Leland the Vampire by JD Hoggatt

Leland the Vampire by JD Hoggatt

Ol’ Wing turned Leland Bonnet into a vampire in a dugout den beneath a crooked silo. It sat on acreage just south of Tonganoxie, Kansas, where Maple Grove Cemetery runs up against the soybeans. Wing carved out the den by hand years before.

Damp and earthy, the walls were reinforced with splintered wood he took from a collapsed chicken coop and sun-bleached animal bones he scavenged from surrounding fields. Torn burlap and brown newspaper carpeted the floor. The remnant of a Morris chair slouched in the corner.

Wing and Leland stood facing one another in the humid darkness. The boy’s breath smelled sharp, like a coffee can full of pennies.

Leland asked, “Will it hurt?”

Wing, thin as a cornstalk, nodded, then leaned in with twitching lips and pierced the soft curve of the boy’s throat.

Leland gasped.

Wing drew back.

“Don’t stop,” Leland told him.

Wing licked his lips, then bit deeper.

Leland whimpered.

After two minutes, Wing released his bite and took deep breaths.

The boy slumped backward. Wing caught him and helped him to the floor. Leland’s eyes fluttered half-open, his chin trembling.

Wing bit into his own wrist and pressed the wound to the boy’s mouth.

After Leland drank, Wing placed the semi-conscious teenager in the broken chair. Leland lolled his head from side-to-side, eyes unfocused.

Wing touched the gash on the boy’s neck. It had been a long time since he’d tasted human blood.

For years, the squirrels and rabbits around the cemetery were his main diet. Raccoons were too smart to catch.

Now, his hands fluttered around the buttons of his filthy wool shirt. He felt himself fading. His fingers vanished first, then his arms, then the rest. He groaned. This happened when he felt overwhelmed.

He needed to go into town and make a phone call. But Barb, the cashier at Casey’s, could see the pay phone through the front window. She’d notice a floating receiver and come investigate.

Wing’s episodes of invisibility started around the time of the Spanish-American War. A celebratory pop from a Colt revolver in Winesburg, Ohio sent him into his first vanishing spell. After that, it came often. Usually, it lasted about ten minutes. But once, during a snowstorm, he vanished for over three hours.

Wing had no idea if other vampires experienced periods of disappearance. Since his turning, he hadn’t met any other vampires.

His turning happened a hundred and fifty years before. He was harvesting in the fields with his father and brothers when, at dusk, a vampire emerged from a dark stand of trees.

After feeding on him, the creature buried Wing under a shallow covering of leaves and dry earth.

He lay, unable to move or speak, listening to his brother call his name.

The vampire returned many times, draining him further. One night, after a long drink, it bit into its own wrist and held the bleeding wound to Wing’s lips.

“Mon petit agneau,” the vampire said, elegant and hollow.

At first, Wing didn’t understand. He was too weak to realize what was being offered. But after a bit of coaxing, and a quivering taste of the vampire’s life essence, he drank.

Afterward, Wing writhed in the dirt.

The vampire put a foot on his chest, wincing while clutching its bloody wrist.

“Merde céleste!” it said.

The memory of his turning prickled behind Wing’s eyes. After all this time, he remembered his terror on the forest floor, the tang of that first blood, and the distant sound of his brother calling his name.

Back on the loose arm of the chair, Wing rocked. He was still invisible. Anxiety churned in his full belly. He dreaded the thirty-minute walk into town. Barb, at Casey’s, always smiled and tilted her head when he came in. It was the smile people give you when they think you’re pitiful, wide and soft.

Ten years before, a woman from the Vampire Network gave him a sandwich bag of quarters and told him to call if there was ever an emergency.

Now, he tucked damp burlap around the boy’s shoulders, checked the quarters in his pocket, and climbed out into the night.

Casey’s was a straight shot up Highway 40, but Wing felt exposed. He cut through Centennial Park and snuck up Church Street, past the dark windows of the police station. He rested on the concrete steps of Victory Baptist Church. Through the trees, he could see the blazing lights of the truck stop.

