Clan Novel Nosferatu: Book 13 of the Clan Novel Saga

by Gherbod Fleming

  Jeremiah’s first impulse was to cower from the flames as well, but he forced himself to take advantage of the few seconds he had. With all the strength and speed he could summon, he leapt directly over the sputtering flare and the burgeoning wildfire of rats.

  He didn’t turn back to see how long the fire burned or how many of the malevolent creatures pursued him. He ran for all he was worth, canvas sack flapping at his side and pounding against his thigh with each frantic stride. The screeching of burning rats filled the tunnel. He could not escape the sound, no matter how much distance he put between himself and the horde. Their screams lingered in his ears—their screams, and the single, drawn-out, eerily lustful word: Flesshhh…

  part two:

  beginning to unravel

  Friday, 12 November 1999, 3:45 AM

  West 132th Street, Harlem

  New York City, New York

  Pug scaled the ladder and slammed into the underside of the manhole cover so hard that it popped out onto the street. He clambered out in the cold night. The street was deserted. The area might be bustling with activity during the day, but people knew enough to stay away at night. Many parts of the city were considerably less hospitable after dark—especially these nights, with the Camarilla and the Sabbat taking their fight to the streets. Kine weren’t stupid, just dense. They sensed that kind of thing even if they didn’t realize it. All the violence and fires and accidents—the kine were staying home in droves. And that’s where Pug wanted to be. Actually, anywhere but where he was would do. He was on his feet without hesitation and ready to resume his headlong flight when a deep, threatening voice checked him.

  “Hold it right there, motherfucker.”

  Pug instinctively froze, but after the first instant realized that, no matter who this person was, he couldn’t be worse than what Pug was already fleeing. He lifted a foot to run—

  —And everything went black. His vision was swimming when he came to some time later, how long he wasn’t sure. The sky was clear and starry. He was looking up at it. From his back. On the street. The pieces came together slowly. A shape was blocking part of the sky, and a face behind the shape. The shape was a gun, a big gun, pointed at his head. The face belonged to an angry-looking young woman. Her anger, and the fact that she was holding the gun, did not comfort Pug.

  Then he remembered the Eye, and his vague discomfort spiked to sheer terror. He started to get up, to flee, but the woman jammed the barrel of the gun against his wide, flat nose. “Nuh-uh!” she grunted.

  From somewhere behind her, came another sound—someone cocking a pump-action shotgun. Then another face was looking down at Pug, a man, a big man, a very big and very black man. Pug didn’t get a good look; he was having trouble concentrating on anything except the gun pressed to his nose, and he kept going cross-eyed. He tried to look back in the direction of the manhole without moving his head.

  “Gotta go,” he managed to force out. “Gotta go. Now.”

  “You’ll be going,” said the man, with a deep rumbling voice, “but it might not be how you wanna go, motherfucker.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s—”

  “Shut the fuck up, asshole!” the woman yelled at him. She pushed him with the gun until his head was back down against the pavement. This woman seemed a bit too willing to splatter his brain all over the street. And she was strong. Kindred strong.

  Fear and a fierce throbbing from the back of his head where he’d just been hit were mingling to make Pug feel sick. Beneath the veneer of terror that these people wouldn’t give him a chance to explain, he was trying to guess whether they were Camarilla or Sabbat. At the same time, he kept trying to glance back at the manhole, but in a way that didn’t induce anyone to blow his head off. He had to take a chance—it would mean his destruction if these two were Sabbat, but there was no time—

  “I’m from Calebros’s warren!” he stammered.

  The woman pressed the gun harder against his nose. “I’m from Philly. Big fuckin’ deal.”

  But the big man wasn’t so hungry for blood. “Lydia, let him up.”

  “Huh?”

  The man gently eased her gun aside. It was a pistol, a Desert Eagle, Pug could see now. It wasn’t quite as big when it wasn’t perched between his eyes, but it was still a handful for the small angry woman. She wasn’t that much taller than Pug, and at least seventy-five pounds lighter.

  “He’s one of us,” said the man, “if he’s tellin’ the truth.” He extended a hand and pulled Pug roughly to his feet.

  “I am!” Pug blurted. “One of you… I mean, telling the truth…both, both.”

  “Theo Bell,” said the big man.

