The Devil's Bed

by Doug Lamoreux

  The Colonel hefted himself from the passenger seat with a chip on his shoulder and a satisfied grin on his face. Behind Blanc, his gendarmes piled out of their van. They fell in, drew their weapons, and slipped their safety catches 'OFF' down the line.

  Within a few minutes the soldiers' names would no longer matter to anyone but the mason hired to carve their grave markers. Still, to complete the record, they were:

  Antoine Beauvais, six and a half feet, two hundred, thirty pounds of imposing muscle whose uniform, kepi to boots, was special ordered. His name meant beautiful and he was gorilla ugly.

  Bernard Sigismund, a barely passable marksman, but formidable at hand-to-hand.

  Leon Pomeroy, smiling now from nerves, who had the previous night without knowing visited his drinking buddy, Chitichia, at the morgue… for the very last time.

  Tristan Maigny, who, marooned on an island, would survive comfortably with nothing more than a regulation manual and an iron to press his uniform.

  And Aurore Vasser. The Gendarmerie were as modern as any military. That said, staffing shortages left Vasser the only female in the Paradis unit. The others considered Aurore their little sister. Until this moment she had been well guarded.

  Petit and Andre Fulke left their car to round out the unit.

  “What is happening?”

  Blanc followed the voice to see Jerome peeking up from his back seat like a bird in a nest. “Stay down and keep quiet, you idiot. Unless you want Fournier to see you.”

  As Delvit came round to stand beside the Colonel, they heard Loup weakly calling for help. Blanc scowled. He had no love for Loup. Even so, the filthy scoundrel Fournier would pay for the humiliation he was doling out.

  The Templar who looked to be in charge (Fournier himself?), stepped in front of the wounded Loup. The other knights watched him as hounds would their master. He pointed a boney finger at the soldiers.

  One of his knights drew two daggers from his belt.

  Thirteen

  The daggers glinted keenly in the spotlights. Even at that distance the weight of the elegant weapons, gripped in the knight's gauntlets, was unmistakable. Unquestionably the weapons were real.

  And so, Blanc thought, was their implied threat. He had had enough.

  “We are the Gendarmerie! You will let that man go and surrender your weapons. Marcel Fournier, you are under arrest. You are, all of you, under arrest.”

  As if Blanc had said the magic word the knight threw one of his daggers.

  It lodged in Delvit's chest. He shouted in pain, spun reaching for the protruding handle, and was hit from behind by a second blade.

  In the car, peeking against orders, Jerome saw the assault through the side window. He saw the driver fall into Blanc's arms. Jerome squealed and dropped down again on the floor.

  “Get them!” The Colonel screamed as he lowered Delvit carefully to the ground.

  “Open fire!” Petit shouted to his squad.

  Blanc had no time to aid Delvit further. He let his driver go, drew his sidearm and stood. Then all hell broke loose as he and his soldiers opened fire. Bullets ripped past and through the staggered line of Templars. The knights in reply released Loup and brought their weapons to bear on the Gendarmerie.

  Freed, Loup crawled away, forced himself up and staggered into the darkness. The dark cloaked Templar saw him. He sheathed his sword, mounted his horse and turned the animal to follow.

  “Stop him!” Blanc shouted, pointing at the Templar chaplain. “He's getting away!”

  Big Antoine Beauvais unloaded his weapon into the knight's back. His cloak bucked and dust clouds erupted. Peppered with bullet holes, he stayed in the saddle and rode - uninjured. When shooting him proved fruitless, Beauvais shot the Templar's horse. That had no effect either and the beast rode on.

  Across the courtyard, for the gendarmes and Templars scattered as they fought, the soldiers were discovering their bullets had no effect on their targets. Obviously, Blanc thought, Fournier's men were wearing body armor. But, sacré, what armor!

  Several more men, or knights, if that's what they were, climbed aboard their horses. Not to escape, but to fight.

