Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  "And Michael won't be able to do anything to protect himself from it?"

  "No. I arranged to leave certain crucial gaps in his education. He has no idea that anything of the sort exists, or could exist. Do you want to take a look at it?"

  I hesitated a moment, suspicious, then said, "Yes."

  "Open the box, then. It can't do anyone any harm until it's been lighted, and you'd have Monteleur to protect you in any case."

  The hand was shriveled gray skin stretched tight over bone and tendon, a wrinkled claw on a white velvet cushion. I closed the lid.

  "How long will it keep Michael asleep?"

  "About twenty-four hours. Which gives you far more time than you'll need."

  "What about Dara?"

  "Monteleur will protect her from its effects in the same way he'll be protecting you."

  It took a little over half an hour to get to the estate. Uncle Stephen left me sitting on one of the gravestones at the edge of the cemetery while he drove the rest of the way up to the house to plant the hand where it would be the most effective.

  He was back about five minutes later. "Michael's below, but he's unconscious. You won't have any trouble with him."

  "You said you'd make sure he wasn't in the cavern."

  "That was before I'd decided to use the hand, when there was still some possibility he could be a danger to you." He took an orange nylon backpack from the trunk and strapped it on, then led the way into the woods, following what seemed at first to be just another of the many deer trails that crisscrossed the forest floor. I hung back, staying as far behind him as I could while still keeping him in sight.

  The trail dead-ended at a gnarled and tangled wall of intertwined rose bushes at least ten feet tall. Uncle Stephen waited until I'd caught up with him, then pushed his way through the bushes. I followed him through, found myself in a large grassy clearing completely cut off from the surrounding forest by the wall of rose bushes that encircled it. I'd never seen it before, though at one time I'd thought I knew everything there was to know about the forest. At the far end of the clearing, perhaps five yards away, was a single weathered gravestone bearing the name of RADU BATHORY but otherwise blank.

  Uncle Stephen took some cloth-wrapped packages from his pack and set them down carefully in the center of the clearing.

  Then he took a length of thick black cord, and laid out a circle with it, placing incense braziers from the pack just inside its circumference, one at each of the four points of the compass. He lit the braziers and, stepping back outside the circle, applied the flame from his lighter to the cord. A ring of fire sprang into existence, burning a few inches above the cord without seeming to touch it. The braziers were giving off thick clouds of sour-smelling smoke, almost none of which seemed to be escaping the confines of the circle despite the faint breeze that had made its way through the encircling wall of bushes.

  Uncle Stephen took two withered brown things—dry roots, perhaps—from an envelope and held them out to me. As far as I could tell they were identical. I took one from him, waited until he'd chewed and swallowed his before taking mine. It was tough, but unexpectedly sweet.

  "Take off your clothes and leave them here outside the circle." He began to undress. He had neither body nor pubic hair and when he'd finished removing his clothes he startled me by peeling off first his eyebrows and then the close-cropped wig I'd always thought to be his natural hair. He was deeply and evenly tanned, scalp as well as body, so thin I could distinguish the individual muscles and tendons. He looked like a man who'd been skinned and then dipped in walnut-brown dye.

  He stepped over the ring of fire, looked back at me and gestured me after him. I told myself that nothing he could do to me could be as bad as having the worm in me and took off the rest of my clothes, stepped in after him. The smoke was a greasy fog, hot and rancid, as though made up of thick drops of some ancient cooking oil in atmospheric suspension. The drug was beginning to make me dizzy. I could no longer distinguish Monteleur's thrashing from the churning and twisting of my own bowels and intestines.

  Uncle Stephen began chanting, long strings of precisely enunciated nonsense syllables. His shape was shifting, melting, becoming unrecognizable.

  He handed me the scourge. I took it, whipped his chest and genitals until the blood flowed. It was mechanical; he wasn't real; I felt nothing.

  He held up his hand and said, "Enough," and was Uncle Stephen again as he took the scourge from me and told me to turn my back to him.

