Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1

by John Vorholt;Arthur Byron Cover;Alice Henderson

  “Well, no. I need to talk about history.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I’ve got some questions about colonial times. I’m afraid I haven’t always been paying attention in class.”

  “So what else is new? You’ve been daydreaming about boys, right?”

  “No, I’ve been taking catnaps because I’ve been up all hours of the night keeping the world safe from the scum of the nether regions.”

  “Oh, now I understand why you’re so interested in history all of a sudden,” said Willow, her sigh indicating her reluctant acceptance. “We are, after all, having a big test this afternoon.”

  All the blood drained from Buffy’s face. “This afternoon? Today? Or this afternoon, tomorrow?”

  Willow checked her watch. “Today. In about twenty minutes, to be precise.”

  “What kind of test is it?”

  “Probably multiple choice, or in your case, multiple guess. That way it’ll be easy for Mrs. Honneger to grade. She likes doing homework about as much as we do.”

  “So, why don’t you ask me a few questions?” said Buffy, trying to relax. Tension always worked against her when she was trying to recall facts for a test, though strangely, it always seemed to help when the situation called for arcane vampire lore or sophisticated combat improvisation.

  “Okay, what year was Plymouth Colony founded?”

  “1620!”

  “Who founded it?”

  “The Puritans, who were fleeing religious persecution in England.”

  “And what did they want?” Willow asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “A place where they could enjoy religious freedom. But that’s where they sorta screwed up. ’Cause the only religion they allowed was their own. Dissenters were punished—banished! Did you know that?”

  “I knew that. What was the name of their colony?”

  “The Massachusetts Bay Colony.”

  “What kind of government did they practice?”

  “A theocracy, meaning government by interpretation of the religious scriptures. Preachers had quite a bit of influence, since officeholders always had to look to them for approval.”

  Willow pursed her lips. “Buffy, you have been studying, haven’t you? On the sly, right?”

  “Uh, right.”

  “What can you tell me about the witch trials of 1692?”

  “Not too much,” said Buffy. “A group of girls about our age became afflicted with convulsive fits; short-term hearing, seeing, and memory loss; and strange bruises and marks on the skin! The local doctors didn’t know what to call it, so their diagnosis was witchcraft! By the time the preachers, judges, and sheriffs got involved, there was a full-scale panic. At that time, anything that couldn’t be explained was blamed on the supernatural!”

  “Mrs. Honneger never told us that!”

  “Did you know that one of the first people to be accused was a slave named Tituba, who on dark and stormy nights fed the girls tales of possession and the walking dead? Tituba survived, actually, because she repented. Mrs. Honneger thinks the girls were faking their symptoms, but the problem could have been entirely medical or psychological in origin! Or maybe they just wanted the attention!”

  Buffy became pensive. “You know, if you put together the changing social and political structure of the colony with the people’s view of a world where the devil and his demons were actively conspiring against them—then the Salem witch trials were almost inevitable. Besides, hysteria over witches had been going on in Europe for a couple of centuries, and there they were burned at the stake, rather than merely hanged.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much about this test if I were you,” Willow said.

  Just then Giles stalked back in, followed by Xander, who was barely keeping his mirth to himself. Giles wore a stern expression on his face.

  “I hope you ladies are through with your little talk,” Giles said, “because I suspect a situation is brewing right under our very noses.”

  Buffy sighed. “Another emergency? No prob. I can probably fit it in between history and math.”

  Xander giggled.

  Giles looked at him sternly. “This isn’t funny. The human race could be doomed to extinction.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Xander, in tones that indicated he really wasn’t, “but you’re getting all worked up about a prophecy made two hundred years ago by some guy even you admit was insane.”

  “He doesn’t sound too reliable,” said Willow as Buffy gestured at Xander to stop snickering. Which Xander did, but with difficulty.

  Giles cleared his throat, then plunged right ahead. “I have been studying The Eibon. It is the most notorious book of prophecies ever written, with the possible exception of two lost books referred to in that great cycle of East Indian mythology, The Mahabharata. Unlike those two lost books, however, The Eibon is still with us. An early copy is almost always in the possession of the Watcher, passed down from the previous occupant of that post.

  “You’ve heard, of course, of Nostradamus, Cayce, Criswell—the great seers of modern Western thought who saw far into the future and then wrote it down, in the hope their wisdom would be handed down to subsequent generations. Their major predictions tend to be deliberately vague, so it’s possible to draw many different meanings from them. Some people, for instance, believe Nostradamus predicted the advent of the airplane and tank as weapons during World War I, while others believe the same verse refers to the approach of the tropical weather phenomenon known as El Niño. Personally, I think they’re both wrong, but nobody’s been asking me my opinion lately.”

  “Is that such a surprise?” asked Xander, unable to resist the line. He was mildly frustrated when everyone pointedly ignored him.

  “Greatest of all was the mad Austrian heretic Prince Ashton Eisenberg V, who lived from 1692 till 1776. Toward the end of his life, when he was imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris—thanks to being caught in the midst of some indiscretion—he wrote a book of prophecies unparalleled in their precision. When he writes that the snake-brother’s army shall devour the parasitic brother’s army in the New World, for instance, he’s obviously referring to the American Civil War, nearly a century later.”

