Vampyrrhic

by Simon Clark

‘No…no, I don’t need any help, get away from me…get away!’

  ‘You’re lost.’

  ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  ‘Why should I want to hurt you?’

  She paused, hearing nothing but the rasp of her own frightened breathing. The hands that held her wrists were warm.

  Living.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Maximilian.’

  ‘You — you’re not one of those things, are you?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘The monsters…vampires.’

  ‘The people who live down here?’

  ‘People?’ She laughed; crimson veins of insanity shimmered through the sound. ‘People? Yes, if you can call them that.’

  ‘No. I’m Maximilian,’ he repeated in a calm voice. ‘Maximilian Hart. I live at 19 Ash Grove, Leppington, North Yorkshire.’

  Bernice took a deep breath; she was trembling so much she thought it would literally shake her apart.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ came the gentle voice from the darkness.

  ‘Why?’ she asked suspiciously.

  ‘So I can guide you out of here.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, still suspicious. ‘Did one of those things bite you?’

  ‘Bite me?’

  ‘Yes, if you’ve been bitten you will be infected. You will become one of them.’

  ‘No.’ The voice sounded puzzled now. ‘No. I haven’t been bitten. They said I had bad blood. Why do you think they said that?’

  ‘Bad blood?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She let out a lungful of air. She was sure he wasn’t one of the vampires. There was some quality to his voice that was indestructibly human. When she spoke again it was in a friendly way. ‘Here’s my hand,’ she said. ‘Can you find it?’

  ‘Yes…yes. Got it. It’s a nice soft hand. You smell nice, too. What’s your name?’

  ‘Bernice.’

  ‘Bernice? That’s a nice name. I like it.’

  With that she allowed herself to be led away into darkness.

  CHAPTER 39

  1

  Arnold McClure, the grandson of the founder of Archibald McClure printers (1897) was a shrewd sixty-year-old with short grey hair, a neatly clipped moustache and the most brilliant blue eyes: they looked as if they should be set into necklaces and worn by princesses.

  Electra’s father had always told her that Arnie McClure was so smart he could sell snow to the Eskimos. On that Monday morning Arnold McClure stood in the office of the printing firm and turned the book Electra had given him over and over in his hands as if handling a precious artefact just extracted from the ruins of a Greek temple. He ran his fingers reverently over the print on the title page.

  ‘Feel that,’ he told Electra, holding out the book, ‘feel the impression of the typeface. You don’t get that now with laser printers.’ Electra complied, feeling the minute depressions in the paper made by the metal letters of the printing press. The old man sighed, ‘Isn’t there something almost affectionate and loving about the old-style printing process? There the metal dies that reproduced the text were brushed with ink, then pressed firmly but really quite gently, you know, against the paper. Now we have lasers that burn the letters onto the paper — that is so much harsher, don’t you think?’

  The sound of the tourists and shoppers moving along Whitby’s Church Lane sounded far away. The printer’s office occupied the top floor of a building that backed onto the quaintly named Arguments Yard. She’d left Black smoking outside on the steps. His tattooed and scarred face would, she thought, be too much of a distraction.

  She knew Arnold McClure well; the hotel had had all its printing done here for donkey’s years. Normally, she would enjoy a friendly chat with him, drink tea and share his biscuits from a big silver drum that sat on the filing cabinet. But now she was keen to zero in on her suspicions. ‘Arnold. You recognize the book, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. One of ours, indisputably so.’

  ‘But Archibald McClure & Sons didn’t become a limited liability company until comparatively recently?’

  ‘That’s perfectly correct. Let’s see, it’ll be, ahm, ten years ago this summer.’ He smiled good-naturedly. ‘Why all the interest in our company all of a sudden?’

  ‘Well, I came across this book. And there appears to be something amiss with it.’

  ‘Amiss?’ He raised his white eyebrows and smiled. ‘No typos, I hope? No misnumbered pages?’

