More MHI fan fiction

[staylor]

So I was in the process of moving files from my old computer and on to my new computer when I stumbled across a sort story I started over a year a go and then prompty forgot about. Figured I would post the first part here ans see what you all thought while I work on finishing it.

McPherson

One

The rain fell in a hateful torrent that threatened to fill the grave and float the coffin within.
A Catholic priest hunched over his bible in a doomed attempt to keep the rain off of it and mumbled through the funeral litany as fast as he could. If any of the small group of mourners was discomfited by this none of them bothered to show it. As terrible as the rain was it had not been predicted by the local weather service and everyone had been caught ill prepared for the deluge.
“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The priest hurriedly sketched the sign of the cross over the casket and with a palpable relief the two grounds keepers began shoveling the thick, black mud that had once been thick, black loam on top of it.
Most of the half dozen mourners did not wait to observe the internment and scurried off with the priest towards the parking lot. Only one of the mourners stayed to watch the top of the cheap casket disappear under the inexorable shovel scoops of mud.
The last mourner was a young man in coal black suit that was obviously a hand-me-down that showed its age in its antiquated cut and its use in the threadbare patches at the knees and elbows. This was not the suit’s first funeral.
The young man himself was singularly unimpressive. Brown hair and green eyes in an average face and build that was lean and slightly taller than average. His face was a stone mask only marred by a fresh scar but the frantic way his left hand gripped the rosary at his side indicated the emotional turmoil his face hid.
Rage, confusion, regret, sadness and horror battled for control of his features but all were locked beneath that stoic mien.
Even after the grounds keepers had finished and hurried for shelter the only sign of the casket’s existence was a patch of mud in the cemeteries otherwise flawless turf the young man stayed and stared at the ground as if expecting something.
The casket held the remains of his Aunt Mabel.
Aunt Mabel had been the young man’s last surviving relative.
Aunt Mabel had been the young man’s first kill.

Two

“Mark… I need help… come… please come…”
The voice of Aunt Mabel fluttered weakly over the phone line and Mark had to strain to hear it before the line went dead. Mark leapt to his feet and threw on a coat before bounding down the steps of his seedy second floor apartment.
He cursed when the engine of his 83 Chevy refused to catch and anxiously cranked the key again and again until the engine came to life with a guttural roar. Mark gave a quick prayer of thanks as he backed out of the parking lot and accelerated down the road.
Aunt Mabel lived in the old family homestead in the western part of Nevada City and was normally a five minute drive away. Mark made it in three minutes and was only flipped off twice on the way. Thankfully he had not encountered a cop angry with his high rate of speed or hit a pedestrian, but he was tense with worry as he roared up the gravel driveway in front of the sprawling, old Victorian.
He left the engine running and bounded up the sagging steps to the font door three at a time. As always the door threatened to come off of its hinges when he flung it open and the entire house creaked ominously.
“Aunt Mabel!” Mark yelled at the top his lungs as he raced through the dusty hallways of his childhood. “Aunt Mabel!” There was no response and Mark frantically searched until he found his Aunt’s frail form collapsed on the kitchen floor.
He dived to floor and gathered her into his arms. His anxious fingers found an irregular and thready pulse, that and the wisp of breath let him know that she was still alive.
So light, when had she become so light? Mark carried his father’s sister down the hallway in odd dance to avoid the boxes of belongings that cluttered the entire house. In his haste his foot caught on a fallen hat rack that had belonged to his cousin Samuel and he fell to his knees which screamed at the abuse the hardwood floor visited upon them.
Mark frantically tried to rise to his feet only to be stopped by a tremulous whisper.
“Mark?” Mabel’s eyes were open and staring, unfocused and unseeing, into Mark’s face.
“I’m right here Aunt Mabel. I’m going to get you to the hospital. Just hold on.”
“No… No, I’m gone boy… just a matter of time…” Her speech was slurred and drifted in and out as if she kept fading into sleep. “Let me go… Never liked hospitals much…”
“No you can’t,” Mark protested futilely, “you can’t leave me alone.”
“Alone? Not alone…. Whole family… there for you…” His aunt sounded genuinely confused and Mark knew then that she really was on death’s doorstep.
“No Aunt Mabel. They are all gone. They’re all waiting for you… I… It’s just me here.” Mark could not go on; this was not the moment to wallow in self pity. However, something he said triggered something in the dying woman’s brain, her eyes suddenly focused on his own.
“Mark, I have to tell you about your father, about why all of this has happened. The family had been cursed. We tried to hide, but we could not… so many dead.” Mabel’s brief moment of lucidity faded fast but part kept trying to tell him something but all he got were disjointed words and phrases.
“A curse… your father not dead in car…” Her breathing grew more ragged and painful.
“Aunt Mabel stop, you have to save your strength.”
“Journal…chest… avenge… everyone….” She trailed off into a mumble and her eyes closed, Mark was sure that she was gone but then her eyes opened wide in terror. “Cut off my head!” she screamed with her last breath before her eyes closed with a penultimate finality.
Mark, the last of the McPherson family, wept over the still form the aunt who had been as a mother to him.

