Isaac stomped down the steps like he lived there. Stealth and caution were irrelevant now. Vampires, especially elders, were notoriously deep sleepers. If the volume of the drowning pillar and hillbilly shouts hadn’t awakened it, then his footsteps would matter little. If it was aware of them, then they were all dead men anyway so he may as well get it over with. Better to dive into a meat grinder than slowly inch in.

He reached the concrete floor and panned his flashlight around as the hunters followed. Dull cinder block walls with no windows. Dust. Cobwebs. A long unused oil furnace sat in the center of the room and the only thing of interest was a weathered tarp hanging from hooks on the eastern wall. Otherwise, the cellar was completely bare.

“What the fuck? Where is he?” Cash hissed.

Isaac tapped Wallace on the shoulder, pointed at the tarp. The leader nodded and moved forward. The rest followed with weapons aimed.

“Hold up,” Isaac whispered. The lights glinted off of a pair of hooks that held the tarp in place. It was probably safer to not get too close. He concentrated, held out a hand, and visualized the tarp lifting. It did as commanded, telekinetically shifting until the right corner fell off its hook and it dropped like a curtain on a magic show finale.

The cinder blocks had been pulled away and a roughly hewn tunnel dug into the earth beyond. Each of their lights quickly settled on a giant person standing motionless about five feet inside.

Not just giant Isaac saw, but gigantic. Easily one of the largest men he’d ever seen. He was dressed in overalls, one strap buckled, one undone, so that half of his corpulent torso lay exposed, the flesh an unhealthy pale blue. Each hand clutched a rusty machete. What worried Isaac more than the dual weapons was the weird mask concealing the man’s head. It was a sack, stitched together haphazardly from some kind of leathery material. It had only eyeholes, no slits for mouth or nose, with the bottom stitched directly to the man’s neck. None of this seemed to matter, as he didn’t seem to be breathing anyway. Spiders had webbed from the man’s head to the wooden beams in the ceiling, a testament to time spent immobile.

“Is that an elder vampire?” Lee whispered.

Slim whispered back, “I have no idea, but that is definitely the biggest bubba I’ve ever seen.”

As the group’s hired magical consultant, Isaac felt the need to intervene and explain the situation. He should have said something to calm the jittery group since Wallace seemed as confused as the rest and was doing little to lead. This is a trap, he should have whispered to them, one far more elaborate than the others. This man wasn’t a vampire and if they valued their lives, they should do absolutely nothing to disturb him.

Those are all things he should have said. Instead, in a complete professional lapse, he turned to Slim and asked, “What the hell is a bubba?”

His answer came with a twang of a crossbow, fired by Cash in a moment of stupidity, or because of an urge to kill something. The bolt whistled by his head and drove deep into the giant’s chest with a dull thump.

“Oh boy,” Isaac mumbled as the giant began to stir and his eyes—milky grey with cataracts—popped open. Cash’s shot, idiotic as it may have been, had flown true and absolutely pierced the heart. The feathered arrow still quivered, but as Isaac had feared, this giant had been long dead. Or undead as the case may be. The sickly hued skin, the sack stitched directly to him, standing in a room unmoving for who knows how long. Oh, and the lack of breathing. No breathing was always a dead giveaway. Isaac nearly laughed at his own pun.

With cobwebs pulling loose, the masked giant strode forward. To their credit, Wallace and crew responded quickly, firing off four more crossbow bolts that each found their mark. But the bolts did not even give the Bubba pause and simply became four more quills porcupined from his fleshy torso. He thundered towards them, agilely turning sideways to fit through the doorway, the ends of the arrows snapping off on the bricks.

As he entered the room the fearless vampire hunters broke into a panic. Each man began shouting and the small space became a cacophony of ignored orders. The one-shot crossbows were too cumbersome to reload with speed and so were dropped as they pulled firearms, which had the unintended consequence of the weapon-mounted lights all suddenly shining at foot level. The crossbows were then inadvertently kicked, the lights sent tumbling, turning the room into a disco strobe. Some of the hunters tried to aim but were bumped into by some trying to flee. Isaac stumbled backward from the cave entrance and dropped to the floor, away from the machetes.

