Resurrection In Vampire Valley

By Carl Reader

Resurrection In Vampire Valley is the long-awaited second volume in the popular Vampire Valley series. It begins where The Hostage of Vampire Valley left off, with Maggie's lover Mabin still dead but about to be exhumed by her little brother Tommy after a year of healing resurrection in the grave. Oddly, black blood begins seeping out of the mountain where Mabin is buried, and when Maggie appears to be teetering on the brink of madness, Tommy decides to take action. The black blood has no intention of allowing the boy to rob Mabin's grave of its victim, and instead inflicts on Tommy a horrible condition that has to be rectified with a terrible ritual by his step-parents, Stephanovich and Elsa. Aghast that Tommy is unable to perform his duty of the resurrection of Mabin, Maggie follows her lover into his strange and magical world, where she, too, must undergo resurrection and rebirth, despite the fact that Mabin is only half alive. While these rituals are performed inside the mountain, the black blood is polluting the world outside it and drawing the entire town back into the vampire's nest. Elsa and Stephanovich must deal with the hundreds of resurrected vampires of the Montana town before they can save Maggie, Mabin and Tommy, but they make the attempt to save their children with a ferocity that can be born only of love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carl Reader
• Release date: Apr 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311505361

Carl Reader

Carl Reader trained as a journalist at Temple University and has worked as a reporter, photographer and editor in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Montana. He's published short stories in literary magazines and on the Internet and has self-published a children's Christmas story called THE TWELFTH ELF OF KINDNESS.That book was partially published in Russia under the Sister Cities program. He's also self-published a novella called THE PERSECUTION OF WILLIAM PENN, which has been well-received in several college libraries. He works as a professional photographer and freelance writer.

Book preview

Resurrection In Vampire Valley

By

Carl Reader

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Carl Reader

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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All characters in this novel are purely fictional.

Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

Resurrection In Vampire Valley

By

Carl Reader

1

In a panic, Stephanovich Emory peered at the yellowed, musky document held just inches from his eyes. His cheeks were red and pinched and his breathing came so hard it nearly blew the trembling paper out of his hand. His fingers shook and his eyes blinked as the sweat poured into them from his forehead. He clutched the document so tightly in frustration that it crumpled and tore in his hands.

No, no, I love the boy too much for this, more than life itself, he murmured. This can’t be. I can’t do this. Never!

Tommy lay on the floor screaming as the black blood ate like acid into his skin. Stephanovich did his best to concentrate on the task and not to hear the screams of his son. He brought the Transylvania Mysteries closer to his eyes and peered once again at the odd squiggled writing. Fingerprints etched in ancient brown blood on the mysteries, but that blood didn’t matter now, it didn’t matter at all. A few more seconds of this torture of his son and he would hyperventilate into unconsciousness at what the mysteries were telling him to do.

What does it say, darling? Hurry. Tommy’s not going to last much longer. How do we save him? What can we do?

I can’t see! There’s no light down here. No, I can’t see what it says. I can’t see! It’s no good! I can’t read it!

You have to! Only scripture can save him now, and I know you can read it, you just don’t want to! Tommy is dying! Do something to help him! Do what the mysteries tell us to do.

I can’t stand this pain! Tommy screamed. Whatever you have to do, do it now!

A little cry broke from Stephanovich, like a pitiable peep from a stricken bird in a net. He spun around like a mad monkey in a cage and lifted the paper above his head to throw light on the tiny, cryptic, foreign characters written in fading black ink on the yellowed sheet, on the Transylvanian Mysteries. He wished to make absolutely sure of his instructions.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no! It does say that. It says what I thought it said.

What is it? What does it say? Hurry!

Stephanovich threw his hand down to his side and shook in anger.

I can’t do this! I can’t do this no matter what! I won’t do it! I love this boy. I love him more than my own life. It has to be wrong!

You have to do what it says. No matter what it is, you have to do it! We live by the mysteries, and without them we’re done.

It says we have to cut off his head. Only that will save him.

In the dark basement of their new house, with the unseen mountains of Montana beyond the dank walls of the basement seemingly mocking them with brightness and light and life and joy, they fell into that peculiar awful silence that is the quiet of the soon-dead. Motionless, in great fear, and seemingly eternal, that quiet gripped them so tightly it squeezed the breath out of them so that no air passed into or out of their lungs for several seconds.

