“But…but…,” Newton stammered, “wait a goddamn minute here. If Griswold was using Mayor Wolfe’s body, doesn’t that mean that, in part at least, you’re…you’re…”
“Yes. That means that I’m also Ubel Griswold’s son.” He gave a bitter laugh. “You all look like you just ate a bug. Imagine how I feel. But, let me tell you the rest of it before I…well, let me just get it out, okay?” Val handed him another tissue, and Mike launched right into the story of how Vic Wingate engineered the death of Big John Sweeney and married Lois shortly after, and then settled in to watch the boy, to study him. “At first Vic hoped that I was going to be like Griswold—another monster. Maybe he even thought I was going to be Griswold reborn. After a while, though, either he or Griswold figured out that I wasn’t a chip off the old block. Vic was furious and he wanted to kill me, but Griswold didn’t. By now Griswold had figured out what I was.”
“A dhampyr,” Jonatha said, and Mike nodded.
“Griswold always expected to become a vampire one day, always assumed he’d get killed eventually as a werewolf, so he made sure he knew a lot about vampires. That’s why he’s so good at being one. He knows what he is, and he began to suspect what I was. He also knows the legend that if any evil hand kills a dhampyr, then its energy is scattered throughout the region. That means that everything in Pine Deep would have had the same powers as a dhampyr.” Newton opened his mouth, but Mike cut him off. “Before you ask, no I don’t have superpowers. I’m not any stronger than I was, I can’t fly or leap tall buildings. The Bone Man said that the dhampyr’s two main strengths are his ability to sense the presence of evil—and, yeah, I got that going overtime, but there’s so much of it I don’t know where to look—and the other thing is that anything I pick up—a stick, a stone, anything—becomes like a supercharged weapon against evil. I don’t need garlic or any of that. Supposedly.”
“Why ‘supposedly’?”
“Because my biological father carries a werewolf bloodline, not a vampire bloodline. His blood and Griswold’s spirit are in me, and my mother was a weak woman who was a slut for Griswold and Vic. A dhampyr is supposed to be pure, untouched by evil, unable to become evil…but look at my family tree, guys. What are the odds that I’m going to be so pure that I’m going to be a real threat to any of these things?”
“Are you guessing, or do you know?” Val asked.
He shook his head. “Even the Bone Man doesn’t know. He says that I’m different than he expected. That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”
No one laughed.
“If you’re not supposed to be harmed by any evil,” Newton said, “why did he give you to Vic? Pardon me for saying this, but Crow told me that Vic knocks you around a lot.”
“Oh yeah, Vic loves to hit, but he never killed me. He wanted to, more than you can imagine, and I think he was trying to make life so bad for me that I’d kill myself. That would remove the threat without any danger to Griswold.” Mike paused. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, too. A lot of times.”
Val bent forward and kissed his forehead. “I’m glad you didn’t, sweetie.”
Jonatha said, “Mike, I don’t know you, but from what I’m hearing it sounds like you’ve certainly taken a side in all this. You may have the worst heritage anyone’s ever heard of, but you’re here with us. You’re not with Vic.”
He didn’t meet her eyes, but his cheeks colored. “I guess.”
“The dhampyr aren’t usually fighters,” she said, changing tack. “They’re more like witch-sniffers—beings that can sense evil and are dedicated to revealing it. Among the Gypsies the dhampyr usually goes from town to town and offers his services to detect and destroy vampires or other evil. Not in single combat or anything…it, um, involves some kind of ritual dance and the use of special charms, and so on.”
“Oh brother,” Weinstock said, rolling his eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Mike said, “I don’t see myself breaking into a dance number any time soon.”
“But there’s a downside to being a dhampyr,” Jonatha said gravely. “Did the Bone Man tell you that?”
Mike gazed at her for a long time before nodding. “Yeah, he told me that.”
“Told you what?” Weinstock asked.
Jonatha cleared her throat. “Well, in folklore, the dhampyr is the antithesis of a vampire. Where a vampire is evil, the dhampyr is not; where a vampire preys on humans, the dhampyr preys on supernatural creatures; and, where the vampire is immortal…the dhampyr is not. In fact, the dhampyr generally only lives into his early twenties.”
“What happens?” Val asked, leaning forward. “Is it a matter of a high mortality rate for someone so young fighting those kinds of odds? Because you’re going to have a hell of a lot of backup here if it comes to a fight.”