  “Obviously,” agreed Willow.

  Caught up in his lecture, Giles continued, “Prince Ashton’s most famous prediction is known simply as Eisenberg’s Prophecy of the Dual Duels. It’s the vaguest of all his predictions. Roughly translated from its pidgin German, it says:

  There came a time when the planets and stars were in harmony

  A time when that which was before, shall be again,

  And that which was done, will be done again.

  A time when a great beast shall crawl onto the land,

  A beast beyond defeat but not beyond loss

  A beast who shall be vanquished by the pure in heart.

  Such a time shall come again

  As surely as the stars will once again be in similar harmony.

  And at this time another beast shall rise,

  A beast different in body but same in spirit

  And like his brother of old he shall strive

  To steal the moon, to consume the sun, and to walk the earth.

  To see if he might strike a dagger into the heart of destiny.

  “Interesting, wouldn’t you say?” Giles eagerly awaited their response.

  “Actually, the word I was thinking of was far-fetched,” said Xander.

  “I think I’m leaning toward Xander’s point of view on this one,” said Buffy. “Tell me again how accurate this guy was—”

  “—on matters other than this great beast thing,” Willow suggested.

  Giles smiled weakly. “There are some who believe Prince Ashton Eisenberg predicted night baseball.”

  “Before or after the invention of satellite television?” Xander asked smartly.

  “Before.”

  “Wow,” said Xander breathlessly. “He was good.”

  “So when did the fi
rst great beast try to walk the earth?” asked Willow.

  “The beast in question was an abomination called the Despised One. The Despised One tried to rise from the nether-regions sometime around the year of Prince Ashton’s birth—”

  “1692!” exclaimed Buffy.

  “And it happened somewhere in the New World. Now, I grant you old Ashton was certifiable, but he is a towering figure in occult studies because so many of his prophecies have come true. He claimed the ghost of the Despised One communicated with him occasionally and discussed strategies to shift the traditional balance between good and evil. Ashton approached occult rather scientifically, so when a routine examination verified the beast’s information, he realized the strategy could be repeated, but only at particular times, when rather specific conditions are met.

  “I don’t know about most of the conditions, but the stars are getting right. And that means we could be in the midst of it and not even know it yet.”

  “1692,” said Xander soberly. “That’s the year of the Salem witch trials. Which happens to be one of the subjects we’re being tested on in history class today.”

  The bell rang, indicating study period was over.

  “A test which is right about now,” said Willow.

  The moment Buffy laid down her pen in history class, she knew she’d aced the test. Answers had come to her so easily she’d had to force herself to slow down, just in case Mrs. Honneger had thrown a few trick questions into the mix.

  After midnight that evening, she snuck out of the house to foil an insane circus clown’s plot to infest the Sunnydale rat population with piranha DNA. The clown, it seemed, held a grudge against the town after some environmental mishap he had suffered during his youth.

  Buffy was successful—but not until the clown had been devoured by his own creations. Unfortunately, while eluding the horde of mutant rodents by crawling through a flooded basement, Buffy came down with a serious cold.

  By the time the rats lay dead in a giant heap before a statue of the blindfolded lady justice, Buffy could barely breathe, and she was sweating like she’d done an intense workout on a hundred-degree day.

  Immediately after sneaking back into the house, she took a cold shower to try to get her temperature to drop. Once again she was out the moment her head struck the pillow. Her hair was still wrapped in a towel and her body didn’t seem cooler by even one degree.

  Her mind fell through a sea of holes. It landed on an infinity of nothingness.

  And she was back. Back as Samantha Kane, intrepid witch hunter in 1692 Massachusetts; but the Salem gallows, the angry men, and Heather Putnam and her co-conspirators were nowhere around.

  Samantha was alone, on horseback, in the crossroads of two trails in a daylit wood. She had followed the escaped Sarah Dinsdale’s footsteps to this point, but now they had suddenly disappeared.

  No matter, Buffy heard Samantha thinking, she’ll reveal herself another way. They always do.

  Samantha’s mount was jittery. Her own horse was spent, so she’d borrowed this mount from Judge Danforth, but it wasn’t used to being ridden as hard as Samantha needed it to.

  The rays of the setting sun reflected off something down the eastern fork. Samantha jerked the reins to get the horse’s attention, then rode it roughly to the place where she’d seen the glint.

  Buffy mumbled in her sleep, “The way you’re treating that mare, it’s a wonder she doesn’t throw you in a briar patch.”

  Samantha dismounted and lifted a bright orange piece of cloth shaped like the letter W from where it was caught on top of a bramble bush. It was the mark of the witch—customarily sewn onto the clothing of a devil’s consort once sentence was passed.

  One thing was obvious: Sarah Dinsdale had taken the eastern fork.

  Samantha spurred her horse onward. Night fell quickly this time of year, and the Slayer knew she must find Sarah soon, or she would lose her under cover of darkness.

  But by late dusk Samantha realized the witch had left no further evidence of her passing this way; indeed, if she had taken this direction in the first place.

