The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

Nevertheless, I picked up the box, crossed to the bed, and spilled out the
contents. Half remembering, I pawed through Indian arrowheads, bits of string,
colored stones, a few Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels, chipped marbles, and
half a dozen clippings from old magazines. One article from Farmer’s World
caught my eye, and when I unfolded it, I discovered an ad for a Regulato 155
tractor. The paper’s edges felt feathery from being handled too much, and the
crease where I’d folded and refolded it had almost cut it in half. I’d loved that
tractor as a kid. I’d dreamed of buying Father one for his birthday.
Finally I sighed, scooped my treasures back into their box, added the carvings
from my bureau, and only paused to look one last time out the single small, high
window. As a kid, I’d always had to stand on a chair to see out. Now it was eye
level.
You can come full circle, but you can’t go home, I thought sadly. My mother
had made that clear the one time I’d called. It was best to let the old ghosts go, to
move on and make the best of your life. That was what I’d come here to do, after
all, wasn’t it?
I ended up staying the night. There were clean sheets in the closet, and I
changed my old bed and slept in my old room. Everything and nothing had
changed.
If there are such a thing as ghosts, perhaps they touched me then. When I
awakened, the sun streaming in that small window and touching my face, for a
second it was 1944 again and I was a kid. I could almost smell bacon frying
downstairs, almost hear Father’s old tractor puttering away in the yard, almost
hear the soft lowing of our cows in the south pasture.
I rose, dressed slowly, and went downstairs to shave and freshen up. In the
bathroom, in a little cup on a shelf, sat my father’s false teeth. I smiled. He
should have seen my teeth, I thought.
As I stared at his, though, it came to me that there was something odd about
them, about the way they were cut. The eye teeth seemed too long…longer
certainly than I remembered, but Father had never been one to smile.
I picked up his teeth and, smiling to show off my fangs, compared both of ours
in the mirror. They were identical.
But that’s not possible, I thought. How—how could he—
And then the full horror of it hit me, and I realized what he had been all along.
Vampire. Like me. Only he’d never known it.
It wasn’t the bite of that German vampire so long ago, I thought, that had
infected me with the vampire disease. With a growing sense of horror, I realized