Vampyrrhic

by Simon Clark

  Never once did she take her eyes from his.

  Those eyes…

  Warmth, love, serenity, sweet music: the music of angels filled her.

  Then a beautiful thing happened.

  The murmur of the river, the song of the birds, the breath of the wind that sang gently through the willow branches. All of that vanished into his eyes. A sliver of her went with it.

  He sees me as beautiful, she thought, overjoyed. I want to surrender myself to him. I want to give him everything. But what can I give? I have nothing special that he could possibly want, have I?

  His eyes were huge shining globes.

  His smile was warm, loving, wanting.

  Hungry.

  His arms moved slowly, gently, lovingly through the gloom to enfold her. They might have been a pair of vast wings wrapping her in a glorious warmth.

  She opened her mouth and awaited that first kiss.

  It was Saturday afternoon; the time, three o’clock.

  2

  Saturday. 3:15 p.m.

  ‘David. Join me for coffee.’

  Electra Charnwood’s voice sailed across the hotel lobby to greet him.

  He let the door swing shut behind him, sealing off the sounds of the market and the traffic. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’ He smiled.

  Electra walked from behind the reception desk with a heavy silver tray on which were loaded cups and a cafetiere containing a richly dark coffee.

  ‘My,’ she said, with a warm smile. ‘It looks as if you’ve had the cobwebs well and truly blown away; have you walked far?’

  ‘Only just to the edge of town. Family visit.’

  ‘Oh, that would be Mr George Leppington. An uncle?’

  David nodded. ‘I don’t know what you feed yourselves on round here but you’re looking pretty good on it. He must be mid-eighties but he looks a heck of a lot fitter than me. Here, let me move the vase.’

  He moved the vase from the centre of the table as Electra set down the tray.

  ‘Do you know George?’ he asked.

  ‘Know of him, really. See him in town occasionally. Now, David, you sit there and amuse me, I’ve just slogged round Whitby looking for a new dress and I can’t find a thing to fit me. Oh, damn the girl. White flowers.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Electra picked up the vase that contained a pair of white carnations. ‘I’ve told her again and again: no white flowers.’ She shot David one of her direct gazes. ‘Did you know in China a white flower is a symbol of mourning?’

  He shook his head and smiled. ‘They don’t make the place look funereal, anyway.’

  Electra sighed. ‘Perhaps the girl has had a premonition or something. Now, allow me to be mum. Milk?’

  ‘Black.’

  ‘A man after my own heart. Don’t be shy. Grab a biscuit.’

  ‘Is it always this quiet on a Saturday afternoon?’

  ‘Always. Dead as a doornail, isn’t it?’ She waved her hand to take in the deserted hotel lobby with its sprinkling of red upholstered chairs and tables. ‘So, we’ve got the run of the place. What shall we do? Swing from the drapes, or bite the heads off these ghastly white carnations?’

  Her eyes twinkled mischievously, making her look years younger. David couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘You know what I’ve always wanted to do?’

  ‘Go on, Doctor, shock me.’

  ‘Use a tray as a sledge and ride it downstairs.’

  Smiling, she nodded towards the silver tray. ‘Go on, be my guest.’

  ‘I think I’d need something stronger than coffee before I did that.’ She laughed, then asked in that no-nonsense style of hers, ‘What do you make of Leppington?’

  ‘Quiet.’

  ‘As a grave?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘More than Liverpool?’

  ‘Liverpool can get a bit mad, you know.’

  ‘Oh, give me the big city anytime,’ she said, stirring sugar into her cup. ‘I like the anonymity of crowds. Here you feel as if you’re constantly in the spotlight.’

  ‘You’re not a fan of the town, then?’

  ‘I hate it!’ she said with feeling. ‘I hate this hotel, too. Big, bloody awful place it is.’

  David reached for a biscuit — not hungry after the huge meal George had fed him — but unsure how to respond to Electra’s sudden outburst. ‘It doesn’t seem such a bad place to live — the hotel or the town.’

