Hunter of the Dead

by Stephen Kozeniewski

  “That’s the one,” Nico whispered, “So this is the guy we’re dealing with.”

  Kasprzak shrugged.

  “This is an iconic illustration in, ah, the fantasy genre. I’ve heard stories that Frazetta based it on the actual Hunter of the Dead. Or, at least, this illustration from De Vermis Mysteriis. There’s even a story that Cicatrice once visited him to make sure he hadn’t seen the real Hunter. Any idea if it’s true, Carter?”

  Price shrugged.

  “There are a million stories about Cicatrice and The Hunter. As far as I know, that’s all they are. Stories. Fairy tales. Nursery rhymes.”

  “So, what’s the…story?”

  Kasprzak sat back down in her chair. She looked at Price.

  “Wouldn’t it be cool if I turned out the lights and put a flashlight under my chin?”

  “The coolest, professor.” He snapped his fingers. “Ah, but then, how would we see the illustrations?”

  Kasprzak grimaced.

  “You’re right. Picture the scene. Eight centuries ago. The Dark Ages. Rome collapsed. The great empires of the colonial age had yet to rise. Really, there were few proper places you could call a state. Europe was a patchwork of feuding nobles. Peasants tilled the earth, living hand-to-mouth. What the nobles didn’t take from them, the church did. And the church was rife with corruption.”

  Kasprzak opened De Vermis Mysteriis to an illustration of a great forest, fading to blackness on the outskirts, surrounding a simple rural village. The people were overworked like oxen, and fat lords and churchmen happily patted their bellies and whipped the peasants.

  “Imagine not being able to walk to a neighboring without fear of being torn apart by wolves or highwaymen or hell, just a noble who considers peasants good sport. It was a place and time where life was cheap and that’s exactly the sort of place and time where vampires thrive. While humans were shivering in the cold and barely able to prop up what we call civilization, in the shadows a new society was taking form.”

  She flipped the page. A wolf bayed against the moon and dark figures emerged from trees.

  “For the first time in a long time the vampires began talking to each other. Instead of preying upon villages and moving on, they were considering ways to extort for the blood, flesh, and lives that they need to survive. They even began to establish plantations where they farmed people like livestock. While mankind was rotting on the vine, the crop of vampires was growing strong.”

  She flipped to the next page, which was a work almost like something out of Gray’s Anatomy, though obviously scrabbled together centuries before ideas like “humours” had fallen out of vogue. The monk who had scribbled it had taken great pains to differentiate the vampire from a man. It had horns, hooves, serrated teeth, hairy legs, and explanations in Latin of how all of its various (presumably imaginary) inner organs worked.

  “Every man had a lord who ruled the day. But the vampires ruled the night. The people cowered behind the walls of their towns and prayed all night in their churches for God to deliver them. Faith was strong amongst the common folk, and faith is a poison to the dead, but the church had grown decadent and opulent, and clergymen were as apt to help the vampires as to shepherd their flocks. Some called it an Age of Faith. We who study the occult call it the Golden Age of the Vampire.”

  She flipped to an illustration of villagers praying in a church, while vampires plucked their babies out of the windows and messily devoured them.

  “Death and blood bathed the land in opulent red. The vampires feasted each night in crazed Bacchanal. Any man foolish enough to be caught outside the city gates at night stood no chance of survival. The people fought back with weapons both spiritual and conventional. At the height of the Golden Age, each night became a monstrous battle for survival. And each night the numbers of men dwindled, and the numbers of vampires swelled like a bloated corpse. And then when day came again, the vampires retreated to their safe hiding places, and the good people could pretend they did not exist, so long as the sun was up.”

  The next illustration showed a line of vampires dancing together, seven in all, blood dripping from their mouths and bodies. They carried goblets of blood and naked women (witches?) kneeled and praised them in a circle.