He darted across the quiet highway, shielding his eyes as he crept alongside the air pump.

A tractor-trailer idled next to the building. Two cars were parked in front. A couple exited the store, each holding a massive plastic cup with an extra-long straw poking out of the lid.

Once the parking lot emptied, Wing crossed to the pay phones. He watched Barb at the register through the window. Only one customer remained, a thin man browsing the aisles.

Wing pulled out the coins, stared at the keypad, then pressed the buttons in the order listed on crumpled paper inside the bag.

He winced after each touch-tone.

Barb watched from behind the counter. Wide-hipped with a curly perm, she wore oversized lenses and a red company polo. She waved at him and started toward the door. He was visible again.

Wing focused on the keypad.

“I’ve been praying for ya, friend,” Barb said, opening the door. Her Bible lay open on the counter, next to a half-eaten Maple Log.

The line rang. Wing pulled the receiver away from his ear like it might bite.

“Vampire Network!” a voice barked on the other end. “Who the fuck is this?”

Barb shook her head.

“Ol’ Wing,” he said into the phone.

“Wing? Did you say Wing?”

Two hours later, a bumperless Toyota T100 rolled into the parking lot.

Barb had gone inside to ring up a customer’s meat stick and cigarettes.

The truck rumbled around to the back of Casey’s. Wing crouched behind the dumpster.

Toth Abraham and Fuchsia Iwersdatter of the Vampire Rescue Network of North-East Kansas stepped out.

Toth was long armed in weathered Carhartts and a beat-up Mackinaw jacket.

Fuchsia, on the other hand, was short and round, dressed in black, with a voluminous burgundy bouffant. It floated on top her head like a firey storm cloud.

“There he is,” Fuchsia said.

Wing pressed himself into the shadows, cold steel against his back.

“Don’t let him go invisible,” Toth said.

“How’m I gonna do that?” Fuchsia stepped closer.

Wing crouched lower.

“Hey, sweetheart,” Fuchsia said.

“We’re from the network,” Toth added.

Fuchsia chuckled and pointed at the edge of the dumpster. “Yer toes are stickin’ out.” She tapped one of his feet with the tip of her pale cowgirl boot.

Wing shrank further into the shadows.

“Did he disappear?” Toth asked.

Fuchsia peered into the murky alcove. “You know us, baby,” she said. “Checked in on ya last summer.”

Wing met Fuchsia’s eyes.

“You been livin’ in that hole too long,” she said.

With gentle voices, Toth and Fuchsia coaxed Wing from behind the big steel box.

“Yer one of them fade away types,” Fuchsia said.

Wing rode, in the bed of the truck, out to the cemetery.

Toth followed Wing down into the dugout. He swept a penlight across the cramped space. “Stuffy,” he said.

Fuchsia stood above.

Toth shone the light on the boy. His eyes were glassy, his mouth slack.

Wing held his hand.

“Holy shit,” Toth said. “It’s a kid.”

“First stretch is real raw,” Fuchsia called down. “We need to take him.”

Wing hung his head as they lifted Leland out of the den. He stood, arms limp, watching the truck vanish down the gravel road. He’d only known the boy for a short while, now they were taking him away.

The horizon glowed golden in the east.

Wing slipped back into the den, curled into the burlap, and waited all day for the sun to go down.

& & &

Narrow-shouldered with thick glasses, Leland grew up in the manicured Grey Oaks subdivision on the west edge of the Kansas City metro. His hair was long, pulled behind his ears.

Six foot two at fourteen, Earl Roosevelt waited for Leland like a lumbering crocodile every morning on the east side of Monticello Trails Middle School. Built like a farmhand, he wore a series of crop tops featuring the lead singer of AC/DC with devil horns.

“Yer my best friend,” Earl often told Leland, while gripping him in a headlock or snatching away his glasses.

The rail-thin Mrs. Colafranceso always glared at him from the front of the room.

His least favorite bully, though, was his older brother, Eli.

A Goliath in soccer cleats, every morning Eli dragged Leland feet-first from his twin bed. “Move it or lose it!”

