Authors: Tim Curran
“I can’t,” she said under her breath. “I can’t do that.”
Rule had his light in her face. “What did you say?”
Megga shook her head. “I…I don’t know.”
The words had barely left her lips when she felt dizzy, as if she might pass out cold. It was like all the blood in her body rose to her head like an elevator car. She stumbled into Rule and he held her up. She could feel the vampires around them, the incessant droning of their thoughts, the fierce and unwavering loyalty to Griska…and, yes
,
something
beyond
Griska. Something else. Something darker.
Wenda was speaking to her, saying something, but the words made absolutely no sense. She could feel Rule’s arms supporting her. She blinked. Then blinked again.
She saw a cemetery…not the tomb wreckage from above they’d been stepping around and over, but a necropolis of the highest order. Graves, mausoleums, huge ornate crypts, chapels honed from black stone. She was in a burial ground of great honor, a place where the gods buried their own. Creeping fingers of mist blew about and the atmosphere was vile and decadent…and for Megga, it was like coming home after a long absence. This was the place she had seen in her dreams, the epicenter of her morbid Goth fantasies. The grounds were oddly landscaped, lying over hill and valley. Immense, winding stone staircases wound amongst the vaults and sepulchers. Wicked, blasted trees sprouted up from the evil ground everywhere, their blackened boughs reaching to the sky like slashes of darkness.
This is what I’ve always been looking for. This is my place. My home. My retreat from my boring, banal existence. Oh, to die here. To lie on a stone slab or be interred beneath the ground, resting uneasily beyond a tomb gate enveloped in creepers. Cobwebs and black silk, carven candelabra and scratching graveyard rats. The rain of dust and mute centuries. Oh, dear God, dear God…
This place had been waiting for her all this time, anxious to welcome her home and wrap skeletal arms about her, to hold her in worm-eaten shrouds and moldering shifts. She was a prodigal daughter no more; the wretched wastefulness of her former world was distant memory, a piss-stained newspaper blowing away in the breeze. She was happier than she’d been since the days she’d nursed at her mother's teat. There was that same level of comfort and satisfaction. She only wished there were inhabitants here, a family to accept her and embrace her as part of their order.
But wait…as she sta
red across the weedy, tombstone-jutting marble wastes about her, the dead
were
coming to greet her. Reedy things. Wraiths. They seemed to be composed of equal portions of protoplasm and colorless gas. They were human in general form and appearance, but obviously not people as she knew them.
Ghouls? Vampires?
She couldn’t say, but that they welcomed her there was no doubt.
Their eyes were glistening orbs alight with brilliant shades of amber and sunset orange. They moved in closer, surrounding her with an icy ambience. Death had freed them of their clothing and Megga saw only transparent nakedness all around her. Their bodies were enclosed by some bizarre gaseous envelope that acted as a membrane, holding the form they wore
in life. Inside this, she could see their dormant anatomies and aged bones, among other, more freakish things. Streamers of ectoplasm blew around them and in them as if moved by some secret wind. They ringed around her, dancing, singing wordless songs that reminded her of howling October winds. Their hollow-cheeked faces were clown-white as if sculpted from some colorless, flaking marble. The song they sang was joyless, their grave-molded lips devoid of smiles. A young girl moved in, as if for a kiss, and then passed through her. It was unpleasant like nothing Megga had ever experienced. Sensations of cold, dampness, and insanity slid greasily through her at the contact. She felt oddly violated, but there was no true word for souls sharing the same physical space for a split second.
But she knew.
They only wanted to worship her. That’s all they asked. She was their queen and they wanted to worship at her feet, her own host of revenants. They touched her, swarming around her, moving within and without her. They only wanted to know if she would be their queen and her lips formed one word,
“Yes.”
20
Rule felt the coldness, the dankness, the chill of the grave coming off of Megga and he took hold of her. He shook her. He didn’t know why he felt it was necessary, but he did it anyway until her eyes seemed to focus again.
“What?” she said. “What are you doing?”
“What are
you
doing?”
“It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve never seen a cemetery like this before. It’s absolutely perfect in every way.”
He looked over at Wenda. What cemetery? What the hell was she talking about? The bones and shattered coffins around them? Was that it? But if so, exactly what was so perfect about it?
“What are you talking about?” Wenda said, growing very suspicious.
“The cemetery,” Megga said, offering the both of them a nearly unspeakable grin that made something in Rule’s belly roll over. “It’s like something out of Poe.”
He did not know what she was seeing, but he had no doubt she was seeing something…something that Wenda and he could not. Maybe it was a hallucination or a waking dream and maybe she was just out of her head…and who had better right? But even as Wenda grew tense, he did not dismiss it. Chances were, Griska was showing her something she wanted to see, amplifying not only the seduction of the dark side but her own coming destruction. Then again…who could say?
Maybe she
was
seeing something that they couldn’t. Maybe she was psychically channeling something.
Twenty-five years earlier, when his mother was dying of lymphoma, he had watched her rotting away in a hospital bed. She was so full of drugs that she was incapable of a coherent thought, let alone a coherent sentence. One day the charge nurse said, “She keeps talking about some man she’s seeing.” She dismissed it, of course, as a drug-induced hallucination. But as Rule had held her hand, his mother had opened
her eyes, which seemed very bright for the first time in many, many weeks and said, “Oh, I’m so glad he’s back. Isn’t he just the most beautiful man? I can’t wait to begin our journey.” She died the next day. Of course, being a guy who had taught literature for years, he was haunted by it. His imagination nagged at him. Was it just a hallucination or had she indeed seen Death?
And he wondered the same thing about Megga right now.
