“Blast it, Seymour – acknowledge my messages!”

  Penny held the phone no more than three inches from her face as a papasan chair threatened to swallow her whole. The furnishings in this yurt-dwelling continued to confound her Heschian sensibilities. This papasan chair was undeniably cozy, but forced her into a posture which she found altogether debilitating – and rather delightful. She sank languidly into its craterous depths, with her legs dangling over the edge and occasionally kicking the air. To say it had robbed her of dignity would be an understatement. But if she wished to have a seat while sending Seymour her informational text messages, then it was either this or the utterly ignoble beanbag chair beckoning from over yonder.

  Not that sending off her messages mattered much if he wasn’t going to heed her advice. She finished typing her latest and gave it a quick proofreading before hitting send:

  Her instincts screamed for her to do something, anything, more. She should have fought harder; should have insisted he bring her along. Something had gone wrong during his reconnaissance.

  “And now, should he fail to return, you may find yourself trapped here in this yurt for the rest of your days.” Her eyelids drooped, made heavy by the unusually comfortable papasan chair. “My fate could be worse, I suppose.”

  For the past three days, Seymour had kept her sequestered in their rented rooms; first in the sprawling techno-fortress he called Denver, and now in this odd, circular dwelling on the outskirts of Manitou Valley; a village more reminiscent of a Heschian locale, with its quaint homes and shops interspersed amongst the pines. She could scarcely bear the forced confinement, desperate to explore this alien world and uncover its untold secrets. Seymour had diagnosed her with an Earth illness called Cabin Fever, but he insisted that it would be unwise for her to venture out much until she was better acclimated to this realm—and never without him—even though according to him the only cure for her condition was fresh air and equally-fresh experiences.

  Frustration and anxiety mounting, Penny shot off another quick text message:

  She already knew better than to expect a response. He hadn’t replied to any of her most recent dispatches. She had messaged to ask if he was ignoring her, but the words were merely a front, sent to herself as much as him. The truth was worse. It gnawed at the back of her mind.

  “Something truly has befallen him. Something awful.”

  Through considerable effort, Penny partially extricated herself from the papasan, rocking forward until she came to at least be sitting upright. She began typing her final text message. Together, she and Seymour had scouted the exterior of his uncle’s antique shop the night prior. She knew therefore where it was located.

  She hit send but knew from the start that no answer would be coming. At long last, Penny rose from the dastardly chair which had so sapped her vitality. If she allowed herself so much as a glimpse of the blasted thing, she feared she might fall back under its spell. Thus she paced away quickly. Then she bowed her head and called silently for Glory to join her. The air within the yurt crackled with mystical electricity as a butterfly-shaped black hole opened up before her.

  Penny gazed down at her phone. Nothing yet from Seymour. She dared to steal one last glance back at the accursed papasan. And then she turned away, setting her jaw in determination.

  Darnold Youngman exploded into a cloud which consisted of no fewer than one-hundred furry, fanged bats. The torch he’d been holding seemed to hover in the air for a moment like when Wile E. Coyote realizes he’s just run off a cliff. Before it could fall to the floor, Seymour deftly snatched it and jumped back, instinctively leveling the flaming brand like a weapon.

  But what sort of attack could he be expected to execute against a chamber filled with freaky ass bats? And furthermore – why should he execute such an attack when the bats didn’t seem to be interested in him at all. In fact, as he recovered from the initial shock of Darnold’s sudden explosion, Seymour found himself relegated to the role of observer as the bats appeared more interested in fighting amongst themselves.

  He slid back a step, and then another, relaxing his combat pose slightly while still keeping the torch at the ready. The bats swirled up toward the domed ceiling, a shrieking vortex of leathery flapping. And then – a splat as one of the bats plummeted to the floor. Followed by another, and another. Soon, their little carcasses fell like rain.

  “What the fu—”

  When Darnold finally reappeared from a sudden coalescence of the bat swarm, his hair which had previously been perfectly coiffed now looked like he’d been caught out in a windstorm. The rest of his styled outfit looked in similarly shitty shape, with his shirt completely untucked and one pant-leg torn completely off at the knee. His chest heaved as he fought to catch his breath, even while a second bat-cloud gathered in the air above him and began to drift back down toward the floor.

  His eyes caught Seymour’s and he shouted, “run, you fool!”

  Before Seymour could take a single step, he watched in horror as the remaining bats suddenly smooshed together and took on the form of another man. A terrifying man. Seymour found himself unable to look directly at him for more than a fleeting moment.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  But he couldn’t ignore what he’d seen in that moment:

  “Another goddamned vampire,” he whispered.

  “Run!” Darnold repeated, and then he flashed to grapple the newcomer, feet hovering an inch above the floor to seize him by both biceps. They then went screaming across the room before slamming into the far wall and once more bursting apart to become two frantically fighting bat-packs.

  Torch in hand, Seymour fled back toward the stairs. He reached the top step and at the same time the bats stopped fighting. Casting a quick glance back over his shoulder revealed that this new vampire had won. Darnold lay motionless on the floor, while the other vampire stood over him. Once more, Seymour found he could hardly stand to look at the newcomer, as if his eyes were quite literally repelled, but what he could make out in fleeting glimpses was something much more monstrous than Darnold Youngman; less Dracula and more Nosferatu.

  And then the monster simply vanished. Its disappearance happened so suddenly that Seymour actually flinched.

  “Where’d he go?”

  Counting the vampire’s sudden absence as a stroke of luck, Seymour turned to make his way down the stairs – only to freeze in his tracks. The stairwell was no longer a stairwell. The walls had become pink, bloody flesh, throbbing like a heartbeat. Glistening blood seeped from the ceiling, stretching toward the floor in long, sanguine strands. Seymour staggered back a step, and then he could go no further as he bumped up against the vampire.

