by Adam Carter
“Damn it, old man,” she muttered, “where are you?”
“You looking for papa?” Emily asked, bouncing into the room with far too much jollity for a morning, particular for the morning after the night they had just endured.
“Different old man,” Tarne said, leaning back in her chair. “So what’s the plan for today, then?”
“Well, we open soon, so I’ll need to have everything cleaned and ready for the first people through the door.”
Tarne blinked. “Am I the insane one here or you? Don’t you remember any of last night, Emily?”
“Of course I remember it,” Emily said with a shudder. “I’m just trying to put it behind me.”
Tarne could see the girl was scared, and regretted her words. “What about the baron?” Tarne asked. “Surely he’s going to strike again tonight, and after we tried to kill him yesterday he’s going to come and kill us.”
“We have garlic buds for the windows,” Emily said, averting her gaze as she arranged some flowers upon one of the tables. “And crosses for the doors. That will stop him.”
“I don’t know much about vampires,” Tarne admitted, “and I never got past the blurb of Dracula, but even if they can be stopped by garlic and stuff, a really hacked-off vampire isn’t going to be stopped by anything; and I think you and I both know how peed off the baron’s going to be. Even now he’ll be lying in his coffin muttering to himself about how he intends to get us back for what we tried to do to him.”
Just then the door opened and Justin entered. “Hey, Justin,” Tarne said. “Fancy taking a trip up to the castle with me this morning?”
Justin shuddered involuntarily. “The castle? Heather, that would be suicide.”
“No more than waiting for the sun to drop. At least we have a chance of catching him napping.”
“It’s been tried before,” Justin said. “Thirty townsfolk went up there with rifles. None of them returned.”
“They take any silver bullets with them?”
“And crosses and garlic perfume. Their screams could be heard all through the night. Seven hours of torment for all of us. No one has dared return to the castle since.”
“No one could return to the castle, since no one came back from it,” Tarne pointed out, then rose from the table. “Well, looks like I’m going by myself, then. Let me know if an old robed man appears around here, goes by the name of Old Man Robes, curiously enough.” She took up the last piece of toast and looked around for her coat before realising she didn’t have one.
“You’re not going to the castle,” Justin told her simply.
“Sure I am. Just need a few weapons, is all. Silver, garlic and crosses, right? Anything else I should know?”
“And just what experience have you in fighting vampires?”
“Well, none.”
“So what makes you think you’ll be able to fight the baron all by yourself?”
“Because I’ve fought sand worms, gangsters and pirates; and I kicked the living tar out of a snake-man once. I don’t see a vampire’s going to be that much different.”
Justin stared at her in confusion. “You’ve what?”
“Look, just tell me where I can get some weapons and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I think that vampire did more to you than just wiped some of your memory,” Justin said, taking hold of her arm. “I think he must have messed with your ...” He said no more, for Tarne grabbed the offending arm with both hands and flipped him so that he slammed his back upon the ground. She twisted one arm behind him, flipped him over with her foot, and landed upon his back, holding his arm against him.
“Believe me now?” she whispered in his ear and then let him go. Justin rose unsteadily to his feet, nursing his bruised wrist.
He stared at her with intense eyes. “How’d you do that?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know. Say, you ever hear the name Sara Kiel?”
“No.”
“Well if she comes around asking for me, you’ve never heard of me either.”
Tarne moved towards the door, although Justin stopped her with words. He said, “There’s a crossbow behind the counter. Some silver-tipped knives, too.”
He had spoken plainly, clearly not knowing what to believe of her, although Tarne discovered he had told the truth. There were also stakes aplenty, two revolvers and two cases of silver bullets. “Tell me again why you didn’t use any of this last night?” she asked even as she loaded the crossbow.
“Tell me again how you know how to load that bow,” Justin said by way of an answer.
Tarne raised the bow quickly and loosed its bolt. The missile slammed squarely into a garlic bud hanging beside the window. Emily released a gasp of shock, and Justin only continued to narrow his eyes. Tarne began to shove the weapons into her belt. “I’d ask whether you minded me taking any of these,” she said without looking up, “but I’m not even convinced either of you is real, so I’m just gonna go with what I got.”
The door opened and Tarne looked up with no small relief to see a familiar old man standing framed in the doorway. “Old Man Robes,” she said excitedly.
“Heather Tarne,” Old Man Robes sighed. “I must apologise for being dragged away earlier. Kiel broke through the barrier just as you touched the cat’s eye, and I was forced to thrust you into another world that I might put her off your scent.”
“Is she on this world?”
“No, But she may not be far off. You have to ... what are all those weapons for?”
“There’s a vampire in the hills. I’m going to go kill him.”
“Whatever for?”
“Because these people are being plagued by it and ... and something deep within my gut’s telling me to help them.”
“Well regurgitate it and digest your moral fibre while you’re at it,” Old Man Robes snapped. “I didn’t throw you here to fight vampires. You’re supposed to be maintaining a low profile.”
“Odd Man Robes is more like it,” Justin said. “Heather, who is this guy?”
