This is an excerpt from Danse Macabre.
Olsen grew up on a farm, far out in the country, though he was too weak to do much. He watched his brothers work, watched their resentment from a distance and their pity up close. He was useless, hobbling a little more each day. He stayed inside with his mother, who taught him to read to keep him occupied.
The library at home was not much, a shelf of books his mother had vouchsafed from abandonment or the outhouse for him. His brothers would sometimes bring him a book from town, but there was little discrimination. To them, a book was a book.
He first noticed them in passing, a reference in Wuthering Heights, when Heathcliff is suspected of being one by the housekeeper after Cathy-herself perhaps one of them-died. Vampire.
Olsen had heard his brothers trying to frighten one another with stories from the Old Country, monsters who came in the night, but they never used the word, as though naming them would be enough to invoke danger.
He was not allowed to listen to these tales - it was understood his heart could not take the stress, and he would be roundly told off for eavesdropping-but there was little to stop him in a home that cramped. Some days, it seemed like his ears were the only part of his young body that worked right.
He had little with which to barter with his brothers, and he knew better than to mention his new interest to his parents. Being an invalid did nothing to excuse him from proper discipline. He felt certain mentioning the name of something ungodly would prevent him from reading again.
Exploiting pity took him only so far, got him third-hand issues of Varney the Vampire that had made their way to the States from England years before, but nothing that sated his hunger.
Olsen verged on giving up, having nothing more to offer his brothers. He could not toil nor take over their chores. He earned no money. Were it not for his mother, he was almost certain he would have been left to die once he became sick, not out of any sense of malice, but because slaughter was the fate of animals that did not pull their weight.
Then his brothers were forced into schooling. His parents argued against it, said they needed strong hands to keep the farm running, but the government refused to relent. Olsen was left at home because even the state understood a boy that sick would be no more useful in the classroom than in the fields. When his brothers would return home from the lessons, he would reteach their primers, work through arithmetic, and prove himself somehow valuable.
In exchange, when they ventured into town proper each month, they would smuggle him a book. Most were useless to him, excuses for smut. But even Carmilla taught him more of the mythology of vampires, what they could do, what they wanted. Why they visited people and how to recognize them. They passed a little further from fiction with every story as he sought to escape from the reality of his coming death, which bed rest could prolong only so far.
The boon came when his eldest brother gave him a copy of Antoine Augustin Calmet's The Phantom World. Here was a holy man not only discussing vampires but regarding them as actual. Olsen felt such delight he could not sit up for a day.
Months later, he heard his mother gossiping to a neighbor from down the way. Livestock had turned up dead, their throats torn out. Olsen propped his head up in his hands and tried to make no other sounds. Were he healthier, stronger, he knew he too would dismiss it as wolves. But he could feel his death looming. He could not tolerate the sobriety of likelihood.
He heard of Michael's approach through hushed words after the fact. Something had attacked the chickens, and they kicked up a racket. Olsen's father shot first, and then he and the brothers went after the creature. They held the vampire to the ground, chopped off his head, stuffed it full of garlic, and then threw it on a fire. The body they buried in a shallow grave, in accordance with rituals their father recalled from the Old Country.
Olsen knew better. If there was a relatively whole body, there was a chance. He gathered his supplies in the quiet of his final predawn and made for the grave.
Olsen soon stood over the decapitated body, which moved not a whit as he uncovered it. He prodded the solid, perfect arms, challenging them into motion, but they gave no resistance. He slid his hands over to the chest, feeling for the heartbeat that could on no account exist. Still. All was the perfect stillness of death, of a victim of murder, but Olsen had sinned too far to think there was a way of going back. If his family were witness to this defilement, he had no doubts he would be thrashed to death, and rightly. He would not refuse punishment. If by his family's hands, those of the corpse under him, or his own, he would die tonight.
He straddled the torso, the copper odor of the open flesh filling his nostrils. He did not know the process of transformation when the vampire was headless and debilitated, but recited in a whisper, almost in sobs, "You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever." He slit open his wrist with a pair of his mother's scissors.
The pain seared through him. Despite his sickness, it was rare he felt more than an ache. In later years, when Michael took him into cities, he would learn he had had hemophilia in addition to his other maladies. Then, the word was beyond his comprehension as the severed arteries splattered their contents onto Michael.
The body under him trembled. Olsen felt every drop of fear within him turn cold. The fantasy, the escape from the limitations of his body, had become real. He grew light-headed and weak, his blood draining into the earth.
With one hand, Michael had held Olsen's wrist to the hole of his throat. With the other, he clutched Olsen's head against his shoulder. Olsen was nearly spent when the spurt of Michael's blood landed in his mouth. Almost unconsciously, Olsen rooted for the source, like a baby at his mother's breast. He nursed on the exposed carotid until his humanity passed away.
Thomm Quackenbush is an author and teacher in the Hudson Valley. He has published four novels in his Night's Dream series (We Shadows, Danse Macabre, Artificial Gods, and Flies to Wanton Boys). He has sold jewelry in Victorian England, confused children as a mad scientist, filed away more books than anyone has ever read, and tried to inspire the learning disabled, gifted, and adjudicated. He can cross one eye, raise one eyebrow, and once accidentally groped a ghost. When not writing, he can be found biking, hiking the Adirondacks, grazing on snacks at art openings, and keeping a straight face when listening to people tell him they are in touch with 164 species of interstellar beings.