‘Marie Antoinette said. ‘Let them eat cake.’ And the people threw stale bread at her. Vampires tend to have a more direct – go for the throat – type of approach. Devils, of course, just frighten you to death.
However this may be, on the London Streets, a Saturday night quite often looked like Hell – from a certain angle – for instance, face down in a gutter full of vomit, not necessarily your own, with both knees broken.
Quite a few people, certainly more than was usual, were experiencing this exact view of the city tonight. And there was worse than this going on.
The term “Bloodbath” is also one that is often used, and, without going into another diatribe about it, I invite you to really think about this one too. Of course, this has been, on occasion, a pretty accurate description of human behaviour. – The massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572, when the Seine actually ran red with the blood of the Huguenots, comes to mind, well to my mind anyway, I am sure you can think of your own examples. But nothing on this scale had been seen before, or rather nothing this concentrated.
Because of course, the carnage that was going on was at this time, confined to a handful of streets and a mere forty thousand vampires and devils. But it was spreading. More were coming. This was only the beginning.
* * *
‘Well,’ said Denny eventually, ‘I suppose, we’d better …’
Stiles shrugged. Between them was the unspoken assumption that they would go and they would fight, even though there was no hope of them winning or even surviving for more than a few minutes – if they were lucky.
Even if Tamar had come back, they would have no chance; it was obvious to them now. They were several streets away from the centre of it. But even from here, the noise and the smell of brimstone and blood was indescribable.
They all grabbed what weapons they could carry and just stood looking at each other for a moment. They did not say “Lock and Load” or “Let’s kick some arse”. This was not the time. They were headed out to an unheralded, useless, pointless inglorious, tasteless and probably rather greasy certain death. There did not seem to be anything to say, or any point in saying it. No valiant last stand, this. It was more like suicide. No one would see them fight and die. No one would care or remember them. They would save no lives. But they were going to do it anyway. Because, in the end, what else was there to do? This was what it was all about in the end. This is why soldiers go over the top. It’s not for glory, it’s because there’s nothing else they can do. Because, some things are worth fighting for. Even if you are already beaten before you start, that’s no reason not to try.
‘It is better to be a broken jade,’ muttered Denny. Part of an old Chinese proverb, which runs: “It is better to be broken jade, than a rude, whole clay pot.”
‘Death before dishonour,’ translated Cindy surprisingly.
He smiled at her; she was loaded up with a crossbow, an axe, a sword and a backpack full of wooden stakes. It was clear that she intended to go down fighting. That was if she could even walk under all that weight. At least she was not going to run away. She would not be able to.
* * *
The devils etc. were making themselves at home. The streets actually looked quite a lot like Hell, as Denny remembered it from his brief visit. Every house for miles was on fire. This was an effective way of driving people out into the streets. Although, Denny thought, had they realised what was waiting for them outside, most people would have preferred to burn. They were going to anyway.
Stiles was in the lead for some reason. He would have said, had he been able to articulate his motives, that it was for reasons of seniority. But, since Hecaté was with them, this argument, on its own, would have fallen down. Just as he did, as soon as he entered the seething crowd of frenzied vampires and devils.
Denny followed him. Abruptly, like walking through the back of an enchanted wardrobe, he was in a different world. A blood red world punctuated by indistinct black shapes dancing against the flames, hazy in the heat and smoke. He felt as if he was moving in slow motion. Up ahead of him, he saw the figure of Stiles; he seemed to be moving quite fast. He watched him swing a large battle-axe at a vampire and remove its head in a shower of dust.
Suddenly he was running. ‘I’ve got your back,’ he yelled. He surged forward unhampered dragging Cindy in his wake, who dragged Jamie in hers. Hecaté was ahead of him.
They formed a circle facing out, while the vampires moved in on them menacingly.
Vampires traditionally do not play well with others, but these seemed to have learned a level of cooperation, or at least, the basic tenets of ganging up on a common enemy.
