Vampyrrhic

by Simon Clark

  He helped Bernice to her feet; her face was blank with shock, too.

  At that moment he looked up to see a huge black crow hovering

  above the treetops. And he knew down to the pit of his stomach that the bird had observed it all. A second later the bird gave a screech that echoed across the town. Then it wheeled smoothly above them before flapping slowly away into the distance.

  The bird’s someone’s lookout, David told himself with a kind of muted surprise at this insight.

  Now it was going to report back to its master on what it had seen played out there on the river bank.

  But what story would it relate?

  And to whom?

  CHAPTER 29

  1

  ‘Well, that showed us,’ Electra said sourly as she poured three shots of brandy into tumblers. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be so lucky next time, are we?’

  David sat heavily on the chair, feeling as energetic as a sack of potatoes; the events of the last twenty-four hours had left him feeling sapped. ‘Why don’t these vampires play by the rules? Why don’t they sleep in a coffin during the day, like they’re supposed to?’

  ‘Because they’re not vampires, not exactly, anyway. As I told you, they are vampire-like.’ Electra handed him a glass. ‘Here. Drink this. Bernice…’ She handed another glass to Bernice who sat with her elbows resting on the table top, her head in her hands.

  With an effort Bernice lifted her head. Her eyes were dull with shock. ‘Thanks. Leave the bottle. I’m going to get blasted.’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ Electra said. ‘We need to stay clear-headed and wide awake tonight.’ She took a sip of brandy herself. ‘This is purely medicinal. So, what now? David?’

  ‘We stick together as much as possible. If they don’t shun daylight, there’s no time of day when we can feel absolutely safe.’

  Bernice wiped her nose with a tissue. ‘I’m sure they try and avoid strong light. The man down by the river kept himself well in the shadows.’

  Electra said, ‘And I fitted the halogen lamp down in the basement this morning in the hope it would at least render Moberry inactive. My impression is that strong light, particularly daylight, does weaken them in some way.’

  ‘Light might give us one slender advantage, then,’ David allowed, ‘but how do we nail these bastards?’

  Bernice and Electra shrugged; Black leaned against the kitchen wall and pulled on a cigarette. ‘They’re strong, too,’ Black grunted. ‘If I hadn’t got behind the thing and shoved it into the river it would have ripped our heads off.’

  ‘The main thing, at least for the time being,’ David said, ‘is to prevent them getting into the hotel. Now if I remember my old horror films right, vampires can fly in through a window, or even melt through a crack in the door. The question is, can these?’

  ‘No. I’m pretty sure they can’t.’ Bernice looked up, the glass held in both hands. ‘The one on the river bank was the American who stayed in the hotel. He’s called Mike Stroud. He showed me a key to the hotel.’

  ‘Where on earth did he…it get a key?’

  Electra shrugged. ‘He could have slipped in one evening when the lobby was deserted and stolen one from the desk. Easy enough to do. After all, you have an outside door key on the fob with your room key.’

  ‘Well, at least that’s one more thing in our favour. We can lock them out; but that doesn’t stop them breaking a window to get inside. Is the lift switched off still?’

  Electra nodded. ‘I isolated it between floors again.’

  David looked out through the window. He couldn’t avoid an involuntary shiver as he saw it was all but dark. Any second a white face might appear at the glass to stare in at them.

  ‘Well, ladies and gentleman,’ his voice felt strained. ‘Night has now fallen.’

  2

  At Electra’s suggestion they retreated to her suite of rooms on the first floor. They took food and the bottle of brandy.

  As Electra locked the door to her apartment behind her she told them, ‘Make yourselves comfortable. It might be a long night.’ She looked at David, then at Bernice. ‘Forgive me for sounding like your friendly neighbourhood drug pusher, but I do have cocaine.

  It’ll keep you wide awake, I guarantee it.’

  ‘My God,’ David said, shaking his head. ‘The tools of the modern vampire hunter — electric lights and cocaine.’

