Bentley Little - The Summoning

Didn't they realize that lives were at stake here? Robert left alone--angry, tired, and frustrated. He'd come with Rossiter, but there was room in Woods's car for the FBI agent, and he decided to let the coroner take Rossiter to his motel He wasn't in the mood for companionship tonight.

He sped toward home. It was cold outside, all trace of Indian summer long since gone, but he felt warm, sweaty, and he drove with the windows open, Lynyrd Skynyrd cranked up on the stereo. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Maybe he was getting a fever. Maybe he had the flu.

Or maybe it was stress.

He gunned the car as the asphalt changed to dirt. ROn me was singing

"I'm on the Hunt," and Robert sang with it. at the top of his voice. It felt good to scream out some rock and roll, cleansing.

The rocks and cacti on the side of the road were black amorphous shapes, but on the hill beyond his house was a strange white object that stood in sharp contrast to the otherwise uniform darkness. He slowed the car as he neared his drive, finally pressing the brake pedal all the way down. At the top of the hill, clearly visible by the light of the half moon, was something bright and fluttering. It had no distinct shape but grew and contracted in rhythmic billows, segments reaching out and retracting, twisting and turning, dancing with the cold desert wind.

The sight sent shivers down Robert's back, and he thought he heard whispers on the breeze. The fluttering thing on the hill was unknown, yet somehow familiar, like something half-remembered from a long-ago nightmare, and the agitated mutability of its shape struck a chord within him.

He put the car into gear, turned onto the driveway, and sped through the darkness, maneuvering the tricky bumps and ruts by instinct. He slowed as the drive opened onto the front of his house and slammed on the brakes.

Pee Wee's pickup was parked in his carport.

Robert got out of the car and hurried across the dirt, heart thumping. Pee Wee's passenger door was open, the overhead light on, but the big man was nowhere to be seen. Robert called out his friend's name, yelled it more loudly, then walked backward out of the carport. He would have sped inside the house, checked to see if Pee Wee was there, but the front door was locked and his friend could not have gotten in.

The burning overhead light worried him.

Pee Wee never wasted energy.

He continued to call the big man's name. Could Pee

Wee have tried the back door? Was the back door open? Robert hurried around the side of the house.

And stopped dead in his tracks.

The tall saguaro next to the kitchen window, the one his father had specifically told the home builders to save when constructing the house, was now thin and anemic instead of thick and healthy. He could see that much even in this weak light. The huge cactus was a skeleton of its former self, and as Robert moved closer he saw exaggerated ridges beneath the dry wrinkled skin and drooping needles. " '

He'd been here.

The vampire.

Robert reached into his pockets for his crucifix, his jade. Had Pee Wee been killed by the vampire or simply taken? He looked quickly around. He saw no corpse, but every boulder, every cactus, every shrub, was suddenly the location of a potential ambush. The desert was silent. Completely silent. There was not even the whisking sound of nocturnal animal scuttlings.

He glanced to the right, toward the thing on the hill. There was something threatening in its unnatural fluttering, and Robert's grip on the jade tightened. He let go of the crucifix, allowing it to fall limply back to the bottom of his pocket. He knew he should go into the house, call the station, at the very least pick up a flashlight, but instead he began walking across the rocky ground toward the hill.

The wind increased in intensity as he reached the bottom of the slope, coldness whipping his hair, stinging his face, but he did not stop, did not even slow down. All of the saguaros here had been drained. In the pale moonlight, the once formidable army of cacti that stretched up the incline looked now like a regiment of stick figures. The destruction was crude and obvious, like a trail left deliberately by the monster, a swath of drained life that cut through the living desert.

He reached the summit, panting and out of breath. He stared at the figure before him. It was Pee Walthoug] he'd already known thatmand somehow the inevitabili! of this outcome scared him more than its actuality. That big man was wrapped in whitish clear plastic, a tarp some sort, no doubt taken from the back of his picku[ Beneath the wind-tossed, still-fluttering plastic, Robe1 could see the dead, dried body of his old friend and mentor, shoved flat against a spiny saguaro, wrinkled fac caved in on itself, the shape of the body conforming to the skeleton.

The vampire was not here. He knew that, too, but he kept his fingers pressed tightly against the jade anyway. From this vantage point, he could see below him an it termittent trail of house lights leading into the larger pot of lights that was Rio Verde. Moonlight glittered on that moving water of the partially visible river. The town was small, he saw from up here. Small and helpless. A tin oasis of light in a desert of blackness.

The smell of blood reached his nostrils, and he turne to face the impaled corpse of his friend, but there was no blood. Even the plastic was spotless.

"Pee Wee," he said softly. "Pee Wee."

And the first tear spilled from his eye onto his cold cheek.

They were gathered in the chapel, over forty of them, and Shelly felt thrilled and honored to have been chosen as part of such an elite group.

"He is a glutton and a sloth," Pastor Wheeler said. "And according to the mandate of the Holy Scriptures, the written word of God, he must be stoned to death for his sins."

Sbelly's gaze turned toward the young boy standing at the edge of the hole next to the pew bridge. He was eight or nine, with short brown hair and a face that would have been cute were it not so distorted by fear. The boy tried again to bolt, but instead of a mad dash, there was only a frustrated twitch. His mother and father held him fast while Wheeler tied his hands behind his back. The boy stood trembling before them.

"You disobeyed your parents," Wheeler said.

"I didn't want carrots!" the boy's voice was filled with panicked terror. :' .: "You disobeyed the word of God."

"I don't like vegetables!"

The preacher unfastened and removed the boy's belt, ripped open and yanked down his pants. His jeans and underwear gathered around his ankles. "Walk," the preacher commanded.

"No!"

"Walk!" The boy's father pushed his son onto the pew bridge above the hole.

The boy began hobbling across the bridge toward the other side, looking fearfully over his shoulder.

Wheeler picked up a stone from the pile at the edge of the hole and threw it as hard as he could. It hit the boy's shoulder, and he screamed, whirled around, nearly losing his balance on the bridge. The fear on his face gave way to pain for a second, then fear resumed its dominance.

Other people picked up rocks, began throwing. bloodying The boy's his mother ear. hit him on the side of the head, His father hit him in the stomach.

One woman hit the boy in the eye, and there was a quick mini explosion of blood, a jet like stream that erupted from his socket.

This felt good, Shelly thought. It felt right. The boy was screaming at the top of his lungs, trying vainly to dodge the increasing number of rocks thrown at him while maintaining his balance on the bridge.

Shelly bent down and picked up from the pile a small flat hand-sized chunk of sandstone. She heaved it at the boy and was gratified to see it fly into his small dangling testicles. The boy fell, writhing, drawing up his legs, causing the bridge to tilt.