I've always loved a good vampire story, ever since I started watching DARK SHADOWS at the age of six. The fearless, driven vampire hunter is a common theme in such stories, from DRACULA to NOSFERATU. But what happens when the vampire hunter finally corners a master vampire, one on one? That is the scenario I envisioned for this little tale, and I hope you enjoy it!
THE HUNTER AND THE HUNTED
A Short Story By
Lewis B. Smith
The vampire’s lair smelled of stale blood, rot, and rodent droppings. Nicolas Hargen shone his light around the chamber, wondering how many hapless victims the bloodsucking demon had dragged here. He tried to imagine their terror as the yellowing fangs punctured their flesh, their life fading away as the monster drained their essence. Here and there he saw splashes of dried blood on the floor where some poor soul had doubtless perished. The lair was in the cellar of a long-abandoned church, and the windows, although broken, had been carefully covered with thin sheets of plywood to keep the sunlight out. He reached under his leather overcoat and grasped the smooth handle of one of the sharpened ash wood stakes he carried there. There were three leather loops sewn into each side of the coat’s interior, and each one had a similar stake tucked into it. He had ended many vampires with those stakes over the last two decades, but tonight he would finally end his quest by slaying the monster who had taken his bride.
For twenty years he had stalked the creature known as Draco, a master vampire who was at least seven hundred years old. Hargen was forty-five now, a lean, muscular man whose only concessions to age were the deep lines under his eyes and the grey at his temples. Like most people, he had thought vampires were a myth; an old wives' tale that formed the basis of countless bad movies and gothic horror novels – and nothing more.
But late one October evening in 2001 he came home, after a long night at the library researching his doctoral dissertation. He found his young wife Vicky stretched out across the bed with a black-clad figure gnawing at her throat. For a split second he froze, thinking that she had taken a lover, but the deep red blood spattered across the pillow where Vicky’s head lay tilted back, eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, dispelled that notion. Then the vampire had looked up at him, its mouth dripping with her gore, its deep black eyes rimmed with the narrowest corona of crimson, and he found himself frozen in sheer terror by its unrelenting gaze.
The creature lowered its mouth to her neck again, and the hideous slurping sounds shook Hargen out of his trance.
“GET OFF HER!” he screamed, lunging across the room to tackle the monster. A single arm shot out, grabbing him around the throat and stopping him in mid-air. Draco slowly stood, holding Hargen – who was not a small man – at arm’s length. Then he raised his arm, and Hargen found his feet kicking at empty space as he was lifted clear of the floor. The iron grip was cutting off his air flow, and he clawed at the hand that held him aloft.
“Fool!” said the deep, raspy voice that would haunt his dreams for the next two decades. “Come not between nosferatu and his chosen vessel. Now begone!!!”
Hargen was hurled across the bedroom and into the far wall with such force that he was knocked out, suffering three cracked ribs and a concussion. His wife’s body was cold by the time he regained consciousness and crawled to the phone. Before he was cleared to leave the hospital, Vicky had already been taken to the morgue. The autopsy determined the cause of death was exsanguination, with less than a pint of blood remaining in her body.
Hargen was released just in time to attend the funeral, his head pounding as he wept over her casket. The police told him that apprehending the culprit was unlikely – Vicky's was the third such death that year, and they were no closer to naming a suspect than they’d been after the first one. He stayed there, standing by her grave as the coffin was lowered into the soil and watched as the hole was filled by the gravedigger, unable to believe she was gone.
The authorities refused to publicly acknowledge his claim that a vampire had killed her, although Detective Rawlins, the lead investigator, believed him.
“They don’t happen often,” he confided, “but nearly every career homicide detective I know has at least one story about the damned bloodsuckers. This one that took your wife matches the assailant’s description in a half dozen cases I know of, going back fifty years or more. Just be careful, Nick. I know of several attacks like this where the victim’s spouse or partner goes missing in the weeks following the attack.”