Leland clung to the mattress like a pasty ghost in sagging underwear.

“So glad I didn’t have girls,” his mother often said.

At thirteen, after coming across a colorful Korean Manhwa about a girl vampire trying to survive in the modern world, Leland dyed his sweeping bangs a raven blue. He started wearing black lipstick and winged eyeliner.

He wrote stories about a vampire protector of his own, a dark girl with bird-skinny arms named Rook. She would swoop in and reduce his tormentors to bloody piles, like a guardian whippoorwill with fangs.

In a story he called They Killed Me and She Saved Me, Leland was mortally wounded by a gang of suburban street thugs. Afterward, Rook knelt beside him in an empty KFC parking lot, sobbing while he bled out. Minutes later, she bit into her own arm and pressed her wound to his lips.

Leland posted his stories on an anonymous blog he called BloodyTears. He devoured every comment he received from his small, passionate readership.

He daydreamed of becoming a real vampire: living eternal life, hiding and lurking without detection, moving with the grace of an African gazelle.

One morning, as Eli came for his feet, Leland sat up, opened his mouth wide, and hissed. Eli yanked his hands back. “Just playin’,” he said.

After that, Leland put on a show. He stared at his brother without blinking across the dinner table. He whispered to the shadows on the walls of their bedroom. He pulled a raw sirloin steak from the refrigerator and licked its edges.

“My hunger is not a choice,” Leland told his brother.

Eli began sleeping on the living room sofa. He woke more than once, late at night, to see Leland’s lined-eyes watching him from the shadows.

Through his blog, Leland received a number of prospects regarding possible real vampires. One comment led him to a wooded area south of a nearby Walmart Supercenter, where he spent a chilly night wrapped in his faded Thundercats sleeping bag. Another evening, he crept around for hours behind an Allstate Insurance office, waiting to glimpse the Princess of the Pale Veil, an Osage vampire who one user said was turned by a traveling fortune teller in the 1960s.

Each time he saw nothing, which only added to his determination.

One afternoon, he received two messages about nighttime glimpses of a creature south of the nearby town of Tonganoxie. Leland rode his hand-me-down Huffy BMX, two and a half hours one Saturday morning, to get there.

The town was small and green. He asked about the sightings at a video game store called Doc’s Pop Shop. The game store proprietor, thin with a missing canine tooth, told tales of what he called, The Night the Lights Went Out in Tonganoxie.

A teenage aide at the library was more helpful. She directed him to the Tonganoxie Historical Society and Museum. The unblinking museum director, a plain woman in a steel-gray bun, showed him a forty year old newspaper article describing The Monster of Maple Grove Cemetery.

“Of course, the graveyard’s closed after sundown,” the woman told him.

“Of course,” Leland said.

Leland set up camp in a small pavilion just inside the entrance to the cemetery. He spent the moonless evening wandering the headstones. He returned to Tonganoxie the next weekend and explored the far part of the cemetery. He called out for the vampire.

He came back a third weekend and followed the sound of dragging footsteps. Through a thicket of bushes, he could see a leaning silo. A feed trough wobbled next to it.

“Somebody there?” Leland asked.

There was panicked breathing as the trough slid, revealing a good-sized hole in the foundation of the silo. Then, the trough moved back into place.

After that, Leland came every weekend.

Late one night, weeks later, he woke to find the trough open. He felt a hand brush his long bangs. He yelped and leapt up.

In the dark, he could make out a slightly-built man with a shaggy beard and tangled hair. He looked only a few years older than Leland.

The two sat in dark silence, several feet apart.

When the sky began to lighten, the creature went back into his den. Leland helped him push the trough back.

“How come you never say nothin’?” Leland asked him one night, a couple weeks later, while the two sat together in the pavilion.

The man gave Leland an uncertain smile. “Name’s Ol’ Wing,” he said.

After that, Leland began knocking on the side of the silo every Saturday night once the sun had gone down.

Wing sometimes emerged with a gift. He fashioned a rugged cross out of a pair of rabbit bones and a strip of burlap.

