The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft
After Father Mancuso left, Lucy went upstairs and hurriedly packed a bag, blindly grabbing armfuls of hers and Lincoln's clothes and shoving them in. Her face was a strained mask of worry and her hands shook as she pulled the zipper closed. She hefted the bag over her shoulder and went into Lugosi's room - the bed was a tangle of sheets and clothes littered the floor, left where they fell. Keeping his room a mess wasn't like him; he was usually neat and organized to the point of OCD. That he left it this way turned Lucy's stomach because it clearly showed how greatly this...thing...was affecting him.
Dropping the bag onto the bed, the opened it and snatched as many articles of clothing from the floor as she could find: A pair of pants, two shirts, underwear, and three socks. She jammed them in, closed it, and rushed out into the hall, her footsteps echoing eerily off the shadow-covered walls. At the top of the stairs, she paused. Was there anything else she needed? She ran through a mental checklist but gave up halfway through and pounded down the steps. Getting the hell out of this house was the most important thing right now.
In the foyer, she grabbed her purse from the end table and glanced over her shoulder: The sun-bathed living room stood empty, looking normal, even peaceful. If it wasn't for the thick tension in the air, she might have been able to convince herself that she was going crazy and that all of the things that had happened over the past twenty-four hours were a figment of her imagination.
Keen loss flooded her as she studied the scene - this was supposed to be hers and Lincoln's forever home; they were going to live here, love here, and grow old here. They were going to have a big, bright, affectionate golden retriever and one day, far in the future, their grandchildren were going to build forts out of blankets and chairs in the living room. None of that would come to pass, however, because their happy home was infected with a disease as old as time: Evil.
She didn't know what kind of evil it was, and she didn't care.; her family was in danger, and protecting them was all that mattered to her. As a younger woman she may have wanted to stay and fight, the way she and Lincoln fought evil before, but she was older now, and a mother. Lugosi was the most precious thing in her life, and even the faintest possibility of him being harmed made her sick; she didn't care about the house, or whatever resided in it, she just wanted her son safe.
Turning away, she went to the door and tried the handle.
Stuck.
Frowning, she jiggled it, but it wouldn't budge. Panic rose in her and she pounded her fist against the frame.
It didn't want her to leave.
That knowledge came from seemingly nowhere, but she did not doubt or question it. The thing in the basement, whatever it may be, was trying to keep her here. She stepped back from the door, heart throbbing in fear, and looked frantically around for something she could use, her eyes falling on the coat rack. She unslung her bag and purse, crossed to it, and removed one of the detachable arms - it was heavy in her hand. She went to the window, gripped the arm tight, and brought it around in a deadly arc. It hit dead center, but the glass didn't shatter, didn't even crack. She drew back and smashed it again, and again, grunts of exertion flying from her lips with every blow.
Nothing.
Damn it.
Terror was beginning to claw at her and, panting, she threw the arm aside and raked her fingers through her hair. Maybe -
A voice spoke behind her, low and grating, and her body went rigid.. "Mom?"
Lugosi?
She turned...and her heart dropped.
Lugosi stood in front of her with his shoulders slumped and his arms dangling limply at his sides. The left side of his face was a ruined mess, jagged bits of bone poking through tattered, bloody skin. Chunky bits of brain fell from a wound on his temple and plopped wetly on the floor. His brow angled down in a dark V, and his black, soulless eyes burned with hateful intensity. Her blood turned to ice water and her hand fluttered to her mouth.
Rolling his neck and oozing more brains from his shattered cranium, Lugosi took a shambling step forward, and her heart spasmed. She uttered a sharp yelp and fell back against the door. "Why'd you let them get me?" he asked, hurt and accusation in his voice. "Why did you let me die?"
Those words ripped into her like shrapnel and hot tears sprang to her eyes. She knew it wasn't him, but that didn't stem the horror surging in her breast. "Y-You're not Lugosi," she stammered through her fingers.
The thing pretending to be her son grinned sadistically and took another step forward. A shaft of light falling through the window behind her touched it, and it shimmered like a wind-swept mirage. "I will be," it said ominously. "He's going to die and so is your brother." It laughed, and Lucy's paralysis broke. Pressing her back to the wall, she edged slowly toward the living room archway. The thing turned to follow her with its soulless eyes. "You're all going to die," it said, its voice changing, lower, deeper.
She backed into the living room, her trembling hand clutching the cross, whether for protection or comfort she didn't know. Lugosi grew dim, then vanished, the sound of his horrible laughter lingering in her head.