  She toyed with a strand of her blue-black hair, her eyes thoughtful. Steam rose from the coffee cup. ‘The hotel’s a place where people come to die.’

  He raised his eyebrows.

  She smiled. There was more than a hint of the grim in that smile, he thought.

  ‘Sounds morbid, doesn’t it?’

  ‘And a tad melodramatic.’ He smiled, trying to lighten the mood. ‘But true. Too many people have died here over the years.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I grew up here. As a child I kept a list of people who had come here only to leave feet first. Some were suicides. When I was eight years old, a girl was suffocated in the room next to mine. Her boyfriend was convicted of the murder but he claimed he was innocent.’ They always do.’

  ‘My aunt climbed out of an upstairs window and threw herself down into the courtyard outside. Died of a broken neck.’

  He decided to let her speak. Clearly she had to get this off her chest. Uh-oh, David, playing Christ again, aren’t we? Absorbing other people’s pain? No, he reasoned. Perhaps Electra didn’t have close friends or family to speak to; this was a form of catharsis; so why not allow her blow off a little steam?

  Electra continued, speaking faster now. ‘My mother died in the hotel’s basement.’

  ‘An accident?’

  ‘Heart failure, so the coroner said.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘No. I think she died of fright. Do you know why?’

  Stop her now, a voice said in the back of his head. Her voice was thickening with emotion. What are you afraid of, David? he asked himself. That she’ll burst into tears and you’ll have to comfort her?

  ‘People do die suddenly,’ he said gently. ‘Sometimes even doctors don’t know why it happens.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, controlling the emotion in her voice. ‘I remember seeing a death certificate for my great-grandfather who dropped dead in that very doorway. In the box headed cause of death the doctor had written: Died as a result of a visitation from God. That’s how they used to describe a death from unknown causes, wasn’t it?’

  David nodded, wishing someone would walk into the lobby or the phone would ring. Anything that would help snap her out of this mood.

  ‘Died as a result of a visitation from God,’ she repeated colourlessly. ‘Now that is a picturesque way of putting it.’ She took a deep breath; on the surface she seemed calm. ‘You see, Doctor, my mother heard sounds coming from the basement.’

  ‘Sounds?’

  ‘Yes, banging. Like someone clamouring to be let out. She’d been hearing these for weeks.’

  ‘Did anyone else hear them?’

  ‘No. At least they pretended not to. Well…these noises terrified her. She dreaded having to go into the basement. But she had to. She ran this monstrosity with my father. She didn’t want to be seen as a silly, neurotic woman. So she kept going down into the basement. And she kept hearing the noises — thumping, banging, like someone hammering on a door.’

  David nodded, realizing that despite himself he was slipping into the doctor-and-patient role.

  ‘Then, a week before she died,’ Electra continued, ‘she became convinced that she was going to die. No, she had no aches or pains or shortness of breath — no physical symptoms of ill health — she suddenly knew as surely as night follows day that soon she would die.’

  ‘And she connected this with the sounds in the basement?’

  ‘Yes. For her the noises were death — Death personified; the Reaper himself was coming for her. All neurotic fantasy after all, what do you say, D
octor?’

  ‘She didn’t confide in anyone?’

  ‘Only her diary. I have it now, in my chest of treasures upstairs. She was a poetic soul, my mother.’ Electra sucked her coffee spoon before laying it back on the silver tray. ‘But a few days later she was found lying dead in the basement. Not a mark on her. But she held a sweeping brush in her hand as if she’d been swinging it like a club. Dead in a little pool of cold urine. Now isn’t that a sad, miserable way to go?’

  ‘You know,’ David said gently. ‘It sounds as if this is unexpressed grief. I’m sorry to sound like the doctor now, but I think you’ve been bottling this up for some time.’

  Electra shrugged. ‘I never cried over her, true. But I’m not the crying sort.’ She gave a sudden smile. ‘Now, drink up your coffee. It’s getting cold.’ David thought the time was ripe to change the line of conversation, but before he could speak she looked quickly up at him and said in quite a matter-of-fact way, ‘Those noises in the basement.’ Fear suddenly bloomed huge in her eyes. ‘The ones that troubled my mother. I’ve started hearing them, too.’