The giant strode with machine-like purpose into the human confusion and swung a wide chop with the right machete, then the left. Screams came now. Gunshots rang out, muzzle flashes giving split-second glimpses of violence. Bullets struck the giant, making wet slapping sounds but having no effect. Isaac stuck to the floor, scrambling past legs towards the stairwell. Something landed with a splat in front of him and Slim’s severed head bounced into one of the fallen beams of light. Dead eyes frozen with a lump of chewing tobacco half out of his mouth. Damn, he had kind of liked Slim.

He got to the stairs, chanced a view over his shoulder, and saw Rocky valiantly leap at the behemoth. He landed a heavy fist into the sacked face that did nothing, before being hacked down. Frank lay against the furnace, a left-arm stump pumping crimson.

Isaac started up the stairs. Wallace was hot on the magician’s heels until the giant hacked one of his feet out from under him and Isaac glimpsed the man topple from the stairs, screaming.

When he burst into the living room, he found Lee had made it out ahead of him. Instead of still fleeing the hunter just stood there, aiming his rifle back at the basement.

“What are you doing? Keep running!”

Lee pointed at the open window. “Sunlight! It’ll burn him up!”

“He’s going to curb stomp us, you moron. He’s not a vampire...” Isaac trailed off as the Bubba emerged from the stairwell and shrugged off several shots from Lee’s rifle as he strode through the brilliant sunbeams. Lee couldn’t process that his defensive scheme had failed, and he stood there pulling the trigger until a blade caught him in the side of his head.

The Bubba now turned to Isaac, dead eyes peering through the holes, machetes dripping. Isaac was closer to the other stairwell than the front door and so he went up, taking the steps two at a time, then down the hall, his hands held wide so his fingertips brushed the walls, as he cast a telekinetic spell that pulled each bedroom door shut with a bang when he passed them. He ducked into the last room, slammed the door behind him, and leaned against it panting.

A crack of splintering wood sounded from the hall. The Bubba breaking down the first door he guessed. The giant seemed to have limited cognitive skills and he surmised it would systemically eliminate each hiding spot as it advanced. It bought him some time.

He reached into his Everbag and produced the glass jar that contained the small brown spider. The arachnid sat motionless. He feared it was dead for a second, and he tapped the glass until it scuttled quickly in circles around the bottom. In the hall, he heard a second door smash open.

He unscrewed the jar and eyed the spider with disgust, like a child who wrinkles his nose at cough syrup. Then, with a down-the-hatch urgency, he tilted the jar up to his open mouth and felt the spider fall in. The urge to vomit was intense as he felt the spindly legs scuttle along his tongue and the back of his throat, but he managed to down it with several tough swallows. He just finished gagging when he heard the third door go down. Only his door remained.

The spider’s small size provided him only a small window of spell time. He kicked off his shoes, pulled off his socks, all the while repeatedly whispering to himself “Spiders stick and that’s the trick”—a silly-sounding spell verse to be sure, but effective. He backed up against a wall, placed both hands to it, felt his fingertips stick as if coated by a layer of double-sided tape. It certainly didn’t feel strong enough to lift him but that was part of the spell, the nature of the trick. One had to believe in the sacrifice of the spider, otherwise, any clown could choke down one and be scurrying along.

Hands pressed, he lifted one leg, planted his foot firmly to the wall, and felt it adhere as his hands had. The other leg followed, and he was completely off the floor. As fast as he could, nowhere near spider-fast, he crept along. Moving to the ceiling was the tough part. It required being suspended from a horizontal surface, while gripping nothing, stuck there only by conviction. But it worked and when the giant guardian kicked open the door Isaac dangled just above it.

The Bubba stopped beneath him, the sack-head slowly going right to left, scanning the room as best it could with small eye holes and non-dilating pupils. Isaac knew he had to act quickly. Already he felt the magical adhesive begin to fade. With a deep breath, he quit the spell.

Isaac landed squarely on the behemoth’s back, one hand around the neck as the other clutched a fistful of sack-mask. The giant reacted as expected, thrashing and spinning around, swinging both hands up and back, but the angle was too awkward to bring the sharp edges of the machetes to bear. Isaac was painfully swatted with the flats of the blades, but bruises were better than cuts.