Warmth, like the kiss of the sun, fell upon her shoulder, and she whipped around with a cry of alarm. John Carver, the vampire she and Lincoln battled all those years ago, favored her with a leering simper. She flashed back to the last time she saw him, reeling wildly and screaming in pain amidst the flames of a burning nightmare. He was tall then, but he was taller now, broader too, looming over her like a mighty oak. His gray skin clung tightly to his skull and his pale blue eyes regarded her with a hunger akin to sexual desire. He wore a wool peacoat over a Victorian era vest, a wide, red cravat around his throat, and held a walking stick in one hand...she didn't remember him having one in life, but he did now.
"Lucy," he said, glimpses of his fangs visible as he spoke, "you've grown more beautiful with age." His tone, a low growl, sent shivers down her spine, and the way his eyes caressed her made her skin crawl.
"You're not real," she blurted and stepped warily back. It was trying to scare her, throwing visions of the most awful things hiding in the recesses of her mind - all the fears she kept locked away out of sight. She swallowed hard and steeled her resolve. She wasn't going to give it her energy. She wouldn't allow it to feed on her.
Carver chuckled in the back of his throat and came forward. Lucy's heart leapt, but instead of running or facing the apparition down, she turned her back on it and started for the kitchen, her mind racing. She had to break its hold just long enough for her to get away, but how?
In the kitchen, she spared a glance over her shoulder. Carver was gone, in his place The Man With No Name lifted his hand and wiggled his fingers, a gleaming, toothy smile glinting from the shadows of his face. He wore a dusty fedora and a long brown trench coat over a ratty gray sweater. "I got something for you," he said and reached into his coat. Lucy turned her head and crossed to the counter, not knowing where to go or what to do, just needing time to think, think, hatch a plan, think. She splayed her hands on the edge and bowed her head. The doors and windows were sealed and something told her that no matter what she tried, the thing would foil her.
"Here," The Man With No Name said from directly behind her. He laid something on the counter with a weighty clunk, and she couldn't stop her eyes from going to it.
A .38 snub nose revolver.
When he spoke again, his rank breath puffed hotly against the side of her neck. "Put it in your mouth...and pull the trigger."
She looked at the gun...if she squinted, she could see through it, as though it were a ghost.
"I told you...I don't want anything from you."
He laughed. "Everyone wants something."
Lucy pressed her hand to her forehead, closed her eyes, and clenched her teeth. GO AWAY! she screamed in her mind, and an electric zap jolted her brain, making her jump. The Man With No Name gasped in pain, then a gust of stale, cemetery wind washed over her, signifying his passage. She looked over her shoulder, and the kitchen stood empty.
She knew the feeling of being mentally cased by phantom fingers the way she was yesterday...and she also knew the feeling of explusing psychic energy even though she had not felt it since she was a girl. Her brain crackled with the electric sensation of power and thoughts that were not her own slithered through her mind. Different… not like the others...strong. There was something profoundly strange about them - their shape, their texture, the way they felt. Like they didn't belong. That was an odd way to put it, but that's how they felt, fundamentally…
...alien.
She closed her eyes. Usually visually metaphors helped, and presently she focused on those thoughts, imagining herself reaching out and literally grabbing one in the form of a firefly. When she closed her hand around it, a vision filled the world. Dense jungle, starry skies, a ball of fire streaking through the heavens, getting brighter as it came closer and closer to earth. It sailed over the treetops with a thunderous roar and slammed into the ground, exploding in a flash of brilliance. Something grabbed her and dragged her forward, and as she watched, a thousand shrieking things resembling leeches swarmed out from the fire and burrowed into the ground.
The scene jumped ahead. Wigwams and wood fires sprang up along the lake; hunter-gatherers from the north. They didn't stay long; the land was cursed and ghosts walked the woods at night. The Indians shunned the land, and so, too, did the first white settlers. Over time, the legends were either forgotten or dismissed as superstition, and people came, but like the Ojibwe before them, they did not remain.
Lucy blinked, and a house now stood where there had once been open field, a Dutch Colonial with a gambrel roof, dormers, and a bay window. Inside, a man in an old fashioned suit stood in the living room, hunched over and panting, his face speckled with blood and an ax clutched in his hands. Body parts littered the floor, and voices swirled in his fevered mind. She could just make them out if she listened hard enough. Madman...murderer...look what you did...you'll go to the gallows. She felt the man's fear, felt it being slowly drained from him like soda through a straw.
