Richard Laymon - The Traveling Vampire Show

“Guess you’ll have to turn around,” I said.

“Too narrow.”

“Maybe go on to the highway,” Lee suggested. “Easy enough to turn….”

From behind us came a thud as if someone riding in back—in the coffin area—had stomped on the floor or dropped something.

Slim looked over her shoulder at the glass just behind our heads. “Rusty!” she called.

Lee was already throwing her door open.

As Lee leaped out, Slim shut off the engine and plucked the key from the ignition. Then she flung her door open.

I scurried out Lee’s side.

Lee was first to reach the rear of the hearse. She was trying to open its door, but not having any luck. “I think it’s locked,” she said.

“I’ve got the keys,” Slim said. She picked one and tried to put it into the lock hole. Her hand was shaking so badly that she couldn’t get it in for a while. When she finally poked its tip into the slot, it wouldn’t go in any farther. Wrong key. So she pulled it out and tried another. Again, she had trouble because she was trembling so badly. Then it went in.

She turned the key and worked the door handle. The door unlatched. She stepped back, pulling it toward herself, swinging it wide open.

The night, until then fresh and sweet with the aromas of a rain-soaked forest, suddenly went foul. The stench made me hold my breath. Lee clapped a hand across her mouth. Slim stepped around the open door, her lips pressed shut and her chest out. It was the way she sometimes looked out on the river just before she plunged below the surface.

I wished we were out on the river. Or anywhere else, just so we were miles away from here.

Inside the hearse a light had come on. It must’ve been triggered by the opening door.

We all gazed in.

The volunteers who’d gone up against Valeria in the cage were there: Chance Wallace, the handsome Marine; geeky Chester, our old enemy Scotty Douglas the hoodlum; and our chubby, sweet, stupid best friend, Rusty.

They were all naked.

They were all in pieces, piled up next to the casket within easy reach of… its occupant.

Inside the casket, propped up with his head against the curtains of the window we’d been trying to look through, sat an obese, legless, hairless man. I guess it was a man. He looked like a bloated sack of slippery white skin. Except the skin was mostly scarlet with blood.

His bulgy eyes looked like a pair of bloodshot golf balls.

Clutched in both hands, upside-down just under his chin, was Rusty’s head. Snuffling and grunting, he shoved his maw into the raw gore of the neck stump. He ripped out a large gob, then raised his head, bumping it against the window, and seemed to smile at us… with a dripping load of Rusty slopping out of his mouth.

All things considered, I think we handled ourselves very well up to the point at which we looked into the back of the hearse.

What we saw in there… it knocked out whatever remained of our brains and guts.

I have vague memories of noises coming from us. Things like “Whoa!” and “Yahhh!” and “Eeee!” as we backed away from the rear of the hearse. And someone—Slim. I think—slammed the door shut. And then we were running down the middle of the dirt road as if we had the boogey-man after us.

We ran and ran and ran. Finally we came to Route 3 and Slim led the way to her Pontiac. We all piled into the front seat. The three of us sat side by side, me in the middle, all of us huffing and whimpering while Slim tried to get her key into the ignition.

At last, the engine roared and we were off.

We sped down Route 3 toward town.

At Lee’s house, we turned on all the lights. Then we took turns taking showers. After our showers, we got into clean dry clothes that Lee had gathered for us. I wore my brother’s stuff. Lee and Slim wore Lee’s. We got together in the living room. Lee let us drink beer. She even made popcorn. We were so freaked out that we hardly talked… not for a while, anyway. By the time we’d each polished off a couple of beers, though, we had calmed down.

The talking began. And decisions were made.

In the early morning hours before dawn, we went out to Lee’s garage to start getting ready. We made a couple of stakes by sawing off a broom handle and whittling a point on one end of each shaft. We gathered a hammer and a hatchet. We also equipped ourselves with the tin of gasoline that Danny kept around for his power mower. And a box of wooden matches and a cigarette lighter.

We loaded all this into Slim’s Pontiac.

After sunrise, we climbed in and Slim started the car. But Lee said, “Just a minute. I just thought of something.”

She climbed out of the car and hurried back into her house. A couple of minutes later, she came back with my brother’s Winchester .30-caliber lever-action repeater. As she climbed in with it, she said, “In case we have human trouble, too.”

“Always thinking,” Slim said.

Then she drove us up Route 3 until we came to the turnoff. She made the turn and drove slowly up the dirt road toward the place where we’d left the hearse and its awful cargo.

It was a lovely summer morning. Sometime before dawn, the rain had stopped. You could still smell it, though. There is nothing like the scent of a forest after a heavy rainfall.

The sky was cloudless. Birds were twittering all around us, bugs buzzed and sunlight slanted down through the treetops like transparent rods of gold.

It was one of those mornings that makes you feel great.

At least if you’re not on an errand like ours.

After a while, Lee said, “Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” Slim said, and kept on driving.

I think we all expected to find the hearse around every bend, but the dirt road ahead of us remained empty.

“Somebody must’ve moved it,” Lee said.

Then we came out the other end of the dirt road. Ahead of us was Janks Field, all rutted and muddy, puddles and bits of broken glass flashing sunlight.

Lee’s red pickup was still there. So was the Cadillac I had disabled. So was a VW bug. I supposed it had probably belonged to one of the other volunteers—Chester, most likely. Scotty had been with a bunch of his hoodlum friends; they must’ve gone off without him after the lightning struck. As for Chance the Marine, who knows?

On our way over to the bleachers, I noticed several fresh holes in the dirt. They weren’t filled in. Just holes. I didn’t know who or what had made them, or why, but I suddenly remembered the poodle that had nipped Rusty’s arm and how it had squealed underneath one of the cars.

Slim drove us all around the bleachers and between them. There was no sign of the black bus or the black truck or the black hearse or the black-shirted crew of the Traveling Vampire Show.

The cage was gone, too.

“ ‘Folded their tents like the Arabs,’ ” said Slim, “ ‘and silently slipped away.’ ”

It seemed they had left nothing behind except Slim’s bow, her arrows, and the special quiver she’d won at the Fourth of July archery contest.

When she spotted them, she cried out, “Ah-ha!” and stopped the car. Lee jumped out and retrieved them.

A few minutes later, Lee jumped out again. This time, she ran through the mud with spare keys in her hand and climbed into her red pickup truck.

We followed close behind her all the way back to town.

There was a big investigation, of course, but the Traveling Vampire Show was never seen or heard of again. Neither were the bodies of the volunteers or Stryker or Valeria or any of the workers we’d killed.

Or Bitsy.