Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-four

  « ^ »

  When I came to the next morning my back was already beginning to heal, but I was loaded and confused, stupefied, as though Monteleur had pumped me full of barbiturates while I slept. It was weeks before I was allowed to wake up completely again.

  Most of what happened to me during that time is gone, forgotten or lost, or perhaps never comprehended in the first place. Only a few images, a few incidents, stand out clearly in my memory.

  A cavern somewhere at the end of a branching corridor deep under the hills, where I awakened to find myself looking up at thousands of dirty-white bats hanging from the roof, more entering through a natural chimney somewhere off to my right.

  Another cavern. Warm, silver-dark, half-flooded, filled with the hopping gray-brown toads and scuttling eight-inch reddish salamanders that John caught and on which Uncle Stephen and Nicolae were operating, setting pentangular plugs of iridescent fire opal into the amphibians' skulls so that the jewels glistened from their foreheads like third eyes. This, as I remember Uncle Stephen telling me, so that the members of the minor covens, those who had neither the right to attend the Sabbat in their proper persons nor the right to use the body of a vampire whose forty days of transformation were still uncompleted, could attend by possessing each a toad or a salamander.

  And in the main cavern, one hundred and forty-four coffins slowly filling with the bodies of the men, women and children killed by the vampires Uncle Stephen had brought with him. The bodies that the members of the twelve lesser covens—those ruled by Black Men who were themselves the twelve lesser members of the coven whose thirteenth member, the coven's Black Man, was Uncle Stephen—would animate for the Sabbat.

  I remember John returning from the Monterey airport with Larry, who'd been lured to California with a telegram signed in my name and fitted with a familiar while still being driven down the coast to the cabin. He spent what might have been a week, might have been two or three weeks, with us before Uncle Stephen sent him back to Provincetown. I remember watching him hold a spoon for Dara, remember him trying to help her walk what must have been some days or weeks later. I remember hearing him crying late at night, when he thought we were asleep and unable to hear him, remember the sounds he made when his familiar hurt him.

  I remember times I was manacled to the post or to iron rings set in the wall and whipped with Dara forced to watch, remember a little of my desperate clumsy lovemaking with her. I remember the time I realized that she could walk and hold things again without too-great pain, remember the anger I felt at my inability to let her know how relieved I was that she was going to recover.

  My other memories are less clear. "The day my father's transformation was complete and he took his place among the vampires whose coffins Uncle Stephen had brought by truck from Illinois. The summonings in the main cavern, when Uncle Stephen obtained the familiars with which those members of the lesser covens who were to be made Black Men of their own minor covens were to be fitted at the Sabbat. A vampire—perhaps my grandmother, from her resemblance to my Aunt Judith—bending over me and drinking from my neck as before Aunt Judith had drunk from me, while Uncle Stephen looked on.

  I have a vague memory of Dara trying to convince father that his days were spent in Hell, an even vaguer memory of the two of us trying to convince John that his precious butterfly was only a familiar spirit and that Alexandra was dead. I remember fragments of conversations I had with Uncle Stephen and Nicolae in which, from what I remember, I seem to have been asking them questions and listening to their answers almost like a trusting child demanding the truth of his parents, and another fragment of conversation in which Uncle Stephen was telling me that he used drugs even though his familiar could easily duplicate any effect they might have on him because he preferred to feel himself the object of external forces, rather than the prime mover.

  Midway through July Uncle Stephen had the road down to the cabin graded and paved. As soon as it was ready trucks began arriving with the equipment needed to further enlarge and furnish the caverns, with food and drink for the Sabbat, and with the coffins containing all but perhaps a half dozen of the vampires that had been left beneath the house in Illinois.

  An altar had been constructed among the live oaks outside the entrance to the caverns, where it was invisible from the road and air: a flat black stone, roughly oval, perhaps two feet thick, three yards wide and a yard deep, supported by four pillars of red-painted stone carved to resemble the legs of some crouching beast. Every day, at dawn and again at dusk, a small animal of some sort was killed on the altar and left there. The bodies were always gone by the time of the next sacrifice.

  Behind the altar three crosses had been erected, intricately carved and painted, each large enough to be used to crucify a man; to the base of each cross a black goat was tethered, its horns painted with gilt.

  There was no way to keep the fact of so much activity completely hidden from my Big Sur neighbors and Uncle Stephen knew more than to try. For some weeks now John had been telling people that I'd arranged while I was back on the East Coast to sell my land to some obscure Eastern Orthodox monastic order that wanted to build a hermitage and retreat on it, but which was going to allow me to retain lifetime tenancy of my cabin. Now, with trucks arriving daily and construction well under way, I was allowed to awaken from my weeks-long half-consciousness so I could accompany John to the bars and restaurants, the baths at Esalen and the private parties, where I could support and confirm his story.

