Older and Fouler Things (Jed Horn Supernatural Thrillers Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  Given what we’d seen the night before, that was probably fair enough. I looked to Kolya and Frank. Kolya hadn’t lifted his head, but finished his prayer, crossed himself, and then nodded. “Seems fair,” he said.

  Frank nodded vaguely. “I thought I’d seen it all after the Walker,” he admitted. “Thought I was getting a handle on this. Last night showed me just how wrong I was.” He shuddered a little. It was a vaguely disturbing motion from the big man. “I don’t know that I’m ever going to get used to this.”

  “Pray that you don’t,” Charlie said quietly. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall under the window where he had posted himself during the Rite. “The day you think that you’re used to this is the day you let your guard down. And I don’t think I need to tell you how dangerous that is.”

  Frank Tall Bear looked at Charlie with a worried frown. Charlie had given him a pretty hard time, at least at first. This newfound grimness in the man had to be even more jarring to Frank than to the rest of us. But he nodded thoughtfully.

  We didn’t have long to wait. The barred door opened as easily as it had during the night, and Magnus, back in his canine form, padded through. The door swung shut behind him. Maybe he’d kicked it shut with a hind leg, maybe he hadn’t. I couldn’t really say.

  With a mind-numbing blur, Magnus shifted shape again, and stood there again in the form of a golden-eyed young man. He was dressed in jeans and a western shirt, though his feet were bare.

  “I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that,” I said, as I uncrossed my eyes.

  “Shape-shifting is not easy on the human mind,” Magnus said quietly. “But I had to stay here, in the house, close to Raymond. And a man alone with a dog is easier to explain than a man alone with another young man with strange eyes who never ages.”

  “I suppose,” I answered. “You said you were the sergeant of the guard. What are you guarding?”

  Magnus looked at Ray. The old Hunter harrumphed. “Yeah, I suppose that is my job to explain, isn’t it?” He sat down in his rocking chair, the one that no one else ever sat in. Magnus usually lay on the floor next to it, but now he moved to lean against the hearth.

  I noticed that he showed no uneasiness at being so close to the crucifix hanging on the stone fireplace. That was noteworthy in and of itself.

  Most Fae, like most Otherworlders, are uneasy around the holy, at best. The Otherworld is largely inhabited by elusive and uncanny predators of one stripe or another, predators that mostly prey on humanity in some way. The Fae are no different, though their form of predation tends to be more a twisted sort of play than anything else. They are like awfully clever, somewhat sinister children in many ways. They are strange, and wild, and capricious, given to playing games that often leave mortals bereft of their sanity or the life they had known.

  Fand, the Fae girl I had met in the woods behind Ray’s house, had been like that, though she had been restrained by some sort of “leverage” that Ray had over her. I had never learned just what that leverage was; Ray had been entirely too reticent to talk about it.

  Obviously, having fun by robbing mortals of their time and sanity through illusion, hypnotism, and subtle deception does not make the Fae all that friendly to the holy. Just how they had come to be that way was a story I had never heard, and in keeping with most of the Otherworld, delving too deeply was dangerous. But Magnus simply bowed his head to the crucifix before he leaned against the hearth and faced the middle of the room attentively.

  Ray rocked back in his chair, his weight making it creak. “While I built this house, I wasn’t the first Hunter to be stationed here,” he began. “There’s been one of us tasked with guarding this place since the late 1800s.” He glanced over at the fireplace, where Magnus stood. “Magnus has been here that entire time.” That I could believe. The Fae don’t age.

  “What are you guarding?” Frank asked.

  “To explain that requires going back to 1879,” Ray replied. “There’s an old abandoned mine shaft up on the mountain behind us. It was a silver mine at one time, and a rich one. You can still find the ruins of the camp not far from it, though the woods have pretty well overgrown the foundations in the years since it was leveled. The mine chute is the only thing still standing.

