Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  The bed was a massive four-poster and heavy, but I finally managed to shift it around enough so I could lie on it with my head to the north. I put the two carving knives I'd taken on a chair by the bed where I hoped I could grab them in time if I needed them, then lay down on the bed. I opened the metal box and rubbed some of the ointment onto my skin. It felt cool on my temples but warm in the center of my forehead.

  Within a few minutes my dizziness and nausea were gone and my sense of urgency had given way to a feeling of relaxed alertness. I began to feel a sort of not unpleasant electrical vibration in my head accompanied by a hissing sound. The vibrations spread to my body, began moving up and down it. My body felt increasingly rigid but the rigidity was comforting, even soothing, as though my previous suppleness had been maintained only by some tremendous unconscious effort which I was at last being allowed to relax. The vibrations slowly increased in frequency.

  After what might have been another ten minutes the vibrations died away. I lay quietly a while longer, waiting for whatever was going to happen next, then sat up. I felt something first give and then break as I sat up, twisted back to see what it was.

  And found myself staring into my own face. I was still lying there, my mouth slightly open, my eyes closed as if in sleep.

  I reached back to touch the sleeping face with some half-formed idea of finding out if it was real—

  Only I no longer had the hand I was trying to use. My left arm terminated above the wrist in the nine flaring necks of a Naga.

  The Naga was a cool luminous green, like liquified jade. Its nine heads were more like those of sculptured Chinese dragons than like those of actual snakes, with high, almost bulging foreheads, eyes like disks of burning crystal, and flaring nostrils over long sinuous mouths. It regarded me a moment out of its eighteen eyes, then twisted away from me and wove itself forward into the air, pulling me the rest of the way out of my body.

  As soon as I was completely out of my body my sense of vision changed. The silver fires and phosphorescences my powersight had revealed to me were gone, as was the darkness underlying them. The Naga was still its luminous green but everything else, even my sleeping self, was bathed in a source-less radiance that showed things with an impossible neutral precision, as though I were moving through an infinitely detailed three-dimensional pencil drawing.

  I had only an instant to stare down at my body, the bracelet still clasping its left forearm, before the Naga was pulling me smoothly through the air. There was a barely perceptible sense of resistance as we passed through the solid oak door and then we were gliding down the hall towards the staircase, flying at what would have been shoulder height had I been walking and not streaming along behind the Naga like some sort of immaterial pennant.

  At the bottom of the stairs the Naga twisted left and pulled me through a wall into the manuscript room, then through the closed door in its far wall and into my father's Oriental room.

  The statue of Shiva burned with close-cropped green and white fires. We began flying in tight circles around it, circumnavigating it eighty-four times before plunging through the walls into the library.

  A black sun burned in the fireplace, leeching the radiance from the neutral air and filling the room with flickering shadow. We dived into the flames and for an instant I was lost in endless darkness, in a sea of thirsty shadows, and then we were plunging through the rear wall of the fireplace and gliding down a hidden stairway.

  The stairway meandered deeper and deeper into the earth, twisting and curving, doubling back on itself without apparent logic. Torches burned with colorless flames in holders on either side. At intervals skulls with burning shadows in their eye sockets were set in niches.

  At last the stairs debouched onto a tiny landing high on the curve of a huge hemispherical cavern. A thick pillar of red-flickering shadow, like a column of burning blood, leapt from the dark waters of the small lake in the center of the cavern floor to the apex of the hemispherical vault; four slender columns of black flame rose to the roof from four dark pools ringing the central lake. The cavern was thick with drifting red and black shadows.

  This must have been where father had taken Dara, where she'd been growing up while I'd been reading about Vlad the Impaler in the house above.

  Steps spiraled down to the floor. We followed them. Below us I could see what looked like a pine or spruce forest, the trees clustered around the base of the stairs. A river divided the forested area from the rest of the cavern. As we got lower I could see two concentric circles of dark objects surrounding the central lake.