  Pug was trying to shake his hand and leave all at the same time. “No time. It’s after me…the Eye. Got the others already. Gotta go. We’ve gotta go….” He paused, cocked his head, and looked up at the man again. “Did you say Theo Bell?”

  “Right as rain,” said Lydia. “We’re the fuckin’ cavalry. Who is it that’s after you?” she asked, more suspicious than helpful.

  Two more shapes were materializing from the shadows. One held his head at a strange angle; the other had a long mane of red hair and was doing a poor job of hiding what appeared to be a broadsword beneath his long coat. Pug was still trying to pull away, to get away, but Theo Bell wasn’t letting go of his hand, and Pug’s considerable strength couldn’t seem to break the grip.

  “Did you say something about an eye?” Theo asked.

  They were interrupted by a hollow voice, all too familiar to Pug, which emanated from the open manhole. “Yes,” it said, “the Eye, it sees…. Mustn’t find…mustn’t harm her.” The spiky hairs on the back of Pug’s neck stood on end.

  “Frankie, Christoph, spread out,” Theo said, watching the hole warily. He let go of Pug’s hand, and the Nosferatu, still pulling, stumbled to the pavement. He caught himself panting again, and wheezing, but he couldn’t stop. And then the creature was pulling itself from the sewer. The Eye took them all in, and Pug felt himself rooted to the spot; he wanted more desperately than anything in the world to flee, but he could not find the strength to do so. The man who bore the Eye didn’t seem so overwhelming out of the enclosed space of the tunnels; he seemed rigid and frail beneath the pulsating vibrancy of the orb.

  Lydia turned to Theo. “You’re not going to tell me that’s one of us, are you?” Theo shook his head. “Good,” she said, and turned and fired. She squeezed off seven quick shots.

  Pug meekly raised a finger behind them. “That’s not going to—” but the bullets were already slamming into the Eye. It sucked the slugs in like a putrid swamp embracing welcome raindrops. Lydia stared at the thing in disbelief. Theo leveled his shotgun at it—

  The creature whipped its head to the side and spewed a spray of ichor over its assailants. The stink of burning flesh and the sound of screams filled the night. Lydia dropped to the ground, hands over her face, still screaming, and rolled. She clawed at her own face and chest, trying to rake away the burning, but the acidic ichor spread to her hands. Her fingertips instantly seared to bone. Theo also whipped around with a yell of pain. His face was steaming. The shotgun clattered to the street as he struggled to rip off his smoldering leather jacket.

  From the other side of the Eye, Frankie was firing a pistol, and Christoph was charging from a different angle with his sword. Suddenly the pavement around the open manhole rippled—then stretched and rose, towering like a giant serpent. It snapped to the side and struck Christoph a bone-crushing blow, knocking him across the street, where he smashed into a parked car.

  The huge black snake twisted and shot toward Frankie. The gaping maw—that seconds before had been the manhole—snapped closed on him. Frankie’s head and right shoulder fell to one side, his legs to the other, but that was all. And just as quickly as it had struck, the black snake was gone, and only crumbled pavement remained.

  Pug lay sprawled on the pavement. Mere seconds had passed since he’d fallen—seconds tha
t seemed to drag on for years, for it seemed they would be his last. He tried to crawl, but all he could do was stare at the pulsating bloodshot Eye.

  Theo, flesh dripping down his face like melted wax and his smoldering jacket at his feet, was all that stood against the creature. The Brujah archon reached down to retrieve his shotgun.

  Pug saw the streetlight bend and swing at Theo. The Nosferatu managed to call out a warning, but the metal post was lightning quick. It flailed Theo from behind with a spray of glass and the sickening crunch of steel and bone. It knocked him to the ground, and then pounded him again and again. Finally Pug forced himself to his feet. He charged toward Theo, hoping at least to pull the archon beyond the reach of the metal post. But it abandoned Theo and struck at Pug. He saw it coming straight for his face, and then the impact, then…nothing.

  He didn’t think he’d lost consciousness, because the Eye was still there, the creature stalking toward Theo’s prone body. But this blow to the head left Pug’s vision blurry and clouded by…blood? He wiped a hand across his face, sniffed and licked at his own blood. He thought he saw the streetlight lying, broken, to his side.

