by AnonYMous
‘Yes. He’s got The Book of Death for you.’
‘He has?’ Jessica sounded surprised.
‘I haven’t seen it, but he says he’s got it in his satchel.’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ said Jessica, snorting a laugh. ‘That idiot hasn’t even worked out I’m a vampire yet, but somehow he’s found The Book of Death. Brilliant. I bet he didn’t even notice all the vampires and werewolves in the courtyard on his way in, did he?’
Panda Girl lowered her voice, knowing Sanchez was within earshot behind. ‘He drove right past them all,’ she said.
‘What a fucking loser.’
‘Want me to send him up?’
There was a slight pause as Jessica mulled over the suggestion. Eventually she replied. ‘No. He’ll get lost, you’d better bring him up. Once I’ve got the book, he’s all yours.’
‘Okay, see you in a minute, Jessica,’ she said, ending the call.
She was already envisaging how much fun it would be to drink the blood from Sanchez’s juicy neck. There was plenty of flesh there to take a bite out of. She stood up and turned around. The crimson sofa at the back of the foyer was now empty. Sanchez had fled. She sniffed the air. His scent, and that of some barbecue chicken wings was still floating in the air. It wouldn’t take long to find him.
‘Sanchez,’ she called out. ‘Oh, Sanchez. Come out, come out, wherever you are!’
Forty
‘It’s like the fucking North Pole here!’ Lionel yelled over the sound of the howling wind.
‘When have you ever been to the North Pole?’ Nate called back.
‘Huh?’
Standing guard at the front gates at the entrance to the Casa De Ville was a shit job at the best of times, but in a blizzard like the one they were caught up in right now, it was as bad as it got. Nate was no big fan of snow. He could handle the cold just fine. Being a vampire made cold weather perfectly bearable. But the wind blowing through his ears and the three inches of snow underfoot was irritating in the extreme. And it was bloody difficult to hear his buddy Lionel over the noise of the wind. It wasn’t that easy to see him through the blizzard of snow either. The highlight of their evening so far had been opening the gates to let Sanchez through to see Jessica. Other than that the evening had been extremely uneventful. Their task was simply to keep an eye out for the approach of the Bourbon Kid, if of course, he was foolish enough to show up and allow himself to be spotted from the front gates.
‘I said, when have you ever been to the fucking North Pole?’ Nate repeated, a little louder than before.
His fellow Panda, Lionel, was renowned for a total lack of enthusiasm in every task he undertook. So even though Nate was hacked off at their current assignment, it was a safe bet that Lionel would be hating it even more.
Behind them, every other surviving member of the local undead scene was concealed behind a tree, bush or statue in the courtyard, ready to ambush the Bourbon Kid if he did show up.
‘Well I’ve never actually been to the North Pole,’ Lionel yelled back. He took his baseball cap off and shook the snow from it, before securing it tightly back on his head. ‘I’ve seen it on telly though. And it’s got a fuckin’ lot of snow!’
The pair of them had been instructed like everyone else to wear dark clothes to help camouflage themselves in the dark, but against the backdrop of snow the camouflage was largely redundant. Nate reached into his thick dark coat and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his inside pocket. ‘Wanna smoke?’ he called over to his buddy.
‘Nah. I’m good, thanks.’
Nate fumbled around in his pocket for his lighter and then held it up underneath the rim of his baseball cap to shield it from the snow. It was a shitty disposable red lighter that he’d snagged from a victim a few days earlier. It took four flicks to ignite the damn thing and even then the flame was pretty pathetic. After puffing hard on the end of the cigarette four or five times it eventually lit up. The flame on the lighter flickered and went out completely a second later.
As he took a drag on the cigarette, he saw Lionel poking his head through the bars on the gates, peering out into the road.
‘You seen something?’ he shouted over to him.
Lionel looked back and shook his head. ‘Just snow. And more snow.’
The sound of someone moving behind him distracted Nate for a second. He looked back and heard a few of the other vampires and werewolves fidgeting in their hiding places and talking among themselves.