  Even with Monteleur inside me to ensure my obedience I was never allowed off the property except in John's company. And while I was gone Dara stayed in the caverns, manacled to a wall of the locked torture chamber, a hostage and a reminder.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-five

  « ^ »

  It was July twenty-eighth , somewhere around midnight. John and I were sitting at a table on the terrace at Nepenthe with a girl he knew named Cindy. She was blond, pretty, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old; she worked in a massage parlor in Seaside. I'd met her once or twice the year before, at parties Alexandra'd taken me to. The night was cool, the almost-full moon invisible in the fog. The last few days' rain had kept the tourists away and most of the people were local. Everyone was either inside drinking at the bar or over on the other side of the terrace, by the fireplace.

  "Do you want another drink?" John asked Cindy. He'd already managed to tell her everything he wanted to about the Eastern Orthodox monastic order that had supposedly bought my property. "We've got a good two, two and a half hours before the baths open."

  "All right," Cindy said. "A Mexican coffee. With extra brandy in it, to help me stay awake."

  "You, David?"

  I shook my head. All I wanted to do was get back to Dara as soon as possible. "No thanks."

  "You can drive, then. I'll be back in a moment."

  He pushed his chair away, started to get up.

  And Monteleur exploded inside me, ripped its way up through my heart and lungs, out through my stomach wall to flap wetly against the inside of my shirt. The last thing I was aware of was Cindy screaming.

  And then I was Michael as well as myself. I fell through the cold and the wind to the cave beneath my father's roots, the cave where I was already sitting cross-legged staring into the fire fed by the sweetness dripping from above.

  I could see my headless body, Michael's body, lying dead there in the center of the flames. And standing over it a woman, a woman with Dara's face and body and youth, but four-armed, terrible, her skin a blue so dark it was almost black, her eyes dead clay, wet and shining. Around her neck she wore a garland of severed heads, around her slender waist a sort of skirt made of dangling hands, boneless forearms. A slender golden cobra was coiled around each of her long legs, smaller darker-colored snakes around her arms, a seventh snake looped twice around her neck, staring at me from over her left shoulder.

  With two of her
delicate hands she was gently caressing her cobras' golden heads. Her third hand held a bloody sword. With the fourth she was holding my severed head to her face so she could lap the blood still draining from it with her long black tongue.

  She was staring out at me, watching me, her image writhing and flickering with the flames, infinitely desirable, infinitely terrifying. Her black hair which was Dara's hair fell thick and smooth and shining down her back; the hands with which a moment before she'd been caressing the heads of her serpents were opening to me now in invitation, beckoning me to her, and I was falling, jerking closer to her with every dancing movement of the flames, closer to the midnight darkness of her skin, to the severed heads whispering her eternal love to me from their toothless mouths, to the cold shining clay of her eyes, and the sharp teeth behind her blood-smeared lips.

  "Not yet, Mother," I heard myself say. "Not yet."

  And then I was myself again, was David again, and I was lying bandaged and bloody on the jolting floor of the truck.

  Cindy lay unconscious on the floor next to me. I could see John up front driving, and a small man in a black suit—one of the members of Uncle Stephen's coven—sitting on the floor behind Cindy. He had a doctor's black bag on his lap. Which must have been how he'd gotten us out of Nepenthe, posing as a doctor. Unless he really was a doctor. My whole body hurt but the pain was far away, a dull throbbing that merged in and out of the sound of the truck's engine, the vibration coming to me from it through the floor.

  Monteleur had tried to kill me, had almost succeeded. I opened my mouth to ask the doctor what had happened, why, closed it again.

  My mother. That had been my mother, Saraparajni, there beneath my father's roots. And she'd been more terrifying in her beauty and her hunger than any vampire could have ever been.

  No. That had been Michael's terror I'd felt, not my own. I'd seen her through his eyes. Or maybe the terror had been my father's. It was his symbolic landscape. Maybe she hadn't been real, or no more real than the landscape itself.

  But real or not, she was there for Michael. And Michael had to have been behind whatever had happened to make Monteleur try to kill me.

  I could reach him there, in the cave, if he was still there.

  Monteleur was keeping me alive while it helped me repair the damage it had done to my heart and lungs, to the other organs in my abdominal cavity, but the strength to heal myself was coming to me from my father.

  I closed my eyes again, made sure I subvocalized none of my thoughts as I climbed the shadow tide to my father.

  I was in the dark corridor, but Uncle Stephen could find me there, listen in to me there.

  I abolished the corridor, fell through the cold and the wind.

  I abolished the void. I was standing knee-deep in the salmon-pink mud. I seemed to be in my proper body, and I was far closer to the hill than I'd ever been on arrival before. Perhaps because this time I was there without Dara.

  I crossed the red moat, climbed the hill to the entrance beneath the roots, crawled in through it.

  Michael was there, sitting cross-legged in front of the fire. The three faceless stone images were there, at the center of the flames, just as they'd been when I'd been there with Dara. There was no sign of the figure Michael had addressed as our mother.

  "Michael." He looked up, noticed me for the first time. "What happened? Monteleur almost killed me—"

  "I tried to kill Uncle Stephen."

  "Tried?" I sat down next to him. "You mean you failed?"

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because he's going to kill all three of us on Lammas Day. As part of the Sabbat. That altar he set up, the three crosses behind it—those are for us. He's going to sacrifice us and end the family. Replace us all with members of his coven. Unless you can find a way to stop him that I couldn't.

