Elias stared, and then began groping at his shirt, pawing at it, desperately searching as the nightmare on the ground began a bizarre, grim tug of war with Ed Smith, each of the two trying to snatch the axe away from the other. Smith was standing, feet braced, while the woman was lying pinned to the earth, but he could not wrench it away.

The woman-thing had the better grip, because of the axe-head, which kept her hands from slipping off the end, and because Smith’s hands were slick with sweat, while hers were dry – or almost dry. There was still a faint slick of Sandy’s blood on them.

Elias pulled at the chain around his neck, and brought out his grandmother’s silver cross.

Sandy took more direct action; injured hands or not, he had to do something. He stepped forward and kicked the axe out of the thing’s hands.

Khalil stepped up and grabbed it, and he and Smith backed away with it to one side, beyond the thing’s right shoulder, while Maggie pulled Sandy back, past its feet. And Elias stood there, protected by his holy crucifix, to its left.

The thing was still pinned and helpless, but now it was struggling, silently.

Then it took the stake in both hands, but instead of trying to pull it up and out, it pushed down.

“Jesus God,” Sandy said, watching. Maggie retched.

The thing was pushing itself up off the stake.

“Split it with the axe!” Sandy called. “Split the stake! Wedge something in it!”

“Are you nuts?” Smith yelled back. “I’m not going near that thing! What if it got the axe away from us?”

“Let’s get out of here!” Maggie shouted.

Sandy watched as the thing pushed itself up, and saw that the grey flesh around the stake wasn’t just sliding, it was oozing, or rolling, along the rough oak. “Yeah,” he said, “Yeah, I think you’re right.” He started backing away.

He wasn’t afraid of anything God had put on Earth, Sandy told himself, but this thing was none of God’s doing.

“Sandy,” it called, in Mary’s voice, “What’s the rush?”

He ignored that. “Smith,” he called, “Whatsyername, come on!”

Smith nodded, and started circling around the thing, giving it a wide berth. The axe was still in his hand. Khalil, after an instant’s hesitation, came close behind him.

Only an inch or two of stake still showed above its chest, and its entire body was off the ground. Its knees were bent, its sandalled feet planted on the earth; Mary’s golden hair, tangled and filthy with blood and dirt, hung from its head.

“Elias,” Maggie called, “Come on!”

Elias was holding out the crucifix. “I’m all right,” he called. “It can’t hurt me while I’ve got this; you guys go on, and I’ll bring up the rear.”

“Elias,” Smith shouted, “It’s not a goddamn vampire! Look at the stake, for Christ’s sake!”

Elias threw Smith a glance in which Smith read dawning terror, and then turned to follow.

The thing came off the stake and threw itself after him; a hand caught his ankle, and he went down.

He rolled over and thrust the cross in its face as it fell on top of him. “Get away!” he shrieked, “Get it off me!”

“Oh, Christ,” Sandy said, and he turned back.

Smith and Khalil hesitated, then joined him.

Elias was lying on his back, the Mary thing sprawled across him, and as the others started back toward it it took the crucifix from Elias’s hand, smiled at him, and then lifted the crucifix to its mouth and bit it in half.

Even in the dimming light Sandy and Smith and Khalil could see the ragged hole in the thing’s back where the stake had gone through; Mary’s skin had been shredded, leaving an opening several inches across surrounded by ragged flaps of tissue.

Under that, though, the grey flesh had already healed over; only a slight indentation remained where a two-inch shaft of oak had gone through the creature’s body.

It spat out one piece of the crucifix, and flung the other aside. One hand reached up and pulled Mary’s skin up and off its face, flopping it back like a hood. Blonde hair trailed back in a mass of blood, dirt, and tangles, and its own true face was revealed – staring red eyes in round, black-rimmed sockets, grey muscles like clay smeared on a skull, a few strands of grayish-white hair on an almost-bald scalp the color of mud. It smiled down at the trapped boy, revealing what seemed like hundreds of gleaming silver teeth.

Then it leaned its head forward and kissed Elias on the mouth.

He shrank away in terror. The thing’s black lips were hard and cold; its red eyes filled his field of vision. There was no warmth or softness to this, such as he imagined there would be in kissing a woman, no warm breath – no breath at all that he could sense.

Nonetheless, it was undeniably a kiss, and somewhere under his terror he wondered why, why was this thing kissing him? How should he respond?

Then its hands reached up to his face and stroked gently along either side of his lower jaw. He felt a thin, pointed tongue pressing against his lips.

Then the thumbs dug into his cheeks just behind his molars, painfully forcing his mouth open. The tongue slipped into his mouth, and ran slickly along his teeth.

He could taste something foul, something compounded of mildew and decay, as if that tongue probing his jaw were rotted and moldy.

He pulled his own tongue back until he almost gagged on it, and struggled to pull his head away, forcing himself back against the hard ground. He was dimly aware that Sandy and Smith had reached him, that they were tugging at the creature’s shoulders, trying to get it off him, but with no effect.

The thing shifted, its lips sliding down, so that instead of meeting his own mouth squarely it was nuzzling his lower lip, its own lower lip on his chin, its upper lip in his mouth. He tried to bite, but those unyielding fingers at the hinge of his jaw wouldn’t let him.

And then he felt the fangs extending from its upper jaw – not just a pair of them, like a vampire, but an entire rank of them, six or eight, at least, like steel needles, forcing themselves down behind his teeth and into the flesh below his gums, and then the pain hit and he screamed and screamed and screamed until the blood filled his mouth and he couldn’t scream any more.

It seemed like an eternity.

It was just over four seconds before he passed out.

5.

When the screaming began, Sandy and Smith struggled harder, hauling at the thing’s shoulders with all their strength, but they couldn’t move it. Sandy’s hands were bleeding again, which made it hard to grip, but he tried not to think about it.

Khalil wasn’t helping them, and Sandy started to shout a demand to him, but then he saw him running up with the axe, and he was swinging it at the nightmare creature’s back.

The screaming had been muffled to begin with, and within seconds it stopped. Sandy saw that Elias’s eyes had rolled back in their sockets until only the whites showed.

The axe struck the creature, and bit into it, but the thing didn’t seem to even notice, and Sandy realized that the flesh of its shoulders seemed to be softening.

“What the fuck?” he said.

His hands pulled free suddenly, ripping away pieces of Mary’s skin; the thing’s shoulder had become too soft to grip properly. He started to reach down again, then stopped as Smith’s hands, too, came away with nothing but skin in them.

He looked at its lower back, where Khalil had hit it with the axe, and the thing seemed almost insubstantial. Mary’s shorts were no longer filled out in a mockery of human sexuality; they were flattening even as he watched.

What’s more, the thing seemed to be crawling forward, as if somehow, despite its size, it was crawling into Elias’s mouth. Blood bubbled up around its jaws, spilling out of Elias’s mouth and running thickly down his cheeks.