Thrice Told Tales Page 8

  Eldred put the phone to his smoke gray ear. “Yes sir…no sir…tonight you’ll see fast results, I promise you, Professor.”

  From where Bob Throgmorten stood, he could only hear a kind of bleating noise at the other end of the phone, something like a tied animal pleading, but his attention was fully on Charlene as she now sipped from a Vanilla Coca-Cola can, her lips moving over the sweating aluminum sheen of it. He wondered what she’d make of the lingerie he’d bought her over the years but had kept to himself.”

  “Key-rist, Dr. Van Helsing,” erupted Eldred. “We fucking know stump grinding. Uuuhuh… uhuh… awwwright, umm-huh…take care now, and we’ll be pulling into your front yard ‘fore dusk, I promise. Yes, before dusk.”

  Eldred sourly scrunched his features, lips gripping one another. He took a long moment to shake his head as if to clear it of roaches. He finally replied to the nervous voice at the other end. “What’s sat? Charlene? Naw sir, she generally stays back—so-as-not to do any stump grindin’ of her own, if you get my drift.” He chuckled and chortled at this. Bob and Charlene now listened to the one-side of the discussion they could hear.

  “Yes sir, Professor. She’s got a lovely speakin’ voice? Red head-a-hair, yes. Unusual markings below her mane? Look, she’s a sweet thing, but she’s not exactly a philly. No sir…not Charlene. Home body. Not likely you’d’ve seen her round the Turniptown River Crossing after dark, no. Nor likely the old settler’s cemetery near Half Day road, no sir.”

  # # #

  Bob Throgmorten kindly tractored the Soviet built grinder to Van Helsing’s place—the crumbling old Risley homestead no one in his right mind could possibly see any future in, but here was a crazy professor from over at the college with a notion to farm. Van Helsing and Eldred shook on the deal, which Charlene had carefully drawn up. Three months of payment with Van Helsing’s land held in collateral for the loan. Van Helsing crumpled the contract and tucked it below the folds of his London Fog trench coat, its tails lifted by an ominous breeze and this revealed bony and skin beneath to go with the sallow, vacant-eyed features and a white-knuckled left hand, and a three-foot long wooden stake he secretly clutched.

  But Eldred imagined he’d been surveying the prop’ty lines.

  “Van Helsing had guided them toward a giant stark white oak stump that he now leapt atop with a flourish, revealing tears and rents of a lifetime or several lifetimes in the coat he wore. Ragged and weather beaten, weary and vain at the wisps of white hair he smothered beneath his fedora, Van Helsing raised an arm skyward and shouted, “The bloody sun is abandoning us!”

  “She’s sure a blood red orange t’night, all right,” agreed Eldred.

  “You SAID you’d be here before dark. We’re fast losing the sunlight, man.”

  “Sure got alotta bark on you, Professor, and I like a man with bark, so long as he ain’t barkin’ at me.” With typical Eldred panache and subdued flourish, Eldred calmly ended any thought of not enough light when he flicked on the thousand watt beam from the Vladverbooten 2004. The light flooded the stump and illuminated the field for a good hundred yards in every direction save, behind the machine where rear red lights created an atmospheric glow over the headstones of the Risley family plot.

  Eldred revved up the 2004’s engine, and the horror of its noise filled the night air and swept through thicket and forest in successive waves of banshee shrill. Van Helsing looked ominously about, the tails of his London Fog riddled with stains, rents, odd smears brown with age. Van Helsing shouted for Eldred to hurry.

  “Von is it? Can I call you Von?”

  “Call me anything you like,” he replied, struggling to be heard over the stump grinder. “But get digging now!”

  “But we got artificial light!” Both men realized it was useless to try speaking over the 2004’s horsepower.

  Bob had outfitted the machine with a special attachment called a speedaxe grinder, a kind of whirling-dervish of claws and knobby teeth. He and Eldred had tested the speedaxe earlier on a much smaller stump back of the trailer. It explained the lateness of the hour. But now, the grinders had every reason to believe this ‘root-a-mentary’ problem of Van Helsing’s was solved. “Finito,” is how Bob had put it, raising Charlene’s eyebrow.

  “Still we’re dealing with white oak. It’s like grinding stone,” complained Eldred in return. But that was then, and now was now, and now Eldred—ear goggles in place-- sat haughtily at the controls in the cab of the 2004; a beauty he knew he must have at any cost.

