by Hugo Huesca
And then he had to lure three children far away from the rest of the Colony when they had resisted the illusion he had cast. And now he was having trouble surpassing those three kids, who were holding him back so far…
“You are not a predator, you are a coward,” Quark muttered with his jaw clenched shut.
Something, someone out there was looking for him, and he could feel it… In desperation, he reached out into the Martian night. And there he found a warm presence, far into the sky, flying straight at him, as if he were homing into a beacon right on top of Quark’s head. The kid’s fears disappeared, and he could feel Sullivan drawing back, its mind-tendrils retreating……
Old Sullivan roared, and stepped back, his face contorted into a snarl.
“You are just a bully, aren’t you?” said Quark. “I bet you got so weak, hiding here in the dark for so long. I bet you are not as strong as you want us to believe.”
And then, instead of merely holding back the vampire’s mind, he pushed against it, tearing with all the strength of the four of them into Sullivan’s own.
The man screamed, and raised his arms upwards as if in prayer. Quark could feel him trying to force itself back on the attack, but he pushed again, with all his strength. Besides him, other three minds pushed with him. They overwhelmed it.
Sullivan fell on his knees, and then its skin melted, his suit evaporated slowly. The thing screamed without making any noise, a scream inside Quark’s mind. And then the veil tore apart.
It was as if Sullivan had disappeared into a black smoke cloud, absorbed into thin air almost instantly, leaving behind the true form of the vampire.
Quark could see now there had never been any man or any disguise. What floated stunned a few feet above the floor was more like a sheet of oily black silk, vaguely resembling a shark skin with long, frail tendrils that scrambled furiously in the air. It floated as if it swam in the Martian sky, like a bizarre jellyfish. It had no eyes, but Quark could glimpse a reddish underside, filled with rows of suction cups. He also caught a glimpse of a beak at its center, from which it spat weak jets of ink-like mist, like an octopus. The mist tried to coalesce around him, as if it was alive, to reform the vampire’s cloak; but it was too little, too weak, and it scattered in the Martian atmosphere.
That was the true Martian Count. It screeched pathetically from its beak, like a scared baby. It was upsetting and sad at the same time.
Quark was alone in his own head, which still pulsed weakly, remembering the pain it had endured. With the monster’s connection broken, the others’ presence faded too.
“You were never even real,” said Quark, with contempt. His flashlight beam hit it directly, and the thing sizzled. It screamed in a high, piercing shriek and it swam through the air for the relief of the dark in a blur of speed, so fast Quark had lost it in a mere instant.
He looked around with his flashlight, trying to catch it again, to make sure it was not coming back, but the beam only found darkness.
The kid turned to his friends. Lizzy looked as ashen and as shaken as he did, but the girl stood up without flinching, holding her head with one hand. “We have to get out of here, Quark.”
Orion was not moving, and for a terrible second, Quark thought the kid wasn’t breathing. But then Orion opened his eyes and reached for Lizzy, who helped him stand up.
“What… happened? For a second, I thought we were in Quark’s house, playing with his parent’s machines. I wanted so hard to take my helmet off… But you guys wouldn’t let me.”
“I think we beat him, all of us,” said Lizzy, out of breath. Quark joined her and got Orion by his other arm and together they limped slowly towards the exit. “At the end, he transformed into this… this Martian bat and flew away. Quark’s flashlight hurt him.”
The girl pointed her own beam at every wall and the ceiling, just in case, with every few steps.
“It looked more like a fish-thing to me,” Quark added, “I don’t think it was ever a man, perhaps not even intelligent. I think it was that ink… I saw it in my dream, too, and I think that’s how it… hunts. Builds itself a cloud around its body and uses it to trick us into believing it’s like us.”
“Like camouflage,” said Lizzy, dubiously, “I don’t know, Quark, he seemed quite smart to me. He said his kind had been on Earth, too.”
“I don’t know. I bet it can fly in space, as long as it’s well fed. But the same… cloak it used to reach into our minds we could use to reach his. And he was very weak. He had fed only a couple of times after being asleep for so long, see? That’s how we broke him. He tried to break our minds, and instead we broke his. We overloaded it.”
“You are saying the ink was his brain?” Lizzy asked, and Quark could feel her shiver next to him. “That’s disgusting.”
“Back there,” Orion mumbled, “we had help. I could feel someone else. I… I think it was your dad, Quark.”
The kid nodded. And wondered. If the ink was the conductor, how had his dad been able to reach him? He had felt him so far away… But that hadn’t stopped Frank Campbell, even if it was impossible.
“Yeah. I know.”
After they got out of the chamber, the hardest part was the path towards the cave’s entrance. They tried to walk down without stumbling and falling. The three kids felt more tired than ever in their life, and the sand and the loose Martian pebbles threatened to make them slip at every step. And yet, they helped each other keep a stable footing, and slowly made their way down.
The Martian night had progressed beyond darkness now. It was riddled with stars and the light of the two moons. To Quark, who had never known another night-sky, it still managed to look like the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. And in the middle of it all, he could see the light-beam of a Coaster approaching at full speed towards them. Quark knew it was his father.