‘At least we get to stand on the driveway,’ he called over to Lionel. ‘It sounds like everyone else is knee deep in waterlogged shit back there!’
Lionel stepped back from the gates and shrugged. ‘The werewolves probably like that.’
‘I bet the clowns hate it though.’
‘Why the clowns?’
‘Those big shoes will get filled with muddy water. Ruins their socks.’
Lionel looked surprised. ‘I didn’t know clowns wore socks.’
‘Some of ’em must do. I’ve got some new socks on today so I’m glad to be up here at the gates. This is probably the safest place to be as well.’
‘How d’ya figure?’
‘Think about it. If the Kid really is gonna show up here, then coming in through the front gates would be pretty fuckin’ stupid wouldn’t it?’
‘Yeah, we’ll see him coming down the road long before he gets to the gates,’ said Lionel, once more peering through the gates and down the road.
‘Five bucks says he doesn’t even show.’
‘I’m not taking that bet. Of course he won’t show. I wouldn’t be out in this weather if I had a choice.’
Nate sucked hard on his cigarette and blew a lungful of smoke out into the cold night air. It vanished instantly within the downpour of snowflakes. Lionel had a good point. Only thing was, where most people would stay indoors in such abysmal weather, the Bourbon Kid wasn’t most people. He was a fucking psycho with no fear of anything or anyone. A few drops of snow wouldn’t keep him away if he was intending on showing up.
‘You hear that?’ Lionel shouted over to him.
‘No. What?’
‘I think I heard something just now.’
Nate took another drag on his cigarette. ‘I didn’t hear anything. What did it sound like?’
‘A rustling in the bushes over there,’ Lionel pointed at a row of bushes that ran along the inside wall of the grounds, over to his right. He took a step towards them, his back turned on Nate.
‘Whoa, hold on a sec!’ Nate shouted. ‘Just stay here. This isn’t fuckin’ Camp Crystal. You don’t walk off on your own to investigate a noise. Stay here where I can see you. And make sure you’re in view of the CCTV cameras too. No one can help you if you do something dumb like wander off on your own!’
Lionel kept his back to Nate and craned his neck around to see if he could make out anything over by the bushes.
‘It’s fucking hard to see anything in those bushes, man,’ he complained. ‘Shouldn’t we have some lights on down here?’
‘Quit bitchin’. If anyone sneaks up on us, the guys watching on the cameras will turn on those big fuckin’ spotlights. But if you go wandering off behind a bush out of sight of the cameras, I’m not following you in.’
Lionel turned back to face him. ‘What if I need a piss?’
‘Piss through the fuckin’ gates!’ He took another drag on his cigarette. ‘You don’t actually need a piss, do you?’
‘No. I was just askin’, is all.’
Nate leaned his head back and blew a lungful of smoke up at the sky again. This time he was able to watch the smoke escape in a snake like shape upwards. The snowfall was slowing. The wind had eased ever so slightly, but it still made a gentle whistling noise. The dark clouds up above were beginning to part and a narrow shaft of light from the moon began to reveal itself. Nate took one last drag of his cigarette and tossed it down into the snow. As he heard the cigarette hiss and fizzle out, he looked up again and was pleased
to see that the snow had stopped completely. A few flakes still floated around in the wind, but there was no more blizzard. “Finally, thank God for that,” he thought.
‘Looks like Gaius is bringing the moon out for the werewolves,’ he called over to Lionel, his voice suddenly a lot clearer over the calming winds.
Lionel didn’t respond. He was stood still, just staring back out through the gates.
Nate called over to him again. ‘I said, it looks like Gaius is bringing the moon out for the werewolves.’
Still no response.
Nate could only see him from a side angle and couldn’t tell if he had heard him or not. ‘Lionel? Are you listening—’
Before Nate could finish his sentence, Lionel’s legs buckled at the knee. He crumpled towards the floor in slow motion. It reminded Nate of the moment Charlton Heston slumped to his knees in front of the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. As he mulled over the insignificance of it, he received a shock.