  Samantha brought her horse to a halt and fumed. Flummoxed by a witch! She felt very stupid, which made her very, very angry.

  Suddenly the walls of the dream shifted a few hours into the night. The seventeenth-century Slayer sat by a campfire. She was alone, without a captor to keep her company; even the corpse of a witch would have been an improvement, because then Samantha would have had her satisfaction to keep her warm.

  The forest was quiet, devoid of insect noises and animal calls, and it was still—no breeze rustled the leaves, no animal wandered about. Not even the owls hooted in the trees.

  Samantha knew this silence was unnatural. The forest was a live, vibrant place. It was this quiet only when the presence of some malevolent force made it so.

  Samantha yawned. She had been traveling nonstop for the past three weeks and had expected to rest once in Salem. She needed time to refresh herself, and to think. It didn’t appear she’d have it anytime soon.

  She tore off a piece of dried meat with her teeth, sat on a log, and watched the fire. Samantha didn’t regret being the Slayer of this time—in fact, she rather enjoyed ridding the earth of unclean abominations—but she disliked the lonely nights.

  She thought of roads she might have taken, opportunities seemingly offered up by God’s will millions of years ago. In truth, only eight years had passed since Samantha had first embarked on the quest, but each year seemed like a lifetime.

  Suddenly—what? A sound of some sort, but it ceased almost the moment it began.

  It had happened there, in the brush.

  Samantha picked up her flintlock—she’d refilled the powder just this morning—and with her other hand took a torch from the fire.

  Her every sound was accentuated, from the crunching of pebbles underfoot to the soft rustle of a branch she shifted to get a better look at the place from which the sound had come. None of those noises, however, could match the pounding, pounding, pounding of her heart. She was convinced the thunder in her chest and temples could be heard all the way to New York.

  A cluster of leaves and twigs near the ground moved.

  The thunder stopped; Samantha’s heart felt like it had collapsed. But a bittersweet taste in her mouth forestalled the fear. It was the taste she always got when she knew she was in the presence of an abomination. Every chance she had to rid the Earth of one of those infernal things made her thrilled to be alive. And every thrill erased a thousand regrets.

  She moved in, wishing for a third arm so that she might hold forth her rapier as well.

  She shook the torch and yelled. Not the most cautious move, but certain impulses toward danger were among her more self-destructive traits.

  The move worked. Fortunately or not—mostly not, from Buffy’s perspective. Because it darted out! And it was charging full out like a giant spider, weaving from side to side with every step, yet never wavering from its basic direction: straight toward Samantha Kane!

  It leapt, grabbing Samantha’s throat with gray, decomposing fingers that were amazingly strong. They squeezed Samantha’s neck. Hard.

  Samantha dropped her torch and her pistol and grabbed it by the stump at the end of its hand. Actually, that’s all it was—a disembodied hand, but it was one that could move of its own accord, with a will of its own. Samantha couldn’t pry the fingers loose. Her face and lungs felt like they were about to explode.

  She suddenly remembered her knife. She began butchering the hand. Tearing off the skin was easy; the hand was about the size of a rabbit, and Samantha had skinned plenty of those.

  She whittled away at the muscles, yet the bones of the fingers squeezed just as hard on their own. They had no need of muscles—exactly the sort of thing Samantha had come to expect from such sorcerous vileness.

  One by one, she cut the finger bones from the hand. Lacking even a palm, the fingers still tried to hang on to her throat. Samantha had to
break them off with her own hands.

  She seethed with anger and shivered in disgust. With the simplest of lures, the witch had drawn Samantha into a trap. This really gnawed at Samantha’s pride—she was the best hunter and tracker in the northern colonies who didn’t wear war paint and worship like a heathen, and she’d been tricked like a novice.

  Samantha noticed her mount was nervous and was trying to pull its reins free.

  She picked up another torch from the fire and somewhat impulsively, but with a growing sense of horror, peered deeper into the bush.

  Other body parts approached: Another hand walked on fingers. One full arm and the two halves of another rolled toward her. At least the head was still attached—though to a limbless torso. That meant the head and torso had to pull themselves forward with the use of the neck, teeth, and chin, a process that had wreaked havoc with the corpse’s freshly decaying flesh.

  The eyes looked toward Samantha. The head tilted sideways so it could speak more easily. “Samantha,” the broken mouth said. “I’ve come for you. Wait for me. …”

  Now Samantha knew what had happened. Sarah had used her witchcraft after coming upon, and perhaps butchering, this pitiful wretch. Then she had placed a spell on the pieces to find and kill Samantha.

  Samantha took aim at the center of the head with her flintlock. She fired once, and the disembodied head’s skull and brain exploded in all directions.

  That didn’t stop the other body parts, though. They were still coming for her, as quickly as they were able.

  Obviously the time had come to leave. Samantha kicked out the fire, got on her horse, and lit out with all possible speed, using only the moonlight to guide her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The gathering was a spontaneous event to which everyone had been invited. It was being held in a giant cavern on the outskirts of the Lair, lit by fires whose embers burned farther below than anyone wanted to know.