  I turned, screamed as the braided leather cut into me again and again.

  He put the scourge aside and unwrapped a vial full of some heavy aromatic oil. He shook the bottle vigorously before applying it to my back, buttocks and ass, then rubbed himself with it.

  "Lie on your stomach with your legs apart," he told me. "Concentrate on the pain you're going to feel, on your sense of being violated, on the fact that you don't know whether or not I'm going to live up to my half of our agreement after I've finished with you. You don't want me fucking you, you hate it, the very touch of me puts you in a rage, makes you so angry you could vomit or kill me right now—"

  And then he'd grabbed me, opened me, and I could feel my sphincter muscles tearing as he thrust himself into me. I tried to struggle, to throw him off, but I was too weak, too dizzy, was back in that other clearing on the night of my father's funeral was Dara being raped by Michael in my body while Uncle Stephen thrust the cock that Michael had stolen from me into my ass as I vomited and he held my face down smeared it in the vomit so I couldn't breathe and there was a lead pipe in my hands I was bringing it down on his head in an ecstasy of hatred and loathing, and his broken head was falling away in shards of brittle plastic to reveal the severed neck of an angel with black velvet-tipped wings singing with a sweet throaty voice that had a screaming inside—

  And Monteleur's laughter was spasming through me as the familiar sucked the power out of me, bloated itself on the pain and the ecstasy and the loathing. And it was over.

  Uncle Stephen pulled himself out of me, left me lying there with the worm twitching in my guts as he walked over to the orange backpack and got two white pills out of a bottle.

  "Here." He took one, handed me the other. "This'll counteract the drug I gave you earlier and put you back in shape to go after Dara."

  He stood smiling at me while I dressed.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  « ^ »

  "It's been two hours," uncle Stephen said, handing me the long straight knife in its jeweled silver sheath. "With Monteleur to help you you should be ready by now."

  I nodded, glad to have an excuse to look away from him while I attached the sheath to my belt. My back and buttocks still hurt from the scourging and my sphincter muscles felt bruised and torn but the dizziness was gone and I felt well enough to function.

  "Good. Monteleur will have taken care of the rest of the pain before you reach the cavern." His voice once again full of its overrich self-mockery, the archnesses and ironies that hid the greater falsehoods. "Remember, don't touch each other and don't speak to each other except through Monteleur. And don't do anything to harm the sexual hand. We'll need it later."

  The avuncular smile, the clean white teeth, the eyes their cold startling green in the tanned face. I nodded again, unwilling to speak and let my voice betray me.

  He'd explained that if we touched, or even spoke to each other before beginning the final rite we'd need an additional three days of ritual preparation before we could start over, and that during those three days Michael would be able to destroy us. Without Dara's knowledge, the memories she might or might not have regained, I had no way of judging how much of what he'd told me was truth and how much was lies—but what he'd told me was too consistent not only with what I remembered from my aunt's grimoires but with the instructions in my father's letter for me to see any alternative to doing what he had planned for me.

  The entrance was under Radu's tombstone. The s
tone was heavy, far heavier than it looked, and it took all our combined strength to push it aside. Uncle Stephen had explained that the entrance was rarely used, and then only when it was necessary to take a human being or something of similar size below without passing through the house; he'd pointed out the holes, little bigger around than pencils, in the surrounding ground which the vampires themselves used.

  Just beyond the entrance was a straight drop of about fifteen feet. Uncle Stephen lowered me on a rope. From there the passage continued level for a while, then angled sharply downward, beginning to twist and coil like some subterranean intestinal tract. The silver-burning rock was slippery with slime molds, chill to the touch; the air hung heavy and fetid.

  "To the left." Monteleur's voice was a mocking bass rumble that I felt as much as heard, as though my heart and lungs, stomach, liver and intestines had all become sounding boards for the familiar's voice.