Lionel’s head drooped forward. And kept going. It slid clean off his shoulders and landed with a gentle thud, face down in the snow. The rest of his body remained kneeling upright. A fountain of thick red blood began gushing out in all directions as if someone had turned on a garden sprinkler between his shoulders. The snow behind his decapitated head was sprayed blood red and a dark patch began spreading quickly towards Nate. The rest of Lionel’s body slumped forward landing just short of his head. Nate watched the events unfold in stunned bewilderment before suddenly coming to his senses and reacting.
‘Oh fuck!’ He grabbed his walkie-talkie and raised it to his mouth. He pressed the button to speak, but before he could utter a word he felt a razor sharp blade pressed against his Adam’s apple. He tried his best not to swallow too hard. The last thing he wanted was to feel that blade cut into his throat as a result of his own actions. A body pressed up against his back and he felt the warm breath of a man at his right ear. A hand appeared out of the darkness and grabbed a hold of the walkie-talkie, removing it from his grip. Then he heard a voice. A gravelly whisper.
‘How many vampires in the courtyard?’ it asked.
Nate took a short breath before sensibly replying. ‘Hundreds.’ The blade pressed harder against his throat. ‘Possibly thousands,’ he added.
‘And werewolves?’
‘The same.’
The blade that had remained pressed to his throat was loosened and pulled away. Nate breathed a gentle sigh of relief.
‘So what now?’ he asked.
The knifeman did not respond.
Unsure if his attacker was still behind him or not, Nate tried to reason with him. ‘I won’t say I saw y…’
A horrific ripping sound interrupted his speech. He felt an agonising pain in his lower back. The pain rapidly shot through to his stomach. Gasping for breath, he succeeded only in chasing after some oxygen like a kid trying to bite an apple in a barrel. His chin dropped forwards suddenly as he found his neck muscles no longer able to hold his head up. And as he looked down he saw the blade of a sharp knife protruding through the front of his stomach.
It was covered in blood.
His blood.
His legs buckled in the same way as Lionel’s had. As he began to fall face first into the snow a hand grabbed his head to stop its downward trajectory. Blood was rushing up through his lungs into his mouth. Thick lumps of it began sliding over his tongue and seeping out through his lips. He could see it dribbling onto the white snow below.
Then the blade in his stomach began to move again. His attacker pulled the knife upwards, through his stomach and up through his rib cage. The blade sliced his undead vampire heart in two, splitting his chest open. As he exhaled his last breath he saw his guts fall out onto the snow.
Forty-One
After a particularly stressful and tiring day, Elijah Simmonds was at last able to relax. The museum was closed for the evening so he finally had a chance to wander around the displays and decide on what changes to make. First up, he decided, there were far too many boring paintings. Definitely more nudes were required. At present there were far too many paintings by the expressionists. Simmonds couldn’t stand the expressionist paintings. The only redeeming feature they had was that they were worth a lot of money, so there was a possibility that he could sell a few of them off and bring in a few hundred thousand dollars revenue, maybe more.
In fact, he decided, the entire hall containing the expressionist paintings could probably be replaced by something far more entertaining, like a mini theatre with a cinema screen. If the museum showed films about the expressionists rather than stocking their dull works it could generate some much needed extra revenue. As he strolled around the halls he began to feel great excitement at the project that lay before him. Transforming the museum into something much more modern would see him hailed as a visionary. Most of the locals didn’t visit the museum any more because it had become so damned dull under the stewardship of the now deceased Bertram Cromwell. A redesign could bring them back.
On his way through the main hall on the ground floor, he came across Cromwell’s favourite display, the Tomb of the Egyptian Mummy. It was a vast display that took up enormous space behind a large glass wall. A year earlier this monument had been trashed and the mummy stolen. Cromwell had spent vast sums of the museum’s resources having it restored, against Simmonds’s better judgement. But now that he was in charge he had visions of turning it into a kind of House of Horrors attraction, perhaps set in a giant plastic pyramid. It could even feature a mini fairground ride with mummies and other creepy creatures.
