Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  His summons. Right out of Robin Hood, or Le Morte D'Arthur: And the King summoned his courtiers and bespoke them, saying—

  The shocking thing was how easy it was to accept.

  "I don't have any choice, do I?"

  "No." She kissed me gently. "Neither of us has a choice."

  We dressed and repacked the sleeping bags, then climbed out through the entrance hole and into the light.

  The sky was clear and the day already hot, though the rocks were still glistening with the previous night's rain. We made our way to the path, started up it.

  Climbing out of the Grand Canyon is like climbing a mile-high mountain. But though we had to rest from time to time, we were never as tired as my backpacking experience told me we should have been.

  "Why were you so afraid, before we found the membrane?" I asked somewhat later, while we were resting and eating some of the fruit we'd packed in.

  "Because they'd attacked you on the path down, and because both the canyon and the cave are places of power. And where power is concentrated like that his enemies can use it against us.

  "Look." She pointed to a spot far below us on the canyon wall, where even in the bright morning sunlight I could see a faint cool shimmer totally unlike a heat mirage. "There's the cave. Even from here you can feel its power."

  We soon began meeting hikers on their way down from Indian Gardens. Many of them seemed to be staring at us with unusual curiosity but I didn't pay any attention to them until a heavyset man of about fifty in a too-tight red nylon bathing suit stopped me and asked, "Excuse me, but is that the latest thing?"

  "The latest thing?" I repeated stupidly.

  "You know. Your eyes." He gestured to include Dara. "Gold and silver."

  So my eyes were now silver? "Contact lenses," I told him confidently.

  "But the dark iris?"

  "One-way glass, to make them look natural."

  "Ah. Thank you. I must say the effect is startling."

  I waited until he disappeared around a bend in the trail, said, "Dara?"

  "I'm sorry, David. I've always been able to see the silver there, in your eyes and under your skin, and I didn't realize that there'd been a change in your eyes that people like that could see. I just thought I could see the power in them better now. But you handled him well."

  "My years of experience as a part-time dope dealer. But are there any other signs of, of my transformation?"

  "Not that someone like that could see, no."

  "But that you can see?"

  "I can see the power in you a bit more clearly, as though it were closer to the surface of your skin than it was before, or shining a little more brightly, but that's all."

  We reached the rim by midafternoon, spent the rest of the day sitting looking over the canyon while we explored Dara's fragmentary memories together, looking for something that would be of use to us but finding nothing.

  Watching the sunset over the canyon through the window of the restaurant in which we'd decided to eat dinner, I found myself wondering again about the matter-of-factness with which I'd accepted the new terms of my life. How could I be sitting eating a restaurant dinner here with the other tourists, knowing what I now knew?

  As if to emphasize the changes taking place in me, the gathering darkness revealed that almost every rock formation in the canyon shimmered with its own spectral light.

  "A place of power," Dara said. And that was that.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world to follow my original plans and spend the next day at the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert. Dara and I behaved like typical tourists and I even bought her a piece of petrified wood.

  We spent the night at a campground just past the New Mexico border and arrived at Carlsbad Caverns late in the afternoon, after driving all day through the most monotonous ' country I had ever seen. We took our places in the small stone amphitheater facing the caverns' entrance, watched as the bats, ten thousand of them a minute, came spiraling up out of the ground, their hundreds of thousands of beating wings creating a wind rank with the smell of bat guano as they angled off to the southwest in a cloud that stretched from us to the horizon.

  The entrance to the caverns blazed like a door opening onto a cold subterranean sun and I could feel the power of the place twisting and burning in my spine.

  * * *

  Chapter Nine

  « ^ »

  The caverns had closed to the public at three and would not reopen until eight in the morning. We stayed a while longer, trying to find our way to the feeling of personal contact with a living entity we had had at the canyon, but the forces twisting at us were unbearable and we had to leave.

  We rented a room in the town of Carlsbad, some miles away. Even there the caverns were a rasping agony that was all the worse because it was almost pleasurable.

  We tried to make love but as soon as we'd touch each other the caverns would reach out to us through our interface, would try to draw us to them. We had to stop and lie side by side without touching on the bed.

  And then something interposed itself, shielded us from the caverns' energies.

  "They're outside the window," Dara said. I got to my feet, threw back the curtain.

  Hundreds of tiny albino bats were clinging to the window screen and shutters, their naked wings wrapped tight around them, their blind red eyes glinting in the light from the room.

  Hundreds more were darting around in the air outside, like a cloud of impossibly quick moths. Their dirty white fur shimmered, gleamed with power.

  "They won't hurt us," Dara said in a taut, overcontrolled voice. She had joined me at the window. "Not while they're still his to command. They've been sent to help us."

  His to command. Not Vlad the Impaler, Renaissance prince inhuman only in his cruelty, but Count Dracula. Bram Stoker's invention. Bela Lugosi in his black cape and feelthy foreigner accent, the rubber bat with the strings you could almost see.

  "Are they vampire bats?" Keeping my voice as calm as I could.