  “Thomas Breeks was the first one to strike silver up here. He was a prospector, and would have kept the claim for himself, except that he was a bit too loose with his words. A claim jumper named Duncan Symes shot him in the back, not fifty yards from this spot. Unfortunately for Symes, the men from the Rocky Peaks Mining Company who had been coming up to offer Breeks a small fortune for his claim heard the shot, and came running. They captured Symes, turned him over to the local law, and he was hanged.

  “With Breeks dead, the Rocky Peaks Company moved in on the mine. It turned out to be far richer than Breeks had ever imagined, and in six months, they were pulling a ton of silver or more out of the mountain a month. It wasn’t as big as the Comstock Lode, but it was big enough. And it showed no sign of petering out, either.

  “But after about two years, some of the miners started to report strange things down in the mine. Odd noises, tools going missing, and passages opening up where there hadn’t been any before. And the men working the deepest levels were reporting worse and worse nightmares, even while they apparently were experiencing an intense compulsion to continue digging.”

  He ran a hand over his beard. “That compulsion became an obsession, the deeper they went. Pretty soon they weren’t even looking for silver; they were just tunneling, deeper and deeper. The mine foreman tried to get them to stop, but they killed him. The next foreman went down there with strikebreakers, and only a handful of them came out alive. Of those, only one could still talk. The rest were out of their minds.

  “Pretty soon the Army showed up, but they didn’t know what to do, either. Mason Moore, the closest Hunter, had gotten wind of it, and showed up to investigate. He’d done some work for the Army as a scout in the Indian Wars, so he had no trouble getting through the Army’s lines. He knew something was off right away. He could feel it as he got closer to the shaft.

  “Mason told the Colonel in command to hold his men some distance from the shaft and be watchful. He then said he was going down the mine shaft, and if he didn’t return after three days, then the Army should dynamite the shaft and make sure everyone stayed away. The Colonel wasn’t sure what to make of it, but Mason was insistent, so he agreed.

  “Mason headed down the shaft with his dog.”

  I turned to Magnus. “I’m guessing that was you?”

  Magnus nodded. “It has been a useful shape.”

  “As fascinating as the story is,” Frank put in, “I’d like to digress for a minute, and ask just how a Fae ended up running with a Witch Hunter. No offense, Magnus, but that doesn’t fit with what I know about your…kind.”

  “And for most of my kind, your assessment would be very accurate,” Magnus replied calmly. “We possess caprice in excess of our power, which is considerable. My kind are terrible beings, capable of sowing much chaos and suffering for their own amusement.”

  “So what makes you different?” Kolya asked.

  “I am the son of my father,” Magnus replied. When five quizzical eyebrows rose, he held up a hand. “I am the prince of the House of Abedoin.”

  I shook my head. “Never heard of it.”

  “Our alliance with the Order has long been a close-kept secret, though less for fear of other mortals learning of it than for fear of the other houses of our kin,” Magnus said. “My father and my House dwelt in the high peaks of the Pyrenees since time immemorial, along paths that mortal man feared to tread, for our games were deadly, more often than not.

  “When Charlemagne and Roland marched through the mountains, our eye fell upon them, and here, surely, we thought, was great sport to be had. But Charlemagne and his Palatines were of stronger character than we knew, and Roland not least of all. That terrible youth stormed the ve
ry halls of my father, and demanded, in God’s Holy Name, our utter and abject surrender.

  “Imagine it, if you can,” he went on, awe in his voice. That alone was weird enough. Fae aren’t supposed to feel awe. “A man, not out of his twenties, surrounded by beings as old as the Earth itself, immortal and powerful, able to bend the thoughts of men as easily as they can bend matter. A stripling, an upstart, clad in cold iron and wielding a terrible sword that burned our very eyes to look at, demanding that we, who had walked the world since time immemorial, bow down to him.

  “But such grace was upon him that we surrendered. We could not touch him, and not only because of the iron that sheathed him, or the terrible glare of the light on Durandal’s blade. God was with him, this flower of knighthood, and so we bent the knee. And one by one, beginning with my father, we swore to forsake our ways, bow before the Cross, and pledged allegiance to Charlemagne and the Church, on the hilts of Durandal itself.

