A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [42]
“It is a gift I give to you,” he crooned, voice smooth and steady, comforting and warming, but my terror locked me in an icy grip. “Trust me, you will be so much happier. All worry of your circumstances can fade away, like shadows blending with nightfall! He will provide all you need, and more than you can imagine, and all for the most meager of costs!”
A pale figure cast aside the silver dome before me, and on the platter, ringed with greens like a delicacy from a distant land, lay the head of the coach driver, eyes bulged in perpetual terror, mouth agape, crusted with dried blood, brown and caked over pulled, tight lips. The ragged cut along his neck beneath his chin showed sinewy tangles of stringy material, flesh bruised and tattered. My breath caught in my throat and I would have fainted if possible, but no merciful loss of consciousness blessed me. And I saw the servants at the far end of the table moving again, and my eyes drifted helpless to them.
The ghost-like servants creaked open a groaning door, its hinges squealed and wailed. In a sudden quickening, they darted to and fro, some lighting more candles at the opposite end of the table from me, others scattering and scrambling like insects away from piercing light. And as the warm amber glow rose on wicks in receding wax, I beheld a sight which froze my blood in my veins, stabbed through my heart and ripped through my mind like a bolt of lightning.
A white figure draped in baggy, sagging black clothes, arms crossed over concave chest, its skeletal, bone-hued hands and curled, gnarled fingers poking like dead tree limbs from the dusty cuffs, and wispy white gossamer cobweb hair spilling over shoulders and rail-thin neck. The eyelids, so thin the irises bulged and cast shadowy color through them, nestled deep in sunken sockets, purple and bruised over sharp cheekbones and stark, papery tissue-thin skin. Ragged deep lines carved through the valley of the cheeks, drawn and parched, the feathery lips of parchment puckered and cracked, the temples recessed behind sharp ridge lines of the brow, the wrists, thin as a child’s, huge knobs protruding so far as to threaten to pierce the flesh, and the neck nothing but a taut stretch of blue veins and skin wrapped over corded sinews.
I tried in vain again to scream, the sound unable to escape the paralysis of my body, my chest heaving with the effort, a tear streaming down my cheek. I stared at the cadaver in the casket, nestled amidst folds of pale satin, and my heart lurched and tore in my breast when the doors of the chamber slammed shut, leaving me with this man, this evil I thought a friend, and the dead man in his coffin.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” his voice sang, his breath soft on my face. He moved away from me to better admire the corpse in its bed, and I saw them, from the corner of my eye I saw them, his impossibly long, gleaming fangs, slicked with spittle, sparkling reflections of candles flames writhing over their white enamel.
He turned to me, still holding my face toward the carcass in the casket across from me, and smiled again. “It’s so easy … and he shall provide all you need, and you will live forever.”
In that instant the eyes of the cadaver popped open, the maw yawning wide as a sucking breath gasped into the lungs, jaundiced sclera webbed with crimson veins, the gray tongue rolling over the cracked lips and fangs, the canine fangs, stretching long and glittery until at last the dead, the undead, rose full from its slumber. The baleful eyes fixed on mine, and the hideous lips, the horrible face, broke into a smile which folded the