand.' He touched me on the cheek, the first time ever. Papa never has been much for show.
'Now you run along to the Greenoughs', Mandy Jane,' he said. 'And remember how much your mama loved you. This isn't her, child. Mama's gone. Something else has come to take her place. I should have remembered that the Good Book says, The living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything.''
I wanted to ask him how the vampire knew to come first to our house, then, but I was silent, for Papa had been asleep and hadn't seen her.
I left without giving him a daughter's kiss, for his mind was well set on the night's doing. But I didn't go down the lane to the Greenoughs' at all. Wearing my triple strand of garlic, with my cross about my neck, I went to the burying ground, to Mama's grave.
It looked so raw against the greening hillside. The dirt was red clay, but all it looked like to me was blood. There was no cross on it yet, no stone. That would come in a year. Just a humping, a heaping of red dirt over her coffin, the plain pinewood box hastily made.
I lay facedown in that dirt, my arms opened wide. 'Oh, Mama,' I said, 'the Good Book says you are not dead but sleepeth. Sleep quietly, Mama, sleep well.' And I sang to her the lullaby she had always sung to me and then to Bubba and would have sung to Baby Ann had she lived to hold her.
'Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays,
All the pretty little horses.'
And as I sang I remembered Papa thundering at prayer meeting once, 'Behold, a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death.' The rest of the song just stuck in my throat then, so I turned over on the grave and stared up at the setting sun.
It had been a long and wearying day, and I fell asleep right there in the burying ground. Any other time fear might have overcome sleep. But I just closed my eyes and slept.
When I woke, it was dead night. The moon was full and sitting between the horns of two hills. There was a sprinkling of stars overhead. And Mama began to move the ground beneath me, trying to rise.
The garlic strands must have worried her, for she did not come out of the earth all at once. It was the scrabbling of her long nails at my back that woke me. I leaped off that grave and was wide awake.
Standing aside the grave, I watched as first her long gray arms reached out of the earth. Then her head, with its hair that was once so gold, now gray and streaked with black and its shroud eyes, emerged. And then her body in its winding sheet, stained with dirt and torn from walking to and fro upon the land. Then her bare feet with blackened nails, though alive Mama used to paint those nails, her one vanity and Papa allowed it seeing she was so pretty and otherwise not vain.
She turned toward me as a hummingbird toward a flower, and she raised her face up and it was gray and bony. Her mouth peeled back from her teeth and I saw that they were pointed and her tongue was barbed.
'Mama gone,' I whispered in Bubba's voice, but so low I could hardly hear it myself.
She stepped toward me off that grave, lurching down the hump of dirt. But when she got close, the garlic strands and the cross stayed her.
'Mama.'
She turned her head back and forth. It was clear she could not see with those black shroud eyes. She only sensed me there, something warm, something alive, something with the blood running like satisfying streams through the blue veins.
'Mama,' I said again. 'Try and remember.'
That searching awful face turned toward me again, and the pointy teeth were bared once more. Her hands reached out to grab me, then pulled back.
'Remember how Bubba always sucks his thumb with that funny little noise you always said was like a little chuck in its hole. And how Sukey hums through her nose when she's baking bread. And how I listened to your belly to hear the baby. And how Papa always starts each meal with the blessing on things that grow fresh in the field.'
The gray face turned for a moment toward the hills, and I wasn't even sure she could hear me. But I had to keep trying.
'And remember when we picked the blueberries and Bubba fell down the hill, tumbling head-end over. And we laughed until we heard him, and he was saying the same six things over and over till long past bed.'
The gray face turned back toward me and I thought I saw a bit of light in the eyes. But it was just reflected moonlight.
'And the day Papa came home with the new ewe lamb and we fed her on a sugar teat. You stayed up all the night and I slept in the straw by your side.'
It was as if stars were twinkling in those dead eyes. I couldn't stop staring, but I didn't dare stop talking either.
'And remember the day the bluebird stunned itself on the kitchen window and you held it in your hands. You warmed it to life, you said. To life, Mama.'
Those stars began to run down the gray cheeks.
'There's living, Mama, and there's dead. You've given so much life. Don't be bringing death to these hills now.' I could see that the stars were gone from the sky over her head; the moon was setting.
'Papa loved you too much to cut your hands and feet. You gotta return that love, Mama. You gotta.'
Veins of red ran along the hills, outlining the rocks. As the sun began to rise, I took off one strand of garlic. Then the second. Then the last. I opened my arms. 'Have you come back, Mama, or are you gone?'
The gray woman leaned over and clasped me tight in her arms. Her head bent down toward mine, her mouth on my forehead, my neck, the outline of my little gold cross burning across her lips.
She whispered, 'Here and gone, child, here and gone,' in a voice like wind in the coppice, like the shaking of willow leaves. I felt her kiss on my cheek, a brand.
Then the sun came between the hills and hit her full in the face, burning her as red as earth. She smiled at me and then there was only dust motes in the air, dancing. When I looked down at my feet, the grave dirt was hardly disturbed but Mama's gold wedding band gleamed atop it.
I knelt down and picked it up, and unhooked the chain holding my cross. I slid the ring onto the chain, and the two nestled together right in the hollow of my throat. I sang:
'Blacks and bays,
Dapples and gray…'
and from the earth itself, the final words sang out,
'All the pretty little horses.'
That was when I cried, long and loud, a sound I hope never to make again as long as I live.
Then I went back down the hill and home, where Papa still waited by the open door.
Abraham's Boys by Joe Hill
Joe Hill is the bestselling author of the novel Heart-Shaped Box and the short story collection 20th Century Ghosts, both of which won the Bram Stoker Award. He is currently at work on a comic book called Locke & Key with artist Gabriel Rodriguez.
The vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing first appeared in the most famous vampire novel of them all, Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, and served as the inspiration for editor Jeanne Cavelos's 2004 anthology The Many Faces of Van Helsing, which features new stories about this intriguing and enigmatic figure.
Joe Hill's 'Abraham's Boys,' from that anthology, provides a new literary interpretation of this classic character by way of nods to such contemporary issues as domestic abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder. The story also calls to mind Nietzsche's famous dictum, 'Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.'
We also note that, like his protagonist, the author is the son of a famous man (author Stephen King) and also has a younger brother (author Owen King). This is most assuredly just a coincidence.
Maximilian searched for them in the carriage house and the cattle shed, even had a look in the springhouse, although he knew almost at first glance he wouldn't find them there. Rudy wouldn't hide in a place like that, dank and chill, no windows and so no light, a place that smelled of bats. It was too much like a basement. Rudy never went in their basement back home if he could help it, was afraid the door would shut behind him, and he'd find himself trapped in the suffocating dark.
Max checked the barn last, but they weren't hiding there either, and when he came into the dooryard, he saw with a shock dusk had come. He had never imagined it could be so late.
'No more this game,' he shouted. 'Rudolf! We have to go.' Only when he said
have it came out hoff, a noise like a horse sneezing. He hated the sound of his own voice, envied his younger brother's confident American pronunciations. Rudolf