The Futurisians walked towards it, waving, even when there was no doubt he had seen them. Quark felt a wave of relief wash over him. They were safe. His father was coming to get them, and he brought help. They had survived the lair of the vampire.
Then something fast and slick hit him hard against his back and Quark fell to the floor, stunned. He felt a sharp pang of pain in his knee when he hit a rock with it, and his head banged against the side of the polyplastic helmet.
“He came back!” Lizzy exclaimed.
This time, Quark was ready. He would never let that thing scare him anymore. Instead, he was angry. He rolled on the floor until he was on his back. The Count was trying to envelop itself against Quark’s helmet. The kid remembered how fast it had carried Orion to its lair. How fast it could move. Perhaps it was strong enough to break the polyplastic, with those tendrils of it.
So he grabbed at it and caught a fistful of its leathery skin at a corner, near its tendrils, and yanked the monster down to the floor.
The thing screeched its baboon-cry with fury and tried to wiggle itself out of Quark’s hold. The kid put all his weight over it, and it pulled and pulled. It gaining on him, slipping away with a mad fury… Then Lizzy fell over it and grabbed at it just like Quark, and together the two Futurisians wrestled it to the ground, where it could not fly or get away, using their weight against it.
“You dumb thing! You could have survived!” Quark spat at it. The Count screeched again, but this time with mindless panic, and wriggled with all its strength, shaking the kids around like they were riding a furious bull.
Its tentacles enveloped Quark’s helmet and tried to push it towards the sharp beak, that opened and closed desperately while it spat its ink like black foam. Quark tried to push it away, but the suction cups that covered the tentacles held to the polyplastic. The boy roared, and smashed his fist against the oily skin of the octopus-like thing, again and again. The beak scratched against the helmet, leaving thin, long lines on its surface. It was going to pierce it…
Then the full-powered beam of a flashlight shone on him almost point-blank. Quark closed his eyes, stunned for a moment,
and he could hear the Count screech in agony, and sizzle… Its leathery skin scorched and shriveled and covered in yellow ulcers and red meaty cracks. It fell to the floor and thrashed for a moment, weaker every time, until it was silent and unmoving. The beam held on even then, burning and burning.
Quark blinked furiously until he stopped seeing dancing stars and caught sight of Orion’s silhouette laying on the floor, still aiming his flashlight at a charred bunch of meat at Quark and Lizzy's feet.
“Orion, you saved us!” Lizzy said.
“Yeah, I totally did, right?” The kid said. “It wasn’t so scary after all, without his cloak.” And then he fell unconscious.
The Coaster arrived just a minute later, its jets roaring blue flame behind it, and it landed gracefully a couple meters away. Quark’s dad dismounted and rushed over to the kids.
“Quark!” He exclaimed, with preoccupation marked on his face underneath his polyplastic helmet, “I saw it all, by Christ. Is that…… was that Old Sullivan?”
“What’s left of him,” Quark muttered. “Dad… Orion isn’t moving—”
The man went to check the boy’s vitals, downloading them straight to his tablet. For a moment, Quark tried to read his father’s serious expression, fearing the worst. Then the man said:
“He is dehydrated. He’s going to need medical attention, but I think he will be alright. He’s just sleeping. Don’t worry, his dad is coming to get us. Mom’s with him, too.”
Quark let out a breath of relief and finally relaxed. It felt good to let the adults handle matters for a change. His dad checked his and Lizzy’s vitals and asked them a lot of questions. He took a lot of pictures and samples of the dead, charred animal that had confounded the minds of almost the entire colony. It didn’t look as scary, crumpled in the Martian soil, it looked like old roadkill, small and disgusting.
Quark said nothing. He glanced the Martian moons. He felt very tired, and very old, which was a new feeling for a boy of eleven. He felt a weird melancholy as if he had lost something valuable during the face to face with Old Sullivan. He didn’t know what it was, but he would have years to learn its name, and maybe try and find it again.
When Orion’s dad arrived in the buggy and everyone was on their way back to the Colony, Lizzy was already asleep too, and Quark felt he would join his friends soon.
He suspected the Futurisians had earned a rest from adventuring for a while. Perhaps even a whole week. But they had the job cut out for them for years to come, he thought, looking over the window.
He could see the landscape of Mars, lit up by Phobos and Deimos, littered with mountains –some of them as big as some countries back on Earth. He remembered the words of the monster: “A long time ago it was easy to swim over the vastness of the True Night, you see. Some of my kin liked to visit your world, even some of my own children. I preferred the cold planets, farther away…”
There were many, many mountains in the Martian landscape, and Quark felt the dead planet was merely sleeping. And with the Colony bringing new life to the barren wasteland, maybe the sleeping may stir again…
Quark was a Martian, too. This planet was his home, with all its secrets and all its dangers. And if more Counts rose from their slumber, out of their tombs demanding worship and water with their mist-like cloaks, they would find that Mars had new owners. Ready to fight back.