It was nearly three weeks later when she came for him. Hargen’s concussion was slowly improving, and his ribs were on the mend, but he still slept in his recliner because he had a hard time breathing lying flat. He dreamed of Vicky’s face every time he closed his eyes – sometimes laughing, sometimes talking to him in that lilting Irish accent that was music to his ears. But no matter how innocently the dreams began, they all ended the same way – her head tilted back, her gore staining their bed, and the monster’s fangs buried in her throat. Then he would jerk awake, screaming first in horror and then in pain as his damaged ribs informed him they did not care for sudden movements.
So, when Vickie came that night, he thought it was a dream at first. She was wearing a long, sheer blue nightgown that he had bought for her during the first year of their marriage, her eyes alight with mischief and desire as she slowly crossed the room towards him. It was so real, he thought as she reached out to take his hand, more real than any dream he had experienced since that awful night. But then he felt her cold hand touch his, and her mouth suddenly opened to reveal freakishly long canines that glinted in the dim light. He realized this was no dream, and he threw up his free hand to hold her back as she leaned forward to latch onto his throat.
It was the rickety old kitchen chair that saved him. As he struggled, his slender wife - who was fully four inches shorter than him - lifted him over her head and threw him across the room towards their dining table. He had come down hard on the old chair, breaking two more ribs (on the opposite side from his previous injury, at least) and shattering the chair to kindling. Groaning, he’d rolled onto his back just in time to see her launch herself towards him, eyes blazing with a scarlet light and fangs bared. He grabbed for the nearest thing within reach, which happened to be one of the chair’s broken legs, and blindly thrust it towards her as she landed on him. He heard the sickening sound of ripping flesh as the wood slid between her ribs and transfixed her heart.
She let out a ghastly shriek, her hands grasping at the chair leg, and then rolled slowly on her back. He sat up, his twice-injured torso shrieking in protest, and looked at her face. Just before the light faded from her eyes, he saw a glimmer of recognition, and even as the ghastly fangs receded, she spoke his name.
“Nick,” she said. “I’m so sorry. . .”
Then she was gone, and with her spirit, all semblance of life left her body. Her skin faded to a mottled blue-grey, and he saw the crude stitches covering the Y-incision left by the coroner slowly appear across her chest. The stench of formaldehyde and rot assailed his nostrils, and what lay on the floor was not the graceful creature that had glided across the room towards him, but a foul, weeks-dead corpse.
Detective Rawlins helped him through the horrible days that followed. The official verdict was that a ghastly prank had gone wrong. They said someone – perhaps even the killer – had used his wife’s dead body to terrorize him, and then, his mind in a haze from pain medication, he had impaled a corpse. The real version of events was deemed too disturbing to reveal to the public.
But after the press furor died down, Rawlins called him late one night.
“I told you, you’re not the first,” he said. “Twenty years ago, when I was a rookie, another man lost his wife to that same bloodsucking bastard. He spent a decade trying to track the monster down, and I guess he got too close. We never found his body, but his head was left on the fireplace mantle of his home - as a warning to us, I reckon. I read his files – he'd traced the history of this thing as far back as the American Revolution!”
“I want those files,” Nick Hargen said firmly.
“You’ll just be butchered same as he was!” Rawlins said.
“My wife is dead, doubly dead because I killed her myself the second time!” Nick replied. “My parents are gone and I have no siblings, but what I do have is money, time, and a gift for research. I am going to find this monster and drive a stake through his foul black heart before I die, or else be killed in the attempt. I will count death, when it comes, as a relief. I have nothing to live for except to end this curse!”
It had taken a week of pleading before Rawlins finally dropped the files off one night. He looked worn out, and Hargen could tell he was already regretting the decision.
“The only reason I am doing this is because I’ve known about this vampire for twenty years and was never allowed to follow up on it,” the detective said. “I’m old, I’m retiring next year, and I hate the thought that this thing is still out there killing people – and worse! It’s your case now, Hargen – try to stay alive.”