“You can see him?”
“You’re surprised by that?”
“Actually, yes,” Tarne admitted. “Uh, excuse us.” She raced to the old man’s side, taking him out into the street, where they began to walk briskly away.
“Heather,” Old Man Robes chided, “you’re carrying an awful lot of weapons and people are beginning to stare.”
“Low profile, right?”
“Right.”
“Just tell me what’s going on. Am I entering other people’s bodies? Am I taking over people’s lives? Am I screwing around with things I really shouldn’t be messing with or what?”
“You’re still assuming these worlds to be real, Heather, and therein lies your mistake.”
“Last I checked, reality was real enough.”
“Which is true, but this is not reality.”
“Then what is it?”
“Fabrication. Tell me, how many vampires do you know who lived in a castle in the nineteenth century?”
“None. Well, except for Dracula, and he wasn’t real.”
“Then why do you blindly accept there’s a vampire living here now? Because you’ve met Nagas and sand worms and flown through space? Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps none of that was real?”
“Of course I have, but without any truth by which to gauge reality, I’m sort of at a loss here, Homer. Throw me a bone, come on.”
“These worlds are a fabrication of a power greater than I, populated by imaginings. I am something of a curator, and Kiel is a disease. You are the portion of the body the disease wishes to infect, and as curator it is my job to protect you.”
“So the body can remain whole, or so the exhibit in the zoo doesn’t die?”
“One or the other, yes.”
“All right,” Tarne said slowly when she realised she was not going to get a decent enough answer, “just tell me something before you disappear again. What am I doing on these worlds i
f not to sort out people’s problems?”
“You, Heather Tarne, have been watching far too much television. You don’t need to sort out anything, don’t even need to do anything. What you should be doing is hiding. There’s a vampire here? That’s a good thing, because it means that when Kiel arrives, she’ll not have free run of the town. She’ll be restricted by this vampire, and if you’re hiding in some cellar somewhere, she’ll not be able to reach the building you’re in to search it.”
“Well that actually makes sense,” Tarne admitted.
“The vampire is a ward,” Old Man Robes explained. “His job is to make sure Kiel is delayed, distracted.”
“Then you created the vampire?”
“Unlike you, I did read Stoker’s Dracula. My advice to you would be not to kill the very thing which I have set up here in order to protect you. That would be like kicking down the door from your end when I’ve barricaded it to keep Kiel out.”
“You could’ve told me this in the pub,” Tarne said. “People are staring at me with all these weapons here.”
Old Man Robes sighed. “Eventually, Kiel shall find her way here, which means you’ll have to have located the cat’s eyes by then. You don’t have to use them to escape of course, but so long as you know their location and remain reasonably close to them, you should be able to utilise them the instant you realise she’s here.”
“Then I left the Scorpion too early?”
“The ship was sinking and you had just assaulted the pirate captain. I think you left just when you should have. The eyes here might not be found in such perilous circumstances. If possible, find them and carry them about with you, but don’t touch them until you’re surely ready to leave.”
“And what about these people here? If I remain with them, Kiel will kill them when she arrives.”
“Let her. They’re no more real than is the vampire. You need to be ruthless, Heather; you need to start taking care of yourself. These people may appear real to you, but they are as insubstantial as a thought. They are, if you will, nothing more than the characters written upon a page by the fingers of a writer, busily clacking them out upon a Silver-Reed 500 typewriter.”
“Then it doesn’t matter if they were to die?”
“To one another it shall, but once the book is closed, who really cares?”
Tarne nodded slowly. “It just seems so real, though.”
“That’s the way it’s meant to seem, Heather. Now get back to that pub and lie low for a while. The people there know you, since that’s the way they’re programmed, and they’ll protect you to the end. Just try not to show them you can fight when you shouldn’t be able to, and for heaven’s sake don’t make them believe you’re insane.”
“Little late for that, I’m afraid.”
“Just blame it on the vampire’s stare and feign a headache or something; and never mention anything foolish to them again.”
“Sure, although you’ve raised another point there. These people seem to know who I am, just as the pirates did. Just as everyone has, come to think of it, even back when I was with Jagrad and the others. You say they’re programmed? What, like robots or something’”
“More like a computer programme,” Old Man Robes said. “Let’s just say I make certain there are people friendly to you upon every world. It was more difficult before, since I didn’t know Kiel was the one who represented the evil.”
“Oh come on, her name was practically an anagram of it. What about Jagrad and Sparky?” she asked then in a more subdued tone.
“Sparky was apparently a part of the unreality,” Old Man Robes said. “When he died, I sensed nothing of his passing. He could actually be brought back, although the energy drain would be tremendous, and new characters are easier to process.”
“I’m relieved to hear that,” Tarne said and meant it. “I was always quite fond of Sparky.” She hesitated. “And Jagrad?”
“Darkthorne was real enough,” Old Man Robes sighed, “although I didn’t know it at the time. He was locked within this realm long ago and never found his way out. He slowly went insane through constant shifts in realities and lives. It is this future which faces you also if you do not leave this place soon and return to the real world.”
