Habeas Corpses

by Wm. Mark Simmons

  "You think our demesne is impregnable," Polidori continued, "but it is not. Our security protocols are designed to warn us of even our own comings and goings—they are not foolproof. Your Doman has returned to New York and has walked among you this evening. He walks about even now."

  Again the room erupted and Polidori had to sit down this time. It took several minutes of shouted exhortations for everyone else to shut up to accomplish just that.

  "Where is he?" Valentine growled as the room fell silent.

  "I cannot say it aloud but, if you will come over here," Polidori said, "I will whisper the answer in your ear."

  Scowling to show his disdain, nevertheless, Valentine got up and strode impatiently to the head of the Polidori family. Friederich stood and leaned toward Carmella's brother who turned and cocked his head to receive the information. He opened his mouth as if to whisper, then dropped his jaw and struck like a viper, burying his fangs in Valentine's neck.

  There was no real struggle. One moment a Polidori was clamped to a Le Fanu neck, the next the former was on the floor while the latter staggered toward his sister.

  Carmella was unprepared for the assault on her brother. She was even less prepared for her brother's assault on herself. His teeth were in her throat before she could even cry out. The two nearest clan leaders stepped in to separate them. One ended up with an unconscious Valentine, the other with a bloody-minded Carmella. The attacks unfolded like a chain reaction of fang-to-throat quickies diagrammed by Rube Goldberg and choreographed by Busby Berkeley. Each attack lasted mere seconds and then turned upon another victim as soon as the victim in question was unfanged. In short order nearly sixteen family, gang, and tribe representatives were left bloody and gasping in various states of disarray across aisles, chairs and floor.

  Silvanio Malatesta got up, brushed himself off, and walked up to the front of the room. "Go sit with the others," he told Kurt.

  The seneschal, as yet untouched and unbloodied, looked up at the undead gangster as if to measure his chances for one-on-one combat. Malatesta shook his head and said, "Please. Your Doman commands it." Kurt got up slowly and moved to the nearest seat in the front row.

  Suki stood as Malatesta turned to her. "Go," he said, "it is time." He leaned in and whispered: "Fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops."

  As Suki left the room he turned and sat down in the Doman's chair of judgment.

  "As most of you now know, I am your Doman. At least the mind of Chris Cséjthe, anyway. For the moment I speak to you from Silvanio Malatesta's body. I entered the room a short while ago in Friederich Polidori's flesh. During our little exercise a few moments ago, I passed though the minds and bodies of most of the full-blooded vampires in this room. While I was visiting, I was in full control of your flesh just as I'm playing puppet master for Malatesta now. Any questions so far?"

  Well, of course there were questions but those would be asked later. For now everyone was too stunned to do anything but try to absorb this sudden turn of events.

  "I'm not the man I was four days ago. Not just in what I can now do but in how I now feel. The first thing you need to fully understand is what I am capable of. I can, if I wish, take your body when I please and you cannot stop me. While I am wearing it, I can use it to torch your nests, drain your children, and then take a little stroll outside on a bright, sunny day. Right after I pop out of your dissolving, carbonized remains I can go and pop inside of the next vampire I take a shine to.

  "Are we clear so far?"

  There were a few stunned nods.

  "Perhaps you did not understand my question. Do you understand that I can show up inside your heads unannounced, wreak bloody havoc, and disappear again without effort or cost to myself?"

  Heads were nodding all around now. It looked like a bobble-head convention.

  "Good. Because the other change is just as important. As I said, I'm not the same guy I was four days ago. Back then I was essentially the Rodney King of fangdom, just wishing we could all get along. Guess what? You have a new Doman now and the survivors will all get along."

  I let that word "survivors" hang out there for a moment for them all to contemplate.

  "Rule number one," I continued, "anyone who doesn't follow the rules is gone. No 'ifs,' 'ands' or 'buts.'"

  "Gone . . ." someone murmured.

