Nosferat Summer
Mark Patrick Lynch
Summer rites are safest, when the nights are shortest. In winter, when the hours of darkness are so much longer, no one would dare such a thing.
Emma Scales is the one you’re paired with. Emma, who’s kissed you already, in spring, her hair garlanded and you nervous as a wren as she raised a sprig of hawthorn berries above you. She’s in her blue jeans this evening, and a white blouse containing the newly gathering weight of her breasts. Dark-haired, her face a little sharp, but with eyes in which something dances – life, youth, a wry, sparkling intelligence. All the things summer gives to a girl and makes her pretty with eternity.
You meet her at the bus stop an hour before the late sun-fall. She’s with friends, though you arrive alone, your heart racing, your hair grown long and braided up, an echo of the old ways.
“You’ll be careful,” Megan says. Megan who will do this with Joe Collinson soon and not be any the worse for it, other than a little pale, a little drawn.
You reach into your jeans and fumble out your cross, the one with Jesus hanging from it. When Megan lifts her nose to you, you huff obediently.
“Ugh. Utterly gross. That stinks. Worse than usual.”
“Thank you.”
It’s garlic, of course. And even though you munched the cloves until your eyes swam and your sinuses stung, you can smell it on Emma too.
While Megan wafts away the smell in exaggerated mummery, Rowan checks your backpack; a drawstring affair holding a rolled-up sleeping bag curled around a pillow. There’s a fresh rose on top, wrapped in paper. Emma will have her own, and because she is a girl it will be red to the white you’ve brought along.
“You’re sure about this?” Megan asks Emma.
She nods and smiles, takes your hand, if only for a second.
“Phones.”
You hand them over. You don’t want any adult tracing your course tonight.
After the girls hug each other, the pair of you steer yourselves to the top of the village and along the dusty path lining the moor road, making your way to the forlorn hamlet a mile or so away. There to thrill yourselves with your fears, there perhaps to undress and hold each other in an unrolled sleeping bag beneath the summer stars.
There to brave the nosferat should he appear.
*
“You still believe in him?” Emma asks as you walk.
It’s a lazy evening, quiet; long grass in the fields and everything still, without a breeze. Cars do come this way, but rarely, and certainly with no reason to stop at the hamlet and feel the blind eyes of the abandoned houses on them.
“Sometimes.” You’re at that age, on the cusp of all kinds of change. Belief is … fragile. “But not so much anymore.”
“Not like when we were kids, then?”
“We’re going to lose it, I suppose. Forget it all.” You shake your head. “That’s kind of unreal.”
Because it does leave you. You both know that, have seen the evidence of it in older kids who simply don’t know what you’re talking about if you mention the vampire.
“They call it growing up,” Emma says. “We call it the Forgetting.”
“Yeah.” It’s difficult to keep the sadness from your voice.
Emma slips her hand into yours.
You walk in silence, your palms grainy against each other, the strange but simple comfort of a coming together that is newly innocent and a temptation for something more.
*
When you finally arrive at the hamlet, Emma shudders. “It’s creepy.”
You can’t argue with that. The row-houses are a century old and more, plain and practical. Stone. Slate roofs. Crooked chimneys. They have dark, broken windows and gaping doors, some of which are boarded with wooden sheets now rotted through. A farmhouse leans over on the other side of the road, walls cracked, roofing timbers exposed. It lacks warmth even as the crimson sunset strikes it.
“The phone box is safe though?” Emma says.
So the theory goes. But you think it better to offer up more reassurance than that. “Course it is. Anyway, people’ve been coming here and spending the night before it was around. They survived.”
“But the stories …”
You know them. The nosferat, prowling, taking its fill; leaving you thinned, eaten up, a spoiled, used thing. Alive, but its forever. And infected with dark dreams and hard-to-swallow thoughts.
Emma takes a breath. “I’m being silly, aren’t I? We should do this. If you still want to.”
You do. It’s more than fulfilling tradition, the coming-of-age ritual that village kids have gone through for decades. You want your night with her, and whatever it leads to.
“Come on,” you say, and squeeze her hand.
The phone box stands beside what might have been a turning point for a tractor at some point. There’s an old bench missing a few slats, angled about six feet from it. But it’s the box that catches the eye. Emma tenses at what she’s seeing. A red sentinel, forlorn but solid, on a concrete base. Crosses in various states of repair decorate it from top to bottom: wooden, plastic, metal, splintered, half-intact, some blackened as if set on fire. A few hang from chains or fraying string looped around the top, others are nailed into the metal frame. Jesus is limp in his defeat on some, while others are empty, simple intersections of unadorned lines, the short across the long.