  “It is a vow that has bound us ever since, and will until the breaking of the world, the Final Judgement, and whatever fate might be in store for those of us who walk Between. It is our hope, from old tales of your people, that perhaps, in return for our service and our repentance, God might grant us souls, that we might join the Blessed for eternity.”

  Everyone in the room but Ray and Father Ignacio was staring at Magnus, thunderstruck. It’s not every day you hear that kind of a story, even in our line of work.

  I knew it wasn’t impossible. I knew a Tomte, a sort of old Scandinavian guardian spirit, who had converted to Christianity a thousand years ago. He even wore a silver cross of his own around his neck, even though no one ever noticed him in the back of the church during Mass. But an entire House of the Fae having come back across the fence was mind-boggling.

  And yet, somehow, I didn’t doubt it. Fae are strange, and one of their many oddities is a curious honesty. Oh, they are certainly deceptive. The only beings more so are the demons themselves. But somehow, the Fae manage to deceive without ever actually lying to your face. And a converted Fae, as Magnus was, would be honest to a fault.

  Not only that, but I’d known Magnus for years, even if I hadn’t known what he was. And I trusted him, whatever shape he was wearing. He had saved our skins more than once, and he had a sense for those who were good for the Order and those who weren’t. As Eryn had told Frank, if Magnus doesn’t like you, you’d best find a different line of work.

  “I went deep into the Earth with Mason,” Magnus continued, taking up the story. “Some of the surviving miners were insane, dangerously so. They attacked us, but we fought them off, and went deeper. Eventually, the shaft became a single passage, going down.

  “It was at the lip of that deep pit that I warned Mason that we should go no farther, but should warn everyone away and seal the mine as best we could. I could feel the evil down below us.”

  He paused, and his eyes got far away. That’s a good trick for a Fae; their eyes are weird enough as it is. “There is a thing sleeping down there, far under the mountain,” he said. “It was calling to the miners in its dreams, calling to them to delve deeper and wake it.”

  There was a long, brooding silence after that. As if demons and a vampire weren’t bad enough. “What is it, exactly?” Frank asked. “Do you know?”

  If a Fae could shudder, Magnus would have. I could tell that much from the look in his eyes. “It is kin to the demons,” he said. “A chthonic spirit taken unnatural flesh. No one, not even of my kin, knows how long ago it wormed its way into the deep places of the world. It is a thing of Chaos and Old Night. It is more potent than any number of my father’s Knights or any number of Hunters. Should it crawl out of the dark pits where it lies slumbering, this entire country would become a wasteland of madness, as men clawed their own guts out in their agony.”

  “How did you seal it?” Eryn asked.

  If anything, Magnus looked haunted. “We did not. I do not know who did.” He swallowed, his gaze far away and far in the past, though probably not all that far for him. “It was waking. It was reaching up toward the surface, and even as I warned Mason that we must leave, neither one of us could move. We were like a mouse in front of a snake. It was stirring down there, reaching toward the surface and the world above. We would be devoured, and it would get loose.

  “And then, even as I thought that I should soon see it appear at the bottom of the shaft, and go mad—and to go mad is a terrible thing for a Fae, even more than for a man—there was a brilliant flash, and it was gone. No, it was not gone. It was still there; I could feel the foul touch of its dreams. But it had been forced back to sleep in that momentary flash of light.”

  I frowned. That sounded an awful lot like the flash that I’d seen outside the night before. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “I believe it was a Power, or an Archangel,” Magnus said. “Nothing else could have struck that thing down.”

  “After that,” Ray said, taking up the story again, “Mason and Magnus came up and told the Colonel that he and his men needed to clear out, that the mine was too dangerous, and it had to be sealed. The Rocky Peak folks weren’t happy, but they’d lost a lot of people down there, so they decided that there was dangerous gas in the mine, put a ‘Danger, Do Not Enter’ sign on the entrance, and left.

