Richard Laymon - The Traveling Vampire Show

But my parents wouldn’t go along with it. Therefore, neither would Slim’s mother.

Midnight. Take it or leave it.

Midnight, it seems, is the magic hour for parents. Somewhere along the line, maybe someone was too impressed by Cinderella. Or maybe midnight was when the gates of the city got locked, back in the old days when cities had gates. More than likely, the fixation on being home by midnight had primitive, superstitious origins. Midnight, the witching hour, “when churchyards yawn” and all that. Who knows?

I do know this. The need to be home by midnight was what got us into trouble… the fact that we left the drive-in exactly when we did.

We arrived at the Moonlight Drive-in early enough to find a parking place fairly close to the screen. Though the sun had already gone down, it wasn’t quite dark enough yet for the movies to start. “Big Girls Don’t Cry” was coming from the speaker box on the post beside our car. Kids were still playing on the swings and slide and teeter-totters below the giant screen.

We had plenty of time for a trip to the snack bar, where we bought Cokes and hot dogs and buttered popcorn. Back at the car, I took the driver’s seat. Slim sat beside me, and Rusty sat by her other side. “Walk Like A Man” was playing on the speaker. I leaned out the window, grabbed the metal box off its post and brought it inside. I cranked the window up a few inches and hung the speaker over its edge. And we were all set.

About ten minutes later, the Shockfest began.

The first movie turned out to be Bucket of Blood. It’s about this goony beatnik who wants to be an artist, but he’s no good at it. Then he accidentally kills a cat, which was pretty funny in an awful way. To conceal the cat’s body, he covers it with clay. Presto! He has himself a perfectly good sculpture. Everybody’s amazed by how detailed and lifelike it is. Knowing a good thing when he sees it, he starts murdering gals and covering their bodies with clay.

We loved it. We kept laughing and going, “ Oh , no!” But it scared us, too. A couple of times, Slim grabbed my leg and squeezed it.

After Bucket of Blood was over, we went to the restrooms. We also paid another visit to the snack bar, where we picked up boxes of Juicy Fruits, Good ’n Plenty and Milk Duds.

The second show was The Killer Shrews and even scarier than Bucket of Blood. Shrews are supposedly the fiercest creatures in the world, but they’re so small they don’t go after people. These shrews, though, were the size of dogs. (Looking back on it, I’m pretty sure they were dogs.) They kept trying to get at a group of people stranded on this island. Wanted to rip them up and eat them. The people took refuge inside a house and boarded up the place to keep the shrews out. But the damn things kept getting in, anyway. It was pretty horrible. Several of the people got themselves eaten.

When I saw The Night of the Living Dead a few years later, it reminded me of The Killer Shrews … and of what happened after we left the drive-in. I found myself reminded of that night about a zillion times because the main actor in The Killer Shrews turned out to be Festus in Gunsmoke. After Chester got replaced by Festus, I could hardly ever watch Gunsmoke without thinking about The Killer Shrews and what happened on the way home.

At about eleven-thirty, the movie ended. An intermission started, and the area around the snack stand lit up. Here and there, headlights came on and engines started. Apparently, we weren’t the only people who needed to get home.

Since I was already behind the wheel, I asked Slim, “Want me to take us back?”

She was supposed to do all the driving that night. In fact, she always drove us to and from the drive-in movies. But I figured it would be easier if we just stayed in our seats and I took the wheel.

Slim didn’t answer for a few seconds. Then she said, “We told everyone I’d be driving.”

“Yeah, true. Maybe you’d better.”

“I suppose so.”

Leaning out the window, I reached over and hooked the speaker box onto its pole. Then I brought myself back into the car and opened the door.

And realized my mistake. If I went around to the other side of the car so Slim could scoot over behind the wheel, I would end up sitting next to Rusty on the way home.

I wanted to sit next to Slim, not Rusty.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I couldn’t tell her. We were pals, buddies, best friends. If she found out I needed to sit next to her, she might realize how I really felt. It might scare her.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? If you really want to drive…”

“Nah, that’s okay.” I climbed out and shut the door. Starting to feel lousy, I walked around to the other side. By the time I reached the passenger door, Slim and Rusty had both scooted over.

I sat beside Rusty and swung the door shut.

Leaving the headlights off, Slim drove slowly forward down the slope of the hump from which we’d viewed the movies. At the bottom, she made a sharp turn onto the cross-lane.

She put on the parking lights. A couple of times, she stopped to let people walk by. At the end of the lane, she waited for a car to pass us before she pulled out.

She didn’t cut anyone off. She didn’t do anything wrong or even rude. Neither did Rusty or I.

In fact, we’re pretty sure that what happened a few minutes later had nothing to do with any of the cars from the drive-in. Those exiting ahead of us had all turned the other way at Mason Road. And none came out after us. None that we noticed, anyway.

For a while, Slim’s Pontiac seemed to be the only car on the road. We were about ten miles north of town, midway between Grandville and Clarksburg.

We had forest on the right.

On the left was the old graveyard. If it had a name, we didn’t know it. Nobody’d been buried there since about 1920. We’d explored it a few times, though never at night. It had a lot of very cool tombstones and statues and stuff.

Driving by, the three of us snuck glances at it the way we usually did. I think we wanted to make sure nobody was digging up bodies… or crawling out of any graves.

No one was.

But a car sat between the old stone posts of its entry gate. A car without any lights on.

“Uh-oh,” Slim said. I felt our speed decrease slightly. “Was that a cop car?”

“Didn’t look like one,” Rusty said.

“It wasn’t,” I confirmed. Being the son of Grandville’s police chief, I knew what every cop car looked like: not just ours, but those of all the nearby towns, plus the county cars and state cars.

“Thought it might be a speed trap,” Slim said.

“Nope,” I told her.

“Cool place to make out,” Rusty said.

Slim and I both laughed.

“Don’t you think?”

“No,” Slim said. “For one thing, it’s right by the road where everyone can see you. Not to mention the bone orchard. You wouldn’t catch me making out there.”

“Wouldn’t catch you making any…” Rusty tipped his head back and stared at the rearview mirror.

“What?” Slim asked.

“I think it’s coming,” he said.

“Huh?” Slim glanced at the rearview mirror. “I don’t… oh.”

I was already looking over my shoulder and knew why she’d said, “Oh.” A car was coming, all right, but without headlights on. It looked like a clump of shadow hurling toward us from the rear.

“That the car from the graveyard?” Slim asked.

“Think so,” Rusty said.