Vampyrrhic

by Simon Clark

  ‘Wait a minute, the original does describe our ancestors’ dealings with the god, Thor, and the creation of the vampire army, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does, yes. Although it makes no mention of the prophecy that the last of the Leppingtons — that’s you, David — will return to the town to take control of the vampire army before marching it away to death and glory in the outside world.’

  David rubbed his jaw, his mind ticking over faster. ‘So what other changes have you identified?’

  ‘It was all a rush job on the drive back up here. But it seems in the later version George Leppington cut all references to the folk tale of Sir William of Saxilby’s battle with the vampires in the thirteenth century.’

  ‘So he was deleting all references to the vampires being destroyed?’

  ‘Got it in one. He wanted to present a new version of the myth, that the Leppington breed of vampire was indestructible. That the long-lost son of the Leppingtons would return to lead them out to smite the old enemy. You see what’s happened, don’t you?’

  David nodded. ‘He’s sat down and rewritten the Leppington myth in a form he wanted to be true.’

  ‘But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that you — the last in the blood-line of the Leppingtons — would actually return to the town.’

  ‘You think he’s insane?’

  ‘I think he was driven by this obsession to extraordinary lengths — in fact, ultimately, he believed in his own version of the Leppington myth, including the prophecy he’d concocted out of his own head that you’d returned to lead the monsters.’

  ‘But we’ve seen these creatures.’ David rubbed his forehead. ‘They’re real, aren’t they? I mean, we haven’t imagined all this?’

  ‘No,’ Electra said firmly. ‘We’ve not imagined those things. They are real, all right.’

  ‘So, we’re still locked into this nightmare.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘I take it these monsters aren’t going to evaporate into thin air if we all get a good night’s sleep, are they?’

  ‘No.’ Electra’s eyes glittered with the beginnings of triumph. ‘But don’t you see what this means, David?’

  He shook his head. His mind was spinning dizzily. ‘No, I don’t see what it means at all.’

  ‘Think about it, David. Your uncle deleted all references to the fact that these monsters can be destroyed.’

  ‘You mean by cutting off their heads?’

  ‘Yes!’

  David glanced at the sword he’d left on the kitchen work-top. ‘My God, Electra. You’re telling me we should actually try and kill these creatures?’

  ‘David, that’s exactly what I’m saying!’

  He rubbed his jaw. ‘But it’s a hell of a risk.’

  ‘One we’ve got to take.’

  ‘But it means tracking these things through the caves, somehow cornering them, then hacking through their necks. How the hell do we do that? And how do we know beheading will actually kill them?’

  ‘Remember on the phone I told you we needed to conduct an experiment?’

  He nodded, a cold-water sensation bubbling through his bowels. He knew what she was going to say next. ‘The girl locked in the basement?’

  Electra’s eyes locked on his with an intensity that made him shiver. ‘That’s right, David. What I’m proposing is that we put the theory to the test.’

  ‘Oh, Christ…you mean we cut off her head?’

  Electra nodded. ‘And we do it now. While there’s still plenty of daylight.’

  4

  David watched Electra go to the door and call Black into the kitchen. He’d been sitting on a wall outside, smoking cigarettes with his three mates who’d helped with the building of the wall in the cave.

  David sat there at the kitchen table, stunned by Electra’s suggestion. She couldn’t be serious, could she? To kill another human being? He was a doctor, for Godsakes; hadn’t he devoted all his working life to saving lives? Memories scooted through his head of his training on maternity wards, delivering babies; his time in A&E, stitching together flesh torn open in car accidents, even holding together a child’s raw wound with his bare hands. The arteries in one wrist had been cleanly sliced through after a fall onto broken glass. He’d nipped the cut closed with his fingers, stopping the blood squirting out in every direction until they’d got the child into surgery. Save lives. Dear God, that’s what he believed he’d been put on this Earth to do.

  Now Electra was calmly repeating to that tattooed monster Jack Black that they intended cutting off the head of a fellow human being. Jesus wept…

  ‘Listen,’ David said, interrupting Electra. ‘This isn’t as easy as you think, you know?’