  There was a photographic negative of a man descending the stairs ahead of us. We glided up to him, slowed, floated just behind him. I could hear his hard-soled shoes on the stone steps.

  It was my brother Michael.

  He turned right at the bottom of the stairs, following a path that took him a short ways into the woods, to a clearing where a stone altar stood. On stone tables surrounding the altar were all sorts of Catholic paraphernalia: holy water, vestments, sacramental wine, Communion wafers, crosses and crucifixes.

  All the weapons that faithful Christians were supposed to be able to use to protect themselves against Satan and His creatures.

  Michael paused a moment, studying the assortment, then took a single Communion wafer and sealed it in a plastic sandwich bag, put the bag in his pocket and proceeded on.

  A stone bridge spanned the river. The cave floor on the other side was a tangled mass of ground-hugging black plants, fleshy bulbous shadows, creepers and fungi, all glistening with moisture. Some of the creepers sported flowers, dark drooping flaccid blooms. No plant grew more than two feet from the ground and there were no woody plants or briars.

  The path cut through the growth. Beside it, perhaps a hundred yards beyond the bridge, its base concealed by a thick mass of flowering creepers, stood a great statue of Satan as a satyrlike man-goat clutching the traditional pitchfork in his right hand. The statue burned with smoldering red and black flames.

  On the other side of the path, where it must have once stood facing the statue of Satan, was the shattered ruin of what had been a statue of Shiva. Though most of its chest was gone and its right arm was missing it still gripped its trident in the remaining hand. The three-eyed head lay on a pile of rubble at the statue's feet. Body, head, and broken stone all burned with green and white fires.

  In front of the statue of Satan lay my father's open coffin. Its exterior had been coated with some glossy resin, as though to waterproof it, and a small squarish electrical device with a large two-pole switch protruding from it had been attached to the right side.

  Michael paused a moment, staring down at father, then touched him lightly on the forehead with one black finger and continued on.

  Coffins had been arranged in two concentric circles around the central pool. The resin with which they were coated seemed to drink the red-burning shadows. Every coffin had one of the electrical devices I'd first seen on my father's coffin attached to its right side.

  Michael walked around the outer circle of coffins until he came to a gap in the arrangement. Leaving the path—I could hear the black vegetation squelching under his feet, sickeningly loud—he walked up to the last coffin on the right-hand side of the gap, lifted its lid and threw it back. The interior had been coated with the same glossy resin as the outside. Michael took the Communion wafer out of his pocket and placed it, still sealed in its plastic sandwich bag, on the floor of the coffin. Then he sat down to wait, a satisfied smile on his face.

  Within moments vampires had begun to appear, men and women with Bathory faces returning to shut themselves into their coffins for the day. Some of them came walking up the path or across the black vegetation, others dropped from above as huge bats or swirling mists and only assumed human form after alighting. They came in perfect silence, without conversation or communication among themselves or with Michael before they closed themselves into their coffins.

  A dirty gray bat with a win
gspread of at least three feet landed in front of Michael. It shifted and changed, became a woman in white standing in a half crouch. She straightened and I could see that she was my Aunt Judith, her face pink and swollen, without trace of the stark beauty that had been hers earlier in the night.

  "Did you feel well tonight?" Michael asked.

  "Well enough," she said, dismissing him. She took a step towards her coffin, saw the holy wafer in its plastic bag, spun back to face Michael.

  "You know why," Michael said. "Not while I still need him."

  "Then keep him. But let me return to my coffin. I can feel the dawn."

  "No. You disobeyed me."

  She took three quick steps towards him but he held up an empty hand and she jerked to a halt.

  "I have the power of three dhampires in me now," he said. "You cannot hope to defy me."

  "And you'd kill me, one of your own?"

  "Yes."

  She stared at him a moment, her swollen pink face expressionless, then said, "Then let me return to my coffin and sleep. Let me be dancing with Satan in my dreams when I die. You owe that at least to the blood that we share."

