Authors: Scott G. Mariani
Through his pain he’d heard the sounds of the street outside, cars coming and going, voices. The familiar engine note of his ma’s Renault Clio pulling up on the driveway after five o’clock when she got back from work. Mrs Jackson from number twenty calling across to her, ‘Have you heard?’ His ma’s cry of horror as she was told the news, and then a lot of talking in low voices that he hadn’t been able to make out. He’d sunk back into his torpor, not responding when his mum had come to his room five minutes later to see how he was.
For once she didn’t scream at him for lying in bed with his shoes on. He heard the door shut and her soft steps walk away. Some time later the diesel clatter of the Transit told him his da and brother Cormac were home. More raised voices downstairs, followed by an unnatural hush all through the house.
Now it was dark in the room. A lot of time had passed and with its passage Dec’s emotions were changing. Instead of a crippling, paralysing depression, he could feel a white hot tide of rage building up inside. Instead of losing the will to live, now he was suddenly tingling with energy, his mind tightening into focus until he could think of only one thing.
He leapt out of bed and burst out of his room. Raced past Cormac’s door and up to the end of the hall, where the door to his parents’ room was open. He stepped in, already feeling bad about what he was going to do. Hanging over the head of his folks’ bed was a heavy brass crucifix. He strode up to it, reached up his hand to it, then drew back with a pang of guilt.
I’m just borrowing it,
he thought.
And they’re not even that religious anyway.
He grabbed it off the wall and weighed it in his hand. It felt good. Like a weapon. His mind filled with visions of himself confronting those monsters. Grabbing one and plunging the blunt end of the metal into its heart. He imagined how it would scream and shrivel up and fall around his feet like crisps of burnt paper. Then he’d kick it into a cloud of ash and move on to the next bastard vampire in the line. Send them all to hell, where they belonged.
He thrust the crucifix like a dagger into his belt, feeling suddenly invulnerable. Gripped with wild fury, he charged down the stairs three at a time and almost crashed into his ma, who was coming up with a mug of tea and a plate of biscuits.
‘Thought you might be wanting—’ she began.
‘I’m going out. Need to borrow the Clio. Okay?’
Her startled gaze landed on the crucifix in his belt. ‘What are you doing with that thing?’
‘Off to kill some vampires.’
‘What?’
‘See you, Ma.’ He bounded down the rest of the stairs. Through the living room doorway he could see his da and Cormac slumped in front of the TV. Their long faces told him right away that they knew about Kate. Cormac was muttering something and shaking his head as he cracked open a can of lager and foam spat over his jeans. They both looked up as Dec went dashing past, making for the front door.
‘You all right, son?’ his da called out, voice full of worry. Dec barely heard him as he snatched his mother’s car keys off the hook by the door.
Mrs Maddon came thudding down the stairs after her son. ‘You listen to me, now…’
‘Bye, Ma.’
‘Liam, talk to him!’ she yelled at her husband. ‘Cormac!’
But Dec was already out the door. He leapt in the Clio, reversed down the drive with a squeal of tyres and sped away down Lavender Close.
He knew exactly where he was going.
Alex could almost smell Cheap Eddie’s cigar from the other end of the line when he called her back.
‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting hours.’ She checked her watch as she spoke. 9.42 p.m.
‘Yeah, well, I had to ask around, didn’t I?’
He gave her the address. Before he’d even finished saying it, she had turned the car around, pointing north towards Harlesden. The sat-nav gave her a thirty-five-minute ETA – but it didn’t know who was driving. She got to Harlesden a shade before ten, and five minutes after that she was parking the Jag in the dingy road where Paulie Lomax lived. Some street kids were loitering nearby and eyeing up the car, but shrank away disconcerted when she caught their eye and smiled sweetly at them.
The concrete stairway leading up to Paulie’s flat reeked of piss and lager vomit, and the graffiti that covered the block walls was an exercise in nihilism.
Fuck you. Fuck this. Fuck everything.
Someone had fucked with the lock on Paulie’s door, too. The whole cylinder had been punched through the wood from the outside and was lying among the splinters on the peeled linoleum of the entrance hall.