  ‘Why?’ Black grunted.

  ‘I see two obstacles to this.’

  ‘And they are?’ Electra said evenly.

  ‘One. Have we considered there maybe is a way of treating this girl’s condition?’

  ‘You mean cure her of being a vampire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But David, we haven’t got the time. It’ll be dark in a matter of hours. Then those things might be pouring up from the sewers like rats.

  Do you know how we can stop them then?’

  ‘For crying out loud, what if we’re jumping the gun here? Locked down in that storeroom is a human being. Right?’

  She shook her head. ‘Wrong, David. Was a human being. She was called Dianne Moberry. She was a pretty girl in her twenties.’

  ‘And now she’s one of them bastards.’ Black crushed the cigarette under his massive boot. ‘Electra says we can kill these things. We can see if she’s right by having a go at that thing in the basement.’

  David shook his head. ‘You mean you won’t even give that girl a chance?’

  ‘Would she — or her fellow vampires — give us half a chance if they got their hands on us? Have you forgotten what happened to Bernice?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t. But we could take the girl to hospital where —’

  ‘Where they could conduct scientific tests on her forever and a day.’

  ‘The condition might be reversible.’

  ‘Might be.’ Electra nodded. ‘But how long would it take? Days? Weeks?’

  ‘They could try.’

  ‘But we don’t have the time. How long is it now until sunset? Six hours?’

  ‘Electra, we could —’

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Black grunted. ‘Come sunset those things will be after our blood. I don’t want to be sitting here waiting for that to happen, do you?’

  ‘Not me,’ Electra said. ‘I’ve got a bloody boring life, but it’s the only one I’ve got and I’m hanging onto it with both hands. David?’

  He stood up and walked across the kitchen to where the sword lay gleaming on the worktop. That morning he’d bound tape around the handle so he wouldn’t be gripping bare metal. He ran his finger along the now shining blade. His thumb throbbed again from where he’d pricked it on the wickedly sharp point. It was almost as if his body responded in some kind of mystic harmony with the weapon.

  David reached a decision. He turned round and looked at the pair of them. ‘I mentioned two objections.’

  ‘OK,’ Electra said calmly. ‘What’s the second?’

  ‘The second is a practical one. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to cut off the head of a human being?’

  She shrugged. ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult. There’s some pretty sharp kitchen knives hanging up across there.’

  ‘Well, I have removed a human head from its body. At the university hospital med students are allocated a corpse — these are the bodies of men and women who donate their bodies to science. There I surgically removed the head of the corpse allocated to me. It was the body of a sixty-year-old man and, believe me, it was difficult — bloody difficult. The handles of the instruments get slippery from the moisture leaking from the body. So it’s not at all easy to grip them properly. Remember that the thing — the creature — downstairs hasn’t been drain
ed of blood like the corpses used in the anatomy classes. There’ll be bucketfuls of the stuff still in its veins. And the human body is a far tougher organism than most people appreciate. The windpipe’s basically armour-plated with a hard shell of cartilage; the carotid and jugular arteries are incredibly tough, too, whatever you might have seen on television to the contrary. Then there is the spine that extends through the neck.’

  ‘We can do it, David,’ Electra said reassuringly. ‘We’ll get whatever tools you need. There’s even a power saw outside in the garage.’

  ‘Just one other thing,’ David said, looking at her. ‘Have you considered she might not submit to being decapitated?’

  ‘You’re worried she’ll put up a fight?’

  ‘Hell, Electra.’ He gave a dark laugh, edged with hysteria. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  5

  David Leppington had been a doctor for six years. He distanced himself — or at least tried to distance himself — from what he’d do fifteen minutes from now by concentrating on the necessary preparations. This was as much a ritual as you’d find in any religious service.

  First he rolled up his sleeves before washing his hands. Then he took a large formica-topped serving tray with wooden handles. On this he laid three thick towels, one on top of the other. A little bird tells me we’re going to need plenty of absorbent material, he told himself, as he worked there in the kitchen.

