Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy

by K. J. Wignall

  William of Mercia may have eluded me, but over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries I caught many of his kind. Some were from the wider area surrounding this city, for this seems a region particularly plagued by them, and others from across these islands.

  I learned many hard lessons in those early days. I learned, for example, that the best way of transporting them was in a sealed box during the daytime – after all, why would they wish to escape into the agony of sunlight?

  Equally, and almost to my great cost, I learned that as well as superhuman strength, they were possessed of the ability to open locks with the use of their minds alone. After much trial and error, I developed an ingenious system in which chains held their cages shut, but the chains fed through the floor and were locked in another room.

  The bars and chains were made from a particularly strong alloy of my own design, but as knowledge of electricity developed in the early nineteenth century, I soon learned that I could run a current through the metal, strong enough to convince the captives that it was better not to touch the bars.

  I won’t dispute that some of the experiments I’ve carried out on these demons have not been pleasant. How else was I to learn how they lived and how they died? Fire and sunlight I soon discovered would make them plead for death, but would not kill them. Fire and light, I also learned, would make them talk.

  Yet much of what I learned early on was gained without resorting to such methods. The second vampire I caught, in 1842, was unearthed in the south-west of England, a gentlemanly creature who insisted on being known only as Baal. A scholar in his first youth, he considered it amusing to be known now by the name of one of the Princes of Hell, for that is what he believed he’d become.

  He still had the look of a young student with dreams of following in the footsteps of the late Lord Byron, yet Baal had actually been alive since the time of Chaucer. Born in 1360, he’d been lucky enough to be taken under the tutelage of the vampire who’d infected him. It speaks of both Baal’s sense of honour and his ruthlessness that he’d killed his master as soon as he’d learned everything the latter could impart.

  It was Baal who told me that they only fed on those who did not carry the vampire bloodline, and even then only on those who were fit and healthy. It was the life force they were taking from their victims, spiritual nourishment rather than food, and the life remaining within a body determined how long it would be before they needed blood again.

  Garlic, he told me, was not repugnant to them, but confused their otherwise extraordinary senses, making it impossible to judge the blood of potential victims. The crucifix meant nothing to them, and Baal, a committed and penitent believer himself, reasoned this was because his condition predated the arrival of Christianity.

  Daylight and fire were like the agonies of Hell, and a stake through the heart would weaken them to the extent of helplessness, but Baal also confirmed that I had quite accidentally chanced upon the only certain way of killing a vampire – the removal of its head.

  Of course, I did not entirely take Baal’s word for all these things and carried out experiments over the following decades to test the truth of them. He was never the subject of these himself, and I must admit that for all the evil he carried within him, I respected him, even liked him.

  In 1861, desperate for blood, he begged me to end his life. He had been reading almost continuously for months before this, the Bible most often of all, even though I tried to discourage him from a book which I’ve never found of worth.

  I agreed, albeit with a sad heart, and before the end I asked if he would at last tell me his real name.

  “I cannot use it,” he said. “It would bring shame on the good people who gave it to me.” I nodded and he said, “I’m ready,” and closed his eyes.

  Another demon in an adjoining cage had never seen his own kind’s death, and the sight of Baal disappearing so completely filled him with such horror that he began to babble. How ironic that it was an act of mercy on my part that should lead to the greatest leap in my knowledge.

  It still took the application of bright lights to get the facts reasonably straight, but it was this creature that told me of Lorcan Labraid, a demon it laughably described as the overlord of all vampires, a vampire king. Even under extreme torture, it claimed not to know the whereabouts of this greater demon, but it did admit to knowing where I could find Labraid’s servant, the demon that did his bidding. Was this William of Mercia, I asked, because I had heard the name by now and reasoned it was the one I sought.

  “William of Mercia?” The creature laughed through its pain. “It’s not for the likes of me to know about William of Mercia. But the vampire I speak of is more powerful than anything you’ll have yet encountered.”

  This was intriguing, but once again I couldn’t persuade it to talk further on the subject, even when I threatened to remove its head, a threat I eventually carried out. In the face of such obstinacy or ignorance, the only inference I could take was that even the vampire king, Lorcan Labraid, waited on William of Mercia.

  I had neither of them, but I had precise information on the whereabouts of Labraid’s loyal lieutenant. The location was close by, deep beneath a mausoleum in one of the city’s oldest cemeteries. If it had not been for the information I’d received, I would not have believed the mausoleum to contain any hidden passages and I certainly could not find the entrance.

  But in much the same way as we’d captured that first vampire many years before, I surrounded the mausoleum at dusk with a handful of servants, their lanterns covered so as not to give away our position.

  The small stone building had a circular window high up facing the door and this window had broken at some point in the past. The plan was that, when I gave the word, one of the servants would lift the kitchen boy up to that broken window and he would drop a burning torch inside with the aim of flushing the demon out – I knew it would be able to sense us outside and did not want it to retreat deep underground.