  ‘Oh no. Nothing like that. Only your logo at the front of the book describes you as a limited company.’

  ‘Which we are now. So why all the mystery?’

  ‘The book was — it says on the title page — printed in 1957.’

  ‘And then we were just plain old Archibald McClure and Sons, not Archibald McClure and Sons Limited?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  The old man held the book just under his nose and flicked through the pages as if to inhale the aroma exuded by the paper. ‘Mmm…still has a new-book smell, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That too. So why does a supposedly forty-year-old book appear to have actually been printed quite recently?’

  ‘Where did you get this, Electra?’ he asked, suddenly thoughtful. ‘You know, it’s quite a rarity.’

  ‘It belongs to a friend of mine.’

  ‘A Leppington?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘George Leppington?’

  ‘No, he gave it to his nephew who’s staying at my hotel.’

  ‘Ah, I thought it couldn’t have fallen into your hands from a secondhand-book dealer.’

  ‘So, the book is a forgery?’ Electra asked quickly.

  ‘Well, no…I could hardly describe it as a forgery.’

  ‘But the book was printed when — two or three years ago?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘And it bears a date stating it was printed more than forty years ago.’

  ‘The original print run was made in 1957. I was working in the print shop then — my father insisted I start at the bottom, learn the trade, even though it was my family’s business.’

  ‘Oh…’ She felt deflated. ‘This is just a reprint of the original, then?’

  ‘George Leppington commissioned another print run two years ago. What’s wrong, Electra? Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ she said wearily. ‘I just thought…oh, nothing really. It’s not important.’

  ‘But important enough for you to hightail it down from Leppington to see me about it?’

  She gave a weak smile. ‘I’d convinced myself the book was a forgery somehow. It never occurred to me that it was simply a reprint of an earlier edition.’

  ‘Electra.’ Arnold McClure sat down behind his desk and knitted his fingers together in front of him, his expression grave now. He looked at her levelly with his brilliant blue eyes. ‘I take it that it was important to you that the book is, shall we say, not as it appears to be?’

  ‘Really, I’m sorry to have wasted your time, Arnold. I’ve been barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘Wait, Electra, sit down…please. I’ve known you since you were so high. You’re not the hysterical sort. And I’m long enough in the tooth to know when someone’s in trouble…ah!’ He held up a hand. ‘You don’t have to tell me the ins and outs.’ He smiled sympathetically. ‘I might be turning into a bit of an old goat these days — I can give the lads on the shop floor a hard time if I catch them larking around — but I still think I’m intuitive enough to see fear in someone’s eyes.’ He looked at her. ‘Do I see fear in your eyes, Electra?’

  She nodded.

  He stroked the side of his face, troubled. The light twinkled from his wedding ring. ‘OK. I think we need to exercise the old loyalties of what, after all, are two old family firms that go way back together.’

  ‘You mean there is something about the book — something more than meets the eye?’

  He nodded. ‘Can I get you a drink? Coffee, tea, s
omething stronger?’

  ‘No. I’m pushed for time.’ She glanced out of the window. The sun, half hidden by scudding cloud, rode high in the sky by now. There were maybe another seven hours or so before dusk. The clock was ticking. ‘Thanks, anyway.’ She forced a smile.

  ‘The truth is, Electra,’ he picked up the book from the desk, ‘this mystifies me somewhat. Oh, I know what it is: a family history of the Leppingtons. We’ve printed this kind of thing before for local families. We’re typesetting one now for the Harkers from Ruswarp. Basically, we’re happy to print anything as long as we’re paid on time.’ He flicked through the book again. ‘Miss Gertrude Leppington commissioned us to print this book in 1957 — three hundred copies, if I’m not mistaken. Good job we did, too, good-quality paper; the books were hand-stitched, not glued like you find today. This book will still have all its pages in a hundred years.’ He paused, considering. ‘And that was the end of the job. But two years ago George Leppington came into this very office, sits in that very chair where you’re sitting, Electra, and asks me to reprint it. “OK,” I reply. “How many copies?” “Two,” he replies. “Oh, two hundred?” say I. He looks me right in the face and tells me, “No, Arnold. Just two copies.” I pointed out to him that that’s going to make for a couple of very expensive books. We still have the typefaces, but we have to set up the machines again — and, believe me, it costs a lot to set up the machines to print a whole book.’