  Saturday 3:30 p.m.

  The road over the mountains stretched out before them. Above them clouds raced like dark phantoms on a mission from hell. Jack Black drove the van steadily. Nice and easy does it. Nothing to attract attention.

  In the back of the van his maggots sat amongst the furniture and electrical goods they’d taken from the house. In another hour they’d hit the city of York, then they could unload this on a crooked dealer in exchange for a nice wad of cash. After that the maggots would head for an almighty piss-up. Jack Black would pay his share into the hole-in-the-wall machine and maybe spend the weekend cruising the city streets.

  Then it came right out of the great shining blue to hit him.

  He was going the wrong way.

  He stopped the van at the side of the road.

  ‘What’s wrong? Why’ve you stopped?’ asked one of his maggots.

  ‘I’m going back the other way,’ he announced in a low voice.

  ‘Going back? We’ve got to get this shit to York.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going back to Leppington.’

  ‘Leppington? For Godsakes, why?’

  Why? He didn’t know why. Only he had this need — this burning need to go back there. There was unfinished business. Again he didn’t know what but it gaped at him like a great, raw unhealed wound.

  4

  Saturday. 3:40 p.m.

  Dianne Moberry thought: I am dead.

  She wasn’t. But perhaps it would have been better for her if she were.

  She wouldn’t like what was going to happen to her next.

  A moment ago she’d opened her eyes. She thought she was waking in bed, that she’d been dreaming about meeting a beautiful blond-haired man on the river bank.

  Reality came clunking back — as cold, as forceful, as brutal as a runaway truck.

  Jesus-oh-Jesus. Help me.

  Her clothes had been stripped from her body. Now, naked, she stood facing an iron gate. Water swirled round her feet. She looked round, her mind juddering back to full consciousness.

  The river flowed past behind her. Overhead willows arched. She realized she was standing in what must be a culverted stream that ran beneath the town before finally flowing out into the Lepping through a huge drain. The drain lay in darkness beyond the bars of the gate.

  But why am l standing here? Why am I naked?

  She shivered and tried to move back, away from the gate.

  She couldn’t, she realized with muted surprise. She couldn’t move so much as a centimetre. It took a moment to push understanding through her fogged brain. But at last she understood: she couldn’t move because someone was forcing her, face forward, against the bars of the gate; her bare stomach, breasts, hips pressed against cold metal.

  She felt sick. She only wanted to get away from here. There was an unpleasant animal smell oozing through the gate. Oh, why is he holding me like this? He’s using his body to hug me against the iron bars. I’m going to vomit; I’m cold.

  And frightened. Incredibly frightened.

  ‘Let go of me,’ she begged. ‘Please…I — I’ll do anything.’

  Without a shadow of a doubt she knew it was the blond man holding her tightly there against the gate.

  But why?

  Then, ahead in the darkness, she sensed movement.

  Dazed, she found herself asking, ‘Who’s there?’

  No reply.

  Now there was a flurry of movement in the darkness of the tunnel. There were gleams of white — bluey white, like blood-starved skin. The movements grew quicker.

  All of a sudden she sensed, rather than saw, figures moving out of the darkness towards the gate. She heard feet splashing the shallow water of the stream.

  Dianne Moberry closed her eyes.

  She knew things were going to happen to her. Nasty, awful things. Knew it absolutely. But, no…oh no, she couldn’t watch.

  Water splashed up against her bare body. She flinched.

  Eyes closed — keep them closed!

  She screamed the words through her head. Keep them closed! You don’t want to see what’s —

  Ah!

  She gagged in pain.

  Pain speared through the tips of her breasts.

  Her teeth clicked as she clenched her jaw.

  A hand folded over her mouth. She couldn’t even scream now. But, oh, she wanted so much to scream. She wanted to roar out her agony and fear.