“Keep the vampires away,” he said. Leland laughed.

Over the next few weekends, they explored a dilapidated church called C&B Temple together. They broke into the Tonganoxie Water Park and swam in the dark pool. They teased Barb at Casey’s, pounding on the window when she was all alone.

She emerged with a handful of pre-wrapped burritos. “God’s timin’, not mine!”

Wing’s dark days in the hole became more tolerable because now he had a friend.

Late one Saturday night, while the two climbed a Hackberry tree in the VFW Memorial Park, Leland out-of-the-blue asked Wing to make him into a vampire.

Wing began to disappear. “Awful lonesone.”

“I’m already lonesome.”

Wing faded away. “Ain’t never done that,” he said.

His footsteps were heard minutes later as he descended into the hole.

Leland left for Grey Oaks as soon as the sun came up.

Three weeks went by. Leland did not return to Tonganoxie. He recounted his adventures with Wing in stories on his blog. His readership doubled.

He thought about Wing all the time. His life in Grey Oaks was lonely and violent. He longed to be lurking around the backyards of Tonganoxie again with the only true friend he ever had.

He returned to the cemetery. When he knocked on the silo at sundown, Wing emerged with a giant smile. He hugged Leland.

They got back to their adventures.

Over the next few weekends, Wing told Leland all about himself: his turning, his long trek from Ohio, his pitch-black days in the hole under the silo.

Leland said it sounded more exciting than his lackluster life in Grey Oaks.

One night, while they swung on the playground at Genesis Christian Academy, Wing said, “Don’t go back no more.”

“Back home?” Leland said. “I got school.”

Wing wiped his nose and raised his shoulders.

They sat on the swings for a long time.

“Don’t be lonely,” Leland said.

Later, outside the silo, Wing clung to Leland’s purple windbreaker. “Don’t go away no more.”

“I gotta,” Leland said.

Wing was quiet for another minute, then said, “Want me to turn ya?”

“You will?”

“Are ya sure?”

Leland let out a heavy breath. “Will it hurt?”

Wing nodded.

They descended into the den.

Leland felt Wing’s moist breath on his neck.

Wing bit into his throat.

Leland gasped as his head fell back. His breathing quickened.

Wing pulled away.

“Don’t stop,” Leland said, as hot pain bloomed across his shoulders. His knees buckled. Everything seemed to turn upside down.

& & &

Months later, Leland the vampire sat cross-legged on the end of a metal cot in a dark basement in the Riverview District of Kansas City, Kansas. A dull glow emanated from a Hewlett-Packard laptop sitting on his knees. He adjusted an oversized pair of aviator-style sunglasses on his nose. The room smelled of mildew and old magazines.

Across the low cellar, on a battered motel roll-away, an ancient vampire called Egidio lay with his ample snout buried in a foam pillow.

“Turn off da goddam light,” he said, in a bygone nasal accent.

Leland peered upward at a dark fluorescent tube. “It’s not on.”

The older vampire twisted onto his back. “Dis is damn double!”

Leland was quiet for a second, then said, “Toth told me you were a friendly vampire.”

“No such ting.” The vampire yawned, opening his toothless mouth wide. He covered his face with the seven crooked fingers still left on his gnarled hands.

There was the sound of children playing outside.

Egidio sat up straight. “Dey are two kids in da yard. One is nine. Udder is tert-teen.”

“You really do have vampire ears.”

The old vampire curled into a fetal position on his cot. “I don’t understand modern world.”

“When did you become a vampire?” Leland typed as he questioned.

“Long time ago.”

“Where?”

“Bottom of well.”

Leland stopped typing. “How did you get down there?”

“Soldiers trew me down dere.”

Leland looked at the vampire over his laptop screen. “What soldiers?”

“Tsarigard!” Egidio said. “Assholes!”

Just then, a sudden clank sounded from the padlock on the bulkhead cellar doors above them. The two looked up. A hollow squeal reverberated as aluminum doors were pulled open.

A twangy, “Goddammit!” rang out above.

Leland closed his laptop.