It was while he was staring at the tomb that Simmonds’s night took an unexpected turn. He heard footsteps coming down the main stairs at the far end of the hall on his right. He looked around and saw James the security guard. He was being followed by a group of men. One man in particular stood out above the others. He was a broad fellow with a shaved head. He wore a smart silver suit and a pair of sunglasses. The other four men who flanked him, two on either side were dressed all in black with their faces largely concealed behind black headscarves. They looked like ninjas.
James waved at Simmonds. ‘Mr Simmonds, I have a gentleman here to see you.’
Simmonds sighed inwardly. It seemed that the day was not quite over after all. The group of men made their way up to him and then James introduced the big fellow in the suit.
‘This is Mr Gaius,’ he said. Then he turned to Gaius and gestured back at Simmonds. ‘This is Elijah Simmonds.’
Simmonds held out his hand. ‘Hi, I’m the manager here,’ he said. It felt so good to say it out loud.
Gaius took his hand and shook it firmly. ‘I’m the new owner,’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘I’m the new owner of this museum. So good to meet you, Mr Simmonds. I’m a big fan of your work.’
Simmonds couldn’t hide his shock. ‘How did this… I mean, umm, will I still be manager?’
Gaius placed his right arm around Simmonds’s shoulders and steered him away from the rest of the group, walking him away to a corner where there was a large piano with a mannequin dressed as Ludwig van Beethoven sat behind it on a stool.
‘Ever seen Beethoven play?’ Gaius asked.
‘Um, no.’
Gaius raised his left hand. A gentle glow seemed to emanate from his fingertips. He waved his fingers gently in several directions like a puppeteer. It generated a reaction from the wooden figure seated at the piano in the purple suit and grey wig. Beethoven was coming to life. The figure of the composer began moving in an awkward, clunky manner. His head perked up and his fingers began tapping away on the keys of the piano.
‘Recognise the tune?’ Gaius asked.
It did sound vaguely familiar to Simmonds, but he wasn’t entirely sure where he’d heard it. ‘Is it Thank you for the Music by Abba?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s concerto number five, you ignorant prick.’
Gaius squeezed Simmonds’s shoulder tightly as
they watched the pianist perform. About thirty seconds into the performance Simmonds heard the sound of glass cracking behind him. He twisted his head around to get a look at where the noise had come from. He saw the four ninja guys were taking turns kicking the glass cover around the tomb, using their bare feet. The glass was several inches thick and not the sort that would normally break easily, but as Simmonds watched on, held back by the firm grip of Gaius’s hand on his shoulder, the four ninjas kicked at it repeatedly until after four or five seconds the whole thing came crashing down. James stood by helplessly, looking to Simmonds for advice on what to do.
‘What the hell?’ Simmonds blurted out. ‘You can’t just do that.’
Gaius twisted him back around again to watch the wooden figure of Beethoven performing at the piano. He leaned in and whispered into Simmonds’s ear. ‘Did Bertram Cromwell die easily?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘When you killed Bertram Cromwell, how did it make you feel?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Gaius smiled, not a warm smile by any means, but a smile nonetheless. ‘I know you killed him,’ he said. ‘But I’m not mad. As it happens you did me a favour. He would never have allowed me to come down here and mess with his precious tomb, would he? But you, you Mr Simmonds, have wisdom beyond your years. You don’t mind if my boys here spend a bit of time rearranging the tomb do you?’
‘Um, well…’
‘I thought not. We’ve got business here this evening you see. I’m having a couple of kids mummified and condemned to hell for all eternity. I think you know them, Dante Vittori and Kacy Fellangi?’
‘I know them,’ said Simmonds, recalling the brief time that Dante had worked at the museum. ‘That asshole Dante smashed a vase over my head once.’
‘Good,’ said Gaius, slapping Simmonds hard across the back. ‘Then you’re in agreement?’
‘Umm, I guess so.’
Gaius wrapped his arm back around Simmonds’s shoulder and turned him back towards the middle of the hall. Then he began walking him back through the hall towards the main stairs.