Elsa and Stephanovich simply stared at each other, as though not believing their lives had come to this.

Only when Tommy screamed out in agony from the floor again did they come back to an existence they no longer wanted. The little boy was in such great pain now he was beyond speech, beyond reason, and yet they would not, they could not, kill him as the mysteries dictated.

Are you sure you read it correctly?

Stephanovich partly crumpled the parchment in his hand, forming a tight angry fist around them.

It says, ‘The victim of this black affliction of blood dissolution must be hung upside-down like a savage wild pig and his head cut off from his body, before the black blood dissolution washes over him completely and tears the hair from his head and dissolves the skull shielding his brain in a flooding agony of pain. Then it will be too late for him, it will be too late to make the victim whole again, if the brain is gone, and he will wash away into the ground and his spirit will wither and die and never reach eternity.’

Good god! It says that?

I can’t do this sacrifice, not to one I love so much. Let me kill myself first.

Stephanovich looked around desperately for a knife to slit his own throat.

No! Stand him up! Good god, stand him up and gather your courage for this! Elsa screamed. The black blood is trickling up the back of his neck!

The boy was bound in a straightjacket, his feet tied together so that he could not kick or move but only scream in agony. In a pool of his own black and red blood on the concrete floor, he thrashed in agony, the two-colored blood seeping out of his flesh in an uncontrollable flow until he looked like little more than commingled black and red liquid somehow formed into the shape of a boy.

He could still scream, and only out of desperation at what Stephanovich said must be done to him could he still talk.

I heard what you said! I heard it! You want to cut off my head! You want to cut it off and think that will make me better, but no, don’t do it! Don’t cut my head from my body! It won’t help me at all. Please, please don’t do it!

Almost roughly, and certainly grimly, they grasped the little boy’s dissolving arms in their rubber-gloved hands and pulled him to his feet and stood him on what used to be his feet. His legs would not hold. Elsa had to support him while Stephanovich tied the rope around the bloody bones of his ankles. Grasping him close as he thrashed and cried out, they felt the black blood splash by them, and tears flowed from their eyes as they prepared to do this horrible thing to their son.

Hold him! Hold him! Stephanovich yelled out, his voice breaking with the agony of what he was doing.

I’m trying. He’s slipping away. He’s slipping away, and dying! Whatever you do, do it quickly!

Hold him tighter.

I am holding him tightly. He’s dying. Don’t you understand that?

Again, a cry of agony broke from Stephanovich’s throat. He sobbed so loudly Elsa’s legs nearly collapsed beneath her, but he shot to his feet and in one motion threw the loose end of the rope over a wooden beam above their heads. He caught the other end and was pulling on it hard before he regained his composure and roared out instructions to his wife.

Let him go!

She could hardly hold him, and her heart told her she must not let him go, as the fierce tug on the rope tore the little boy’s body out of her grasp and upward, upside-down, to swing as a man executed by hanging would swing in the wind. In her agony over the coming murder of their son, she grasped the body feebly until it slipped out of her hands and swung away. She gave out a piteous cry, and the body flew further skyward, like a savage thrashing pig’s, until it hung over a large silver vat. Even before it stopped swinging Stephanovich tied off the rope on the sturdy handle of the vat and picked up a machete off the floor.

Don’t do this! Not this! Tommy screamed. I want to live! Fix me somehow, but not this!

The blood is washing over his hair! Elsa screamed out, stricken with grief. He’s done! He’s finished!

This is going to kill Maggie, to lose her brother, too. We are all dead after this.

The little boy’s body was disintegrating already, falling in small pieces to the bottom of the silver vat.

Just do it! Elsa screamed. You must do it now! Cut off his head! Save your son from more pain.

With hot tears streaming down his face and washing his son’s red blood away from his cheeks in white streaks, Stephanovich drew back the machete in a full arc and screamed out so loudly the noise blew open the basement’s casement windows with hurricane force.

Outside, the happy, sun-drenched mountains felt the fierce power of the scream wash over them. They could understand nothing of the animalistic horror of that scream, or what it meant to everyone who lived in peace in their shadows.