  Theo moaned. The Eye creature was on him now. Pug tried to get up again, but the world was spinning, the street shifting beneath him. He saw Theo roll over and weakly raise his shotgun. The creature reached out a hand. A flash and an explosion, a spray of white phosphorus and blood.

  The creature stood above Theo, staring at its own stump of a hand. All the fingers and most of the palm were gone altogether. It rotated its wrist and stared curiously at the bloody mess. Theo and Pug and the others were completely forgotten as the thing turned and wandered away down the street, all the while staring at what had been its hand.

  Thursday, 22 July 1999, 1:03 AM

  A subterranean grotto

  New York City, New York

  The light flickered incessantly. Finally, like a cobra striking, Calebros’s gnarled hand shot out and cuffed the lamp. The illumination shone bright and steady. For several minutes, the tarnished bead chain became a pendulum, swaying back and forth, tapping softly against the curved metal shade of the banker’s lamp. All the while, Calebros unceasingly studied his reports. The latest word from Las Vegas, from Atlanta, from Boston, from London and Lisbon, from Calcutta…

  Occasionally, he reached for his red pen and added a note to one of the typed reports. He tirelessly examined and re-examined the countless details, the logic behind the details. Endlessly questioning. Dissecting the analyses, his own as well as that of others. Distinguishing fact from assumption. The discrete bits of information often fit together in unexpected ways but, as with a jigsaw puzzle, forcing the pieces together, though temporarily satisfying an impatient yearning for order, served only to distort the overall picture in the long run. But that was obviously what had happened.

  Scrap paper. Calebros began sifting through the piles of folders and loose papers piled and spread across his desk, their placement seemingly the result of some great explosion or catastrophic natural disaster. They were stacked tall enough to give the impression that his trusty Smith Corona was actually resting in a hole instead of on the desktop. Eventually, he found what he was looking for: a report that had outlived its usefulness. It was on the bottom of a stack, of course, but Calebros skillfully extricated it without compromising the structural integrity of his filing system.

  He turned the piece of paper to its relatively unmarked side, then paused and flipped it back over. This particular report was a list, circa 1950, of suspected Communist sympathizers in the New York metropolitan area. Page one of seven. He scanned the names, crossed off several, and circled several others, individuals it might be beneficial to check up on. Most if not all of them were certainly dead by now—such an unrewarding proposition, tracking a kine population over the long haul—but there was bound to be dirt on some. And a descendent or an estate executor was often willing, more willing than the potentially embarrassed individual would have been in life, to negotiate in order to keep damaging secrets just that—secret. Favors, knowledge, these were more useful to Calebros than, say, money, but one took what one could get. Cash had its uses as well; a good old-fashioned bribe was sometimes the very grease a wheel needed.

  Not distracted overly long from his original task, Calebros turned the list back over and began jotting down assumptions to which Rolph, in the matter of the Sabbat ‘raid’ in Atlanta, had obviously jumped. Several of those assumptions were, just as obviously, flawed. Calebros didn’t spare himself in the critique. He should have recognized Rolph’s less than rigorously analyzed conclusions for what they were at the outset. Calebros was just as guilty in the matter: By taking Rolph’s word, by not demanding at least an accounting of more of the raw data, Calebros himself had fallen victim to slothful, undisciplined thought. He pressed down on the red pen, item after item, as his new list grew.

  And then the light failed. His grotto office fell into total darkness.

  Calebros sighed. A lamp, a lightbulb. Details. Mere details. But all the details were connected—in one way or another. One ignored even the slightest detail only at his own peril. Each puzzle piece was part of the larger picture. Still, Calebros was little more than irritated by this particular detail of existence. He preferred to concentrate on other, more relevant facts. But reading in the dark was tiresome, so he climbed painfully to his feet, tried to stretch out his back a bit, and then shuffled over to a free-standing rusted, metal cabinet. He slid aside three bulging boxes filled with newspaper clippings so he could open the cabinet, and took a package of small lightbulbs from the second shelf from the bottom. Calebros took one of the last two bulbs, twisting it slowly in his talons, as if he were trying to screw it into thin air. For an instant, he was overcome by a sense of regret.