That had been the beginning of the twenty-year chase that Hargen hoped would culminate by sunrise. He’d read every document in the file, and then he picked up where Jacob Collinsworth, the man who’d accumulated it, left off. The Collinsworth files had given his quarry a name – Draco Ferenc, descended from an ancient line of Romanian nobility. The vampire had operated on either side of the Atlantic since colonial times, taking victims on one continent until the outcry grew too great, and then switching to the other. Hargen spent months in London and Paris, digging through musty archives, finding description after description of the vampire’s depredations. Draco had killed dozens of people, mostly women, in America right before the Revolution, then fled back across the Atlantic and terrorized the poor districts of Liverpool, London, and Southampton before returning to America during the Jacksonian era. He’d fled back across the Atlantic during the Civil War, taken dozens of victims in Paris during the days of the Second Empire, then disappeared for a decade around the time of the Franco-Prussian War. Hargen later traced him back to Romania, his original homeland, during those years. Draco then returned to London in the 1870’s and 1880’s, claiming multiple young women and inspiring a young author named Bram Stoker to publish a fictionalized account of the killing spree. Then, early in the twentieth century, the vampire had returned to America, killing dozens in New Orleans, then surfacing again in New York shortly after World War One before fleeing to Europe again during the chaotic thirties.
After a decade of research into Draco’s history and travels, Hargen began his hunt. The master vampire was wily and clever, so at first the vengeful hunter focused on the undead that were most recently turned. Newborn vampires were sloppy and careless; by the end of his first year on the trail, Hargen had staked a dozen of them. In his second year, he encountered a true master vampire – not quite as ancient as Draco but still powerful and clever. Hargen nearly died that night, but centuries of preying on humans had made the undead monster overconfident. He’d managed to wound it with a bolt from his crossbow, and that weakened the vampire just enough for the hunter to impale it with his last stake even as its fangs descended towards his neck.
For the next few years, Hargen hunted vampires with a vengeance. The more of the bloodsuckers he killed, the more he learned about them. He learned to spot them by the thin corona of crimson that surrounded their pupils; he learned what kind of structures they liked to hide in, and he killed them as they slept whenever possible, although twice he survived night-time battles with wide-awake, angry undead opponents.
A year before, noting that Draco had claimed no new victims in the West, Hargen had journeyed to the creature’s homeland, the chaotic state of Romania. He knew that there was an ancient stone manor deep in the forests of southern Romania where the oldest records claimed the Ferenc family had once ruled as vassals of Vienna. Draco also knew that the monster had living thralls who protected his ancient home by day; not Gypsies as in Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel, but a dozen hardened Chechen mercenaries that Draco plied with women and drugs to guard his crumbling mansion.
Hargen watched them quietly for a week before finding their vulnerability. On Friday nights they ordered a huge meal from a local Italian restaurant, which was driven to the gate of the property by a delivery truck. Hargen had concealed himself outside the restaurant, waited for the food to be loaded, and then disabled the driver with an injection of Ketamine to the neck. He had laced the food with enough botulin to kill or sicken the entire squad in a matter of hours. The guards usually ate their meal and turned in, since their vigil was kept during the daylight hours only. By night, the property was protected by Draco’s vampire thralls.
Hargen switched clothes with the unconscious driver and delivered the food to the guards, who noticed that he was not their usual supplier but didn’t question him too closely. An hour after dawn he eased through the perimeter fence and approached the guardhouse. Eight of the men were already dead, four more unconscious. He finished each of them off with a single, silenced shot to the head, and then made his way to the ancient house.
Draco was not there – he had left not long before; Hargen found out later. But there were six vampires sleeping in ancient coffins in the warren of rooms that made up the cellar. Four were women, incredibly beautiful, looking natural and lifelike except for their long canines that protruded over their lower lips even as they slept. They each died quickly, their flesh evaporating as soon as his stakes penetrated their hearts.