[staylor]

Some more...

Three

Hours later night had fallen and Mark sat numbly in the foray of the house, staring at the body of his aunt. He knew that he had to call the cops and coroners, get his aunt declared officially dead, but he could not. He needed some time to come to grips with the reality that it was really just him, alone in the world with last of the comforting presence of kin stripped away by cruel fate.
The smooth wooden beads of his rosary slipped easily between his fingers and Hail Marys tumbled off of his lips with the ease born of repetition. Saying a rosary comforted him, calmed him, it seemed that faith was all he had left any more. Faith and this old house that now belonged to him.
He let his eye wander off of his aunt’s body and drift across the walls covered with cobwebs and stains. The old Victorian had once been so proud and full of life but it had decayed much as the family it housed had, defying all efforts at revitalization and upkeep. It rotted and decayed with death of each family member even as it filled with unclaimed furniture and personal belongings. The whole of the worldly possessions of the once vast McPherson family had been gathered in the family’s last property
On the wall, in pride of place among the family photographs, was one of the whole family that had been taken when he was six, a year before his father had died. In that picture he had both parents, five older brothers and sisters, six aunts and uncles and their spouses and over twenty cousins. Now he had nothing.
His father, Jack McPherson, had died in a car accident a year after that picture had been taken, his brother Nathan had died with him. After that it really did seem like the family was cursed. Within the next year Mark lost another uncle, an aunt, both of his older brothers and his mother. It was then that Aunt Mabel had begun caring for him and his sisters. In the years afterward, the McPherson family’s fortunes steadily declined. Death followed bankruptcy followed death. The family business was lost after Mark’s remaining uncle Gregory was killed. One by one his relatives died out, his last sister had died when he was twenty one, until it was just him and Aunt Mabel.
It had seemed that the tough old woman would last when no one else had and yet the doom of the McPherson family had finally caught her as well. She was the constant in Mark’s life and at that moment he would have given anything to have her back. The idle wish dragged has eyes away from the pictures of happier days and back to his aunt’s body.
Then her eyes opened.
“Aunt Mabel?” Mark said tentatively. He knew what he was seeing was impossible, that a random nerve cluster must have fired and opened her eyes. Or maybe he was seeing a miracle that God had heard his plea and returned life to his relative.
Mark made no move towards the body, he did not even breath. He watched in fascination and wonder as his dead aunt slowly picked herself up off of the floor.
“Aunt Mabel, you’re alive!” All caution was gone and Mark let all of wonderment at the healing power of the Lord fill his voice… and then he saw her eyes. They were not the green eyes so much like his own that he remembered, they were red and vicious.
“Mmmaaarkkk,” she hissed his name not as loving surrogate mother returned from the dead but as a predator identifying her prey.
“Jesus protect me!” Mark cried out as scuttled away from the reanimated corpse in an awkward crab walk. With a feral hiss; what used to be his Aunt Mabel started after him in a rush that was surprisingly speedy for a dead person. She reached for him with undead hands and her mouth opened to reveal inhuman canines. Mark was only saved when his attacker tripped over the same downed hat rack that he had fallen over hours earlier.
Mark scrambled to his feet and dashed down the hall towards the house’s massive living room. Behind him, he could hear the creature bashing its way through the clutter of boxes in the hallway instead of adroitly dodging around them like he was.
After the cramped confines of the hall it was a relief to burst into the relatively wide open spaces of the living room. Mark vaulted over the moldy sofa and sprinted towards the fireplace where he could see his salvation gleaming on the mantle. His pursuer did not bother to jump the couch and instead flung it to the side where it crashed into pieces.
Mark lunged the last few yards to the fire place and grasped for the ancient cavalry sword that hung above it. His fingers brushed along the hilt for a brief, tantalizing instant before a hand as cold as death grabbed his shoulder and flung him across the room to land in the fragments of the sofa.
The undead abomination fixed Mark with its red gaze where he lay gasping in the tumbled remains of wood and fabric.
“Maarkk…” it hissed again, more distinctly but with infinitely more menace. Aunt Mabel’s familiar features had been twisted almost beyond recognition into something from a nightmare. It reached for him slowly yet inexorably, as if it wanted him to wallow in his helplessness. Its mouth yawned open to reveal the impossibly long canines that he had glimpsed earlier.
In a last desperate reflex of a man powerless to stop his own death Mark flung his hands up in front of his face and shrieked like a trapped rabbit. He was frozen in that tableau for several seconds before he opened his eyes to see why he was not yet dead.
Instead of trying to rip out Mark’s jugular the creature was instead repulsed; held at bay the object in his hand. Mark glanced away from the walking corpse and to the rosary that he still clutched in his right hand.
Thought and memory congealed in his head, forcing away that panic that had ruled him; that instinctual flight or fight response that made people struggle valiantly for their lives in a very stupid fashion.
