Eldren: The Book of the Dark (27 page)

If there was no light from above...if it was indeed dusk, then he could wander around the room for a long time before stumbling on it.

And he might not have a long time...he might not have any time at all.

Even as he had the thought a noise stopped him in his tracks, a rustling followed by the scrape of metal on stone, as if someone had just got off one of the cots and in doing so had moved it slightly as their weight shifted.

~-o0O0o-~

Tony and Margaret stood above the trapdoor in the kitchen, staring down into the blackness. Margaret had the bicycle lamp in her hand and she shone it downwards, but all it lit was the first three steps of the ladder.

“Down there?” Margaret asked.

“Yes. That’s where we went.”

Tony could feel the shackles in his mind loosening, and he knew that if he went down to the cellar again then he’d have to face it. Not just the present but the past as well.

They were casting long shadows across the linoleum on the kitchen floor.

“It’s getting late,” he said, and Margaret nodded.

“I figure we’ve got about an hour before sunset,” she said. “That’s long enough. We’ve put it off and put it off, but now it’s time. Let’s go.”

Without looking at him she stepped down into the hole. Tony waited until her head was below floor level then stepped onto the ladder.

~-o0O0o-~

Donald Allan’s eyes snapped open.

It wasn’t time yet, but it was coming. Already the drone of the sun was lessening in his head.

He smiled to himself there in the darkness.

JIM KERR held his breath, but the sound was not repeated. The only thing he could hear was the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. He stood still for five heartbeats, hoping that his eyes might get accustomed to the darkness, but there was no improvement.

He let out his breath slowly, breathing through his mouth, and began to grope along the wall. If he could get to the end of the corridor then he might be able to somehow lock the iron door...keep the bloodsuckers in until he felt better prepared to deal with them.

He tried to hold on to that thought as he inched further away from the bunker, trying to keep his feet on the ground, shuffling rather than walking to avoid knocking against anything that might move and make a sound that would give him away.

There was still a buzzing in his head, a lightness of feeling that he might have associated with an oncoming flu if he didn’t know better. He realized that he had been seriously weakened...just how much it remained to be seen. He’d dropped his guard, and they’d got him straight away. He shuddered when he realized how close he had been to giving in completely.

The vision had been seductive.

And the worst thing is, I produced it all myself.

The desire, represented by the vision hadn’t been placed in his mind by an outside agent...it was all his own work. And if he allowed himself to dwell on it, he would be dead in seconds. He forced his mind back to the present, back to the place where he inched along in blackness.

The wall was smooth behind him.
Plaster
, he remembered from the brief glimpse he’d had on the way in. He tried to remember how far it had been. Surely it was no more than ten yards. A couple of minutes, that should do it.

He still clutched tight to the crossbow, so tight that his fingers had began to ache. He forced himself to relax, counting the muscle groups down out of their tension before making another move. He put the torch deep into a pocket in his overcoat...it was useless now anyway...and replaced it in his hand with a packet of garlic.

The picture came into his mind without him thinking about it, and with it came memory. He’d only taken one down with the garlic once before. That was in London, in a cellar under a cinema in the West End. He’d almost been killed that time. The bloodsucker had come at him unexpectedly. In those days he’d used the hammer and the stake...both hands full. It had landed on his back and knocked him to the ground, pinning both the weapons under the weight of his own body.

Luckily he had managed to get one hand free. And while the bloodsucker tore and gouged at the high leather collar of his jacket, he twisted and squirmed, trying to retrieve a packet of garlic powder from his shirt pocket.

He managed it just in time. The back of his jacket was already in shreds as he opened the packet with his teeth and, throwing his weight to one side managed to turn and thrust the open packet into the bloodsuckers face.

The reaction had been instantaneous.

The weight lifted from him and a loud choking scream filled the air, followed by silence. By the time he got to his feet the vampire was lying on the ground, its face no more than a black, smoking ruin, like a roast left forgotten in a hot oven. Its eyes had gone completely, now no more than two deep pits, wisps of gray mist rising from deep in the skull. There was a hissing, bubbling sound and Jim realized that the garlic was still in there, still eating away at the soft parts inside. He had almost gagged but he forced himself to move closer, to make sure the thing wasn’t going to get up again.