The other two were men; one was powerfully built and bore a strong resemblance to Draco himself, the other was a tall, slender man with a bald head and nightmarishly long fangs. He alone put up a struggle; having heard the screams as his companion woke to find his heart transfixed. The vampire sat up in his casket. It was dark in the cellar; no sunlight could penetrate there, and he’d come after Hargen with an expression of lethal fury. Hargen was down to his last stake, but he had not used his crossbow all evening. The polished wooden dart, tipped with silver, flew across the room so fast the eye could not follow it. The vampire had tried to get his hand in front of it, but it had shot clean through his palm and into his chest, skewering his heart. The creature managed to stagger forward two steps before his body collapsed into a pile of dusty bones.
Hargen searched the crumbling stone manor carefully to see if there were any other vampires there and found none. Still, he knew that such an old structure might well be riddled with secret passageways. So, before he left, he set the place on fire. He may have missed Draco, but destroying the monster’s ancient sanctuary gave him a great sense of satisfaction. He fled from Romania as quickly as possible after that, catching a plane back to the States the next day.
Now Draco came after him, as Hargen expected him to. For almost a year he’d played cat and mouse with the monster, blending with crowds at night, and looking for the monster’s lair by day. Draco turned multiple victims, sending his newborn thralls after Hargen, but the vampire hunter cut them down with ruthless efficiency. Twice he’d glimpsed Draco from a distance, watching and waiting, but the monster could not seem to strike him if he stayed on holy ground. Hargen found that most priests had no problem letting him sleep in the sanctuary after he made large donations to their parish relief fund.
Hargen had also fended off attacks from two human assassins, either hired or enthralled by Draco, although one attacker had left him with a knife wound on his bicep. He relished the idea that, for perhaps the first time in centuries, the master vampire was afraid of something. Now, finally, he had found the vampire’s current lair. He knew Draco would be returning to the site within the next two hours, and so he carefully set his trap and waited. The sky in the east could not be seen from the underground chamber, but by his cell phone it was only moments before dawn when Draco soundlessly glided down the stairs into the deserted church basement.
Hargen had positioned himself behind some old crates near the monster’s coffin, crouching low with his crossbow aimed at the doorway. He pulled the trigger the moment the vampire came into view, sending a silver-tipped oak dart flying towards Draco’s midsection. But the vampire’s guard was up, and it moved with supernatural speed; the arrow that should have penetrated its vitals merely nicked its forearm instead.
Draco hissed in fury – wounds inflicted by silver always hurt the undead, even if they were not lethal. Hargen rose, casting aside his crossbow, and pulled a sharpened stake from under his coat.
“Hargen!” snarled the master vampire. “I thought I detected your murderous stench. Are you not content having snuffed out the lives of so many of my people?”
“I will be content when I bury this stake in your heart and watch you crumble to dust, you monster!” the vampire hunter snapped back.
“Genocidal wretch!” Draco spat, fixing Hargen with his gaze as he slid away from him with his back to the wall. “How many newborn nosferatu have you butchered, and you call me a monster?”
Hargen reached into his coat pocket, grasping the crucifix he carried there. He could not believe what he was hearing.
“All the innocent lives you have taken, and you want to play the victim now, bloodsucker? Is that how it is?” Hargen snapped.
“I have never taken an innocent life!” Draco said. “It is the code of my clan that we only feed upon those whose hands are stained with innocent blood!”
“MY WIFE WAS INNOCENT!” Hargen shouted; then he hurled the stake at the vampire’s torso with all the force he could muster. It was a bad idea and he knew it – Draco batted the missile out of the air easily – but his anger was getting the better of him.
“She was innocent,” the vampire said. “Innocent, young, and beautiful. She reminded me of a girl I knew in Constantinople when it was still Roman. But I did not feed on her, you fool! I turned her. You were gone, night after night, working on that silly dissertation, and I spoke to her. I told her what I was. I gave her the choice to grow old with you, or to remain forever young with me. She chose me.”
“LIAR!” Hargen snapped; his voice raised again.
