"Them darn Transylvanians!" Rupert G. said (pronouncing it, "Trans-vein-ans!") whittled the stick end to a fine point with his pocketknife. "Done ruined our neighborhood, they done. You know that don’t you, Jeph?"

Jephthah H. usually didn’t speak, but always grinned from ear hole to ear hole. Folks in the mountains, where Rupert G. and Jephthan H. lived, thought Jeph had wound up the way he had from having been dropped on his head, more than once, when he was knee-high years old.

"Don’t you?!" Rupert G. asked him again.

Jeph nodded. He’d have agreed with Rupert G. had he spoken in Latin. He showed off his encrusted yellow teeth, the ones between the spaces, and jacked up his nod to the speed of an outdoor water hand-pump rapidly driven by a man dying of thirst.

Rupert G. slapped a palm on Jeph’s head and said, "Okay! Okay! Gonna break the fool thing off that way." Then Rupert G. turned to the west and, catching the sunlight in his eyes, prayerfully said, "It’s time, Jeph. It’s time." Jeph’s lips pursed and his eyes wandered, looking for that sign from Rupert G. that would make him grin and nod. Finally, it came. Rupert G. looked at Jeph and asked him, "You with me, Jeph?!"

On cue, Jeph widely grinned and wildly nodded.

Rupert G. hand-stopped Jeph’s head, once again, and peering squarely into Jeph’s eyes, saw something different about them. His eyes weren’t dull as they usually were - lit with the 5 watts of power flowing from the poor generator of his mind. They were now at least a 100, may- be even 200 watts, and were riveted upon Rupert G’s...

"You all right, Jeph?" Rupert G. asked Jeph.

Jeph grinned and his head bobbed under Rupert G’s hand, but the brilliance in his eyes never lessened. Where before, Rupert G. pondered, had he seen those kind of piercing eyes of Jeph’s? He had to know. His very life, Rupert G. now thought, may very well depend upon his finding out that answer, and soon.

Rupert G. thought back...back to when they, the Translyvanians, first arrived. They’d come one night one week ago, a man and two women all in black clothing, under the guise of being long lost kin of Jasper Ginny - the village drunk - and by sunrise Jasper was loonier than an outhouse rat.

Without a stitch on, in his "birthday suit" folks here in the Ozarks called it, Jasper left his home wide-eyed, clicking his heels in the air, and went over to Molly Harper’s cow pasture. Jasper, a man in his seventies, ran his skinny wrinkled body in circles until he dropped - - down, for awhile. Then Jasper sprung up, like some marionette yanked up back into play, and hightailed it over to Hurley Joe’s swine farm. There he wallowed in the pens with the pigs and gobbled down handfuls of their slop. Finally, Clinton’s bull, Old Jessie, laid Jasper to rest. It happened after Jasper shook some red earth on his rear in Jessie’s face and brought the old bull a charging. After being gorged in his buttocks, Jasper landed on his back and then, being straddled by the bovine, had his throat and chest run through with the horns of the beast. "Ain’t normal-like things to be doing," all the mountain folks agreed on, and then de- cided to pay a visit on them supposed long lost kin of Jasper’s. Hurley Joe and Molly led the folks from the mountain village over to Jasper’s shack, and there they hunted for them kinfolks, but found neither hide nor hair of ‘em anywhere. However, if they had been able to look under the shack’s plank flooring - held down by the forces of hell - they’d have found them. Down there in the dirt among the corked old jugs of distilled spirits, in velvety caskets inside opened wood crates, laid Jasper’s pretend relatives: the Transylvanians.

"Transylvanians," Count DeMoore said in Bela Lugosian later that evening to the inquir- ing crowd, headed by Molly and Hurley Joe. Count DeMoore then introduced his wife, Liv, and his sister, Di. "We’re here on a very short stay, I assure you." Then smirking he added, "And again, my condolences on my cousin’s sudden demise. Now, if you’ll excuse us..." and they turned and walked away and vanished into thin air, or so it seemed. A sudden sandstorm had risen and impaired everyone’s vision for awhile and then, as suddenly, ceased and they were gone; and nothing but sloping graze land for miles was all anyone could see. Definitely among the last sights that Molly and Hurley Joe would ever see, that was for sure.

A day later, Molly was found on her knees in the muddy cow pasture with her head driven underground like an ostrich. Hurley Joe met a similar fate. A few days later, he was found sprawled out face down in the pig pen trough. That’s when the mountain folks took the law in their own hands, which, in the Ozarks, was the only law around.

"Them darn Transylvanians! They’re the ones to blame here!" All the folks yelled, and then marched themselves over to Jasper’s. There they threw their torches in the dry wooden shack, as volatile as a vat of gasoline, and watched it burst into flames.

After, among the night smoldering embers, Rupert G. saw Count DeMoore, his wife, and his sister walking, inspecting the ruins. And though flames shot up wherever they stepped, not a fiber on them caught fire. Then Rupert G. saw their eyes, lit by the flashes of light, and that they were: riveted upon him!

Like Jeph’s were now, Rupert G. thought, and then heard the snapping of wood. He looked down at the sharpened sticks he had whittled, the ones he would’ve anchored through the hearts of Count DeMoore, Liv DeMoore, and Di DeMoore, and they laid broken in halves on the ground; broken by Jeph’s hands.

Rupert G. then looked up, first at the two red holes in Jeph’s neck and then at Jeph’s grin - now with long fangs. As Jeph opened wide his mouth and came toward his throat, Rupert G. groaned, "Them darn Transylvanians!"