The Traveling Vampire Show Read Free Page B

wanted her to put it back on, but I didn’t say anything.
    “All set,” Rusty said. I saw him check her out. “What’s going on?”
    “Nothing much,” Slim told him. “Just waiting for you.”
    “We’re thinking we’ll have to be really careful,” I explained. “Valeria’s gonna have...”
    “Casket keepers,” Slim threw in.
    Rusty smiled and nodded.
    “No telling how many people might be with the show,” I said.
    “And it’s likely a scumrvy lot,” added Slim with a bit of Long John Silver in her voice.
    “They go around with a traveling vampire show,” Rusty said, “they’ve gotta be at least a little strange.”
    “And maybe dangerous,” I said.
    Rusty suddenly frowned. “You guys aren’t gonna chicken out, are you?” Before either of us had a chance to answer, he said, “Cause I’m going irregardless.”
    “Irregardless ain’t a word, Einstein,” Slim told him.
    “Is too.”
    She wasn’t one to argue. She just gave him a funny smile, then pulled her T-shirt on. “Let’s go.”
    After that, none of us said anything. We weren’t that far from Janks Field, so I think we were starting to get more nervous.
    Janks Field was the sort of place that made you nervous no matter what.
    First off, nothing grows there. It’s a big patch of hard bare dirt surrounded by thick, green woods. But it’s not bare on purpose. Nobody clears the field. As far as anyone knows, Janks Field has always been that way.
    I’ve heard people say the dirt there is poison. I think they’re wrong about that, though. Janks Field has more than its share of wildlife—the sort that lives in holes in the ground—ants, spiders, snakes, and so on.
    Some people say aliens landed there, and that’s why nothing will grow.
    Sure thing.
    Others say the field is cursed. I might go along with that. You might, too, after you know more about it.
    The reason they call the place Janks Field isn’t because it belongs to anyone named Janks. It doesn’t, and never did. It’s called that because of Tommy Janks and what he did there in 1954.
    I was just a little kid at the time, so nobody told me much. But I do remember people acting funny the summer it all happened. Dad, being chief of police, wasn’t home very often. Mom, usually cheerful, seemed oddly nervous. And sometimes I overheard scattered talk about missing girls. This went on for most of the summer. Then something big happened and everyone went crazy. All the grown-ups were pale and whispering and I caught bits and pieces like, “Some kind of monster ...” and “Dear God ...” and “their poor parents ...” and “always knew there was something off about him.”
    As it turns out, some Boy Scouts had hiked into the field and found Tommy Janks sitting by a campfire. He was a deaf mute, so he never heard them coming. They caught him with a gob of meat on the end of a stick. He was roasting it over the fire. It turned out to be the heart of one of the missing girls.
    Must’ve been awful, walking into a scene like that.
    Those Boy Scouts became instant heroes. We envied them, hated them, and longed to be their friends. Not because they captured Tommy Janks (my dad did that), but because they got to see him cooking that heart over the fire. Those scouts were legends in their own time.
    One of them, years later, ended up committing suicide and another...
    That’s another story. I’ll stick to this one.
    After my dad busted Tommy, he led a crew out to the field and they found the remains of twenty-three bodies buried there. Six belonged to the girls who’d disappeared that summer. The rest ... they’d been there longer. Some, for maybe five years. Others, for more like twenty or thirty. I’ve heard that several of them might’ve been in the ground for a hundred years.
    The field apparently hadn’t been a cemetery, though; nobody found signs of any grave markers or caskets. There were just a bunch of bodies—a lot of them in pieces—tossed into holes.
    Tommy