“I think this’s the one,” you joke.
Emma is wary, but you kick away the shards of small charcoaled sticks and melted plastic strips that litter the ground around the entrance and pull on the door.
“Will it open?”
“Yeah, a bit of effort.”
The door tries to swing back on its hydraulic arm, as if to suck itself shut and trap you. But it gives enough for you to be able to get in. It’s warm and close and summer-dry inside. The phone itself is long gone; the box is nothing more than a hollow shell. But there’s room enough for two, refuge if needed. The back wall where the phone used to hang is graffitied with crosses. Some are sprayed, others daubed on with paint. Some are crayon and pen, others flaking correction fluid from years past.
“Definitely the right one,” you say, stepping out. But the joke’s no longer funny, if it ever was, and the door thuds closed behind you.
Emma’s smile is strained. She casts her gaze back along the road, to where rays from the setting sun slice the darkening sky. Even when it’s fully dark, the sky will glow. It’s that time of year. The day bleeds on the edge of forever.
“Let’s try the bench,” you say. “Wait a while.”
*
Dusk falls, and darkness follows. You’re sixteen years old, the pair of you. You’re together on the bench, in the depths of a July night, cocooned and too warm under the cover of the sleeping bag. Close by, the interior light of the phone box has clicked to life on a timer. You didn’t know it still had power to it. There’s no moon, just the speckled infinity of stars in the luminous blue curl of the witching hour. Emma’s hands are under your t-shirt, her palms fast across your skin. Her touch is electric. You kissed, tentatively, and then more firmly, and your mouths have barely been apart since.
There is no vampire, there could not be a vampire on a night like this. And now, as your own hand moves inside Emma’s blouse, you give no care to the consideration that there ever was a vampire. There could only be this, a boy and girl straining at adulthood, and a village rite that puts a boy and a girl together, so that the most tantalising of mysteries can be undone …
“No, wait,” Emma gasps. “Stop.”
She pushes you away. The sleeping bag slips, showing the flesh within her blouse and her half-untangled bra. She covers herself, but it isn’t her most urgent consideration. You wonder what you’ve done wrong. “Em?”
“Don’t you hear? What is that?”
Every part of you is pounding, not just your head. Your hands, tingling with delight, have been all over her, have even squeezed a little into her jeans. Your breath is light, fast and needful. You’re dizzy with longing, alive in a way you didn’t believe possible. This is something animal and yet profoundly human. It is something that might be spiritual, all you have longed for but never found in the village church services and talk of the old ways. You could, at this moment, believe in purpose, in truth, in the intractable meaningfulness of everything, from the moment of your birth to this most vital of instants. If this is not what you were born for, then why did God ever push breath into Adam?
“Sorry,” you manage. “I don’t …”
Emma starts, almost screams, and that does it, snaps you out of the spell she has cast on you.
Her eyes are so wide they collect stars. “There! It’s there. Oh my God.”
You look around, vision sharp, heart quick, like the mouse fearing the owl’s talons.
“Where?”
She points an unsteady finger, then snatches it back, as if scared it will be taken off her hand. “Oh good God, we have to go. We have to get out of here.”
“No, wait.”
But she’s standing, hoisting her blouse together as the sleeping bag falls to the weed-cracked earth of the pavement. You stand yourself, the tightness at your groin painful but fading. You glimpse the night above you, a speckled band of stars arching high overhead. It seems so fragile, as if it could crack and something unimaginable pour through. Your sense of self shrinks and you are suddenly cold beneath the warm night.
“We have to go.” Emma’s all but gabbling. “It’s here.”
You squint and see a pale something. Something mottled in blues and greys as well as a ghostly white sheen. There, and then sinking back into shadows by one of the houses across the road.
That’s when the tales come back to you: villagers who’ve wasted away with no apparent cause, the cattle that have been bled out, the sheep with torn throats and not a drop of blood to be found around them …
Vampire, of course, because what else could it be? You’ve always known, just as you know the moon shines at night and the sun rises at dawn.
But the moon isn’t in the sky. And dawn is – even going by the short, perfumed hours of summer night – a long way off.
You huff out your breath, garlic-scented still, for all it’s been diluted by Emma’s kisses.
Protection? Defence?
Earlier, before you’d both relaxed into yourselves, Emma insisted you twine the roses around the rear slats of the silvered bench. They’re withering now, the petals curling as if under assault.