  A little after nightfall I heard stone slabs moving within the mausoleum. A stillness followed, and this I knew from experience was the demon testing the air. I signalled and the boy was lifted up to the window. He looked briefly horrified, and for a moment, I feared he would lose his nerve, but with admirable precision, he threw the burning torch into the building.

  The scream which resulted was so alarming that I saw my servants becoming agitated, but they had no time to think on what was coming. An instant later, the demon emerged, wild and vicious and terrifying. Even in the painful glare of our lamps, it lashed out and I think if we’d been relying on light alone, we wouldn’t have succeeded.

  But the demon had failed to notice that it had emerged on to a small wooden platform and now, at my command, four sides of a cage sprang up round the creature, a fifth falling into place on the roof. The process was so fast that there was no longer any question that the demon would end up in my cellars.

  Little did I know that this was the point at which my progress with this particular fiend was to end. Usually when caught, the creatures spend the first days testing the bars and exploring their surroundings like a spider trying to escape an upturned glass.

  As if sensing immediately that there was no escape, this demon sat and fell deep into some sort of trance from which it could not be shaken. It was as if it was deep in communication with itself, or with another far away.

  I burned its flesh and it did not flinch, I even used mirrors to expose it to sunlight, and though its flesh combusted, still the demon did not respond. The flesh healed and I tried again, but always without response. Nor over the many decades that followed did it ever give any indication of a spiritual hunger from the lack of blood.

  I knew full well that this was a demon of a different order, and even though it failed to yield any further information, I became convinced that if this strikingly strong and powerful demon answered to Lorcan Labraid, then maybe he was indeed a vampire king.

  For nearly one hundred and
fifty years I have held this demon captive, longer than any of the others, and in all that I time I had never heard it speak, nor seen any other signs to suggest it was even fully conscious. Then last November, as I worked nearby, it suddenly uttered five words, quite clearly.

  So surprised was I that I couldn’t be certain I had heard correctly. But I noticed the demon’s eyes were open, and it seemed to smile as it repeated the words, “William of Mercia rises again.”

  I walked over and asked it what it meant by those words, but nothing more was forthcoming, the trance was re-established, and I knew better than to waste time on more torture.

  This creature was evil, and it waited upon evil in the form of Lorcan Labraid, and Lorcan Labraid waited upon evil in the form of William of Mercia. I knew this was not just the end of another hibernation for my mother’s tormentor, but that something momentous was afoot and that if good was to triumph, I would need to prepare for battle. This, I realised, was the point to which I’d been heading, and for which I hoped my long education had prepared me.

  26

  Eloise walked a couple of paces ahead of him, then stopped and turned, smiling. The sun was behind her, catching her hair, outlining the curves of her body through the material of her summer blouse.

  “I could tell you things about this place that you don’t know.”

  “Then tell me,” Will said.

  She reached out and took his hands, her warmth radiating through him, and lowered herself to sit on the grass, pulling him to the ground too. A memory flashed into Will’s mind, of lowering Alex Shawcross to the floor in the same way, but he fought to stop it from taking over.

  “Take the grass we’re sitting on.” He looked down at it, a vibrant sunlit green that filled him with heartache. “There are thousands of bodies buried under it, all over here.”

  “How so?”

  She said, “They found hundreds when they built the old house, more when they built the new one, but they’re everywhere. They think a huge battle took place here in ancient times, but it was a burial site too, for pagan warriors and kings.”

  “I should’ve known that,” he said, but he was distracted now by her lips, soft, slightly parted, inviting. He leaned forward and kissed her and reached out to hold her, but his hand failed to find the warmth of her body and the dream melted away.

  Will opened his eyes, disappointed, and stared at the wall of skulls which stared blankly back at him. He was sitting cross-legged, his back against the ossuary door. He wondered if his location had inspired the dream or if the dream had answered for all these remains.

  Marland had been a place of significance long before the abbey had been built there, that much was obvious to him. It had been common too for churches to be built on sites that had been of significance to their pagan predecessors.

  So a sacred place for the burial of warriors and kings seemed likely. But the site of a large battle too? There had been no talk of this being a battlefield during Will’s childhood, or at least nothing that had been spoken of in front of him. If there had been a battle here, it could only have been in ancient times.

  He stood and looked at one of the skulls, running his hand across the time-darkened facial bones, up towards the jagged fracture on one side of the forehead. And he wondered what this warrior would have been able to tell him of this place and what had happened here.

  Will was distracted for a moment, sensing that the sun had set in the world above, but he turned back to the skull and stared a few moments longer, trying to imagine the man this had been, saying finally, “Little do you know how much I envy you.”

  He turned and left the ossuary, though he delayed for another hour or so in the crypt. He listened to the school choir as it practised above, and at the end, he heard the supervising teacher mention something about the appointment of a new chaplain. They filed out afterwards, chattering, happy, and the lights were turned out and the heavy door closed.

  A little while later, Will climbed the steps. The combination of the moon behind snow clouds and the snow itself on the ground outside produced an ethereal light that made him feel homesick for his own church again, a homesickness that represented everything he had lost and longed to get back, even as he knew it would never be in his power again.

