Vampyrrhic

by Simon Clark

  ‘Where people under hypnosis recall being abducted by UFOs or remember being sexually abused by their Scoutmaster.’ He smiled — at least he tried to: this smile felt a watery effort. ‘Yes, we covered repressed memory at university.’

  ‘So you had a repressed memory about the people you saw caged up down there. Now it’s been released. You remember your uncle calling them by banging on the bars?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘But you remember it in so much detail, the way your uncle struck the bars, what they looked like, even the clothes you were wearing. You’re not going to tell me that was just some old nightmare you had when you were six years old, are you?’

  He sighed, and looked at her as she drove. Her face had a brittle quality. As if she was composing her expression through will-power alone. And why was she so keen to believe in the underground-people story so strongly? It was almost as if she were clutching at it like the proverbial drowning man clutching at straws scattered on the water. He realized all of a sudden this repressed memory of his was important somehow — to her at least. It was something she was clutching at to stop her drowning.

  As she turned the car into the Station Hotel car park he said gently, ‘Bernice, there’s something called false-memory syndrome. There’s evidence to suggest that a lot of these so-called repressed memories that have been recovered under hypnosis or through therapy are false.’

  ‘But you recalled everything in such detail, didn’t you?’

  ‘That’s all part and parcel of it. But the truth of the matter is, Bernice, some of these memories are just phantoms; they’re products of imagination. In the light of false-memory syndrome some notorious child abuse cases are going to have to be overturned.’

  Bernice parked the car. One look at her set expression told him she refused to doubt what he had remembered — apparently remembered, he corrected himself, up there at the mouth of the cave.

  ‘Well,’ he said, deliberately striving to sound down-to-earth. ‘I think we’ve earned a good day’s sleep after all that excitement.’

  She nodded, her face still tight.

  He smiled. ‘I’ll see if I can find Electra and tell her what happened; she’s probably wondering what’s happened to us.’

  ‘David?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That book you mentioned — the family history. May I borrow it?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled, ‘I’ll push it under your room door. It is rather a slim volume.’

  She gave no answering smile. Her face was earnest. As if she’d been given a tough problem to crack. And as though lives depended on her coming up with the right answer.

  Hell, he thought as he climbed out of the car. What is it with this town? It’s as if eccentricity has suddenly become infectious; people were deadly serious about some old piece of family folklore.

  In the grey light of day the night’s events, and that torrent of memory — false memory, he corrected himself — seemed nothing more than a bizarre dream.

  That’s it, he reasoned to himself. False-memory syndrome; that was the neat, all-encompassing explanation. Tie it all up in the sensible ribbons of modern-day science with a neat double bow on top: False-memory syndrome. Pure imagination. Some remembered childhood nightmare. Nothing more.

  Nevertheless, as he followed Bernice across the courtyard to enter the hotel by the back door, the words continued to circle around in his brain: the monsters are waking up.

  4

  Within ten minutes David had handed the book, The Leppington Family: Fact and Legend, to Bernice at her door, then he’d retired to bed. The curtains were thick and admitted little daylight. Hell, it was a long time since he’d stopped up all night. He still felt…weird: that was the only word for it.

  The monsters are waking up…

  Electra had left a note on the kitchen table, saying not to worry about the couple in Room 101. But David doubted somehow they’d turned up sheepishly in reception: this was more a sweeping-everything-under-the-carpet kind of operation. The PS at the foot of the note added that Electra had gone to bed.

  And why is Bernice so interested in my family history? he asked himself. At one point he was reluctant to hand the book over — the intensity of her manner suggested she was in the early throes of developing one humdinger of a fixation about the thing.

  He pulled the bedclothes higher. Perhaps after a few hours’ sleep the peculiar, no, he corrected, the downright bizarre night he’d just experienced wouldn’t seem so strange. He yawned. The time on his bedside travel clock read 7:17 a.m.

  By 7:18 he’d entered a deep, dreamless sleep.