  I nodded Malatesta's head. "Gone. Not 'banished.' Not 'kicked out.' Not designated 'rogue.' Just . . . 'gone.'"

  "How will you know," Blackstar Sabertooth asked, "if one of our gang members doesn't fully sign on?"

  I made Malatesta grin what I hoped was a truly unpleasant grin. "Word gets around. One of the other clans or gangs or families produces evidence. Then that group is . . . gone."

  Eyes goggled.

  "Don't you mean that individual?" Dante countered with an uncertain glower.

  I shook my head, all pleasantness. "No. It is up to you to see that all of your people are on board. If a member of your gang looks like he or she might betray the cause, it's up to you to make them 'gone' before I find out and make all of The Deads dead and gone. Capeesh?"

  Polidori was picking himself up off the floor. He shook his head as if to clear the last vestiges of my intruding consciousness from his skull. "You threatened severe consequences the other night and then allowed Yuler to live after his attempt on your life. Why should we believe you now?"

  "Because I hitched a little ride in your head to get into the room, Freddie-boy, so you should know how deadly serious I am, this time. All these past months of you guys sending assassins after me, playing politics once I was here, pushing to see if I would push back—you know what? I get it. You guys are predators. You're hard-wired for it. And, as if the bloodlust wasn't enough, all that preternatural power tends to corrupt.

  "You should be proud of yourselves: you're a great bunch of teachers and I think I'm ready to graduate and apply what I've learned now. You've convinced me that I really can't do this any other way.

  "Now, rule number two: no more killing humans." I expected the room to erupt like Mount Krakatoa but they all just sat there and glowered at me like students trapped in after-school detention. "I'm not forbidding you to hunt or feed. But I know that it can be done without killing. So no killing the warms."

  "Not even in self-defense?" someone asked from the second row.

  "Self-defense is like the insanity defense. You can only invoke it once and then the odds are seriously against your acquittal. So don't get in a 'kill or be killed' situation—you're only postponing your own execution.

  "Rule number three: undead birth control. No more adding to the ranks of the undead without my permission."

  "We have to ask your permission to sire?"

  Malatesta and I nodded together.

  "Won't that get a little complicated?"

  We shook our head. "Not really. The answer will be 'no,' ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And that's if I'm feeling generous."

  "Anything else?" Valentine asked dourly.

  I stopped smiling and the real Malatesta down in the crypt of his hindbrain whimpered. "Yeah. There was supposed to be. Rule number one was supposed to be no one—NO ONE—was to lay a finger on my wife or child . . ."

  Carmella's face registered a mixture of distaste and disbelief. "The wolfbitch was your wife?"

  I was down off the dais and plowing through the chairs in the blink of an eye. My own arm couldn't have raised Valentine's sister off her feet and held her struggling in midair. Malatesta's could and did. "She would have been my wife," I growled, pulling Carmella's face close to the undead mask I wore for the moment. "But someone sent assassins with silver bullets and poisoned more than just my blood. She would have been my wife and I would have been with her instead of leaving her to die alone and unprotected!" I hurled her across the room and turned on the others. "In case you haven't been taking notes, I'm internalizing a great deal of rage right now! If anyone else would like to tap into that, I could use the catharsis!"

  No o
ne moved. No one said bupkis.

  I turned and started to walk toward the door.

  "Is that it?" someone whispered in the back.

  I stopped. "No. That is not it. That's just for starters. But lest you think I'm all about punishment, there will also be rewards. For those who are my eyes and ears, those who bring me word or evidence of any that speak rebelliously, that plot in secret, that might be my enemy now or in days to come—I know how to reward, just as I know how to punish."

  I turned back toward the exit. "Sunrise is coming and I have other things to do yet tonight, as well as tomorrow. I will meet with you all again in three nights. For now I wish to be alone."

  It would all begin here in a few days if not a few hours, I thought. Chaos, panic, rage, disorder, and the preemptive betrayals: my work here was done. I took three steps before the door flew open and vomited broken, bloody vampires.

