The decrepit mansion my mother lives in looms over a small town in Montana called Bakersfield, built upon the crown of a stony hill whose sheer slopes are covered in copses of aspens, ash and beech. In summer that sheerness glows like an emerald in the light of day, the wind teasing a million leaves into a collage of shadows and brilliant green. In Fall the inclines are frozen fire and boast calendar worthy color. In Winter, well...white, skeletal and forboding, the road to the door of her indolence unplowed and as lifeless as the creature that lurks within the coldness of candle lit halls.
It's true what the townsfolk say when it comes to my relationship with my mother. I do hate her, left for a big city on the eastern seaboard to spite her...yet most of the rest of local lore is a lie.
She's not a witch or a sorceress for one thing, nor do I believe she murdered my father (though I confess the circumstances that led to his death are suspect to say the least). The disappearance of Reverend Alder is not because she turned him into a toad...in fact I tracked him down, he's traded his frock in and become an Atlantic City card shark.
Better a toad than that, I would suppose, yet I'm not the one running this world's circus of a show so who am I to judge? No, I'll leave that to the kind of person he used to be.
They've missed the mark, the good people of Bakersfield. They're all shy of the metaphorical bullseye you could say, though you can't say they didn't try.
She's not a mystic. She's a fucking vampire.
-
I still remember the evening she tried to turn me. Total nightmare, one that revisits my sleeping mind at least once a week. They do that tired old cliche in many a Hollywood movie yet truths are truths no matter how tired or old or cliche, aren't they? When you endure something so terrible that a monster memory can literally sink its sharp, serrated claws into your subconscious, insert itself like a fish hook complete with the cruel and glinting barbs, you're haunted by it. You live it, you die within it, over and over.
I've tried almost everything, from drinking to ill fated brushes with many of the world's religions. Nothing works...not really anyway, and what little help I get doesn't last long.
Her coven, at that time, consisted of four others. Two foxes, like herself, a wolf who used to be a rancher a county over, and a vole who used to be the town drunk before she found him.
That last was the worst, a small and vile little thing wrapped in a robe black as midnight, blood red eyes glowing with the sort of sick and shining fervor I'd imagine the so-called witches and werewolves of times past saw in the eyes of their inquisitors before a drowning or a stoning.
He bore a steaming golden goblet, filled to the brim with my mother's unholy blood, and commanded me to drink it as the other three stood stilent, shrouded in their cloaks and faceless in their hoods, and my mother watched from a chair carved into the shape of throne that was all velvet and gilded carvings and imperious soft things.
"Your time has come, Lord Grayson," he intoned in a thin, wheedling voice that raised my hackles and made my lip curl into an involuntarily snarl. "Drink and join us. Live forever!"
The steak knife I'd stolen from the dinner table was in my paw before I knew what was happening and then I stabbed him the throat. The goblet tumbled from the vole's grasp, soaking me in hot red, the others were moving my mother rose from her throne with a howl and-
-
What happened after that? I'm not sure. I have vague recollections of the five of them beating the shit out me.
I woke up in a rainstorm, in the soaked wilderness miles from the mansion as white lightning split the sky and thunder crashed, hurting everywhere. A note had been sown to my torn, blood soaked shirt, the ink black, the wetness turning the straggling capitals written on the vellum into words that seemed to weep:
'Never come back'.
For ten years I followed those instructions. And for ten years I was a haunted fox, sometimes spooked by my own shadow, sometimes thinking obedience was the right thing to do even though I knew to live the rest of my life in the onus of that command was dead wrong.
So in the end...here I am. At her door. Again. For the last time, no doubt.
I wonder what will happen now. All I know is I've come home.
So I reach for the handle of the front door, gilded in silver and rusty with time, and lo do you believe it? It's fucking unlocked.
I wonder if they're expecting me. I hope not. Like most nightmares, though, there's a driving force behind this, a faceless malediction and the fierce force of its infernal command. I have to step through and put my past to rest or I'll never have a future.
Wish me luck won't you?