  5

  7:19 a.m. In her suite of rooms on the first floor Electra Charnwood slept in her bed alone. Naked, she lay face down. In the throes and turns of the dream the duvet had slid partly off, revealing a breath-takingly long back. Her blue-black hair formed a dark wash across her pillow

  The mantelpiece clock that had been a wedding present for her mother and father ticked resolutely on in the sitting room. If she had known that subsidence in the town cemetery had split open her mother’s coffin and that baby rabbits now scampered across the skull and through the still-moist ribcage she would have given a little laugh; that was all. Electra Charnwood knew that real life was shot through with threads of the macabre. In the midst of life we are in death, she’d tell herself a half-dozen times a day. She found death and all its trappings fascinating. The Egyptian mummy room of the British Museum was one of her favourite places in all the world. There she could stand and stare in a dreamy fascination at the three-thousand-year-old dead: the women bound in linen with their jewellery, and the bones of their still-born children between their knees.

  Now she dreamed of a dark figure with great leathery wings that erupted from a grave in the town cemetery. She couldn’t tell whether it was male or female. Only that its face was beautiful and its skin was as smooth as PVC.

  Now, in her dream, it slipped smoothly as a snake through her bedroom window and crept onto the bed beside her, wrapping those great bat-like wings around her body, binding her so tightly she couldn’t move. The eyes were as bright as light bulbs.

  From the beautiful face that straddled the borderline between the

  feminine and the masculine it breathed silkily into her ear: ‘I love you, I love you, I love you…

  6

  7:20 a.m. Bernice Mochardi was in bed. But she did not sleep.

  She held the book that David had lent her so tightly that every so often she had to make a conscious effort to lay it down and flex her aching fingers. She felt as if she was close to making an important discovery.

  For weeks now she’d obsessively watched the videotape she’d found in the Dead Box downstairs. She thought and she’d dreamt about Mike Stroud, the blond-haired man in the video. It had preyed so intensively on her mind that she’d been frightened that she was going mad. Now all these events — the video, imagining that someone stalked outside on the landing at night, what had happened to the couple in Room 101; everything — were like fragments of a jigsaw that were swirling like fury in front of her. She knew they’d all fit together into a single coherent picture if only she could find more clues. She had to solve this puzzle. For the sake of her sanity. Now she was determined to work on it until she had an answer.

  And perhaps that answer lay in these pages.

  As the grey light brightened she settled down to read the book.

  CHAPTER 26

  1

  By four o’clock on the Sunday afternoon David was sitting in the kitchen of the Station Hotel. He’d slept for a good seven hours after going to bed that morning. Already he was experiencing a mild disorientation from a disturbed sleep pattern. Nevertheless, he’d visited his uncle at the hospital (this time taking a taxi and going alone). There was no change. His uncle lay in the side ward, deeply asleep, the dried blood now washed from his face; all the doctor could tell
him was that the X-ray had revealed nothing; that the old man’s vital signs were within tolerable limits (that is, they didn’t believe he would die on them just yet) and that they’d continue to observe him (that was, a nurse would, every now and again, put her head around the side-ward door and look in on him to make sure he wasn’t awake and asking for his breakfast).

  For the last thirty minutes David had sat in the kitchen (which he now realized was the nerve centre of the hotel). Electra stood at the cooker, ladling stew into bowls. Bernice Mochardi sat across the other side of the big well-scrubbed table. David noticed how young and vulnerable she looked now that she’d removed the Goth make-up and changed into a plain grey sweatshirt and black jeans.

  Jack Black was working out back, moving in that mechanical way of his as he manhandled empty beer kegs across the yard to the store.

  Already they’d had time to swap their stories about the events of Saturday night. Electra was sympathetic about his uncle’s accident — and she was nothing less than goggle-eyed when she heard how it had happened from a dynamite blast. Electra’s recollections of Saturday night were fairly scanty. In a nutshell she’d seen nothing, heard nothing. Now she was playing the mother role with the aplomb of an experienced actress.

