Free A Passing Curse (2011) by C R Trolson

twenty years ago and next to that a picture headed “Richard Lamb” with crude fangs zig-zagging down his mouth, painted in. In slow motion his hand jerked, sending the coffee to the floor. People turned. Mouths flashed. Coffee shot across the floor. The waitress two-stepped around the coffee and gushed, “I knew it was you yesterday, Reese Tarrant, Vampire Killer.”
    Father Ramon wrapped the leg carefully in linen from a three foot roll he’d found years ago and kept in his closet. He then set the wrapped leg gently in the shade of the garden wall and glanced at the ditch. Three feet deep, but only twenty feet long, the backhoe perched at the end like some infernal insect. The workers had certainly not accomplished much.
    He’d sent the ditch-diggers home; he’d locked the cemetery door; he’d called the police. He’d never called the police before, not even when the rectory had been burglarized, and he wondered if he’d made a mistake. If he’d made a mistake, though, it was only because he was following the new rules of cooperating with the authorities. Then why feel guilty?
    He cursed himself for causing the leg to be discovered in the first place. It had been his lack of self-image that had needed a gazebo. It would have been nice, though, a place of serenity in which to contemplate God. A place of his own. And now this. Still, he was not surprised by the leg. He’d been expecting something to turn up for some time. He was always expecting something to turn up. His life hung on revelation.
    He could still have his gazebo if he could clear up this matter with the leg. It may be nothing. A stray leg near a graveyard was nothing to panic about. All he had to do was find the body that belonged to the leg, have it all moved thirty feet into the graveyard, a small ceremony perhaps, and continue with his plan. It was probably only the mummified remains of a stray Indian, dead for centuries. Simple. Well, maybe not that simple. He reached under his robe and tightened the spiked corset. He sighed and climbed into the ditch. It was up to him.
    He crawled along the rocky bottom. Dust choked him. Sharp rocks gouged his hands and knees. The dirt smell changed to sweet rot. He felt a rough knob like sharkskin. He saw a knee joint, brown skin shrunk tight around the patella, dry as parchment.
    He grabbed a shovel and went to work. In twenty minutes he’d uncovered the body.
    The skin had shrank in tight folds around the bones, as if drawn by vacuum. The genitalia had shriveled into a wrinkled line. The eyes were dry and flat. The mummified body, missing the lower half of the right leg, was naked except for the remaining sandal on the left leg. A burial shroud, at least, would have added dignity.
    He sobbed once. Decorum was needed in the burying of another human being.
    He moved a rock that covered the jaw. Yellow fangs curved into the leathery, flat lower lips. His heart stopped.
    There was something else - wood? - protruding from the chest. No. Impossible. He pulled himself out of the ditch. He could not breathe. He loosened the corset, easing the spikes, and ran along the path to the rectory. This was no ancient Indian, he thought, and immediately damned Ajax Rasmussen. He saw a group of tourists watching him. He waved at them and one snapped his picture. He slowed to a walk. He took deep breaths. He prayed for the guidance of God, a thing which he had not done in some time.
    6
    Rusty Webber trudged through San Francisco’s airport feeling spent. Her right hand grasped the handle of a blue airline bag purchased at Heathrow to carry paperbacks, extra plane food, toothpaste, and deodorant. Her left hand held a small suitcase packed with clothes bought at Harrod’s.
    One month ago she’d escaped from Romania with her life, barely. From being nearly executed in the courtyard of a Romanian hospital, to being escorted to the stairs of a waiting Lufthansa 737 had taken five short, head-spinning hours, four of them aboard a