  Michael was silent an instant, then he nodded. "Very well." He lifted the Communion wafer out of the coffin and put it back in his pocket. He stepped back and Aunt Judith lay down in her coffin and pulled the lid closed over her.

  Michael waited a few moments longer, then threw the switch attached to the coffin and retreated a few yards. The coffin exploded into white hot flame. In less than a minute all that remained of it was a small pile of ashes.

  Michael waited until the last sparks had died away and the vegetation had stopped smoldering, then turned his back on the coffins and took a path leading away from the river towards one of the columns of black flame.

  We floated after him, followed him to Dara.

  A circle within a five-pointed star had been cut into the bare rock, and at the center of the circle Dara lay naked and unconscious. She was on her back, her head to her side, as if she were asleep. Her skin was smooth and unbruised and I could hear her breathing, slowly but regularly. At each of the circle's five points a hand of glory stood upright. Four of the hands were lit and flaming: the hand I had seen at Carlsbad, each eyeball-tipped finger burning a different color; a black hand clutching a thick black candle which burned with a smoky blue flame; a six-fingered hand burning a sulphurous yellow; and the thumbless hand of an infant or a monkey burning a dull orange. The light from the hands flickered over Dara, pooled on her belly and thighs, in the hollow between her breasts.

  One hand of glory was unlit. The palm and thumb were normal but all four of the fingers had been replaced by leathery gray upright cocks.

  We were floating just outside the star, perhaps two yards above the stone floor. I tried to swim myself, drag myself down to Dara but I was anchored to the unmoving Naga like a balloon tacked to a wall.

  Michael stripped off his clothes and dived into a pool of water to the right of the pentagram. His back and chest were covered with lines of small, long-healed scars. He emerged and dried himself carefully, then dived in again. After seven repetitions he rubbed his body with oil from a bottle on a stone table, then dressed himself in a skintight black garment that left his crotch exposed from the same table. ;

  He faced the pentagram, gestured at it. All the hands of glory except the one with the eyeballs sewn to its fingertips went out. He gestured again and the hand with the leathery cocks for fingers burst into rose-pink flame.

  And suddenly the Naga was pulling me back the way we'd come. I tried to resist it but there was no way to drag my floating feet, nothing to clutch at with my immaterial hands. I was dragged back to my room.

  My body was still sleeping peacefully. The Naga slipped into my left arm like a hand going into a glove and the sourceless clarity was gone. I twisted around and lay down, feeling that slightest of resistances as I reentered my body and merged with it again.

  I jumped up, grabbed the knives and yanked the bolt on the door. I got the door open, then had to grab the doorframe to keep from falling. I made my way down the stairs to the library.

  * * *

  Chapter Nineteen

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  There was a fire in the great fireplace, stacked oak logs still burning fiercely from the night before. And hanging unsupported within and above the orange-yellow flames, partially obscured by them, was a ball of pale silver power-flame.

  Confronted by the two fires, I realized that I had no idea how I was going to get through the hidden door that had to lead through the back of the fireplace to the stairway beyond. The mantelpiece was a smooth heavy slab of unornamented black marble and though three grinning wolf's heads were carved in high relief on either side of the fireplace, I had pushed and pulled and twisted them all often enough as a child to be sure that nothing I could do to them would produce any obvious result.

  But perhaps the result only became obvious when you pushed on the rear wall of the fireplace and found a door swinging open; perhaps the only way to open the door was from within the fireplace itself. In either case I'd have to get to the door before I could use it, and I couldn't get to it as long as the logs were still burning in front of it.

  I used a pair of brass fire tongs to try to drag the heavy iron grate with its load of burning logs out onto the hearth but was still too weak to move the grate more than an inch or two towards me. I ended up dousing the fire with buckets of water from the laundry room so I could wrestle the logs out of the grate individually.

