Tales of the Slayer

  They were uncertain of her. They were wary of her. Harly was wary of her.

  When little Betts Mullins shrieked and pointed her way in fear, Mollie’s heart fell away. But from the direction of the toolshed came Ethan’s still croaky voice. “What the bloody—” She whirled around, realizing the pointing wasn’t for her at all and terrified at the thought of the demon climbing to its feet behind her.

  No demon. Instead, a wraithlike hant, all wispy and wavering murk—until, even as Mollie gaped, the thing’s facial features jumped into clear, hard definition.

  As one, the gathering gasped. Ethan eased up behind Mollie and with leftover harshness whispered, “They know him. Who—?”

  Someone else answered, not even knowing the question had been posed. “Asa Peavey! Mean as a skunk even from the grave!”

  “Preacher Peavey’s grandfather,” Mollie added in a murmur, suddenly more trusting of the only body here—stranger or no—who hadn’t eyed her so doubtfully. “He passed before I was born, but I hear tell his heart weren’t nothing but mean.”

  Even now, the hant’s visage was distorted with anger; it gave a wordless howl of rage that ended, to Molly’s ears, in something like a sob. “You’ve kilt it!” the hant moaned, as much anguish as anger as it looked down upon the mottly heap of dead demon. “I wandered so long before I found it, and you’ve kilt it!” As it looked up, its features wavered. When they solidified again, its expression had changed—become crafty and determined. “I’ll take one of you, then. I’ll by-damn take what I need!”

  A high, scared-to-thin woman’s voice said, “She done it! Not us!” and though Molly whirled to see who had betrayed her, she found them all looking at her—and her family full of worry, keeping silence. Half convinced.

  Ethan stepped up beside Molly—not like Harly, tall and broad shouldered and full of strength—but with a kind of confidence that made her desperately glad for the company. “What,” he said with perfect calm, “is it that you need?”

  “What I never had,” the hant said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “Them things I never felt. All them high feelin’s, good and bad. All I got on my own is mad and I’m wicked tired of mad.”

  “Ah,” said Ethan, his matter-of-fact tone startling her into taking her gaze from the hant and latching it onto him. He’d resettled his cap, she saw, and he kept a thoughtful look about his fox-narrow features. “Classic situation, really,” he said to Mollie, as if they were the only two there with the hant. “An angry ghost who felt little else in life, now doomed to go hunting for what he missed when he was alive. I suggest you all forgive him.”

  Dumbfounded, Mollie just said, “Do what?”

  “If he was an angry man, he left a lot of people angry at him, feelings they passed down to their children. And if he wasn’t still blocking those other emotions, he’d feel them for himself. Forgive him, and he can feel his own feelings instead of hunting down weddings and stealing joy.”

  “Well, ain’t you the smart one,” Mollie muttered, confounded by the man all over again.

  Ethan gave her a rakish grin, one that vanished as he turned to the gathering. “Forgive him!”

  As one, they stared back in stubborn resentment. The hant laughed. Anger-tinged, knowing laughter. “I’ll take what I want, be it bodies to use or feelin’s to have,” he said. “I always had to.” “Ain’t that the truth!” Granny Lil shouted at him. “You was a bastid!”

  “No!” Mollie said. “When he uses me up, what do you think he’ll do? Go away, nice and quiet?”

  “He’ll come for someone else,” Ethan said, quite sensibly. “And another, and another. He’ll haunt this community until there’s no one left to haunt. But now—look at him now. What a pathetic excuse for a man he is. What a miserable man he must have been! Who among you would choose to live without love? Forgive him, and let him go.” But then he made a wry bit of a face, scratching up under his hatband at the ear. Mollies hand print still stained his throat. “Of course, it won’t work unless you mean it.”

  “Miserable!” the hant said; Mollie would have said he’d sputtered, if he’d only had lips to do it with. “Miserable! I had a good farm!”

  “You near starved every winter,” Harly’s daddy observed.

  “I had a family!”

  “They hated you,” spat Granny Lil.

  “I had a long life!”

  “And you took it out on every one of us who was alive to bear it,” said Uncle Erd, arguably the oldest man in Pike County. “You ain’t worth hating, you was so miserable. I forgive you, and you’re welcome to it.”

  The ghost’s marbled features wavered into a stricken expression. “You can’t do that! I helped this demon kill people!”

  Granny Lil said, “Only ‘cause you was too miserable to do it your own self.” She scratched under her bosom in an unself-conscious gesture and said, “I reckon I don’t want to bear the burden of hatin’ you anymore.”

  Harly stepped up beside Mollie; she felt a little leap of hope come in to erase the despair she’d felt at his earlier wary expression. “I’ve heared tales of you all my life,” he said to Asa Peavey’s hant. “I guess they’re something to marvel at, that a man so mean as you lived in this world. I thank you for those tales.”

  It was the final moment to free them all—Mollie’s neighbors and kin alike. In a babble of overlapping shouts, they forgave the hant that had been Asa Peavey.

  The hant gave a screeching wail and with a final pop! that Mollie felt inside her ears, he disappeared.