  Leon Pomeroy, wide-eyed, couldn't swallow or even breathe. A one-handed Templar rode at him with the reins to his horse clamped in his teeth, his right stump flogging the air, and a spear clutched above his helmet in his left hand. Pomeroy stood courageously shooting the damned thing. He held his ground longer than most would have but finally had enough. He quit his position and ran like hell for their vehicles. The one-handed Templar bore down at full stride and hurled his halberd. The javelin impaled Pomeroy from behind. His rifle flew. So did the gendarme; driven forward, up, and onto Blanc's vehicle. Pomeroy smacked the windshield with his head, cracked both, and came to rest sprawled across the hood, the halberd jutting skyward, staring into the car with unseeing eyes.

  The one-armed knight rode on between the vehicles; the hooves of his horse leaving the clatter of the courtyard for the soft ground in the dark beyond.

  Andre Fulke, Petit's driver, ran to the car. He laid a hand on Pomeroy and quickly determined he was dead. Before he could retreat, Fulke saw the Templar returning; riding from the dark at full gallop. He passed the van and leapt from his saddle taking the soldier down. There was no fight. Despite having only one hand, the knight pinned Fulke to the ground, jerked his head to the side and, with a hair-raising growl, ripped the gendarme's throat out with his teeth.

  The archer, back aboard his mount, towered over the gendarme's little sister, Aurore Vasser. The Templar grabbed her by the hair. He slapped the rifle from her hands and hauled her up onto his saddle before him. Vasser kept her wits despite her disgust at the knight's touch. She drew her sidearm, jammed the barrel under the mummy's chin and pulled the trigger.

  Vasser was so disconcerted by the deafening report, the blinding muzzle flash, she didn't see the explosion of the Templar's hood or the top of the creature's head blown through the hole. But her vision quickly cleared, her hearing quickly returned. The Templar glared down at her - and laughed in her face.

  Tristan Maigny appeared below the Templar's horse. He fired his weapon, at point blank range, into the mummy holding Vasser. Nine shots into the monster's chest. The Templar, with Vasser still struggling, turned his pistol crossbow. He fired it and sent Maigny reeling to the ground. Before the gasping soldier could rise, the Templar who'd started the battle with two well-placed daggers fell on him, tore into Maigny's throat with his teeth and began to feast.

  The archer was laughing again. Vasser, her courage exhausted, could only scream. And she did… even after he bit into her throat.

  It went on for several minutes more; the gunfire, the snicks, clangs, clinks, and thunks of ancient weaponry being employed, the horrified, disbelieving screams, the hellish laughs, the whinnying of horses, the thunder of hooves upon stone.

  Petit and Sigismund tried to put down the Templars' leader - to their everlasting regret.

  Gasping, oozing blood like tap water, Delvit pulled himself up onto his hands and knees. He was crawling; to where and for what even he didn't know. Despite the two daggers in him, one in his chest and one in his back, he was alive and his brain was ordering him to move. Beneath him, the gray, black and white stones of the courtyard were cold, uneven… and, as he moved, speckled with crimson. Amid the cries and the chaos, Delvit paused and raised his head. In the long shadows cast by the full moon, he saw a Templar knight walking purposely toward him dangling a spiked ball on a chain. It swung to and fro with his stride like a clock's pendulum. Delvit's time was up.

  Blanc, as spent as his empty gun, looked in terror on six of his soldiers and friends dead or dying at the hands of these hellish monsters. He'd been so very wrong about Fournier. Then he saw his seventh soldier, big, ugly Antoine Beauvais, backed against the cold stone wall and surrounded by, Dieu dans le ciel, real resurrected Templars moving steadily in on him near the entrance to the castle ruin.

  Beauvais scr
eamed for Blanc's help.

  Blanc holstered his gun with a trembling hand and ran in the opposite direction.

  “Colonel!” Beauvais screamed as the Templars set on him.

  Blanc tripped and hurtled headlong up the chapel steps toward the severely hacked door. He turned his head and avoided breaking his neck but took the full force of the impact with his shoulder. Adrenaline kept him from feeling what, if he lived, would be a bruise from neck to hand. “Ouvrez la porte!” He screamed, banging the door with his only working fist. “Ouvrez la porte!”

  The door came open. Blanc rolled across the threshold and into the vestibule. The door was quickly shut behind him.

  Blanc, a quivering mess on the floor, held his shoulder with a shaking hand and cried, “This cannot be happening! It cannot be happening!”