“Vampire.” Mark breathed to himself as he watched what had been his Aunt Mabel try to reach him but somehow be held at bay by the holy power of the rosary, as if there was an invisible wall between them.
A reanimated body with fangs and an aversion to holy symbols; if the legends were even half way correct then Mark was battling for his life, and blood, with a vampire. He did not believe in vampires, but the evidence in front of him was incontrovertible.
Mark carefully tallied up the ways that one killed a vampire and ignored the little voice in his head that insisted that his sanity had fled with the death of his aunt. Garlic was supposed to do something but he was not about to run all the way to the kitchen and rifle through the clutter their in the hope of turning up a couple of cloves. Silver was also hard to get, though he was sure that there was some around packed in a box somewhere. Holy symbols he had but they seemed to lack offensive punch.
Stakes…
Mark felt through the wooden wreckage of the sofa frame piled around him with his free hand while he used the other to ward off vampire Aunt Mabel. The vampire was trying to fight its way closer despite the rosary’s repellent effect so Mark begun chanting prayers while he searched. He was not sure if they actually worked but they did make him feel better.
It was while he was in the middle of his third Our Father that Mark found what he was looking for. The piece of wood was thick and sturdy and broken into a jagged point, He grasped it firmly and levered himself off of the ground to face his undead aunt.
Mark had no formal training in a martial art or fighting of but had gotten in enough fights over the years to have picked up some practical knowledge. He mentally blessed Herman Biggs, the high school bully, and shifted his hands with left guarding his body with the rosary and the right holding the stake.
The vampire swiped at him from several feet away and leapt back when he brandished his holy symbol in return, driving the creature back a few feet. He kept feinting with his left hand and trying to drive home the stake with the other but the vampire was too quick. Mark almost had his weapon knocked out of his hand a few times and mostly hit nothing but air as the vampire dodged back. Once he did manage to stick the monster in the shoulder but he could only watch helplessly as the wound knitted itself closed in front of his eyes.
The rosary that was keeping him alive was also making it impossible for him to get close enough to the creature to kill it. In an ill advised flash of insight he put the rosary behind his back and attempted to stick his foe when it leapt at his vulnerability. He got three deep scratches on his forearm and in return inflicted a minor wound that healed within moments.
Blood dripped down Mark’s forearm and stained the wooden stake in his hand. Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes. There was no room for pain or for fear, there was only room for one thought in Mark’s head a primal instinctual call to battle that almost sang in his blood even as he battled exhaustion. “Kill It!”
He needed to end the fight fast, his breathing was labored but the vampire was not breathing at all. He could not outlast it, he needed to pin it some how.
Mark began using the rosary to herd the monster across the room. He kept jabbing at it with the stake to keep it off balance. The vampire was not too smart, he expected it to be more intelligent, but it eventually figured out what he was up to and fought like a cornered wildcat. It hurled itself at Mark in a whirlwind of flashing claws and teeth.
Most of the attacks fell short of Mark, stopped by the miraculous power of the simple crucifix in his hand. One strike did slip passed his defenses and a claw stained crimson with nail polish raked down the left side of his face. A red curtain of blood covered his left eye but he did not have the time to worry for his sight. His cares and concerns and thoughts had boiled down to one goal, “Kill It.”
Finally Mark had the vampire where he wanted it. Its back pressed against the fireplace and its claws scraped ineffectually over the dirty, red bricks as it sought to escape the influence of the rosary.
Mark lunged forward with the stake and put every ounce of his remaining strength behind the thrust and this time the vampire could not dodge out of the way. The monster gave an unearthly shriek as the crude stake punctured its black heart in a welter of blood. It fell to the ground and lay still, its features frozen in an ugly grimace of pain.
He stood over the body for a few minutes and thought to get his breathing and thoughts under control. It was not every evening that someone killed their own undead aunt and it was entirely a new experience for Mark. He was tempted to just walk out of the house and try and forget the whole incident but he knew could not. He was not even sure if the vampire was fully dead. It was then that his aunt’s final words registered on him.
“Cut off my head”, she had said with her last breath. Did she know that this was going to happen to her? How? Why? Nevertheless, Mark decided to take her at his word.
The ancient cavalry saber that he had sought to fight the vampire with was still hanging above the fire place mere feet away. Family legend told that the sword had belonged Nathaniel McPherson who was Mark’s great, great, great grandfather and a captain in the US Army in the Civil War and the Indian wars afterwards. It was said that sword had spilled blood in a dozen battles across the entire continent before Nathaniel himself had hung it above the fireplace when he settled in the area in eighteen eighties. Despite all that history the weapon was heavy and solid in Mark’s hands and the blade still sharp.
It took several blows but at last the vampire’s head rolled free from its body and they both began liquefying into a black goop. Mark was sure that at last his aunt was at peace.