  After a startlingly awkward silence full of people looking at Mollie, the assembled kin and neighbors quietly left, gathering the two dead young men and slipping away with muttered goodbyes, as if some silent voice had told them there would be no wedding here today . . . or ever.

  Mollie turned to Harly. Tall, broad shouldered, straightforward Harly. Harly who wanted a normal mountain life—and a normal wife. Harly with the wariness back in his face, and sadness in his eyes. He looked at her; he looked at the demon—that which had killed so many and now lay slain by her hand. He knew as well as she that her life had changed forever, and it showed on his face; Mollie felt it deep, in that same place that sent her dreams.

  Only the dreams had never hurt so much, never felt so desperate.

  Harly opened his mouth to say something; he shook his head instead. And then he turned and walked away.

  Mollie turned her hands over, checking them again for some sign of the battle they’d won.

  The old gash on her palm wasn’t even pink anymore.

  “Everything I ever wanted,” she said, dazed. “Everything I planned for. My life . . . It’s all changed.” Right in this moment. Or maybe when she’d first felt the tingle of her own blood, or when Lonnie dropped the pitchfork . . . or when Harly walked away. “It won’t never be the same.”

  Ethan took her strong hands in his, hesitated, and gave a firm shake of his head.

  “No, it won’t,” he said. “You’re the Slayer.”

  She didn’t know what it meant. But she knew, somehow, that he was right. And she knew—somehow—he would be there with her through it all.

  Silent Screams

  Mel Odom

  MUNICH, GERMANY, NOVEMBER 9,1923

  How does one sum up one’s life if that one is convinced that life may end violently at the hands of a monster in only moments?

  Does one talk about the noble things one has done, or is that too self-aggrandizing? Or should that one talk about the failings that one has experienced while trying to perform those

  Damn! I can’t even conduct myself properly while filling out this journal entry. Now I’ve gone and stained these pages with errant ink. Not that it would hardly matter.

  This feather I’ve taken from a dead woman’s hat hardly makes a precision writing instrument. I managed to cut a nib for it with the small Swiss-made folding knife I’ve learned to carry over the years. You won’t find the fine penmanship I’d prided myself on for so many year
s on the final pages of this journal.

  And they will be the final pages. Of that, I am very certain.

  I look at the writing that covers these pages and am appalled. When I was teaching primary school in Berlin I would never have accepted such work from a student. My ink-stained fingerprints are all over these pages because I cannot sit still. Every small noise scares me because I keep imagining it to be the shifting inside one of the coffins of this mausoleum.

  At present, there are nearly two dozen coffins around me. I don’t know how many generations of Kesslers reside in this place. But I do know that I’m the only one that has been interred alive in this place. However, that shall be soon corrected when it wakes.

  My tears cause some of the stains on these pages. It shames me to admit that, but it is true. I know there are men—and even young girls—who can meet their Maker with calm acceptance.

  I am not one of them.

  My name is Friedrich Lichtermann. I only now realized that whoever finds my body may not recognize me. My captors took pains to strip my regular journal from me. God, when I think of the things that they can learn about the Council from what I have written down over the years it makes me ill.

  My trainer told me in the beginning that this might happen, that the journal I so dutifully kept might not end up in the hands for which it had been intended. Our enemies are great and powerful. I’d been told that ever since the Council had admitted me for training, but until I met them face-to-face, I never really knew the evil that they were capable of.

  Oh God, how can I be so lax in the details you—who have found these papers—will need to know to ensure that they get into the right hands? And, trust me, you’ll be better served to get these papers to the proper authorities posthaste. If you do not, some of the foul fiends that arranged my death will arrange yours as well.

  I am a Watcher, put to task by the Watchers Council to oversee the training of a young girl who may one day become the Vampire Slayer. Though many girls may have the skills to become a Slayer, only a few are chosen. My job has been to train and educate the young girl in my charge so that she might be ready for the mantle of the Slayer.

  That was my assignment here in Munich. The potential Slayer that I was given charge of was named Britta Kessler. After instructing her the last two years and having nothing happen, I had begun to lose hope that Britta would ever become the Slayer.

  Of course, some of my contemporaries would say that such hopes on my part would be very ghoulish. You see, the only way a young girl becomes the Slayer is when her predecessor is slain by one of the foul creatures she was born and trained to hunt.

  Slayers never get to live out the years allotted to normal woman.

  God, that damned scratching of the rats is near enough to drive me insane. I can see them in the shadows watching me. Even in the dim light of the candles I’m working by on top of this stone tomb, I can see their fears and hungry eyes glowing red and orange. Perhaps they can smell my fear, or perhaps they can smell the blood that still stains my clothing and my hands.

  Let me begin at the beginning where I now see I should have begun in the first place. There are so many things to tell about what has happened, so many things the Watchers Council will want to know.

  And if you’re not a believer in the foul fiends that have done for me, then I know you can only take this last note as the final diatribe of a stark-raving madman. I promise you that it would be better for you and your families if I were a lunatic who howls at the moon.

  * * *

  The members of the Kessler household began this day—or, more correctly, yesterday—with a large breakfast in the dining room, as they normally did. As usual I, too, was in attendance.