  “Hello, Seymour” The bloodsucker's breath was cold on Seymour’s neck-flesh. “Long time, no see.”

  He rushed forward again toward the meat-walled stairwell and then quickly turned on his heel, whirling back around with the torch held in a grip straight out of his old Thursday-night softball league. “It’s you, isn't it? You’re the one who took me to Heschia.”

  Seymour forced himself to look at the vampire’s face but it was somehow blurred out, like a smeared oil painting. And yet, he could feel the monster’s smug grin.

  “Enough fun,” it growled. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The vampire suddenly had him by the wrist. The strength of its grip was terrible and unwavering. The torch fell from Seymour’s hand and the flame whooshed out as it rushed to the floor and everything went terminally black. It would take a moment before his eyes could readjust to the meager light seeping in from the pinhole set high above at the apex of the domed ceiling.

  A whimper escaped his lips as something sharp stabbed into his thumb and his knees became paper-weak. He fell, kneeling at the monster’s feet. The vampire began squeezing Seymour’s thumb, milking drops of his blood onto the floor

  “Please,” he pleaded. His voice sounded weak and far away in his own ears. “Please—”

  “I’m sorry. It’ll be over soon.” The vampire’s grip did not lessen and his milking of Seymour’s blood did not stop. “Okay, see? There we go. Not so bad, right?”

  All around where Seymour knelt, the floor began to light up with a series of letters he found unintelligible, written in an eerie red light. He could see the blood which had just been milked from him now, too, no more than a thimble’s-worth resting inside an almost imperceptible divot in the floor, but it was the central hub of the strange writing. The alien script extrapolated out in a spiral as if it were being written by an invisible and evil calligrapher, every letter glowing blood-red.

  As he watched the demonic-looking writing spread, Seymour felt himself coming slowly back to his senses. He rose to his feet and rubbed his sore thumb. It was dry, and there was no indication he had ever been bled at all. The vampire had somehow healed it.

  I mean that’s just basic vampire magic and what not, I guess. Probably why I’m so calm all of a sudden, too. He’s doing mood control shit on me.

  The blood-light runes continued to corkscrew up the walls of the round chamber and even covered the domed ceiling high above. Finally the writing concluded at the chamber’s apex as it reached the pinhole of daylight, which was now drowned out by the glow of the red letters. The strangely beautiful writing had spread across the chamber’s every surface, coating everything in a sanguine hue.

  He could see the machine in the center of the room better now, cast in the eerie red glow. It looked like a steampunk laser pointing up into outer space, as far as Seymour could tell. Like something a super villain might use to blow up the moon. The flat, black metal it was made from immediately reminded Seymour of the doors he and Penny had passed through back when they left the hedge maze and entered the massive treasure room where the Midnight Express had ultimately caught up to them. And when he thought about it a little more – that black metal also evoked memories of the Midnight Express.

  Squinting in the dark to examine the machine more closely, there appeared to be some sort of motor at the base and then a long tube protruded upward about fifteen feet, nearly to the ceiling, like it was aiming for the pinhole of light up there. A round-topped stool with a butt-grooved cushion was situated close to the bottom of the tube, and Seymour noticed that there was an eye-piece attached.

  As he studied the strange machine, the vampire casually sat himself down on the attached stool. And it suddenly clicked:

  It’s the Moonlight Express. Is it some kind of weird ass telescope or something?

  “Took you long enough to figure it out,” the vampire taunted.

  Then he leaned forward to peer into the eyepiece, and the motor Seymour had seen attached to the base of the machine kicked on.

  Penny stepped out of her portal, head on a swivel and muscles tensed. She quickly de-summoned Glory and then she breathed a little easier. No one had been watching, as far as she could tell. No one had seen her step out of a movable black hole in the shade of the trees outside the antique shop Seymour was inheriting from his uncle.

  A signpost out front read: Little’s Shop for Hoarders.

  And a smaller sign, hung in a window beside the door, read: Closed.

  She glanced down at her phone. The time was half-past three. Seymour had been scheduled to meet with the solicitor handling his uncle’s estate at one. And notably, the combustion-powered carriage he had rented for them in Denver was nowhere to be seen. Neither did she see any other vehicles in the shop’s small parking lot.

  An eerie tingling crawled up Penny’s spine. She had been certain something had gone awry, and the absence of vehicles felt like early confirmation of her hunch. Where had Seymour gone? It was possible he had been en route back to their yurt – but then why hadn’t he replied to any of her recent messages?

  She slipped the phone into her pocket. And before approaching the shop’s front door she turned in a slow circle, panning her gaze across everything; scouring the area for anything unusual. Unfortunately, she saw plenty which fit that description. This world was so very different from her own – it seemed to have a way of constricting her perception. All of these oddities which she saw as she rotated in place—objects Seymour had told her were called fire hydrants and lamp posts and Christmas lights and hot dog carts, alongside many sights for which she had no names—worked together to confound her usually keen senses.

  Penny sighed as she finished her fruitless scan of the area and faced the shop once more. The eerie tingling along her spine persisted, but if she was being watched right then, there was no telling by whom.

  “Do you sense anything?” she asked seemingly no one, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Jerome, draped across her shoulders and trailing midway down her back as a pear-green, wooly-leather shawl grew a mouth so he could quietly reply, “naw, momma – and that ain’t right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I can’t sense nothin’ – not even Seymour. And we’re bound by blood, ya heard? I should always have some idea where he’s at, assuming he’s still alive.”

  For Penny, the question suddenly became: do I trust that eerie tingling?

  She stared hard at the cozy little mountain cottage-turned-knick-knack-shop, now certain that something or someone was watching her from inside. Then she moved briskly to the door and tried the knob. It wasn’t locked, so she let herself inside.