As paleontologists have extrapolated that the velociraptors may have done, but which Tamar said was nonsense, they all leapt at once. As they had done the night before, they employed the “divide and conquer” method. Jamie was the first to be dragged away. Denny did not see any more. It took twenty vampires to bring him down. But there was no shortage let’s face it.
Stiles was next; Cindy saw him being hoisted up and passed along the top of the screeching crowd, before she herself was grabbed from behind by her hair. The claws passed within millimetres of her head, slicing off a large chunk of her shining, blonde crowning glory.
Cindy was furious. ‘That was my hair, you bastard,’ she screeched, turning on the unfortunate devil with a ferocity that was rarely seen, even in Hell. The devil was soon in tiny pieces, if it had been on its own, Cindy would have been laughing. As it was, there was nothing funny about fifteen enraged devils bearing down on you and banging your head against the pavement.
It was Hecaté who had the best view of what happened next. She was in the centre of a phalanx of circling vampires, none of whom seemed too keen to get near to her, the reason being, she was on fire. Or at least, she appeared to be on fire, which is nearly the same thing. The vampires suddenly stopped moving.
Denny was on the ground waiting for fanged death, when he realised that everything had gone quiet. The vampire that had him by the throat was frozen in an attitude of vicious ferocity that now looked faintly absurd. Denny leapt to his feet and looked around him. The shrieking world around him was now silent. The grotesque dancing figures, a ghastly frieze. Time had stopped.
Only one person was capable of that, that he knew of. This was confirmed when a loud familiar voice was heard echoing around the silent streets. ‘I thought I told you not to start without me.’
Then another sound could be heard. The sound of many thousands of marching feet. Behind him, he heard Hecaté gasp.
The marching stopped. A cold wind blew suddenly through the streets, clearing the smoke away and revealing, by the light of the frozen flames, Tamar standing triumphantly at the head of an army of … of …
‘Oh the clever, clever girl,’ said Hecaté.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Denny.
‘Do not say that,’ warned Hecaté. ‘Half the magic is in the belief.’ She smiled abstractedly ‘You needed an army. She has made you one.’
‘How?’
‘They’re golems.’
‘What are they?’ hissed Denny.
‘Oh the clever, clever girl,’ said Hecaté. ‘And look behind you.’
Behind them was another army, just the same. And, in fact, all around them the streets that the hordes of hell had occupied were now blocked off on every side by Tamar’s multitudes.
‘But,’ persisted Denny. ‘What the hell are they?’
‘They’re golems,’ Hecaté repeated.
Denny’s brow furrowed ‘Gollums, what’re they?’
‘Go – lems,’ corrected Hecaté. ‘They are … well, any inanimate three dimensional representation of a human being, like for instance, a statue can be … well, not brought to life exactly, but …’
‘Okay, I get the idea,’ said Denny. ‘Sort of like robots – artificial intelligence?’
‘Yes,’ said Hecaté dubiously. ‘That is not a bad interpretation of it. They are not alive,
as we understand it. They have the accoutrements of life, but not the living spark.’
‘You mean that they can walk and talk but there’s nothing going on inside, a bit like Civil Servants?’
But Hecaté had never heard of Civil Servants. However, she assented to the general thrust of this statement.
Statues eh?’ he continued. He looked more closely at the ranks of warriors ahead. They did indeed, now he looked at them, seem to be statues of some sort, although they were a rather unattractive shade of reddish brown.
‘I think that the first few ranks of each – battalion?’ said Hecaté. ‘Would that be the term?
‘It’ll do,’ said Denny, wondering where she was going with this.
‘Yes, the first ranks of each are made up of the Emperor Qin Shi Huang-di’s army of Terracotta Warriors, which guard his grave. But look behind them.’
‘Terracotta warriors?’ said Denny. ‘Like flowerpots are made of?’
