The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire, page 1
THE MARK OF THE MODERATELY VICIOUS VAMPIRE
Book Four of the Kent Montana Series
By Charles L. Grant
(writing as Lionel Fenn)
A Mystique Press Production
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Ptacek
Original publication by Ace Books – May, 1992
Cover art by Lissanne Lake
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Photo by Jeff Schalles
Charles L. Grant taught English and history at the high school level before becoming a full-time writer in the ’70s. He served for many years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association and in Science Fiction Writers of America.
He was known for his “quiet horror” and for editing the award-winning Shadows anthologies. He received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award in 1987 for life achievement; in 2000, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from HWA. Other awards include two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for writing and editing.
Charlie died from a lengthy illness on September 15, 2006, just three days after his birthday. He lived in Newton, NJ, and was married to writer/editor Kathryn Ptacek for nearly twenty-five years.
Book List
Horror
Novels
Black Oak: Genesis
Black Oak: The Hush of Dark Wings
Black Oak: Winter Knight
Black Oak: Hunting Ground
Black Oak: When the Cold Wind Blows
Fire Mask
For Fear of the Night
In a Dark Dream
Jackals
Millennium Quartet #1: Symphony
Millennium Quartet #2: In the Mood
Millennium Quartet #3: Chariot
Millennium Quartet #4: Riders in the Sky
Night Songs
Raven
Something Stirs
Stunts
The Bloodwind
The Curse
The Grave
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
The Last Call of Mourning
The Nestling
The Pet
The Sound of Midnight
The Tea Party
The Universe of Horror Trilogy
The Soft Whisper of the Dead
The Dark Cry of the Moon
The Long Night of the Grave
Collections
Dialing the Wind
Nightmare Seasons
The Black Carousel
The Orchard
Science Fiction
A Quiet Night of Fear
Ascension
Legion
Ravens of the Moon
The Shadow of Alpha
As “Geoffrey Marsh”
The Fangs of the Hooded Demon
The King of Satan’s Eyes
The Patch of the Odin Soldier
The Tail of the Arabian, Knight
As “Lionel Fenn”
The Quest for the White Duck Trilogy
Blood River Down
Web of Defeat
Agnes Day
The Kent Montana Series
The Really Ugly Thing From Mars
The Reasonably Invisible Man
The Once and Future Thing
The Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire
668: The Neighbor of the Beast
The Diego Series
Once Upon a Time in the East
By The Time I Get To Nashville
Time, the Semi-Final Frontier
The Seven Spears of the W’dch’ck
As “Simon Lake”
The Midnight Place Series
Daughter of Darkness
Death Cycle
He Told Me To
Something’s Watching
As “Felicia Andrews”
Moonwitch
Mountainwitch
Riverrun
Riverwitch
Seacliffe
Silver Huntress
The Velvet Hart
As “Deborah Lewis”
Eve of the Hound
Kirkwood Fires
The Wind at Winter’s End
Voices Out of Time
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THE MARK OF THE MODERATELY VICIOUS VAMPIRE
Table of Contents
Proven fact
I
1
II
1
2
III
1
2
IV
1
2
3
4
5
6
V
1
VI
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
VII
1
2
3
4
VIII
1
THE CREDITS
It is a proven fact that the creatures depicted within this film do not now, nor have they ever existed, to the absolute knowledge of the director and the writer.
It is also a proven fact that, in days of old, absolute knowledge asserted that the world was flat, kings were anointed by the direct hand of God, and Australians spent their whole lives standing on their heads.
Therefore, it is my studied opinion that knowledge is what you make of it, including the doilies on the back of your aunt’s sofa and which are hell to get the hair grease out of.
—Timothy Boggs
(younger brother of Lionel Fenn, who still hasn’t sold his first book but not to worry because he has a real job now, even if he’d rather be writing his second book in the hopes that his first book will sell for a million dollars so that he doesn’t have to write his second book, or one of these stupid introduction things either)
I
Damsel In Distress, With Wolf
1
The small but not provincial about it coastal community of Assyria, in Maine, had never quite seen the like of it before.
Without warning, from all points of the horizon, massive dark clouds rose above the land and crawled up from the sea to swallow the sky and bring the night early. No lightning. No thunder. Not a single touch of wind.
Just the clouds.
