Authors: Scott G. Mariani
The morning was crisp and bright as Dec sped westwards in the Audi banger, but it wasn’t the sunshine that was putting a broad grin on his face as he drove. Glancing at the shiny new laptop on the passenger seat next to him, he instinctively reached out and patted it like a faithful dog.
The reply from Errol Knightly had arrived just after seven o’clock that morning.
Hello Dec,
Thank you so much for your fascinating message. I certainly would like to meet up with you to discuss these enormously important matters. I’ve just returned from my national book-signing tour and am now back at my home, Bal Mawr Manor, in west Wales. Why don’t you come and see me a.s.a.p.? We have a lot to talk about.
Yours, Errol T. Knightly
Dec had jumped straight into his banger and burned rubber – inasmuch as the Audi
could
burn rubber – all the way out of Wallingford. Four hours later, and just about as far west as you could get before dropping into the sea, he saw the first sign for Newgale, Pembrokeshire, and his heart began to thump all over again at the prospect of meeting up with a real vampire hunter.
Him and Errol Knightly. What a team they were going to make. Dec was so excited about it that when the radio news came on, with one of its top items the growing concern over the apparent disappearance of MP Jeremy Lonsdale, he was too lost in his thoughts to even notice.
It wasn’t much longer before he arrived at Bal Mawr Manor, nestled among the rolling hills of the wild Pembrokeshire coastline. As he goaded the protesting Audi up a long hill, the glittering sea to his left, his first sighting of the place was the spectacle of four tall towers, circled by clouds of seabirds and silhouetted against the sun; beyond them was the greyly glittering Irish sea.
‘Looks like a frigging castle,’ he muttered to himself. The Audi managed to drag itself over the crest of the hill and the building came more fully into view. Dec let out a low whistle. The manor house was an arresting sight, perched on the cliffside overlooking an immense sweep of white beach. The nearest neighbours were farms dotted here and there against the green hills. A scattering of buildings in the far distance was all that remotely resembled a town anywhere within sight.
Dec drank it all in with a sense of awe as he approached the tall gates of the manor and found himself on a thickly tree-lined private road that stretched on for ages. Just as he was beginning to think he’d taken a wrong turning, the trees opened up and the road ended abruptly at a barrier. Beyond it was a ten-foot drop to a wide expanse of water that Dec realised with amazement was a moat surrounding the entire manor house.
On one of the barrier’s high pillars was a small black box that he knew from movies to be an intercom system.
He wound down his window, pressed a button, and a moment later a crackling voice from the speaker asked him who he was. Dec stammered out his name.
For a minute, nothing happened; Dec sat in the car gazing at the incredible dwelling across the water. The place was at least five times bigger than the whole of Lavender Close put together. What he’d at first taken to be ivy growing up the manor’s walls was actually a climbing sprawl of thorn bushes. Black shapes in the still waters of the moat were the half-submerged blades of two huge paddle wheels. Above the water, the massive closed wooden gate wasn’t a door, but a drawbridge, held up by enormous iron chains. Either side of it were gleaming metal crosses three yards high.
A sudden wave of self-doubt washed over Dec as he sat there, bewildered by the spectacle. What was a poor stupid kid like him doing, thinking he could get involved with something on this scale?
But then, just as the impulse gripped him to turn the car around and head for home, the drawbridge began to descend over the moat, lowered on its chains by some hidden mechanism behind the walls to reveal a huge stone archway and the courtyard beyond.
Dec gaped. The drawbridge touched down. The barrier rose. The crackling voice on the intercom informed him that he could enter. Dec swallowed hard and drove the Audi over the moat and into Bal Mawr. As he pulled up inside the courtyard, the drawbridge was already closing behind him.
Dec got out of the car. The same thorny growth covered all the walls. In one corner, a long carport housed a cherry-red Porsche 959 and a big dark blue Bentley. The Bentley had a puddle of oil under its sump.
An iron-studded door flew open and a big, beefy figure that Dec instantly recognised as Errol Knightly came striding confidently out to meet him. The Man Himself extended his hand warmly. ‘It’s a delight to meet you, my boy.’