  "Cséjthe!" an inhuman voice bellowed from beyond. A bat-headed silhouette filled the opening and then some.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It was just a moment, a couple of eye blinks really. First the hulking brute was outside in the cramped corridor, peering through the too-small egress at the lot of us.

  Then it was in the room with us.

  It should have taken out half the wall to do so. I didn't doubt that it could. Aside from the old werewolf's testimony regarding another house investment gone bad, the creature had arms that made the fire department's Jaws of Life look like chopsticks.

  But the demon merely stepped through the opening. And, for just the briefest of moments, I thought I saw a small, neatly dressed man take its place.

  There was nothing small or neat about the behemoth that crouched past the threshold, however. It was as if some demented genetics lab had blended bat and human DNA in ways that only Bruce Wayne could imagine in his darkest nightmares, and then gene-spliced the growth hormones of an African elephant into the mix. Its head was the size of a wrecking ball—and that did not include the large, tufted ears that erupted from the sides of its skull like inverted jet engine scoops. Its nose was like a flint knife, its teeth like the stalactites of the underworld realms that spawned it. The creature half squatted on legs that were, each, as big around as a human torso. Leathery wings draped beneath furry arms that could tear a man in two without flexing. And over one of those massive shoulders was draped the lower half of a human body.

  My human body—if I recognized the clothing I had dressed in just a couple of hours before.

  "Cséjthe!" It bellowed again, casting about the room like a hound dog hoping to pick up a scent.

  I looked at the rest of the vampires in the room.

  They looked back at me.

  I could order them to defend their Doman.

  Yeah, right. They were probably thinking that batboy was the answer to all their prayers. It takes me out; they get to go back to the big blood orgy.

  Since taking the demon on, myself, was obviously a no-win situation, that left me with taking the body I currently had and beating a hasty retreat. My original birthday suit could be counted as lost at this point but I could always dump Malatesta's skin and find something more appropriate down the road.

  The trouble was I was never very good at walking, much less running, away from no-win situations. More importantly, this bat-headed bastard had killed Lupé and Will.

  "Over here, Zotz," I said, and stepped back from the tangle of chairs so that there was open floor between us.

  The rest of the vampires scrambled to the back of the room as the monster stomped toward me.

  And then past me.

  It moved up to the dais and, lifting my limp body from its plateaulike shoulder, placed it upon the throne. I looked nothing so much like I had dozed off during a tedious meeting.

  It turned to Malatesta-me then and said, "Will you return to that which is yours?"

  Well, hell, why not?

  If I was going to die with my boots on, better they were on my feet than somebody else's: a twist, a pop, a glide, and then splish-splash, I was taking a bath all inside my own little husk. My eyes popped open just in time to watch Malatesta keel over and then Batzilla loom over. His very size blotted out most of the light in the room.

  Then his face was dropping toward me and all the lights went out.

  * * *

  You can't imagine darkness as a human. You can only experience a certain lessening of light. Until you've gone down into the darkness under the earth, slept under a sky of earth and stone, where no breeze blows, no sound sighs, you do not know the darkness beyond the land of the living.

  And that is but the outer darkness.

  There is an interior landscape of eternal night that the living may never know. Yet I knew both as profound emptiness swallowed me. I was cast adrift in an interstellar gulf as lifeless and lightless as anything that might be grasped and still sustain cohesive thought. A limitless void made up of dark years stretched in all directions, cold and vast and deep and lonely.

  Years passed.

  Lifetimes.

  Centuries.

  Eons.

  The darkness began to resolve into dim images like a backward Doppler shift, moving toward that which had been left behind.

  Traveling back in time . . .

  space . . .

  memory . . .

  experience . . .

  being . . .

  Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Desmodus draculae, the gigantic ancestor of the modern vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus.

  In the Popol Vuh they dwelt in the fearsome Underworld realm of Zotzilaha; in the real world they inhabited the mountain caves, the giant trees of the densest jungles, and the mysterious depths of the greater cenotes. The Zotzil peoples of Mexico still refer to them in legend as Black-man and Neckcutter. In their day the Quiché Maya named them Bloodletter and Camazotz after their god of fire, Zotzilaha Chamalcan.