  Ray slid the batten back into its brackets to secure the door. He looked at the blubbering mass that once was a Gendarmerie Colonel and shook his head in disgust. “Isn't it about time you got over that?”

  Alone on the floor of the Colonel's car, Jerome talked quietly to himself. Even he didn't know why; perhaps to pass the time, maybe to avoid going out of his mind, or perhaps because he had already gone crazy. “What's so bloody terrible about the establishment? Can you tell me that, Jerome? What are you going to do with your life? Go into bleeding civil service, son. Listen to your old dad.” Jerome adjusted, searching for room that didn't exist.

  “Why, in God's name, do you want to go back to Paradis? See the world! Let someone else pay for it. Never go home unless you're called. Then you know you're wanted. Stay in England. And stop with the bleeding tattoos! You'd think you had a self-esteem issue, for heaven's sake. For heaven's bleeding sake.”

  Jerome looked up from his hiding spot.

  At the front of the car – to see a soldier, sprawled unmoving on the bonnet, dead eyes staring blankly in through the cracked windscreen. It was Pomeroy and his days chasing women on the Riviera were over. Then to the side - to see a Templar staring through the passenger's window. The knight's red eyes deep in his grinning skull seemed almost to burn. Then to the other side – to see what, at first, looked to be a reflection. It was not. The mirror image was a second Templar.

  The tattoo artist began singing in the high, whispered voice of a child, repeating a song his mother sang, a thousand years ago and a million miles away.

  “Forgive me. Forgive me. I know not what to say.”

  One of the knights lifted a heavy mace, reared back and struck the passenger's side rear window with a dull thwack. The tempered glass splintered to a smoky spider's web. Several spikes from the ball's head poked menacingly through the glass. Amazingly, the window held.

  “Father never showed me. Mother never told me.”

  The other hit the driver's side window with the butt of his crossbow. The glass bounced with the blows. Once. Twice. Three times was a charm. That window, too, cracked into one large spider's web.

  “My parents never showed me what it means to pray.”

  The mace and crossbow were driven home again. Thwack. Thump. The passenger's side window shattered and the mace was withdrawn. The driver's side followed with a rain of glass shards and the crossbow was pulled back.

  Jerome Rousseau had nowhere to go. “I'm a hemophiliac!” he screamed.

  From both sides of the car, through the shattered windows, the claw-like hands of the Templars reached for him.

  Fourteen

  From somewhere outside the chapel they heard a final tortured scream. Then all fell silent. The Templars were feasting.

  Blanc, their new arrival, wandered from the vestibule into the nave teetering on the edge of sanity. His lips trembled and he babbled, “How? I do not… Why? Do you…”

  “We don't have any answers,” Ray said sharply. “Besides, it doesn't matter. They're out there and we're trapped.” He walked away making it clear the gendarme officer could keep whatever authority he thought he held.

  Blanc followed after the big American. “But what do they want?”

  “Revenge,” Ray said, taking the stairs to the gallery two at a time. “If you believe Clive, eh, Father Trevelyan. Human blood, our blood, to pay for their executions.”

  The gallery door stood open and Ray took it to the balcony; protected now by Brandy's ossuary crucifix. Blanc followed like a child. Trevelyan, at the rail, stared silently out over the courtyard. He too had heard that final scream and was praying for the soul involved. He paid no mind when Ray and the Colonel joined him.

  The shadowy forms of the Templars appeared sporadically, in the distance, in and out of the moonlit courtyard, now littered as far as the eye could see with the bodies of dead soldiers. Drawn by the warm-blooded humans on the balcony, they guarded their eyes and hissed their hunger. Ray stared, wondering what he could do about them.

  Blanc gripped the railing, steadying himself as he fought to steady his nerves, and followed Ray's gaze. A light shown in his eyes and the Colonel shouted, “Fire! We could burn them! Fire took care of your sister.”

  Ray's mouth fell open in disbelief. The muscles in his face tightened and he stared daggers at the despicable military man. “You sons-of-bitches already burned them, seven hundred years ago, for all the good it did.”

  “It wasn't the fire…” Trevelyan said quietly.

  “What did you say?” Blanc demanded.