Perhaps that is what undoes you as much as anything else, as much as the pale, lopsided figure that detaches itself from the shadows across the road.
Crooked and ungainly, grey wispy hair on its bulbous, rat-like head, it lurches towards you.
You cry out. Emma screams. She turns to run, but away from the phone box.
“Emma, no!”
You jump after her. She stumbles and you snatch her collar. It tears. The silver crucifix, which you’ve pushed around to the nape of her neck during your petting, springs free of its chain, falls through her badly-buttoned blouse and spills to the ground. It lands with a tinkle, turning over and over, circumscribing half an arc before settling at the kerb’s edge. Something inside it starts to brighten.
“This way,” you tell her, sparing yourself from the wonder of the crucifix and what it might mean. You haven’t time to calculate whatever mysteries, what deeper meaning it might hold, not that and the existence of the vampire, to work out their place in the world. There’s no time for the new arrangement of a belief system in your head, what it means for your soul. Survival is all that matters right now. “This way, Em. This way.”
But this way is back towards the monster as well as possible safety, and Emma resists. Because this thing is a monster: long-limbed, pale as death in garments as ragged as a scarecrow’s. It stilts its way like an ungainly spider, lurching haphazardly on the thinnest of limbs, head swinging, misshapen ears spiky like brittle leaves, bare feet with wild, clawlike toenails. It’s bent over by a nasty curve of the spine, making it look twisted and hobbled. The knuckles of its hands brush the ground as it canters on. Its expression, lifted towards you, is a gaping scream, mouth hanging ridiculously loose, the face around it a mottled rush of fungal growth and decaying flesh stretched thin, ripped raw in some places, showing dry tendons where it’s split.
Emma loses what’s left of her self-control, and even over the tang of garlic riding her screams on the flat night air, you can smell urine. You haven’t time to process your own bodily functions, just as you haven’t time to find hope in the fallen cross. You grab her, dragging her to the box.
“Get the door!”
But she isn’t fit to. She’s weeping, hysterical.
Holding her with one arm, you try to swing the door open with your free hand. It’s so heavy though, the suction from the drag of the hinged arm slowing everything. You have to release Emma, have to hope she won’t flee screaming into the night. You’ll both be lost if she does, because you know you’ll go after her, and that the nosferat will follow.
You brace yourself and haul at the handle two-handed, force a gap. You jam your shoulder, legs splayed, to keep it from closing. Your feet skitter on pieces of broken old crosses and disfigured Christs, but there’s enough of Emma still upright to pull at, to tumble inside and, time enough, barely, for you to press in against her as the door whooshes shut, a maw closing with a flat thud, sealing you in, where your frantic breathing is magnified in the close confines.
There are slide bolts, top and bottom of the door. The top one’s missing a couple of screws; the others are rusted so much they look like nails, as if their heads will break off if challenged. You slam the heel of your hand at the topmost fastening, skinning it raw as the bolt roughhouses itself into place, and then try and fail to stamp the bottom one into its holding.
Something whacks into the door, sending a deep vibration through the phone box, just as a weird radiance starts to life all around the box. In the sudden blaze, the nosferat falls back, spinning around and whining in a high animal hiss as if scalded.
Bits of crosses splinter from the phone box, fraying the night like moths burnt by candlelight. They’re alive like Emma’s crucifix, you realise. Golden with light.
Emma screams. “Make it go away! Oh my God, make it go away!”
You haven’t time to deal with her. The bolt, you are telling yourself, get that lower bolt driven in.
“Make it go away!”
Emma’s voice drops into sobs. She’s jiggling, all but running on the spot. She doesn’t seem to realise she’s wet herself, but you are well aware of the fact; the smell of urine is even stronger than the garlic. You can’t help but curl your nose at it and breathe through your mouth.
Even so, there are worse things in the world. Like what’s outside, and the fact you cannot, just cannot, get the lower bolt into place.
Emma groans, makes a deep hiccoughing sound as she tries to find words. Her hands claw your shoulders and force you to look up. “N-n-n-n-n-n,” is all she can get out. She can’t quite point, and instead flails at you, slapping you to follow what she means.
Outside, at the edge of the illumination cast by the phone box and the blazing crosses, it’s there. The vampire. The nosferat.
It’s moving its head back and forth at the pair of you, bright as buttons and trapped in this red cage.
*
You press against Emma, even as you wonder that your trembling legs can bear your weight. You’ve given up on the lower bolt. It’s almost in, is touching the lip of the retaining hole, and that’s as good as it’s going to get. The alignment just isn’t there for it to sink in all the way.