‘Surprise, surprise,’ Alex muttered to herself as the stink reached her nostrils over the smell of stale sweat and booze. To a vampire, the scent of live human blood was the most enticing thing in the universe but the stench of dead blood was the most repellent, and they could smell it a long way off. It was coming from behind a door, and she knew what she was going to find even before she kicked it open.
All that remained remotely recognisable of Paulie Lomax’s human form was the four-fingered right hand that lay curled on the floor. It had been roughly severed at the wrist. It looked like a maimed spider that had died trying to drag itself away to safety.
The rest of him was smeared up the wall, across the bed, over the threadbare carpet. Some unidentifiable chunk had found its way up to the ceiling and snagged on the light-shade. Other than the muted thump of rap music coming from an adjoining flat, the only sound in the place was the soft
plop…plop…plop
as congealing blood dripped down onto the floor.
‘Keeping busy, Stone,’ Alex said out loud as she walked back out to the street.
Crowmoor Hall
9.56 p.m.
The clouds had parted and the full moon was sparkling on the early autumnal frost that covered the lawns of the stately home. Dec tiptoed through the grounds, glancing furtively around him as he went. The brass crucifix from his parents’ bedroom, thrust through his belt like a short sword on his left hip, was all that held back the rising tide of panic as the adrenalin-fuelled lust for revenge that had sustained him on the drive from Wallingford to Henley quickly ebbed away. The tremble in his hands was getting worse. He was beginning to think he’d been too hasty. He was a fool – should have called Joel Solomon before venturing out here alone like this.
The bare, crooked fingers of the trees seemed to claw at him as he made his way through the grounds. Things that had no place in this world would be awake now. Perhaps watching him at this very moment from the shadows of the trees and the dark windows of the old house.
Too late. You’re here now.
Shivers seized him from head to toe as he heard the rustle of something moving towards him through the foliage. Unable to help himself, he broke into a run through the fallen leaves and crackling twigs. Something snagged his foot and he fell with a grunt and twisted in terror to look back – and saw the badger ambling away through the bushes.
Dec picked himself up, feeling stupid and shaken, and resumed his creeping progress towards the manor house. A breathless dash across the open stretch of lawn and he’d made it to the wall. With his back pressed tight against the pitted stonework and his heart in his mouth, he edged down its length, keeping his mind resolutely closed to the horrors inside.
Then, without warning, a side door burst open just a few yards ahead, and Dec almost collapsed in terror as a gaunt, bald-headed figure stepped out. This was it. He was caught. Out in the open, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. They must have been watching his approach from behind the darkened windows. His heart began to race out of control, his chest so tight it felt like his ribs would crack.
But nothing happened. Finch paused, looking out across the gardens, and Dec realised the man was quite unaware of his presence. Finch quietly shut the side door behind him and began to walk away from the house.
Dec swallowed hard, fighting to control the quaking in his knees. He peeled himself away from the wall and followed Finch across the grass, creeping stealthily from bush to bush. His hand moved to his belt and his fingers closed on the cold, reassuringly solid metal of the crucifix. As the moonlight shone off the back of Finch’s bald head, Dec imagined swinging the cross with all his might and splitting it open.
Kill the lackey first. Then move on to the rest of the bastards.
For Kate.
Finch walked on, following a winding path away from the lawns and through the trees, towards a dark, lopsided structure that looked like an old shed or gardener’s hut. Finch opened the door with a creak, and stepped inside. For a few moments, Dec lost sight of him in the darkness and squinted to see. Then a soft glow of light filled the hut as Finch reappeared in the doorway holding a paraffin lantern.
Dec crouched behind a shrub and watched through the open door as Finch placed the lantern on a table before squatting down on the floor to pick something out of a cardboard box. It was some kind of package, wrapped up in paper like a bag of fish and chips. Dec watched breathlessly as the man carefully unwrapped it, dipped a hand inside and then brought his hand up to his mouth. Sure enough, he’d gone into the hut to eat.