  ‘Did he say why he wanted just two copies of the book?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the books were to be exactly the same?’

  ‘Well…’ He knitted his fingers gravely together again. ‘Actually, no. He’d prepared alterations to the text. Not a great deal of difference. It was to one of the earlier chapters that describe the Leppingtons’ past. He also wanted some kind of prophecy added to the chapter. He said he’d been researching the family history and needed to make a few additions.’

  ‘But that would mean typesetting part of the book again?’

  The man nodded. ‘As well as renumbering the pages and altering the contents page to reflect the new page numbers of the chapters.’

  ‘That would have cost a small fortune, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Indeed it did,’ he said. ‘And George was willing to pay. Not only that, he asked for it to be printed on 1950s paper, and for every other detail of the book to be the same so it would look identical to the original 1957 edition.’

  ‘But surely you wouldn’t have paper that old in stock?’

  ‘We do, as a matter of fact. Not very businesslike in this day and age, but we do carry stocks of paper that go back decades. We even have some high-quality vellum that dates back a hundred years — though the mercury content of the paper would probably be enough to make a toxicologist reach for the panic button.’ His blue eyes twinkled. ‘I’m going to print the invitations to my retirement party on that one.’

  ‘But what accounts for that new-book smell on the pages?’

  ‘The inks. We had to use new inks, although we tried to match the shade as closely as possible to the original.’

  ‘If the new book was to be like the old edition in every detail — with the exception of George Leppington’s amendments — why did you alter the name of the printer to include the word limited?’

  ‘A matter of observing the laws of the land, Electra. If we were to omit the word indicating we are a limited-liability company we might be liable for prosecution by the Registrar of companies — the Companies Acts and all that. So well spotted, by the way. You’d have made quite a detective, Electra.’

  She acknowledged the compliment with a nod and a smile. ‘You don’t remember exactly what changes were made to the book, do you, Arnold?’

  ‘I can do one better than that. We keep copies of what we print — just in case there are any complaints from clients later — not that we receive many, I should add.’ He smiled, and picked up the telephone. ‘I’ll just ring downstairs and get Judy to ferret out one of the original 1957 copies of the book for you. Then you can compare the two versions of the book and see the differences for yourself.’

  ‘Thank you, Arnold,’ she said gratefully. ‘You don’t know how much this means to me.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said soberly as he stood and held out his hand. She shook it. ‘But there’s a look in your eye that suggests that lives depend on what I told you today.’ He held on to her hand while resting his other hand on top of hers, then added gravely, ‘May God go with you, Electra, and keep you safe.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, touched.

  Five minutes later she was striding through Whitby’s busy streets in

  the direction of the car park. Jack Black walked alongside of her, his fierce expression enough to part the crowds.

  ‘Got what you wanted?’ he asked.

  ‘And a whole lot more.’ They crossed the car park to where the van was parked. It overlooked the harbour where boats rocked on the wind-ruffled sea. She shot Jack Black a look as she pulled the mobile phone from her bag. ‘Do you believe in God, Jack?’

  ‘Never have done. Load of bollocks.’

  ‘I shared your opinion. But we might have to revise our views.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  She held up the two books. ‘Because I think one of our prayers has just been answered.’

  She tapped the keys on the mobile. Instantly it was answered. ‘Hello, David?’ she said, pressing one hand over the other ear as the wind gusted, rattling the car park sign. ‘David, yes…it’s Electra. David, listen. Have you finished at the cave? Good. You’re back at the hotel? Stay there, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Yes…yes. I’ve acquired some information that you’re going to find interesting. Also, get some rest while you can, because this afternoon we’re going to conduct an experiment — a very important experiment.’