‘I’m almost eighteen,’ Dec said as his hand was crushed in Knightly’s grip.
‘Of course. Come in, come in. Welcome to my humble abode. Sorry to have kept you waiting. The drawbridge is a little slow, but entirely necessary. As I’m sure you’re aware, the creatures of the night daren’t cross running water. I have the moat blessed by the local priest every Tuesday and those paddle wheels are activated from dusk till dawn to keep the current flowing. Can’t be too careful.’ Knightly pointed up at the walls. ‘See those thorns? Specially imported from Transylvania. Vampires can’t abide the sight of them.’
Dec couldn’t find much to say as Knightly led him inside the biggest hallway he’d ever seen. It made the entrance of Gabriel Stone’s mansion, Crowmoor Hall, look like a hovel. Huge iron candlesticks around the walls gave the place a medieval air. Dec’s nostrils twitched at a strange, sharp odour. Knightly noticed his expression, and boomed with laughter. ‘We burn incense in every room, twenty-four hours a day. For cleansing and protection. Vampires loathe the smell.’
Can’t say I blame them
, Dec thought, trying not to breathe the stinging smoke as he followed Knightly through a doorway.
‘As you can see,’ Knightly said, ‘we’re well protected here. I only leave the place when absolutely necessary.’
‘That’d be when you go off on your travels to hunt down vampires? All over the world, like?’ Dec asked eagerly.
‘Yes, yes, to go off and hunt vampires.’ Knightly smiled broadly. ‘Let’s talk in the library. I’ll have Griffin bring us refreshments.’
Dec gaped in wonder as they entered a gigantic wood-panelled room with bookcases twenty feet high.
‘Sherry?’ Knightly asked.
Dec had never tasted sherry. ‘Um, got a beer?’
Knightly frowned, then smiled. ‘Beer it is.’ He tugged at an ornate sash that hung down the wall. Instants later a wizened, stooped little man who could have been any age between sixty and a hundred appeared in the doorway.
‘Griffin, this young gentleman would like a pitcher of whatever finest ale we have in stock. Just the usual for me.’
‘Right then,’ Griffin said. The crackling voice hadn’t been the fault of the intercom.
‘Griffin is my faithful manservant,’ Knightly boomed, clapping Dec on the back. ‘He’s been with my family for many years. Griffin, this intrepid young fellow wishes to join us in our crusade against the Undead.’
‘Aye,’ Griffin crackled sullenly, and shuffled off.
‘Now,’ Knightly said, rubbing his hands. ‘To business.’
Siberia
A mile beneath the frozen wastes, far beyond the reach of the pale sun, Gabriel Stone stood at the window of his small quarters adjoining the Chamber of Whispers, wearing a long velvet tunic that brushed the ice floor. He was deep in contemplation as he gazed out at the crystalline sculptures of one of the citadel’s many subterranean gardens. Cut into the towering domed ice ceiling high above was the ornately-carved, ice-shuttered oval window that the Übervampyr Masters called the Ecliptic Portal. The thousand-year-old astronomical device allowed the dwellers in the citadel to gauge the path of the sun, using dully polished mirrors to reflect only the tiniest degree of sunlight, unharmful to vampire eyes, thus telling them when it was safe to venture to the surface.
The sound of his chamber door opening disturbed him from his thoughts, and he looked round to see Lillith crossing the room towards him with a happy smile. She threw her arms around him. ‘You’re back, brother. I can hardly believe you’re on your feet again so soon.’
Gabriel smiled and stroked her raven hair. ‘The Masters are custodians of many secrets and much wisdom,’ he told her. ‘Thanks to their powers, I feel my strength quite restored.’
‘Zachary’s going to be so happy. He was worried about you. We both were.’
‘Master Xenrai tells me that I have much to be grateful to you both for,’ Gabriel said. ‘You saved me. I won’t forget.’
‘You did the same for me,’ Lillith said. ‘Now you need to rest a while. We have to be sure that you’re fully recovered before we make our next move.’