  "Now right, and then left again. Now left again, and then down." The passageway had become a labyrinth of narrow twisting tunnels, some so low that I could barely crawl through them. There were deep pits that had to be leaped or skirted, crevices in the walls and ceiling where spiders as big as my head lurked. There were foot-long scorpions and nests of giant ants, pockets of poisonous gases, more pits, false tunnels, deadfalls. Once the way opened out onto a large cavern filled with heaped human and animal skeletons, thousands of bright-eyed rats staring at me from their nests among the silver-shining bones. But with Monteleur to guide and protect me it was easy, too easy, and I passed the traps and guardians unharmed, in no more danger than I would have been had I been strolling through a zoological garden or playing miniature golf.

  Even the cavern when we reached it was too bright, too clean. The pillar of burning blood at the center, the four pillars of black flame ringing it, the drifting clots of shadow—everything burned a brilliant silver, gleamed chrome and antiseptic.

  Monteleur guided me along a path that skirted the center, avoided the statues of Shiva and Satan, the vampires in their concentric circles and my father in his open coffin.

  "To your right." I turned, saw Dara lying naked in the center of a pentacle cut into the rock beneath her. A pool of water, a huge rectangular fishpond, behind her. Her legs spread, one twisted partially under her, and Michael, wearing his black costume with the crotch cut away, lying sprawled on her, his still erect cock buried in her. They were both unconscious, their breathing slow and regular.

  Only two of the hands of glory were burning; Monteleur had taken care of the other three while we were still making our descent. The master hand with the eyeballs sewn to the tips of its fingers, each finger burning with a different flame, controlling Dara in a different way. And the sexual hand, burning rose-red, the leathery-looking cocks rising from the edge of the upright palm like the long necks of those huge clams you find along the beaches in northern Washington.

  I laid out the six cloth pentacles Uncle Stephen had given me, forced myself to pause, take a few deep breaths and then check to make sure I had them in the right order. I put the white leather glove Uncle Stephen had given me on my left hand, carefully drew the knife from its sheath with my right. The blade was some sort of silvery alloy, incredibly sharp, inlaid with thousands of tiny gold sigils that caught the light, shimmered, seemed to float just above the white brilliance of the blade.

  The master hand, the eyeballs sewn to its fingertips, their gaze focused on Dara. The little finger slightly bent, the skin stained and wrinkled, burning green: Dara's heartbeat, her other involuntary life functions. I held the hand steady, severed the little finger from it with a single blow of the silvery blade, caught it as it fell, its flame extinguished, and put it in the smallest pentacle.

  The next finger, burning orange-red: Dara's voluntary muscles. The third finger, the index finger, the flames a rose with darker eddies: her perception of her body and of the world around her. The final finger, a brilliant cobalt blue: her physically based emotions, her anger, her fear, her pleasure and her pain. I severed them all, caught them in my gloved left hand, put them in their pentacles. The eyes sewn to their tips swiveled to watch me as I attacked what remained of the hand.

  There was a livid design consisting of three large circles and a number of crosses, arrows, lines and smaller circles burned onto the palm: the sigil of FORNEUS. The thin yellow fluid was eating its way through my glove, beginning to burn the hand with which I held the mutilated hand of glory steady as I carved first a circle around the sigil, and then around that a pentangle, the flesh falling away from the blade like overcooked stew meat. While I was still cutting the circle the sigil blurred and shifted and something part fish, part reptile, part human looked out at me, tried to reach me before I could complete the design, but Monteleur kept it away from me until at last I cut the last line of the pentangle into the palm and it vanished.

  I put the hand in the pentacle Uncle Stephen had provided for it. I realized I'd been holding my breath again, forced myself to exhale.

  And suddenly I was seeing Michael and Dara lying there in front of me for the first time, Dara's hips grinding beneath his sprawled unconsciousness as his erect cock writhed and wriggled deeper and deeper into her, a thick purple worm feeding, and yet I could see that they were neither of them moving, that it was I who was moving as the swelling waves of my need beat through me, as I let the knife fall and grabbed Michael by the arm, the black rubber or plastic of his sleeve a confusion of chromed reflections, taut and slippery as raw liver in my hand as I yanked him off and out of her—

  A burning, an explosion of fire and agony in my groin and the lust was gone. In its place only shame, and an anger beyond all reason as I straightened, as my hand found the knife, hacked the flaming cocks from their hand of glory and I ground them under my bootheel into the rough stone floor of the cave, smearing the gray pulpy flesh across the darker gray of the floor—

  This time the burning went on and on.