Then, in response to Hecaté’s urging, he looked beyond them. And saw …
Every possible representation of the human form that mankind had ever come up with. Thousands upon thousands, rank upon rank of … Statues, shop dummies, scarecrows, some of these, were no more than a few farm implements covered in old potato sacks with a face painted on the topmost sack, but they stood to attention in the eerie light and gave an impression of alertness. Denny was horrified by them.
On his right, he saw several hundred Michelin men bobbing importantly like overfed businessmen. And on his left, among the sartorial elegance of the department store mannequins he could just pick out the odd Ronald McDonald. The bright red heads nodding ridiculously above the crowd.
‘I think I’m having a seizure,’ said Denny.
Tamar’s voice was heard again, from the front lines. ‘Get the civilians out,’ she ordered. ‘I’m going to start up time again.’
‘Why not just leave them like this?’ said Denny gesturing to the frozen hordes.
‘No, it has to end here,’ said Hecaté.
‘First wave,’ shouted Tamar. ‘Attack.’
The Terracotta Warriors of China’s first Emperor surged forward.
‘They take orders?’ said Denny.
‘They wouldn’t be much use to us if they didn’t,’ observed Stiles. He had been far less astounded than Denny had been by the golems. To Stiles, it was all equally incredible, whereas Denny worked on different levels of incredulity. The sight of five thousand of these “flowerpot men” as he thought of them, marching forward with slow deliberation stamping out the fires of Hell and ripping up lampposts like daffodils as they went, was somewhere right at the top. In an abstracted way, he could see why Tamar had put them at the front. They were terrifying.
The dammed thought so too. Most of them did not stay to fight, which Denny thought was very sensible of them. The problem that they had, was that there was nowhere for them to run. Tamar, with a military prowess that Denny felt he should have expected of her (she certainly ran his life with terrifying precision) had blocked off all possible exits. Suddenly the thought struck Denny, which had possibly already occurred to you. They were going to win. And why not? Their army was far bigger than Askphrit’s and was entirely composed of beings, which, by virtue of not being alive in the first place, could not die. Of course, technically the dammed were not alive either. But they were merely un-dead.
‘What we have here,’ he thought, ‘are the un-alive!’ He was beginning to enjoy himself.
He was now facing away from what he had thought of as the front lines, because that was where Tamar was, but, in fact, there was a front line in every direction. It was the lesser known, “Box ’em in and slaughter ’em” movement.*
*[The difference between this manoeuvre and other typical military manoeuvres, is that this one works]
From behind him, he heard Tamar’s voice ringing out. ‘Second wave – ATTACK.’
The golems, of all types, had this in common. They all commenced hostilities in absolute silence, which made their attack all the more unnerving. The only sounds were the thin despairing wails of the damned as the tables were turned on them. Now, as the ranks of mannequins and statues ran them down in eerie silence, their retreat became a rout. On his left, Stiles was startled to hear another sound rupture the night air. The sound of war whoops. He turned, startled, and nudged Denny. Behind them, breaking ranks was, what was, by comparison to the other battalions, a mere raiding party of Cigar Store Indians firing wooden arrows with unerring accuracy into the welter of vampires in the streets.
Now it may have occurred to the more astute among you that vampires can fly. At least some of them can. Vampires have different talents, just as humans do. Golems do not ordinarily fly, because humans do not ordinarily fly. But there are exceptions. As one or two of them managed to escape the turmoil in the street and rose into the air, the sound of a cock-crow could be heard above the streets. Every head automatically turned upwards. And there, circling gracefully, firing rapid arrows at the horrified vampires, was the statue of Peter Pan that is usually to be found, standing charmingly on its plinth (and behaving itself far better than the original could ever have done) in front of the house that inspired his existence. Tamar had thought of everything.
‘Oh, isn’t he lovely,’ cooed Cindy predictably. And he really was too.
‘More to the point,’ said Stiles, isn’t he vicious?’ and this was also true.