Jonatha shook her head. “No…it’s worse than that. Beginning with late puberty the dhampyr’s skeleton begins a process of degeneration. It…um…”
“What she’s trying to say,” Mike said, “is that my skeleton is going to turn to jelly by the time I’m in my mid-twenties. It’ll stop supporting my organs, and eventually I’m just going to collapse into a big mooshy mass and die.”
“Holy…God!” Newton said.
Val reached out and put her hand on Mike’s arm and he shied away.
“I’m so sorry, kid,” Jonatha said softly. “Maybe that part of the story’s just bullshit. Maybe the different biology here…Mayor Wolfe and all…it might make things different.”
“Yeah,” Mike said brightly, “and maybe Santa will come and sprinkle elf-dust on me and make everything all better.”
“Well don’t forget you’re in a hospital and this is the twenty-first century, not fifteenth-century Romania.” Weinstock said, reaching out with his good arm and patting Mike’s shoulder. “I’ll bet there’s a whole we can do, so let’s not dig a hole quite yet.”
Mike’s eyes searched the doctor’s face, then he nodded.
“Is there more?” Newton asked.
“Sure,” Mike said softly, “I haven’t even gotten to the part where I died, yet.”
2
The crucified man hung there in the shadows and felt his life run out of him. He could barely feel his limbs; his hands and feet were distant countries from which he received little communication. Most of the time he was not conscious, lost in blackness but still aware of his own body, of the tether of pain that still held him to the world. Sometimes he could find his way into the light, but he had to blink away tears of blood just to catch a brief glimpse of the weak gray daylight. He coveted those momentary glimpses because he was sure they were the last ones he would ever have.
His head felt heavy. He wanted to lay it down, let his chin fall on his chest, let his neck rest from carrying that improbably heavy burden, but he couldn’t. Something burned in the back of his head and he felt as if that burning pinpoint kept his head from falling forward. There were other burning spots as well, little fires in his hands, along his sides, down one leg, in the heel of his other, twisted leg. The skin around each point of fire was warm, too, but the warmth was wet and ran in long lines down his limbs.
When he was up in the light he could smell things that didn’t make sense, a cacophony of odors. Distantly he thought that they should make sense, but it was so hard to think with that constant burning. He struggled to separate the smells. There were four of them, he thought. One smell was sweet and thick and reminded him of freshly sheared copper. Another smelled like his mother’s kitchen and her spicy food, of Sunday dinners with Uncle Tony and the pot of gravy always simmering on the stove. He could remember that kitchen to the tiniest detail, though he could not, for the life of him, remember his own name, or how he came to be there. Or where he was. Or anything useful.
His thoughts drifted back to the smells. The third smell was an outhouse stink of urine and sweat, and he knew that those smells came from him. He wondered if he had made a mess of himself; he wondered if he should care. The last of the smells was an aroma from his teenage days long ago. How long ago? He wasn’t sure. A long time? Yesterday? He could not be sure, but he knew that smell was the gasoline stink of cars and grease and filling stations. The four smells were all around him, covering him, clogging his nose, filling the air that drifted past his bloodied nose and mouth and eyes.
He tried to move, and from a thousand miles away he felt the fingers of one hand twitch. Was it his right hand? He wasn’t sure. Just fingers, moving.
He coughed once. A short, sharp cough choked with bloody phlegm, and the brief convulsion of the cough ignited each of those burning points into white-hot searing suns that fried his nerve endings. He wanted to scream, to run away from the burning points of agony, but he could not throw his head back to utter the shriek that welled in him; instead his jaw dropped down and a stuttering, gagging growl bubbled out of the back of his throat.
Gradually, gradually, the intense flare of pain subsided, the fires banking back down to the burning points of heat. Then he coughed again, unexpectedly, sharply, a deeper cough that knotted his guts as if he’d just been punched. He doubled forward and the burning pain in the back of his head flared again, but the resistance was immediately gone. As his heavy head sagged forward, his shoulders followed, igniting more of the burning spots again, but with each flare more of his body became unstuck. He crumpled forward and he could see the ground reaching up toward him. He could see the puddle of gasoline and blood and urine that pooled around his shoes. He toppled forward, finally pulling free of the nails that had held him to the trapdoor.
Frank Ferro collapsed onto the porch of Griswold’s house.
The punctured sprayer leaked high octane down his sides and onto the floor, and blood pumped sluggishly from twenty-six deep punctures in his body. The hole in the back of his head glistened red and there were tiny flecks of bone and brain tissue mingled in with the flowing blood.