Eleanor

by RA Williams

  ‘Is this too easy?’ she asked, watching the Jungfräu devouring the fiends. Nobody replied. She caught the Belgian’s face in her torchlight. He nodded.

  Beyond them, a narrow stairway led down. At its bottom, yet another Huntian. Too frail to stand, it scratched at the earthen floor. Disturbed by their torchlight, it turned to them, rotted lips parting as it released a croak. Elle could not help but pity it.

  ‘First footman?’ asked the Persian. Balthasar knocked the Huntian over with his boot. Its torn shirt was covered with a century of shed dander, standing collar sprung. A wretched gasp spewed from its mouth as Balthasar thrust a spike into its chest, and its head quivered before falling slack.

  ‘They’ve all lost their spikes,’ said the Persian, watching as the Huntian burped up a foamy stew, mottled skin shrinking around its ribcage.

  ‘Someone has removed them.’

  Elle turned to Balthasar. ‘How is that possible? The way we came was undisturbed?’

  ‘It’s not the only way in,’ said Gaele.

  Fear began to claw its way back into Elle’s chest.

  ‘There’s another entrance,’ replied the Persian. ‘Just outside the cemetery back wall, through the crypt under St Michael’s church.’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t we come in that way?’

  ‘Not possible,’ Balthasar told her, concentrating his torchlight on the narrowing passage ahead.

  ‘The crypt is in use as a bomb shelter,’ Gaele explained.

  A whisper seeded the darkness.

  ‘What was that?’ Elle asked. A stifled snigger followed. It set her hair on end. ‘What the hell is happening?’

  Balthasar eagerly moved forward, his tommy gun pointing into the blackness.

  ‘Up ahead,’ he whispered. Elle squinted through the disturbed dust. ‘In the wine cellar.’

  A few paces more and their torches struck upon another cluster of Crimen. Huddled morosely together, they appeared engaged in a household conference. Brushing her behind him, Gaele joined the others at the front. Quietly closing in on the Huntians, they felled them with a butcher’s efficiency. Stepping over the fiends withering at her feet, her torchlight picked out deep gouges in the packed earthen floor. Something heavy had been dragged that way.

  The passage came to an end. Chiselled into the blocking stone was Balthasar’s heraldry. Elle stared at the grimacing skull atop a human body. It was exactly the same as at the Externsteine.

  Mahmoud looked back to Balthasar, unease on his face. ‘It’s sealed.’

  ‘Who but we would open the hollow?’ Gaele asked.

  ‘Or could?’ asked Elle.

  ‘And close it up again after,’ said Mahmoud.

  Balthasar’s torchlight illuminated the hulking slab of stone barring the way. ‘Ten strong backs couldn’t budge this.’

  He struck the tips of his fingers into the seam of the massive stone. With a grunt he forced it back, the blocking stone rotating away with a grinding thud. The sticky odour of mortality wafted from within.

  Mahmoud just managed to direct his torch into the passage beyond before he was set upon, the light revealing a Crimen, puffed up with rage. It threw itself on him, bony fingers grasping hold of his anorak. Confined by the narrow passage, he was able to raise the butt of his gun to fend off a bite. Balthasar was there in an instant, taking the feeder by the neck and heaving it against the opposite wall, shattering the mortar. Wild-eyed and flush-skinned, it shrieked in protest, the veins in its bare arms pulsing as it battered him.

  ‘It has fed,’ Balthasar said through gritted teeth, twisting as he thrust the Huntian against the wall of the passage again, vestiges of its mouldy French-twill dress falling to bits. ‘A household maid. Run it through.’

  Brandishing a spike, the Belgian pushed his way towards the feeder. It shrieked in fright at the sight of the Jungfräu. Pushing its right arm back, he exposed its chest and thrust the spike in. It howled, putrescence exploding from the puncture. Unlike the starved Huntians, there was fight in it. Thrashing, it clobbered Gaele in the face. He reeled back, his rifle butt catching Elle in the stomach, causing her to double over. She rolled onto her side, trying to regain her breath, and watched as another beast emerged from the cellar entrance and lunged at Balthasar. Raising her Sten, she fired off a burst. The discharge was deafening in the claustrophobic passage. Bullets caught the beast in its side, spinning it round, the tails of its lounge jacket flapping.