He shook his head. ‘Celerity is of the utmost importance in this situation. Now that our mission is renewed, I intend to see it through. There will be no one to stop us this time.’ He pointed out of the window at the dim glow of the Ecliptic Portal. ‘It is still light out there. As soon as darkness falls, we can leave.’
‘Gabriel, we have none of the human money. It’ll be hard to travel without it.’
‘Our friends here are not without resources, sister. The gold and diamonds we can carry with us, irresistible as they are to the humans, will see us a long way. As for hard currency itself, we still have millions in our Swiss bank account that our dear, departed and rather hapless ghoul, Jeremy Lonsdale, kindly donated to our cause. The moment we reach our destination, we can liberate all the funds we require.’
‘What destination did you have in mind?’
‘We will journey to England,’ he told her.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Back to England? Are you sure that’s wise? It’s not long since we had to flee from there.’
‘Our mission takes priority, Lillith. If we want to strike back at the heart of the Federation, we must crack the hard nut that is VIA. In order to be close to our enemy, we will establish our base in the former home of our beloved ex-ghoul.’
‘Lonsdale’s estate in Surrey,’ Lillith said, her doubt giving way to a smile of pleasure. ‘The Ridings. Nice. I like it.’
‘The last place our enemies would look for us,’ he said. ‘As for the human police, we have little to fear from such benighted halfwits.’
‘We have little to fear from
anything
,’ Lillith said. ‘Now that the cross is gone.’
Gabriel said nothing in reply, and for a few moments the two of them stood in silence gazing out of the window.
‘Gabriel, what is that thing?’ Lillith asked, pointing across the subterranean garden, beyond the ring of sculptures, at an enormous cylindrical tower that rose up high towards the ceiling.
‘The Masters have long been astronomers,’ he told her. ‘That is their form of what the humans would call a telescope. This garden, with its portal above, is what the Masters use as their observatory. Look, sister – you see the mechanisms that allow the segments of ice to be slid apart, allowing a full view of the night sky? They have a passion for viewing the stars and planets of this galaxy and the countless others that surround it.’
She frowned. ‘I love the night too. But the stars? What can be so fascinating about those tiny pricks of light?’
‘There is much you do not know, sister.’ Gabriel moved away from the window and began to pace the length of the chamber, looking pensively at his feet.
‘Something wrong, Gabriel? You seem very serious all of a sudden.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he replied.
‘I know you better than anyone. I can see something is troubling you.’
He seemed unwilling to say; then sighed and came out with it. ‘Since I awoke, I’ve been aware of . . . I find it hard to explain. Little more than a sensation, but one that fills me with unease.’
‘A sensation of what?’
He stopped pacing and fixed her with a piercing look. ‘It has become part of me now,’ he said. ‘The cross. As if somehow it were burned into my soul.’
‘Gabriel, you
know
you don’t have a soul. What are you talking about?’
‘I can only tell you what I feel. I feel it with a growing certainty.’
She laughed nervously. ‘Gabriel, you’re scaring me. Come, now. You’ve been very ill. That
thing
almost destroyed you. It’s like nothing we’ve ever encountered before. But these feelings will pass. The cross is broken, gone. Its powers are lost, and it’ll never harm us again.’
He stared at her for a moment longer, then slowly shook his head. ‘I fear you are wrong, Lillith. It is the cross’s presence I can sense. It was broken, but now it has been remade.’
‘Gabriel—’
‘Please don’t ask me how I know this. But there is no doubt in my mind. We have not seen the end of this cross.’
Bal Mawr Manor
Errol Knightly listened intently as Dec told him everything he knew. He started from the beginning, with the account of how he and Kate Hawthorne, the girl next door, had argued while out for a drive; how she’d run off and got a lift in a Rolls with some rich guy, and gone with him to this party at a manor house called Crowmoor Hall.
‘You might have heard of the place, like?’
‘Certainly I have. It’s where they found all those bodies recently,’ Knightly said, perched on the edge of his leather armchair, already into his third top-up of sherry and heading for a fourth. ‘It was on the news. Henley-on-Thames, isn’t it?’