Perfect, Dec thought. While the fucker was distracted, he’d sneak up on him and knock his brains out.
Dec moved closer.
Finch didn’t see him.
He moved a little closer.
Finch continued to eat, making little smacking sounds.
A few more steps. Dec raised the crucifix like an axe. His heart was thumping like crazy, and he had to fight to control his breathing.
Then he stopped.
And stared at the food in Finch’s hand, realising with a shock what it was that the man was munching on.
It wasn’t a piece of fish. It was a baby’s arm. Blue, mottled, severed above its dimpled little elbow. Finch was gnawing on the bone, sucking and slurping and groaning to himself in pleasure.
Dec didn’t even feel the crucifix slip from his fingers. The next thing he knew, he was running like hell away from the hut, sprinting across the grass.
Which way was the wall? Which way?
Twigs cracked and snapped underfoot and the leafless branches whipped his face as he stumbled along.
The sound of a voice stopped him dead in his tracks.
‘Hello, Declan.’
Very slowly, he turned.
He knew that voice.
She moved sinuously towards him. She was wearing a long white dress; it looked like a shroud in the darkness.
‘I knew you’d come,’ she said softly.
‘Kate?’ he gasped in astonishment. It was her…and it wasn’t.
He’d never seen her look this way before. The thin white material clung to every curve of her body as she stepped out into the patch of moonlight between the trees. He could see she was naked underneath.
‘But you’re dead.’
‘I didn’t die,’ she whispered to him. ‘My mother made it up, to keep us apart.’
She was beautiful. He couldn’t stop staring at her.
‘Kiss me, Declan,’ she said, and her lips parted
.
Ten miles from Dornoch, the Highlands of Scotland
10.41 p.m.
The Hayabusa’s trip meter read four hundred and thirty-five miles as Joel rode up the bumpy path through the trees. A fox darted away as his headlight cut through the overgrowth of thistles and brambles. Rounding the bend in the path, the semi-derelict cottage came into view up ahead. He fought the urge to turn the bike right around and ride back down the whole length of the country.
Joel parked the bike in what had once been the front yard, turned off the engine and peeled himself painfully out of the saddle, stiff and aching and frozen to the core from the long ride. But the chills running through his body weren’t only the effects of the cold. Just being here again had filled him with dread.
He lifted off his helmet and looked around. The last time he’d seen the cottage, it had stood in its own clearing. Now, after nearly twenty years of neglect, the woods had encroached on the building. The naked branches raked the roof and scraped against the walls to the sway of the cold wind. The whitewashed walls were thick with moss, and the ivy had grown over most of the windows. He stared for a long time at the front door, still splintered in half from where the vampire had smashed his way in all those years ago.
And as he stood there, memories flooding back to him, Joel thought about the strange, wonderful man who had been his grandfather.
The mystery of why Nicholas Solomon had suddenly, sometime during the mid-1970s, abandoned his respectable middle-class existence, left his wife for no apparent reason and disappeared virtually overnight to lead a reclusive life up here in the middle of nowhere had always been a contentious issue in the Solomon family. Joel’s parents had brought him up to believe that his grandfather was selfish, obsessive, mad as a bag of snakes, someone for whom ‘eccentric’ was way too kind a word. ‘Crazy Nick’ was what they’d called him.
For years after his unexplained disappearance, the family had refused to have anything to do with him. Joel had been about five years old when his father had, for reasons that had never been discussed, decided to make contact with Crazy Nick again. One of his early memories was of his father talking on the phone to a private detective he’d hired to track the old man down. Soon after that the family had tentatively made contact with him and paid their first visit to his Highland hideaway.
It hadn’t been a welcome one. Nicholas Solomon had seemed deeply unhappy about their presence, nervous and on edge and impatient for them to leave. His father had said the old man resented them – but young Joel had never believed that. It had seemed to him that he was the only one who could see the sadness in his grandfather’s eyes as they said their goodbyes. As the years passed and the visits to the isolated cottage became more frequent, Joel had always felt that the growing bond between him and his grandfather was the only thing holding the family together. He’d loved the old man dearly. Always would.