Dropping the ax, he went into the attic, threw a length of rope over an exposed rafter, and hanged himself.
Darkness stole across her eyes, then, in a flash, she saw herself standing at her counter, her head bowed. This other Lucy turned; blood smeared her lips and long, wicked fangs overhung her bottom lip.
With a start, she came back to the present. Voices chattering endlessly in her skull.
They sounded afraid.
She didn't know how, but she was draining their energy the way they drained everyone else's, soaking it up like a sponge and growing more powerful by the minute. She pushed away from the sink, went to the back door, and tried the handle.
It turned easily.
Leave...leave...leave…
Its plan, she knew in an instant, was to keep her here and siphon her mental energy, then to do the same thing to Lincoln and Lugosi. It knew she was stronger than the average person, but it underestimated how strong. It wanted her metaphorical blood because it was richer and more sustaining, and it let that single-minded frenzy blind it. Only now, after she'd been unconsciously leeching off of it for a while, did it realize, and now, it was scared of her.
Leave…
She hesitated, then closed the door. She was going to end this. She turned, and a voice so loud it made her stagger exploded in the center of her skull.
COME HOME NOW HELP US GOD PLEASE!
She saw Lincoln spring to his feet and rush out of the office, his eyes clouded and dazed. He was completely in its thrall now.
KILL LUCY KILL LUCY KILL LUCY.
Ignoring the frantic voices, she went into the living room and grabbed the gas can from its spot by the fireplace. Back in the kitchen, she opened the junk drawer and took out a long grill lighter. She turned, and froze.
Her mother, clad in a pink button up blouse and looking the way she had when Lucy was a teenager, blonde hair beginning to gray and face starting to wrinkle, stood between her and the basement door, arms at her sides and features twisted in seething hatred.
"You're disgusting," she spat.
When Mom and Dad found out about her and Lincoln, they were both upset, but Mom more so than Dad. Twice before she moved in with Lincoln, Mom sat her down and tried to talk some sense into her. She never said outright that hers and Lincoln's relationship was disgusting, but Lucy could tell from the way she looked at her that she did, and knowing that her own mother thought she was repulsive bothered her far more deeply than she ever admitted, even to Lincoln.
Leaning slightly forward, Mom narrowed her eyes to reptilian slits. "You make me sick."
Those words cut Lucy even though she knew that the thing was not really her mother. "You aren't Mom," she said flatly, "go away."
With that, she walked through the apparition as though it were a puff of smoke. "You're a whore and your son should have died in the womb," Mom said.
Lucy ignored her and tried the basement door.
The handle wouldn't turn.
"Open," she commanded, but nothing happened.
Gripping it tight, she closed her eyes and summoned all the energy she could. A scream filled her head and the door flew open, slamming against the wall. "Stop this right now," Mom said, alarm creeping into her voice.
Lucy went down the stairs; she did not stop when John Carver and The Man With No Name appeared side by side at the bottom. "Turn around or we'll kill Lugosi," Carver warned. His voice was different than before, toneless, wooden; the thing was faltering, unable to keep up the illusion in its own fear.
She walked through them and went to the wall. A large section of stones was missing and a shallow tunnel had been carved into the soft earth behind it. She uncapped the can but froze when Lugosi's upper half popped from the hole like a Jack-in-the-box, his face pale and splattered with blood. His lips hung in tatters and one eye seeped yellow cemetery pus down his sunken cheek. Lucy's throat constricted, and even though it was only a mirage, she couldn't look at it; she forced her gaze to her feet, her fingers curling around the can's handle.
"Mom, why didn't you stop?" he asked flatly. It wasn't him speaking and she never in a million years would have mistaken it for his voice; the shadow might look like him, but it didn't sound like him.
She took a deep, steadying breath. "You're not my son. Go away."
A stale gust of wind blew over her, and when she looked up, the apparition was gone.
"You're totes gross."
Lucy looked over her shoulder as Leni stepped from the shadows. Her face was twisted in hatred and her hands balled into fists. She looked as she did when she was twenty except for one key detail: Her hair was red. Lucy favored her with a blank stare. "Leni's a blonde," she said and turned to the hole.
At a glance, it was three feet deep, roots sticking out of earthen walls like gnarled fingers from a grave. Putrid air rushed out from an indeterminable source and jammed itself into her nostrils. She closed her eyes and saw them, a million black, slimy things nestling in the soil like cancer cells in a body. Their panicked chattering filled her head. They were speaking to each other, she realized, in whatever passed for a language among them, their slick bodies writhing in fear, reminding her of seething maggots in a bowl.