  On the towels he laid out a selection of knives in order of size. There was no surgeon’s scalpel, of course, so he chose a sharp paring knife, the kind kitchen staff would use to trim fat and gristle from meat. Then he laid out larger carving knives for cutting through the considerable slabs of muscle found in the neck that support and provide mobility to the brain, skull, teeth, muscle and skin that comprise the human head.

  As he worked, checking the sharpness of the knives and the strength of the hacksaw blades, he ran through his other wants with Electra and Jack Black. Outside, the three men who’d helped earlier sat like vultures on the wall. The wind blew harder, drawing forth insane fluting sounds from the guttering and the eaves. As the wind dropped, these sounds, that seemed so mournful and despairing, deepened and softened into a breathy kind of sigh he’d once heard ooze from the throat of a man dying of lung cancer.

  Again David forced himself to suppress the clamour of doubts. Speaking in a cool, dispassionate way, like a surgeon preparing for an operation, he said,4 We’ll need rubber gloves, and aprons. There will be body fluids. Probably copious quantities. Bring me as many towels as possible — preferably big bath towels, Electra; we’ll drape them over the body as near as possible to where I make the cut. Also we’ll need to carpet the floor with them. Prosaic as it sounds, it’ll get slippery underfoot; we don’t want to hinder the operation by people falling. Jack, we’ll need a bucket of some description.’

  ‘How big?’

  David said grimly, ‘Big enough to put one of these in.’ He touched his own head. ‘After we’ve done, we’ll have to wrap the body in plastic and bury it.’

  ‘Any ideas where?’ asked Electra returning with armfuls of fluffy white bathtowels.

  ‘I think tradition dictates either at a crossroads or next to flowing water. A river bank will be best. Then we have to make sure the head’s buried on the side opposite to the body. I don’t know if these folklore rules relating to the disposal of supernatural beings are all tosh, but we’d be fools not to observe them to the letter. You never know what might be vital. There…’ Quickly he ran through the instruments. Paring knives, cleaving knives, hacksaws, touching each in turn as if conferring some kind of blessing on them. ‘That should do it.’

  Black asked, ‘Why don’t you take the sword and swipe off the head in one go?’

  ‘Because that would require the expertise of a skilled swordsman. And seeing as I’m not one, I’m going to have to resort to what I know best: surgical technique. Right, everyone ready?’

  He looked at Black and Electra who nodded, their faces tight with tension.

  ‘Good. Now, it’s just coming up to three o’clock. We’ve got ample time to see if this works. If we can kill that thing in the basement we can then concoct a strategy that will wipe out the other vampires. OK?’

  They nodded.

  He picked up the tray set out with the knives and hacksaws. ‘All right. Let’s do it.’

  Electra and Black picked up the armfuls of towels and the bucket. In the bucket were pairs of latex surgical gloves that the kitchen staff normally wore. Resting on top of the gloves was a roll of gaffer tape. This was a heavy-duty adhesive tape, something like Sellotape, only the tape itself was made of fabric and impregnated with a silvery plastic compound that resisted water — and any other liquids that might be split on it. The creature that had once been Dianne Moberry might not lie still when David cut into the throat. They’d use the tape to bind her limbs.

  They crossed the hotel lobby. David glanced out through the windows of the locked doors. Beyond them the world outside still went about its day-to-day business. He saw buses rumbling by; people were shopping, a policeman looked at a map held out to him by a stranger to the town and scratched his head as he considered the best directions. Steam rose from a chimney that jutted from the slaughterhouse roof. A train pulled out of the station and David wished to high heaven he were on it.

  When Jack Black unlocked the basement door the wish came again, with a pang so strong it hurt David all the way down to his stomach. What’s that phrase? He’d give all the tea in China to be on that train, rattling down the track to Whitby and the sea. That’s a lot of tea. A hell of a lot of tea. But worth it.