  "Yes." Dara's voice was impossibly distant, as though she were reading a grocery list to me over the phone. "That's all I know, David. All he'll let me remember."

  The bats clinging to the screen never moved. At last we closed the curtains on them and went to bed. Eventually we slept.

  When dawn came we were sitting waiting in the stone amphitheater. At first there was just a low buzzing, the sound of thousands of paper-thin wing membranes, but with the first light we could see the bats as they flew high over the entrance, folded their wings and dived straight down into the interior.

  There were no silver-shimmering albinos among them, nothing to indicate that any of them were anything but the useful, harmless insectivores they were supposed to be.

  When the caverns opened for the day we had to walk back up to the Visitor's Center, pay our fees, and then be fitted with the radio receivers that took the place of tour guides. They dangled from our necks like bulky toy telephones.

  A man in a ranger's uniform examined our fee receipt, waved us on.

  Once past the stench of the bat cave we began to see the giant stalagmites and stalactites, the limestone formations that resembled fossilized squids or Portuguese men-of-war, the helictites like the roots of impossible trees, pushing their way sideways out of the rock, twisting and gnarled and interwoven, the cave coral like clusters of stone barnacles, the drapery stalactites like folds of hanging fabric, the pits, pools, columns and chasms—but for us the sculptured rock was only context for the living energies of the caverns. Columns shone with the light of silver suns; networks of flaming lines the color of burning aluminum ran across the roof, walls, floors; blinding lights shone through the solid rock as through murky glass, burning at us through the asphalt of the path.

  We tried to maintain what we thought was a normal pace, never taking our radio receivers from our ears. Our eyes were almost always drawn to blank walls, unimpressive columns, small boulders. Only rarely did we find ourselves loo
king at the same formations as the other visitors, and then we might stare for long moments at something no one else had given a second glance.

  We made it as far as the Green Lake Room before attracting anyone's attention. We were standing half blocking the path, lost in a thousand-petaled flower of silver blue flame pulsing just beneath the surface of the asphalt, when the guide stationed in the chamber noticed it. When we finally realized he was watching us, we—I don't know how to describe it exactly, but we turned his attention away from us so that he ceased to be aware of us.

  It was as natural and effortless as blinking your eyes to get rid of a cinder; in the confusion of forces and powers through which we were moving such a feeble manifestation of personal power seemed so totally insignificant that it was not until much later that I realized it was in any way unusual or out of the ordinary.

  At last we moved on to the next chamber, the so-called Queen's Chamber. And found the source, the center, the heart:

  Within and between and around the interlocking helictites, projecting from every side powers complex and alive flowed and changed, sang through shifting spectrums. And from a hole in the wall hidden high behind fluted drapery stalactites like the fossilized mantle of a great jellyfish, a waterfall of suns burst, fell soft and shining through air and stone.

  We wrapped ourselves in concealment, climbed the rough cave coral to the hole, wriggled through it into a long, low tunnel, the energies singing through us growing ever subtler, ever purer as their intensity increased, as we crawled deeper and deeper into the radiance.

  At last we came to a large chamber, its far end covered by a pool of water. Bubbles rose from the bottom of the pool, burst with a soft plopping sound.

  And here, at the center, there was only clarity, only silence.

  A slab of rock by the edge of the pool drew us to it, pulled us down onto its rough surface to make love, to merge ourselves with that vast grid of living energies which coexisted with the caverns, which sent tendrils of itself out to every part of the living earth.

  We were lost to ourselves, making love with bodies forgotten, when a sudden glaciality, an invading tension, froze us into our separate selves and I saw, superimposed on the scene before me, a hand mounted on a wooden rod, bone fused to wood, jutting from a basin of thick yellow liquid into which nerves and tendons, arteries and veins, dangled like roots. The fingers curled slightly inward, the skin was weathered and rough, and to the tip of each finger an eyeball glistening with moisture had been sewn. The eyeballs gazed inward, down at the palm, each burning with a different color flame—green, orange-red, pink, blue—and in the center of the palm a sigil the color of a livid bruise had been drawn or stamped, and I was there, in the palm, trapped within the lines of the sigil.

  And then the hand melted, was gone, leaving me poised above Dara, trapped in her sucking mucous membranes by the impersonal lusts of my body, feeling my substance draining out of me and into her. And yet even as she leeched my essence from me I was one with her, sharing her violation, feeling my cock penetrating and rending her, but though I knew she was as aware of what was happening to me as I was of what was happening to her, our mirrored awarenesses did not cancel each other out but only reinforced each other, resonated and grew stronger as I felt myself building towards a dark orgasm which I could not stop but which I could not survive, as I felt myself losing control, dying—

  I was crawling naked through blue-white tunnels, dragging myself over ridges and spines of knife-edged ice, leaving behind me a trail of frozen blood. Light shone through the tunnel walls. Ahead of me fat hairy ice spiders spun their brittle webs but I always managed to break through the half-completed webs before the spiders could fasten themselves to my body. I kept on crawling, crawling toward the cleansing fire that waited for me at the end of the last tunnel, the fire I knew I would never reach…

  He was me and he was not me and though I knew him they had hidden his name from me. Four men in black held him down on the long blue-white table while the fifth severed his head from his body. The head was wrapped in dark cloth; the blood was saved.