"We're very old, Lucy."
Her father stood next to her, hands on his hips and eyes pointed unwaveringly at the trench. He wore a pink blouse and brown slacks, an outfit she associated with her mother. The thing was jumbling her memories, plucking them out with shaking hands and getting sloppy, working with the careless rush of something scrambling to preserve itself. Without turning, he continued, "There are billions of us in the stars, enough to overrun your planet in a matter of days. We don't want that, though." He turned to her, and the look of malevolent hunger in his eyes made her shiver. "We like it here...we like people. But if you don't stop, we'll call for help, and you world will crumble."
It was lying.
Lucy didn't know how she knew - call it psychic intuition - but she did. Whatever they were, they didn't come here on purpose, and something told her that they couldn't have if they wanted to. They were like diseased spores blowing on the wind, drifting where ever time and happenstance took them, seeding planets and sucking up what energy they could.
"I don't believe you," she said. She upended the can and splashed gasoline into the hole, its astringent odor choking the air.
"You have to dig if you want to get us," The Man With No Name said from behind her.
"No, I don't," Lucy said. She sparked the lighter and touched it to the gas; flames caught with a whump and crackled lowly. She threw the lighter away and took a step back.
HURRY HELP HURRY HURRY HURRY.
She called up a vision of Lincoln; he was doing 90 miles per hour down Route 10, five miles from home.
Holding her hands up, palms facing out, Lucy took a deep breath and strained as hard as she could. Her mind flashed, and the fire was sucked into the ground, racing through an ancient network of tunnels. Wordless howls of rage and agony filled her head, and she basked in it like a woman in gentle spring rain. The three phantoms in the basement all winked out of existence, and the screams tapered off as the creatures from outer space were consumed in the conflaguaration.
At Royal County High, the voices that had been plaguing Lugosi Loud stopped as if cut off by a switch, and he lifted his head from his hands, a tentatively hopeful expression on his face.
Lincoln came awake just as he parked in front of the house. His heart slammed and adrenaline surged through his veins. He could not remember the journey home or anything else for that matter. He started to get out but stopped when his phone rang.
It was his boss.
"Hello?"
"Loud, get your ass back here or you're fired."
Lincoln's heart dropped into his stomach. "Y-Yes, sir."
Inside, Lucy returned the cap to the gas can and went back upstairs. At the sink, she closed her eyes and searched the darkness, but it, like her new home, was empty. The evil had been vanquished.
She smiled.
Lugosi slipped his hand into Ramona's and threaded their fingers together. For the first time in days, he felt...normal...better than normal, actually.
They were moving side-by-side along the sidewalk; the afternoon light was growing weak and the air chilly. Ramona shivered when a gust of wind blew over them, and, letting go of her hand, Lugosi put his arm around her shoulder and drew her close. She melted into him and rested her head on his shoulder, one arm hugging his waist.
As if reading his mind, she said, "What was that you said yesterday about your house being haunted?"
Lugosi snickered. Maybe she did read his mind. Ramona, he thought, was more than met the eye, and so, too, was he. At lunch, they stared at each other across the table and carried an entire conversation without moving their lips. He felt her emotions, and she felt his as well. He'd always been sensitive and perceptive, but this was deeper, stronger; parapsychological bullshit that, he supposed, wasn't bullshit after all.
If he was right, then they were feeding off of one another, both getting stronger. Where that would lead, he didn't know. Maybe one day they'd be able to levitate things just by looking at them, or maybe he was wrong completely and they were both crazy.
Who knew?
And who cared? The soft warmth of her body against his felt good and made his heart pleasantly race. That was all that mattered.
"I don't know," he said honestly, "I thought I was going crazy but…"
"...you aren't?"
He shrugged. "Truth be told, I don't know. I don't know anything anymore."
"Did you ever know anything to begin with?" she asked teasingly.
Lugosi thought and shook his head. "Nah, I don't know shit."
That made her laugh, and the musical sound of her laughter made him laugh.
Then they kissed each other, and a crisp vision of the future passed between them: Many, many, many more kisses. Maybe a year's worth, maybe a lifetime's - neither knew and neither cared, for right now, everything was perfect.
Holding hands again, they strolled into the sunset.
I hope this ending doesn't disappoint anyone. I got three quarters of the way through this story and just...I don't know, hit a wall. Finishing it was extremely hard. I think the alien vampire things sucked a bunch of my energy out and I haven't gotten it back since.