  “At the height of the Golden Age, a vampire of unusual clarity of vision and unholy power, sometimes called Lilith or Lily the Half-Face or in some texts, the Quarter-Face, founded the Necropolis, the City of the Dead. It was built into a volcanic mountain and is sometimes described as a gothic castle of towering obsidian spires. Humans were kept as livestock. The blood flowed, and no vampire ever went hungry. Vampires flocked there in numbers never before imagined. Lily the Half-Faced dreamt of an empire of the dead. The dead thought of it as their Camelot, their Rome, their ‘glorious, bloodstained city’ and homeland of all vampires.”

  She flipped to an unusually complex drawing of a black mountain, shown as though it had been split in half and its inner workings exposed. At the top was the vampire queen, quite literally missing half her face. She held a goblet carved from a skull, from which blood dripped freely. Beneath her was a banquet hall, gruesomely decorate with trophies, furniture carved from bone and human skins nailed to the wall. Vampires feasted, some drinking from golden goblets of blood and others laying their victims on the table to feast on them directly. Below, humans wailed as they were chained and fattened up for the slaughter.

  “What happened?” Nico whispered, realized his mouth was dry as sandpaper.

  Three

  Earlier that night…

  “Where are we going, Santa?”

  Santa held his gigantic hand down to Alessia. She placed her own diminutive paw into his and he clasped her tightly, seeming to envelop her entire hand with his own.

  “Hold on tightly, now, my dear. Have you read Through the Looking Glass?”

  Alessia brightened up at the mere mention of her favorite book. Well, second favorite. She liked the first Alice book better.

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  “Well, then you’ll be very pleased. That’s where we’re going.”

  She was so stunned for a moment she couldn’t say anything and tripped over her own feet. She would have tumbled facefirst to the ground but Santa pulled her up to her feet. He was very strong.

  “We’re going to Wonderland?”

  “We’ll be there shortly. Just a trip down the rabbit hole and we’ll be there.”

  She found herself flustered by excitement and could barely talk as they descended into a cave. It was cold and she began to shiver. As soon as she was shivering she realized how truly strange this place looked, how it was unlike anywhere she had ever been before. She tugged on Santa’s shirt.

  “Santa, I’m scared. Are you sure Mom said this was okay?”

  Santa scooped her up into his arms as though she weighed nothing. She wrapped her arm around his neck and nuzzled his shoulder.

  “She insisted. She said that you had been a good girl, Alessia, and that I should give you a special treat. You have been a good girl, haven’t you?”

  Her mind flashed back to peeing her pants in the department store, scrawling in crayon on the wall, jumping on mom’s bed when she wasn’t home, and the dozens of other tiny transgressions which had filled her world and worried her no end.

  “But it’s so far from Christmas!”

  “Well, I have to fill my time somehow, don’t I? The elves spend all year making the toys. What else am I to do with my time but to visit my favorite children?”

  She nodded. That made sense.

  “What happened to your eye, Santa?”

  “I had an accident. I got into a fight with the Easter Bunny.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be fine. And look. You’ve been so brave and we’re already here.”

  Alessia turned and looked but all she saw was a dead end to the cave. Santa put her back down on the ground and revealed a secret door. She clapped with wonder as he inserted a giant g
olden key and turned it. This was just like something out of The Polar Express or some other magnificent storybook of discovery and wonder.

  “Here we are, Alessia. There’s the rabbit hole.”

  She looked out over the wide expanse before her. The rabbit hole seemed to go on forever in every direction, just like the time they had visited San Diego and seen the Pacific Ocean. The rabbit hole was scarier than the ocean, though, because it was gloomy. She even felt a little thrill of terror looking at it.

  “We’re going down there?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” Santa replied, “But not just yet. First I have to put on my hat.”

  He picked her up and placed her on a tall stone table. Her legs dangled over the side and she kicked them.

  “Your Santa hat?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “This is a different hat. Don’t you remember what I told you? How I’m going…”

  He gestured for her, as he had earlier when teaching her the funny word. She racked her brain, and was just about to give up when it hit her.