  Only, right now, he had to go down those gloomy steps. Cold air welled up from the shadowed void below. He shivered. Then he took a deep breath and plunged down into a basement that could have been some terrifying anteroom to hell itself.

  CHAPTER 40

  At three-thirty, exactly the same time David Leppington was taking that first step down into the basement, Bernice Mochardi and the Down’s syndrome man walked beneath the town.

  For all the world we might be walking through the intestine of some huge beast, she thought; an intestine of brick and stone. Every so often a surge of water came along the channel that ran in the centre of the tunnel. Once soapy water had discharged with a roaring sound from a pipe at shoulder height, nearly drenching her.

  She walked with her back to her wall, still holding the hand of Maximilian Hart. There was no doubt his presence was a comfort to her. Especially during the long — long to the point of seemingly never-ending — walks through sections of tunnel that were blanketed in total darkness. If it hadn’t been for the man’s presence she felt she would have been reduced to a fit of lunatic screams as the darkness seemed to press into her eyes and mouth and throat like an inky black liquid that threatened to suffocate her sanity as much as her lungs.

  Perhaps the dark does have a different quality down here, she thought. Like the air pressure varies from mountain tops to valley bottoms. Down here the darkness seems so much denser, almost liquid somehow. Shivering, she’d pushed on.

  Now this section of the tunnel was marginally better. There was light from grates set in the ceiling high above her head. To people in the street, those grates would probably be no more than the everyday kind of drains inset between the kerb and roadway. Where the water poured down on rainy days, or where little children dropped their lollipop sticks.

  But those little grilles of iron were a godsend. They admitted precious rays of grey light that lit their way. Now she could see the narrow path at either side of the drainage channel; the slick ribbon of water running through it; the herringbone pattern of bricks that formed the inner skin of the tunnel. It even lit downy webs spun by spiders over the decades, through which she had to push her hand, the sticky strands clinging coolly to her skin.

  At that moment she sensed, rather than heard, a deep rumble. It tickled its way through the earth, then through the bricks and into the fingerti
ps of one hand as she slid, back to wall, along the tunnel. That has to be a train, she thought, we’re probably not far from the station. In that case the Station Hotel basement might not be more than a few dozen paces away. If only she knew which direction. And which one of the many branch tunnels she should take.

  Still holding Maximilian by the hand, she branched off the tunnel from the one that she walked along. Yet this tunnel looked depressingly the same as the one she’d left. Same herring-bone pattern of brownish bricks. A channel cut deep into the stone beneath her feet. Same delicate fan shapes of spider webs spanning whole sections of tunnels. Here and there toadstool growths erupted from the walls; the same yellow as ripe bananas, they looked like pairs of clenched fists that had been somehow forced through the brickwork. On the far side of the tunnel a whole cluster of them had grotesquely fused together, forming the simulacrum of a tightly wound human foetus complete with eyes and ears and legs. Yet more feathery strands of spiders’ web covered it lightly in a shroud that was gauzily see-through in the thin light.

  She stepped forward, breaking yet another membrane of web with her free hand before stepping through. Much of the web clung to her black skirt. More of the web formed clots of dirty grey fluff on her black lace gloves.

  Here she paused. The smell of the place was different. No longer cold and damp and earthy. The air was distinctly warmer; the air smelt coppery; yes, yes, she thought with a flutter of astonishment; there was definitely a tang of some altogether different odour staining the air.

  Why was this tunnel so different from the rest?

  It started without warning.

  She looked up with a gasp.

  There was a loud hiss like the sound of an ornamental waterfall. Seconds later liquid poured from drainage holes feeding down through the roof.

  For a second she thought they were street drains that were being flushed through with water.

  But then she saw the liquid was blood.

  It gushed from dozens of outlets set along the spine of the ceiling. It poured thick and red and steaming down into the channel below. There it pooled, growing deeper and deeper. More blood joined the bloody stream. The hot blood heated the air in the tunnel until it became as warm as a greenhouse — a sticky, close warmth that pressed against her bare skin to fill her nose every time she breathed.