  3

  At the same time as Electra was locking the door to her apartment within the hotel Dianne Moberry’s two sisters, Chloe and Samantha, were clicking along the street in tall stilettos, microskirts and some pretty sassy tops that showed more than they covered. It was fully dark by this time. Street lights blazed. A couple of cars cruised by, catching the girls in the headlights. There were wolf-whistles.

  The Moberry girls wore their make-up strong. Their lipsticks were a vivacious — some might say a predatory — red. They were glamorous-looking girls with broad hips, flat stomachs and they were as full breasted as their big sister Dianne, who even now was swinging herself off the stone slab in the cellar storeroom. Her hungry eyes darted to the locked door. Her stomach blazed with hunger.

  Meanwhile, a few dozen metres away, the two sisters crossed the street to the hotel, stiletto heels clicking busily against the pavement. ‘Fucking wind,’ said one of the girls.

  ‘I told you to keep off the baked beans, didn’t I, Chloe?’

  ‘Ha-fucking-ha, Samantha. Stupid wind’s going to ruin my hair. I spent hours on the stupid thing.’

  ‘You should use hair spray, not mousse.’

  ‘You used all my hair spray, remember?’

  ‘I did no such damn thing. Last time I saw it was on our Dianne’s bedside table. She probably took it with her when — oh, crap.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Just look at that. SUNDAY. HOTEL AND BARS REGRETFULLY CLOSED TONIGHT DUE TO TECHNICAL FAULT.’ She pursed her pretty red lips. ‘Damn and crap.’

  They screwed their eyes up at the notice taped to the door. The wind had caught one corner of it; it flapped with a tickering sound. ‘Charnwood’s only gone and shut the fucking bar.’

  ‘Shit. I was meeting Pete there tonight. Oh crap, I was on a promise, too.’

  ‘Who? Pete the poet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Jesus, you’re getting weird tastes. I’ve never done it with a poet before. Does he talk in rhyme when he’s on the job?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and you to wonder about. Come on, we’ll go to Vines.’

  ‘Ladies.’

  They both turned and looked in the direction of the voice. Now, was this something special? An American accent? Here in godforsaken Leppington?

  Emerging slowly from the darkness came a man all in white. They saw the glint of his blond hair, the flash of white teeth as he gave a broad grin.

  ‘Ladies,’ he said in a voice as smooth as silk. ‘Ladies, I’ve been waiting for you.’

  Then he swept out of the darkness at them. He moved fluidly, like a wild cat. They didn’t even have a chance to draw breath.

  When it was done he said, softly, ‘Now, ladies. I would like you to bring something to me…’

  4

  Deep in the cellar beneath the hotel Dianne Moberry sensed her sisters were joining them; she sensed their ecstasy and fear and pain and excitement and joy.

  She sensed their hearts beating faster and faster until orgasmic spasms shook their bodies, tingling from their thighs to their breasts.

  Her sisters’ hearts beat faster still.

  Then stopped dead.

  Presently they would begin to beat again. Only this time it would be to an altogether different rhythm.

  Beating her fists against the locked door Dianne Moberry hissed and screamed with rage and hunger. Jealousy, too. She’d been invited to this blood party. She wanted to join in the fun. She wanted out.

  5

  In Electra’s sitting room David sat in the leather armchair; Bernice and
Electra had chosen the chesterfield sofa (Electra with her knees bent and feet up on the cushions as if she sat on a chaise longue). Black sat impassively by the window on a straight-backed dining-table chair.

  The breeze blew against the window. The curtains were drawn, hiding the darkness beyond. Earlier, as David had drawn the curtains, he’d looked down into the deserted rear yard and the white strip of river beyond the yard wall. In the trees at the water’s edge he fancied he’d glimpsed a lick of yellow.

  His imagination had supplied the rest of the image. The creature that had once been the American, Mike Stroud, was hauling himself from the swollen river. He’d stand there for a moment, water dripping from his fingers onto the banking in big fat splotches, his blond hair plastered down across his forehead. On his face would be a smile of such evil. Because he knew it was only a matter of time before those people in the hotel were his. He’d take Bernice Mochardi first. His teeth would sink deep into her tender —

  ‘David?’