  “In gabino!”

  “In cognito,” he said, smiling, “Exactly. No, I’ll be wearing this hat.”

  He lifted up a fancy hat that sort of reminded her of an Indian headdress, only not quite. It was lined with feathers and almost resembled a crown. When he placed it on his head she giggled.

  “That’s a silly hat, Santa.”

  “It is,” he agreed, “It’s a very silly hat. But Wonderland is a very silly place. Now there’s one last thing we have to do. I want you to look up at the ceiling.”

  She looked upward. In a ring hanging like bats from the ceiling were pale-looking people. She gasped, but then remembered how strange Wonderland had seemed to Alice. This was just like meeting Tweedle-Dee or the Mock Turtle. She began to count, mouthing each number.

  “Thirteen,” she concluded.

  “Yes, very good. My friends need some medicine.”

  “How are they going to get it, being way up there?”

  “Well, you’re going to give it to them.”

  She squealed in a combination of delight and terror, not sure if he was teasing, and slightly afraid he was.

  “I’m going to go up there?”

  “No, you’re going to stay right here. Just keep looking up at them.”

  Santa placed his hand on her chest. She felt weak, lightheaded, as though she had just spun around in circles for a little bit too long on the lawn.

  “There, you see?”

  Blinking, she refocused and was astonished to see little streams of light coming out of her fingers. They were like firefly freeways, and they stretched out like a rope up to the ceiling, and each stream of light ended at one of the thirteen sick people. They seemed to shiver and grunt in pleasure as her streams of light struck them.

  “Santa, I’m glowing!”

  “You sure are, Alessia. Now think about when you went to the doctor’s and had to get a shot.”

  She pinched her eyes shut and shook her head.

  “I don’t like getting shots.”

  With her eyes closed, she heard Santa’s voice whispering into her ear.

  “Nobody likes getting shots. But just remember: a little pinch and then it’s over. Are you ready? Little pinch.”

  She felt a horrible pain in her chest where Santa had placed his hand. This was worse than a little pinch. This was like being punched in the stomach. She opened her eyes and gawked at her own tiny heart, still attached to her by red strings, beating in Santa’s palm.

  “Now in ten seconds or so it’ll be over. That’s about the amount of time it takes your brain to realize you’re already dead.”

  The heart stopped beating and she fell against the stone table, blackness swallowing her as her chin struck it hard.

  ***

  The sun had only just set and wisps of deep violet still trailed through the night. Idi Han took a deep breath of the frigid night air, though she didn’t have to. She wanted to see what it was like. Intellectually she knew it was cold, but the discomfort of coldness had all but fled her body. She realized that in her simple cheongsam she was barely dressed for a desert night, but hadn’t even thought to ask for something heavier.

  Scavatelli was walking briskly, not back towards the city, but outside its limits into the desert. Even as unfamiliar as Idi Han was with the local geography, she could tell by the stars that he was not going the right way.

  “And just where do you think you’re going?” Idi Han asked.

  “I’m sorry, my young friend. I know promises have been made and I can’t explain everything to you but my business in this city is concluded. You haven’t seen The Hunter that I did. And I don’t ever want to see him again. In fact, you can come with me if you like.”

  “You promised my sire, the most powerful living immortal and patriarch of the most powerful of the Great Houses…”

  Scav stopped and held up his hand, a light, sneering expression on his face.

  “Now let’s get one thing straight. I may not look like much, I may not sound like much, but I’m not a complete fucking fool. Cicatrice is not your sire. Everyone knows the old Scar swore never to take on another get after the nightmare Topan turned out to be. So what’s the real deal between you two? You got something to blackmail him with? Or is he just toying with you?”

  Idi Han pursed her lips, unsure how to respond. Scavatelli held up his hands, as though in mock surrender.

