Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4)

by Michael G. Williams

  Crew Cut looked taken a bit aback.

  Roderick pasted to those NO PARKING signs another round of photocopies of his doodles, his series of bad things happening to Ross.

  “Okay, you have to tell me,” I said.

  Roderick smiled to himself. “Is that a request from a cousin and friend, or is that an order from the boss of all the vampires of North Carolina?”

  “Yes,” I said, frowning.

  “Tulpas,” Dan said, and he clapped his hands together once. “Tulpas! Thoughtforms! Modify the thoughts about the subject and the subject is modified accordingly.”

  Roderick smiled more widely. “Make the subject a mockery and he may lose some of his power.”

  “You’re softening him up by making fun of him?”

  “Softening him,” Roderick said to me, “In the minds of those who might encounter him. It won’t do anything to him right now but it might over time.”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “Moving right along, let’s get going. The dig site is a few minutes walk south from here.”

  Sheila had the pad open, the night vision glasses pushed up and propped on top of her head. “The signal is still there, and seems to be more or less stationary,” she said.

  I harumphed. Roderick looked at me and I shrugged. “I don’t like it,” I said. “They knew we were trying to surveil them. Why come back here? It’s too easy.”

  Beth opened her mouth and said, “You know, ‘surveil’ is a hybrid word-“ but Marty put a hand on her arm.

  Roderick ignored her and said to me, “Yes, but it is worth checking out. Perhaps one of them is desperate. One of them alone cannot present a real challenge to all of us, surely.”

  I clicked my cheeks. Smiles went from sitting behind me to standing beside me. Dog was glued to Roderick’s side.

  Beth looked around and whistled – a sharp chirp – and a bird seemed to land on demand.

  “No,” I said, knowing what she had in mind. “It would be nice to send a big flock of birds to check it out before we get there, but they’ll be obvious as hell. We’re just going to have to sneak up on them.”

  We set out, stomping down the path to the beach with all the stealth of a small herd of bison trying to cross the goddamn prairie.

  The tide was heading back out, leaving the sand a wide, almost bright-white strip between the shadows of the nature preserve and the vast inkwell that is the ocean at night. The sky was gloriously clear, and the stars and a giant full moon were out in force. I think at this point I’ve forgotten how dim the stars look to human eyes. To a vampire, they are exceptionally bright and there are a clean gazillion of them. In the cities, we’re as prone to having them washed out by light pollution as anyone. In the middle of nowhere, with the nearest lights the glow of a few hotels way out on the north end of North Myrtle Beach, well away from us, the stars were like something out of a movie. At one point I actually called for us to stop just so I could stand there and stare at them.

  Nobody seemed to mind.

  The water rippled in the silver light of the skies above, like mercury from an old thermometer spilled across the floor of the world. The water sounded as distant as it felt, even though it was right there, and the silence of the world around us was profound. We were not on a beach in a modern little town. We were in the caves of the ancients, looking up for the first time.

  “That is the water that is winning,” Roderick said, sticking his chin in the direction of the surface of the sea, the moon reflected on it.

  “Huh?” I didn’t look at him when I spoke.

  “All the water in the world is trying to get to the moon,” Roderick said. “That is the source of the tides, is it not? All of it, even the water in the blood in our veins: it stretches for the sky, in response to the strange magnetism of that mysterious sentinel. None of it ever wins. None of it ever makes it. But that water, the water with the moon in the mirror it makes of itself, is the water that is winning.”

  “Are there vampire astronomers?” Dan whispered it, and he seemed to be addressing it to Roderick. In my peripheral vision I could see the boy pull the glasses down his nose so he could look at the stars with just his human eyes.

  “I know a vampire scientist in Seattle,” my cousin replied. His voice was equally low, like he was talking in church. I wondered if perhaps he kind of was: if he was feeling the same awe I did. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s even possible for Roderick to feel smaller than something given how confident he always is. “But he is a necrologist. I have met no astronomers.”

  “How many are there?” Beth asked.