  ‘Sorry, yes.’ He snapped out of the reverie and looked at Electra who spoke to him in those tones of calm authority.

  ‘I think it’s time we had a council of war, don’t you?’

  ‘Definitely. I think we’ve only won ourselves a temporary refuge in here. It’s only a matter or time before they break in and…’ There was no need to finish the sentence.

  Bernice nodded. She looked composed. Black stayed mute. But David knew the man was listening to every word.

  Electra said: ‘The situation, broadly, is this: in the caves beneath the town are a collection of…of — well, we will call them vampires for want of a better word; they certainly have vampiric attributes. Agreed?’

  David nodded; Bernice and Black followed suit.

  ‘Good.’ Electra spoke crisply as if addressing a business meeting. ‘For years, probably centuries, these vampires have enjoyed a close and relatively secret relationship with the Leppington family. It’s clear to me now that the Leppingtons, formerly known as the Leppingsvalts, have acted as jailers to these vampires. For centuries the Leppingtons have provided these creatures with food.’

  ‘And that food is blood?’ Bernice said in a small voice.

  ‘Yes, blood — living, red blood, by the bucketful — the staple diet of mosquitoes, leeches and vampire bats.’ Electra lit a cigarette. ‘Excuse me, I don’t normally; a filthy habit.’ She inhaled deeply before continuing. ‘The Leppington family assiduously cared for their charges who were locked safely underground out of the way. In the nineteenth century this care reached typical Victorian efficiency of industrial proportions when your great-great-grandfather, David, a Colonel Leppington, had the slaughterhouse built.’

  David nodded. ‘I take it that Colonel Leppington’s motives for building the slaughterhouse weren’t purely financial?’

  ‘No, he decided to modernize the vampire-feeding operation by building a huge slaughterhouse where perhaps a hundred or more animals were killed a day. Their throats were cut and the blood gushed out onto the killing-room floor where drains carried it to the vampires as they waited underground — no doubt hungrily licking their lips. Not a pretty picture, is it?’

  ‘Then they weren’t dependent on human blood?’

  ‘No. Not entirely.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I imagine for them human blood is the real McCoy. Animal blood is a substitute for the real thing — just as to a drug addict pethedine is only an inferior, weak-as-dishwater substitute for heroin.’

  David thought hard, nipping his bottom lip between finger and thumb. ‘Presumably these creatures have been satisfied with the blood of sheep and cattle for centuries. You can imagine my ancestors, hundreds of years ago, trudging into the caves with buckets of the stuff and pouring it into pig troughs for them. And for a long time this kept the monsters satiated. So what’s disturbed the status quo? Why have they started feeding on people again?’

  Electra blew out a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Perhaps some inner biological clock is the trigger. You know, at some point in the Autumn geese know it’s time to migrate. In the Spring buds suddenly start appearing on the trees…’

  ‘No. You’re wrong,’ Bernice said quietly. ‘I read the family history that David lent me this morning. You know how all this is supposed to have started, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Electra said, and tapped the ash off from her cigarette into the

  ashtray that was balanced on her knee. ‘That was the fairy story our grandparents told their children on dark and stormy nights like this. What would our politically correct child psychologists say about that?’ There was a look of concentration on Bernice’s face. She’d been giving this some thought. Now she was reaching conclusions of her own. ‘In a nutshell, the story was this: A thousand years ago the Leppingtons were given a divine mission. To oust Christianity by killing the Christian kings and conquering all the Christian countries. To help them do this the Norse thunder god, Thor, gave the Leppingtons this army of the undead.’

  David nodded. ‘That’s how the fairy story runs.’

  ‘But on the eve of battle,’ Bernice continued, speaking slowly, calmly, ‘disaster struck. The chief of the Leppingtons was in his palace along with his sister and his bride-to-be. The sister was ill with some unspecified disease and never ventured from the palace. The bride-to-be suffered a social handicap of her own. Originally she had been a harlot. The chief had saved her from what amounted to being the sex slave of a Christian warlord in the north. Also there with the chief was his right-hand man, the Goth warrior called Vurtzen.’