‘Still, I’d say he could use a hand,’ said Denny, it was true, there were more vampires trying the vertical escape route and Peter was running out of arrows.
Denny manifested a bow and arrow and rose up into the air to join him. Thus becoming the unconscious object of envy of small boys everywhere, even in these cynical times.
When he saw Denny, the statue of Peter Pan let out a delighted ‘Cock a doodle doo.’ And flipped a somersault in mid-air. Denny mimicked this sound and his “crowing” was unerringly accurate too – one of the lesser known advantages of having perfect pitch.
Stiles could not help laughing.
From this vantage, Denny could see the ranks of golems stretching out below him for what seemed like miles in every direction. Over the horizon, he was quite certain that the neon figure lounging nonchalantly against the skyline was L.A.’s infamous Marlboro Man. But he “hadn’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Down on the ground, Stiles was astounded to see coming up behind the mannequins and scarecrows, a rather smaller army. ‘Jesus,’ he thought, ‘Tamar must have raided every toyshop in the western world.’
It was like “Small Soldiers” meets “Bride of Chucky” and some of those “Tiny Tears” dolls, really did have preternaturally ferocious expressions.
Jamie, at Tamar’s side, was watching the carnage with an unusually abstracted expression, as if he were watching, from very far away, events that did not really matter very much. Tamar was rather too busy to notice his strange behaviour at the moment.
After a while, he turned abruptly and disappeared into the shadows.
Tamar never noticed him go.
At this point, the vampires, who had been running and shrieking for some time, now appeared to redouble this activity. Denny found himself in the absolute thick of a veritable swarm of panicking bloodsuckers who had all risen suddenly, as if by command. The devils on the ground now had more room to manoeuvre, and they also began to try even more desperately than before, to escape.
Denny, higher up than the others, was first to notice a weird light in the East. A gentle glow that seemed to be spreading. He shook his head stupidly. Then all activity ceased abruptly, as every head was turned to follow his gaze. The dammed shrieked in despair as Tamar and the others let out a cheer, both weary and triumphant. And Denny suddenly realised what he was seeing.
It was the dawn.
~ Chapter Twenty Three ~
Askphrit sat drumming his fingers impatiently. Why had no one come to bring him news of his victory? The lack of discipline down here was appalling. We
ll, there would be a day of reckoning all right. If they thought they could get away with this they could … he would light a fire under them all right, just as soon as … and then they would all be … Once he ruled the world there would be no more of this slack behaviour. He would see to that. It would all be … Aha, yes, he would be the Despot that he had always wanted to be, and then… and then … oh yes – then there would be some … and everybody would be sorry. Then they would see what he … mmm.
Askphrit often thought like this, in a kind of shorthand. He would talk this way too, leaving people to guess the ends of his sentences, which even for an imp, was not too difficult. There are only so many ways the sentence. ‘I’m not happy, and when I’m not happy…’ can end, and none of them are good, at least not out of certain mouths.
He was just making his mind up to stir himself and head up to the surface to find out for himself what was going on, when Peirce appeared in the room. Askphrit scowled at him and Pierce very unwisely backed away nervously. This only served to irritate Askphrit. He glared at Peirce who, he noticed now, did not look at all happy and suddenly Askphrit had a premonition.
‘What’s happened?’ he snapped.
* * *
The vampires crumbled to dust. The demons all turned to stone where they stood, providing, as Tamar said, a lot of interestingly ugly statues, which did nothing to enhance the ambience of the neighbourhood.
In the chill dawn light, the streets now looked, if possible, even more eerie than they had done during the night, particularly with the ranks of the golems now standing perfectly still and silent. The vampires were not a problem anymore, but the demons were. Come the night, Askphrit would be able to resurrect them in much the same way as Tamar had created the golems. They would not be the same as they had been, but perhaps, from Askphrit’s point of view, that would not necessarily be a bad thing. As golems, the demons would be more – suggestible, than they had previously been.
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