A minute later, from behind the low door at the front of the basement, Toth Abraham whispered, “Edgie?”

The door opened.

“Turn on the light,” Fuchsia Iwersdatter called from behind Toth, then cackled.

Toth ignored her. “VEE-NET! Comin’ in!” He carefully slid his hands, palms out, into the dark room.

Fuchsia reached up, blind, and grabbed Toth’s right shoulder.

Toth screamed and leapt involuntarily about four feet into the basement. He took in a loud breath, spun in a circle, slapped at nothing in the dark, and kicked his long legs into a pile of cinder blocks. He howled and dropped to the floor.

“What just happened?” Fuchsia asked.

The old vampire watched from his cot.

Toth let out an aggravated breath. “Goddammit, Edge!”

At that, the big vampire pulled his heavy body up into a sitting position. “Boo,” he said.

Leland opened his laptop, releasing its glow into the room.

“Let there be light,” Fuchsia said, stepping through the door while checking her burgundy hairdo with her right hand.

“Hi, Fuchsia!” Leland called.

“Hi, baby!” Fuchsia crossed toward him.

During his metamorphosis, Leland spent several weeks feverish and confused on his cot. Fuchsia came to the basement every afternoon. She held his hand and explained to him as much about the vampire transformation as she knew.

Toth rose and dusted himself off. “Edge, got ya new place. Up near Holton.”

“No double,” Edge said.

“It’s a single,” Toth told him. “Damn!”

Edge shook his head and looked at the floor. “Is Luchik angry?”

 “Well, you ate his mother.”

“She taut I was her dead husband, poor lady.” Edge stood up and put his right hand on his chest. “Adelina Nikolaev Baranov was once ballerina with da Kirov.”

“What’s the Kirov?” Leland asked.

Edge sat back down and folded his hands in his lap. “I don’t know.”

“Well, good on her, whatever it was,” Fuchsia said.

“We go to Holton, now?” Edge asked.

“Needs some work,” Toth said.

Leland giggled, sitting back on his haunches. “What about me?”

Toth cast an uneasy look his way and scratched the back of his head.

Leland let out a whoop, like an over-excited spider monkey.

“Oh fuck,” Toth said.

The little vampire, now on the floor, began to shake his head.

“Why don’t ya come lay down, honey?” Fuchsia said and backed herself into the wall.

Toth drew in his arms and nestled on the floor like a pill bug.

The boy shrieked.

“Get the fuck away!” Toth said.

The boy was quickly on him. He chomped at the air above Toth’s head.

“Edge!” Fuchsia called.

Edge rubbed his skull and stood up. “What you do?” he asked Leland.

Leland froze on top of Toth.

Toth scrambled out from underneath.

“I didn’t hurt him,” Leland said.

Children’s shouts came from outside. Both Edge and Leland looked

upward.

Fuchsia cackled. “Neighbor’s girl-cousin from the Twin Cities is

visitin’.”

Toth crossed slow and careful around the vampires. Fuchsia met him at

the door.

“Wanted to let ya know about Holton, Edgie,” he said.

“No double,” Edge said.

“It’s not a double.”

“I’ll take a double,” Leland said, standing.

Toth did not look at him.

Fuchsia nodded. “You’re fine here with me. Right, baby?”

Leland smiled.

After Toth and Fuchsia left, Edge watched the shadows on the ceiling,

listening to the children play outside.

A rock hit the north side of the house. Both vampires turned toward the

sound.

Edge crossed to the brick wall. A tree branch was swiped across the foundation. Someone pried at a piece of plywood covering a window.

In the far corner of the room was an old wooden coal chute. A rusted

hatch to an outside alley sat at the top.

The children’s laughter and shouts got louder and closer.

Edge moved to the ramp. “Climb up,” he told Leland.

Leland scrambled up and ran his hands along the bottom of the coal door.

He grunted as he tugged on the latch. There was a slight pop as the door opened.

Streetlight leaked in underneath.

Edge moaned and covered his eyes. Traffic on Interstate-70 could be

heard in the distance.

Leland climbed down. He crouched, chattering beside Edge.