The magician held on, a cowboy on an enraged steer, and began to yank on the mask. He was actually thankful at this point that the giant didn’t know better to drop his weapons. With a free hand, the giant could have easily reached back and grabbed him, pulled him loose, and pretty much choked the life out of him. But it stubbornly, stupidly, flailed away with the blades. Brainlessly it floundered around the middle of the room with Isaac on board.

The mask began to tear, dead skin a poor fabric for stitches to hold. The seams connecting it to the neck flesh gave first, the skin stretching and then snapping bloodlessly. With one last yank, the sack pulled loose and Isaac tore it from the giant’s head.

The result was predictable. The Bubba simply became dead again and dropped with a thunderous boom. He rolled off and lay next to the body, the mask in hand. When he’d gathered his breath, he examined the giant’s body. The face, pale and puffy like a corpse, was otherwise normal. He’d really expected a disfigured face, something terrible to behold. In the end, he could only assume the man was indeed, just a large, dead Bubba.

***

With the adrenaline fading, aches from the blunt machete whacks were setting in and he imagined he’d be covered in nasty bruises for several weeks. He found Wallace on the couch, clutching a nasty calf gash. The leader saw the mask in the magician’s hand, nodded, and went back to wrapping the wound.

“Another trap,” Wallace said evenly, asking a question he already knew the answer to.

“Yeah.” Isaac held the mask up, eye to eye with empty sockets. “Everyone dead?”

Wallace stood, winced at putting weight on his leg. “I can’t find Cash. All the others are dead.”

There weren’t any words for Isaac to use—no consoling, keep-your-chin-up nonsense. They would have been empty platitudes anyway. Wallace needed to handle this alone. He and his crew had chosen a dangerous occupation and it had cost them everything. Wallace would either be born again hard, or he’d sink into depression, or he’d get a regular job. Whatever. Isaac didn’t really give a shit.

Outside they found Cash. Seated in the driver seat of one of the trucks, he stared emptily at the house.

“You fucking ran on us. Left us to die.” Wallace drug him out and slammed him against the cab.

Cash offered up no resistance as he hung slack in Wallace’s grasp like a doll. His bravado was shattered. “Yeah. I did. I would have left, but I don’t have any of the car keys.” He hung his head. “So, I just sat there.”

“Gutless fucker.” Wallace shoved him toward the van. “Gear up. We’re clearing the last tunnel and then burning the place to the ground.”

***

“It was never there.”

Wallace said this aloud needlessly. The three of them had swept through the house, searched every nook and cranny, and had come away empty. Even the tunnel in the basement had been vacant—a winding, carefully dug passage that led to nothing, yet with a powerful guardian posted to protect its emptiness.

The house was ablaze now, black smoke billowing into the sky. It was standard vampire-hunting practice, a scorched earth policy to kill any hidden ticks they may have missed and also to deny them a safe lair in the future.

“No, he wasn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” Cash said, something he’d probably repeat a lot in his lifetime.

“Who knows,” Isaac replied. “Someone certainly went through some trouble to set up some powerful traps here. It could be an old safe house, an abandoned or decoy lair. But we’re alive. Best to walk away.”

They did just that.

***

“Nope, there was nothing of value. No elder vampire. No regular vampires. Just a big undead farmer with a human skin hood,” Isaac told Lefse on the phone in his hotel room, while examining the skin mask he had stretched out on the table. “The mask burned up in the fire.”

“This will be my shortest report yet. No vampires and all of the hunters still ended up dead,” Lefse replied like Isaac had somehow failed a test he’d studied weeks for.

“Not all. Just most,” Isaac defended his performance as if arguing for a D grade over an F.

“I’ll make a note.”

Isaac hung up. Since Arrangement had not mentioned the Bubba, he felt no obligation to hand the mask over. The decision also saved him a drive to New Jersey.

The mask was really a grotesque work of art. The stitching was a bit rough and the eyeholes were wonky, but when Isaac flipped it inside-out he found magical runes inked into the skin. These were intricately flawless and would require much study. For now, he had the perfect place to safe-keep it and he flipped open his Everbag.