  A valet.

  Mahmoud slugged it in the face, crunching its nose as easily as dry leaves underfoot. Casting aside the maid’s carcass, Balthasar took hold of the valet from behind, its jacket coming apart in his hands. Grasping its suspenders, he wrenched the beast off Mahmoud, pinning its arms back. The Huntian twisted, trying to break Balthasar’s grip. Elle heard a distinctive ripping sound as the valet’s sleeve tore at the shoulder and its entire arm came away, like old rope breaking free. Tossing aside the limb, Balthasar put the feeder into a headlock, while Mahmoud punched a spike into its chest. Squirming in his grasp, the beast purged a viscid curd.

  ‘Who have you eaten?’ whispered Balthasar, thrusting the fiend into the wall of the passage with such spite its head went to mush.

  Scooping his Thompson up by its sling, the Persian said, ‘I’d say someone got themselves trapped inside.’

  Gaele chambered a round into Henry as the beast fell into a raving fit, casting off a revolting stew of bodily fluids.

  ‘And gobbled up.’

  Balthasar pressed a finger to his lips, whispering for Elle to stay close to Gaele while he joined Mahmoud probing ahead. Before she could protest, the sticky stench of death filled her nose. She quickly put a gloved hand to her mouth, holding back the urge to be sick. Torchlight swept across web-bound wine racks set back between simple brick supports. Her boots crunched loudly on broken glass. Lowering her torch to the floor, she stopped to lift the remnants of an open wine bottle.

  ‘Château Margaux,’ Gaele said. ‘I drank it last time I looked in.’ He shrugged. ‘Pity to let it spoil. Especially a Grand Vin Rouge.’

  ‘Buster.’

  Ahead, the Persian stood in the central arcade of the vault, probing the darkness with his torch. Lined up between the cellar’s supports were eleven sarcophagi, their lids all smashed open. They lay empty.

  ‘How many Crimen have we put paid to?’ asked Gaele.

  ‘Eleven,’ replied Balthasar, taking stock. ‘I think.’

  ‘Good,’ replied the Belgian. He looked at his watch. ‘We can just make a late dinner at The Ritz.’

  ‘I wouldn’t count on them holding a table.’

  ‘Eleven?’ Elle repeated, tossing the neck of the broken wine bottle into the darkness. ‘And the Sentinel in the Roman bath?’

  Balthasar turned to Elle, his brow furrowed.

  ‘Makes for twelve,’ said Gaele.

  ‘One too many,’ realised Mahmoud.

  The glass bounced off something metallic, shattering. Turning just in the nick of time, Elle sidestepped a beast stumbling from the murk. Gaele lashed it in the head with the butt of his rifle. A loud prang vibrated along the arcade. Shining her torch past him, the beam fell upon the tin helmet strapped to a Crimen’s head.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Mahmoud, covering the Huntian with his chopper as it struggled to its feet. ‘A suited and booted Tommy.’

  Torches converging, it was plain to see why the beast had difficulty standing.

  ‘Its arms have gone,’ Gaele said unsympathetically.

  With his gun barrel, Balthasar brushed aside the soldier’s shredded battle jacket, the buttons of his shirt underneath torn away. On its chest, left of the sternum, over the heart, was a bite.

  ‘Putain,’ said the Belgian.

  ‘What?’ asked Elle.

  ‘Dosis,’ replied Balthasar.

  ‘Dose?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘He’s been injected. If we’d arrived much later, we would have had another Sentinel to deal with.’

&n
bsp; ‘How long does it take to turn?’

  ‘Not long,’ Balthasar replied.

  ‘Not long at all.’ Holding the beast down with his boot, Mahmoud thrust a spike into the Huntian. It heaved, its Tommy helmet flying from its head and rolling into the darkness. Booted feet dug furiously into the floor. Without arms, there was nothing it could do to defend itself.