“And what happened to him now he’s dead?” Tarne asked. “I mean, if none of this is real, where did his body go? Surely it can’t just dissipate; it’s solid matter.”
“Worry not about such things, Heather. Leave all that to me. Deal only with what immediately affects you and leave literally everything else to me.”
“I wish I could believe that was the most viable solution, but for some reason I just can’t.”
“Then learn to,” Old Man Robes told her not unkindly, then offered a brief smile. “Well, it seems we’ve arrived back at the public house. Remember what I said about feigning a lingering lapse of senses.”
“I will.” She paused at the door. “Thanks, Robi-Wan.”
“You’re welcome, Heather. But for now I really have to slow Kiel up some more.”
“Slow her up?”
“Optimistic at every turn, Heather. Until we meet again, farewell.”
Tarne re-entered the pub, knowing she would have to explain things just as Old Man Robes had suggested, and only wishing the whole mess could be over with soon. Before she went the way of the poor departed Jagrad Darkthorne.
*
“Well I’m glad all that nonsense is over with,” Justin said some time later, once Tarne had slept a while longer, then fumbled with the crossbow to show she could not actually operate one. Emily had suggested that the vampire had instilled the knowledge of its usage into Tarne’s mind in an attempt to get her to charge off after him, and since the explanation seemed reasonable, it was accepted. Tarne followed the advice of Old Man Robes and did not leave the public house. Nor, however, did she think it a very good idea for her to be dealing with townsfolk, so she feigned fear long enough for Mr Walters to suggest she remain out the back for the foreseeable future. No further questions were asked about Old Man Robes, and Tarne assumed the old man had altered their minds so they could not remember him.
That was a concept with which she was forcing herself to come to grips. That everyone she had ever known was not real was a strange notion, but that they were all programmed by some higher being was something far too bizarre for her mind to get around. Tarne reasoned her home time was somewhere in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century; it was the most popular ‘present’ time she had been visiting. If her present was the twenty-first century, however, she wondered how Old Man Robes could formulate scenarios based upon the future. Perhaps he had been to them, perhaps time was indeed a loop and the future was just another portion of the past which had yet to actually happen; and perhaps he had just made them all up. All of them: past, present and future.
Heather Tarne had no answers, just a lot of questions, and she knew she would have none of them answered until she spoke again with Old Man Robes. In the meantime, she knew she would have to locate the cat’s eyes in case she needed to make a speedy exit into the next world.
Tarne peered through the crack in the door leading to the common room. She could see the room was hardly busy, although evening had yet to set in. She doubted it would grow any busier now, however, for anyone with any sense would be heading for home very soon. She could see no sign of Sara Kiel, and she stepped into the room, approaching Emily where she was cleaning one of the tables. “There’s something I need,” Tarne said.
“You took enough garlic buds?” Emily asked.
“It’s not more wards I need, Emily. I’m after a symbol and was wondering whether you’d ever seen it before.”
“What sort of symbol, Heather?”
“The eyes of a cat, possibly two cats.” There was no reason why cats could not be in the plural. She pushed aside memories of Darkthorne’s opinion regarding plurals, for she could not focus on him if she wanted to survive.
Emily looked at her st
rangely. “The cat’s eyes?” she asked.
“Don’t tell me it’s the symbol of old Vlad?” Tarne groaned.
“Not the vampire, no. But there’s a hermit out past the edge of town who fought the baron one time. He has a cat’s face painted on his door.”
“He fought the baron and survived?” Tarne asked, surprised.
“He was some form of great vampire hunter who came here to rid us of our problem. He confronted the baron and the two fought for a couple of minutes; it really was over in no time at all. The baron won and the poor guy was humiliated. They say the vampire messed with his mind, made him depressed and whatever. Anyway, von Tier doesn’t care about him any more, suffers him to live as an example to all those who dare oppose his reign, or something.”
“What’s the name of this hermit?”
“Salamander. Why? You’re not thinking of going out there, are you?”
“I think I might have to,” Tarne admitted. “Don’t worry, I have no interest in taking on that vampire any more, and so long as I can avoid him I should remain a happy woman. I just need to find this shack. I don’t even need to talk to the man himself.”
“I’ll have Justin take you down there tomorrow.”
“I’m thinking of heading out there tonight,” Tarne said. She did not have to do anything but see the eyes for herself to know whether they would lead her away. Once she had her route planned out, she would be able to run there if need be, but she didn’t want to have Kiel walk into the pub sometime that night and not have her escape route plotted.
“There’s only an hour before dark,” Emily warned. “You could make it there and back in that time, but you’d sure be cutting it fine.”
“I’ll be OK, just give me directions and I’ll head out there now.”
“Look, I’m not so sure that it’s such a good idea to ...”
“I’ll be fine, Emily, I promise.” She offered a small smile of supposed reassurance to reinforce her pledge. “And I’ll be back before ya know it.”
Emily sighed heavily. “All right. Head north and keep going past the entry sign to the town. It’s about a ten-minute walk from there, straight on.”