  Eldred let loose the machine over the stump, and the monster began its long meal of splinters and rubble. Eldred knew stumps. He knew a hickory stump from a burnt hickory stump; he knew maple, ash, box elder, jack pine and red pine. He could smell the subtle difference between ash and oak; could eye-ball the distinct eddy and swirl of a tree’s signature markings. Could read a tree’s history from a stump—its lifeline--and at the annual stump grinder’s State Fair and BBQ picnic, he proved his skills each year by walking off with the most coveted prize for stump jumping, stump races, stump the stump contests for mental agility, and of course the tractor-pull stump raising contest--the natural finale. He and Bob had partnered up now going on fourteen such fairs, always with the latest equipment, thanks to Bob’s contacts in Birmingham.

  “Where the hell’s Bob got off to?” Eldred wondered as he reached up and rubbed the irritating marks—bramble bush cuts he’d strangely awakened with a few days earlier. He absently ran a red bandana over the two deep briar cuts to his neck. Breaking the scab, he cursed to see blood spilling froth-like into the bandana. “Fuck-allaway-ta-hell, where’d ol’ Bob get himself off to? Ain’t he ‘spose to be filming this stump grinding?”

  The other man’s camera and tripod, previously set up and ready to go, stood at just the right angle, and the digital camera was running, but no sign whatsoever of Bob. Eldred thought it odd; then he recalled Bob’s having recently complained of bladder problems, so he decided that Bob squatted somewhere behind the trees.

  The massive and thundering Soviet built grinder tore into the stump, first leveling it as Van Helsing had insisted, thus rendering it near impossible to ever remove as the price in time and hardware would be cost prohibitive. Next, he began scooping and ripping downward into the stump itself. Eldred hoped mightily that this would actually work, thanks to the Russian built 2004 and Bob’s clever rigging of the attachment.

  By all rights, Eldred knew that he and Charlene ought to’ve been honest with Van Helsing; they ought to’ve told him the job would have to hang fire till they practice this bore technique on an actual white oak. Eldred ought to’ve pointed out that they really hadn’t the boring equipment of an oil derrick--that GSG was, in effect for the first time in its history, stumped. But as the 2004 chewed ever downward and outward, seizing more territory from the stubborn white oak, creating the refrigerator-sized hole the ancient-faced professor wanted, Eldred’s confidence in the job soared. IT MADE HIM FEEL SO GOOD INSIDE, and he grooved on the vibration of it all.

  Once stumping away as he was, Eldred entered a world all his own; a world in which time seemed none existent and no one but Eldred and the machine remained on the planet. He became one with the grinder. But his reverie proved short-lived when, out of the corner of his one palsied eye, he watched Van Helsing doing something odd.

  Off to the right of the machine, displaying an amazing agility, and next a superhuman strength, Van Helsing pushed, prodded, dragged, and prayed over a derelict free-standing ancient Sears Freezer Queen. Chains and locks reinforced the door. In fact, Eldred saw that these hefty chains encircled the freezer several times over. The sheen of the Queen had long ago deserted her, replaced by a jaundiced yellow mingling with grimy grey and a moldy green. And Van Helsing kept shouting something up at Eldred, which the old man took to mean, “Hurry, hurry!

  Then a little more distinctly, “We’re losing the light!”

  Van Helsing had stopped in mid-yank, and he was shouting up at Eldred a warning!
“Watch out! To your right, Eldred!”

  Eldred’s head turned to the right, but he never saw it coming. Bob literally flew into the cabin of the 2004 in his vampiric undead state. With Bob himself still bleeding from a ghastly neck wound, he ripped out Eldred’s throat in one fell bat swoop, and as the 2004 droned on without Eldred, Bob fed like an animal on the old stump grinder’s blood.

  It was horrifying, and as with any time that Van Helsing witnessed the unbridled and full raw fury of the undead, he took a strong pull on a hidden flask he kept at all times filled with Dr. Tewes’s elixr of life—a mixture of Bishop’s Brandy and Ox blood with a smattering of Scotch, Rye, and bitters. After dousing his throat with this, Van Helsing suddenly felt his feet leave the ground; he’d been grabbed by the shoulders by a pair of painful talons ripping into his flesh. But he’d taken earlier precautions, as he’d resourcefully lashed himself to the chains on the Freezer Queen even as he’d been swilling the elixir.