  After David rang off she slipped the phone back into her bag and looked up at the tiers of ancient houses climbing the side of the valley in row after row. The orange pantile roofs glowed warmly in the sunshine. Above the lines of houses, the church of St Mary’s stood on the hilltop. Behind that lay the ruins of the thousand-year-old abbey.

  With a sense of surprise she found she was really fond of this little old town by the sea. It looked lovely. Utterly lovely. For much of her life she’d fostered a breezy indifference to the value of her life — and of actually being alive. But now she realized how much she would regret dying young. Well, God willing, that won’t happen, she told herself firmly as she looked up at the houses. We won’t be destroyed like poor Bernice. And, moreover, we will avenge her death.

  2

  Bernice Mochardi, very much alive but trapped beneath the town of Leppington, watched the stranger step into the little pool of daylight admitted by the iron grating above their heads.

  ‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said, so grateful to be in the company of another human being she could have jumped up and down excitedly on the spot.

  Maximilian Hart smiled beneath the grey wash of light. ‘And I’ve seen you, too. You live in the hotel?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She gripped his hand tightly. ‘But how did you get down here?’

  ‘They brought me down into the tunnels. But none of the white people would touch me. They think I’ve got bad blood.’

  ‘They let you go?’

  He shrugged and smiled, his almond-shaped Down’s syndrome eyes twinkling. ‘I just walked away. They ignored me. You see, I’ve got bad blood,’ he added as if by way of explanation. ‘Why do you think I’ve got bad blood?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’ve got bad blood,’ she said with feeling. ‘As far as I’m concerned you’re my knight in shining armour. A hero.’

  He smiled. ‘I wish I was a hero. I wish I could be brave.’

  ‘Believe me, Maximilian, you are,’ she said firmly, then looked along the tunnel that was intermittently lit by pools of daylight. ‘Maximilian, do you know a way out of here?’

&nbs
p; He shook his head. ‘I’ve never been down here before.’

  Bernice kept a grip on his hand, reassuring herself with his physical presence. T guess all we can do is keep looking. What do you say?’

  ‘Keep looking. Yes, keep looking.’

  ‘As long as we don’t bump into any of those creatures,’ Bernice added with a cold shudder. ‘Come on, sooner we’re out of here the better.’

  Keeping her eyes locked onto the core of darkness that lay beyond the pools of daylight, she walked on, and wondered what Electra and David were doing now.

  The time was just a moment past midday.

  3

  At half-past twelve Electra walked briskly into the hotel kitchen, followed by Jack Black. David leaned back against a worktop, chewing doggedly on a sandwich and drinking a syrup-thick black coffee. Quickly, Electra told David what she’d uncovered that morning.

  He shook his head, puzzled. ‘You mean my uncle had two copies of a specially doctored version of my family’s history printed?’ He shrugged, perplexed. ‘What on earth for?’

  ‘I think the reason can be summed up in one word,’ Electra replied. ‘Obsession.’

  ‘Obsession?’

  She gave a confirming nod. ‘He must have been obsessed by your family’s legendary past; he wanted more than anything else for it to be true, including the parts about the Leppingtons being blood descendants of Norse gods, and that the family were destined for some great and glorious future as empire builders.’

  David looked down at the copy of The Leppington Family: Fact and Legend that his uncle had given him. This was the newer, altered version. Electra had already hi-lighted the doctored text in fluorescent yellow. He shook his head. ‘But why go to all that trouble?’

  ‘I think, originally, he produced the new version of the book purely for his own satisfaction.’

  ‘So he never intended anyone else to see it?’

  ‘Absolutely. It would probably have been enough for him to sit alone in his house up there on the hillside rereading the version of your family history as he wanted it to be.’