  "I've been spying on you all through Father's eyes every night. Watching and listening, making sure I saw everything Stephen did, heard every order he gave, knew everything that he had you or his followers do. While Monteleur kept you drugged, and Dara didn't do anything.

  "He had our ancestors kill the parents and grandparents of all the other members of his coven, kill them all the same night, and in such a way as to ensure they become vampires. He timed it so that they're all finishing their transformations now. They'll be ready for the Sabbat. And then he won't need us or the family any more. His followers will be able to do everything he needs to have done by vampires controlled by the living. The rest of us—you, me, Dara, our ancestors—we'll be vampires, yes, but we'll be out of control, without a dhampire to protect us from the living and keep us from destroying ourselves."

  I thought about it a moment, asked, "Are you still back in Illinois?"

  "Yes."

  "How did you try to kill him?"

  "I used Father. Stephen isn't there, with the rest of us—" he indicated the stone figures—"and I knew I could use Father to act for me as long as I didn't do anything to arouse his suspicions. I waited for a time when he was alone in the cabin, when you were off the property and he had Dara chained up, so he wouldn't be worrying about either of you. Then I had Father get one of the heavy steel struts left over from the construction out in the caverns and had him station himself outside the door to the cabin, where he had a chance to surprise Stephen while he was coming out.

  "And that much of it worked, worked perfectly. When Stephen stepped out of the cabin Father was right behind him, ready to smash his head in with the strut before he knew what was happening."

  "But he managed to duck away or something?"

  "No. Father hit him. And it should have killed him. It would have killed you, or me, or even Father himself if he'd still been alive, but it didn't kill Stephen. I don't know why. Father hit him with the thing with all his strength but it just glanced off his head. It didn't even knock him unconscious, and before Father could hit him again he'd had Bathomar hurt me so bad I couldn't stay conscious myself to keep control of Father.

  "I've got to get back to my body, David. If they realize I can come here to escape the pain they'll do something to stop me. But you've got to stop him somehow. You and Dara. It's too late for me to do anything."

  "Michael, wait. If you'd succeeded, what were you going to do about Bathomar? How were you going to keep it from killing you?"

  "I was going to come here, and deal with it from here before it killed me. Make a new deal with it, offer to do more for it than Stephen'd ever done now mat he was gone."

  "And you think that would have worked?"

  "I don't know. Maybe. But even if it didn't there'd still be you and Dara. Or at least Dara, if your familiar killed you. And Uncle Peter. Some chance that one of you at least would do what was needed to keep the family going. With Stephen there's no chance at all."

  "Michael. Another thing. Right after, what must have been right after you tried to kill him, when Monteleur attacked me, I came here. The pain drove me out of my body and I, I was sitting here with you. Only it wasn't me, wasn't David, I was just you. Michael. I didn't even know that I was both of us."

  "And?"

  "And I saw—a woman. There, in the flames, where those three stone figures of us are now. She was gesturing to you, trying to get you to join her there in the flames… and you said, "Not yet, Mother. Not yet—"

  "You want to know if that was really our mother?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes."

  "But how—why was she there? Here? And what did you mean, not yet?"

  "She was there because I was dying, David. And maybe because you were dying too, I don't know."

  "To rescue you?"

  "No. To consume me. Swallow me up body and soul, David, not just drink my blood while granting me immortality in return." And he was gone.

  * * *

  Chapter Thirty-six

  « ^ »

  The pain was worse, much worse, a band of burning metal tight around my chest, a hot gnawing in my belly, something jagged stabbing
me in the lungs every time I took a breath.

  I opened my eyes. The moon was out and the truck was bright with its light, with the backwash from the headlights, the green glow of the dashboard instruments, the silver phosphorescence that spider-webbed everything in shadow. We were making our way down the far side of the hills to the cabin and every time we hit another bump it tore something new apart inside of me.

  Monteleur shifted, sliding through the pain. And the pain was real, in a way that nothing before had ever been. The other agonies had been imposed on me from outside, something to face and defy and try to defeat, but this was me, my intimate self, telling me that I'd been too badly wounded to heal myself, and somehow that was very different and far, far more terrifying.

  "Monteleur," I whispered. The whisper hurt, hurt bad. "Make it stop hurting. Help me. Stephen didn't tell you not to. Make it stop!"

  Monteleur shifted inside me, remained silent. I lay motionless, getting my breath back as best I could, then levered myself up into a sitting position. For some reason it was very important to sit up. But I couldn't hold myself there, it hurt too much to bend like that in the middle, and I had to lie down again.

  The man with the black bag on his lap was watching me. "Are you a doctor?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "Make it stop hurting. So I can breathe. I've got a punctured lung."

  He shook his head. "There's no need. Monteleur's already done everything necessary. Everything your uncle wants. You'll have to do the rest of it for yourself."

  He was lying. A real doctor would've given me something for the pain.

  "Why?" I asked. "Why did Monteleur—?"

  He shook his head, told me to wait until we got back to the cabin.

  I closed my eyes again, thankfully climbed the tides of my father's stolen strength up out of the pain to the shadow corridor, trying to reach through to Dara. But Stephen was there, watching, listening, and there was no way I could get past him to her.