  “G…” Marty started to speak, but his voice caught. “Given forty seven minutes I could count with precision one quarter of the sky, then make an estimate based on light density.” He sounded like he was in heaven.

  “Alright,” I whispered. “Let’s get moving again.”

  I hope I’ve never got forty seven minutes to listen to a man count under his breath.

  The smell of vampire was very faint when it hit me, and the Atlantic was whipping hard that night, but Roderick and Beth and Marty all stopped walking when they caught it, too, so I knew it wasn’t just my imagination. I put up a hand and we all stopped. The dig site wasn’t quite in view, but I figured we must be getting close.

  “Two hundred yards,” Sheila whispered. She was shielding the screen of her tablet with her other arm. “Slightly to the right of where we’re headed.” Sheila showed us on her tablet where the vampire was.

  I nodded, and we began walking more slowly. “Tell me if it moves,” I said.

  With nothing but the sound of splashing waves, the howl of the wind, and the call of the occasional night bird, we crossed half the remaining distance. I signaled to the others, and the technopagans and Crew Cut and Beth and Marty hung back a little bit, letting Roderick and me get ahead. I figured we had a far better chance of sneaking up on another vampire than any bunch of humans, no matter how clever.

  We got close enough to the dig site to see it, but there didn’t seem to be much of anyone there: just the abandoned lights, not powered on, and the massive maw of the hole the historical society dug out at Herman’s command, its edges smoothed now by a day of Atlantic wind running over the top of it. Behind it, though, were two Beach Patrol four-wheel ATV’s and, slumped on the sand next to them, two dead Beach Patrol officers. They looked like their necks had been slashed with a knife, but of course lots of vampires deface the corpses of our victims so as to obfuscate why they died. Poor bastards, I thought. They should have abandoned ship with everybody else.

  Roderick nodded to the right, at the massive dune overlooking the scene, and I nodded. The mailbox, where I’d perched the night before, was just visible in the starlight at the very peak of the dune. The mailbox, sticking out of the sand in a place with no houses in sight, was even more surreal from down there on the beach. It was easy to imagine some mail carrier making her quiet rounds, walking up the side of the dune with great effort, and sticking a letter inside without so much as looking up. The mailbox was so bizarre it felt mundane, and in that respect I knew exactly how it felt. I think the same can sometimes be said of how I relate to the neighborhood where I live or the people who are my friends.

  It looked like the only way to the top would be to cross the bottom of the dune and go around the back, ultimately ascending from the other side the same way I did. I didn’t like that we just walked right up to the same place I so effectively spied on just the night before. I didn’t like how hidden someone could be up there.

  My dislike was immediately confirmed.

  “Where are your friends? Tell them to come join us,” I heard Herman say from above.

  So much for sneaking up on him.

  “They’re shy,” I replied. No need being subtle now, so I started snapping my fingers and clapping one fist against the other palm, like a tough from an episode of Happy Days. “C’mon down and maybe we can introduce you to ‘em.”

  Herman appeared at the
top of the dune. In his hand was one of the notebooks from the mailbox. “Do you know what people write in these things?” He gestured with the notebook itself.

  “No, but I suggest you write ‘goodbye,’” I said.

  “Great,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “A tough guy. Oh, Withrow, I’m so scared.” I could practically hear the rusty squeak of the decrepit old bastard rolling his eyes. “Do you think I came here to fight you? In this body?” He snorted aloud. “I can barely breathe sometimes. Admittedly, I have been pretty hard on this one, but it’s a wonder he was alive at all when I moved in. I barely made it up here.” He took some wheezing breaths and cleared his throat. “Now shut up and listen to me.”

  Roderick and I exchanged a glance. My cousin shrugged at me. “Okay,” I said. “Impress me with your big last-stand speech.”

  He held up the notebook again. “They – the humans, the tourists,” but it sounded like he’d just said the worst cuss he could possibly manage, “They come here and write poems. They have their children scrawl decidedly un-precocious little essays about how they love the beach and they love Jesus and thank their sad little god for making this place.” He slapped the notebook shut and dropped it from the edge so that it fluttered to the wet sand like a dead seagull. “Never mind that humans made this place. Most of the island is artificial. It was created to sell real estate.” Again, disgust dripped from every sound his mouth made.