It had been finished already, but he had pounded the stake in anyway. For all he knew it was still there, lying under several thousand cinema attendees, seekers of fantasy unaware of the real horror beneath them.

And since then he had used the crossbow, to keep the other hand free. And he always carried garlic everywhere with him, even when he’d been in prison. He almost smiled as he remembered the nickname he’d been given. Not very original, but appropriate...‘Onion breath’.

His mind was wandering. He brought it back to the present with a shake of his head. He wouldn’t think of the damage the garlic had done to the vampire child. It had been a bloodsucker...it deserved everything it got.

Somewhere deep in his mind he knew that such a young child couldn’t be held responsible
.

But was my son responsible? Had he even been given a chance?

He talked to himself, muttering all alone in the dark. It was something he’d found himself doing many times during the long prison nights and he had long since ceased to notice it.

The memory, his only one, of the child burning in the sunlight almost brought back the tears, but he forced them down. He searched for the place where the lust for revenge still burned, as hot as ever, and let it come, chilling him and driving out all other emotion.

He felt control come back, the state of firm determination that he’d spent years cultivating in the dark days and nights after Jura. And with the control came strength, of body and resolve. He’d get out of here, and he’d be back, stronger and better prepared. He’d been too confident, had underestimated his opponents. There would be no more mistakes from now on.

His movements became more purposeful. He made his way down the corridor, using only the back of his left hand to judge the distance to the wall.

Within ten seconds he had reached the iron door once more.

~-o0O0o-~

Margaret was waiting for Tony in the first cellar. There was still enough light coming from above for him to see that her face had gone an ashen gray, and that the white of her bandage had become tainted with the deep red of new blood.

She dropped the sports bag to the ground. It hit with a muffled thud and threw up dust to dance in the air around them.

“I’ll need to rest a bit,” she said. “I’m just about done in.”

Tony said nothing, but looked upwards. Was the light getting dimmer? Surely it was just his imagination.

The teacher didn’t seem to notice, she had sat down, cross-legged, on the dusty floor, her head bent forward to her chest. Tony could see by the rise and fall of her shoulders that she was breathing in quick, hot bursts, as if she’d just ran a mile.

“Margaret?” he said. “Are you okay?”

She raised her head and Tony stepped back. For a split second her eyes had seemed to be no more than two black pits in a skull, her mouth no more than a thin slit, but then she smiled, a weak thing but enough to dispel the illusion.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” she said. She waved her good hand at Tony. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be back to normal soon.”

Normal was a word that was fast disappearing from Tony’s vocabulary, but he didn’t say anything. Margaret looked like a woman near the end of her tether...the way his mother looked sometimes on a Sunday morning. He sat on the floor beside the teacher, as close to her as he dared.

In the films, the hero would put his arm around the woman at this point, and she would cry into his shoulder.

But this wasn’t a film, and Tony didn’t feel like a hero, and if anyone was going to cry, it was more than likely to be him.

Now that he was actually here he felt less frightened than he had imagined, but a lot of that was due to Margaret’s presence. If she collapsed and fainted...as looked distinctly possible...he would be left alone again.

Without saying anything to Margaret he opened the sports bag and drew out the garlic bulbs.

It took him a few seconds to figure out how they were attached to the string and at least a minute after that before he got the arrangement disentangled.

He stretched the string out on the ground in front of him. It looked like he had enough to make two necklaces.

The next five minutes were spent reattaching the bulbs to separate pieces of string. The string was only just long enough to tie off at the back of his neck, and the large bulbs stopped him from looking down towards his feet, but the feel of them there gave him a strange comfort.

“Hey, Margaret,” he said turning to the teacher. “I’ve done it.”