  Now, try as she might, Charlene in her most gruesome vampiric aspect, her talons digging deeper, could not completely make off with Van Helsing. The old Dutchlander’s eyes stared up at her even as his hands grasped the three-foot stake he kept at all times, always securely fastened beneath his coat. Charlene screeched loud enough to rival the still screaming 2004 where Eldred’s body lay dead across the controls. From her hovering screeching perspective, she realized how dangerously close her wings were to the chewing business end of the 2004. Even in death, Eldred—an artist with a stump grinder--had won her admiration, as the grinder continued its blind two-step attack of the white oak stump: attack, retreat, attack, retreat. A rhythm like an in-heat pachyderm given over to an unbridled passion, chanting and rocking to a thunder and roar created of this tumultuous self-perpetuating hullabaloo.

  Seeing Eldred’s form slumped over the controls, and seeing Bob’s sated expression there in the cab, Charlene said, “Daddy died doing what he loved.”

  Using Charlene’s moment of distraction and her very tug on him, Van Helsing, with a mighty heave of his own, brought the enormous Freezer Queen to bear over Eldred’s final grind-hole, while the monster machine mindlessly continued chewing, kneading, splitting, and shitting wood chips from its rear.

  The supernormal power displayed by Van Helsing, along with the weight of the freezer unit, pulled Charlene into the now enormous pit. At the same instant, Bob tumbled Eldred’s body out over the neck of the feeding dinosaur in an attempt to get to the controls. Van Helsing landed in a niche alongside his freezer, alongside Eldred’s contorted features.

  Charlene landed atop the unit and was promptly in the spinning saber-toothed jaws of the Vladverbooten; the sound of her crackling rose-painted bones, playing bass to the chewing of gristle, fat, cartilage, muscle and sinew all so close to Van Helsing’s ear proved as excruciating as it was fortunate. She’d been infected sometime over the past several days, he guessed to have so much power. Bob, by comparison, appeared a more resent, inexperienced undead. Likely infected by Charlene who’d been infected by the fucking Count. All thoughts that fired through his brain even as the the din of the machine feeding promised to grind him up next.

  Charlene’s blood painted Eldred’s brown eyes red; it painted all of Van Helsing, his London Fog, and his freezer Queen with a candy apple red. The sickening neon hue of the blood of the undead--a sticky red taffy, a thick overly dark substance like congealed blood flecked with corn kernel-like curdled nubs.

  Now Van Helsing, still on his back, jammed between the sides of the white oak and the freezer unit, trapped below Eldred’s dead weight gave pause to his master plan. It had seemed so right at the time: Bury Dracule. Bury him in a fixed and impenetrable coffin. White walls all around. Trapped as he was now in the Freezer Queen, and a venerable old vampire spiking, vampire hunting mentor had told Van Helsing of a legend of the white oak, that it had powers to confine the undead if only a man could find a way to encase the unclean creature within its grasp. How better to finally and for all keep the most powerful and elusive beast of prey of all time imprisoned in the very lattice work of the roots of a white oak.

  His master vampire hunter’s plan had come together at such fateful step here on the Georgia -Tennessee border in America. All Van Helsing had to do was arrange for the stooges, the workmen to come and hollow out the stump he’d found waiting, and for the cement to be poured and to set and to sit and watch it dry overtop of Dracule in the Freezer Queen for final eternal sleep. No one was supposed to get hurt…no one was meant to die.

  “VAN HELSING!” he heard the reverberation of Dracule’s voice bouncing around in the freezer unit now. The unclean thing had come sentient! He must act and act now! But Van Helsing held himself in check when he looked from the pit of the white stump that Eldred, even in death, had created. Van Helsing stared up to where Bob had cat-walked the length of the giraffe neck of the 2004. Amazing how agile the undead could be.

  Van Helsng froze in place and witnessed the most selfless act of vampiric love he’d ever encountered--Bob Throgmorten’s amazing reaction to Charlene’s mincemeat exit from her undead state. Bob stood teetering on the rim of the vibrating grating biting machine, while the mad machine itself began tearing and ripping into the freezer unit, kicking up a powdery dust. Bob raised his arms in the universal gesture of the crucified, and committed himself in a final act to Charlene, leaping into the pit. As in slow motion, disbelieving, Van Helsing watched him drop, screeching into the rhythmic deathblow that had taken his Charlene before him. This resulted in more of the same.