  He sat in one of the pews, losing track of time. When he heard someone approaching, he moved quickly and descended halfway down the steps into the crypt. The door opened and closed, but rather than the lights coming on, a torch beam bounced across the dark interior of the chapel.

  A moment later, he heard Eloise say, “Will?”

  He put on his dark glasses, not confident of them managing to keep the torch beams under control, and climbed the steps again.

  “I’m here.”

  They both had torches and walked towards him now, going to great lengths to keep the beams on the floor in front of them. Marcus was carrying a rucksack and Eloise held some rolled-up papers under her arm.

  She said, “We’ve brought candles – there are still a lot of people about so we thought it might make more sense to go to the crypt.”

  “Good thinking,” said Will and walked back down the steps ahead of them.

  He waited then while Eloise and Marcus lit some candles on one of the flat-topped tombs in the second chamber. Once there was enough light for them to see, they turned off the torches and Will removed his glasses.

  Marcus looked around the room and said, “You spent the whole day down here? You don’t sleep?”

  “I don’t sleep at all. And I spent most of the day in there.” He pointed at the old wooden door to the ossuary. “It’s the nature of my condition – one gets used to being alone.”

  Marcus nodded, accepting the comment at face value. “I suppose we’re all alone one way or another.”

  “Cheery,” said Eloise, then pointed and said, “What’s in there anyway?”

  “It’s full of human bones. There was a battle here long ago, the ground all around is full of human remains.”

  Eloise looked surprised and said, “How amazing. I’ve never heard anything about that.”

  Will wasn’t sure why he took such perverse satisfaction from proving his dream wrong and said only, “It’s not a widely known fact.”

  “Well, maybe it should be.” She smiled. “Anyway, we’ve had a productive day. The place we’re looking for is called Southerton House, a couple of miles outside the city, but on the other side from us. Marcus recognised the picture straight away. And it’s owned by a company based in the Cayman Islands, which is obviously one of Wyndham’s fronts.”

  She spread out a map of the area on the top of the tomb and pointed to where the house was, then placed a photograph next to it, printed off the internet. Will looked at them, but didn’t think he’d ever seen the house, even on his longer nocturnal walks. Seeing the map and how little of it he’d covered made him realise how confined his world was. For the most part, since the time of his sickness, he had stirred little beyond the city itself, particularly as the edges of the city had crept out into the countryside.

  He turned to Marcus and said, “What sort of defences does he have?”

  “You mean security?” He got a nod from Eloise and said, “Probably cameras on the gates and walls, but I didn’t see them. He told me there were attack dogs in the grounds and I bet the house is alarmed.”

  “Not very much to contend with,” said Will, and wondered if Wyndham was a little too confident that his house would not be found, and that his sorcery would be enough to protect it if it were. Not that Will underestimated Wyndham’s magical powers. He turned to Marcus. “I know I need not ask Eloise, but I ask you, do you want to be part of this? There will be unknown dangers and it will place your break with Wyndham beyond repair.”

  “Oh, I’m coming. I’m done with Wyndham, I told you that, and besides, you need me there.”

  “So be it,” said Will. “You have torches which, as Eloise knows well, are as useful a weapon as any. We have the sabr
es.” He looked at Marcus and said, “He will have told you, but I tell you again, avoid eye contact with them. If you stab them through the heart, they are weakened but not killed. The only way of killing them is to sever the head.”

  Even as he spoke, he realised he was talking about “them” instead of “us” and Marcus appeared to pick up on that and said, “Hold on, I thought the vampires were on your side. I thought that’s why we’re going there, so that they can tell you stuff.”

  “That is my hope, but you say these poor creatures have been locked up, possibly for decades or more, starved of blood, driven half-mad. I sincerely hope Asmund’s master is more helpful than he was himself, but the others could be very dangerous indeed.”

  “Yeah, they’re in some pretty serious cages, but I get what you’re saying.”

  Will looked at Eloise and said, “I’ll try to obtain a weapon for you, or you …”

  Before he finished she said, “I’ll take a torch, but I’m not chopping anyone’s head off, so it’s better that I don’t – I’ll end up dropping it or something, or stabbing myself with it.”

  “Fine. All that remains then is to plan a time. Is tomorrow night convenient?”

  They looked at each other and Eloise said, “As good as any. About eleven o’clock? How are we getting there? Do you want me to call Rachel and Chris?”

  “No, we’ll take a taxi. I see no way of them helping in this, so I see no point in endangering them.” She appeared satisfied with that, and certainly didn’t seem to think it was a matter of trust. And for once, it wasn’t, but rather a practical decision. “Good. We’ll meet here tomorrow.”

  Marcus looked enthusiastic, but said, “Great, but I’ve got to go. I’ve got a chess match waiting for me.”

  “I’ll catch you up,” said Eloise.

  Marcus flashed her a cheeky, knowing grin, gave his now familiar wave to Will, even though he was standing within reach of him, and left, skipping up the steps of the crypt.

  Eloise waited until she heard the door to the chapel open and close and looked at Will questioningly. Will nodded, assuring her that Marcus had left, and she said, “You do trust him?”