[staylor]

Last bit for the day...

Four

Covering up what had happened just seemed to make sense, even if it did mean the sacrifice of the garden shed. Mark moved the vampire’s jellied corpse inside the small building and rigged it so that the ample kerosene stores in there combusted. All that was left was a pile of ash, the metal remains of tools and the blackened skeleton of Mabel McPherson that showed no sign that it had recently belonged to an undead bloodsucker; Mark had removed the elongated canines himself. The work was grizzly but Mark felt himself prepared by the several weeks that he had worked in a slaughter house.
There was some trouble with police, apparently being consumed in a mysterious fire constitutes suspicious circumstances; but after only a few uncomfortable interrogation sessions and not so subtle accusations the death was suddenly written off as a tragic accident and Mark was free to bury his aunt’s remains.
He stood over that grave for a long time and let the boil of emotions and thoughts battle within him. The need to reconcile his new knowledge of how the world was with his preconceptions of how the world should be kept him standing there for hours. When he left he was no closer to resolving the confusion in his head than he had been. He almost did not see the man who had been watching him from the shelter of the trees around the cemetery.
From a distance it was impossible to make out the man’s features through the rain. The fellow was wearing a cheap black suit that made him look like either an undertaker or a low to mid level bureaucrat. Mark assumed that the man was a fellow mourner and ignored him as he said a short prayer made the sign of the cross and left the graveside.
The drive back to the old homestead was wet and dangerous, he almost got sideswiped by one crazy, old bat driving a forty year old Oldsmobile. Mark was glad to get home and shuck off his father’s old suit, which was soaking wet, and change into a comfortable pair of sweats.
He was sorting though the piles of junk that came with being the sole beneficiary of a once large family. There was so much stuff packed into the old house that there was barely room for Mark’s very few personal belongings that he had brought from his small apartment when he moved in.
“Why the hell did Aunt Mabel keep these,” Mark muttered to himself as he threw away what he thought was his cousin Simon’s old bug collection but it was hard to tell considering the level of decomposition. The entomological artifact joined countless other useless heirlooms that were slowly filling up garbage bags around the house. Mark was hoping to find enough meaningless valuables among the piles of dross to pay the property taxes on the old place but had not had much luck.
The recession had hit Mark as hard as anyone and harder than most. He had been bouncing between low paying jobs for years, never lasting more than a month or two at any of them. He blamed the economy of California and the damn Democrats that had destroyed it. Aunt Mabel had always harped that he should have finished college instead of dropping out, “you’re very intelligent Mark.” He was, but he just got tired of the stupid, petty crap that infused academia and the shallow, godless existence of college life. Some people told him that he was being a killjoy. In any case, Mark figured that at least he did not have twenty thousand dollars in student loan debt to deal with in addition to a dilapidated old house and no income.
An unexpected knock at the door interrupted his search for financial windfall. Mark answered the door cautiously, he had recently made it a habit to have a stake on his person in addition to his rosary and he had begged some holy water off of Father O’Grady. However it was no vampire at the door, it was the man from the cemetery.
Up close he looked even more the petty official. His face could best be described as rabbit like and a comb over did nothing to hide the obvious bald spot on his head. Mark figured that the man was probably some low level administrator in the county government, come to harass him over some inappropriately filed tax receipt from the early seventies.
“Can I help you?” Mark asked, using the resigned tone the implied that he really did not want to be any help at all.
“Markus McPherson?” The man’s voice was thin and reed like.
“Yes that’s me, want do you want?” Mark was not in the mood to fight the government over a twenty year tax lien or zoning violation.
“Go inside and sit down. We need to talk.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are but I just had my aunt’s funeral today and I am in no mood…”
“I am Agent Tipperton from the Monster Control Bureau and I need to talk you about your vampire.”
“What? I don’t know…”
“Get inside Mr. McPherson!” The gun that Agent Tipperton produced looked too large to have been concealed anywhere about his person. Mark made no further protest as his unlikely assailant shoved him inside and up against the wall.
“Now listen closely Mr. McPherson, because this is the part where I do my job and I threaten you.” The man’s voice was still thin but now was more like a rapier than a reed and he shoved the gun barrel hard into Mark’s chest. “I know that recently you have come into contact with a vampire and that you killed it. We picked up on your little ploy at the morgue. Thanks for doing our work for us by the way; usually I am the one who has to invent some crazy accident to cover things up.”
“I am here to let you know that under the Unearthly Forces Disclosure Act if you ever tell anybody about what you saw the government will hunt you down and kill you. That goes double if you tell any ACLU lawyers about this meeting, but at least then I will have the upside of offing a lawyer.” The steely glint in the agent’s eyes was enough to let Mark know he was not joking. “As of this moment all of your first amendment privileges in this area are revoked and if I even think you are going to tell somebody about monsters who is not already in the know I will off you myself. Are we clear?” Mark started to nod in the affirmative but caught himself with a question.
“You mean there are other things out there besides vampires?” Agent Tipperton gave him an odd look.
“You should know better with your family history. But I am not here to answer your questions Jesus freak; the official MCB stance is the less you know the better.” He stifled more questions from Mark before they could even get started with only a look and a meaningful tap of his weapon.
“Ok, since you don’t have any questions we can get down to the business part of this visit.”
“Like hell I don’t have any questions,” Mark thought to himself but he was too cowed to say so. Tipperton put his gun back into its shoulder holster and motioned for Mark to sit down on a nearby cardboard box. Despite all the show of setting him at ease Mark could feel the promise of imminent violence should the MCB agent desire so.
“What I am not supposed to tell you is that monsters have a bounty on their heads. A bounty that is paid by the Perpetual Unearthly Forces Fund, PUFF for short; these bounties are often rather substantial, but you have to know how to fill out the right paperwork. That is information that you can’t find on Wikipedia. Now it just so happens that I can fill out the paper work for you and get you your PUFF bounty.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“MCB doesn’t pay as well as I like. In return for my help you will give me fifty percent of this first bounty and twenty percent of every bounty there after.”
“And what if I don’t? It’s not like you can sue me.”
“No, but I can say that you were in violation of the Unearthly Forces Disclosure Act and kill you.” The bastard sounded almost cheerful.
“This is extortion,” complained Mark but the agent just shrugged.
“It’s a living. Besides you would not see a dime without my help. Do we have a deal?” Tipperton extended one greasy palm and Mark glared at it distastefully. He hated making a deal with this man but he really needed the money, he had not held a steady job in over three years. With the trepidation of a man touching a hot stove he extended his hand and made the deal.
“Excellent, here is your first check. I expect half of that in my bank account by the end of the week and here is the account number and my phone number in case you make any more kills. Pleasure doing business with you.” The MCB agent handed over two slips of paper and a check for twenty thousand dollars before letting himself out.
Agent Tipperton left behind a man who was more confused about his past than ever but as he looked at that check he somehow felt confident about his future.