  “Okay,” I said. After a pause, I added, “I have to say, I don’t quite see where you’re going with this. I mean, they’re sentimentalists. Big fucking deal if they want to waste their lives feeling twee little things about places.”

  “And yet you fight on their side,” Herman said. He crossed his arms. The breathing still wasn’t easy for him. He sounded like he’d more than worn himself out getting up there. He sounded halfway to a coronary. I wondered again if his possession ability made bodies break down faster than normal. “Why is that?”

  “I don’t fight on their side,” I said. “I fight on my side. If some of them choose to fight with me, well, I compliment them on their good taste.”

  “Bullshit,” Herman said. The accent had come back in the moment of vehemence. He sounded fresh off the boat from Germany. “Gah, you cannot even be honest with yourself.”

  “I do have to agree with him on that, Cousin,” Roderick said. He was idly dusting an imaginary speck of something from the front of his white plastic jacket. “You clearly do in fact fight on behalf of others than yourself.” My look of shut-the-hell-up just made Roderick smile. “Why deny it? But do not worry, I will not insult you with the term ‘humanitarian.’” He winked at me then mouthed in silence, This is a trap.

  I looked back at Herman. “You’re the U-boat officer, right?”

  “A long time ago,” he said. “Lifetimes ago. I see no reason to hide that.”

  “But you were destroyed in the battle. Here. On this site.” Roderick put his hands in his pockets as he spoke. “At the last moment, you leapt into a nearby human and used them to escape. You have been leaping from one to another ever since. That is why you are digging here. You think whatever method the others wish to use to bring back The Rhinemaiden can instead be used to bring back you.”

  “Of course,” Herman said. “I should think that much is obvious.”

  “How’d you plan to do it?” I pointed at the hole. “Is there really a canister of ash down there? Can you really use that to restore a vampire’s body? It just seems…” I gave an apologetic shrug with one arm. “It seems pretty far-fetched.”

  “Ross says it can be done with blood,” Herman replied. “He says a vampire’s ashes, in the right ritual space, in the place where they were destroyed, when the stars in the heavens attain the correct configuration, can be used to reconstitute that vampire if those ashes are drenched with blood in sufficient quantities – or of sufficient power.” Even from here, in the light of the stars, I could see the flash of his eyes. He drew from his shirt pocket a little glass vial, like a test tube, and with a vampire’s sight I could see it contained something dark and malleable: ash, no doubt, and probably his.

  “I know this may seem obvious,” I said, “And I’m flattered you think my blood is powerful, but let’s be realistic. You are not killing anybody in that rickety old body no matter how much you want to resurrect yourself.” I looked sideways at Roderick. “Do you hear what I just said? ‘Resurrect yourself?’ Do you hear the things shit like this makes me say? Jesus.”

  “Oh,” Herman said holding up the vial. “These are not mine. They are my mistress’. I have given up finding my ashes. I was told they were here, but I think that must be untrue.”

  I scrunched my eyebrows close together. “How’d you get her ashes? If she really died out here, I mean, I don’t know man, there’s a bit of a breeze.”

  “She foresaw her own death,” he said simply. “She was gifted with a vision. When she realized she would be destroyed, she set aside some of her own blood in a vial in her stronghold.”

  Roderick made a small ‘ah’ sound. “Where it stayed intact until her death, at which point it turned into a vial of ash.” He chuckled. “Clever. But why wait until now to do the ritual?”

  Herman grinned. “The stars were not right,” he said. “When they were, the first time, the ritual was fouled. Too little blood.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, right. You assholes? You’re all on the Liz Bathory diet. There’s no shortage of blood around when you fucks are in town.” I gestured at him, at the hole, at the sky full of stars supposedly now “right,” then I looked back at him. “Besides, she’s had plenty of blood and then some, right? She’s been turning people to slag left and right.” I gestured back the way we came, towards the houses, towards the little cinder block bar, towards the planetarium closed for winter. “Look around, man. This island’s practically a ghost town in its own right. She’s chugged down just about everyone alive at this point. That’s why it’s so fucking dead around here. And what’s it gotten her? A big fat goose egg, that’s what. What makes you think this is going to go differently?”