  When the logs had stopped spitting and hissing and the smoke and steam had cleared, I could see that the ball of powerflame was not the pure lunar silver I had thought it but veined with scraggly lines of reddish fire like a bloodshot eyeball. The veins would rise to the surface from somewhere inside the fireball, drift languidly around like strands of bleeding seaweed, then sink back into the interior, only to be replaced by new veins.

  There was something purposeful about the way the veins drifted and clumped, as though the configurations they formed reflected in some way an awareness of my presence and movements. I put my hand in the fireplace, moved it slowly closer to the fireball, noticed that the veins seemed to be drifting in towards the point where my hand would have struck the surface.

  I pulled my hand away and knelt down to wrestle the still-smoldering logs out onto the hearth, keeping my eyes on the fireball and carefully avoiding any contact with it. I had to catch my breath after each log and I almost passed out while dragging the grate out onto the hearth.

  I squirmed in under the fireball, groping through the wet ashes in search of the hidden catch, then used my hands to explore as much of the walls and back as I could reach while keeping clear of the fireball.

  Nothing. I wriggled back out and began searching the rest of the room. I ripped up the carpet and checked the floor underneath for loose boards or small holes into which keys could be fitted. I pulled the paintings from the walls and the books from their shelves. I checked the mantelpiece for pressure-sensitive areas, the light switches, desk lamps and electric . sockets for hidden circuits. I pushed, pulled, prodded, twisted and banged on the wolves' heads in every way I could think of then crawled back into the fireplace and examined it again, all without finding anything.

  I gave up, left the books and paintings heaped on the floor and sat down with the two carving knives in my lap to wait for Michael. But I was so weak from loss of blood and from the aftereffects of the drugs they'd given me that despite everything I could do to keep myself awake I kept drifting off.

  "David." I started, opened my eyes. The knives were gone. Michael was sitting watching me from another armchair. I could feel the power in him like the sun on my skin; he blazed with silver and his eyes were cold stars, intolerably brilliant.

  Wet footprints led from the fireplace to his chair, but there was nothing to tell me how he'd gotten through the fireplace, nor what he'd done with the knives.

  "Where's Dara?" I deman
ded, trying to summon up the spurious charisma I'd used on the two cops in Provincetown and turn his attention away from the fear I couldn't keep out of my voice. But I was too weak, too sick.

  "Below. As you obviously know. But the way you've torn this room apart proves that's just about all you know, so for your sake and mine, to save us both a lot of needless effort, I'm going to tell you some of the things you're going to have to know if you want to stay alive and safe."

  He paused an instant, waiting for my response. I told him to go ahead.

  "To begin with, there's no way for you or anyone else to force your way down to the caverns. None. Even if you could find your way past this door and its guardians—which you couldn't—you'd find the stairs beyond blocked to you by other guardians you could never pass.

  "But you might succeed in getting yourself killed, and that's the last thing I want to have happen to you. Do you remember your encounter with Aunt Judith last night?

  "Because of what she did to you—and because she disobeyed me in doing it—I was forced to kill her this morning when she tried to return to her coffin. As I could kill you, David. Or Dara. As all your undead ancestors will try to kill you the moment I quit protecting you from them. But as long as the two of you continue to be useful to me I'll keep you safe. And I may even allow you to live together with relatively little interference from me once I'm convinced that you've come to accept the fact that your lives are mine, and mine alone, to control."

  "What happens when you no longer need us?"

  "I no longer need you now, David. Either of you. I can use you, which is different. And I'll continue to be able to use you as long as I can make you obey me, but I'll never need you again."

  "Then will you let Dara go? If we can't hurt you and we can't get away from you—"

  "No. You could hurt me, David. You could even kill me: it's the traditional thing for a Bathory in your position to try to do and you're not as different from the rest of us as you like to think you are. What you can't do is hurt me in any way that won't end up being a lot worse for you than it is for me, and until you realize that, I'd be a fool to do anything that would let you think you had a chance to defy me safely.