SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: RUNAWAY

"Runaway" by Darrell Schweitzer  (first published in I, Vampire, edited by Jean Stine [Jean Marie Stine on the title page] and Forrest J Ackerman, 1995; reprinted in Schweitzer's collection Refugees from an Imaginary Country, 1999)

Lawrence is fifteen and is hitchhiking on a lonely highway in the cold, night rain.  Not a problem because the cold doesn't bother him.  He is carrying a knapsack.

Howard, an older man and a pederast, stops to pick him up.  Howard begins to interrogate Lawrence, whom he calls Larry.  Larry has no specific destination in mind, and begins to spin Howard a wild story.

Larry is running away from because his mother killed his father.  His mother imagined herself to be a witch and began doing weird stuff which his father did not like, so he would beat her mercilessly.  Seh and some of her female friends would hold meetings in the cellar.  From his bedroom, Larry would hear tortured noises -- a cat, or a dog, and once he thought he heard a baby.  Larry's  mother would emerge from the cellar, naked and covered in blood.  Then, Larry's father came home early one evening and was upset, so they killed him and took out his heart.  Shortly thereafter, Mr. Andrescu, a mysterious person who filled Larry with fear, started showing up.  Larry's mother called him down to the cellar, where Mrs. Walker, the lady from down the street, lay with her throat torn out and her heart missing.  Mr. Andrescu also lay on the floor.  Larry had to help bury Mrs.Walker, and place Mr. Andrescu in a box under the cellar floor.  the next day, Mrs. Walker and Mr. Andrescu were there again, seemingly uninjured.  Over the next few days, other members of the coven were killed -- Mrs. Dade and Mrs. Lovell and Mrs. Freeman and others Larry did not know -- and they all came back.  Finally, Larry's mother called him into the cellar one evening and Mr. Andrescu told him that he was saving Larry for last  as a favor to his mother.

As they were driving, they were passed through a bad accident scene by police.  Larry told Howard that two persons were killed, and third would die soon.

Howard stopped to ;pick up some food -- hamburgers and fries -- but Larry did not eat.  During the entire trip he kept reaching into his knapsack and touching...something.

It was about four in the morning when Howard stopped at a  motel and got a room for the two of them.  Howard was a little unsettled about Larry's wild story, but figures that Larry was displaying an odd sense of humor and was fabricating the tale, or that Larry was delusional.  No matter, because Larry was a very handsome boy.

But once they entered the motel room, Howard discovered what Larry had in the knapsack that he kept touching so lovingly...

A short, sharp bite of a story, originally published in an anthology of eleven vampire tales published in the first person.

Darrell Sweitzer (b. 1952) is a writer of dark fantasy and horror, editor, and critic.  He is the author of hundreds of short stories, at least fourteen collections, four  novels, eleven poetry collections, eleven books of criticism and bibliography, eleven critical anthologies, ten books of interviews, and nine fictional anthologies, and has edited two collections of short stories by Lord Dunsany.  He has been an editor of Weird Tales magazine and its successor, both singly and with others, from 1982-1986, 1987-1990, 1991-1994, 1994- 1996, and 1998-2007.  He and others won a World Fantasy Special Award in 1992, and has been nominated three other tines for the World Fantasy Award and once for the Shirley Jackson Award.  He won the Asimov's Readers Award for Best Poem in 2006.  Schweitzer was also Editor Guest of Honor at the 1997 World Horror convention.