  “Mason, Magnus, and Abedoin’s honor guard of fifteen Fae Knights took up residence here, to guard the spot and keep the unwary away. And so it has stood, ever since.”

  “Until now,” Magnus said darkly. “Because I am certain that the vampire is coming to awaken the Thing Under the Mountain.”

  Chapter 11

  As chilling as those words were, they led to other questions, questions that couldn’t be put off. “So, the other elephant in the room is the vampire,” Frank said. “I didn’t think they actually existed. At least, I’ve never heard mention of them in my training, so I guess I just kind of assumed.”

  I was curious to hear the answer, myself. I’d been a Witch Hunter for a few years, and had never come across any reference to or encounter with actual vampires.

  “Oh, they’re real,” Father Ignacio said. “They are extremely rare, fortunately. It takes a life of extraordinary wickedness to become one, most of the time. We generally don’t talk too much about them because they’re so rare, and also that studying their lore tends to be…dangerous.”

  Which meant that there were things lurking in the dark that were ready and willing to lead the unwary down a very bad path if they got too curious. There’s a lot of that in this line of work.

  “Forget everything you know about the popular mythology of vampires,” Father continued. “It’s all bunk. They’re not made that way by a virus, or by a curse that they have no control over. It’s far worse than that.

  “A vampire isn’t dead. It should be dead. Generally speaking, vampires are born when a particularly evil man or woman is supposed to die, but right at the instant before they shuffle off this mortal coil, unrepentant, a demon meets them in between, and offers them a deal. Power, immortality, a postponement of judgement, in return for doing the Abyss’s work on Earth.”

  “So, you’re saying that people become vampires because they want to?” Eryn asked.

  “Essentially, yes,” Father answered. “It is like any other evil; it is, ultimately, the result of an act of the will. One doesn’t become a monster completely by accident.”

  “So, the biting people and drinking blood thing?” Frank asked. “Is that bunk too?”

  “Oh, no,” Father Ignacio replied. “That part’s accurate enough, as far as it goes. Drinking the blood of their victims is part of the deal. It is at one and the same time a blood sacrifice to their demonic patron, a blasphemous mockery of the Blessed Sacrament, and a way to transmit a curse.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he added, “it’s still not like in the movies and novels; the curse isn’t in the form of vampirism itself. It’s more like a venom, though one that can’t be detected by any physical science, nor
any antidote concocted by chemistry. After being bitten, the victim will slowly sicken and fall into a coma. Once there, the vampire’s patron offers them the same deal it offered the original vampire.”

  “And if they don’t accept?” I asked quietly.

  “They don’t wake up,” Father Ignacio said grimly. “But it’s better than the alternative.”

  “That’s awful,” Eryn breathed. “How many people would really be strong enough, prepared enough, to reject that offer?”

  “More than you might think,” Father replied. “Fewer than you might hope. In this day and age, particularly, fewer and fewer people have the preparation and the spiritual fortitude to willingly accept death that way, particularly in the face of whatever lies and deceptions the demon puts before them.” He sighed. “That’s another reason it’s fortunate that they’re so rare.”

  “If they can really ‘transmit’ the curse like that,” Frank asked, “how come there isn’t already a plague of these things crawling all over the country? Shouldn’t they be multiplying? How are they so rare?’

  Ray laughed humorlessly. “Simple. They don’t actually try that often. You see, most of the ‘original’ vampires, that is, those who have deliberately sought it out, or been vicious and evil enough that they were presented with the offer at the moment of death, are supremely nasty, self-centered people. They are well aware of the power they’ve been granted, and they aren’t particularly eager to share it. A new vampire isn’t necessarily going to be ‘grateful’ to its patron, especially as it gets older and more wicked. The more someone wallows in the kinds of crimes that vampires excel in, the less that hatred and resentment need logical groundings. They’ll try to kill each other just because. One of their ‘progeny’ might decide to knock them off, and then they’d face the Judgement, themselves. So most of them just murder their victims where possible. It keeps them reasonably in control.”