  She tried to push herself back from the iron gate. The agony grew even more intense.

  Her eyes snapped open at last. The image she saw was impossible.

  Blood. There was plenty of blood, lashings of blood, spurting, covering her bare arms.

  But it was what else she saw that refused to make any sense to her splintering mind.

  Two tubes — all white and softly fleshy — had grown out of her chest. They ran straight out through the bars of the gate to where something white as bone bobbed and shivered.

  White tubes. For Godsakes, what were they?

  She gasped, shuddered, as she stared down over the hand clamping her mouth.

  Then she knew what the white tubes were. Something had gripped her breasts as they’d been forced through the bars of the gate. Now it pulled hard. And no way would it let go. Not ever. She knew that absolutely. Her nipples felt as if they were gripped by red-hot pincers. Now her breasts were drawn out as thin as a pair of baby’s arms. Blue veins showed through the skin.

  And here and there that white skin was smeared with blood.

  The blond man still held her tightly, face forward against the gate.

  The only way she could escape would be to tear away her own breasts.

  But she couldn’t fight it any more.

  She stopped trying to push herself back; immediately the pressure exerted by the man slammed her body forward against the metal bars.

  Pain — aching — exhaustion — submission; and with that there came something else, too. A sweetness; a deep, penetrating sweetness that oozed back from her breasts, to her heart, to every single cell of her body.

  Once more she closed her eyes.

  As Dianne Moberry, she had seen the last of this world.

  CHAPTER 16

  1

  David Leppington took the lift to the fourth floor of the Station Hotel.

  The ancient lift seemed little larger than a coffin. The fact that it was lined with a dark varnished pine only added to the effect.

  Normally he’d have taken the stairs but the huge meal he’d eaten at his uncle’s (and the whiskey he’d drunk that fired up a warm glow in his veins) made him feel drowsy. In one hand he held the carrier bag containing the bottle of home-made wine, and the self-published book, The Leppington Family: Fact and Legend, by Gertrude H. Leppington.

  As the lift bumped and squeaked slowly, slowly up the shaft he thought of Electra’s sudden outpouring in the lobby below. Both her pare
nts had died when she had been young. Despite her air of sophistication and cynicism there was probably a vulnerable little girl inside her that was still bewildered and hurt at being orphaned in her twenties.

  It was only the arrival of a couple that had interrupted Electra. They wanted a room for the weekend. Both had been flushed and glitteryeyed from drink. The girl had kept repeating, over and over: ‘A double room, it must be a double room. Do you have a sunken bath? A four-poster bed? Oh, Matt, we must have champagne…make them send champagne up to the room.’ Giggles.

  He found himself liking Electra. Once she dropped that tough shield she was a nice, warm human being. He pictured her: the blue-black hair, the strong nose, a dark, almost Egyptian colouring. I wonder if I should — shit.

  The single light in the coffin of a lift went out. There was instant darkness.

  The lift gave a groan.

  Stopped.

  Oh, shit.

  Great.

  Now I have to bang on the door and shout and end up feeling a right prat when the fire brigade at last winch me out.

  He looked up. Though there was little point. The darkness was absolute. There, above the roof of the lift, he pictured cables running up to the lift motor. The winch motor was smouldering, rats were nibbling at the brakes, a psychopath was hacksawing his way through the cable that held this little pine coffin three storeys above the ground.

  OK, OK, he told his runaway imagination, don’t forget the werewolves and the zombies, too.

  He reached out to where he judged the control panel would be — no, David, a little more to the left. First came the edge of the door; then his fingers found the raised edge of the metal plate where the buttons were set. Then he found the buttons, feeling oddly like cool nipples in the dark.

  Cool nipples. Now, David, he thought, suddenly grinning, does that or does that not show you’ve not been getting any lately? Comparing lift buttons to nipples?

  You need the love of a good woman (well, a bad woman would do). He smiled again. Hell, this is one way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Groping lift buttons in the dark.

  By touch he found the lowest button on the panel. That, he guessed, would be the alarm button.