[staylor]

Here is the last piece that I have finished, the rest may take a while longer. And seriously guys, give me some input, criticisms, sugestions, accolades what ever...

Five

A cloud of dust wafted out of the ancient machine and carried the scent of mold and ozone. The computers at the library were old but the internet connection was far superior to the dial up at the old homestead.
“VA M P I R E S” Mark slowly typed each word into the search engine and nervously looked over his shoulder. He thought he had taken enough precautions, but he could not be sure. He was at a public library in a town two counties away from his home. He had signed in under a fake name and was wearing a hat and sunglasses just in case. If the government was going to kill him it was not going to be because they knew about his internet search history.
As he expected the search turned up millions of hits.
Most of them were crap.
Twilight. Ann Rice. Dracula. Dumbass Goth Kids. Crap. Most of the hits were about entertainment and pop culture. It took Mark a half an hour to filter out most of that. Then there was the stuff that was left was more interesting but still useless, mostly theories about how vampire legends came to be and medical descriptions of vampirism. There were also contemporary accounts of vampires including descriptions but most of these were laughably wrong.
Most of the useful information Mark was able to glean from his search came from historical accounts of vampires. These carried the faintest glimmers of truth even as they were woven through with superstition and exaggeration. He did not discover much more about vampires than he already knew. What sent a shiver down his spine was the myriad of other creatures mentioned in those old stories.
Trolls, ogres, werewolves, walking dead, ghouls, dragons, demons. They all walked through the old tales with the vampires and Mark had damn good reason to suspect that they walked through the modern world as well.
Mark was a little disappointed in the dearth of information that he had uncovered, he suspected that the government was responsible for making sure no monster eyewitness accounts made it on the internet. He was not necessarily expecting a “Monster Killing for Dummies” book but he was hoping for something.
It was only the day before that he had decided that he would hunt monsters. Partly that was because of the money but there was something else, a calling almost. He liked to think of it as his own personal crusade against evil, a personal mission assigned by the lord. The very thought of creatures of darkness preying on the innocent made his skin crawl. Just as he was determined to destroy the abomination his aunt had become he was determined to do the same to its brethren. He just needed to find them first.
Granted, Mark had no idea what exactly he was going to do when he did find some monsters to kill. He was not a former marine, or black belt or even a gun nut. Aunt Mabel had eschewed all forms of violence as he had been growing up which as a bit of a contrast with rest of her hard bitten, conservative politics. She refused to let Mark join the judo club at school, or play peewee football and she had hit the roof the one time he had shot a friend’s 22 during a camping trip, which was odd as he distinctly remembered guns in the house before his father died. The only experience Mark had in the art of violence he had gained courtesy of the bullies that seemed to target him with an uncanny reliability. Mark always fought back against his tormentors, he did not always win the fights but he always made sure that Aunt Mabel knew nothing about them.
Aside from his complete lack of martial training Mark only skill seemed to be not having one, he was an invariable Jack of all trades and had tried his hand at everything from being a mechanic, to logging, to computer programming, to carpentry. Every job he had he was fired from after only a few months; he attributed this to his family’s bad luck. Every hobby he had eventually soured; he attributed this to undiagnosed ADD.
Mark’s plan so far was: Find Monster: ? : Collect PUFF bounty. Even as a new comer to the profession he knew that he needed more to battle the forces of evil than good intentions. It seemed sensible to do some searches on weaponry, combat tactics and improvised explosives while he was on a computer that was hopefully untraceable to him. He suspected that the government was going to very interested in his search history aside from his poking into monster lore.
There was one fact that Mark had discovered during his search that caused the drive back home to move into a blur as his brain struggled to fit it in the right place. One definitive fact about vampires that kept propping up in his search was that for a human to become a vampire they must first have been bitten by a vampire. But when could Aunt Mabel have been bitten? She had also known that she would turn after she died, she knew that she had been bitten and what would happen.
Mark tried to fit that into Aunt Mabel’s last few gasped sentences. She had said something about hiding and failing, about Mark’s father not really dying in a car crash, something about a curse and a journal. Mark needed to find that journal because he suspected that his crusade had another motivation behind it.
Revenge.