“Why should I condescend to lie to you, murderous insect?” Draco sneered. “The tragedy of it is, she loved you. Even after she became nosferatu, she still loved you. She begged me to let her turn you into one of us. I should have refused – she was a newborn, still weak, and inexperienced. But she insisted that you would never harm her, that she could turn you quickly and easily, and I let her go. You murdered her.”
With that, Draco began to cross the room towards him – not quickly, but not slowly either. Hargen pulled out the crucifix and held it up between them to keep the vampire away. Draco only smiled, baring his fangs at the hunter.
“That trinket only works on us elders if you have a strong and vibrant faith in what it symbolizes,” he said. “You were never a man of faith, Hargen – and I imagine whatever belief in God you once had died the night you killed your wife.”
Hargen swallowed hard – the vampire was right. He’d not been raised in the church, and whatever belief he might have had in a higher power had died that night twenty years ago. But he was nowhere near done. He grasped the loop of wire he’d tied to his belt and yanked it hard.
He had chosen a spot beneath the east-facing window deliberately, then he’d loosened the screws holding the plywood in place before drilling a small hole in the top of the board and looping the wire through it. The plywood came clattering down when he tugged, and the rays of the rising sun came streaming through the window, directly into the vampire’s face.
Draco squinted and grimaced, then shaded his eyes with his hand. Nothing else happened. Hargen paused in shock.
“Winter sunrises are always the brightest, aren’t they?” he said in a conversational tone. “You, my worthy adversary, have watched far too many movies. Bram Stoker may have been a mawkish Victorian drama queen, but he did get one thing right – elder vampires are not harmed by the sunlight. We sleep during the day because the sun drains our supernatural strength and leaves us as weak as mortals, but other than that, it does us no damage. Were you expecting me to collapse into a pile of bones and dust?”
“I watched a vampire burst into flames when I opened her coffin during broad daylight!” Hargen said incredulously.
“A newborn, no doubt,” Draco replied. “You seemed to delight in killing my children! After a century or so, sunlight is only an annoyance to us.”
“So now you are only as strong as a mortal?” Hargen said. “Then you are mine! I’ve spent twenty hears training in strength and conditioning and practicing martial arts. Now I will silence that bloody mouth of yours forever!”
With a scream of pure rage, he launched himself at the ancient vampire. Draco was still strong, no doubt, but only as strong as a normal man. Hargen was no normal man. He broke free of the vampire’s grip, grabbed him in a judo hold, and slammed him to the ground. Draco’s eyes were wide with anger and – for the first time – a bit of fear. Hargen already had another stake in his hand and drove it downward as hard as he could. Draco deflected it from his chest, but the sharpened wood drove deep into his belly. The monster screamed in pain and rage.
Hargen stood up, with a grim smile on his face. Draco looked at him with fury, but the injury was grave enough that he could not get to his feet.
“Now, you damned bloodsucker, I am going to pin you to the ground with four more of these before I impale your heart and let you die!” he snarled.
“You are becoming very tiresome,” Draco sighed, and reached into his coat. His hand emerged clutching a small revolver. Before Hargen could react, the handgun barked twice, and he staggered backwards, feeling as if he’d been kicked in the chest by a small mule. Hargen’s back hit the wall, and he slowly slid down into a sitting position.
“A gun?” he whispered in disbelief.
“You don’t live to be nearly eight hundred years old without adapting to the times,” the vampire said, pulling the stake from his midsection with a groan of pain. “Firearms are a very effective means of defense, when all else fails.”
“That’s. . . cheating. . .” Hargen gasped as his eyes began to dim.
“All’s fair in love and war,” the vampire replied, and began to crawl across the room towards the hunter. The wound to his midsection was painful, but not lethal, and a few days of sleep would see it completely healed. He looked into the dying eyes of the man who had hunted him for twenty years with a small measure of pity. The vampire hunter’s lips were moving, but he didn’t have enough breath left to form any words.
“Some congratulations are in order, Hargen. You really did come close to killing me,” Draco said as he lowered his mouth to one of the gunshot wounds. It would be a shame to let fresh blood go to waste.