  As the mercury spread through the Huntian’s internal organs, it shuddered violently, mouth forming silent words of despair before going still. Like an insect on its back, its legs curled up as life drained away.

  ‘Poor bugger.’ Gaele stared down at the withering beast. ‘His mum won’t be getting a notification from the War Office.’

  Mahmoud rifled through the pockets of his battledress.

  ‘Are you looking for loose coppers?’

  The Persian removed the soldier’s ration book, flipping through its pages. ‘His last ration stamp was on the eighth of September.’

  ‘Yesterday,’ said Balthasar.

  ‘What in hell has gone on here?’ Gaele asked.

  Elle felt the hair on the back of her sweat-soaked neck stand on end. Instinctively, she turned to the darkness, her torch falling upon a heap of bleeding carrion.

  ‘Black shit and buggery,’ she gasped as her torch passed over the sprawled-out remains, picking out a schoolboy’s cap, a single night slipper, a child’s dummy, fox stole, and a blood-spattered apron.

  Balthasar looked over the pile. ‘What a jumble of sticky bits.’

  ‘Civvies.’ Mahmoud nudged a gas-mask bag with his boot. ‘Seeking shelter from the air raids?’

  ‘This isn’t a shelter,’ replied Gaele. A sad-looking teddy lay nearby, its stuffing protruding from a missing leg. ‘This is an abattoir.’

  Elle swallowed, the bile rising in her throat again. ‘How did they get down here?’

  ‘They didn’t,’ said Balthasar. His torchlight fell upon a low passageway, revealing a second blocking stone sealed in place.

  Gaele nervously tapped Henry’s trigger guard. ‘They didn’t what?’

  ‘They didn’t get down here,’ he replied, eyes zeroing in on movement from the darkness. ‘They were brought here.’

  A fiend lurched its way into his torch beam; an old man, intestines unravelling from beneath spattered pyjamas.

  The Persian pushed him into a wine rack, disturbing a millennium’s worth of dust. Without pausing for thought, he spiked him.

  ‘Nefarious roué.’

  ‘Brought here?’ asked Elle, watching the debauched old soul wither. ‘Why?’

  Before Balthasar could reply, the queer canticle broke the cellar’s quiet once more. Not nearly as distant as before, it ended again in a curious fugue joined by a caw, like seagulls in distress.

  ‘Mahmoud.’ Balthasar stepped cautiously back as the singing died away. ‘Circle the wagons.’

  The Persian and Gaele closed with Elle, their backs brushing against her.

  ‘So very clever,’ Balthasar muttered, as he joined them in a defensive square around her. ‘We’ve been baited.’

  Raising the Sten, Elle swept her kill zone, focusing on a bottle vibrating in one of the wine racks.

  ‘Balthasar,’ she squealed, drawing his attention to the wine rack just as it toppled over in a cloud of dust and broken glass, the sweet scent of wine long gone off mingling with an odour of human decay. The others waited silently, all movement obscured by lingering dust.

  ‘Can’t see bugger all.’

  Clipping his torch to a button on his anorak, Balthasar produced a fusée from his pocket, pulling its ignition cord. As it spat red flame, he tossed it into the fog. It bounced off something close by before rolling across the floor of the cellar. Flaring, it began to burn bright yellow.

  ‘Bordel de merde,’ the Belgian cursed quietly, pushing back against Elle. She jumped, unnerved, trying to force her courage to overtake her fear. A Crimen hive crept towards the fighting square. Ripped up and closing awfully fast, there were too many. Her instinct was to leg it, but there was nowhere now to go.

  Nothing remained but to fight.

  RA WILLIAMS lives by the Mediterranean with his wife and their young son. The Gift was born in Sherman Oaks, California, sussed out in Pimlico, England, and realizado in the Costa Brava, Spain, where Williams writes to this day amidst twelve cats who pay him no never mind. Book 1: Eleanor is the first in The Gift Trilogy.