[staylor]

Just in case anyone cares... here is the latest chapters to my little writing project.

Six

A chest. She had said that the journal was in a chest.
The problem was that the McPherson home had roughly four hundred and eighty five chests, or it at least seemed like it did. Mark started in the obvious place, his aunt’s room and worked his way out from there.
Three weeks later and he had not found the journal. He had found many other strange things that he had no idea were in the house. A tesla coil, a medieval battle ax, a stuffed marmoset and a carved tusk; all hinted at his family’s storied yet mysterious past or at least in his dead relatives’ eccentric tastes. Yet there was no journal, nothing that hinted at how or why Aunt Mabel had been bitten by a vampire.
Mark was getting a bit discouraged that he would ever find what he was looking for but was not yet ready to give up hope. There were entire rooms in the sprawling old house he had not been able to search. That was not even counting the basement which had been cluttered beyond belief when he was still a boy. He had veritable oceans of dust, spiders and family belongings to wade through before he would admit defeat.
In addition to searching for clues to his family’s past and sorting through the piles of crap left to him he was also trying to find some work. Mark had been obsessively watching the local news and listening to the radio while he cleaned and sorted. He was hoping that he could discern a covered up monster attack from the mass of normal accidents and fluff pieces, but he had even less luck with that than with his other task.
That was about to change.
“…last people to see Ashley were her friends, who say that dropped her off in front of her home on Greenhorn Road at ten O’clock on Wednesday. But when Ashley’s parents came home at ten thirty Ashley was nowhere to be found.”
Mark jerked his attention away from the papers he was sorting through and towards the TV where a picture of a pretty, blond girl lay under the reporter’s solemn voice over. The screen changed to show an ordinary house in the woods that Mark assumed was the victim’s home.
“Authorities urge anybody who has information about Ashley’s whereabouts to contact the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office as soon as possible. Back to you Dan.”
“Thank you Kit. Of course our prayers are with Ashley and her family.” Mark turned off the television before that overly tan anchor could blather on about something else.
Greenhorn Road was just south of Grass Valley which was the town next door, Mark could be there in fifteen minutes. Odds were good that it was probably just a serial killer or that Ashley had ran away from home. The last two “monster attacks” that he had investigated had turned up nothing but this was so close he figured he had nothing to lose by checking it out.
Mark quickly assembled the gear he had either found or purchased over the last couple of weeks and packed most of it into a large black duffle bag. Several items he secreted about his person including a vial of holy water, his rosary, a large hunting knife he had found and a 357 magnum revolver that he had purchased. That last part was not easy, California gun laws were so Byzantine and nonsensical that Mark almost gave up monster hunting before he even got started.
The duffle bag Mark threw into the passenger seat of his truck. In the bag he had a myriad of items that he thought could be useful under the right circumstances; silverware, the cavalry sword, extra ammo, rope, an axe, homemade explosive and other things. He knew he would be going to jail if he was ever stopped by the police but decided to write that off as a hazard of doing business.
It took fifteen minutes to drive down to Greenhorn Road. Mark tried to hide his nervousness from himself by whistling tunelessly to country music that crawled reluctantly out of the half broken radio. As always when he took it out of the house, his 357 burned guiltily on his hip and his eyes darted around in a search for the cop who would bust him for a concealed carry violation. Despite his apprehensions Mark did find the house on Greenhorn road that he had seen on the news.
He drove by as casually as he could he did not want to give Ashley’s any reason to suspect him. Getting out of the truck right in front of the house was not a good idea but even from the road Mark could see how the ground around the house had been trampled down by sheriff’s deputies in search of a clue. A fragment of doubt worked its way into the soft, unprotected corner of his brain; how could he find something when all of the searcher before him could not? Mark pushed the doubt a way and breathed deeply to calm himself as he pulled off to the side of the road in a spot where his truck would not be particularly conspicuous.
Mark at first tried walking a perimeter around the beaten area where any clue would not have been disturbed by an unknowing deputy but found nothing. He tried casting deeper into the woods but to no avail. He was no tracker or hunter of any sort but he had spent enough time in the woods around the old homestead to become familiar with the spoor of animals common to the area. Deer, coyotes, raccoons and skunks had left their mark in the area as well as people, but there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
The light was fading fast and the fragment of doubt in Mark’s mind had grown into a brick. He did not even know what he was looking for. Ashley could have been taken by anything including regular human scum and flailing through the woods was turning up nothing. He resisted the urge to curse but instead made the sign of the cross to calm himself and resumed his search for several more minutes and turning up nothing.
Mark had given up and was making his way back to the truck when he spied a strange track on the ground. It looked to be a hoof print but it was far too large and round to belong to a deer and there was an odd quality to it as if the light itself twisted around it to give it a vague shimmer. In the faint light of dusk Mark could just make out another track in the forest floor several yards away.
The trail led deeper into the woods. Each strange track was separated from its brethren and Mark gulped as he imagined a creature that could cover a yard with a single step. Refusing to let fear overcome him he allowed the trail to take him into the dusk gloom for the forest. His pace slowed to a crawl as he tried to discern each track in the weak light of dusk and eyes scanned restlessly over the duff covered ground. He wished he had brought his flashlight but instead he had left it at the truck and was unwilling to risk losing the trail to retrieve it.
The disappearance of the sun behind the horizon forced Mark to concede to necessity. He pulled his gaze away from the ground where it had been fastened for the last fifteen minutes and turned find his way back to the road only to stop dead in his tracks.
Even in the murk of a forest headed towards night the thing shoved in his face was unmistakably the barrel of a gun.