The teacher was still sitting cross-legged beside him, but she didn’t answer. He touched her on the arm, and her body started to fall away from him, just before she sat up straight with a start.

“You were asleep,” Tony said incredulously.

“No I wasn’t. But it was close.”

He held out the other necklace.

“I made these. They’re a bit tight, but I think it’ll fit you.”

He stood and went round behind the teacher. He looped the bulbs over her head and tied the thin twine in as strong a knot as he could.

“How long was I….dozing?”

“I don’t know. About five minutes?  It’s getting dark.”

The teacher looked up at the circle of dim light above them.

“Just a cloud,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Tony wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t have a chance to reply. Margaret stood, groaning, hefted the bag so that it lay across her back and stepped on to the ladder.

“How far down do we go?” she asked.

“Right to the bottom,” Tony said. “And we’ll need the light.”

“I don’t think I’ve got the energy left to take this bag off,” she said. “Can you reach it from there?”

Tony unzipped the bag and took out the lamp. He zipped the bag up and tapped the teacher on the shoulder.

“Okay. I’ve got it.”

At first he didn’t know how he would carry it...it was too bulky to fit in his pocket, and he needed both hands for the ladder. But when he turned the lamp over he saw that it had some sort of buckle on the back, and with a bit of wriggling he could fix it onto his belt.

Margaret had already gone on down the ladder.

“Hey, Hurry up,” he heard her say in a loud whisper. “It’s dark down here.”

He stepped onto the ladder and tried to look down between his arms, but there was only darkness. He took one hand off the ladder and switched on the light, but it was pointing straight out from his waist and only lit the steps of the ladder.

It helped Margaret though.

“That’s better. At least now I know where you are.”

Her voice sounded further away now, and Tony tried to move faster...he had no desire to be separated from her, not here in the dark.

He kept going down, and the silence got deeper around him. There was only the muffled rustle from beneath him as Margaret descended.

He tried to concentrate on putting one foot down at a time, but his arms had started to tremble and his legs felt like jelly. He tried to think about something else, something good and bright that he could look forward to when this was over, but he couldn’t think of anything at all.

It was only when the lamp lit up the floor of the next level down that he realized that he could no longer hear the noises of Margaret descending.

“Margaret?” He called, little more than a whisper, afraid to raise his voice, too terrified even to move.

Down below him, where it was pitch dark, there was a sharp intake of breath and a dull thud, then only the quiet again.

~-o0O0o-~

Jim Kerr stood beside the iron door and listened.

Just a second ago he had heard something, like the shuffle of feet on stone, but it hadn’t been from the bunker...it had come from the cellars above him.

He pushed the door shut, trying to stop it creaking. It closed into place with a small click, and he couldn’t open it from the outside. He was smart enough to know that the same didn’t apply to the inside.

Now that he was out of the corridor, away from the bunker, he felt slightly safer. But he still needed to find the ladder, and he still needed to get out before nightfall.

He stood with his back to the door and tried to force his eyes to pierce the darkness. There was still no sign of the ladder.

He had steeled himself to walk across the room when he heard another sound. It was above and to his left, and to Jim it sounded like the creak as pressure was applied to the steps of the ladder. He moved towards the noise, taking care not to make any sound that might alert the newcomer to his presence.

The sounds were getting louder, and when Jim looked up he realized that he could see the dim figure of someone framed in the light that was coming in from the entrance in the roof.

The figure was coming down the ladder, quietly, almost stealthily, as if taking care not to make any undue noise. All he could hear was the soft scrape of shoes on metal.

Jim waited until it was three feet from the floor then moved forward. He grabbed at its left leg, pulling the body away from the ladder and twisting the leg at the ankle so that his victim had no option but to let go of the ladder and fall to the ground.

He dropped on the body and had the crossbow over its chest, ready to fire before his other hand met the garlic bulbs at the neck.

Even then he nearly fired, but he could feel the heat of the body through his hand. It wasn’t a bloodsucker. He moved his hand away from the neck and met long strands of hair. It seemed he had just come close to killing a woman.