  Herr Kessler sat at the head of the table and was in rare good humor. Perhaps you know of Herr Kessler. He is one of the most influential among the German industrialists that rose from the bloodbath that had been the Great War.

  I, myself, served as a motorcycle messenger during the war. Occasionally Herr Kessler and I would share a stout drink in his den and talk of the things we had seen during that terrible conflict. I was only in my early twenties during that time.

  I served my country as best I could, but I never really understood, or cared to learn, the full ramifications of the politics behind the war. One thing I’ve learned about wars, they are generally fought by people trying to take something from other people who are trying just as desperately to hang on to whatever it is the first people want.

  Herr Kessler was in his late thirties and a family man with much more at risk than I. Miraculously, he and I both made it through the war intact. But the instances of our survival were enough to warrant that occasional drink shared by two men who had learned to appreciate being alive.

  I think that appreciation for life was what allowed Herr Kessler to be so close to his six children. He genuinely enjoyed them. Fräu Kessler ended up being the sterner disciplinarian between the two of them, but you would never doubt her love for those children either.

  Britta was the oldest at seventeen. She inherited her father’s red hair and freckles as well as his tall and slender build and flashing green eyes. She had striking features, and I’ve seen several boys her age turn their heads to watch her as she passed by. She was such an innocent that she barely even kept track of such notice, and if her mother were to point it out—as Fräu Kessler sometimes did because she considered her daughter to be of marrying age—Britta’s face would turn scarlet.

  I sat to Herr Kessler’s right, as was the custom. The three older boys sat to my right, all of them giggling and whispering among themselves as they usually did unless their father was in one of his sour moods, which he seldom had. All of the boys had their mother’s blond hair and blue eyes.

  Britta sat across the table from me to her father’s immediate left. Her younger sister and youngest brother sat on her side of the table as well. The youngest boy was only three and tried to entertain us with his obnoxious eating habits. The Kessler family always reacted in mock horror at his antics.

  The telegram came while we were at breakfast. Klaus, the butler, brought it to me on a silver plate, saying a messenger had dropped it off only moments ago, insisting that I see it as soon as possible, for it was marked Urgent.

  I thanked Klaus, then—curious—I opened the telegram. Only one short sentence greeted my eyes, but it changed my whole world.

  From this moment on, Herr Lichtermann, always be at your best.

  It was not signed. There was no need. I knew immediately that it had come from the Watchers Council, and I knew what it meant for Britta, though I had seen no sign of the changes in her. Does any Watcher ever know that he is suddenly watching the Slayer until that moment is announced to him? You would think that such a drastic change in his charge would be immediately noticeable. But I had seen nothing, and I felt very much discomfited by the idea.

  “Is it bad news then, Herr Lichtermann?” Herr Kessler asked politely.

  “No,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly, for I saw the ashen look that suddenly manifested on Britta’s features. “Just a polite reminder about some new business.”

  “Father,” Britta gasped, still overcome by the truth she only suspected, “may I be excused from the table?”

  “Britta,” Herr Kessler asked in consternation, “what is the matter?”

  “I think I’m going to be sick.” Britta covered her mouth with a hand.

  I grew immediately concerned myself. What if her father suddenly suspected that the telegram I had received was the reason for Britta’s sudden sickness? As for myself, I didn’t know what to think. Britta and I had discussed on occasion the probability that she would become the Slayer. It was remote at best, I told her. There were plenty of girls who were being trained. But she had the potential, and we couldn’t allow that to be ignored.

  From my studies as a Watcher, I knew that upon being notified that she was the new Slayer, a Slayer-in-waiting could experience a gamut of e
motions. Some girls relished the mystical appointment, while others lamented the fact that their lives—and, indeed, also their deaths—would never be the same. Becoming the Slayer was a cruel reward at most. But it was a task that Britta had known she might someday have to undertake. Both our fates were sealed with that one telegram.

  “Of course,” Herr Kessler agreed, somewhat puzzled in his concern.

  Britta threw her napkin onto the table and ran from the room.

  The other children immediately started discussing among themselves exactly what kind of sickness might have assailed poor Britta. Fräu Kessler excused herself as well and went after her oldest daughter.

  “It’s these damned sicknesses,” Herr Kessler said irritably. “They seem to hang on longer and longer after each winter.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” I said to reassure him, for he did worry so much about his children. I think it had to do with some of the things he saw in the war, some of the things he had still never discussed with me, although we had talked about the war in some detail. I, too, had my horrors that I never shared with him. However, I’ve seen the haunted looks men get on their faces when they remember the things they’ve seen in combat. The expression Herr Kessler had on his face was one such haunted look.

  “Still, even if it is only a transitory thing, it could be a month before it passes completely through this household. Then what’ll we have but a bunch of runny noses and coughing at all hours of the night. It’s pure hell on earth for a man who has to work for a living.”

  Although his days as a common laborer had been gone for fifteen years and more, except for his service in the German military, Herr Kessler worked six days a week most weeks and put in long days to make his company grow. Since the war, there were a lot of new opportunities for a man with vision and a willingness to work. At the same time, the German economy was very unstable.