Seven

“This is a restricted area and civilians are not permitted to enter. Go home.” The voice behind the weapon boomed with authority and Mark saw no option but to raise his hands meekly and try to back away before the guy in front of him changed his mind.
“What is that Martinez?” Another armed form materialized out of the woods to Mark’s left.
“Civilian. I’m sending him on his way.”
“Belay that! This sucker’s armed.” The second man snatched Mark’s revolver off of his hip before he could protest and the first man, Martinez, aimed his weapon at Mark’s face with renewed aggressiveness. The second man patted Mark down and discovered his other tools.
“So, we have a Hunter looking to cash in!” Martinez sneered as his companion flipped through to small notebook of monster traits, mostly copied off the internet, that Mark kept in his back pocket. Mark resisted the urge to snarl in response but something about the gun barrel in his caused him to hold back. “You think he is one of those MHI assholes, Simmons?”
“No, those guys steer clear of California these days, too many gun laws and Hunting regulations here; besides they’re always better prepared than this asshole. He’s probably just a freelancer looking to cash in on our hard work.”
“That what you trying to do? Take the PUFF bounty after we kill the goddamn thing?” Mark tried not to bristle at the other man’s blasphemy; he really did not want to end up in prison.
“No. I had no idea you guys were out here. I swear…”
“Bull crap. You Hunters just think…”
Martinez was interrupted by a thin but familiar voice that was vacillating between a shriek and a whisper.
“What the Hell do you think you are doing? I said to be quiet.” Agent Tipperton’s weedy form charged out of the forest’s deepening shadows. The green dark of the forest was enough to obscure most details but it was still plain that the little MCB Agent had traded in his suit for the tactical gear that his two minions wore.
“We caught a Hunter sir…” Martinez began only to be cut off.
“Nonsense. With the Governor’s help we drove all of the big outfits out of the state… wait a minute.” A flashlight shined briefly into Mark’s face leaving him half blind. “Mr. McPherson, I told you to forget that monsters exist.”
“But you…” Tipperton shoved his gun barrel into Mark’s diaphragm and his protest dissolved into a wheeze.
“Don’t argue with me McPherson. You are in world of trouble. Simmons, escort Mr. McPherson put of the area. I’ll deal with him lat…” At the soft, reedy notes of a wooden flute Tipperton’s mouth to shut with an audible snap and he whirled towards the sound with his gun up. The other MCB agents followed their boss’s lead and aimed their weapons towards the unseen source of the ethereal music that floated out of the trees and brambles.
“Satyr,” breathed Tipperton softly as if unwilling to interrupt the haunting lyric. His subordinates responded with muffled curses and shifted nervously in place. The MCB operatives seemed to be terrified.
Mark was just confused.
What was a satyr? After some thought he vaguely remembered something about a satyr in some Disney movie. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe maybe, or perhaps Hercules; both movies had those little half-goat men, but those seemed more like comic relief than anything that would make an armed, federal agent ready to crap his pants.
As suddenly as it began, the unseen flute in the trees stopped playing plunging the forest into a quiet that was every bit as spooky as the music had been.
“OK, we now back away slowly.” Tipperton’s whisper was hoarse as if all the moisture had been sucked out of it. “It may have decided to leave us alone since it cannot put a glamour on us. But if you see anything move; kill it.”
“What’s a glamour?” Mark asked. He was still unsure as to what all the fuss was about.
“Keep your mouth shut McPherson out I will leave you out here,” Tipperton snapped back. Mark had no doubt that the MCB agent would do as he threatened and he did not relish the prospect of finding his back to his truck without a flash light.
“Fine,” he conceded mulishly. The whole group started backing away from the flutist and towards the road. Mark was straining his eyes, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever had spooked Tipperton when two soft flute notes came unbidden from the left.
“Shit!” Tipperton said with feeling.
Simmons whirled towards the sound but he was not fast enough. A small, dark form dashed through the party so quickly that it was nothing more than a blur; A blur that left only a hint of malicious laughter and nearly decapitated Simmons in its wake.
The MCB agent gabbled unintelligibly for a few seconds and pawed at the clean cut that had neatly severed his throat, jugular and carotid before collapsing to the ground. Suddenly, the MCB operatives’ fear made far more sense. Tipperton and Martinez fired a few vain rounds at the forest around them and Mark dived for Simmons’ corpse in an attempt to recover the weapons that had been taken from him.