  The grinding of bone in Van Helsing’s ear here in the pit, the accumulated human gristle swallowed up by the grinder only heightened Van Helsing’s horror at what had been wrought. The gooey red stuff of life that somehow and mysteriously supported the sentience of the undead, all glommed onto the freezer, onto Van Helsing’s clothes and hair and features.

  “You’re a fool in death as you were in life, Bob,” Van Helsing muttered a eulogy to the grinder salesman. “Charlene’s heart, body, and soul belonged to Luther D. Noble as you locals knew him. Luther Dracule Noble, now encased in my Freezer Queen!” Van Helsing didn’t know what good it’d do to rail at the dead, but he did it anyway.

  As if in angry response, somehow controlled now by Dracule’s very will, the jaws

  of the 2004 came directly at Van Helsing’s terrified eyes. Only Eldred’s body kept the jaws at bay as they attacked, retreated, and attacked again, spewing forth a healthy cadre of human blood from the elderly stump grinder. Nasty vampire-Bob had set the controls on auto-pilot before doing his bat-love imitation.

  The Russian operatic music inside the cab had mysteriously come on, accompanying a thorough chewing up of Eldred even as the poor devil’s body lay atop Van Helsing. An ironic twist, Van Helsing thought as he kicked out at Eldred’s dead weight. Finally, he clamored and clawed his way to the edge of the white oak stump, the only ally left him. He closed his ear to the bone crunching sounds behind him.

  Finished now with Eldred Giddings’s remains, the blind jaws of the 2004—now pulsating to the sound of Moussorgski’s Night on Bald Mountain--seemed bent on finding Van Helsing flesh and bone. At the same time, he was acutely aware that Luther Noble’s sleep had been disturbed. Van Helsing more than sensed the coming alive of the undead creature trapped inside the icy coffin. He saw it now. Seeping from a bad seal between compartments, a wisp of fucking smoke.

  Dracule’s essence, struggling to combat the cold, to combat the painful whiteness of his prison, struggling to disperse as fog--one of his many shape-changing permutations. He possessed powers satanic to reorder his structure and composition at will, becoming all manner of vermin that crawled the earth and slithered from cemetery earth or bayed at the moon. While the larger part of Vlad Dracule’s undead corpse still remained sealed inside the white coffin, draining the creature of its full power, harnessing his will, Van Helsing knew from the his own scars—scars from a time when he himself had been infected, carrying the vile
virus of this thing and keeping it at bay--that this base vile thing would soon regain its full strength…unless.

  As the wisp smoke cloud increased around him, Van Helsing spotted a narrow strip at the top of the white oak trunk, and he began frantically climbing. Behind him the stump grinder wildly gnawed at the refrigerator, as if knowing more gooey blood lie within.

  Half in, half out of the stump, Van Helsing snatched out his Nokia cell phone and called for the men with the cement mixer to come full on from where he’d kept them in check. “Macovoy! Van Helsing here! Come now! Now! Hurry!”

  Van Helsing realized in an instant of knifelike pain that he’d been injured, his leg bleeding badly, his hand coming away with his rich, red, globulin-filled blood. Globulins he’d named the odd eerie curious nodules and globs embedded in his blood these days. “More now than ever before,” he muttered under the fury of the grinder, and the sudden roar of awareness of omnipotence coming out of Dracule. The fiend was growing even from within the freezer.

  How many times had Van Helsing baited the thing? He’d lost all count. How many times had it taken the bait—this time in the form of Charlene Giddings. How many times had Van Helsing taken the bite? How long could Van Helsing hope to be immune? What properties of his blood, what elemental DNA strand proved an effective deterrent to the virus? How resilient and how long and what quality of life had Van Helsing left him, even should he succeed here and now in these unknown woods? How long could he hope to beat back the effects of the vampire’s unclean genetic horror coursing now through Van Helsing’s arteries? And so like a snake handler, he sensed one day he would take the bite that would do him in, but he’d never imagined being bitten and ripped apart by a stump grinder.