And the silence.
All of which ended a few hours later when a pretty vicious bolt of lightning fractured the midnight sky.
Suddenly there were winds that lifted waves so high, it seemed as if the ocean itself were rising from its bed; winds so strong that doors and windows rattled in their frames, trees were stripped of their leaves, and the leaves themselves flew like claw-shaped hail. The rain that followed flooded every street and filled every drain almost instantly, washed gravel from driveways and pounded flowers into the mud, found cracks in roofs and splits in walls and spat into houses before it could be stopped.
The lightning.
A tree in the forest exploded at its touch, another became a torch short-lived in the deluge; a mast on a fishing vessel was shattered to splinters, each splinter an ember that flared briefly in the dark; a massive boulder on the high rocky headland was split in half, and half again; and when it didn’t strike the ground, the lightning seemed to strike the water, tease it, torment it, ripping the black apart and mending it again in seconds.
Nothing moved but the wind and rain.
Nothing, that is, save a solitary boat, exposed and helpless on the water.
Its proud, surf-battered prow, despite the storm’s best attempts to turn it, remained steadfastly aimed toward the distant shoreline, splitting the waves where it couldn’t ride them, riding the waves when it could ever closer to the beach belo
w the town. Thunder snarled at it, the wind bellowed at it, lightning tried and failed a hundred times to strike it, but still the boat moved onward.
A curious boat.
A lonely boat.
It was, in fact, a purple dinghy.
No one worked the oars, which twisted and turned aimlessly; no one sat defiantly at the rudder, which had long ago been wrenched from its mooring; no one stood amidships, bravely bailing with his bare bloody hands and screaming defiant curses at the elements.
It was empty.
Almost.
For, snugly wedged beneath the fore and aft plank seats, was an unadorned oblong crate just over six feet long. The ocean charged over the gunwales, the rain pounded on its top, but the curious cargo did not tremble, neither did it shift.
The beach drew nearer.
The purple dinghy labored on.
Impossibly, the lightning doubled, and doubled again, and the beleaguered craft was driven slightly southward, away from the sodden sandy beach toward a section of the shore where large rocks and small boulders hunched with kelp against the elements.
The left oar snapped and whirled away into the dark.
The dinghy spun crazily across the crest of a wave, and the right oar snapped as well.
A second wave drove the battered vessel closer, a third even more, and a fourth, huge, roaring leviathan mother of a curl lifted it clear of the sand and sent it crashing among the rocks where its prow was severely blunted, its keel split, and the oblong crate burst through the planks and was flung end over end between the two largest boulders.
When it landed, a jagged crack appeared along its top.
When a distant flare of blue-white briefly illuminated the night a few minutes later, the crack had widened.
When thunder finally arrived, the top was gone.
The mysterious crate was empty.
But the beach was not deserted.
Not far from the boulders and rocks and quivering kelp, a shadow made its way erratically across the beach, squishing a little and muttering darkly to itself about the vicissitudes of an ocean voyage. Bad enough it had ruined the only container it had been able to drag halfway across the world; bad enough it would probably catch its metaphorical, not to mention metaphysical, death because its elegant attire was soggy like unto a sponge; and bad enough its stomach was growling since it couldn’t even remember the last time it had eaten a decent meal.
It sneezed.
Its mouth felt funny.
And definitely bad enough that when its container had hit that damn boulder, it had awakened with such a start, and so ready to feed, that its head had burst through the wood and smacked into the rock.
It hoped it could do with one tooth for a while; it hoped that regeneration included a dental plan.
Yes, all that was bad enough.
But what was worse was the storm.
It hated storms.
The shadow wished, just once, it could make an entrance without a lot of bother. Just walk into town, greet the citizens, smile at the children, set up housekeeping in a conveniently deserted mansion, and get to work. No fuss, no mess, and a full set of dry for a change clothes. And no one understanding until it was too late why it had arrived.
Storms, on the other hand, were warnings.
Wherever the shadow went there was always some idiot out there who knew that bad things happened whenever there was an unexpected storm of somewhat biblical proportions. Which sooner or later alerted the populace and made house-hunting a bitch, not to mention the feeding.
Just once.
That’s all it asked.
A spring evening with a full moon, stars, a gentle breeze, things like that.
It sneezed.