To the mountains, it was a scream that meant nothing.

2

Maggie walked barefoot through the mountains for several hours each day. Her trips sometimes lasted until sunset, on summer days, that is. When the winter snows covered the Bitterroot Mountains, her pilgrimages were curtailed by Stephanovich and Elsa out of concern for her survival. The mountains were unforgiving and fierce in the winter and would surely kill her. Since Mabin had died, she had little use for her powers, even for survival, and she ignored the magic within her to wait for his return. She did little with her life but wait for him to live again, as was promised by the mysteries. With little concern for herself or understanding what she was doing, she closed off her mind and would have walked in the cold but for her step-parents’ concerns. So in winter she paced barefoot inside the house while staring out the windows at where she thought Mabin was buried.

It’s up there where my sweet love lies, calm and at peace, she’d say, in a sing-song musical way, talking to the mountain as though it would answer. Keep my sweet love warm and well, mountain, until the day he steps out of his grave and walks into my arms, for it is said he must return to me, according to the truth of the mysteries.

There were strange ideas twirling around in her head, tiny dancers of hope. He was to come to life again just one year after he was murdered by the vampires who were now recovered and living normally as her neighbors and friends, free of the lust for blood. She and Tommy and Mabin and Stephanovich and Elsa had saved those tortured souls and brought them back to a normal life, and to further develop the community, Stephanovich and Elsa were making plans to begin gold-mining operations on the mountain and employ hundreds of the saved from the town. Stephanovich had already blasted several exploratory shafts into St. Mary’s mountain to discover where best to do the mining. The souls they had rehabilitated from their monstrous habits and made human again were alive and well and soon to prosper due to their efforts, but Mabin was gone, at least for this year. Yes, he was to come to life again, be resurrected, Maggie knew, by her blood. She waited for that and that alone. Maggie was not recovered from any of her earlier adventures in fighting the vampires, and simply lived these days in wait for Mabin’s rebirth, which she believed would make her whole again. During all those months of waiting for love to flourish, like the green buds of spring, she walked barefoot through the house staring at the mountains, mumbling to herself. She lit up brightly whenever she saw Tommy. Tommy was going to save Mabin and her. He alone had that power, since he would perform Mabin’s final resurrection.

You remember where you buried him, don’t you? You remember what day you have to go out into the mountains to dig him up, don’t you? she’d ask. It’s exactly one year after he died that you should go to the mountains and bring my love home to me.

I remember. Here, I have it written down, the date and the time and the place, on this piece of paper in my pocket. See? I know the mysteries say I’m the only one who can exhume him up and revive him, so I’m really careful with the exact location and time.

I don’t know what I’d do if you can’t save him. I might wander through the mountains forever without him, or eat the earth, or live in a tree and stare at the sky all day.

Ew, gross, Maggie.

Or I might do worse to myself.

Maggie, come on. Don’t be a dorky jerk about this love junk. You know I’ll do what I have to do to bring Mabin back. You’re saying these things again like your brain is all messed up and scrambled. I don’t know why they come out of you. They make me think there’s something wrong with you.

I think there is something very wrong with me, Tommy. It’s all wrong.

Tommy would produce the crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket, carefully open it and hold it in front of her gray sparkling eyes, which danced at the sight of it. Her eyes had dark circles around them, and the bones of her cheeks stuck out alarmingly, for she had nightmares and lost sleep and weight. She would scan the boy’s scrawl and she would smile adoringly at the writing on the paper, as though it was scripture. She’d nod, shiver and hug Tommy and say, You’ll tell me you’re going on the day you dig him up, won’t you? I can’t come with you, according to the mysteries, but I’ll wait here until you bring Mabin back home to me. You have to tell me when you’re going to do it, though, so that I can be happy that day and prepare to love him again. You know I can’t be happy until that day.

Sometimes, Maggie collapsed to the floor out of sheer exhaustion when pestering Tommy about when he was doing to bring Mabin back from the dead, and he’d have to help her into bed and make her rest until she was well. He’d serve her chicken soup he made himself.

Just get better, he’d say. You can’t be like this when Mabin comes back. He wants to see the same beautiful girl he loved when he died, not a sick girl.

I promise to be beautiful for him. I promise to get better, if he thinks I should.