  There was a garden beneath the earth where giant fungi grew in moist white rows. The men in black planted his head at the end of the last row as I watched terrified, unable to move, unable to turn my head away to protect my staring eyes from the dirt raining down on them.

  They watered the ground over his buried head with the blood they had saved.

  Something was growing, pushing its way up through the sticky black earth—

  And I was lying naked on the cold rock and Dara was gone.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  « ^ »

  I tried to get to my feet, could not. Lay sprawled and helpless in the center of the caverns' pulsing heart.

  Dara had been taken from me, summoned back to her mysterious master or taken prisoner by his enemies, and without her I was only a crippled fragment of myself, voiceless and blind, my thoughts and feelings as unreal as the pains an amputee feels in his missing limbs.

  I could hear the distant voices of the tourists in the Queen's Chamber. I reached for my clothes, could not force my fingers to close on them.

  And pulsing through me the energies of the caverns, lulling me and soothing me, making it almost impossible to hold on to my thoughts, to drive myself on.

  The visions of the ice tunnels and of the man who was me and not-me's death were losing definition, fading into each other, like the dreams that begin to slip away from you as soon as you're completely awake.

  But I hadn't been asleep and dreaming, I'd been forced into unconsciousness by whoever had used the hand of glory to take control of Dara and me. My visions could have been manufactured for me, spun around me to keep me distracted and helpless while Dara was being stolen from me—or while she was being compelled to leave me and surrender herself to whoever had used the hand against us.

  Whoever had used the hand against us. If what I'd seen had been real, some sort of clairvoyant vision made possible by my new powers or by the energies of the caverns, then Dara's master was dead and Dara was in the hands of his enemies. If it had been Dara's master that I'd seen killed. If the vision hadn't been designed by either her master or his enemies to make me think that he'd been killed when in fact he had not.

  But the hand—I had seen it: there was no way it could have been a hallucination or an illusion. It reminded me of the hands of glory described in many of my aunt's grimoires: the hands of hanged men, specially prepared and dried, the fingers set aflame when the sorcerer who had created the hands wanted to use one of them to render someone unconscious. But I had at one time or another read every grimoire in my aunt's collection—and her collection was reputed to be one of the best in the United States—and none of her grimoires mentioned the yellow fluid, the sigil on the palm, the eyeballs sewn to the fingers. And this hand had done far more than just render us unconscious. How much more I could only guess.

  Dara had been taken prisoner. Either forced back to the master who she had believed meant her no harm but who had used me to violate and torture her just as he had used her to violate and torture me, or in the hands of the man-goat and his dancing worshipers.

  (Dara chained naked to the altar, two of the mutilated dancers holding her open to the man-goat, his huge segmented cock a hungry bronze centipede, the other dancers watching and waiting, skillful knives cradled in playful hands—)

  And after she was dead, when they finally let her die, they'd do to her what she'd been so terrified they'd do. And I didn't know what it was they could do to her, didn't know how to find them, how to recognize them if I found them, didn't know what I could do to rescue her from them if I found her.

  But I was beginning to feel stronger. I tried to stand, had to grab a stalagmite to keep from falling. I got my pants on, had to sit down for my shirt and sandals, finally hung the radio receiver around my neck and crawled back through the tunnel to the Queen's Chamber.

  And maybe she had
n't been captured yet, maybe she was hiding from them and from me somewhere in the caverns or out in the desert, still gripped by the fear and the horror of me that the hand had forced on her. Hiding somewhere where I could find her, could let her know that I still loved her, make her believe that I wouldn't hurt her, wouldn't betray her.

  Find her before they found her. Find her before she fled the area altogether, hitched a ride out with any of hundreds of people going almost anywhere.

  And even if she was a prisoner they might have had to keep her here so they could use the caverns' energies on her or so they could force her to use the energies for them.

  The drapery stalactites blocked my vision of the Queen's Chamber but I could hear people talking somewhere off to my left. Half remembering the means Dara and I had used to make ourselves unnoticeable. I tried to shroud myself in concealment again before dropping to the floor.

  I must have succeeded because dozens of tourists passed within a few yards of the spot where I lay half stunned without seeing me.

  When at last I felt strong enough I staggered onto the path and took my place among the tourists. All I'd been able to think of to do was to make a thorough search of the caverns and the desert around them: I remembered reading that the whole area was honeycombed with caves.

  And if she fled from me again, if I couldn't find a way through the fear and horror to the part of her that still knew I loved her?

  They could have taken her away, taken her anywhere.

  She was not in the Papoose Room. Not in the Boneyard or the Lunch Room or the Big Room, not back at the truck, on the nature trail, sitting in the amphitheater, in the Visitor's Center, the main corridor, the bat cave, Devil's Den, the Green Lake Room or the Queen's Palace. I crawled for hours through dangerous side tunnels closed to the public. Nothing.