  "You have violated your compact," Monteleur said when the pain ceased. "My master wanted that hand."

  "I lost control." I tried to stand, found I could. I seemed to be undamaged. Dara still lay limp and unmoving in the center of the pentacle. A few feet away from her Michael lay curled around himself in a tight foetal ball.

  "What's wrong with her? Why isn't she awake yet?"

  "Because she's still under the influence of your uncle's hand. Stand behind her, where she can't see you or speak to you before we've had a chance to warn her. When she begins to awaken mouth the words you want me to say to her. I'll repeat them to her."

  I moved around behind her, stood waiting.

  "Now," Monteleur said.

  "Dara. Don't say anything." Monteleur's voice rumbling from my belly. Dara opened her eyes and tried to sit up, saw me. "Don't try to talk. I'm speaking to you through Monteleur, a familiar spirit, but if we talk to each other directly or touch each other we'll lose any chance we have of escaping and taking dominion of the family away from Michael. But before we can leave we must immerse ourselves seven times each in the pool behind me. Do you understand?"

  She nodded. I began taking off my clothes. The sweater ripped some of the scabs on my back open when I tried to pull it off. Dara sat the rest of the way up, stood. Michael lay curled at her feet. She stood looking down at him a moment, then stepped over him and made her way unsteadily to the pool. The leg that had been twisted under her was badly bruised. She hesitated a moment at the water's edge, her back to me, the silver fires of the place glowing on her rich dark shoulders, on her smooth tight buttocks and legs, shining from the hair falling black and thick to her waist.

  She shook her head as though to clear it, looked back at me and then took a deep breath and dived in. The pool was not quite the size of a backyard swimming pool, but very deep: I waited until I was sure she'd be able to make it back to the edge without difficulty, then followed her into the water, making sure I kept far enough away from so that there'd be no danger of us brushing against ea
ch other by mistake.

  Uncle Stephen was waiting for us at the surface. We climbed the rope, Dara first, and then I helped him move the gravestone back over the hole while Dara sat on the grass a few feet away, resting and massaging her leg. Behind her the circle was burning again, enclosing its cloud of thick smoke.

  "The ritual part of what the two of you are to do is simple."

  Uncle Stephen said. "You are to rub yourselves with these aromatic oils and enter the circle from opposite directions—you, David, from the west, and you, Dara, from the east. You must find each other within the circle without speaking, and continue to refrain from speaking until the purpose of the rite has been achieved and David has established dominion over your father. Once you have found each other you must lie together with your heads to the north and begin having sex, with David, as the dominant partner, on top, and Dara as the passive, beneath."

  I looked at Dara, trying to read her reaction in her face, but could see nothing beyond her exhaustion, her tension and fear.

  "As the power builds in you"—he was speaking to me alone now, ignoring Dara—"your father's soul will be drawn to yours. You will find yourself becoming aware of his thoughts, beginning to share with him the transformation he is undergoing. As soon as you feel this beginning you must reach into him and take from him his lusts and his hungers, his needs and the strengths with which he intends to satisfy those needs, and make them your own: you must take the vampire within him and make it a part of yourself before you can command it, and through it, him.

  "Remember, also, that you will be facing your brother as well as your father, and that you will have to defeat both of them to establish your dominion. But as long as the hand I've placed in the house continues to burn Michael will remain asleep, so that it will be only the productions of his will, and not that will itself, that you will have to overcome to defeat him."

  And your part in this? I wanted to ask as he rubbed first Dara and then me with the proper oils and led us to our places. The smoke was so thick that I couldn't see Dara standing facing me, though she couldn't have been more than a few yards away.