A few more notes strained out of the woods and instinctively Mark threw himself flat against the ground. An ugly wind brushed the top of his head and Mark barely perceived a wickedly curved blade rendered near invisible by the combination of dusk and speed. Again, faint but cruel laughter filled the woods followed mere instants later by the screams of Martinez. The MCB agent fell to the forest floor gripping at the new wound on his right thigh. Fresh blood glistened darkly in the rapidly fading light as it seeped from between the man’s fingers.
At last, Mark’s questing hand found the grip of his .357 and ripped it out of the pocket of the dead agent. He pointed the gun at the forest around him as if it were a talisman that would keep evil away by its presence alone. His other hand continued searching Simmons’ body for something he could use.
Mark found a flashlight just as those ominous notes once again echoed out of the trees. Desperately he fumbled the Mag Light on and swung it towards the music he had learned to fear.
The satyr stood frozen in the beam of the flashlight for a split second. It was shorter than anything that terrifying had any right to be, standing no taller than your average ten year old. Like the satyr from the children’s’ stories it did have the lower body and horns of a goat, but there the similarities evaporated. The body was not one of chubby, cherubic innocence but was instead was as twisted and distorted as something sprung from an acid trip and eighties music viedo. Bulging muscles warred with skeletal leanness for control of the satyr’s body which was colored a variety of green shades like a camouflage print. A set of male gonads hung between the muscular goats legs like over ripe fruit, far too large for the body that supported them. It was a thing of children’s nightmares.
One of the satyr’s arms, the one holding the pan flute, was held over its face to protect its eyes from the sudden light but did nothing to hide its diabolic features or snarl of hate. The other hand held the knife that Mark had glimpsed moments earlier; the knife that had killed Simmons and maimed Martinez.
The creature held still just long enough for one drop of blood to glint darkly as it fell from its blade and then it was gone with an explosive leap before Mark could bring his gun to bear. He screamed with fear and frustration as he squeezed off a few wild shots. The deep booms of the pistol were joined by the sharp crack of Tipperton’s weapon but if they hit the satyr it gave no sign of it.
Mark and Tipperton stopped firing, both hoping that, somehow, they had scared the nightmarish creature away. Tipperton had backed into the nearest tree, his gun swept back and forth, seeking a target that was no longer there. Martinez had stopped screaming and was instead groaning and gasping as he tried to bind up the wound on his leg. Mark tried to ignore the injured man and instead focused on the forest around him, listening for the tell tale notes of the flute.
The minutes trickled by and there was still no sign of the satyr.
“Is it gone?” Mark finally whispered, tense with the expectation that even that small, flutter of sound would draw the satyr from the woods.
“I don’t think so,” Tipperton whispered back so softly that Mark could barely hear him over the beating of his terrified heart, “Satyrs are one of the smarter fey. It is probably just trying to figure out another way to attack us.”
“Then how do we kill the goddamn thing?”
“I am not sure.”
“Not sure,” Mark struggled to keep his voice at a whisper. “You were out here hunting it. How can you be not sure?”
“This was supposed to be reconnaissance only; thanks of fucking that up. SOP is to find its lair and attack it during the day but never to engage at night.”
“So light hurts it?”
“It’s not a vampire. I think light just slows it down.”
“If it slows down then we can kill it. Do we have flares?”
“I don’t, but I think there may be some on Simmons.”
Mark resisted the expletive that tried to crawl passed his lips turned back to the cooling corpse before him. His hand had no sooner touched the red cylinder that he hoped was a flare when once again the notes of the satyr’s flute drifted out of the forest. Frantically, Mark ripped the tap off of the flare, hurled it in front of him and shielded his eyes from the burst of phosphoric white light.
In the seconds it took for Mark’s eyes to adjust the bright light of the flare he was sure that he was dead and the last thing he would feel would be the unseen blade of the satyr; but he was wrong.
That satyr seemed to be trapped by the bright light of the flare, like a bug caught between two panes of glass. It still moved, but its movements were slow and had nothing in common with the lethal grace that Mark had glimpsed earlier.
The tableaux created by the flare lasted only a second before Mark and Agent Tipperton trained their guns on the fey creature and blew it apart in a hail of bullets that would have pleased even the most gun happy of rednecks.
Odd colored blood and implausible organs festooned the forest and a pair of twisted goat legs stood improbably upright for a few moments before toppling to the ground. Mark had never found such utter carnage to be so pleasing.