  “Whatever. Nevermind. I don’t care. And I don’t have time for it now. But look, you’re a good kid. You’re more powerful than I am, that’s just natural power. I can smell it from here even through all that garlic you’re wearing. We Signaris are a House of stray dogs, you know. I could get someone else to adopt you, maybe I could do it myself if Father Otto accepts me back into the fold. I happen to be in need of a new travelling companion. So, hey, what the fuck, come with me if you want. But if not, just leave me be. Please.”

  Idi Han stood waiting in the moonlight as Scav turned to go again, her breast roiling. A few days ago she had been back home in Guangdong. Now she was a million kilometers away, in a strange land she knew nothing about, and she had no idea whether she should even trust the man who had promised to look after her.

  The last man who had promised to look after her had turned out to be a rapist, a lunatic, and a monster. Not just a human monster, but a monster of myth and legend, of seafoam and cloud. How was Cicatrice any different from Topan? Who knew if he was even worse?

  Perhaps I should learn to look after myself.

  “Father Cicatrice ordered you to take me to this encampment of yours.”

  Scav jammed his hands into his vest pockets and turned around.

  “You don’t want that. Just trust me. I don’t want that. You don’t want that. We could go on the open road, the way me and my sire did. Old Connor, he used to tell me he hopped train cars during the Depression. Made meals out of stewbums like they were candy. Now I wasn’t sired until the ‘80s, but that was a hell of a time, too. We’ll have to get you new clothes of course.”

  “What’s wrong with my clothes?”

  “What’s right with them?”

  If I mean to look after myself…this is my chance.

  A smile split Scav’s face in two. He was ready to run. Idi Han sighed and his smile melted away.

  “Whatever he is to me…whatever he is to you…Cicatrice entrusted us with this task. He can’t go among the fixers. He’s too well known. And he’s probably their target. Once you’ve shown me this place, I don’t care what you do. But you will fulfill your promise at least.”

  Scavatelli reached up and gouged eight great furrows into his own face with his fingernails, laying bare muscle, sinew, and meat. Idi Han stepped back, tensing herself for battle, but when he began knocking at his own forehead she realized it was just a nervous tick. His horrible wounds were already healing over. The Long Gift of immortality in full effect.

  “I warned you. I tried to warn you. Whenever you
think of me, remember: I tried to warn you.”

  “I won’t think of you.”

  Scav turned and headed back toward the city. He led her to an overpass. As the cars and trucks rolled by overhead, two concrete tunnels led down ominously into the depths below the neon city.

  “Do you know where you are?” he asked.

  She nodded. She had been paying attention to the street signs.

  “Thank you. Good luck.”

  She grasped at the garland of garlic bulbs around her neck to make sure it was still there. Cicatrice had warned her not to remove it and not to show off her skills if it could be avoided. She had nearly laughed in his face then. Her skills mostly amounted to cooking rice and yoking oxen without getting kicked.

  A hiss like a tea kettle sounded.

  “Ah, hell,” Scav said, “I can’t let you go down there. But you owe me.”

  She cast him a sidelong glance as he reappeared at her side.

  “For remaining true to your word?”

  “For hanging around The Hunter of the Dead’s hunting grounds, how about that?”

  They passed into the labyrinth. At first she wanted to look for light, but in a moment she remembered she didn’t need any. Her eyes could pick out everything in the dark as well as in the light – even the colors of the graffiti.

  A few mortals rose to stop them, but upon seeing Scav they returned to their business. Sections of the sewers and tunnels had been laid out like apartments. Each had a coffin, sometimes two, or else a platform of some type covered with dirt and a burial shroud. Mortals busied themselves cooking, cleaning, and looking after the effects of their immortal masters, but Idi Han could spot none of them.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Out fixing. Or seeing the town. Or…just about anything but hanging out in a dank sewer. Come on, I’ll take you to my encampment.”

  Probably looking for Cicatrice, in other words.

  As they continued through the maze, Idi Han took care to note the twists and turns they took. She was supposed to be doing reconnaissance, after all. It quickly became apparent from the habitations that people had been living here for many, many years.