  “It wasn't the fire that burned Vicki. It was the hand of God.” Trevelyan kissed his crucifix.

  Ray looked from Trevelyan, to Blanc, and back again. He'd already reached the conclusion the Colonel had lost his mind. Now he wondered about the priest as well.

  A new scream arose in the courtyard. Ray, Trevelyan and Blanc watched as a Templar rode in from the shadows. It was the dark cloaked chaplain, carrying his ornate cross on its half-staff (since Brandy broke it) in his up-raised hand. He was dragging someone on the ground behind him.

  His captive screamed again and turned his face into the moonlight. It was Loup; the rope on his wrists stretched to the knight's saddle. The Templar pulled him to the center of the courtyard and let him fall. The chaplain rode around him and, when Loup tried to rise, kicked him back to his knees. The standard bearer dismounted, lifted the cross with skeletal hands, and called out to the others. Again he started their Latin chant. The other knights joined in, and moved in, gathering around the terrified Loup.

  Trevelyan stared, appalled and captivated at the same time. It looked to be some black religious rite and the dark cloaked one was obviously their minister – if Satan sanctioned ministers.

  Blanc, staring too, suddenly looked hard to the left of the knights' circle.

  Ray couldn't help but follow his gaze. “What is it?”

  “Something… moved.”

  Ray stared. He saw the gathered Templars, their sacrifice, the courtyard bathed in moonlight and shadow, and the scattered remains of the soldiers. “What moved?”

  As if in answer, the corpse of Lieutenant Colonel Petit sat up.

  There wasn't any doubt in Blanc's mind. He'd seen the massacre with his own eyes. His entire compliment of soldiers were killed; Petit among them. But the devil was playing tricks, for those same shell-shocked eyes now watched in horror as Petit lifted himself to his feet and began shambling around.

  The chanting, that damnable Templar chanting, led by the knight in the dark cloak, continued. To the sounds of this evil song, one by one, the rest of his gendarmes came back to life. Fired by something from the pits of hell their neurotransmitters traveled again, their dead eyes opened, their stilled muscles flexed. Each in their turn sat up, or lifted themselves to stand up and, horribly wounded, soaked in their own blood, walked again. Blanc, his mouth agape, stared in disbelieving horror. Beside him, Father Trevelyan crossed himself with a shaking hand and muttered, “God in heaven.”

  No longer alive, but not quite dead, Andre Fulke, Petit's driver, arose. Antoine Beauvais, now ugly in a way nobody could ever have imagined, followed. He leapt up with a
snarl and landed in a crouch. Across the courtyard, Bernard Sigismund stood from a pool of his own blood. In life, Sigismund was a happy man. No longer happy or sad, he gazed now, hungrily, through piercing yellow eyes that suddenly saw in the dark. Maurice Delvit, the Colonel's driver, wobbled before finding his balance. The daggers that led to his death were still in position; one in front, one in back. He yanked the blade from his chest with a sucking sound and dropped it clattering to the ground. Several attempts at the dagger in his back failed and the once proud soldier, now a stumbling thing like the rest, soon gave up trying. The others followed in time, Tristan Maigny, and their 'little sister', Aurore Vasser. Seven new vampires risen from the dead.

  Only Pomeroy escaped this walking damnation. Killed instantaneously by a flying halberd, and left atop the hood of Blanc's car, Leon was untouched by the vile infection manipulating the others. Sometimes it was good to just be dead.

  The undead gendarme soldiers, some energetically and others in stumbling fits, moved in around their Templar masters. The Templars likewise encircled their chaplain; a gathering of the minions of hell. The chapel bells started ringing again.

  Then, like an electric shock, something occurred to Trevelyan that hadn't before. With it came a flood of fear and disbelief. He grabbed the balcony rail, to curb his swoon, and stared up at the chapel's tower. “It's… It's…” He caught his breath and released it in a whisper. “It's not possible.”

  “We've spent the whole night surrounded by the living dead,” Ray said angrily. “Why don't we get over whether or not it's possible?”

  Trevelyan turned on Ray. “I'm not talking about the Templars!” He pointed to the balcony roof and, by implication, to the tower above. “I'm talking about the bells. They can't be ringing. It's not possible.”