  David said softly, ‘For some reason the chief argued with his warrior friend, who was a wild beast-like man by all accounts. They drew their swords against each other, and fought in the palace all night.’

  ‘And during the battle a great wind blew open the doors of the palace. The candles and fires were put out in the gust. The two men carried on fighting in the dark, slashing at each other with their swords. So ferocious and full of hate were they for each other that unwittingly they killed the sister and the bride-to-be in the dark. Next morning, so the legend goes, both see what has happened. The Goth warrior Vurtzen is full of remorse and exiles himself in a land at the ends of the Earth. Chief Leppingsvalt is so full of grief over the death of his sister and beloved fiancée that he burns down the temple to Thor and refuses to lead the invasion force of dead warriors on Christendom. Instead he seals the entrance to the cave.’

  Electra added, ‘And so the curse of the Leppingtons is wrought. Thor disfigures Chief Leppingsvalt and presumably commands the chief’s descendants to continue to care for the undead — this army of vampires — until the time is ripe for the next invasion of the Christian nation.’

  ‘And the time has now come,’ Bernice said, quietly but firmly. ‘Don’t you see what’s happening?’

  Electra shook her head, frowning. ‘No. What?’

  ‘Somehow events have gone full circle,’ Bernice said, earnestly. ‘On Friday night, when we were all together in the kitchen — you, Electra, me and David and Jack. The wind pushed open the door and blew the serviettes into the air. At that moment I knew we’d been together before; the four of us. Now I know why.’ She looked from face to face. ‘You see now, don’t you? We’re the same people who were in that palace on that night, more than a thousand years ago.’ She stood up and paced the room. ‘You, David? That’s easy; you’re Chief of the Leppingsvalts, as they were known then. Electra is your sister. Jack Black here is the Goth warrior, Vurtzen. And I…’

  Electra looked at her levelly. ‘And you are the bride-to-be.’

  For a moment there was absolute silence in the room. The wind blew hard against the glass. It swirled around the four towers of the hotel drawing forth a long, low moaning sound that sounded like a girl sobbing broken-hearted in the night.

  David’s mouth was dry. He sensed a gigantic mechanism that existed in some other world beyond this one beginning to turn its mighty wheels. That mechanism would dri
ve the events in this world. It happened rarely, but it was happening now. Things beyond his comprehension would happen.

  But despite this sensation that was so palpable he felt he could reach out into the air and grasp it, the rational side of his brain tried to put the brakes on the mechanism that was going to launch him on one hell of a nightmare roller-coaster ride.

  ‘You’re saying that something is going to force us to relive what happened to four people — four legendary people who might never have even existed in reality?’

  Bernice nodded. ‘The legend in your book said that the gods would give the Leppingtons a second chance to complete the task that had been entrusted to them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Now the four of us are together again.’

  ‘And tonight’s the night,’ added Electra in a low voice as she tapped the ash from her cigarette.

  David rubbed his face; it felt stiff; his ears were ringing. ‘And this is where I get a second chance to take command of my army of dead warriors and lead them into battle?’

  Bernice nodded; Electra’s face was as inscrutable as the Sphinx’s.

  ‘And if I don’t take command of them…’ David’s mouth was dry. ‘They will run amok and kill everyone?’ He shook his head, his palms moist with perspiration. ‘You expect me to believe that? I mean, would vow?’

  Electra spoke calmly. ‘Let’s vote on it. Who believes what Bernice has just told us? Hands up, please.’

  David watched, with shivers running up his spine to tingle icily across his scalp. Bernice put her hand up straight away; her eyes, sober and serious, were fixed on David’s. Then Electra slowly raised her hand.

  David turned to look at the tattooed beast of a man sitting by the window. The scarred face remained stone-like; never a flicker revealed what he might be thinking. Surely Black wouldn’t go along with this?