Richard Laymon: The Traveling Vampire Show

As it turns out, some Boy Scouts had hiked into the field and found Tommy Janks sitting by a campfire. He was a deaf mute, so he never heard them coming. They caught him with a gob of meat on the end of a stick. He was roasting it over the fire. It turned out to be the heart of one of the missing girls.

Must’ve been awful, walking into a scene like that.

Those Boy Scouts became instant heroes. We envied them, hated them, and longed to be their friends. Not because they captured Tommy Janks (my dad did that), but because they got to see him cooking that heart over the fire. Those scouts were legends in their own time.

One of them, years later, ended up committing suicide and another…

That’s another story. I’ll stick to this one.

After my dad busted Tommy, he led a crew out to the field and they found the remains of twenty-three bodies buried there. Six belonged to the girls who’d disappeared that summer. The rest… they’d been there longer. Some, for maybe five years. Others, for more like twenty or thirty. I’ve heard that several of them might’ve been in the ground for a hundred years.

The field apparently hadn’t been a cemetery, though; nobody found signs of any grave markers or caskets. There were just a bunch of bodies—a lot of them in pieces—tossed into holes.

Tommy Janks got himself fried in the electric chair.

The clearing got itself called Janks Field.

There hadn’t been a road to Janks Field, dirt or otherwise, at the time Tommy got caught cooking up the girl’s heart. But Dad managed to drive in with his Jeep. He made the first tire tracks into that awful place. By the time the bodies and bones had been removed and all the investigations were over, the tracks were worn in. And people have been driving out to Janks Field ever since.

First, it was to gawk at where all those bodies had been found.

Before long, though, teens from Grandville and other nearby towns realized that the field was perfect for making out. At least if you and your girl had the guts to drive in there at night.

Not only did people go there to park, but some pretty wild parties went on sometimes. A lot of booze and fights and sex. That’s what we heard, anyway.

We also heard rumors of witches and so on meeting at Janks Field to practice “black magic.” They supposedly had naked orgies and performed sacrifices.

I sometimes thought it’d be pretty cool if they were sacrificing humans out there. I imagined bonfires, drums, nude and beautiful and sweaty girls leaping wildly around, chanting and waving knives. And a lovely, naked virgin tied to an altar, her body shiny with sweat, terror in her eyes as she waited to be sliced open in a blood sacrifice to the forces of darkness.

The whole notion really turned me on.

Turned on Rusty, too.

We used to talk about that sort of thing in hushed, excited voices. Not in front of Slim, though. I couldn’t have said any of that stuff with Slim listening. But also we figured, being a girl herself, she might not want to hang out with us if she knew we had fantasies like that.

Whenever I imagined the Janks Field witch orgies, I always pictured Slim as the virgin tied to the altar. (I didn’t mention that part to Rusty or anyone else.) Slim never got sacrificed because I came to her rescue in the nick of time and cut her free.

I don’t know if any humans actually were sacrificed at Janks Field back in those days. It was fun to think about, though: sexy and romantic and exciting. Whereas the sacrifice of animals, which apparently was going on, just seemed plain disgusting to us.

The animal sacrifices disgusted and worried just about everyone. For one thing, pets were disappearing. For another, people going to Janks Field for make-out sessions or wild parties didn’t appreciate tripping over the dismembered remains of Rover or Kitty. Also, they must’ve been worried that they might be next.

Something had to be done about Janks Field. Since it was outside the city limits of Grandville, the county council chose to deal with it. They tried to solve the problem by installing a chain-link fence around the field.

The fence remained intact for about a week.

But then a concerned citizen named Fargus Durge entered the picture. He said, “You don’t have orgies and pagan sacrifices going on in the town squares of Grandville or Bixton or Clarksburg, do you?” Everyone agreed on that. “Well, what’s the difference between the town squares and Janks Field? The squares’re in the middle of town, that’s what. Whereas Janks Field, it’s all by itself out there in the middle of nowhere. It’s isolated! That’s how come it’s a magnet for every teenage hoodlum, weirdo, malcontent, deviate, sadist, satanist and sex-fiend in the county.”

His solution?

Make Janks Field less isolated by improving access to it and making it a center of legitimate activity.

The council not only saw his point, but provided some funding and put Fargus in charge.

They threw enough money at the problem to bring in a bulldozer and lay a dirt road where there’d only been tire tracks before. They also provided funds for a modest “stadium” in the middle of Janks Field.

The stadium, Fargus’s brainchild, consisted of high bleachers on both sides of an arena.

A very small arena.

The county ran electricity in and put up banks of lights for “night games.”

On a mild June night a little over two years ago, Fargus’s stadium went into operation.

It was open to the public unless otherwise booked for a special event. Anyone could use it day or night, because the lights were on a timer. They came on at sundown and stayed on all night, every night, as a deterrent to shenanigans.

Fargus’s “special events” took place every Friday and Saturday night that summer. Because the arena was so small, there couldn’t be anything the size of basketball games, tennis matches, stage plays or band concerts.

The events had to be small enough to fit in.

So Fargus brought to the stadium a series of spectacular duds: a ping-pong tournament, a barbershop quartet, a juggling show, a piano solo, a poetry reading, an old fart doing card tricks.

Even though the events were free, almost nobody showed up for them.

Which was a good thing, in a way, because Fargus’s big plan for the stadium hadn’t included a parking lot. This was a major oversight, since most people drove to the events. They ended up parking their cars every which way on Janks Field. Not a big problem if only twenty or thirty people showed up.

But then one night toward the end of that summer, Fargus charged a five dollar admission and brought in a night of boxing and about two hundred people drove in for it.

Things were so tight in Janks Field that some of them had to climb over the tops of cars and pickup trucks in order to reach the arena. Not only did the field get jammed tight, but so did the dirt road leading in.

Regardless, just about everyone somehow made it into the stands in time to see most of the boxing matches.

They loved the boxing.

But when it came time to leave, all hell broke loose. From what I heard, and my dad was there trying to keep order (not on duty, but moonlighting), the logjam of cars was solid. Not only were there way too many cars in the first place, but some of them got flat tires from the broken bottles and such that always littered the field.

Feeling trapped, the drivers and passengers, in Dad’s words, “went bughouse.” It turned into a combination destruction derby/brawl/gang-bang.

By the time it was over, there were nineteen arrests. countless minor injuries, twelve people who needed to be hospitalized, eight rapes (multiple, in most cases), and four fatalities. One guy died of a heart attack, two were killed in knife-fights, and a six-month old baby, dropped to the ground by its mother during the melee, got its head run over by a Volkswagen bug.