“It’s real,” Emma whispers from behind your shoulder. The whisper echoes and hisses like a snake. “It’s there.”
“Yes,” is all you can say.
It is there. Every bit as real as you used to believe it to be. It has stalked wheat fields made silver by a swift moon in your dreams since you were seven years old and were first initiated into the village’s strange lore. Has glided on a string of gossamer over the night-dark village in other dreams and descended to scuttle along the ridge-stones of slate roofs, to crawl down walls head-first to scratch against bedroom windows, has stood waiting where the hedgerows grow thick, ready for prey to come into its arms.
Hardly daring to breathe, you watch its head tilt to one side and then the other, its ears weirdly prickled as it contemplates you. Its eyes are globular orbs of darkness, entirely black, with no visible pupils and nothing reflecting on them.
Not too long ago you were wondering at the glory of being alive, at the bounty of the earth, with Emma fuelling your desire. Now your heart is full not of joy but fear. The world is not all treasure and bounty, the honey of dew and pleasure of love. There is a corrosion in it, rats to gnaw at the flesh, to tear away tendons from corpses, to bite at a neck and rip open a vein so that blood gushes everywhere and the essence of the children of Eve is there to be lapped at and drunk, in mockery of any god likely to command the heavens.
“What’s it doing?” Emma asks.
“I don’t know.”
“But we’re safe here?”
You think of the crosses, wedged together on the outside, others on string like religious barbed wire. But there are the broken ones, in pieces by the door. Dread falls all the way into your stomach as you think about what they might mean. You cast your glance elsewhere, seeking help. But the road is empty, and cars rarely frequent it. From here, you can see the bench. The wild roses were supposed to ward the vampire off. But they’ve rotted, petals bleeding to dryness, falling and torn. Emma’s shoulder bag is limp on its strap from the rear of the bench, your rucksack slumped over to one side of it. But there’s nothing inside them that can do you any good. Her crucifix is a few feet further on, its light dim but visible all the same, Jesus intact upon it. A forlorn hope maybe.
The nosferat trip-traps closer, a strange floating challenge to gravity. It seems to exist in a world not quite in sync with your earthly realm. You inhale sharply, the dusty dry scent of the phone box’s interior mixing with the garlic and the ammonia of the stain on Emma’s jeans. Above you, the electric light buzzes, stutters, sickly and yellow.
It comes closer still.
The crosses outside crackle, growing brighter. They fizz and spit, and as the nosferat draws ever nearer some flay and fall apart, bursting under the weight of their fire. One of the larger ones falls to the ground. Another comes apart with a sudden tearing sound, flaring as its pieces drop.
Still the nosferat comes.
Emma mewls, the pitch rising, sharp and high in your ear, echoing in the confined box. You have to force yourself not to think about coffins. Her fingers dig into your arms. You tell her to look away.
The nosferat’s terrible face presses closer despite the fury of the crosses. Hands with fingers that are far too long go to either side of the phone box frame. The crosses there are more alive than ever, brighter than all the stars in heaven, and the nosferat hurriedly draws its hands back as if burned. Emma whimpers. She’s praying under her breath. But no one’s answering her prayers. Those ungainly fingers return to the box, smoking but otherwise unharmed, and nails as thick as shells scratch at the panes on the door.
You shy back, pushing Emma into the wall where the phone once hung. The crosses, you want to scream. The crosses should hold this thing off.
But they don’t. The tired old symbols, nailed, screwed, glued on, blaze. But they splinter, falling apart. They hum as their light intensifies, louder and louder, shaking the box. More come loose and patter uselessly to the ground, going out and darkening like spent fireworks. These gummed lollipop crosses and tied-together twigs aren’t the same as Emma’s silver crucifix. They’re feeble representations, homemade toys, nowhere near as strong. As many are burning themselves to cinders as causing the nosferat any harm. And as more of them flare and disintegrate, the fewer of them there are to keep the vampire at bay.
“No,” you whisper, putting your hand to the door to try and keep it closed. But there’s nothing to grip, to pull tight on.
Emma’s prayers intensify. “Our Father … Deliver us from evil …”
You remember your own crucifix, the silver figure of the Nazarene on the polished wood. It had dug into you as you’d pressed up against Emma on the bench, uncomfortable and painful in your pocket as your body responded to hers.
Shoving your skinned hand into your jeans, you wince and pull the crucifix out. Lift it to the door and press it at the nosferat beyond.