Edge fit his arm through a space behind a wooden filing cabinet, reaching

the hatch door. He cleared his throat and nudged it outward.

“Hellooo,” he called, in a whistling singsong.

The children in the alley went quiet.

“Hellooo to yooou,” Edge continued.

There was sudden screaming and the sound of scampering feet.

Edge listened with intensity.

“Who’s there?” a teenage voice asked.

Another, younger voice said, “I wanna go home.”

The teenager pulled open the hatch.

“Kelly!” the younger voice shouted.

“Swear yerself to my dominion,” Edge said.

“Who’s that?”The teenager slid her blond head into the hatchway.

“Sloooshaaay,” Edge called. “Sloooshaaay.”

The girl’s face went slack. “Sloooshaaay,” she repeated.

“I am Egidio. My name means Shield of Goat Hide.”

The girl stared into the darkness.

“Come in,” Edge said.

The teen pulled her body down the chute.

Leland scampered around, several feet away.

“Call yer cousin,” Edge told the girl.

“Ricky!” the teen called.

A small boy pushed his face into the open hatch. “I don’t see nothin’.”

“I dare ya to come in,” the teen told him, her face impassive. She made clucking sounds like a chicken. “Booock! Bock! Booock!”

Leland snorted.

“I ain’t chicken,” the boy said. He crawled down the dark ramp and grasped the hood on the back of his cousin’s jacket.

Edge turned to Leland. “It is time.”

Leland grimaced, his body twitching.

Edge pulled Leland into position next to the old chute. He took Rickie’s elbow. “You, come.”

The boy yelped, clinging to his cousin.

The teenager was expressionless.

Edge pulled the child off the ramp.

“Kelly! Help me!” Ricky sobbed.

Edge tugged the boy’s head backward and presented his pale throat to Leland.

“Bend down. Open mouth,” Edge said.

The little boy was trembling.

Leland shook his head. “I don’t wanna.”

“Kelly!” the boy called.

“Do it!” Edge told Leland.

Leland opened his mouth wide.

Rickie tried to hit back.

Edge held him firm. “Do it!”

Leland leaned in and bit into the boy’s throat. The boy cried out.

Blood sprayed onto Edge and the impassive teenager.

After a few minutes, the boy’s body went limp.

Edge let him slip to the floor.

Leland squatted over the boy, sucking and licking at the wound.

Edge watched them for a minute, then turned to the teenager. “Your turn,” he said.

Kelly stared ahead with blank eyes.

& & &

At 8 A.M. the next morning, Toth Abraham and Fuchsia Iwersdatter stood just inside the open basement door. Toth aimed a small pen light around the dark cellar. Fuchsia steadied herself against the door frame.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Smells like garlic and rotten eggs.”

Toth’s light shown on the vampires, sitting cross-legged on the floor like boys at a picnic, knees touching. The wooden filing cabinet was overturned. Scraps of torn denim, bits of hair, and discarded bones were strewn across the floor.

Leland, red-faced with blood in his hair, murmured with pleasure while gnawing at the end of a detached ear. “Sooo goood,” he said, holding it upward, like a sommelier checking the viscosity of a glass of wine.

Edge worked his toothless gums on a foot and a half-string of intestine. He pulled it out of his mouth like a strand of spaghetti.

Fuchsia held her hand to her chest.

“Gotta give these guys twenty four hours,” Toth told her.

“What for?”

“They’ll clean up spic-n-span.”

“They will?”

“Vampire tongues are like industrial scrubbers.”

Fuchsia moved her hand to her belly. “This ain’t natural.”

She pulled away from the door frame, tugged at the bottom of her dark blouse, and exited up the concrete steps.

Toth grinned big, watching the vampires tear off bites of human flesh. They were laughing with their faces close, like they were sharing a secret joke.

As Toth made his way out of the cellar, an elderly woman’s voice could be heard calling out across the sunny neighborhood, “Kelly! Ricky! Mom’s here!”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright JD Hoggatt 2025

Image Courtesy: Samuele Giglio from Pixabay