Although he was several years younger than Maggie, Tommy was a mature and confident boy, more confident and mature than Maggie ever was, and he was every bit as tough as she was. He’d hold her lovingly, comforting her, and stay with her through her fits of anxiety. She had lost her lover, and Tommy had only been captured and held and tormented by the vampires. He had been saved, she and Mabin and Elsa and Stephanovich had saved him, but Mabin had not been saved, and had been killed, and it made her sad and mad and a little crazy to be alone. How is it that the best and strongest among them had died? The only thing that kept her going was her little brother and his promise of bringing about Mabin’s redemption. Tommy understood that once the year was over Mabin would be healed in the ground by the blood that had been withdrawn from her heart and injected into his heart. Then Tommy would be there to dig up her lover, who would be bright and sweet and as loving toward her as he had ever been, and the vampires could never harm them again with strong Mabin at her side. The blood from her heart was in the grave with him, she thought as she lay sick in bed, and her blood was healing him and making him whole again. It made her feel she was with him.

Still, it had been a sad, lonely year, and she had many twisted thoughts of what could go wrong. Secretly, she feared her blood could not cure him, that it was not good enough, and he would never live again.

When winter passed, she returned to the forest to wait for her lover.

In the woods where she walked, she noticed certain spots on the ground held pools of black blood, blood leftover from the bloody lightning that had been hurled at them by Karin after the vampires had killed Mabin and he could no longer protect them. In other places, blood was leaking out of the mountain. Much of the blood simply dried up and disintegrated, becoming part of the forest and nature, but other pools bubbled up and hissed, as though freshly seeping out of St. Mary’s mountain. The mountain itself seemed to be bleeding, while Mabin lay dead in it. In waves that lapped the edges of the pools, this active blood seemed to want to break the bonds that trapped it. In places, the black blood had broken through the surrounding walls that held it. It had seeped out in streams, only to be frustrated again when the ground wrapped new walls around it and held it in check. Maggie knew better that to touch the black blood, and she hated it. It was a contagion, and evil, the same sort of contagion that had destroyed Mabin, and it was best simply to let it dry up and die, be transformed into something good in nature by the forest’s beneficent forces. She noticed it was leaking out in places all over the mountain.

The black blood can not harm you, she sang to herself. I walk over blood, and laugh at blood, and know you are better than it.

Maggie! Tommy would yet at her. You’re doing it again. Let’s go home before you make yourself sick in the head again.

Stephanovich had told her what she little she knew about the black blood, that it held sickness and disintegration for any living person who touched it, but that it healed the dead. That only made her crazier as she walked among the standing lakes of blood in the forest. They were like dark mirrors of wickedness, and she would stare at her image reflected in that wickedness. Evil never left the blood, even when vampires were cured and the black blood left them.

She thought she found Mabin’s grave on one of her walks through the forest, and the strange thing was the grave was covered by a pool of the black blood.

Maybe she was wrong, maybe this was not the place where Mabin lay buried under the mountain forest’s healing soil, maybe this was not the place where he was beating death with the blood withdrawn from her heart reviving him after Stephanovich injected it, her blood, into his heart. The black blood was bubbling up like thick tar over the spot she thought was Mabin’s grave, but it was contained in a pool there. She wondered, should I break through the wall that holds the blood in its pool and let it flow out so that he will not be harmed? Maybe this is not the place he is buried, she thought. Oh, why is he dead? Why not me instead? Maybe it was just another pool of blood in the forest where there were many pools of blood, and maybe he was still safe. She lifted her toe carefully, about to dip it in the blood and then push it through the wall of soil that held the blood in place.

What are you doing? Tommy had screamed at her, so alarmed he ran to her from next to a huge Ponderosa pine. Are you crazy? Don’t you know what that is?

It’s black blood. I know black blood, and black blood knows me. I know it could kill me, but I’m afraid Mabin is in there in the black blood.

He’s not! He’s not, no! He’s somewhere else. I buried him somewhere else. If you touch the black blood it will destroy you the way it would destroy any of us if it gets out!

She drew back her toe but continued to stare at her reflection in the dark pool. That does not look like me, she thought, as she stared at her own image. What if I am not me anymore? Will he still love me?

"Ah, well, if