It brightens, glows with a gold so intense you have to screw your eyes half closed against its light. Its warmth flares inside you, but it doesn’t burn you. It will hurt the nosferat though, you know that. It must do.
But …
Your heart skips and sinks, heavy as stone as you watch the nosferat open its mouth in a ragged smile full of teeth like knives and push its face to the glass. The swollen globes of its eyes are infinitely deep and dark, and the light from the cross falls into them, sinking through their depths, there to flicker and fade and, finally, to die.
“No,” you whisper disbelievingly. “No.”
For all that the crucifix burns in your hand, there’s no reflection of it in the vampire’s eyes. It cannot see the cross. It is blind. The defence offered by this most ancient of symbols is worthless to you.
The nosferat’s long, ungainly fingers find the recessed handle of the door and pull.
*
You have wondered at the reason you have breath in your lungs, why the world exists, and why you, with all your puzzled thoughts and unanswered questions, are upon it. You’ve pondered on existence and the search for a narrative to explain it all. Now, in this moment of crisis, confronted with something as unreal and yet starkly vivid as the nosferat, something utterly demonic, you are comforted by the knowledge of angels. That understanding flows through the crucifix to you. If the cross cannot hold the vampire back, it can convey this knowledge: where there is one, there must be the other.
If there are demons, there are angels.
In this moment, you have something that can only be called … faith.
You tighten your grip on the golden crucifix and touch it to your lips.
Fortified, you lift your other hand to the rattling bolt, already half loosened by the vampire, at the top of the door.
Seeing what you intend, Emma releases a breathless scream that carries no weight.
The bolt drops and the door is wrenched open. The crucifix in your hand flares all the brighter and you swing it as the nosferat darts its head at you, mouth wide, countless teeth as brilliant as blades.
But crosses are for defence, not attack. It isn’t enough to fly at it, to bring the thing down, only to scorch it, to bring a burn to its already grizzled skin. Emma screams again, clawing as if to get through the rear of the phone box as you throw yourself at the nosferat and shout at her to run.
You tumble outside. You’re back in the luminous July night, bewildered but full of righteous faith, and with that, anger, that something as foul and unclean as this creature exists. You swing wildly with your cross, damning the vampire with your every breath.
The nosferat turns around you, evading the worst of your attack, as if wrapping you in silken web. Behind you, the phone box blazes with the brilliance of the crosses. You hurl your crucifix again, throat raw as you scream at the vampire, your head buzzing.
And it comes at you and there is darkness. Not the darkness of a faith undone, but of the deep rushing slide into oblivion, as the vampire’s teeth latch onto your neck, bite deep and inject their venom into you. As your scream fades, your fingers fall loose, drowsiness has you, and you drop your cross.
The last you know is the slowing of your heart as your blood is taken.
*
You will wake at dawn. You’ll be laid out on the sleeping bag in the long grass edging the wall behind the bench. Emma will lie beside you. You’ll remember only kisses, some strange, some sweet, and the pounding of your hearts, a thrill of something like ecstasy. As if drunk, slightly dizzy, you’ll gather yourselves together and walk arm-in-arm, in gentle comfort, to the village, to the love of your friends and family.
As for the rest, all will be gone … the Forgetting is upon you. Even the lore of the village will fade from your minds.
You will live, the years will pass, and you will not knowingly fear the night. And when there is a scrabbling noise on the rooftops, a scratch at your bedroom windows, you will stand and in a dreamer’s trance, open the window and invite me in. You will bare your necks to me, and I shall see through your eyes and take, just a little, just enough, as I drink from so many of you in the village.
As I have always done, as I shall continue to do so.
Mark Patrick Lynch is a UK-based writer whose short fiction, mainstream and genre, has appeared in various publications around the world, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Zahir. His first two books were published in hardcover in the UK by Robert Hale, with paperback rights going to Thorpe. Most recently tales from him have been published in the Flame Tree Press anthologie Loki and Were-Wolf. His short story “Some Things Just Are” was performed on the stage in London as part of the Luminal Tales event, and he appeared in last year’s Kilter & Rammel anthology CriminOlly presents Trash Tales: An Anthology of Trashy Fiction. His latest collection is Ghost Stories and Other Strange Tales. Feel free to find him on BlueSky as @markpatricklynch.bsky.social
© 2026 Mark Patrick Lynch. All rights reserved.
Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of any part of this story to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, locations or general circumstances is entirely coincidental and/or used in a fictitious manner.
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