  And they made sacrifices to them.

  One thousand.

  Ten thousand.

  Eventually hundreds of thousands of souls went into the earth and the watery wells of sacrifice. Mass graves to rival the Nazis' Final Solution though the results were accomplished over a much longer time frame.

  Something else was accomplished, as well.

  Something was awakened.

  Not a collection of separate entities as suggested in Mengele's butcher shop but a single, mass mind.

  A single mass hunger . . .

  That fed on life and blood and glutted itself into an indolent sleep that lasted centuries, then millennia, while the Maya and the Aztecs passed from glory and their cities crumbled and their sacred wells were lost in oblivions of green and brown.

  But that sleep did not last.

  Blood calls to blood and, though the surviving descendants of the Mesoamericans had ceased their sacrifices, other tribes had taken up the practice. The ceremonies were different, the methods varied, but the pain and the blood and the vast numbers of the dead were much the same. The world was a smorgasbord of terror and death and it could gorge itself from a variety of menus over a succession of generations. There were pogroms in Russia, world wars in Europe, spreading to the Pacific on the second go-round. South American revolutions and African genocides. Then there came a day when It grew tired of the feast. Sin sick and full of the pain and death of billions, it turned back home and, sinking into the dark depths of the bottomless lake beneath the well of souls, where it had been spawned a thousand years before, it once more sought oblivion, a nirvana of blackness.

  But the blood festered.

  The pain would not subside nor be mastered.

  And, having overpowered death so many times, there was now no strength remaining to serve it in a final, personal solution.

  I came out of my trance to find the massive creature kneeling at my feet with its huge head cradled against my knees. My trousers were soaked from its tears as it sobbed and sobbed and finally said in a very small voice: "Please . . . help . . . me . . ."
r />   * * *

  It followed as I stumbled and picked my way through the scattered tumble of chairs. The room looked like the aftermath of a cattle stampede—a stampede of fanged, two-legged, undead cattle who figured their best chance for survival lay in escaping while the demon tore their Doman apart.

  Too bad they hadn't stayed around long enough to witness the altar call.

  "Get away from me," I mumbled.

  "I thought that if any human might understand . . ."

  "I don't want to understand," I said. "Leave me alone!"

  "I cannot."

  "What do you want from me?" I staggered, half-blind from the images and sensations still roiling through my brain. "Are you looking for absolution? I'm not a priest."

  "You are better than a holy man," the demon answered. "You know the taste of blood, have walked in the pathways of darkness. Yet you strive to do good and prevent others from doing evil."

  "Yeah, I'm a regular Boy Scout."

  "I am darkness given form and function. I am death given a semblance of life. I am sin that finally chokes upon its own essence. All the lives, the deaths, the years, have made me filthy beyond repugnance. I need the blood."

  "Sounds like the blood is the root of your problem, addiction-boy."

  "Not mortal blood," it answered. "Your blood. It is said to have healing properties. It gives life to those who would otherwise be dead."

  "My blood," I said carefully, "kept a severed head alive to everyone's regret. It caused my lover to leave me and all but killed a vampire who took a little sip. You want to be washed in the blood of Jesus, Zotz, not sampling a little Cséjthe Bordeaux."

  "I am not ready to make supplication to another god, yet. My condition is too lowly. I must learn to be human, first. That is why I have sought you out. Your blood calls to me. It tells me that you understand the darkness. That you have known The Hunger and resisted it. That you can teach me how to either make an ending or a new beginning."

  "I teach American Lit. Except I'm on sabbatical this semester."

  "Please, Master! You are my only hope!"

  I stopped and tried not to tremble as I parsed my words carefully. "Listen. I'd be very happy to kill you if I thought I had any chance of being able to do so. Give you the oblivion, here and now, that you think you crave. Except I don't believe it would be possible even with your cooperation."