‘What they won’t tell you on the news is that it was a nest of frigging vampires,’ Dec said darkly. He went on to describe how, after following Kate and her party hosts down to a strange crypt underneath the house, he’d witnessed the ritual slaughter of another girl. How they’d hung her from chains by her ankles, and then this black-haired vampire bitch with a sword had slashed her throat open, how the bastards had all stood there taking a shower in her blood. ‘You should have seen it. You should have been there.’
Knightly had turned very pale by this point in Dec’s story.
Soon after that, Dec continued, Kate had started going funny. The doctor hadn’t been able to understand the illness that had struck her after her return from the party. Nobody would have wanted to hear Dec’s story. ‘But I was right.’
Knightly made a lunge for that fourth top-up. ‘She
bit
you. A vampire actually
fed
on you?’
Dec nodded and showed him the faint marks on his neck. ‘But like I said in my email, it wasn’t enough to turn me. My mate Joel reckons she didn’t have the powers, like Gabriel Stone did.’
Knightly’s eyes were popping. ‘And this Joel fellow . . . he’s . . .’
‘The one who destroyed her.’
‘With . . .’
‘With this weird-looking cross.’
‘I see.’ Knightly paused. ‘Er, weird how, exactly?’
Dec pointed at the shiny crucifix Knightly was wearing around his neck. ‘It wasn’t like that. Or this one.’ He pulled out his own to show him. ‘It had a ring around the top bit.’
‘You mean a Celtic cross?’ Knightly said, fingering his crucifix.
‘That’s right. And it was made of stone. About this size.’ Dec held his hands eighteen inches apart.
‘So they
do
work,’ Knightly sighed in immense relief.
‘What?’
‘I meant Celtic crosses,’ Knightly said, collecting himself. ‘Why wouldn’t they? Are they not as holy as other crosses, or something?’
‘Well, you see, Declan, some scholars have maintained—’
‘It’s Dec,’ Dec said. ‘Anyway, it worked pretty frigging well as far as I could see.’
‘Tell me about Joel. Where is he now?’
‘He went after them. To Romania, like. I haven’t seen him since.’
Knightly drained the last of his sherry and looked wistfully at the bottle. ‘And what about this Gabriel Stone?’
‘He’s the leader. Of the vampires, I mean.’
‘And you’ve actually
seen
him? I mean,’ he added carefully, ‘seen him in a way that would make it clear that he really was a vampire?’
Dec nodded without hesitation. ‘I saw his fangs and everything. I told you. He was there in the crypt. Then after that, he was the one who turned Kate.’ He clenched his fists. ‘I hope Joel’s destroyed the bastard. If he hasn’t, I will. And that’s why I’m here, Mr Knightly.’
Knightly looked at his feet and said nothing.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Dec pleaded. ‘You’re the big leagues. The real deal. I’m nothing compared to you. But I can’t do this by myself. I’m just a kid, really. I’m all alone. I can’t talk to me ma and da about this. Me brother thinks I’m a nutcase. The police . . . forget it. For all I know, Joel’s not coming back. You’re all I’ve got. The only person who understands. You’ve really
done
these things. Mr Knightly, you’ve got to help me.’
Knightly sat quietly for a long time, deep in thought. ‘Normally, of course, I would have to charge for my services.’
‘I don’t have much money,’ Dec blurted out. ‘But I’ve thought about that. I’m a mechanic, so I am. Well, trainee, like, but I could fix that Bentley of yours. That’s a nasty oil leak. I’ll valet the Porsche, too. I’ll clean your windows. Skim the moat. I’ll do anyth—’
Knightly raised his hand, cutting him off. ‘None of that will be necessary. In fact, under the circumstances, I would be willing to pay
you
, if you’d agree to let me include this incredible material in my next book. I’m already working on it. But I don’t have
anything
like the kind of stuff—’ Knightly broke off suddenly. He was sweating. ‘How does a hundred pounds sound?’
Dec frowned. ‘You don’t understand, Mr Knightly. I want you to help me catch them. Like you said, they dwell amongst us.’