It reached the main street and glared at the empty sidewalks, the dark windows.
That was the other thing.
Every time there was a storm people stayed inside, and how the hell was it supposed to do what it was supposed to do when there was no one around to do it to?
Sonofabitch.
A sigh, then, that ripped an awning off a pawn shop, and made a bolt of lightning head for New Hampshire.
It was hungry.
It was pissed.
It was wet.
Any thought of waiting another day to grab a bite vanished in a spurt of not inconsiderable temper.
Out there … somewhere out there … was breakfast, damn- it. There always was. Some full-fledged beanhead who didn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Always. It never failed.
The shadow stretched a little, shook the rain from its cloak, and changed.
And, as it sprinted across the street, it howled…
and sneezed.
Somewhere in Assyria, in Maine, in the dark, a nervous dog began to bay at the unseen moon.
Purity Horton, on the other hand, wasn’t nervous at all; she was, in fact, mad enough to chew nails and spit rust.
First there was that fatheaded but sinewy-thighed Buddy Plimsol, who had taken her out for dinner, drinks, and a few clumsy turns on the dance floor at the MooseRack Dining Salon and Bar, after which he had driven her halfway up Nachey Mountain to the delightful seclusion of Lovers Ledge. Once there, and while a hell of a storm slashed and raged around his windshield-steamed automobile, it became swiftly apparent that he expected willing, nay even eager, compensation for his charming company and witty Down East repartee. He even attempted to twirl his pencil-line mustache.
Now, while Purity was not ordinarily averse to a little slap-and-tickle, giggle-and-grunt, and some acrobatic high kicking in the name of love and neighborly relations, she was always repelled by heavy-handed masculine attitudes of right-of-passage, especially when she was the one expected to pay the tolls. When he persisted and she demurred, when he begged and she refused, when he finally demanded and she blew her stack, he commanded that she give him something to remember her by since she could be damn sure this was the last time he was going to waste his hard-earned money on a woman with a name like that. What he received was an expertly severe boxing of the ears and a deft set of knuckles to his limited personal fortune, after which she received in turn a boot out the door and the smell of his exhaust.
Then there was the mountain itself. Heavily wooded with pine and fir, oak and maple, its not terribly steep eastern slope was broken only by the aforementioned prow-shaped outcropping and a paved, narrow, switchback road that made riding to the summit a torturous affair because of its serpentine twists and unnatural bends, most of which had signs cautioning downward-bound drivers not to go too fast or they’d probably end up in Heaven’s Path cemetery before first light.
Lastly, there was the storm.
Purity didn’t mind the boot from the car, not all that much, because now Buddy would be so thoroughly embroiled in contemporary male guilt that she’d probably be able to castrate him without lifting a finger, and get some nice new jewelry, and another meal, into the bargain; nor did she mind the road, because there were connecting trails between each straightaway which, in daylight, tended to cut several hours off a homeward trip if you didn’t mind a few snags and deadfalls and the occasional curious moose.
She did, however, mind the storm.
After exhausting its initial fury, it had calmed itself slightly, even as she trudged through blowing leaves and twigs, lightning spitting at the distant water, thunder echoing through the flanking hills, the distinct scent of additional rain making her shiver and pull her pearl-studded cardigan closer about her shoulders. She hated the rain. It messed her hair, made the streets smell funny, and this time of year raised a mist from the ground that looked all too much like bewildered ghosts looking for a way to get back to their graves.
The wind blew harder.
The trees, now and again leaping into view on the heels of flaring lightning, were too dark, too close together, too tall and dark for comfort.
Thunder rolled off the ocean on the backs of huge breakers. Making her jump, making her angry because she had jumped, making her break into a cautious, angry trot fueled by the idea that as soon as she reached bottom, she would go straight back to the Dining Salon and take Buddy’s nose off with the ice tongs her father kept behind the bar.
But the anger lasted only until she heard the wolf.
At first she didn’t believe it. A stray dog from town maybe, pretending to be a wolf, but certainly not the real thing. There were never wolves in the forest. Hadn’t been for ages. In fact, the last wolf she had ever heard of had last been seen thirty years ago, and that had turned out to be an abandoned German shepherd which had, upon closer investigation, turned out to be nothing more than an extremely hairy Berlin tourist with no English and a lousy sense of humor.