  ‘Here, you must eat. Both of you,’ Electra said firmly as she set two steaming bowls in front of them. ‘It’s a beef-in-ale stew. A good hearty recipe of my own; it’ll put new life in you. I made it all myself, chopped up the ingredients. And don’t look at me like that, Bernice. I haven’t put the occupants of Room 101 in the pot.’ She smiled as she laid a soup spoon by each bowl. ‘I’m roasting them on a spit out back tonight.’

  ‘With an apple in their mouths?’ David added; then instantly regretted the flip remark.

  ‘Naturally. And with a sprig of rosemary up the bum.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ Bernice said, her face looking tight. ‘If you’d seen the mess that girl was in you wouldn’t joke, Electra.’

  ‘Bernice, I’m —’

  ‘She was bleeding, bruised. Raped. I really thought she’d been raped.’ Electra sighed. ‘Point taken. Sorry. I was just trying to lighten the mood a little. Any bread to go with that, Dr Leppington?’

  ‘Please.’

  She’s striving to be light-hearted, David thought, looking up at her as he spooned some of the rich stew into his mouth. Something, however, was still preying on her mind.

  ‘So, David,’ Electra said as she sat down at the table with a cup of coffee, ‘what’s it like to have divine blood coursing in your veins?’

  He smiled. ‘Oh, Bernice has been telling you about the Leppingtons’ colourful family history?’

  ‘She has, but we heard the stories from our grannies here in Leppington.’

  ‘Stories to be told on a dark and stormy night, eh?’

  ‘Something like that. Stories about vampire armies to frighten little children before bedtime. Charming. But the Leppingtons’ claim to divine ancestry? You have to admit it’s something to boast about it, isn’t it?’ David’s smile broadened. ‘I did plan to add it to my CV’

  ‘I approve.’ Electra flashed a vivid smile back. ‘Anything to improve one’s career prospects must be good, I say.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘Unfortunately we Charnwoods can’t boast anything so grand as having a Norse god for an ancestor. The only thing handed down genetically in our family are our petite ears.’ She flicked back her blue-black hair to reveal a small ear, from which dangled a jet drop earring. ‘Cute, eh?’

  ‘Well, to be honest.’ David smiled. ‘My mother said the only thing that ran in our family were noses.’ He touched his own prominent nose.

  ‘And the only thing to run in our family were feet,’ Bernice said, a smile at last warming the serious expression on her face. ‘Which has to be the most feeble joke ever.’

  David laughed, Electra too. The laughter was loud and David suspected those feeble jokes were providing an outlet for the emotional tension that had been building over the last few hours. Laughter — friendly laughter, not mocking laughter — is also a way of bonding a group of people together. But as they sat around that table David was once more struck by the sensation that he’d met these people before.

  When he stopped laughing he looked at the two women, going from one face to another. They were looking back at him, too, and he sensed a growing empathy: as if some subliminal communication flashed from one to another, some spark of understanding as if they shared the same secret.

  And what could that secret be? Perhaps, deep down, all three of them were thinking the same thing: The monsters are waking up.

  2

  And it was at that moment that, by some kind of instinctual and unspoken agreement, the three of them decided the time was ripe to bring out into the open the secret that weighed on their hearts like a rock.

  For a few moments they made small talk. The sun broke through the heavy cloud that lay like a grey rug above the town; shafts of sunlight fell onto the hillsides, then moved towards Leppington, playing on the rooftops like searchlights being shone down from the sky.

  As they talked Jack Black — all tattoos and bad attitude — walked into the kitchen, took milk from the refrigerator and sat on a stool by the worktop, drinking straight from the carton.

  And now we are four, thought David. The team is complete. The notion surprised him. However, it seemed oddly right. And again the impression came strongly that the four of them had interacted in the dim and distant past.