‘It’s “lurk”. They
lurk
amongst us.’
‘Dwell, lurk, whatever. I want to rid the world of them. All of them. I want you to learn me everything you know. I want to become a vampire hunter just like you. I want—’
Knightly’s face flushed. He stood up and walked to one of the library’s tall windows, gazing out to sea and thinking hard.
‘If you aren’t going to help me,’ Dec said in a pained voice, ‘I’ll have to find someone else.’ He thought for a moment, then added more brightly, ‘Maybe I could join up with that Federation. You know, the one you talked about on TV. Maybe they’d take me on?’
‘Fact is, Dec, I don’t know any more about them than you do. I’ve no idea how you could contact them, or who they are. That video clip isn’t much to go on.’
Dec’s shoulders drooped. He slumped deep in his chair with a look of defeated resignation. ‘Then it looks like I came all this way for nothing, so it does.’
Knightly sighed heavily, and turned away from the window to face him. ‘Where are your family? Who else knows you’re here?’
‘Me ma and da and brother Cormac are home in Wallingford. I didn’t tell them where I was going.’
‘What about work? College? Is anyone expecting you back tomorrow?’
Dec shook his head. ‘I work for me da. I can call him and make an excuse. I do it all the time. He’s used to it.’
Knightly let out another big sigh. ‘Very well. I’ll help you.
You can stay here for a while. I’ll teach you everything I know. I’ll train you in the use of anti-vampire weaponry. I’ll even give you one of my advanced vampire detection kits – worth £49.99. You can be my apprentice.’
Suddenly glowing with joy, Dec jumped out of his armchair. ‘Cool!’
‘On the strict understanding that every evening, after your training’s over, you’ll sit with me and help me get every detail of this down on paper. I mean everything. The house. The vampires themselves, what they looked like, how they talked, how they dressed, exactly what they did.’
‘No problem. I remember it all.’
‘And all about this cross. This library has books centuries old, filled with illustrations of ancient crosses. We’ll go through them systematically, until we find one that’s similar to yours. We’ll make drawings of it. You’ll tell me precisely what happened when your friend pointed it at Kate. Every last shred of detail.’
Dec’s face fell. ‘I can remember that too. I could never forget it.’
‘It’s a deal, then?’
‘Deal,’ Dec agreed.
Knightly grabbed his wallet and peeled off two fifty-pound notes. ‘Here’s the money.’
Dec hesitated, embarrassed, then thought of the credit card payments for the new laptop and took the cash.
‘Good. Now, I need to make a phone call,’ Knightly said, looking at his watch. ‘Griffin will show you to the guest quarters.’ He walked over to the sash and gave it a yank to summon his manservant.
As the bent old man led Dec away from the library, Knightly waited until they were gone, then ripped a mobile phone from his waistcoat pocket and feverishly dialled his agent’s number in London.
‘Harley, it’s me,’ he said breathlessly. ‘Listen, you won’t believe what’s just happened. You know the
thing
I told you about . . .?’
‘Your little, ah, problem?’ the agent’s voice said dryly.
‘My writer’s block.’
‘Or basic lack of material,’ Harley said. ‘Other than that phoney video footage some nutter sent you from Romania. Maybe if you’d ever
done
any of the things you’ve written about, instead of just putting on this dismal Van Helsing act for your readers. It would help even more if you actually believed in vampires.’
‘I
do
believe in them,’ Knightly exploded, deeply hurt. ‘Just because I’ve never had actual, you know, first-hand experience of them . . .’ He flapped his arm impatiently, as if the inconvenient truth was an irritating mosquito he could swat away. ‘Anyway, never mind all that. I’ve just come across enough material for three more bloody books. Five more, if we pad it out a bit.’
‘So you won’t have to refund that hundred grand advance-on-signature payment,’ Harley said. ‘That’s welcome news.’
‘And you’ll get to keep your commission.’
‘Even better. What is this new material?’
‘Pure gold. I’ll tell you all about it over a champagne lunch next week,’ Knightly said. ‘You’re going to love it. The publishers are going to love it even more.’