  He felt for some reason that his time, like his supply of lightbulbs, was running out. He wondered which of his charges would some night take his place. Who would inherit the dilemmas that he left unsolved? Surely Emmett lacked the patience. Perhaps Umberto, with his interest in things electronic and modern, would be the torch-bearer. But Calebros had his doubts. He should put his mind to the matter, he decided. Soon. He should begin grooming a successor, just as Augustin had groomed him.

  Then the feeling passed. Calebros continued twirling the bulb. He could just make out the edges as it turned in his grasp. “Hmph,” he snorted. “Getting all philosophical about a damned lightbulb…and with so much else to do.”

  He changed the bulb. A piece of junk, Umberto had called the lamp. He’d been trying to get Calebros to replace both it and the Smith Corona, but Calebros scoffed at the suggestion. He was not of this new, disposable age. One did not simply cast away a useful tool.

  With the new bulb in, the lamp again cast semi-adequate reading light over the mammoth desk. And almost instantly, the light started to blink and flicker.

  “Damn you.” Calebros smacked the lamp; the flickering stopped. Good as new. His own sire, were Augustin still around, would have disassembled the lamp years ago, rewired it, checked the switch, basically spared no trouble to make sure the device worked as it should have. Then again, Augustin had always been more the hands-on type—which was why he wasn’t around any longer.

  Before he sat back down, a distant sound caught Calebros’s attention. Howling. Not wolves or lupines, but not wholly human either. The kennels. Emmett must be back. Good.

  Calebros shuffled away from his desk, past bookcases and makeshift shelves in various states of disrepair, each crammed full of boxes and bundles of reports, newspaper clippings, letters, photographs secured with strings grown black and brittle with age. No crevice was wasted. Information of one sort or another was crammed into every available space. Calebros took hold of one metal shelf unit and wrenched it away from the wall. He hunched down and climbed head-first into the knee-high tunnel that had been hidden by the shelf and boxes.

  His movements were a syncopation of popping joints and crackling vertebrae as he endeavore
d to force his corkscrew spine through the narrow passage. Not needing to look behind himself after years of practice—and unable to do so in the tight space, at any rate—he expertly hooked a foot through a metal bracket on the wall side of the shelves and pulled the weighty unit back to. He pulled himself along the tunnel by hooking his talons in ridges worn in the stone floor over many years of use. The orthopedic symphony lessened after his initial movements, but, of course, the discomfort remained just as acute. Jolts of pain shot periodically through his wrists and shoulders, neck, back, hips, knees, ankles. Despite the nagging physical pain, however, Calebros retained a fondness for the tunnel. Amidst the constantly changing world of his reports and messages from the outside world, this cramped stone crawlspace was a constant, a familiar place, a connection between present and past.

  The tunnel sloped downward with mostly gentle curves. There was one sharp turn, precisely three fifths of the way down—Calebros had counted the talon indentations in the stone, estimated the distance, then checked his calculations with a series of tied-together tape measures. Minor curiosities sometimes took on seemingly obsessive interest among the monotony of the endless nights.

  The chamber beyond the tunnel was dark, but Calebros felt the room open around him as he climbed free of the passage. The air against his face was cooler and distinctly sticky, salty. He could feel, too, his pupils stretched wide, as wide as a kine’s entire eye. Before him lay water, his lake, the surface calm except for the few lazy ripples marking the air currents. It was, of course, more pond than lake, a glorified mudhole, some—notably Emmett—would say. Calebros realized this full well, but to Augustin it had been a lake, and Calebros had inherited that exaggerated fondness, along with much else.

  Slowly, almost ritualistically, he removed his long jacket and laid it over a stone outcropping. He took off his shirt and trousers, laid them aside as well, and then waded naked into the pool. The water, never warmed by the sun, was cool against his ankles, shins, thighs. He came to the drop-off quickly. He paused, but there was no need. His hesitation was perhaps the last remnant of species consciousness, an evolutionary oversight. There was no great shock as he plunged into the icy water and pushed away from the shelf of stone that ringed the shoreline; there was no scrotum-tightening exhilaration from the blast of cold water. The water was not so much colder than his own body, than the tainted blood within it. He allowed his initial push to carry him out into the lake; he lay motionless below the surface. Gradually, he achieved equilibrium—of temperature, his body’s dropping to match that of the surrounding water; of mass, his inert form maintaining a constant position a few feet beneath the surface of the water.