  Electra took Black’s arrival as a cue to change the topic of conversation.

  ‘Bernice was telling me that when you were up at your uncle’s you experienced some kind of flashback.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said, trying to make it sound as if it wasn’t of the slightest importance. He looked at Bernice who leaned forward clasping her hands together on the table as if in prayer. Her eyes were troubled.

  Electra continued in low, even tones. ‘That you remembered what you saw in the cave when you were a child?’

  ‘Thought I remembered,’ David corrected. ‘Yes, I imagined I saw people in the darkness beyond the railings of the fence.’

  ‘The fence that your uncle dynamited last night?’

  ‘Which I’m sure will get him into trouble with the police.’

  ‘The fence has been breached?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t check.’

  ‘But if it has, then the people you once saw in the cave are free to come out.’

  ‘Come out?’ He shook his head, bemused. ‘Electra. I was no more than six years old at the time. I probably imagined seeing those…people, whatever they were.’

  ‘You described them as monsters,’ Bernice said quietly. ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, monsters. So, I was remembering some old nightmare.’

  ‘And now your uncle has dynamited the gate and let them out.’ Bernice pinched her bottom lip between finger and thumb as if allowing the full weight of the truth to sink in. After a moment she added, ‘George Leppington said…let me get this right…he said, “I am like Ishtar. I have broken down the doors of the underworld and set the dead upon the living.”‘

  Electra nodded, eyes narrowing as she considered what Bernice was saying.

  David felt increasingly bemused; and underlying the bemusement a sense that the world — the reality he knew — had assumed that dreamlike quality again. ‘Now wait a minute,’ he said, still smiling, but he felt a tension creeping into his stomach. ‘Who the heck is Ishtar?’

  Without hesitating, Electra said, ‘The Ishtar-Tammuz myth dates from the Akkadian civilization that flourished in the Middle East around four thousand years ago. Ishtar was a goddess who fell out with her fellow gods and goddesses and threatened to break down the gates of the underworld and, therefore, set the dead upon the living with the intention of wiping out humankind. Your uncle employed the story as an apt metaphor for his actions.’

  ‘Wait…wait…’ David rested his fingers against his s
uddenly aching temples. ‘Have I missed something here? Or have I gone mad and I’m imagining all this?’

  ‘I can pinch you if you like,’ Electra said crisply. ‘And I’ve got a jolly hard pinch, believe me.’

  He looked at Electra. She was no longer joking. She gazed back at him levelly, her expression serious.

  ‘Wait a minute.’ He looked from Electra to Bernice. ‘Are you telling me you believe all this? You believe the fairy stories about the Leppingtons having divine blood, and…and — for crying out loud — that there’s a vampire army lurking somewhere in a cave?’

  Electra’s gaze did not flinch. ‘Don’t you, Dr Leppington?’

  He gave a laugh; to his ears a strange barking sound in the tiled kitchen. He shook his head. ‘You can’t be serious. Tell me this is some kind of wind-up!’

  Gravely, Electra said, ‘But you’ve seen these creatures, haven’t you, David?’

  David glanced at Black, hoping at least to hear mocking laughter from the tattooed man. Black’s face was like stone. All he did was wipe the milk moustache from his thick lips and light a cigarette.

  David took a deep breath. ‘Like I told Bernice, this is obviously a case of false-memory syndrome. Yes, I agree, I can close my eyes now and picture my uncle beating a steel peg against the bars — like you’d rattle the bars of a cage to attract an animal — then I remember looking into the gloom beyond the bars.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Yes, I remember — appear to remember, I should say — seeing dozens of people — men and women — sort of shambling forward. Their faces were white — as white as that plastic bowl across there. Eyebrows seemed heavy and as black as the bristles on a paint brush; as for their eyes, they had a bruised quality to them: the skin was dark, very dark, around their eyes. This made the whites stand out — so much so that they actually seemed to shine, as if they were lit from inside.’