“Let’s get moving,” Wenda said. “We don’t have time for this.”
Ah, Little Miss Practicality reminding him that it was important to be practical when in the business of vampire slaying. He liked that. He could see it in his head.
When killing vampires, one must be practical.
If he still had his office at Stony Brook, he would have had that lettered on a card to hang on the wall.
They moved on and suddenly Wenda halted. “Wait,” she said. “There’s something.”
He opened his mouth to ask her what sort of something…and a wind came blowing out at him. He couldn’t conceive of where it might be coming from, but it was there. It came with a high, shrilling, wasplike buzzing that was so loud he had to cover his ears. Gust after gust punched into him, separating him from Megga. He hit the ground, tried to stand, and was knocked down again.
Hell is this…what the hell is this? What—?
He still held his flashlight and nothing could make him let go of it. He didn’t want to imagine the absolute, cloistering blackness of this place or how he might wander, lost and alone, in it until the vampires found him and fed on him. In the beam of his light, the wind was filled with flying debris: dust, clots of dirt, what might have been finely ground powdered bone and human ash. It blew in a wild, raging tempest. He could barely see anything. He thought he heard Wenda cry out or maybe it was Megga. There was no way to be sure.
Drifting about the perimeter of the light’s illumination, he could see vampires like black death’s-head
moths circling ever closer—their stark white faces and grinning red mouths, eyes like yellow, red, and silver starshot.
He crawled slowly towards where he thought he had been when the wind hit him. The dust-clotted beam of his light found nothing but heaped black earth, fingers of frozen meltwater, and stray ice-locked bones. He was most assuredly alone and that’s what Griska had wanted from the beginning, the very beginning. As Megga had said, a game, it was all a game.
They’re toying with us, letting us think there’s hope. At the last moment, they’ll snatch it away from us when they’re done letting us run the maze like rats.
Yes, yes, yes, that must have been true all along. Griska had wanted them here on his private killing grounds and he had fooled them into thinking it was their own idea.
“WENDA!” Rule cried out.
“MEGGA! DEAR GOD, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
But it was pointless.
Not only had the wind separated them and blinded them with its cycling debris, it was howling now like blood-maddened wolves, baying and shrieking. All means of communication between him and the others had been taken away, one by one. They were trapped down here in these monolithic catacombs, this rat-crawling lair of the undead. Horror crept inside him, chilling him, filling his brain with nightmarish imagery.
And the wind increased in intensity.
21
Whereas the sudden windstorm had knocked Rule on his ass, it propelled Wenda forward to a place that she knew she would have found eventually. She was no longer under the cemetery now; that was far behind her. She was under the town itself, pushed into secret channels of night and nameless chambers of charnel silence. Her internal clock told her that daylight was probably less than an hour away and she could sense the desperation, the
fear
the undead held for the first cleansing rays of dawn.
They want closure on you. They want you finished by then. Griska must finish you. It is his job to protect them. He has to stop you before…before…
She wasn’t sure. Certainly, before sunrise. The idea of her living past that hour was a horrid danger to them. They knew very well what she would do. Yes, that was part of it…but there was something else, something bigger, something far grimmer. A secret, a divine mystery that she was not to know of but she knew all the same.
The other that stood behind Griska.
He had to keep her away from whatever it was, even at the cost of his own existence.
Holding her lantern high, ever aware of the dark sweet smell of putrescence thickening around her,
Wenda moved ever forward over the hilly terrain, amongst heaps of earth and low hollows filled with frozen pools of water. There were bones littered about and most looked quite old, but she saw other debris now, too. Bricks and huge, shattered stones, blackened beams and heaps of rubble. She stepped around massive rusted gears half-buried in the earth and staffs of twisted iron, ancient rotted planks that looked like they had been dropped from far above.
And they had.
She was under the old mill that Rule had told her about. Somewhere above would be a shaft leading up into the ruins. Up there, the air would be glacially fresh and cold. Down here, it was a buried mausoleum. The vampires were all around her and she knew it. Mostly, they were discorporeal things, shades and phantoms, hissing masses of mist and white smoke through which burning eyes and blood-red mouths could be seen.
She was very close to the epicenter now and she knew it.
22
Using a stone, Rule pulled himself to his feet and the wind seemed to slow and die out. A figure stepped out in a gore-stained parka that was filthy from years of sleeping in the dirt and beneath dank piles of autumn leaves. Its face grinned at him, except it wasn’t a reflexive action of muscles but more like the white vellum of the face had been torn.
You came back, eh, squirt? We’ve been waiting for you a long time.
It was Bugs and with him was Andy, his brother Andy. Staring at them with his mouth open, it was 1957 again and he was ten years old. He felt small and weak and utterly in thrall to them, which, he supposed, he truly was. Their faces were like death-swollen toadstools, greasy and shining.
I think he’s scared, Andy.
He is.
Let’s see how scared he can get.
Rule stood his ground as they moved slowly in on him, but it wasn’t out of machismo or some self-destructive seam of bravery, it was because he felt rooted to the spot, rooted by terror. Maybe the skin he wore was that of a sixtysomething ex-lecturer of humanities and English lit, but inside, down deep, he was a ten year old boy who was scared stiff. He was still in awe of his brother, but mainly of the abomination he had become.
Andy stepped lightly in his direction, the flashlight making his
face glow like the mantle of a deep-sea squid. His eyes were huge and yellow, the color of drainage leaking from an infected wound. His lips were threadbare, split by seasons of cold, the teeth discolored, fangs mottled. He reached out with a hand much like the crooked roots that grow from the bases of ancient oaks. The fingers were spidery and limp.