  Herman smiled again. “I’m no mage,” he said. “I just report what Ross told us.”

  “He is a demon,” Roderick said. His voice was utterly cold. “He lies. It is his only imperative.”

  Herman ignored him. “As I said, this ash is not mine. It’s that of my mistress. And though I am forced to make do with the frail failings of mere mortal flesh, exhausted by decades of sunlight and weakness, my blood is still quite powerful. Surely I owe her this service after all my failures to serve myself.” With surprising alacrity he yanked the cork out of the test tube with his teeth and his other hand produced a knife.

  Roderick and I both immediately sank our feet into the sand and shot forward in a blur, aiming to stop him, but we were too far away. We scrabbled at the near face of the dune, too steep for us to climb, sand tearing away in our hands in great chunks, as Herman drove the knife deep into his own neck and then tore it back out. Smiles and Dog hadn’t even managed to catch up to us. Roderick and I were going hell for leather trying to get up the face of that dune and making zero progress.

  A great, red gout of the blood of a living body – tainted by the clotted black ichor of the vampire possessing it – pumped from the wound in an obscene spurt of fluid. The mixed smells, the aroma of human blood and the stench of another vampire, hit my senses like a brick to the face. With his last strength, Herman pressed the test tube to his own wound and cried out, “Mistress! I restore you to life in gratitude and eternal service! Destroy these thine enemies!”

  Though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, a bolt of lightning struck the sand where Herman stood above us. There was a boom of thunder, and a roar of wind, and I could smell ozone in the air.

  Screams rose up from all around us: the screams of a monster freed at last and behind that the gibberish cries of its countless victims protesting from the beyond-realm they now inhabited. Strange light erupted
from the sand all around us: blue and yellow, unnatural in their hues, like the unfocussed glow of a computer screen in the next room, but bright as a floodlight. I felt someone push past me with tremendous strength but Roderick was still beside me, shielding his face with his arms.

  “Jennifer!” Roderick screamed over the howl of the wind, but I wasn’t sure he could be heard ten feet away, much less three hundred.

  On the other hand, they could probably tell some shit was going down.

  13

  Roderick and I backpedaled from the dune in the blinding glare of the not-blue light shooting out of it in great rays. The glow got brighter and brighter, and when we got a few yards, Roderick and I both decided to all-out run for it. Each of us scooped up his respective dog, still bounding towards us in relative slow motion, and took off back towards the technopagans. We could see them ahead of us, many yards away, expressions of shock just beginning to form on their faces.

  I glanced back in time to watch as the dune – mailbox, notebooks, and all – exploded in a great pulse of light and energy and wind. Imagine a smoke bomb going off in a Batman cartoon: a little sound and a huge great whorl of gas concealing his escape. Now imagine that happening to a dune the size of a large house.

  Grains of sand shot in all directions, sharp as needles, and the sound of the explosion – a boom followed by a hiss and then the patter of rainfall as sand sprinkled back down to the ground from high above – was so loud as to about knock us over. Even in slow motion, the audio distorted by our speed, it was a gargantuan boom that rattled the fangs in my skull.

  Looking back in front, I realized who had pushed past. His body clearly failing, burning it down to its last embers with a final push of his vampiric strength in that clattering, wobbling, all too mortal frame, Herman was barreling towards the technopagans with his arms out.

  Maybe he could smell the magic on them, or maybe he just wanted someone younger to try to jump into so he could have his cake and eat it, too, sacrificing himself to resurrect his maker and yet still surviving in his own right. I will never know exactly what went through Herman’s mind. I saw the sound wash over the technopagans, each of them rocking backwards. Jennifer was about to fall prone, and Herman was running right for her.